The Way of the Knife

by Mark Mazzetti

Art Keller, operations officer in Pakistan, 2006

OH RLY?

“Good intelligence work, Control had always preached, was gradual and rested on a kind of gentleness. The scalphunters were the exception to his own rule. They weren’t gradual and they weren’t gentle either. . . .” —John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

From now on, things would be handled according to Moscow Rules—the unwritten, unforgiving ways of spycraft practiced between enemies during the Cold War.

But the Davis affair also told a bigger story. The former Green Beret hired by the CIA for a manhunt in Pakistan was the face of an American spy agency that has been transformed after a decade of conflicts far from declared war zones. No longer a traditional espionage service devoted to stealing the secrets of foreign governments, the Central Intelligence Agency has become a killing machine, an organization consumed with man hunting.

Prior to the attacks of September 11, the Pentagon did very little human spying, and the CIA was not officially permitted to kill. In the years since, each has done a great deal of both, and a military-intelligence complex has emerged to carry out the new American way of war.

The foundations of the secret war were laid by a conservative Republican president and embraced by a liberal Democratic one who became enamored of what he had inherited. President Barack Obama came to see it as an alternative to the messy, costly wars that topple governments and require years of American occupation. In the words of John Brennan, one of President Obama’s closest advisers whom Obama eventually tapped to run the CIA, instead of the “hammer” America now relies on the “scalpel.”

Like his predecessors, as the head of MI6 he signed all internal memos with his code name, “C”—by tradition, always in green ink.

Control? that you?

The primary reason for getting close to foreign spies was for counterintelligence purposes: figuring out how deeply another foreign spy service had penetrated the CIA and catching the moles before they burrowed too deeply. But the dictates of a new war quickly changed the rules of the spying game. The CIA’s top priority was no longer gathering intelligence on foreign governments and their countries, but man hunting. The new mission put a premium on getting detailed intelligence about specific individuals, and it mattered little how that information was collected.

The parameters of America’s dysfunctional relationship with Pakistan in the post-9/11 era had been set: The United States insisted on the right to wage a secret war inside Pakistan, and Islamabad extracted money in return. President Musharraf had acceded to most, but not all, of Washington’s requirements. For instance, he put limits on where American planes could fly in Pakistani airspace, fearing that the United States might try to conduct surveillance flights over Pakistani nuclear sites. He also denied the United States access to most military bases, allowing the American military to station personnel at only two air bases: Shamsi, in the southwestern region of Balochistan, and Jacobabad, in the northern province of Sindh. In the end, Washington and Islamabad’s renewal of their vows left both sides believing they had given up more than they were getting, creating recriminations and resentment that would boil over years later.

The Church Committee pointed out that, for all the CIA’s questionable activities during its early decades, it was always the White House encouraging reckless operations like coup attempts and killing foreign leaders. The CIA offered secrecy, and secrecy had always seduced American presidents.

The agency was also still facing a reckoning for the aggressive operations in Latin America overseen by Dewey Clarridge in the 1980s. In 1996, an intelligence-oversight board issued a report detailing the extensive human-rights abuses carried out for more than a decade by CIA assets in Guatemala. It alleged that between 1984 and 1986 several CIA informants were alleged to have “ordered, planned, or participated in serious human-rights violations such as assassination, extrajudicial execution, torture, or kidnapping while they were assets—and that the CIA was contemporaneously aware of many of the allegations.” The Guatemala revelations had been trickling out for years, leading CIA director John M. Deutch to impose new restrictions on agency case officers consorting with unsavory characters. The drug lords with whom Ross Newland had once bet on cockfights in Bolivia would now be off-limits to CIA officers, as would terrorists who might be attempting to kill Americans.

“This is a political war and it calls for discrimination in killing. The best weapon for killing would be a knife, but I’m afraid we can’t do it that way. The worst is an airplane.” —Lt. Colonel John Paul Vann, American officer in Vietnam

IF THERE WAS ONE EVENT that had catalyzed the CIA’s escalation of lethal operations, it was the completion of a devastating internal report in May 2004 by the spy agency’s inspector general. The 106-page report by John Helgerson kicked out the foundation upon which the CIA detention-and-interrogation program had rested, and it raised questions about whether CIA officers might face criminal prosecution for the brutal interrogations carried out inside the agency’s network of secret prisons. It suggested that interrogation methods like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and exploiting the phobias of prisoners—such as confining them in a small box with live bugs—violated the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which prohibits “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.” The CIA had subjected several detainees to waterboarding—wherein the prisoner was hooded and immobilized on a wooden plank while water was poured over his face, creating the sensation of drowning—and in one month alone had used the technique on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the September 11 attacks, 183 times.

There were instances of interrogators conducting mock executions to scare the detainees into talking; one CIA interrogator pointed a spinning drill at a prisoner’s head.

