Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

29. “Let JSOC Off the Leash”

SAUDI ARABIA, WASHINGTON, DC, AND YEMEN, LATE 2009—In late August 2009, Saudi prince Mohammed bin Nayef received a phone call from one of the kingdom’s most wanted men, al Qaeda operative Abdullah Hasan Tali al Asiri. Prince bin Nayef was the son of the powerful Saudi interior minister, Prince Nayef bin Abdel-Aziz, third in line to the throne. In addition to serving as his father’s deputy, bin Nayef was also Saudi Arabia’s head of counterterrorism. As part of his official duties, bin Nayef encouraged al Qaeda fighters to turn themselves in through the kingdom’s terrorist rehabilitation program. Asiri, who was placed on the Saudi’s eighty-five most wanted persons list in February 2009, had fled the kingdom and was living in neighboring Yemen. If Asiri was calling the prince to turn himself in, it would be an unthinkable coup for the Saudis. Asiri was reportedly recruited to join al Qaeda by his brother, Ibrahim Hassan al Asiri, whom Saudi and US intelligence alleged was the chief bomb maker for AQAP.

“I need to meet you to tell you the whole story,” Asiri told Prince bin Nayef.

“If you come, I will sit with you,” the prince replied.

Asiri told the prince that he would meet with him in person if Prince bin Nayef sent a private jet to pick him up in a Saudi town just across the border with Yemen and bring him to bin Nayef’s palace. The prince agreed. On August 27, the two men met in person.

According to Richard Barrett, the head of the United Nations’ al Qaeda and Taliban monitoring team, as the meeting began, Asiri presented the prince with a mobile phone. “Asiri said, ‘Oh, you need to speak to my friends because they also want to give themselves up, and if they hear from you, they’ll certainly come.’”

While Prince bin Nayef was on the phone with Asiri’s alleged cohorts in Yemen, Asiri’s phone activated a bomb, Barrett explained. Incredibly, Asiri had managed to board a Saudi royal plane with a bomb made of pentaerythritol tetranitrate, known as PETN, pass multiple security checkpoints and make it onto the grounds of Prince bin Nayef’s palace in Jeddah. The reason the Saudis hadn’t detected it was because the one-pound bomb was lodged in Asiri’s rectum. As Prince bin Nayef held the phone, Asiri exploded. “It was really very fortunate for the prince that all he did was hurt his finger, because the blast blew downwards and blew upwards, and not across towards the prince,” said Barrett. The attack was caught on a video. “You see the guy’s left arm embedded in the ceiling—so the blast must have been quite considerable—and bits of him scattered all over the room,” recalled Barrett.

Although Prince bin Nayef survived the attack, it still represented a symbolic triumph for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. It was the first known assassination attempt against a Saudi royal in decades and the first significant al Qaeda attack since a twenty-month rash of bombings and killings across Saudi Arabia by al Qaeda in 2003–2004. Asiri’s brother Ibrahim was believed to have manufactured the bomb. AQAP was on the map.

Within days of the attempted assassination of Prince bin Nayef, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, was in Saudi Arabia delivering a personal letter from Obama to bin Nayef expressing his “outrage” at the attack. “I met with Prince Mohammed bin Nayef,” Brennan later said. “I went to the room where the attack took place. We worked very closely with the Saudis.” He added: “We’re very concerned about it from an assassination standpoint, and we continue to look at all the evidence that is out there so we can take the steps necessary to prevent any types of attack from taking place.”

To the UN’s Barrett, the attack raised the prospect of bombs concealed inside the body, such as Asiri’s, being used to attack airlines. “Here is a guy who got on a plane, he went through at least two security checks. He would have passed a metal detector. So he could get on any plane. That technique would work on any airline anywhere, regardless of what sort of security measures there are in the airport. And this is likely to have some severe consequences: What can you do? How much protection can you provide when this is possible?”

After meeting with the Saudis following the August 27, 2009, attack on Prince bin Nayef, Brennan said, “There was no indication…that al Qaeda was trying to use that type of attack and that modus operandi against aircraft.” Brennan was wrong about that. The attempted bin Nayef assassination wouldn’t be the last the Americans or Saudis heard from Asiri’s bomb-making brother. But the attack sharpened the focus on al Qaeda’s base in Yemen for both Riyadh and Washington.

ON SEPTEMBER 6, 2009, a week after Asiri carried out his assassination attempt on Prince bin Nayef, John Brennan once again sat face to face with President Saleh in Sana’a. Saleh boldly complained that the “current level” of US aid for counterterrorism was inadequate and claimed that his offensive against the Houthi rebels was in Washington’s interest. “This war we’re launching is a war on behalf of the US,” he told Brennan. “The Houthis are your enemies too.” In his meeting with Brennan, Saleh accused Iran of trying to undermine his relationship with Washington by backing the Houthis and tried to implicate Hezbollah as well. (In a subsequent classified cable, US officials acknowledged that the Houthis hadn’t attacked US interests or personnel since the fighting began in 2004 and raised serious questions about the extent of Iranian involvement.) Brennan told Saleh it would be against the law to give him military support against the Houthis because the United States considered the Houthis a “domestic insurgency.” Saleh countered that the lack of US support and Washington’s refusal to declare the Houthis terrorists were undermining claims of friendship and cooperation. US officials described Saleh as being in “vintage form” as he met with Brennan, “at times disdainful and dismissive and at others, conciliatory and congenial.”

