Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

53. The Pink House

WASHINGTON, DC, AND SOMALIA, 2011—A month after the bin Laden raid, Admiral McRaven was still the toast of Washington. In June 2011, he appeared before Congress for his confirmation hearings to become head of the US Special Operations Command. The new post was a promotion from the commander in chief and would officially put McRaven in charge of the military’s global targeted killing program. As he sat before the Senate Armed Services Committee, praise was heaped upon McRaven by Republicans and Democrats alike for his running of the bin Laden raid and his role in other operations. “I salute you and your colleagues in the SEALs for extraordinary operations,” said Democratic senator Jack Reed. “I think your decisiveness and your feel for every level of the conflict, from the villages of Afghanistan and Pakistan all the way up here to the more complicated rooms in Washington, was amply demonstrated.” Republican John McCain echoed those comments, telling McRaven, “What you had achieved in your distinguished career is already extraordinary before May 2, 2011. But on that day, by leading the mission that killed Osama bin Laden, you and your men won an enduring place in American military history.”

But then the real focus of the hearings unfolded: Were McRaven and his Special Ops Forces “prepared and capable to expand” their “operations at a moment’s notice worldwide?” Reed asked. McRaven told the senators that because of the dramatically increased deployment of Special Ops in the widening global battle space, more resources would be required and a new generation of operators had to be trained. Then the admiral zeroed in on the current prime targets. “From my standpoint as a former JSOC commander, I can tell you we were looking very hard at Yemen and Somalia,” he declared. McRaven said that in order to expand successful “kinetic strikes” there, the United States would have to increase its use of drones, as well as on-the-ground intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations. “Any expansion of manpower is going to have to come with a commensurate expansion of the enablers,” McRaven declared.

When I flew into Mogadishu in the month McRaven was promoted, a rather large symbol of the not-so-quiet presence of American “enablers” was in full view from the moment I landed. Nestled in a back corner of Aden Adde International Airport was a sprawling walled compound. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looked like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. I later learned from multiple Somali and US intelligence sources that it was a new counterterrorism center run by the CIA and used by JSOC operators. Somalis called it the “Pink House” because of its color. Others simply called it “Guantánamo.” Adjacent to the compound were eight large metal hangars, and the CIA had its own aircraft at the airport. The site, which airport officials and Somali intelligence sources said was completed in early 2011, was guarded by Somali soldiers, but the Americans controlled access. At the facility, the CIA ran a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives aimed at building an indigenous strike force capable of snatch operations and targeted “combat” operations against al Shabab.

As part of its expanding counterterrorism program in Somalia, the CIA also utilized the secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being al Shabab members or of having links to the group were held. Some of the prisoners, like al Qaeda leader Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan’s alleged right-hand man, had been seized off the streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu. Others had been yanked off commercial flights after landing or taken from their homes in Somalia and brought to the dungeon. Although the underground prison was officially run by the Somali NSA, US intelligence personnel paid the salaries of local agents and also directly interrogated prisoners. Among the sources who provided me with information on the prison and the CIA counterterrorism center were senior Somali intelligence officials, senior members of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, former prisoners held at the underground prison and several well-connected Somali analysts and militia leaders, some of whom worked with US personnel, including from the CIA. A US official, who confirmed the existence of both sites, told me, “It makes complete sense to have a strong counterterrorism partnership” with the Somali government.

The elevated CIA presence in Mogadishu was part of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism focus on Somalia, which included targeted strikes by JSOC, drone attacks and expanded surveillance operations. The US agents “are here full time,” a senior Somali intelligence official told me. At times, he said, there were as many as thirty of them in Mogadishu, but he stressed that those working with the Somali NSA did not conduct operations. Rather, they advised and trained Somali agents. “In this environment, it’s very tricky. They want to help us, but the situation is not allowing them to do [it] however they want. They are not in control of the politics, they are not in control of the security,” he added. “They are not controlling the environment like Afghanistan and Iraq. In Somalia, the situation is fluid, the situation is changing, personalities changing.”

According to well-connected Somali sources, the CIA was reluctant to deal directly with Somali political leaders, who, despite public praise, were regarded by US officials as corrupt and untrustworthy. Instead, the United States put Somali intelligence agents directly on its payroll. Somali sources with knowledge of the program described the agents as lining up to receive $200 monthly cash payments from Americans, in a country where the average annual income was about $600. “They support us in a big way financially,” said the senior Somali intelligence official. “They are the largest [funder] by far.”

