Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

6. “We’re in a New Kind of War”

DJIBOUTI, WASHINGTON, DC, AND YEMEN, 2002—In mid-2002, US intelligence operatives discovered that the man they had fingered as one of the masterminds of the 2000 USS Cole bombing, Abu Ali al Harithi, was in Yemen. US officials had dubbed him “the godfather of terror in Yemen.” For months, JSOC teams and drones had been hunting him to no avail and US ambassador Edmund Hull had been meeting with tribal officials in Marib, paying them for information on Harithi’s location and movements. Harithi used multiple mobile phones and regularly swapped out their SIM cards to avoid detection. On Sunday, November 3, the Special Ops signals intelligence team inside Yemen located Harithi in a compound in Marib after he used a mobile phone number that US intelligence had traced to him months earlier. “Our Special Ops had the compound under surveillance,” recalled General Michael DeLong, at the time deputy commander of US Central Command. They were “preparing to storm in when Ali exited with five of his associates. They got into SUVs and took off.”

As part of the operation, the CIA had launched an MQ-1 Predator drone from its outpost in Djibouti into Yemen’s airspace. But this wasn’t just a spy drone—it was armed with two antitank Hellfire missiles. The drone was under the operational control of the CIA’s highly secretive Special Activities Division and a live video feed from the drone was piped into the Counterterrorism Center in Langley, Virginia, as well as to the command center in Djibouti. “Now we were involved in a high-speed Predator chase,” according to DeLong.

The video feed from the drone showed Harithi and his cohorts driving off in a convoy at dawn in their dusty Toyota Land Cruiser, one hundred miles outside of Sana’a. The men were driving through Marib, where the US ambassador was scheduled to visit the following day. As the convoy circled the Yemeni desert, Harithi’s driver shouted into a satellite phone, speaking to a man with whom the al Qaeda operatives were supposed to rendezvous. “We’re right over here,” he yelled. Intelligence analysts determined that Harithi’s voice could be heard in the background giving instructions to the driver and that the drone had a solid lock on the jeep. “Our intel says that’s him,” DeLong said to CIA director George Tenet, as they both monitored the live feed from their respective locations. “One of them is an American—the fat guy. But he’s al Qaeda.”

Tenet called Saleh and informed him that he was going to give the go-ahead for the strike. Saleh consented but was emphatic that the mission be kept secret. Tenet agreed. “We didn’t want publicity, either,” DeLong recalled. “If questions did arise, the official Yemeni version would be that an SUV carrying civilians accidentally hit a land mine in the desert and exploded. There was to be no mention of terrorists, and no mention of missiles fired.”

Once the formalities were taken care of, Tenet gave the green light for action. A five-foot-long Hellfire missile slammed into the jeep, blowing it up. One passenger survived the strike and managed to crawl about twenty-five yards before collapsing and dying. As the jeep’s remnants continued to burn in the desert, a CIA operative went to examine the aftermath of the strike and to obtain DNA samples from the dead. A few days later, it was revealed that among those killed in the strike was Ahmed Hijazi, also known as Kamal Derwish, a US citizen born in Buffalo, New York. After the attack, US officials publicly tied Hijazi to what they described as a terror cell in Buffalo, known as the “Lackawanna Six.” Hijazi had been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the alleged plot of six Yemeni Americans to provide material support to al Qaeda. Civil liberties organizations alleged that the men had been encouraged and ultimately entrapped by the FBI. The men had been arrested two months before Hijazi’s killing. FBI investigators in the case alleged that Hijazi was a “card carrying member of al Qaeda” who was helping to run a sleeper cell in Buffalo.

A day after the drone strike, President Bush was in Arkansas stumping for Republican candidates in the midterm congressional elections. Without specifically mentioning the strike, Bush sent a message about his strategy against al Qaeda operatives around the world. “The only way to treat them is [as] what they are—international killers,” Bush declared. “And the only way to find them is to be patient, and steadfast, and hunt them down. And the United States of America is doing just that.”

