The Family Jewels (25 page)

John Rizzo and the Bush administration said little about the Derwish affair. Rizzo continued to plug away at his many tasks. When Scott Muller left, Rizzo became acting General Counsel. Transformed into the program's sole legal guardian, Rizzo kept the target list current. As with many other awkward subjects, National Clandestine Service chief Jose Rodriguez, who had the primary operational interest in this, has nothing to say about Predators. Rizzo, meanwhile, nursed the ambition of formal promotion to General Counsel. President Bush finally tapped Rizzo for the job in 2005. Then his nomination languished, with a Senate confirmation hearing not even scheduled for more than a year, and postponed repeatedly after that. John Rizzo finally faced the senators on June 16, 2007. All the public's attention focused on the fixer's role in the CIA torture memos, and the senators were quite exercised as well about the Bush administration substituting narrow briefings of the Gang of Four for full and current notification.

The Predator program, if it was addressed, was discussed only in closed session. The closest the participants came to taking up the issues of Derwish and the drones was when Oregon Senator Ron Wyden asked Rizzo whether a president had the authority to order the CIA to capture and detain an American citizen in a foreign country. “It would
be extraordinarily difficult,” Mr. Rizzo replied, “given the rights that attach to a U.S. citizen in terms of due process, for the President to direct the CIA to capture a U.S. citizen overseas.”
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John Rizzo never got his prize. Senators who were infuriated at the Bush White House's shabby treatment of the intelligence committee put a hold on the nomination. In September 2007 he withdrew his name from consideration. But, survivor that he was, John Rizzo hung on at Langley for two more years. He retired in 2009.

By then the Obama administration had taken office. Barack Obama came to the White House determined to energize the Afghan war, which to his mind was being lost because Washington had stopped paying attention, and because leaders were not taking a regional view of the conflict. Conceptualizing the combat theater as Afghanistan and Pakistan together, or “AfPak,” President Obama ordered a surge to the Afghan front. For Pakistan there was the Predator. The Washington policy review that led to these decisions included specific consideration of escalating the drone war in AfPak. Within Afghanistan the military, primarily the air force, would be responsible. Over Pakistan the drones belonged to the CIA.

These choices were problematic. Drone strikes had never been popular in Pakistan, with which America's alliance was already shaky. Frustration that the Pakistani military resisted action led Obama to order the CIA to do more. In effect, the Obama administration converted the drone operation from a program of selective, precision strikes into an aerial interdiction campaign. One positive development has been that President Obama has brought the procedure for putting enemies on the target list back into the White House. A strike in Pakistan soon after he assumed office killed a number of civilians. Obama not only demanded explanations, he arranged that Pentagon target nominations be discussed by a wide array of officials in regular teleconferences,
and that the CIA have a more closely held, but similar, process. Interagency approvals go to the White House, where the president personally has the last word. Driven by the logic of his escalation, however, President Obama later diluted that procedure by sanctioning “signature” strikes—targets in certain locations, in certain kinds of facilities or vehicles, even associated with certain telephone numbers, could be attacked under standing orders.

But there was no possibility the CIA could mount a sufficient number of Predator strikes to exert true military weight, particularly once the agency reduced the explosive charges in the weapons carried by its drones in an effort to reduce collateral damage. Ratcheting up the offensive effort also increased the already-significant problem of the militarization of the agency. In the rugged mountains of Pakistan's northwest frontier provinces, air strikes had marginal effectiveness. At the same time, more numerous Predator attacks meant more Pakistani civilian casualties, further inflaming bilateral relations. Military experience in Korea, Vietnam, and even World War II—all with astronomically greater U.S. force applied—showed that aerial interdiction could not stop a determined adversary.

Meanwhile, all of this was supposed to be about Al Qaeda—and CIA data showed that organization down to a few dozen adherents. The drone attacks had some success in killing senior operatives. But the biggest fish of all would be netted by old-fashioned methods. A raid by Navy SEALs inside Pakistan eliminated Osama bin Laden in May 2011. One consequence would be to throw together the issues of assassination and torture. There were claims that only torture had enabled American operators to obtain the intelligence that identified the house in which bin Laden lived. This dispute came to a head in late 2012 with release of the Kathryn Bigelow film
Zero Dark Thirty
, a dramatization of the covert operation that could be seen as backing the torture
argument. Informed opinion held that bin Laden's hideout had been found by conventional methods: a Pakistani tipoff identified the enemy's courier, monitoring the courier's movements and cell-phone calls enabled operatives to localize the place, satellite and ground observation led to increasing confidence in the intelligence. President Obama did not have complete certainty when he approved the SEAL mission, but he had enough to give the okay. In the wake of
Zero Dark Thirty
three senators, including intelligence committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein and John McCain, issued a joint statement denying that information from torture had informed the raid. They were followed by the acting director of the CIA, then Michael J. Morell, who told agency employees in an official statement that the facts were otherwise. The director rejected the strong sense the movie conveyed that torture had been the key to finding bin Laden. “That impression is false,” Morell noted.
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After bin Laden the agency approached the end of its Al Qaeda thread. Washington now switched enemies for CIA's operation, from Al Qaeda to the Taliban partisans fighting the Afghan war, and it added Pakistani extremists, framing them as Al Qaeda appendages. The net effect was to rob Langley's drone campaign of any remaining connection to retaliation against the terrorists of 9/11. The CIA's drones became an appendage too—of the conventional military campaign inside Afghanistan.

The one real advantage of the drone war was that it could be
controlled
. Rather than depending on indifferent local allies, Washington could plan and conduct its activities and switch emphasis at will. That, too, Obama did, moving to expand the network of Predator bases throughout the Near East and Horn of Africa. Yemen and Somalia became major foci of Predator strikes. The escalation cast President Obama in the role of war manager. At this writing, CIA drone attacks carried out on Obama's watch exceed the number conducted
through the entire eight years of George W. Bush's presidency. If the trend continues, Obama's drone war will exceed Bush's by a considerable margin before this book reaches print.

