Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

18. The Imprisonment of Anwar Awlaki

YEMEN, 2004–2007—When Anwar Awlaki returned to Yemen in 2004, history was laying a path for him that would lead him toward international infamy and a showdown against JSOC, the CIA and the US assassination program. It seems unlikely he knew that at the time. How could he? His father, Nasser, said that Anwar’s decision to return to Sana’a was a practical one, not an indicator of his growing radicalism. “He could not get a scholarship to study in Britain,” Nasser asserted, so “he decided to come back to Yemen.” But what happened to Awlaki when he did return would harden his views toward US policies and propel him to renounce any allegiance he had once professed to hold to the country of his birth.

Awlaki arrived in Sana’a and was contemplating his next steps. He had plans to study at Iman University and was invited to preach at some mosques. In a lecture at Sana’a University, he delivered a speech on the role of Islam in the world and condemned the US war in Iraq. He and his wife and their children settled into Nasser’s home in Sana’a, just near the university. By that time, Awlaki’s eldest son, Abdulrahman, was nine years old. Like his father, he had spent the first years of his life growing up as an American. He was a lanky, bespectacled boy and the spitting image of his father at that age. Anwar “thought about creating a center of learning Islam and also language—teaching non-Muslims Arabic, and things like that,” recalled Nasser. “He thought about starting his own school, like an elementary school. He wanted to just do regular preaching, until he found some job which was appropriate for him.”

But the United States had not forgotten about Awlaki, and Yemeni intelligence agents were on him from the day he arrived. Awlaki had grown accustomed to life under surveillance, and he did his best to make a living. But religion—his faith—was his real passion. He spent a lot of time in front of the computer, recording sermons and carrying on extensive correspondence with his followers across the globe. “He was mostly doing lecturing, through the Internet,” said Nasser. “And also he got into trying to start some businesses, you know, real estate, some ventures. He was trying to work as a private person, buying and selling real estate.” Nasser laughed, shaking his head, before adding, “You know, but this didn’t work out.” Awlaki’s children were enjoying the time they spent with their grandparents, aunts and uncles, and the Awlakis began building a separate apartment for Anwar and his family inside their gated lot in Sana’a.

Awlaki’s family members describe this period in Sana’a as a time of exploration for Anwar. It seems clear that by 2006, Anwar had come to terms with the fact that his life as an American was over. The FBI was not going to leave him alone. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan enraged him. He spent endless days and nights toiling over questions of how Muslims should respond to the wars, from Iraq, to Gaza, to Afghanistan and beyond. His sermons were becoming sharper. He often debated the nature of jihad with those he corresponded with. He truly seemed to be struggling to discover his own truths about the post-9/11 world. But Anwar did not mention al Qaeda, at least not in any positive way. “Everything was normal, and we thought that he put everything back [in America] behind him,” recalled Nasser. “And we were building our house, and we built him an apartment, and all that. So really, everything to me was very normal. And he himself was just only working on his preaching and things like that. And nothing else.”

Nothing else, until Anwar was put in prison.

“That was a turning point,” said Nasser.

ANWAR AWLAKI was a political prisoner. When he was arrested in mid-2006 by US-backed Yemeni forces, there was a cover story. Something about Anwar intervening in a tribal dispute. But, as with most political prisoners, it was just a thinly veiled excuse to take him off the streets. Anwar was taken at night and put in solitary confinement at the feared prison in Sana’a run by the PSO, the Political Security Organization. The PSO worked closely with US intelligence. After he was arrested, Yemeni intelligence agents confiscated his computer and tapes of lectures he had given at Iman University. There were never any real charges brought against him. Anwar swore that it was the US government that was keeping him locked up, so Nasser reached out to the US Embassy for help. He was their citizen, after all. Surely they knew Anwar, Nasser thought. He was the one on TV after 9/11. The “go-to imam.” A counselor at the embassy said he could offer little more than an assurance they would “look after” Anwar.