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld deflected questions about the US role in the strike, saying only that if Harithi was killed, “it would be a very good thing if he were out of business.” When pressed on the extent of US operations in Yemen, Rumsfeld would only say, “We have some folks in that country,” adding, “I’m not going to get into the arrangements we have with the government of Yemen, other than to say what I said.”

While the Bush administration characterized the attack that killed Hijazi and Harithi as a successful takedown of a dangerous high-value target, unnamed officials revealed in multiple media outlets that it was a US operation but said they were reluctant to discuss the US role because of the damage it could do to Saleh’s government. “Most governments aren’t keen on the idea of U.S. hit squads or unmanned Predators roaming their country, executing summary justice,” reported Newsweek, adding that Saleh had given the United States “consent to go after Al Qaeda with its own high-tech resources.” But then, on November 5, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, openly confirmed it was a US strike, angering Saleh as well as the CIA. “It’s a very successful tactical operation, and one hopes each time you get a success like that, not only to have gotten rid of somebody dangerous, but to have imposed changes in their tactics and operations and procedures,” Wolfowitz declared on CNN. “And sometimes when people are changing, they expose themselves in new ways. So, we’ve just got to keep the pressure on everywhere we’re able to, and we’ve got to deny the sanctuaries everywhere we’re able to, and we’ve got to put pressure on every government that is giving these people support to get out of that business.”

Saleh was described as being “highly pissed” at the disclosure. “This is going to cause major problems for me,” Saleh complained to General Tommy Franks, the commander of CENTCOM. “This is why it is so difficult to make deals with the United States,” said Yemeni brigadier general Yahya M. al Mutawakel. “They don’t consider the internal circumstances in Yemen.” To the American intel and special ops community, which had cooked up a cover story with Saleh’s government to blame the hit on a truck bomb or a land mine, this was infuriating. But not everyone was displeased. When Senator Robert Graham, then chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was asked if the drone attack was “a precursor of more to come,” he replied bluntly, “I hope so.”

The targeted assassination of a US citizen away from the declared battlefield of Afghanistan sparked outrage from civil liberties and human rights groups. It was the first publicly confirmed targeted killing by the United States outside a battlefield since Gerald Ford implemented a ban on political assassinations in 1976. “If this was the deliberate killing of suspects in lieu of arrest in circumstances in which they did not pose an immediate threat, the killings would be extra-judicial executions in violation of international human rights law,” declared Amnesty International in a letter to President Bush. “The United States should issue a clear and unequivocal statement that it will not sanction extra-judicial executions in any circumstances, and that any US officials found to be involved in such actions will be brought to justice.”

Far from issuing such a statement, the Bush administration not only owned the operation but pushed back hard, asserting its right under US law to kill people it designated as terrorists in any country, even if they were US citizens. “I can assure you that no constitutional questions are raised here,” National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said on Fox News a week after the attack. “The president has given broad authority to U.S. officials in a variety of circumstances to do what they need to do to protect the country. We’re in a new kind of war, and we’ve made very clear that it is important that this new kind of war be fought on different battlefields.” She added, “It’s broad authority.”

The targeted killing didn’t just grab the attention of human rights groups. “To the extent you do more and more of this, it begins to look like it is policy,” said the CIA’s former general counsel, Jeffrey Smith. If used regularly, such attacks would “suggest that it’s acceptable behavior to assassinate people….Assassination as a norm of international conduct exposes American leaders and Americans overseas.”

In addition to launching a new kind of war in Yemen and the surrounding region, the drone strike that killed Hijazi would prove to be a precedent for Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, who nearly a decade later asserted the right of the US government to kill another US citizen in Yemen.

