Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

1. “There Was Concern… That We Not Create an American Hit List”

WASHINGTON, DC, 2001–2002—It was 10:10 a.m. on June 11, 2002, nine months to the day since the September 11 attacks. The senators and representatives filed into Room S-407 of the US Capitol. All of them were members of a small, elite group in Washington and were, by law, entrusted with the most guarded national security secrets of the US government. “I hereby move that this meeting of the committee be closed to the public,” declared Republican Richard Shelby, the senior senator from Alabama, in a Southern drawl, “on the grounds that the national security of the United States might be compromised were a proceeding to become public.” The motion was quickly seconded and the secret hearing was under way.

As the members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence gathered in Washington, DC, half a world away in Afghanistan, tribal and political leaders were convening a loya jirga, a “grand council,” that was tasked with deciding who would run the country following the swift overthrow of the Taliban government by the US military. After 9/11, the US Congress had granted the Bush administration sweeping powers to pursue those responsible for the attacks. The Taliban government, which had ruled Afghanistan since 1996, was crushed, depriving al Qaeda of its sanctuary in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders were on the run. But for the Bush administration, the long war was just getting started.

At the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were deep into planning the next invasion—Iraq. They had come to power with plans to topple Saddam Hussein in hand and, despite the fact that there was no Iraqi connection to the attacks, they used 9/11 as the pretext to push their agenda. But the decisions made in that first year of the Bush administration were much bigger than Iraq, Afghanistan or even al Qaeda. The men in power at that time were intent on changing the way the United States waged its wars and, in the process, creating unprecedented powers for the White House. The days of fighting uniformed enemies and national militaries according to the rules of the Geneva Conventions were over. “The world is a battlefield” was the mantra repeated by the neoconservatives in the US national security apparatus and placed on PowerPoint slides laying out the plans for a sweeping, borderless global war. But terrorists would not be their only target. The two-hundred-year-old democratic system of checks and balances was firmly in their crosshairs.

Room S-407 was nestled in the attic of the Capitol building. It was windowless and accessible only by one elevator—or a narrow staircase. The room was classified as a secure facility and had been fitted with sophisticated counterespionage equipment to block any attempt at eavesdropping or monitoring from outside. For decades, the room had been used to house the most sensitive briefings of members of Congress by the CIA, the US military and scores of other figures and entities that inhabit the shadows of US policy. Covert actions were briefed and debriefed in the room. It was one of a handful of facilities in the United States where the nation’s most closely guarded secrets were discussed.

As the senators and representatives sat in the closed-door session on Capitol Hill that morning in June 2002, they would hear a story of how the United States had crossed a threshold. The stated purpose of the hearing was to review the work and structure of US counterterrorism (CT) organizations before 9/11. At the time, there was a substantial amount of finger-pointing regarding US intelligence “failures” leading up to the attacks. In the aftermath of the most devastating terrorist strikes on US soil in history, Cheney and Rumsfeld charged that the Clinton administration had failed to adequately recognize the urgency of al Qaeda’s threat, leaving the US homeland vulnerable by the time the Bush White House took power. Democrats pushed back and pointed to their own history of combating al Qaeda in the 1990s. The appearance of Richard Clarke before the US lawmakers on this particular day was, in part, intended to send a message to the congressional elite. Clarke had been President Bill Clinton’s counterterrorism czar and chaired the Counterterrorism Security Group of the National Security Council (NSC) for the decade leading up to 9/11. He had also served on President George H. W. Bush’s National Security Council and was an assistant secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan. He was one of the most experienced counterterrorism officials in the United States and, at the time of the hearing, was on his way out of government, though he still held a post as a special adviser to President George W. Bush on cyberspace security. Clarke was a hawkish figure who had risen to prominence under a Democratic administration and was known to have pushed hard when Clinton was in power for more covert action. So it made tactical sense that the Bush administration would put him forward to make the case for a regime of military and intelligence tactics that had previously been deemed illegal, undemocratic or, simply, dangerous.

Clarke described the dialogue within the national security community under Clinton as marked by great concern over the possibility of violating a long-standing presidential ban on assassination and a deep fear of repeating scandals of the past. Clarke said he believed that “a culture” had developed at the CIA “that said when you have large scale of covert operations, they get messy, and they get out of control, and they end up splattering mud back on the Agency.”

“The history of covert operations in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s was not a happy one,” Clarke told the lawmakers. The CIA had orchestrated the overthrow of populist governments in Latin America and the Middle East, backed death squads throughout Central America, facilitated the killing of rebel leader Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and propped up military juntas and dictatorships. The spate of assassinations had become so out of control that a Republican president, Gerald Ford, felt the need to issue Executive Order 11905 in 1976, explicitly banning the United States from carrying out “political assassinations.” The CIA officers who had come of age in the shadow of that era and rose to positions of authority at the Agency during the 1990s, Clarke said, “had institutionalized [the notion that] a sense of covert action is risky and is likely to blow up in your face. And the wise guys at the White House who are pushing you to do covert action will be nowhere to be found when [the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence] calls you up to explain the mess that the covert action became.”

President Jimmy Carter amended Ford’s assassination ban to make it more sweeping. He removed language that limited the ban to political assassinations and also extended the ban on participating in assassinations to US proxies or contractors. “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination,” read President Carter’s executive order. Although Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush maintained that language, no president’s executive orders actually defined what constituted an assassination. Reagan, Bush and Clinton all developed work-arounds to the ban. Reagan, for example, authorized a strike on the home of Libyan dictator Muammar el Qaddafi in 1986 in retaliation for his alleged role in a bombing of a night club in Berlin. The first President Bush authorized strikes on Saddam Hussein’s palaces during the 1991 Gulf War. Clinton did the same during Operation Desert Fox in 1998.

Clarke described for the lawmakers how, under the Clinton administration, plans were drawn up for killing and capturing al Qaeda and other terrorist leaders, including Osama bin Laden. President Clinton asserted that the ban did not apply to foreign terrorists engaged in plotting attacks against the United States. In the aftermath of the bombings of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in late 1998, Clinton authorized cruise missile attacks against alleged al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and also a strike against a factory in Sudan that the administration alleged was a chemical weapons plant. It turned out that the plant was actually a pharmaceutical factory. Although this lethal authority was granted by Clinton, it was envisioned as an option that would be rarely used and only at the direction of the president on a case-by-case basis. Rather than granting a carte blanche authority to conduct these operations, the Clinton White House required each proposed action to be thoroughly vetted. Legal structures were put in place and “lethal findings” were signed by the president, authorizing the use of deadly force in pursuit of terrorists across the globe. Yet, Clarke said, the trigger was seldom pulled.

Clarke conceded that the Clinton-era authorizations for targeted killings “looks like a very Talmudic and somewhat bizarre series of documents,” adding that they were crafted in a careful way to narrow the scope of such operations. “The administration, and particularly the Justice Department, did not want to throw out the ban on assassination in a way that threw the baby out with the bathwater. They wanted the expansion of authorities to be limited.” He added that the Clinton-era authorizations for targeted killing look like “a very narrow casting. But that, I think, is because of this desire not to throw out altogether the ban on assassinations and create an American hit list.”