According to the classified US diplomatic cable on the meeting, Saleh “repeatedly requested more funds and equipment to fight” AQAP. In return for increased aid, which Saleh undoubtedly wanted more for his domestic wars than to fight al Qaeda, he offered Brennan a valuable card. “President Saleh pledged unfettered access to Yemen’s national territory for U.S. counterterrorism operations,” the cable noted. “Saleh insisted that Yemen’s national territory is available for unilateral CT [counterterrorism] operations by the U.S.”

Brennan and other US officials saw Saleh’s offer as an attempt to take out an insurance policy in the event of any future attacks on the US Embassy or other American targets. “I have given you an open door on terrorism,” Saleh told Brennan, “so I am not responsible.” In Brennan’s view, Saleh’s “interest in outsourcing the CT effort in Yemen” to the US government was linked to his desire to free up and better equip his own forces to battle the domestic insurgencies. “A concerted [US government] anti-terrorism campaign in Yemen will free Saleh to continue to devote his limited security assets to the ongoing war against Houthi rebels,” the cable stated. “The net effect, and one we strongly suspect Saleh has calculated, of both the American and [Yemeni] ‘iron fist’ unleashed at the same time in Yemen will be a clear message…[to] any other party interested in generating political unrest in the country that a similar fate awaits them.”

Regarding the Brennan-Saleh meetings, Colonel Lang, who dealt with Saleh for years, said, “What they tell you at a meeting like that doesn’t mean a damn thing. You have to see what they’re really willing to do when you talk to people at the operational level behind the scenes. And the more you understand them, the less easily you are bullshitted about this, to be honest about it, the more willing they are to come to some sort of reasonable arrangement.”

Regardless of Saleh’s motives, the meeting satisfied Brennan that the United States was getting the official green light to conduct special operations inside Yemen. In Yemen, Brennan delivered a letter to Saleh from President Obama, pledging increased support in the “fight against terrorism.” Yemen’s security, Obama wrote, “is vital to the security of the United States and the region, and America will adopt an initiative to help Yemen.” During this period, according to US Special Operations sources, the Obama administration began authorizing plans for more lethal US operations in Yemen.

Some within the Pentagon feared the focus on Yemen was coming too late. “Not enough people in the intelligence community or the military paid the right attention to [the region], and al Qaeda has taken advantage of that to our disadvantage,” a senior defense official told the Washington Times shortly after Brennan’s visit to Yemen. “This is going to be a serious problem for us in the near future.”

ON SEPTEMBER 30, 2009, Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, appeared before the US Senate. “Al Qaeda’s under more pressure today and is facing more challenges and is more vulnerable than any time since 9/11,” Leiter told the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “But that being said, they remain a robust enemy. And although I believe we have done much to deter attacks and defend against attacks, attacks in the United States remain quite possible.” Even though “al Qaeda’s safe haven in Pakistan is shrinking and becoming less secure,” Leiter said, the group was growing in other countries.

Leiter warned the senators that al Qaeda offshoots were beginning to “pose an increasing threat to the homeland.” Some “have proven capable of attacking Western targets in their regions,” he said, but “they aspire to expand even further.” In particular, he warned about the growing threat in Yemen posed by AQAP. “We have witnessed the reemergence of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, with Yemen as a key battleground and potential regional base of operations from which Al-Qaeda can plan attacks, train recruits, and facilitate the movement of operatives,” Leiter asserted. “We are concerned that if AQAP strengthens, Al-Qaeda leaders could use the group and the growing presence of foreign fighters in the region to supplement its transnational operations capability.”

That day, President Obama convened a meeting of his top military and political advisers in the Situation Room of the White House to discuss the US strategy in Afghanistan. At the meeting were Vice President Joe Biden; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Defense Secretary Robert Gates; CIA director Leon Panetta; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen; the director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair; and General Petraeus. The details of what was discussed at the meeting remain classified, but clearly Afghanistan wasn’t the only issue on the table.

Shortly after that meeting, General Petraeus signed a seven-page secret order authorizing small teams of US Special Operations Forces to conduct clandestine operations off the stated battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. It was marked “LIMDIS,” for limited distribution. Hard copies were given to about thirty people. Its original code name was “Avocado.” The directive, known as a Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force (JUWTF) Execute Order, served as a permission slip of sorts for US military Special Operations teams to conduct clandestine actions without the president’s direct approval for each operation. “Unlike covert actions undertaken by the C.I.A., such clandestine activity does not require the president’s approval or regular reports to Congress,” reported Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, who was allowed to read the execute order.

