Dirty Wars

20. Prison Break

YEMEN, 2006—While the CIA’s warlords were battling the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia and the Bush administration was almost singularly focused on the mounting insurgency in Iraq, a mass prison break in Sana’a occurred that would prove to be a seminal event in the reconstruction of al Qaeda in the region. Among those who escaped were several key figures who would go on to form the nexus of the leadership of a new organization, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), including Nasir al Wuhayshi, bin Laden’s former personal secretary. On February 3, 2006, Wuhayshi and twenty-two others escaped from their maximum security prison by tunneling out of a cell into a nearby mosque, though Wuhayshi later boasted that they performed morning prayers before literally walking out the front door. Wuhayshi would unite the Saudi and Yemeni branches of al Qaeda under the regional banner of AQAP. Qasim al Rimi, who escaped in the same breakout, would go on to become AQAP’s military commander. “It is a serious problem,” Rumsfeld said a few days after the prison break. “They were individuals who were deeply involved in al Qaeda activities and directly connected to the attack on the USS Cole and the death of the sailors that were on board that ship.” But while Rumsfeld and other US officials focused almost exclusively on pressing Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh to recapture Jamal al Badawi, whom the United States wanted to be extradited, and other Cole bombing suspects, it would be Wuhayshi and Rimi who would become the most notorious and problematic of the escapees.

Several former senior US intelligence, law enforcement and military officials who worked on Yemen operations and policy told me these prison releases were not accidental, and neither was AQAP’s choice of Yemen totally beyond Saleh’s control. While generally dismissing notions of direct collusion between Saleh and al Qaeda in planning attacks, the former officials described a multiyear pattern of Saleh’s tacitly allowing acts of terrorism to be conducted on Yemeni soil, or exploiting such attacks after they occurred, as a way of reminding Washington of the threat posed by al Qaeda in Yemen. “Saleh knows how to play the game in order for everyone to know he is needed—from al Qaeda to the Saudis to the US,” said the former top US counterterrorism official with extensive experience in Yemen. “And he plays it very well.”

The game was about getting the money and weapons and specialized training for Saleh’s most elite forces to battle the domestic rebellions he viewed as the real threat to his survival. “For years we have seen some of these regimes play these types of games,” said Dr. Emile Nakhleh, the former senior CIA intelligence officer, in 2010. “They play it for survival, they play it to stay on our good side, they play it to get all kinds of military aid—and, in fact, the military aid is two or three times more than the economic aid that Yemen gets….Therefore, if that’s true, then they are not necessarily serving [US] strategic, long-term counterterrorism policy.”

Some seasoned Yemeni political analysts, however, believed that there was actually direct cooperation between the Saleh regime and al Qaeda. There were allegations that some members of the elite Republican Guard, the Political Security Organization and the Central Security Forces—all of which received support from Washington—were working with al Qaeda cells or had helped them with supplies, safe houses and intelligence on foreign diplomatic installations. The 2006 prison break struck some well-connected Yemeni security experts as “an inside job,” asserted journalist Sam Kimball in a report for Foreign Policy. “The prison is an imposing fortress in the heart of Sana’a, with plainclothes soldiers patrolling its perimeter. Inmates’ spare cells—only plastic silverware is allowed in—are inspected several times a day. Prisoners are only allowed a half-hour a day outdoors.” Retired Yemeni colonel Muhsin Khosroof said, “We don’t know how they got the tools to dig a 300-meter tunnel, and we don’t know where the soil they dug out went.” Short of direct support from prison officials, he asserted, “this operation would seem impossible.”

The prison break would directly contribute to the growth of al Qaeda in Yemen. If what Colonel Khosroof and his colleagues alleged was true, it meant that the United States was backing the very government whose forces were facilitating al Qaeda’s resurrection in Yemen.

Following the prison break, the Bush administration continued to increase military assistance to Yemen. According to the former top US counterterrorism official, Saleh had calculated that the political costs of cracking down on al Qaeda in a meaningful way—by handing over its leaders—would have been too great. “The moment he surrenders key figures, [Saleh’s] gone off the cliff with al Qaeda. They won’t support him any more. It means the relationship would be severely shaken.” He added that Saleh “has given the US nothing of substance for the money he has received.”

In July 2006, five months after the prison break, the United States launched a major expansion of Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, from eighty-eight acres to almost five hundred. Its force had grown to 1,500 personnel, and it served as a major hub for the CIA and a stopover point for Special Operations Forces conducting covert or clandestine actions in the region. “Some teams use the base when not working ‘downrange’ in countries such as Kenya, Ethiopia and Yemen,” reported Stars and Stripes, citing the camp’s executive officer, Colonel Joseph Moore.