Representative Nancy Pelosi, one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress at the time, admonished her colleagues in the closed chamber not to publicly discuss any of the highly classified memoranda that authorized the use of lethal force. The memoranda, she said, “were held to the most restricted form of notification at the highest level in the Congress. It is extraordinary…that this information is being shared here today.” She warned against any leaks to the media and added: “There is no way that we can confirm, deny, stipulate to, acknowledge knowledge of the memoranda.” Clarke was asked whether he thought the United States should lift its policy banning assassinations. “I think you have to be very careful about how broadly you authorize the use of lethal force,” he responded. “I don’t think the Israeli experience of having a broad hit list has been terribly successful. It doesn’t—certainly hasn’t stopped terrorism or stopped the organizations where they have assassinated people.” Clarke said that when he and his colleagues in the Clinton administration issued authorizations for targeted killing operations, they were intended for very surgical and rare cases. “We didn’t want to create a broad precedent that would allow intelligence officials in the future to have hit lists and routinely engage in something that approximated assassination….There was concern in both the Justice Department and in some elements of the White House and some elements of the CIA that we not create an American hit list that would become an ongoing institution that we could just keep adding names to and have hit teams go out and assassinate people.”

Even so, Clarke was part of a small group of officials in the counterterrorism community under the Clinton administration who agitated for the CIA to be more aggressive in using that lethal authority and pushed the envelope of the assassination ban within the limits he outlined. “In the wake of 9/11,” Clarke declared, “almost everything we proposed prior to 9/11 is being done.”

It would soon be everything and more.

RUMSFELD AND CHENEY HAD PADDED the administration with leading neoconservatives who had spent the Clinton era effectively operating a shadow government—working in right-wing think tanks and for major defense and intelligence contractors, plotting their return to power. Among them were Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, David Addington, Stephen Cambone, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, John Bolton and Elliott Abrams. Many of them had cut their teeth in the Reagan and Bush White Houses. Some, like Cheney and Rumsfeld, went back to the Nixon era. Several were key players in building up a policy vision under the umbrella of the ultranationalist Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Despite Clinton’s decisions to use force in Yugoslavia and Iraq and to conduct a series of air strikes in other nations, they viewed the Clinton administration as an almost pacifist force that had weakened the hand of US dominance and left the country vulnerable. They believed the 1990s had been a “decade of defense neglect.” The neoconservatives had long advocated a posture that, in the wake of the Cold War, the United States was the lone superpower and should exert its weight aggressively around the globe, redrawing maps and expanding empire. At the center of their vision was a radical increase in US military spending, plans for which were drawn up by Cheney and his aides when he was defense secretary in 1992. The Cheney draft Defense Planning Guidance, the neocons asserted in PNAC’s founding document, “provided a blueprint for maintaining U.S. preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.” Wolfowitz and Libby were the key authors of Cheney’s defense manifesto, which argued that the United States must be the sole superpower and take all necessary actions to deter “potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”

Their plan, however, was scrapped by more powerful forces within the first Bush administration, namely, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, Secretary of State James Baker and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. The final draft, much to Cheney’s and the neocons’ frustration, was greatly toned down in its imperialist language.

A decade later, even before 9/11, the neoconservatives—restored to power by the Bush administration—pulled those plans out of the dustbin of history and set about implementing them. Expanding US force projection would be central, as would building up streamlined, elite special ops units. “Our forces in the next century must be agile, lethal, readily deployable, and require a minimum of logistical support,” George W. Bush had declared in a speech on the campaign trail in 1999 that was crafted by Wolfowitz and other neocons. “We must be able to project our power over long distances, in days or weeks, rather than months. On land, our heavy forces must be lighter. Our light forces must be more lethal. All must be easier to deploy.”

The neocons also envisioned further asserting US dominance over natural resources globally and directly confronting nation-states that stood in the way. Regime change in multiple countries would be actively contemplated, particularly in oil-rich Iraq. “Ardent supporters of U.S. military intervention, few neo-cons have served in the armed forces; fewer still have ever been elected to public office,” noted Jim Lobe, a journalist who tracked the rise of the neoconservative movement for a decade leading up to 9/11. They have a “ceaseless quest for global military dominance and contempt for the United Nations and multilateralism more generally.” Lobe added: “In the neo-conservatives’ view, the United States is a force for good in the world; it has a moral responsibility to exert that force; its military power should be dominant; it should be engaged globally but never be constrained by multilateral commitments from taking unilateral action in pursuit of its interests and values; and it should have a strategic alliance with Israel. Saddam must go, they argue, because he is a threat to Israel, and also Saudi Arabia, and because he has hoarded—and used—weapons of mass destruction.” The PNAC crowd had concluded that the “United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” Within weeks of taking office, Rumsfeld and Cheney pressed to reverse President Clinton’s signing, at the very end of his time in office, of the Rome Statute, which recognized the legitimacy of an international criminal court. They would not stand for US forces being subjected to potential prosecution for their actions around the world. Soon after becoming defense secretary, Rumsfeld wrote that he wanted his legal staff—and those of other US government agencies—to immediately determine “how we get out of it and undo the Clinton signature.”

Even among the GOP foreign policy community of elders, these figures were viewed as extremists. “When we saw these people coming back in town, all of us who were around in those days said, ‘Oh my God, the crazies are back’—‘the crazies’—that’s how we referred to these people,” recalled Ray McGovern, who served for twenty-seven years at the CIA and was a national security briefer to George H. W. Bush when he was vice president and served under him when he was the director of the Agency in the late 1970s. McGovern said that once they were in power, the neoconservatives resurrected ideas that had been tossed in “the circular file” in previous GOP administrations by veteran Republican foreign policy leaders, adding that those extremist ideas would soon “arise out of the ashes and be implemented.” These officials believed, “We’ve got a lot of weight to throw around, we should throw it around. We should assert ourselves in critical areas, like the Middle East,” McGovern said.

For decades, Cheney and Rumsfeld had been key leaders of a militant movement outside of government and, during Republican administrations, from within the White House itself. Its mission was to give the executive branch of the US government unprecedented powers to wage secret wars, conduct covert operations with no oversight and to spy on US citizens. In their view, Congress had no business overseeing such operations but should only fund the agencies that would carry them out. To them, the presidency was to be a national security dictatorship, accountable only to its own concepts of what was best for the country. The two men first worked together in the Nixon White House in 1969 when Rumsfeld hired Cheney, then a graduate student, to be his aide at the Office of Economic Opportunity. It kicked off a career for Cheney in the power chambers of the Republican elite and a lifetime project to further empower the executive branch. As scandal rocked the Nixon White House in the 1970s—with the secret bombings of Laos and Cambodia, revelations of a domestic “enemies” list and the infamous break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel—the US Congress began attacking the executive privileges and extreme secrecy that permeated the administration. Congress condemned the Laos and Cambodia bombings and overrode an attempt by Nixon to veto the War Powers Act of 1973, which limited the powers of the president to authorize military action. It mandated that the president “consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances.” In the absence of a formal declaration of war, the president would be required to inform Congress, in writing, within forty-eight hours, of any military action of “the circumstances necessitating the introduction of United States Armed Forces; the constitutional and legislative authority under which such introduction took place; and the estimated scope and duration of the hostilities or involvement.” Cheney viewed the War Powers Act as unconstitutional and an encroachment on the rights of the president as commander in chief. He termed this era the “low point” in American presidential authority.