“For the first nine months, I was in solitary confinement in an underground cell. I would say that the cell was about 8 feet by 4,” Awlaki later recalled. “I was not allowed pen and paper, and no exercise whatsoever. I hadn’t seen the sun for the entire period.” He said he was allowed “no interaction at all with any person except with the prison guards.”

There is no doubt the United States was involved in Anwar’s imprisonment. “I believe that I was held at the request of the United States government,” Anwar said. “I was taken into custody without any explanation.” When he was first arrested, he said Yemeni intelligence agents “began asking me questions about my local Islamic activities here, and later on it was becoming clear that I was being held due to the request of the US government. That was what they were telling me here.” They also told Awlaki that the United States wanted its own agents to question him. A report by the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial summary or arbitrary executions alleged that Awlaki was arrested “at the request of the United States Government.”

The New York Times reported that John Negroponte, who at the time of Anwar’s arrest was the US director of national intelligence, “told Yemeni officials that the United States did not object to his detention.” But it was more than simply not objecting. A Yemeni source with close ties to Awlaki and the Yemeni government told me about a meeting between Negroponte, Yemen’s ambassador to the United States and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the United States. Bandar was extremely close to the Bush administration and President Bush in particular—so close, in fact, that his nickname was “Bandar Bush.” The source told me he spoke to the Yemeni ambassador, who told him that Negroponte had said something to this effect: “Oh, it is very nice that you locked Anwar in prison. It is good. Because what bothers us is [his] preaching, and his sermons, and we are afraid that he will influence young people in the West.” The Yemeni ambassador, according to the source, told Negroponte, “Look, if there is nothing, no case against Anwar, we cannot keep him indefinitely in prison. The tribal people in Yemen, [Anwar’s] friends, civil rights groups in America and in Britain, they write letters to Condoleezza Rice and to us, regarding the imprisonment of Anwar. And so we cannot keep him indefinitely.” Negroponte’s reply, my source said, was, “Well, but you have to.”

In November 2006, Nasser Awlaki ran into Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh at a development conference in London. “I asked him to release my son from prison,” Nasser recalled. “And he said, ‘there are some issues with the Americans, I will try to solve them and I will release your son.’” Saleh bin Fareed, Anwar’s uncle, with whom he stayed briefly in Britain, is one of the most powerful tribal sheikhs in Yemen. He is the head of the Aulaq tribe, Anwar’s tribe, which numbers some 750,000 people. In Yemen, it is the tribes, not the government, that hold the power and influence, and the Aulaqs were not going to stand for Anwar being in prison without charges. Bin Fareed told me he called President Saleh and asked him why he was holding Anwar in prison. “The Americans asked us to keep him in jail,” bin Fareed said the president told him. The Americans told Saleh, according to bin Fareed, “We want you to keep him for three, four years.” Saleh told him, “[Anwar is] well spoken—the reason they gave us is that he’s very well-spoken, many people listen to him in United States, especially young people. And all over the world. And we want him to be kept [locked up] for a few years, until people forget about him.”

When President Saleh visited Washington, DC, early on in Anwar’s imprisonment, he met with FBI director Robert Mueller, CIA director George Tenet and other US intelligence officials. Saleh told Nasser that he raised Anwar’s case with them. In fact, he said he asked President Bush directly about Anwar. “If you have anything against Anwar al-Awlaki, tell us,” he said Saleh told Bush. “If you don’t, we will release him from prison.” President Bush, he said, responded, “Give me two months, and then I will answer you.”

Two months passed and then Nasser received a call from the chief of Yemen’s Political Security Organization, General Galib al Qamish. “Dr. Nasser,” he said, “please ask your son to cooperate with the interrogators, who are coming from Washington to meet Anwar.” So Nasser went to the prison to appeal to Anwar. “I told my son ‘Please, you know, we want to settle this thing forever. Why don’t you be helpful, and meet these people?’ And [Anwar] said, ‘I am willing to meet them. I met them in America, and I am going to meet them in Yemen.’”