While Saleh played his game with the United States over the escaped prisoners, the United States was gradually building up its presence in the region, although Bush administration officials continued to treat al Qaeda’s regrouping in Yemen as a secondary priority. In October 2007, Saleh received President Bush’s top aide on homeland security and counterterrorism, Frances Townsend, in Aden. During the meeting, Townsend asked Saleh for an update on Jamal al Badawi, the alleged mastermind of the Cole bombing. Saleh confirmed that he had been released and was “working on his farm” not far from where he and Townsend were meeting. Saleh added that he had just met with Badawi two weeks earlier. “Al-Badawi promised to give up terrorism and I told him that his actions damaged Yemen and its image; he began to understand,” Saleh said. When Townsend “expressed dismay” over Badawi’s release, Saleh told her not to worry because “he is under my microscope.” It was Saleh who, according to a US diplomatic cable sent after that meeting, brought up Wuhayshi and told Townsend point blank that he had taken over as the head of al Qaeda in Yemen. Townsend, according to the cable, responded by changing the subject to Yemen’s failed house-arrest system. Later in the meeting, Saleh discussed his fight against the southern secessionists, again portraying his survival as central to Washington’s policies. “It is important that Yemen not reach a state of instability,” he told Townsend. “We need your support.” Townsend replied, “You do not even have to think about it. Of course we support Yemen.”

Perhaps the most unusual moment during the Townsend-Saleh meeting came when Saleh brought in Faris Mana’a, a top Yemeni arms trafficker, and seated him next to Townsend. According to the United Nations, “Despite the Somalia UN arms embargo since 1992, Mana’a’s interest in trafficking arms into Somalia can be traced back at least to 2003,” and Mana’a “has directly or indirectly supplied, sold or transferred to Somalia arms or related material in violation of the arms embargo.” As Mana’a entered the room, he was given a chair at Townsend’s table. “Hey FBI,” Saleh said to one of the US officials, “if he does not behave properly, you can take him… back to Washington in Townsend’s plane or to Guantánamo.” Saleh told Townsend his forces had recently intercepted a shipment of weapons from Mana’a and given them to the Yemeni military. “He has donated weapons to the nation’s military—he can be considered a patriot now,” joked Townsend. Saleh laughed. “No, he is a double agent—he also gave weapons to the al-Houthi rebels.” A US diplomatic cable Townsend authorized following the meeting proclaimed: “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up.” Putting an exclamation point on the whole episode, two years later, Mana’a would go on to serve as coordinator of President Saleh’s “peace” efforts with the Houthi rebels.

Townsend’s interaction with Saleh—and those of other US officials—showcased Saleh’s prowess in playing multiple sides in his war to maintain power. “His use of the dual threats of terrorism and instability when referring to internal conflict is also not new,” asserted the US diplomatic cable cleared by Townsend after her visit. “Saleh consistently uses this tactic when attempting to garner USG [US government] support.” Saleh clearly used this approach because it was effective. When it came to al Qaeda, the less stable Saleh’s government appeared, the more money and training he could squeeze out of the United States. “All these US officials were in way over their heads in dealing with Saleh,” a former senior US military official who worked in Yemen told me. “When it comes to Yemen, he is so much smarter than them.”

After the US drone strike in Yemen in 2002 and the subsequent arrest of scores of suspected militants, al Qaeda in Yemen had been severely disrupted and was largely a theoretical entity. But after the 2006 prison break, the escaped prisoners rebuilt the dormant organization. Saleh did little to stop them. The United States was obsessed with Saleh’s recapturing Jamal al Badawi and another Cole suspect, a US citizen named Jabir al Banna, and paid scant attention to the others. “The US put a great deal of pressure on Yemen to track both men down,” according to Gregory Johnsen, the Princeton Yemen scholar. “But, as is often the case, it was not the people the US was worried most about that caused the biggest problems, rather it was those it knew too little about that proved to be the most dangerous.”

As Saleh told Townsend during her meeting with him in 2007, al Qaeda was indeed regrouping after the 2006 prison break. And, as he said, they were led by Wuhayshi, bin Laden’s former secretary. Wuhayshi was a hardened jihadist who first went to Afghanistan in the late 1990s, where he hooked up with bin Laden. In 2001, when the United States invaded Afghanistan, Wuhayshi fought in the famed battle at Tora Bora and then fled to Iran, where he was arrested and held for two years before being handed over to Yemen in 2003. He was never charged with a crime. Upon his escape from the Yemeni prison, he rebranded al Qaeda in Yemen as a regional rather than a national group, called “The al Qaeda Organization of Jihad in the South of the Arabian Peninsula,” which eventually became AQAP. Under Wuhayshi’s leadership, al Qaeda in Yemen would “become more strident, better organized and more ambitious than it has ever been before,” asserted Johnsen at the time. Wuhayshi “completely rebuilt the organization.” That al Qaeda was back in business played well for Saleh because it required the Americans and Saudis to deal with him—and more important, to fund and arm his regime. But JSOC was growing impatient with Saleh and would soon begin to expand its own operations inside Yemen, with or without Saleh’s permission.