After the Watergate scandal forced Nixon’s resignation, Cheney went on to serve as President Ford’s chief of staff, while Rumsfeld served as the youngest defense secretary in US history. In 1975, Congress intensified its probes into the underworld of secret White House operations under the auspices of the Church Committee, named for its chair, Democratic senator Frank Church of Idaho. The committee investigated a wide range of abuses by the executive branch, including domestic spying operations against US citizens. The Church Committee’s investigation painted a picture of lawless, secret activities conducted with no oversight whatsoever from the courts or Congress. The committee also investigated the involvement of the United States in the overthrow and eventual death of Chile’s democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende in 1973, though Ford invoked executive privilege and stymied the probe. At one point during the Church investigations, Cheney attempted to compel the FBI to investigate famed investigative journalist Seymour Hersh and to seek an indictment against him and the New York Times for espionage in retaliation for Hersh’s exposé on illegal domestic spying by the CIA. The aim was to frighten other journalists from exposing secret controversial actions by the White House.

The FBI rebuffed Cheney’s requests to go after Hersh. The end result of the Church investigation was a nightmare for Cheney and his executive power movement: the creation of congressional committees that would have legally mandated oversight of US intelligence operations, including covert actions. In 1980, Congress enacted a law that required the White House to report on all of its spy programs to the new intelligence committees. Cheney—and Rumsfeld—would spend much of the rest of their careers attempting to thwart those authorities.

By the end of the liberal Carter administration, Cheney concluded that the powers of the presidency had been “seriously weakened.” Throughout the years of the Reagan administration, Cheney served as a Wyoming representative in Congress, where he was a fierce backer of Reagan’s radical drive toward reempowering the White House. As Pulitzer Prize–winning author Charlie Savage noted in his book, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, Reagan’s Justice Department sought to end “the congressional resurgence of the 1970s,” commissioning one report that called for the White House to disregard laws that “unconstitutionally encroach upon the executive branch.” Instead, the Reagan White House could use presidential “signing statements” to reinterpret laws and issue presidential edicts that could be used to circumvent congressional oversight. In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration was deeply embroiled in fueling a right-wing insurgency against the leftist government of the Sandinistas in the Central American nation of Nicaragua. The centerpiece of this campaign was covert US support for the right-wing Contra death squads. Reagan also authorized the mining of the harbors around Nicaragua, bringing an unlawful use of force judgment against the United States at the World Court.

When the US Congress finally moved in 1984 to ban all US assistance to the Contras, passing the Boland Amendment, some officials within the Reagan White House, led by Colonel Oliver North, who worked on the National Security Council, began a covert plan to funnel funds to the right-wing rebels, in direct contravention of US law. The funds were generated by the illicit sale of weapons to the Iranian government, in violation of an arms embargo. Fourteen members of the Reagan administration, including his secretary of defense, were later indicted for their involvement. When the Iran-Contra scandal unfolded, and Congress aggressively investigated its origins, Cheney emerged as the White House’s chief defender on Capitol Hill and issued a dissenting opinion defending the covert US program that most of his congressional colleagues had deemed to be illegal. Cheney’s “minority report” defending the White House condemned the congressional investigation into Iran-Contra as “hysterical.” The report charged that history “leaves little, if any doubt that the president was expected to have the primary role of conducting the foreign policy of the United States,” concluding, “Congressional actions to limit the president in this area therefore should be reviewed with a considerable degree of skepticism. If they interfere with the core presidential foreign policy functions, they should be struck down.”

President George H. W. Bush pardoned Cheney’s allies convicted in connection with Iran-Contra, and Cheney went on to serve as his defense secretary during the 1991 Gulf War, where he continued building his vision of a supremely powerful executive branch. During his time as defense secretary, Cheney began planting the seeds for another program that would aid the consolidation of executive supremacy, commissioning a study from the oil services giant Halliburton that laid out a plan for privatizing as much of the military bureaucracy as possible. Cheney realized early on that using private companies to wage US wars would create another barrier to oversight and could afford greater secrecy for the planning and execution of those wars, both declared and undeclared. Cheney would then go on to head Halliburton for much of the 1990s, spearheading a drive to create a corporate shadow army that would ultimately become a linchpin of his covert and overt wars when he returned to the White House in 2001. During the Clinton era, Cheney also spent time at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, developing a political and military agenda that could be implemented once his party resumed power. When President George W. Bush was inaugurated, Cheney became the most powerful vice president in history. And he wasted no time in driving to expand that power.

ON SEPTEMBER 10, 2001, a day before American Airlines Flight 77—a Boeing 757—smashed into the western wall of the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld stood in that very building to deliver one of his first major speeches as defense secretary. Two portraits of Rumsfeld hung inside—one of him as the youngest defense secretary in US history, the other as its oldest. September 11 had not yet occurred, yet Rumsfeld was at the podium that day to issue a declaration of war.

“The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America,” Rumsfeld bellowed. “This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans, and beyond. With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.” Rumsfeld—a veteran Cold Warrior—told his new staff, “Perhaps this adversary sounds like the former Soviet Union, but that enemy is gone: our foes are more subtle and implacable today. You may think I’m describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world. But their day, too, is almost past, and they cannot match the strength and size of this adversary. The adversary’s closer to home. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.” The stakes, he declared, were severe—“a matter of life and death, ultimately, every American’s.” Rumsfeld told his audience, consisting of former defense industry executives turned Pentagon bureaucrats, that he intended to streamline the waging of America’s wars. “Some might ask, How in the world could the Secretary of Defense attack the Pentagon in front of its people?” Rumsfeld told his audience. “To them I reply, I have no desire to attack the Pentagon; I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself.” It would be dubbed by Rumsfeld and his team his “revolution in military affairs.”

Bush’s all-star foreign policy team had come into power with an agenda to radically reorganize the US military, to end what they characterized as the Clinton-era weakening of national defenses and to reenergize the drive for massive missile defense systems favored by Reagan and other Cold Warriors. As Rumsfeld’s deputy, Douglas Feith, recalled, “The threat of jihadist terrorism was on the list of U.S. government concerns at the start of the Bush administration in early 2001, but it got less attention than Russia did.” The focus on “terrorism” in the early days of the administration centered on the threats posed by nation-states—Iran, Syria, North Korea and Iraq—and enacting regime change. Cheney and Rumsfeld had spent much of the 1990s plotting out a course to redraw the maps of the Middle East, but it was not focused on the asymmetric threat al Qaeda and other terrorist groups posed. Iraq, not al Qaeda, was their obsession. “From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country,” said former treasury secretary Paul O’Neill. “And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, ‘Fine. Go find me a way to do this.’” At the new administration’s second National Security Council meeting on February 1, 2001, Rumsfeld said bluntly, “What we really want to think about is going after Saddam.”