In the bigger picture, the 2002 Predator drone strike in Yemen was a seminal moment in the war on terror. It was the first time the CIA’s armed version of the Predator drone was used to attack al Qaeda outside Afghanistan. “It means the rules of engagement have changed,” an ex-CIA official familiar with special operations told the Los Angeles Times. The attack was an early salvo in the US government’s new borderless war. “The best way to keep America safe from terrorism is to go after terrorists where they plan and hide,” President Bush said in his weekly radio address after the drone strike. “And that work goes on around the world.” Bush reasserted that he had “deployed troops” in Yemen but emphasized they were only there in a training capacity.

As Bush spoke, plans were under way to put the new “world is a battlefield” doctrine into practice. In late 2002, US military and intelligence personnel worked around the clock upgrading and expanding Camp Lemonnier on the outskirts of Djibouti’s airport, preparing it for its role as a clandestine base of operations for JSOC and other special operations teams to strike at will against targets in Yemen and Somalia deemed to be terrorists under President Bush’s sweeping parameters of what constituted a combatant in the war on terror. On December 12, Donald Rumsfeld paid a surprise visit to the base as it was still under construction. “We need to be where the action is,” Rumsfeld told several hundred soldiers dressed in military fatigues. “There’s no question but that this part of the world is an area where there’s action.” He continued, “There are a number of terrorists, for example, just across the water in Yemen,” declaring, “These are serious problems.” That day, a US Army spokesman at Camp Lemonnier was asked if any missions had been launched from the new US base. “None that are conventional enough that we can speak about,” he replied. On December 13, the base officially became fully operational.

The US force in Djibouti was bolstered by more than four hundred soldiers and sailors aboard the USS Mount Whitney, a command-and-control ship sailing the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden. Its official mission: detect, disorganize, defeat and deny terrorist groups posing an imminent threat to coalition partners in the region. “We’re coming, we’re hunting, we’re relentless,” declared the Whitney’s senior officer, US marine major general John Sattler. His warship would help coordinate a covert US offensive encompassing Somalia, Yemen, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Sudan. As Sattler spoke, in December 2002, his ship was decorated with paper Santas and other Christmas decorations, as well as a portrait of Osama bin Laden riddled with bullet holes. He described his mission as hunting terrorist leaders fleeing Afghanistan and heading to Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere in the region. “If they stumble, we’ll bring them to justice. Even if they don’t stumble, if they sleep a little too early one night or a little too late one morning, we’ll be there.”

Sattler refused to confirm his forces were involved in the November 2002 drone strike but said, “If I were a terrorist, and I thought I was happily driving down the road with my terrorist buddies, and all of a sudden—with no warning—I cease to exist, I would be looking left, right and, now, up, because we’re out there.” On December 22, Sattler met with President Saleh and other senior Yemeni officials in Sana’a. The US Embassy would not comment at the time about the meetings. The Yemeni government said only that the officials had discussed “coordination” in the “war against terrorism.” At the time, the New York Times characterized the views of a senior Bush administration official on Yemen: “As long as Mr. Saleh allows the C.I.A. to fly pilotless Predator drones over Yemeni territory and cooperates with American Special Forces and C.I.A. teams hunting for Qaeda members,” the administration would continue to back the Yemeni president.

The lethal US drone attack in Yemen and the construction of the base in Djibouti presaged an era of “direct action” by US counterterrorism forces in the region. “Needless to say a year ago, we weren’t here,” Rumsfeld said at Camp Lemonnier. “I suspect that if we looked out one or two or three or four years we would find that this facility would be here.” In addition to the conventional US military forces building up around Yemen and the Horn of Africa, US Special Operations Forces, including troops from JSOC, discreetly based at the time in Qatar and Kenya, were put on standby for more clandestine incursions into Yemen and its neighbor across the Gulf of Aden, Somalia. Although the CIA would take the lead in many of the future US operations in the region, it was a key moment in the rise of US Special Operations Forces, particularly JSOC, to a position of unprecedented influence within the US national security apparatus.