When the FBI agents arrived to interview Anwar, they stayed for two days. Awlaki “was summoned to an office and as he entered upon the Americans, he didn’t put himself into [an] accused position, rather he entered the office [and] acted like a boss,” recalled Shaykh Harith al Nadari, who was imprisoned with Awlaki. “He chose to sit on the most appropriate seat, ate from the fruits prepared by the Yemenis to host the Americans and poured a cup of tea for himself. I had asked him about the nature of the investigation. He told me that the whole thing was to find any tiny violation that would permit them to prosecute him back in an American court. It was an interrogation, he said. Nevertheless, they didn’t find what they were searching after.” Yemeni intelligence insisted on having its own people in the room. Awlaki said that when the US agents interrogated him for two days, “There was some pressure, which I refused to accept and that led to a conflict that occurred between me and them, because I felt that it was improper behavior from their behalf….That was solved however, later on, and they apologized.” Anwar, according to Nasser, cooperated with the interrogators. Still, days and weeks passed, and Anwar remained behind bars.

When the Awlaki family pressed the regime for answers, the Yemeni president made clear to them the stakes. Yemen’s vice president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, told Nasser that the Yemeni president had a grim choice for him: Do you want to keep Anwar locked up or do you want me to release him “to be killed by an American drone?” “So, this is the president of Yemen telling me, ‘Keep your son in prison rather than getting him out, because if he gets out he will be killed by an American drone,’” Nasser said, adding that at the time, he believed that “the only reason which made the United States targeting Anwar was because of his popularity among Muslims, English-speaking Muslims in the world.” He concluded, “I think Ali Abdullah Saleh must have known something.”

AS HIS FAMILY on the outside fought for his freedom, inside the prison, Anwar pored over books. Any books he could get. For the first two months, the only book he was permitted was the Koran. Awlaki later said he saw his “detention as a blessing,” saying it offered him “a chance to review Qur’an and to study and read in a way that was impossible out of jail. My time in detention was a vacation from this world.” He later said that “because they took everything away and gave the Qur’an, that is why the Qur’an had this different meaning,” adding, “It is because of the distractions that are going around us, that we don’t get the most benefit from Qur’an. But when a person is in that solitary environment, all of the distractions are taken away and his heart is fixed on the word of Allah,” and the words take on “a completely different meaning.”

Eventually, Awlaki got his hands on In the Shade of the Quran by Sayyid Qutb. There were some striking similarities between Awlaki’s life experience and those of Qutb. Qutb was an Egyptian scholar and thinker whose writings and teachings later were credited with forming the intellectual basis for militant Islamist movements. He was a dissident in Egypt who advocated for an Islamic government. Like Awlaki, he spent time studying in Colorado, where he enrolled at Colorado State College of Education in 1949. After his time in the United States, Qutb railed against what he perceived as the excesses of American culture—scantily clad women, jazz music, wrestling and football, alcohol. He labeled America a “primitive” society, writing that its people were “numb to faith in religion, faith in art, and faith in spiritual values altogether.” When he returned to Egypt, Qutb developed close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1954, he was arrested and put in jail, where he would remain for most of the rest of his life. While Qutb was tortured in prison, he also wrote his most influential texts, including the book Awlaki would read in his own prison cell a half century later. In 1966, Qutb was hanged after being convicted of plotting to overthrow the Egyptian government.

Awlaki said he was “so immersed with the author I would feel that Sayyid was with me in my cell speaking to me directly. There was something about my reading in prison: I could feel the personality of the author through his words. So even though I was in solitary confinement I was never alone.” Awlaki said that he tried to limit his reading to thirty pages a day, “But because of the flowing style of Sayyid I would read between 100–150 pages a day. In fact I would read until my eyes got tired. My left eye would get exhausted before the right eye so I would close it with my hand and carry on reading with my right eye until it can handle it no more and would just shut down. My vision started deteriorating especially in my left eye. Was it because of too much reading, or was it because of poor lighting, Allah knows best. I found that deteriorating eyesight along with kidney problems were the two most common complaints of the prisoners.”