Ironically—for all of Rumsfeld’s bravado about the weakness of the Clinton era, and neocon charges that the Democrats had been asleep at the wheel watching al Qaeda—Rumsfeld himself was initially dismissive of the imminence of the threat posed by the group prior to 9/11. Journalist Bob Woodward detailed a meeting that reportedly took place on July 10, 2001, two months before the 9/11 attacks. CIA director George J. Tenet met with Cofer Black, the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC), at Langley, Virginia. The two men reviewed current US intelligence on bin Laden and al Qaeda. Black, Woodward reported, “laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.” At the time, “Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the National Security Agency intercepts and other intelligence. Could all this be a grand deception? Rumsfeld had asked. Perhaps it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses.” After reviewing the intelligence with Black, Tenet called National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice from the car en route to the White House. When Black and Tenet met with Rice that day, according to Woodward, they “felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off.” Black later said, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.”

Then the planes piloted by the 9/11 hijackers slammed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. It didn’t take long for Rumsfeld and his team to envision how the fight against terrorism didn’t undermine their Iraq plans but could actually provide the rationale to carry them out. Perhaps even more important, the post-9/11 moment allowed Rumsfeld, Cheney and their cohort to realize the ambitions they had long held for an all-powerful executive branch, with the virtually unlimited right to wage wars across all borders, justified in their minds by a global national security threat. The goals and plans that they had spoken of in hushed tones at unofficial gatherings would soon become the official policy of the United States.

As President Bush’s war team began planning for a response to the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld led the charge to put Iraq on the target list immediately. In advance of the September 15–16, 2001, weekend meetings Bush convened at Camp David, Feith drew up a memo for Rumsfeld that listed “the immediate priority targets for initial action” as: al Qaeda, the Taliban and Iraq. “The agenda was very clear from the night of 9/11,” General Hugh Shelton, at the time the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the most senior military adviser to President Bush, told me. He said that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz immediately began pressing for an attack on Iraq. “We need to be going into Iraq. We need to go right now,” he recalled them saying. “Although there wasn’t one shred, not one iota of evidence that would say [9/11] was linked into Iraq,” Shelton said. “But yet, that drumbeat started that night. They didn’t like the fact that when I came up to the office that night with some plans that we had [to respond to 9/11] that none of them included the Iraq plans.” Richard Clarke said that on September 12, President Bush told him three times to look for “any shred” of evidence linking Iraq to the attacks. Wolfowitz sent a strategy memo to Rumsfeld arguing that “even a 10 percent chance that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attack” meant that “maximum priority should be placed on eliminating that threat.” Joining Shelton in the anti-Iraq invasion camp was one of his predecessors, General Colin Powell, the secretary of state. A decade earlier, during the Gulf War, Powell had clashed with Wolfowitz—at the time an undersecretary of defense—and the ideological civilian leaders at the Pentagon over their desire to send US troops all the way to Baghdad to overthrow Saddam. But Powell and traditional conservatives like former secretary of state James Baker and Brent Scowcroft won that debate. Now, with the 9/11 attacks fresh in everyone’s minds, Wolfowitz and the ideologues were certain they could achieve their goals.

At Camp David, Shelton said, Wolfowitz continued to press for an Iraq attack even as Shelton, Powell and senior intelligence officials said there was no evidence to suggest Iraq had anything to do with the attacks. As discussion focused on Afghanistan and attacking al Qaeda’s sanctuary, “True to form, Wolfowitz brought it up: ‘We need to be using this as a reason to attack Iraq,’” Shelton recalled. Dr. Emile Nakhleh, a senior CIA analyst at the time, was also briefing the president during the immediate post-9/11 period. Nakhleh had been with the Agency for a decade and had spent much of it traveling under academic cover in Muslim countries across the globe. Having started the CIA’s Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program and as its scholar-in-residence on militant Islamist movements and Middle Eastern governments, he was the Agency’s equivalent of a three-star general. In response to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz pushing for an invasion of Iraq in those first meetings, Nakhleh told me, he stood up at one point and said to them, “If you want to go after that son of a bitch [Saddam] to settle all scores, be my guest, but we have no information that Saddam was tied to al Qaeda or to terrorism and we have no clear information” about weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Nakhleh said, after the first several meetings post-9/11, “my conclusion and other analysts’ conclusion was they were going to go to war. The train had left the station, regardless of the intelligence we presented.” President Bush shelved the Iraq discussions for a time, having pledged as a candidate not to engage in “nation building.” He said he wanted a “humble” foreign policy. But his views were rapidly evolving.

It would take some time—and more than a dozen visits to the CIA by Cheney and his chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby—to produce enough “evidence” of an active Iraqi WMD program to pull off their plans for an Iraq invasion. But, in the meantime, they had a war against government oversight and accountability to wage. The CIA and Special Forces campaign in Afghanistan was, in the beginning, a rout. While the Afghanistan war was producing spectacular headlines trumpeting the swiftness and decisiveness of the US military campaign against the weak Taliban government, Cheney and Rumsfeld and their neoconservative deputies were busy plotting a global war. This war would extend to the home front with warrantless wiretapping, mass arrests of Arabs, Pakistanis and other Muslim immigrants and a prodigious rollback of the civil liberties of American citizens. To wage it, they would have to dismantle and manipulate a bureaucracy of oversight and legal review that had been built up over successive administrations. All this would open the door for an array of tactics that had been used before but could now be deployed on an unprecedented scale: covert action, black ops, secret prisons, snatch operations and what amounted to a blanket rebranding of assassinations as “High Value Targeting.”

COMING OUT OF THE REAGAN-BUSH ERA, in which the institution of covert action was marred by the Iran-Contra scandal, President Clinton put in place more oversight mechanisms and created a rigorous legal system for approving lethal covert action. When Clinton or his national security adviser proposed a covert action, it would be passed through an internal oversight system: first to the CIA, where the Agency’s general counsel would review its legality before passing it on for further review (and possibly proposed changes as a result of the legal review) to two separate CIA committees—the Covert Action Planning Group and the Covert Action Review Group. After those committees reviewed the proposed action and suggested alterations, it would go back to the CIA’s general counsel for a final legal review and then would be passed back to the White House. There, it would be put before the Interagency Working Group for Covert Action, comprising representatives from various agencies within the executive branch. The group would analyze the potential consequences of the proposed covert action and, again, review its legality. After a final review by the heads and deputies of the relevant agencies, the action would be presented to the president for authorization. These actions were rarely approved.

When President Bush was sworn in early in 2001, his administration indicated it intended to keep many of those same checks and balances in place. National Security Presidential Directive-1 (NSPD-1), signed by Bush on February 13, 2001, closely mirrored the Clinton-era system for approving covert actions. But in March, Bush asked National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to request that the CIA “prepare a new series of authorities for covert action in Afghanistan.” Clarke and his CIA counterparts who ran the “bin Laden Unit” began laying out covert actions that could target al Qaeda, while the administration proposed beefing up the CIA’s counterterrorism funding. Clarke pushed hard for a retaliatory strike against al Qaeda for the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen. As was the case under Clinton, many of the plans involved targeting al Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan. At the end of May, Rice and Tenet met with Clarke, Cofer Black and the bin Laden Unit chief to discuss “taking the offensive” against al Qaeda. The CIA was running disruption activities against bin Laden at the time, but the consensus of these officials was that they needed a plan for “breaking the back” of al Qaeda. They also endorsed covert aid to Uzbekistan but stopped short of offering any significant support to the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban groups inside Afghanistan. In other words, they were continuing the Clinton-era approach to al Qaeda and Afghanistan, albeit with increased funding and focus.