It was inevitable that a CIA campaign of such ferocity would lead to the recrudescence of the assassination issue. Targeting foreign nationals was already delicate. Deliberately targeting Americans crossed the line—and it brought repetition of the highly questionable practice of crafting Top Secret opinions to justify illegality. In a still-secret exercise over a period of months in 2010, the Obama administration created arguments to nullify the constitutional rights of citizens. It should have known better. Barack Obama was a professor of constitutional law before he became a politician. The responsible official at the Justice Department, Harold Koh, is an expert on war powers and belligerent rights during hostilities. They have not dared expose the product of their labor to public scrutiny. Instead, the legal paper was used to authorize the CIA targeting of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki.

A Muslim cleric who left northern Virginia for Yemen, Awlaki was credited with influencing others to make terrorist attacks. These included a fellow Muslim cleric, an army chaplain who went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, a Nigerian who attempted to blow up an airliner, and a Saudi who crafted bombs embedded in copier machines to destroy cargo planes over the United States. The conspiracies were real enough, but the threat of Awlaki's activities was deemed to override everything. Rather than attempt to capture Awlaki and bring him to trial, the intent was to blow him up. The CIA succeeded in that in September 2011. Another American, Samir Kahn, was killed with him. Kahn's offense was to be an Al Qaeda propagandist. Awlaki's sixteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki went to Yemen to search for his father, and a month later the Predators took him too. “It was a very good strike,” Richard Cheney said on television, interviewed on Cable News Network. “The president ought
to have that kind of authority to order that kind of strike, even when it involves an American citizen, when there's clear evidence that he's part of Al Qaeda.”
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In contrast to the ideal of the covert operation that has “plausible deniability,” the drone war has acquired the trappings of a military operation. The effort is divided between the CIA and the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command. A typology of missions has evolved. “Signature strikes,” aimed at generic categories of targets, can be carried out without specific approval. Attacks aimed at specified individuals are still subject to high-level sanction. Senior officials at the Pentagon have weekly videoconferences to consider the menu options. The CIA has a similar but highly classified routine. The approved target lists go to the White House for review. President Obama approves the most sensitive missions personally. It is reported that during the runup to Obama's reelection in 2012, his administration moved to standardize this decision model and the associated legal justifications in order to have a permanent structure in place for a possible successor. Obama's electoral victory renders the standardization effort unnecessary, but the mere fact this effort took place indicates the United States government now considers targeted aerial killings a legitimate type of activity. As this goes to press the United Nations is on the verge of creating a panel to examine drone killings and their legal justification. War crimes charges are one possible result.

While all this moved steadily forward in the field, it turns out the Central Intelligence Agency also replicated the apparatus for Langley's classic assassination plots. According to press reports, this was another project whose existence was withheld from Congress on the orders of Vice President Cheney.
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Soon after 9/11, George Tenet approved the formation of a standing unit, essentially a commando
team, that could carry out assassinations. This was another Counter-Terrorist Center brainchild, one more of Jose Rodriguez's booby traps. Tenet put the scheme on hold before he left, but planning continued. Known as Project Cannonball, the activity apparently reached a decision point in 2004 and briefly attained some operational capability the following year. Several high-level meetings were held about Cannonball and more than a million dollars spent on it. The unit never conducted any operational missions. Agency deputy director Stephen Kappes, as well as Rodriguez's successor at the head of the clandestine service, Michael J. Sulick, both determined to hold back Cannonball. It came to Director Panetta's attention in mid-2009, when CIA officials contemplated reviving the enterprise, taking it to a level requiring congressional notification. Panetta shut it down instead, and on June 24, 2009, informed Congress of its existence.

Details remain obscure at this writing. For example, the extent of CIA legal review is not known, though it would be highly unusual for the General Counsel not to have put its seal on the project. Personnel were selected, apparently including individuals employed by the private military unit Blackwater (later Xe Corporation, now Academi Corporation) under a 2004 contract, and planning took place over several years. By one account the CIA never could contrive a practical formula. The logistics of moving a team on short notice for a lethal mission while keeping the target under observation were daunting, and the arrangements to extract the hit squad could never be settled. Accounts agree that the program was revamped several times—which is to say the agency kept at it. Although what we know about this venture is entirely based upon press reporting, Director Panetta's notification to Congress is a matter of record, and the hit team also became the subject of an official statement issued by the Central Intelligence Agency. Its creation exactly replicated the special unit formed at the CIA under William
K. Harvey in the early 1960s. As several agency veterans commented in this instance, one of the most difficult aspects of the scheme was to keep it secret. Another Family Jewel on the pile.

During the Year of Intelligence, the revelation of CIA plots for assassinations inflamed the public. The Ford administration tried its hardest to finesse inquiries and then suppress the resulting reports. The plots, the attempts against Fidel Castro, the murders actually carried out by CIA allies, and the agency's creation of an assassination unit were universally deemed reprehensible, a Family Jewel. President Gerald Ford outlawed assassinations by executive fiat. Every successor has followed in his footsteps. Yet now the procedure is to maintain the official prohibition while secretly canceling it by means of presidents' operational directives. To this hypocrisy is added a massive covert campaign that aims to kill people rather than capture and bring them to trial, the extrajudicial targeting of American citizens, a formal hit list, and even the replication of the CIA hit team as a mission unit. Some of this is legal, but most of it is not—and all of it is a Family Jewel. Americans would be appalled to discover the true extent of these covert operations. But over the years Langley has worked very hard to cloak its daggers.