Intel Wars (25 page)

But it has to be said that the U.S. government's interest in Yemen has been anything but consistent, fluctuating wildly based on the crisis du jour. For much of the Obama administration's first year in office, the NCTC ranked Yemen far below Afghanistan and Pakistan as a priority in the war on terrorism. But on November 5, 2009, U.S. Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas, killing thirteen American soldiers and wounding dozens more. An investigation revealed that in the months leading up to the shooting rampage, Major Hasan had exchanged about twenty e-mails with the American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who as noted above was still in hiding in the portion of southern Yemen that the Sana'a government did not control.

Retaliation from Washington for the Fort Hood shootings was swift. On December 17, 2009, a U.S. Navy warship off the coast of Yemen fired a cruise missile at what was believed to be an al Qaeda training camp in Abyan Province just north of the port city of Aden, killing forty-one people. Seven days later, on December 24, another cruise missile struck what was believed by U.S. intelligence sources to be the headquarters of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula deep inside remote Shabwah Province in southern Yemen. The principal targets of the attack were Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the leader of AQAP, and his deputy, Said Ali al-Shihri. But postattack intelligence reports showed that neither man was at the site when the missiles hit. According to Yemeni newspaper reports, the only casualties of the attack were five al Qaeda fighters.

The following day, December 25, 2009, a Nigerian native named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had been trained as a suicide bomber at an al Qaeda training camp in southern Yemen, attempted to detonate a bomb on a Northwest Airlines plane over Detroit. Once again, Yemen jumped to the top of the U.S. intelligence community's terrorism watch list. Within seventy-two hours of the bombing attempt, more than two dozen CIA and military clandestine intelligence officers, SIGINT collectors, and intelligence analysts were put on planes to beef up the CIA station in Sana'a. NSA and its SIGINT partners in Great Britain and Australia immediately began intercepting all international telephone calls going into or coming out of Yemen. The Saleh government gave the CIA permission to conduct daily Predator drone missions over the southern part of the country from Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, and the U.S. Navy was allowed to begin flying manned reconnaissance missions over southern Yemen from warships stationed offshore. There was also a dramatic influx of Green Berets from the 5th Special Forces Group to intensify the training of Yemeni counterterrorist units at a special training camp in Dhamar Province south of Sana'a.

Even so, it is America's foreign intelligence partners in the region who are currently doing most of the heavy lifting in Yemen. A contingent of veteran Jordanian intelligence officers arrived in Sana'a in December 2009 to reinforce the somnolent Yemeni intelligence and security services.
The Saudi Arabian foreign intelligence service, the General Intelligence Directorate
, has also been quietly supplying intelligence, including cell phone intercepts, about al Qaeda activities in Yemen, in the hope that the escalating violence can be prevented from spreading into the restive tribal areas of southern Saudi Arabia.

Yet actionable intelligence on al Qaeda activities in southern Yemen is still extremely difficult to come by. For more than two years, al Qaeda has been systematically assassinating Yemeni intelligence officers stationed in their strongholds in southern Yemen, and the CIA believes that al Qaeda has bought off many of those intelligence officials still remaining. Intelligence collected over Yemen by CIA unmanned drones flying from Djibouti has only led to two air strikes by U.S. warplanes since the beginning of 2010, neither of which appears to have accomplished much.

The simple truth is that we cannot get into the al Qaeda sanctuaries to kill or capture the terrorists.
President Saleh will not allow any CIA or U.S. military intelligence personnel to work outside the city limits
of Sana'a for fear that their presence in the countryside would further antagonize the already rebellious tribesmen in the country's south, where al Qaeda operates. He has also placed very strict limits on American aerial reconnaissance missions, requiring that all imagery collected by CIA unmanned drones over Yemen go to an operations center that had been set up with CIA and U.S. military assistance in the headquarters building of the Yemeni Ministry of Defense for this purpose. The one concession that Saleh was willing to make was to allow U.S. warplanes to strike al Qaeda targets inside Yemen if and when actionable intelligence became available. He even told the commander of U.S. Central Command, General David Petraeus, at a private meeting in Sana'a in January 2010, “
We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours
.”

In effect, by imposing these onerous conditions Saleh has tied the hands of the U.S. intelligence community. Unless these restrictions are lifted, there is not much of a substantive nature that the U.S. government can do in the near future to take the war to the al Qaeda forces in southern Yemen except watch and wait for the next shoe to drop.

The Obama administration decided early in 2009 to revamp and reorient the U.S. intelligence community's stalled efforts to interdict the flow of money from rich Arab businessmen in the Persian Gulf to al Qaeda and the Taliban. In August 2009, President Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke, created a special interagency group called the Illicit Finance Task Force to restart the effort to disrupt or, if possible, shut down the clandestine financial and logistical support networks located throughout the Persian Gulf States that were keeping al Qaeda, the Taliban, and a host of other terrorist groups alive and kicking.

In order to track terrorist finances, it is absolutely essential that you get the countries where the terrorists are raising their money and doing their banking to cooperate. In the case of America's allies in the Persian Gulf, where al Qaeda and the Taliban traditionally raise most of their money, this cooperation has been hard to come by.