A draft of a new Counterterrorism National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) was circulated in June. Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley described the program to the 9/11 Commission as “admittedly ambitious,” outlining a multiyear effort involving “all instruments of national power,” including a far-reaching covert action program. But it would go through five more meetings at the deputy level before being presented to the principals. At one of these meetings, in August 2001, the NSC Deputies Committee had “concluded that it was legal for the CIA to kill bin Laden or one of his deputies” with a Predator drone strike.

Although the use of drones would eventually become one of the staples of the US targeted killing apparatus, before 9/11 there was great dissension on the topic in the ranks of Bush’s counterterrorism team. In the last year of the Clinton administration, the United States began flying drones over Afghanistan out of a secret US base, called K2, in Uzbekistan. There was a program to create a weaponized drone under way, but it was not yet operational. Cofer Black argued that the drones should not even be used for reconnaissance, suggesting that the administration wait until they could be weaponized. He pointed out that a Predator had been spotted over Afghan territory in 2000, spurring the Taliban government to scramble MiG fighters. “I do not believe the possible recon value outweighs the risk of possible program termination when the stakes are raised by the Taliban parading a charred Predator in front of CNN,” Black asserted. In the end, the administration decided to shelve the use of the drones for recon in Afghanistan until they could be loaded for strikes. But while Black, Clarke and others within the counterterrorism team pushed hard for the eventual use of the Predators to conduct targeted killing operations, the CIA’s senior leadership expressed serious concerns about the Agency running such a program, echoing many of the concerns of the Clinton-era counterterrorism team about creating US hit lists. According to the 9/11 Commission, Tenet “in particular questioned whether he, as Director of Central Intelligence, should operate an armed Predator. ‘This was new ground,’ he told us. Tenet ticked off key questions: What is the chain of command? Who takes the shot? Are America’s leaders comfortable with the CIA doing this, going outside of normal military command and control?” Charles Allen, who was the CIA’s assistant director for collection from 1998 to 2005, said that he and the Agency’s number-three man, A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard, “had said that either one of them would be happy to pull the trigger, but Tenet was appalled,” adding that no CIA personnel had such authority to use drones to summarily assassinate people, even terrorists.

While these debates played out inside the Agency, it was not until a week before 9/11 that the Bush administration convened a meeting of “principals” to discuss the al Qaeda threat. At the September 4 meeting, a draft of the National Security Presidential Directive was officially presented and was approved “with little discussion” for presentation to Bush to sign. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice reportedly told President Bush that she thought it would take about three years to implement the ambitious program. On September 10, Hadley continued to press Director Tenet and the CIA to prepare draft legal authorities “for the ‘broad covert action program’ envisioned by the draft presidential directive.” Hadley also instructed him to draw up findings “authorizing a broad range of other covert activities, including to capture or to use lethal force” against al Qaeda “command-and-control-elements.” According to the 9/11 Commission report, this section would overwrite Clinton-era documents and ought to be broad enough “to cover any additional [Osama bin Laden]-related covert actions contemplated.” Although the Bush administration was working to widen the scope of acceptable lethal force against bin Laden and his top deputies, the process was marked by the same concerns expressed during the Clinton era about granting sweeping lethal authority. The Bush White House was embarking on a path similar to the Clinton administration’s, trying to circumvent the assassination ban while still requiring careful review of each proposed lethal operation.

On September 11, all of that would change.

As the World Trade Center towers crumbled to the ground, so too did the system of oversight and review of lethal covert ops that had been carefully constructed over the course of the previous decade.

“ONLY A CRISIS—actual or perceived—produces real change.” So wrote the conservative icon Milton Friedman in his book Capitalism and Freedom. Friedman was a key adviser to successive Republican administrations and held tremendous influence over many officials in the Bush White House. He had mentored Rumsfeld early in his career, and Cheney and the leading neocons in the administration regularly sought his counsel. Friedman preached, “When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

For the senior officials in Bush’s national security and defense teams who spent the eight Clinton years—and more—developing those alternatives, the 9/11 attacks, and almost unanimous support from the Democratic-controlled Congress, provided a tremendous opportunity to make their ideas inevitable. In an eerie prediction of things to come, the neocons of the Project for a New American Century had asserted a year to the month before 9/11 in their report, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” that “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” Cheney and Rumsfeld may not have been able to see 9/11 coming, but they proved masters at exploiting the attacks. “The 9/11 attack was one of those events in history potent enough to stimulate fresh thought and disturb the complacent,” recalled Feith. “It created an opportunity to give many people—friends and enemies, in the United States and abroad—a new perspective. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and I shared the view that the president had a duty to use his bully pulpit.”

Under the Constitution, it is the Congress, not the president, that has the right to declare war. But seventy-two hours after 9/11, Congress took a radical step in a different direction. On September 14, 2001, the House and Senate gave President Bush unprecedented latitude to wage a global war, passing the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). It stated that “the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” The use of the term “persons” in the authorization was taken by the administration as a green light for assassinations. It passed the House with only one opposing vote and the Senate with no dissent. The lone “Nay” vote against the AUMF came from liberal California Democrat Barbara Lee. “However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint,” Lee declared, voice trembling, as she spoke on the floor of the House that day. “There must be some of us who say, let’s step back for a moment and think through the implications of our actions today—let us more fully understand their consequences,” she added in her submitted remarks. “We must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.” Lee’s two-minute speech was the extent of any congressional push-back to the sweeping war powers and authority the White House was requesting.

Empowered by an overwhelming, bipartisan endorsement of a global, borderless war against a stateless enemy, the Bush administration declared the world a battlefield. We “have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will,” Dick Cheney proclaimed on NBC’s Meet the Press on September 16, 2001, hinting at what was to come. “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful.” The president publicly signed the AUMF into law on September 18, 2001, but it was the order he signed a day earlier in secret that was even more momentous. The secret presidential directive, which remains classified, granted the CIA authority to capture and hold suspected militants across the globe, which would lead to the creation of a network of what administration officials internally referred to as “black sites” that could be used to imprison and interrogate prisoners. The directive also wiped out the roadblocks of oversight and interagency review from the process of authorizing targeted killings. Perhaps most significantly, it ended the practice of the president signing off on each lethal, covert operation. The administration’s lawyers concluded that the ban on assassinations did not apply to people it classified as “terrorists,” and it gave great latitude to the CIA for authorizing kill operations on the go. In the beginning, President Bush wanted the CIA to take the lead. He had just the man for the job.

COFER BLACK spent much of his career in the shadows in Africa. He cut his CIA teeth in Zambia during the Rhodesian War and then in Somalia and South Africa during the apartheid regime’s brutal war against the black majority. During his time in Zaire, Black worked on the Reagan administration’s covert weapons program to arm anti-Communist forces in Angola. In the early 1990s, long before most in the counterterrorism community, Black became obsessed with bin Laden and declared him a major threat who needed to be neutralized. From 1993 to 1995, Black worked, under diplomatic cover, at the US Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, where he served as CIA station chief. Bin Laden was also in Sudan, building up his international network into what the CIA would describe at the end of Black’s tour as “the Ford Foundation of Sunni Islamic terrorism.” Black’s agents, who were tracking bin Laden, worked under a Clinton-era “operating directive” that restricted them to intelligence collection on bin Laden and his network. Black wanted the authority to kill the Saudi billionaire, but the Clinton White House had not yet signed the lethal findings it eventually did after the 1998 African embassy bombings. “Unfortunately, at that time permissions to kill—officially called Lethal Findings—were taboo in the outfit,” said CIA operative Billy Waugh, who worked closely with Black in Sudan. “In the early 1990s we were forced to adhere to the sanctimonious legal counsel and the do-gooders.” Among Waugh’s rejected ideas was allegedly a plot to kill bin Laden in Khartoum and dump his body at the Iranian Embassy in an effort to pin the blame on Tehran, an idea Waugh said Cofer Black “loved.”