The order spoke volumes about the continuity of foreign policy from the previous administration to the Obama White House. Under the Bush administration, the Pentagon regularly justified clandestine special ops by insisting that the forces were not at war but rather “preparing the battlefield.” Petraeus’s 2009 “ExOrd” continued and solidified the Bush-era justification for expanding covert wars under President Obama. “While the Bush administration had approved some clandestine military activities far from designated war zones, the new order is intended to make such efforts more systematic and long term,” the New York Times reported. “Its goals are to build networks that could ‘penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy’ Al Qaeda and other militant groups, as well as to ‘prepare the environment’ for future attacks by American or local military forces, the document said.”

Moreover, the Petraeus order made clear that the United States was authorizing the US military, not just the CIA, to conduct such secret operations. “The Obama administration had been reluctant to allow such an expansion of nontraditional military activities in countries where the U.S. formally has no presence. That practice was unfavorably associated with the Bush-Cheney administration’s disregard for international norms,” observed journalist Marc Ambinder at the time. “But political imperatives, the threat of terrorism, and the knowledge of what the U.S. military can accomplish if its strings are cut away has slowly changed the minds of some of Obama’s senior advisers. It is helpful that Congress has generally given the military a wide berth to conduct activities that intelligence agency paramilitaries would find objectionable.”

In addition to authorizing direct actions by Special Operations Forces, the Petraeus order also focused on intelligence gathering, including by American troops, foreign businesspeople, academics and others, aimed at identifying insurgents or terrorists and their locations. The order, which Petraeus drafted in coordination with Admiral Eric Olson, head of the US Special Operations Command, laid out a plan for clandestine operations “that cannot or will not be accomplished” by regular US military forces or intelligence agencies. Among those who would oversee the activities of Special Operations Forces around the globe under Obama was Michael Vickers, a former CIA paramilitary with the Special Activities Division and a major player in the CIA’s weapons- and money-smuggling operations to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Colonel Lang said that at the time the order was issued, JSOC’s forces in Afghanistan believed they had already killed or captured their way through the high-value targets in Afghanistan, at a minimum forcing them into other countries. “That’s why it becomes very tempting to start going after people in other countries. Because you’ve got these highly skilled operators going after targets that are not really worthy of their skills,” he told me. “The temptation for the leadership—the three-star [general] and above level—is to look for places to employ their lads in greener fields.” Lang, who is a former Green Beret, described the men from JSOC who would fight Petraeus’s small wars as “sort of like Murder, Incorporated,” adding, “Their business is killing al Qaeda personnel. That’s their business. They’re not in the business of converting anybody to our goals or anything like that.”

According to the former aide to a senior Special Operations Forces commander who served during both the Bush and Obama presidencies, the Obama administration’s expansion of Special Ops activities globally was actually a continuation of the secret AQN Execute Order signed in early 2004 by Rumsfeld, known as the “AQN ExOrd,” or Al Qaeda Network Execute Order. That AQN ExOrd was intended to cut through bureaucratic and legal processes, allowing US Special Operations Forces to move into denied areas or countries beyond the official battle zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. The mindset in the Obama White House, the Special Ops source told me, was that “the Pentagon is already empowered to do these things, so let JSOC off the leash. And that’s what this White House has done.” He added: “JSOC has been empowered more under [the Obama] administration than any other in recent history. No question.”

Despite some initial hesitation, it became clear that Obama wanted to expand and codify the Bush-era order. “The Obama administration took the 2004 order and went above and beyond,” he told me. “The world is the battlefield. We’ve returned to that,” he added. “We were moving away from it for a little bit, but Cambone’s ‘preparing the battlefield’ is still alive and well. It’s embraced by this administration.”

Under the Bush administration, JSOC and its then-commander Stanley McChrystal were coordinating much of their activity with Vice President Dick Cheney or Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Under the Obama administration, JSOC’s relationship became more formalized with the administration as a whole. As the former aide told me, “It used to be the strategy was to insulate the president. Now they directly interface with these people regularly.”

On October 4, 2009, a few days after the execute order was signed and a month after Brennan’s meeting with Saleh, Admiral McRaven made a discreet trip to Yemen to meet with President Saleh. McRaven was dressed in his naval uniform with yellow stripes on the sleeves. Saleh, in a perfectly tailored suit, sat in a gold-colored armchair. Saleh’s government said the two men discussed “cooperation” in “combating terrorism.” The US Embassy in Sana’a said it had discussed “cooperation between the U.S. and Yemen against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” adding, “These discussions support the U.S. government’s ongoing efforts to assist Yemen in eliminating the threat al-Qaeda poses to its security and stability.” Well-informed Yemeni sources, however, said that McRaven pressed Saleh to let at least three of JSOC’s drones operate regularly in Yemen and to allow “the implementation of some special operations similar to what is happening in Pakistan and Somalia.” Saleh granted the requests, following through on the pledge he had made to Brennan to obtain the US military aid he needed.

On October 9, President Obama met with his national security team to discuss their primary foreign policy question, Afghanistan. During the meeting, Brennan suggested that there was a greater threat posed by al Qaeda in Yemen and Somalia than in Afghanistan. “We’re developing geostrategic principles here,” Brennan said, “and we’re not going to have the resources to do what we’re doing in Afghanistan in Somalia and Yemen.”