Dirty Wars

25. Obama’s Signature Strikes

PAKISTAN AND WASHINGTON, DC, 2009—As he settled into the Oval Office and his new role as commander in chief, President Obama tweaked Bush’s expansive Global War on Terror rhetoric, rebranding it as a “war against al-Qaeda and its allies.” On his third day in office, Obama signed a series of executive orders that were portrayed as “dismantling” the Bushera torture and detention programs. “The message we are sending around the world is that the United States intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle against violence and terrorism, and we are going to do so vigilantly; we are going to do so effectively; and we are going to do so in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals,” Obama declared as he stood with sixteen retired military officers. “We intend to win this fight. We’re going to win it on our terms.” But, while dispensing with the Bushera labels and cowboy rhetoric that marked the previous eight years of US foreign policy, Obama simultaneously moved swiftly to expand the covert US wars that had marked his predecessor’s time in office.

The day after Obama signed his executive orders, CIA director Michael Hayden briefed him on an operation the Agency was about to conduct inside Pakistan: a drone strike near the Afghan border. The targets, Hayden told the president, were upper-tier al Qaeda and Taliban members. Later that day, two Hellfire missiles hit compounds in North and South Waziristan. The first strike hit in a small village near Mir Ali, in North Waziristan, around 5:00 p.m. local time. The second struck a compound in the village of Karez Kot in South Waziristan at around 8:30 p.m. Hayden, weeks away from leaving the Agency, admitted to the president that the main HVTs had not been hit but told him that “at least five al Qaeda militants” had died. “Good,” said Obama, who made clear that he favored escalating drone strikes in Pakistan.

As the US intelligence officers monitored the footage from the January 23 drone strikes, it became clear that civilians had been killed. John Brennan went straight to the president and told him what had happened. Five “militants” may have died in the strikes, but they were not the only ones killed. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the first strike in North Waziristan killed between seven and fifteen people, nearly all of them civilians. Many of the slain were from one family. One boy was reported to have survived, albeit with a skull fracture, a perforated stomach and the loss of an eye. The second strike in South Waziristan struck the “wrong house” and killed five to eight civilians, according to subsequent reports. Many of the dead, including at least two children, were the family members of a tribal elder, who was also killed. The elder was reportedly a member of a “pro-government peace committee.”

Obama summoned Hayden for a face-to-face meeting and demanded a full briefing on the drone program’s protocols. Despite the scores of national security briefings Obama had received from the time he became the Democratic nominee for president, it was the first the new president had heard of what the CIA called “signature strikes.” Beginning in the closing months of the Bush administration, the Agency had begun targeting people based on patterns of life rather than specific intelligence. The CIA said that “military aged males” who were part of a large gathering of people in a particular region or had contacts with other suspected militants or terrorists could be considered fair targets for drone strikes. A positive ID was not necessary to strike, only some of the “signatures” the Agency had developed to identify suspected terrorists.

After some convincing from Hayden, Obama decided not to reject the signature strike policy, although he added a constraint: the CIA director was to have the final say on all strikes, an authority that had been occasionally delegated to the deputy director or the head of the Agency’s counterterrorism center. Obama warned that he might withdraw the signature strike authority at a later time. But he didn’t. In the ensuing months, the new CIA director, Leon Panetta, enlisted the help of “undercover officers” from the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and put the president through a “crash course” on targeted strikes. Panetta reviewed the drone program and other kinetic protocols, including the authorities needed in order to launch a strike. Obama and Panetta would hold one-on-one sessions after HVTs had been hit in Pakistan.

During that first year in office, Obama began to hold regular hourlong meetings with top officials to discuss all matters of national security and counterterrorism. According to participants, these early meetings had a “tutorial” character. Intelligence and security threats were discussed, but Obama was still being introduced to new capabilities. For much of the first year, discussions about capturing or killing people outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan were for the most part theoretical. The vice chair of the Joint Chiefs, General “Hoss” Cartwright, and Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, were increasingly central to the deliberations, as was Admiral McRaven, the commander of JSOC. One of the first tasks on Obama’s national security agenda was a thorough review of Bush’s military executive orders. When it came to counterterrorism, Obama would preserve much of his predecessor’s policies, and he ended up sustaining most of the ExOrds without revision. In some cases, he sought to expand the authorities. Obama began striking Pakistan almost weekly.

OBAMA INHERITED an already escalating drone program from Bush. The strikes in Pakistan had become more frequent in the waning months of 2008. Just before Obama won the election, Bush had “reached a tacit agreement to allow [drone strikes] to continue without Pakistani involvement.” The US policy was to inform Pakistan of attacks while they were under way, or minutes after they had been carried out. President Obama approved of the shift, which brought with it an uptick in drone activity, and he “fully endorsed the covert action program.” Obama also kept in place “virtually all the key personnel” from the CIA who had run the covert campaign under Bush. Part of this program, which Obama was read into by outgoing director of national intelligence Mike McConnell right after the election, was a HUMINT network within Pakistan. The spies provided on-the-ground intel that was a necessary counterpart to the drone surveillance and targeting. The spy program, five years in the making and reportedly expensive, was “the real [secret] that Obama would carry with him from that moment forward.”

Soon after he assumed office, Obama began pressing Panetta about the hunt for bin Laden. By May 2009, Obama told the CIA director that he needed to make the manhunt his “number one goal” and instructed Panetta to deliver a “detailed operation plan” for locating bin Laden. Panetta had thirty days to put the plan together and then began providing the president with weekly updates on progress made on the effort, even when there was little to report.