In the early days of the Bush administration, Black began agitating once again for authorization to go after bin Laden. “He used to come in my office and regale me with all the times when he had tried to do something about Osama bin Laden, prior to 9/11,” recalled Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the time. He told me Black said that “because of the lack of courage of Delta [Force], and lack of bureaucratic competence in the CIA, he’d never been able to do anything.” According to Wilkerson, Black told him that “every time they presented a possibility to Delta, for example, they would come up with this list of questions they had to answer, like, ‘What kind of nails are in the door?’ ‘What kind of lock is on the door?’ ‘Give us the serial number on the lock,’ and all this kind of stuff, which is just standard SOF [Special Operations Forces] stuff for not wanting to do something.” Much to Black’s satisfaction, such meticulous practices would soon be dispensed with altogether.

On August 6, 2001, President Bush was at his Crawford, Texas, ranch, where he received a presidential daily brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” It twice mentioned the possibility that al Qaeda operatives may try to hijack airplanes, saying FBI information “indicates patterns of suspicious activity in [the United States] consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.” Nine days later, Black addressed a secret Pentagon counterterrorism conference. “We’re going to be struck soon,” Black said. “Many Americans are going to die, and it could be in the U.S.”

After 9/11, Bush and Cheney rewrote the rules of the game. Black no longer needed to hold a gun to anyone’s head to get permission for lethal operations. “My personal emotion was, It is now officially started,” Black recalled. “The analogy would be the junkyard dog that had been chained to the ground was now going to be let go. And I just couldn’t wait.” In his initial meeting with President Bush after the 9/11 attacks, Black outlined how CIA paramilitaries would deploy to Afghanistan to hunt down bin Laden and his henchmen. “When we’re through with them, they will have flies walking across their eyeballs,” Black promised, in a performance that would earn him a designation in the inner circle of the administration as “the flies-on-the-eyeballs guy.” The president reportedly loved Black’s style. When he told Bush the operation would not be bloodless, the president said, “Let’s go. That’s war. That’s what we’re here to win.” Philip Giraldi, a career CIA case officer who went through “The Farm,” the CIA’s training facility in rural Virginia, with Black, recalled running into him in Afghanistan shortly after the first US teams hit the ground post-9/11. “I hadn’t seen him in many years,” Giraldi told me. “I was astonished at how narrow-minded he had become. He would basically keep talking about bringing back bin Laden’s head on a platter—and he meant his head on a platter.” Giraldi said that Black “had a narrow view of things,” and loathed America’s closest European allies, including the British, saying, “He didn’t trust them a bit.” When it came to the emerging US global war, Giraldi said, Black was “a real enthusiast, which is unusual in the Agency. In the Agency, people tend to be kind of skeptical. If you’re an intelligence officer in the field, you get skeptical of a lot of things real fast. But Cofer was one of these enthusiasts.”

On September 19, the CIA team, code-named Jawbreaker, deployed. Black gave his men direct and macabre instructions. “Gentlemen, I want to give you your marching orders, and I want to make them very clear. I have discussed this with the President, and he is in full agreement,” Black told covert CIA operative Gary Schroen and his team. “I don’t want bin Laden and his thugs captured, I want them dead,” Black demanded. “They must be killed. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the President. I promised him I would do that.” Schroen said it was the first time in his thirty-year career that he had been ordered to assassinate an adversary rather than attempting a capture. Black asked if he had made himself clear. “Perfectly clear, Cofer,” Schroen told him. “I don’t know where we’ll find dry ice out there in Afghanistan, but I think we can certainly manufacture pikes in the field.” Black later explained why this would be necessary. “You’d need some DNA,” Black said. “There’s a good way to do it. Take a machete, and whack off his head, and you’ll get a bucketful of DNA, so you can see it and test it. It beats lugging the whole body back!” When Russian diplomats meeting with Black in Moscow ahead of the full US invasion of Afghanistan reminded Black of the Soviet defeat at the hands of the US-backed mujahedeen, Black shot back. “We’re going to kill them,” he said. “We’re going to put their heads on sticks. We’re going to rock their world.” In a sign of things to come, the covert operations Black organized immediately after 9/11 relied heavily on private contractors. The initial CIA team consisted of about sixty former Delta Force, ex-SEALs and other Special Forces operators working for Black as independent contractors, making up the majority of the first Americans to go into Afghanistan after 9/11.

In the beginning, the list of people who had been pre-cleared for CIA targeted killing was small: estimates ranged from seven to two dozen people, including bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri. And the operations were largely focused on Afghanistan. On October 7, President Bush officially launched “Operation Enduring Freedom,” and the US military began a campaign of air strikes, followed by a ground invasion. In the early days of the Afghanistan campaign, CIA personnel and Special Forces worked in concert. “We are fighting for the CT [counterterrorism] objectives in the Afghan theater,” the chief of counterterrorist special operations wrote in a memo to CIA personnel in October 2001. “And although this sets high goals in very uncertain, shifting terrain, we are also fighting for the future of CIA/DOD integrated counterterrorism warfare around the globe. While we will make mistakes as we chart new territory and new methodology, our objectives are clear, and our concept of partnership is sound.” At the time, the CIA had a very small paramilitary capability, but as the lead agency responsible for hunting down those responsible for 9/11, the CIA could borrow Special Operations Forces for missions.

Rumsfeld had no interest in being the support team for the CIA, and the Agency’s emerging centrality in the growing US war did not sit well with the defense secretary. Rumsfeld had nothing but contempt for the Clinton administration, and he, Cheney and their neoconservative allies thought that the CIA had become a watered-down liberal iteration of its former self. Covert action, they believed, had been handcuffed by lawyers and unnecessary and intrusive congressional oversight that would hinder what they perceived as life-and-death operations that needed to be conducted in secret. Although Cofer Black shared Rumsfeld’s zeal for killing “terrorists,” that was not enough. Rumsfeld wanted nothing to do with CIA oversight bureaucrats, and he didn’t want his forces under CIA control. Cheney had made clear that under this administration, CIA lawyers and congressional committees would not be viewed as defenders of the law or as part of a necessary system of checks and balances. As Rumsfeld was fond of saying, these institutions were a hindrance to “taking the fight to the terrorists.” Lawyers would be consulted to rubber-stamp secret policies and only certain, select members of Congress would be consulted. Briefings to Congress, including mandated full-access briefings to the elite “Gang of Eight” congressional members who were historically briefed on intelligence operations regarding covert actions, would be censored and redacted internally at the White House, meaning a sanitized version would be given to US lawmakers.