Unlike what people saw in movies, the CIA had no in-house cadre of assassins, and the program would have brought the spy agency more in line with its glamorized Hollywood version.

suuuuuuuuuuuuure

The ill-conceived Blackwater phase of the killing program remains—like the earlier iteration of the program—a closely guarded government secret. Even in retirement, former Counterterrorist Center officer Hank Crumpton is prohibited by the CIA from giving details about the time that he worked on the first phase of the program. But in an interview, he said he found it puzzling that the United States still seemed to make a distinction between killing people from a distance using an armed drone and training humans to do the killing themselves. If the country is going to allow the CIA to do one, he said, should it really be queasy about allowing the other? “How we apply lethal force, and where we apply lethal force—that’s a huge debate that we really haven’t had,” he said. “There seems to be no problem with a Hellfire shot against a designated enemy in a place like Afghanistan, the tribal areas of Pakistan, Somalia, or Yemen.” In those places, he said, it seems like just another part of war. But, he asked, what if a suspected terrorist is in a place like Paris, or Hamburg, or somewhere else where drones can’t fly, “and you use a CIA or [military] operative on the ground to shoot him in the back of the head? “Then,” he said, “it’s viewed as an assassination.”

this remains an interesting debate to say the least, and not nearly as cut and dry as many people on either side might think

STILL, each hit the CIA took for its detention-and-interrogation program pushed CIA leaders further to one side of a morbid calculation: that the agency would be far better off killing, rather than jailing, terror suspects.

i mean,,,,,, where it gets problematic is the question of "suspects" vs "confirmed perpetrators"

Just how little everyone knew was apparent in 2004, amid reports that Iraqi troops had captured al-Zarqawi near Fallujah. Since nobody knew exactly what the Jordanian terrorist looked like, he was released by accident.

“You remember the first rule of retirement, George? No moonlighting, no fooling with loose ends. No private enterprise, ever.” —John le Carré, Smiley’s People

And Furlong wasn’t exactly a rogue operator. The entire episode was born from the frustrations of an American general in Afghanistan who didn’t trust the CIA and who set Michael Furlong loose. If, as the Pentagon investigation into the operation concluded, nobody “connected the dots” about what Furlong was doing, it was because nobody wanted to. “My bosses wanted all of this,” Furlong said, smoking the fifth cigarette of a lengthy interview. “And I made it happen.”

The options for interrogating prisoners weren’t, as Rizzo said, “gone.” But interrogation and detention had clearly become a briar patch for the new administration: Besides the decision to shut Guantánamo Bay within a year, there were also concerns among Obama’s team that capturing prisoners and handing them over to foreign governments could ignite liberal criticism that the administration was outsourcing torture. At the same time, no prominent member of President Obama’s own party had criticized drone strikes, and Republicans were hardly in a position to challenge the new president for fighting too aggressive a campaign against terrorists. The political conditions were set for an escalation of the secret wars.

Back in Washington, Ambassador Haqqani was summoned to CIA headquarters on February 21 and taken into Panetta’s spacious office overlooking the agency’s campus in Langley, Virginia. Sitting around a large conference table, Panetta asked Haqqani for his help securing Davis’s release. Haqqani was skeptical. “If you’re going to send a Jason Bourne character to Pakistan, he should have the skills of a Jason Bourne to get away,” Haqqani said tartly.

During the long, hot summer in Pakistan in the months after Osama bin Laden’s death, the CIA killed a string of al Qaeda operatives, including Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, who had been bin Laden’s tether to the outside world during his time in hiding in Abbottabad. Some in Washington likened President Obama to Michael Corleone during the final minutes of The Godfather, coolly ordering lieutenants to dispatch his enemies in a calculated burst of violence.

Just as lawyers for President Bush had redefined torture to permit extreme interrogations by the CIA and the military, so had lawyers for President Obama given America’s secret agencies latitude to carry out extensive killing operations. One of them was Harold Koh, who had come to Washington from Yale Law School, where he had been the school’s dean. He had been a fierce critic from the left of the Bush administration’s war on terror and had decried the CIA’s interrogation methods—including waterboarding—as illegal torture. But when he joined the government as the State Department’s top lawyer, he found himself spending hours poring over volumes of secret intelligence in order to pass judgment over whether men should live or die. In speeches, he offered a muscular defense of the Obama administration’s targeted-killing operations, saying that in a time of war the American government was under no obligation to give suspects normal due process before putting them on a kill list. Still, in moments of public reflection, he spoke of the psychological burdens of spending so much time reading the biographies of the young men the United States was debating whether or not to kill. “As the dean of Yale Law School I spent many, many hours looking at the résumés of young twenty-year-olds, students in their twenties, trying to figure out which ones should be admitted,” he said during one speech. “I now spend a comparable amount of time studying the résumés of terrorists, same age. Readin...

Al-Awlaki had taken a strange path to being designated as an enemy of the United States. Born in New Mexico in 1971, he spent his early years in the United States while his father, Nasser al-Awlaki, a prominent Yemeni who would go on to serve as President Saleh’s minister of agriculture, studied agricultural economics at New Mexico State University. Nasser moved the family back to Yemen seven years later, where Anwar lived until returning to the United States for college in the early 1990s. At Colorado State University, Anwar won the presidency of the school’s Muslim Student Association but was not comfortable with the rigidly conservative strand of Islam—with its prohibitions on sex and alcohol—that some of his fellow students practiced. He stayed in Colorado after graduation, and to his father’s chagrin he began preaching at a mosque in Fort Collins. Nasser had wanted his son to enter a more lucrative profession, but within a few years Anwar had moved to San Diego to take a position as an imam at a mosque at the edge of the city. His views gradually grew more conservative, and he preached about living a life of purity. But in his private life he sometimes strayed from his own teachings; he was picked up multiple times by the San Diego police for soliciting prostitutes.

naturally