Some of the Gulf States have gone the extra mile to help the U.S. intelligence community block the flow of money originating in or transiting through their countries to terrorist groups. For instance, according to a leaked 2009 State Department cable, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been extraordinarily helpful to the U.S. government in “
countering financial support for al-Qa'ida
, and more recently, in constricting Iran's ability to use UAE financial institutions to support its nuclear program.” In 2009 Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed ordered the UAE's two security services to “
disrupt any Taliban-related financial activity that can be identified in the UAE
.” True to their word, for the past three years the Emiratis have diligently sought to block the flow of money from banks in Dubai to the Taliban in Afghanistan. In return, leaked State Department cables show that the U.S. has provided the UAE authorities with intelligence information about Taliban front companies in the UAE, as well as details of the travel from Pakistan to Dubai by senior Taliban finance officials to raise or move funds. But the UAE has been the exception rather than the rule. Convincing the leaders of other Persian Gulf States to do more to shut down al Qaeda's and the Taliban's financial lifelines running from their countries to terrorist groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan has proven extraordinarily difficult, a surprising development from countries that are actively cooperating with the U.S. intelligence community in the war on terrorism.

For example, the Kuwaiti government has refused to shut down a charitable organization called the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society, which the U.S. intelligence community has determined is a major source of money for al Qaeda and a host of other terrorist organizations. Kuwait has even blocked attempts by the U.S. government to list the charity as a terrorist financier with the United Nations Security Council. The government of Qatar has also stubbornly refused to cooperate with the U.S. intelligence community in its efforts to interdict the flow of money to terrorist groups; a December 2009 State Department cable charges that “
Qatar's overall level of CT [counterterrorism] cooperation with the U.S. is considered the worst in the region
.”

Ironically, perhaps the most recalcitrant of the Arab states has been America's top ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, with a leaked December 2009 State Department cable revealing that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” Despite years of effort by the U.S. government, according to a State Department cable, “
it has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials
to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority.”

So where are we today? In Pakistan, the toll of al Qaeda fighters and other terrorists killed over the past three years has been massive, although no one in the U.S. intelligence community seems to know, much less care, how many enemy combatants have died because to them the body count is an irrelevant measure of success.

Some have tried to keep a tally of the death toll, at least for posterity's sake. A young intelligence analyst at the National Counterterrorism Center, whose responsibilities included maintaining an up-to-date organization chart of al Qaeda's top leadership in Pakistan, in frustration stopped keeping her posterboard-sized chart of who was who in al Qaeda up to date in late 2009 because the CIA's six Predator and Reaper unmanned drones based in Pakistan were killing the terrorist leaders faster than she could keep up.

Outside of Pakistan, the White House has quietly approved an expanded series of classified counterterrorism operations against al Qaeda affiliates in North Africa, Yemen, and Somalia, including commando raids, cruise missile attacks, and clandestine air strikes. The number of individuals on the CIA's “Kill List” has grown exponentially since the list was first conceived in the summer of 2008, growing from just a couple of dozen al Qaeda militants hiding in northern Pakistan to over two thousand today, including its first American, the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, still believed to be in hiding somewhere in southern Yemen.

On the negative side of the ledger, none of the al Qaeda terrorists that are currently in U.S. custody have yet been brought to trial to answer for their crimes. Secret legal opinions prepared by Justice Department lawyers since Obama was inaugurated indicate that successfully prosecuting many of these individuals in American civilian courts may be next to impossible. Key parts of the government's legal case against these prisoners are based on evidence obtained by torturing three of the top al Qaeda leaders currently in U.S. custody—Abu Zubaydah, ‘Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Justice Department officials are convinced that all of these individuals are guilty but fear that they may never be able to try them because federal prosecutors have not been able to obtain corroborative evidence independent of what the CIA obtained from torture. Without evidence untainted by torture, prosecution of these defendants is problematic, at best, and obtaining convictions in a federal court is even less certain. The only remaining option is to try these individuals before military tribunals at Guantánamo, where the rules of evidence are not as strict as in civilian courts. If the U.S. government takes this route, it will almost certainly generate vast amounts of controversy around the world, especially if the government tries to use evidence obtained from torture.

The military-run Guantánamo Bay detention facility in Cuba remains open despite the president's executive order signed during his first week in office ordering its closure. Three years later, the fate of the detainees there remains in limbo. Since 2009, about 200 of the 245 Guantánamo detainees that Obama inherited from the Bush administration have been transferred to prisons in their home countries, leaving forty-eight prisoners that the Justice Department has decided to continue to hold indefinitely without trial although according them the status of prisoners of war. A senior Justice Department official admitted in a 2010 interview that this state of affairs is not popular and almost certainly will result in a legal challenge from civil liberties groups, who will challenge the constitutionality of the government holding anyone prisoner for the rest of his life without due process of law. According to the Justice Department official, “It's the only option open to us … If we can't try them, then we have to keep them behind bars.”

Counterterrorism officials in the United States and Europe tend to be a rather dour bunch, who generally believe that things will get worse before they get better. One of the nightmare scenarios that keeps these men and women awake at night is the gnawing fear that they may never be able to win the war on terrorism, no matter how hard they try.

They are worried that the global battlefield may be expanding faster than the ability of the U.S. intelligence community and its allies to contain it. For example, the al Qaeda affiliate in North Africa, although small in size, is rapidly expanding to countries outside of its base in Algeria. There are signs that new terrorist groups not affiliated in any way with al Qaeda are beginning to take root in a number of East African countries, like the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, Congo, and Sudan. Al Shabaab is continuing to grow in size and power in Somalia, and there is very little realistically that the U.S. government can do about it other than try to prevent the group from expanding into neighboring Kenya, Uganda, and Ethiopia. In Yemen, the options of the U.S. government are constrained by strict limitations imposed by a host government that does not believe that al Qaeda is really a significant threat to national security. The efforts of the U.S. government to choke off the flow of money to terrorist groups like al Qaeda have met with fierce resistance from many governments in the Persian Gulf, almost all of whom are close allies with American troops stationed on their soil for their protection.