In the months after 9/11, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their teams launched several major initiatives aimed at ensuring that no bureaucracy would stand in the way of their plans for the unchecked use of the darkest US forces. Cheney wanted to disabuse the CIA of the idea that it had any kind of independence. Rather than having the Agency serve as the president’s premier fact-checking and intelligence resource, the CIA’s new job would be to reinforce predetermined policy. Cheney wanted to gut the interagency reviews of proposed lethal actions that were standard under Clinton. Soon after 9/11, the White House convened a group of senior administration lawyers whose job it would be to legally justify torture, kidnapping and assassination. The group secretly dubbed itself the “War Council” and was led by David Addington, Cheney’s counsel and longtime adviser who had worked with him on the “minority report” defending Iran-Contra. It also included White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and his deputy, Tim Flanigan; the Pentagon’s general counsel, William Haynes; and Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo. The War Council explicitly excluded the State Department’s general counsel and other military and Justice Department lawyers who had historically been included in reviewing legal structures for combating terrorism. This point was clear: this group was to develop legal justification for tactics in a covert dirty war, not to independently assess their legality.

To fight its global war, the White House made extensive use of the tactics Cheney had long advocated. Central to its “dark side” campaign would be the use of presidential findings that, by their nature, would greatly limit any effective congressional oversight. According to the National Security Act of 1947, the president is required to issue a finding before undertaking a covert action. The law states that the action must comply with US law and the Constitution. The presidential finding signed by Bush on September 17, 2001, was used to create a highly classified, secret program code-named Greystone. GST, as it was referred to in internal documents, would be an umbrella under which many of the most clandestine and legally questionable activities would be authorized and conducted in the early days of the Global War on Terror (GWOT). It relied on the administration’s interpretation of the AUMF passed by Congress, which declared any al Qaeda suspect anywhere in the world a legitimate target. In effect, the presidential finding declared all covert actions to be preauthorized and legal, which critics said violated the spirit of the National Security Act. Under GST, a series of compartmentalized programs were created that, together, effectively formed a global assassination and kidnap operation. Authority for targeted kills was radically streamlined. Such operations no longer needed direct presidential approval on a case-by-case basis. Black, the head of the Counterterrorism Center, could now directly order hits.

The day Bush signed the memorandum of notification, which among other initiatives, authorized a High Value Detainee program, CTC personnel and “selected foreign counterparts” were briefed on it in Washington, DC. “Cofer [Black] presented a new Presidential authorization that broadened our options for dealing with terrorist targets—one of the few times such a thing had happened since the CIA was officially banned from carrying out assassinations in 1976,” recalled Tyler Drumheller, the former head of CIA clandestine ops in Europe. “It was clear that the Administration saw this as a war that would largely be fought by intelligence assets. This required a new way of operating.” John Rizzo, a veteran CIA attorney who helped draft the authorization, later said, “I had never in my experience been part of or ever seen a presidential authorization as far-reaching and as aggressive in scope. It was simply extraordinary.”

GST was also the vehicle for snatch operations, known as extraordinary renditions. Under GST, the CIA began coordinating with intelligence agencies in various countries to establish “Status of Forces” agreements to create secret prisons where detainees could be held, interrogated and kept away from the Red Cross, the US Congress and anything vaguely resembling a justice system. These agreements not only gave immunity to US government personnel, but to private contractors as well. The administration did not want to put terror suspects on trial, “because they would get lawyered up,” said Jose Rodriguez, who at the time ran the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, which was responsible for all of the “action” run by the Agency. “[O]ur job, first and foremost, is to obtain information.” To obtain that information, authorization was given to interrogators to use ghoulish, at times medieval, techniques on detainees, many of which were developed by studying the torture tactics of America’s enemies. The War Council lawyers issued a series of legal documents, later dubbed the “Torture Memos” by human rights and civil liberties organizations, that attempted to rationalize the tactics as necessary and something other than torture. “We needed to get everybody in government to put their big boy pants on and provide the authorities that we needed,” recalled Rodriguez, who, with Black, would become one of the key architects of the torture policy. “I had had a lot of experience in the Agency where we had been left to hold the bag. And I was not about to let that happen for the people that work for me.”

The CIA began secretly holding prisoners in Afghanistan on the edge of Bagram Airfield, which had been commandeered by US military forces. In the beginning, it was an ad hoc operation with prisoners stuffed into shipping containers. Eventually, it expanded to a handful of other discrete sites, among them an underground prison near the Kabul airport and an old brick factory north of Kabul. Doubling as a CIA substation, the factory became known as the “Salt Pit” and would be used to house prisoners, including those who had been snatched in other countries and brought to Afghanistan. CIA officials who worked on counterterrorism in the early days after 9/11 said that the idea for a network of secret prisons around the world was not initially a big-picture plan, but rather evolved as the scope of operations grew. The CIA had first looked into using naval vessels and remote islands—such as uninhabited islands dotting Lake Kariba in Zambia—as possible detention sites at which to interrogate suspected al Qaeda operatives. Eventually, the CIA would build up its own network of secret “black sites” in at least eight countries, including Thailand, Poland, Romania, Mauritania, Lithuania and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. But in the beginning, lacking its own secret prisons, the Agency began funneling suspects to Egypt, Morocco and Jordan for interrogation. By using foreign intelligence services, prisoners could be freely tortured without any messy congressional inquiries.

In the early stages of the GST program, the Bush administration faced little obstruction from Congress. Democrats and Republicans alike gave tremendous latitude to the administration to prosecute its secret war. For its part, the White House at times refused to provide details of its covert operations to the relevant congressional oversight committees but met little protest for its reticence. The administration also unilaterally decided to reduce the elite Gang of Eight members of Congress to just four: the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees. Those members are prohibited from discussing these briefings with anyone. In effect, it meant that Congress had no oversight of the GST program. And that was exactly how Cheney wanted it.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION did not create the CIA’s rendition program. It started under Clinton in the mid-1990s when he signed a presidential directive authorizing the CIA and US Special Operations Forces, in conjunction with the FBI, to snatch terror suspects from across the globe without the need to respect bilateral extradition agreements or international conventions. But the Clinton directive also allowed for these US officers to send terror suspects to Egypt, where, far removed from US law and due process, they could be interrogated by mukhabarat (secret police) agents not constrained by US prohibitions against torture. The program required direct authorization for each snatch operation. Under Clinton, more than seventy renditions were conducted. In some cases, US planes would land in countries and ferry their targets back to the United States for trial. Among these high-profile renditions conducted under Clinton were: Mir Aimal Kasi, a Pakistani national who had shot and killed two CIA employees outside the Agency’s headquarters in 1993 and was rendered from Pakistan in 1997; Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; Wali Khan Amin Shah, who plotted to blow up multiple US airlines on a single day in 1995; and Japanese Red Army member Tsutomu Shirosaki, who bombed the US Embassy in Jakarta in 1986 and was eventually snatched in 1996. All of these renditions involved court orders from US judges and ended in civilian trials. However, in cases where the United States wanted intelligence rather than justice, it would render them to third countries where they would have no legal rights. In 1998, the US Congress passed legislation declaring that it is “the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.” Bush’s post-9/11 presidential directives threw those concerns out the door, and the CIA intensified its use of what human rights advocates came to call “torture taxis.”