He also read the works of Charles Dickens (Hard Times), Shakespeare (King Lear) and Herman Melville (Moby Dick). “There was a particularly mean Prison Head who decided to ban me from having any Islamic books,” Awlaki later wrote. “Shakespeare was the worst thing I read during my entire stay in prison. I never liked him to start with. Probably the only reason he became so famous is because he was English and had the backing and promotion of the speakers of a global language.” Awlaki, however, praised Dickens’s works. “What fascinated me with these novels were the amazing characters Dickens created and the similarity of some of them to some people today. That made them very interesting,” he wrote. “For example: the thick and boastful Mr. Josiah Bounderby of Coketown was similar to George W. Bush; Lucy’s father, Mr. Gradgrind, was similar to some Muslim parents who are programmed to think that only Medicine and Engineering are worthy professions for their children; the amazing cruelness of Stephen Blackpool was similar to some people who appear on the surface to be decent and kind human beings; and Uriah Heep was similar to some pitiful Muslims today.”

Awlaki later reflected on the food in prison. Describing kudam, the “staple breads of prisoners and soldiers in Yemen,” Awlaki wrote: “[They] are supposed to be multigrain. That is how it was in the old days. Now they are most likely whole-wheat. They are fermented so their taste resembles San Francisco’s sourdough bread (those who live in America would know what I am talking about). They consist of a solid crust (and I mean really solid); they could be used for fights.” He recalled, “Before my imprisonment, I had discussions with former prisoners about how it was in jail, so there was some mental preparation for what was to come. I remember the words of one of the shuyukh [religious figures] who had been to this same prison. He said the food was so horrible, so I was expecting the worst.” His first morning in the prison, Awlaki recalled, “I began hearing the opening of the doors and soldiers screaming at prisoners to pick up their meals. It was my turn and I was already awake. They opened my door and there were two soldiers, one holding a bucket and the other dragging a sack full of kudam. The one with the bucket took my plate and poured in it a cupful of steaming pinto beans while the other handed me six” pieces of kudam. After a few weeks, he said, he had concluded: “This food stinks.”

Eventually, the prison authorities permitted Awlaki to receive home-cooked meals from his family twice a week. “However the prison administration would use this as a method to pressure prisoners. Under the pretext of searching our food for contraband items I would sometimes receive my food in an inedible state. They once mashed together my rice, chocolate cake and salad and then poured over it a package of cranberry juice. Even the guard who delivered the meal to me was saddened by the state of my food,” Awlaki recalled. Prison, he said, reaffirmed his commitment to his religion. “Islam is not something that we use to fill in the spiritual compartment of our life while we leave everything else to our whims and desires. Islam should rule over every aspect of our life.”

After Anwar Awlaki had been locked up for seventeen months, the tremendous pressure from tribal groups that Saleh’s regime had to keep on his side to maintain power, and from Anwar’s influential family, finally forced his release. Sheikh Saleh bin Fareed had gone to see the Yemeni president to offer his personal guarantees that Anwar would not cause trouble if he was set free. “OK, if you have anything against Anwar, please take him to court,” bin Fareed told the Yemeni president. “And if you prove anything, you kill him. We don’t mind. If you have anything, any proof against him, we don’t mind if you take him to court and you kill him. If you don’t, then give us our son.” The president, he said, told him, “To be honest, I have nothing against Anwar, whatsoever.” That day, the order was given to release Awlaki. “The Americans were not happy about it,” said bin Fareed.

A US diplomatic cable about Awlaki’s release elevated Anwar to a “sheikh” and referred to him as “the alleged spiritual advisor to two of the 9/11 hijackers.” The cable added that Yemeni government “contacts” told US officials that “they do not have sufficient evidence to charge [Awlaki] and can no longer hold him illegally.” A few years later, the US government would characterize Awlaki’s imprisonment as evidence he had long been involved with terror plots against the United States. Without providing any evidence to support the claim, the US Treasury Department statement alleged Awlaki “was imprisoned in Yemen in 2006 on charges of kidnapping for ransom and being involved in an al-Qa’ida plot to kidnap a U.S. official, but was released from jail in December 2007 and subsequently went into hiding in Yemen.”