As the hunt for bin Laden intensified, the drone strikes continued. So too did the civilian deaths. On June 23, the CIA killed several alleged militants with a Hellfire missile in South Waziristan, then followed up hours later with an attack on the funeral mourning their deaths. Scores of civilians—estimates ranged between eighteen and forty-five—were killed. “After the prayers ended people were asking each other to leave the area as drones were hovering,” said a man who lost his leg in the attack. “First two drones fired two missiles, it created a havoc, there was smoke and dust everywhere. Injured people were crying and asking for help…they fired the third missile after a minute, and I fell on the ground.” US intelligence reportedly believed that Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban would be “among the mourners.” He was not, at least when the drones struck.

The elusive Mehsud had already survived over a dozen reported attempts to kill him, between Bush and Obama, which had resulted in hundreds of collateral deaths. But then, in early August, US intelligence tracked Mehsud down to his father-in-law’s house in a village called Zanghara in South Waziristan. On August 5, CIA drones fired at him as he reclined on the house’s rooftop with family members and other guests. Two Hellfire missiles ripped Mehsud in half, killing eleven other people at the house.

In October 2009, Obama reportedly expanded the “target boxes” in Pakistan, broadening the area in which the CIA could go after targets, gave the agency authorization to acquire more drones, and “increased resources for the agency’s secret paramilitary forces.” Obama had already authorized as many drone strikes in ten months as Bush had in his entire eight years in office.

ALTHOUGH THE CIA WOULD TAKE MUCH of the credit and criticism for the US drone program in Pakistan, it was not the only player. JSOC had its own intelligence operations inside Pakistan and, at times, conducted its own drone strikes. At the center of both the JSOC and CIA targeted-killing programs were members of an elite division of Blackwater, who assisted in planning the assassinations of suspected Taliban and al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive actions inside Pakistan. Some elite Blackwater SELECT personnel worked for the CIA at “hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company’s contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft.”

Blackwater operatives also worked for JSOC on a parallel program that was run out of Bagram Air Base in neighboring Afghanistan. US military intelligence and company sources told me that some Blackwater personnel were given rolling security clearances above their approved level. Using Alternative Compartmentalized Control Measures (ACCMs), the Blackwater personnel were granted entry to a Special Access Program. “With an ACCM, the security manager can grant access to you to be exposed to and operate within compartmentalized programs far above ‘secret’—even though you have no business doing so,” a US military intelligence source told me. It allowed Blackwater personnel who “do not have the requisite security clearance or do not hold a security clearance whatsoever to participate in classified operations by virtue of trust,” he added. “Think of it as an ultra-exclusive level above top secret. That’s exactly what it is: a circle of love.” As a result, Blackwater had access to “all source” reports that were culled in part from JSOC units in the field. “That’s how a lot of things over the years have been conducted with contractors,” said the source. “We have contractors that regularly see things that top policymakers don’t unless they ask.”

The military intelligence source said that the Blackwater-JSOC operation in Pakistan was referred to as “Qatar cubed,” in reference to the US forward operating base in Qatar that served as the hub for the planning and implementation of the US invasion of Iraq. “This is supposed to be the brave new world,” he told me. “This is the Jamestown of the new millennium and it’s meant to be a lily pad. You can jump off to Uzbekistan, you can jump back over the border, you can jump sideways, you can jump northwest. It’s strategically located so that they can get their people wherever they have to without having to wrangle with the military chain of command in Afghanistan, which is convoluted. They don’t have to deal with that because they’re operating under a classified mandate.”

In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against suspected al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the CIA, the Blackwater teams also helped plan missions for JSOC inside Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Blackwater did not actually carry out the operations, the military intelligence source told me, which were executed on the ground by JSOC forces. “That piqued my curiosity and really worries me because I don’t know if you noticed but I was never told we are at war with Uzbekistan,” he said. “So, did I miss something? Did Rumsfeld come back into power?” When civilians are killed, “People go, ‘Oh, it’s the CIA doing crazy shit again unchecked.’ Well, at least 50 percent of the time, that’s JSOC [hitting] somebody they’ve identified through HUMINT or they’ve culled the intelligence themselves or it’s been shared with them and they take that person out and that’s how it works.”

CIA operations were subject to congressional oversight, unlike the parallel JSOC ops. “Targeted killings are not the most popular thing in town right now and the CIA knows that,” my source told me in 2009. “Contractors and especially JSOC personnel working under a classified mandate are not [overseen by Congress], so they just don’t care. If there’s one person they’re going after and there’s thirty-four [other] people in the building, thirty-five people are going to die. That’s the mentality.” He added, “They’re not accountable to anybody and they know that. It’s an open secret, but what are you going to do, shut down JSOC?”

As President Obama and his new cabinet began reviewing the covert actions and programs built up under Bush, they were faced with a series of tough choices on which to end and which to continue. The labyrinth of the CIA-JSOC-Blackwater covert action program in Pakistan was a legacy of the infighting and secrecy that had played out within the US counterterrorism community since the early days after 9/11. As a senator, Obama was critical of Blackwater and introduced legislation to try to hold it and other private security companies accountable. Now, as commander in chief, he was confronted by briefings from the CIA and US military about their necessity to covert US operations. Laying out policy visions on the campaign trail was one thing, but confronting the most secretive, elite forces in the US national security apparatus would be no easy task. And, for the most part, Obama elected to embrace—not restrain—those very forces. The more the president became involved with the day-to-day running of the targeted killing program, the more it expanded. By the end of his first year in office, Obama and his new counterterrorism team would begin building the infrastructure for a formalized US assassination program.