As the new kill/capture program began to kick into full gear in late 2001, the CIA’s number-three man at the time, Buzzy Krongard, declared the “war on terror” would be “won in large measure by forces you do not know about, in actions you will not see and in ways you may not want to know about.” A US official directly involved in rendering captives told the Washington Post, “We don’t kick the (expletive) out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the (expletive) out of them.” Another official who supervised the capture and transfer of prisoners told the paper, “If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job,” adding, “I don’t think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this. That was the whole problem for a long time with the CIA.” Cofer Black put a fine point on it when he told Congress about the new “operational flexibility” employed in the war on terror. “This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that all you need to know is that there was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11,” Black said. “After 9/11 the gloves come off.”

The early stages of the post-9/11 rendition program began what would be a multiyear battle between the FBI and the CIA over who would take the lead in investigating the terror attacks. It would also bring to the surface how little regard the Bush White House had for anything vaguely resembling a law enforcement approach to the perpetrators of 9/11. As the Taliban regime crumbled and US troops poured into Afghanistan, scores of al Qaeda operatives began retreating across the border into Pakistan. In November, Pakistani forces picked up al Qaeda trainer Ibn al Shaykh Libi, who allegedly ran the Khalden training camp in Afghanistan where the would-be “Shoe Bomber,” Richard Reid, and Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called Twentieth Hijacker, were both trained. The Pakistanis handed Libi over to FBI agents stationed at Bagram Air Base for questioning. The FBI saw the prisoner as a potentially valuable source of intel on al Qaeda and a possible witness against Moussaoui. New York–based FBI agent Jack Cloonan told his agents in Afghanistan to “handle this like it was being done right here, in my office in New York.” He said, “I remember talking on a secure line to them. I told them, ‘Do yourself a favor, read the guy his rights. It may be old-fashioned, but this will come out if we don’t. It may take ten years, but it will hurt you, and the bureau’s reputation, if you don’t. Have it stand as a shining example of what we feel is right.’” Libi’s interrogators described him as cooperative and “genuinely friendly” and said that he had agreed to give them information on Reid in return for promises to protect his family.

However, just as the FBI believed it was making headway with Libi, CIA operatives, on orders from Cofer Black, showed up at Bagram and demanded to take him into their custody. The FBI agents objected to the CIA taking him, but the White House overruled them. “You know where you are going,” one of the CIA operatives told Libi as he took him from the FBI. “Before you get there, I am going to find your mother and fuck her.”

The CIA flew Libi to the USS Bataan in the Arabian Sea, which was also housing the so-called American Taliban, John Walker Lindh, who had been picked up in Afghanistan, and other foreign fighters. From there, Libi was transferred to Egypt, where he was tortured by Egyptian agents. Libi’s interrogation focused on a goal that would become a centerpiece of the rendition and torture program: proving an Iraq connection to 9/11. Once he was in CIA custody, interrogators pummeled Libi with questions attempting to link the attacks and al Qaeda to Iraq. Even after the interrogators working Libi over had reported that they had broken him and that he was “compliant,” Cheney’s office directly intervened and ordered that he continue to be subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques. “After real macho interrogation—this is enhanced interrogation techniques on steroids—he admitted that al Qaeda and Saddam were working together. He admitted that al Qaeda and Saddam were working together on WMDs,” former senior FBI interrogator Ali Soufan told PBS’s Frontline. But the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) cast serious doubt on Libi’s claims at the time, observing in a classified intelligence report that he “lacks specific details” on alleged Iraqi involvement, asserting that it was “likely this individual is intentionally misleading” his interrogators. Noting that he had been “undergoing debriefs for several weeks,” the DIA analysis concluded Libi may have been “describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.” Despite such doubts, Libi’s “confession” would later be given to Secretary of State Powell when he made the administration’s fraudulent case at the United Nations for the Iraq War. In that speech Powell would say, “I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al Qaeda.” Later, after these claims were proven false, Libi, according to Soufan, admitted he had lied. “I gave you what you want[ed] to hear,” he said. “I want[ed] the torture to stop. I gave you anything you want[ed] to hear.”

The pattern that was emerging early on with the rendition and interrogation program centered on two primary objectives: dismantling al Qaeda’s network and preventing any further attacks, and supporting the case for an invasion of Iraq. In pursuit of these goals, no options or tactics would be left off the table. While the State Department cautioned against declaring an ill-conceived global war and pushed for a narrow, law-enforcement response to 9/11, Cheney began drawing up plans for ambitious global kidnapping and assassination operations in which certain elements of the CIA would initially take a leading role. Cheney, according to former senior CIA and State Department officials, began effectively directing a global manhunt using a mesh of Special Operations Forces and operatives from the CIA’s Special Activities Division, the paramilitary arm of the Agency. The former officials described a culture that permeated these operations in which ambassadors, the conventional US military commanders and even CIA station chiefs around the world were kept in the dark about clandestine or covert activities. To execute this program, Cheney relied on the gray area in US law and command authority between the jurisdiction of the CIA and the military.

In November 2001, Cheney convened a meeting at the White House to put the finishing touches on a presidential order, drawn up by Addington and other lawyers, that outlined how prisoners captured around the world would be tried. As had become custom, War Council lawyers were invited to the meeting, but senior State Department and National Security Council officials were shut out. Powell and the State Department’s lawyers had told President Bush that they believed that, under the Geneva Convention, Taliban and al Qaeda detainees were entitled to legal protections and humane treatment while in enemy custody. They furthermore warned that in not offering America’s enemies such protections, it would endanger the lives of US military personnel captured in the war. On February 7, 2002, President Bush made his decision. He signed another directive, based on a notion that the Geneva Convention was “quaint” and did not apply to al Qaeda or Taliban prisoners held by the United States. The order was issued just after the Bush administration began sending detainees snatched in Afghanistan and elsewhere to a US military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Although Congress was largely asleep at the wheel in its oversight responsibilities early on in the war on terror, the administration knew that would not last. By early 2002, some on Capitol Hill were already demanding that the CIA and administration brief them on the range of tactics being used by the Agency in pursuit of terror suspects. The full details of how those early post-9/11 “Cheney Program” operations were run and who exactly was operating them will likely never be fully revealed. “We deliberately kept the circle of people who knew where the black sites were to a very small number. We didn’t tell the FBI,” recalled Rodriguez, the CIA official who coordinated the construction and use of the black sites. “Many people, even those within the Agency with the highest security clearances, were not clued in. As far as I know, the location of the black sites was not even shared with the president.” Rodriguez added that it was not that those senior officials kept outside the circle of knowledge were untrustworthy, “but rather that they simply did not have a ‘need to know.’”

The strategies that fueled this force’s ascent would become a model for a secret program that Rumsfeld would build at the Pentagon. Rumsfeld was watching as the CIA became the alpha dog in the GWOT under Cheney’s direction. Rumsfeld became determined to break what he called the Pentagon’s “near total dependence on CIA” and to build an iron curtain around the most sensitive activities of America’s most elite warriors. This project was envisioned as a parallel intelligence operation to the CIA, but also as the most effective kill and capture machine the world had ever seen—one that, by its very nature, would answer to no one but the president and his inner circle.