It was unclear how much control, if any, Somalia’s president had over this counterterrorism force or if he was even fully briefed on its operations. The CIA personnel and other US intelligence agents “do not bother to be in touch with the political leadership of the country and that says a lot about the intentions,” Abdirahman “Aynte” Ali, the al Shabab researcher who also had extensive sources within the Somali government, told me. “Essentially, the CIA seems to be operating, doing the foreign policy of the United States. You should have had State Department people doing foreign policy, but the CIA seems to be doing it across the country.” The Somali officials I interviewed said the CIA was the lead US agency on the Mogadishu counterterrorism program, but they also indicated that US military intelligence agents are at times involved. When asked if they are from JSOC or the Defense Intelligence Agency, the senior Somali intelligence official responded, “We don’t know. They don’t tell us.”

As the CIA built up its Somali intelligence agency, CIA Director Leon Panetta appeared before Congress and was asked about the fight against al Qaeda and its affiliates in Yemen, Somalia and North Africa. “Our approach has been to develop operations in each of these areas that will contain al Qaeda and go after them so that they have no place to escape,” he said. “So we are doing that in Yemen. It’s obviously a dangerous and uncertain situation, but we continue to work with elements there to try to develop counterterrorism. We’re working with JSOC as well in their operations. Same thing is true for Somalia.”

After I broke the story of the CIA’s counterterrorism program in Somalia for the Nation, one Somali official told the New York Times that the CIA-backed spy service was becoming a “government within a government.” “No one, not even the president, knows what the N.S.A. is doing,” he said. “The Americans are creating a monster.”

According to former detainees, the NSA’s underground prison, which was staffed by Somali guards, consisted of a long corridor lined with filthy small cells infested with bedbugs and mosquitoes. One said that when he arrived in February 2011, he saw two white men wearing military boots, combat trousers, gray tucked-in shirts and black sunglasses. The former prisoners described the cells as windowless and the air as thick, moist and foul-smelling. Prisoners, they said, were not allowed outside. Many developed rashes and scratched themselves incessantly. Some had been detained for a year or more without charges or access to lawyers or family. According to one former prisoner, inmates who had been there for long periods would pace around constantly, while others leaned against walls, rocking.

A Somali journalist who was arrested in Mogadishu after filming a sensitive military operation told me that he was taken to the prison and held in a windowless underground cell. Among the prisoners he met during his time there was a man who held a Western passport (he declined to identify the man’s nationality). Some of the prisoners told him they were picked up in Nairobi and rendered on small aircraft to Mogadishu, where they were handed over to Somali intelligence agents.

Once in custody, according to the senior Somali intelligence official and former prisoners, some detainees were freely interrogated by US and French agents. “Our goal is to please our partners, so we get more [out] of them, like any relationship,” the Somali intelligence official told me. The Americans, he said, operated unilaterally in the country, but the French agents were embedded within AMISOM at its airport base. Indeed, in July 2011, I witnessed a French intelligence agent, with an AMISOM commander, monitoring the passengers disembarking a flight from Nairobi. Somali intelligence sources told me the French sometimes ask for passengers to be snatched from flights and questioned. According to Aynte, in some cases, “the US and other intelligence agencies have notified the Somali intelligence agency that some people, some suspects, people who have been in contact with the leadership of al Shabab, are on their way to Mogadishu on a [commercial] plane, and to essentially be at the airport for those people. Catch them, interrogate them.”

The underground prison was housed in the same building once occupied by Somalia’s infamous National Security Service (NSS) during the military regime of Mohamed Siad Barre, who ruled from 1969 to 1991. A former prisoner told me he actually saw an old NSS sign outside. During Barre’s regime, the notorious basement prison and interrogation center, which sat behind the presidential palace in Mogadishu, was a staple of the state’s apparatus of repression. It was referred to as Godka, “The Hole.”

“The bunker is there, and that’s where the intelligence agency does interrogate people,” said Aynte, who maintained contact with Somali intelligence officials. “When CIA and other intelligence agencies—who actually are in Mogadishu—want to interrogate those people, they usually just do that.” Somali officials “start the interrogation, but then foreign intelligence agencies eventually do their own interrogation as well, the Americans and the French.” The US official made available to me for comment said that American operatives’ “debriefing” of prisoners in the facility had “been done on only rare occasions” and always jointly with Somali agents.

In a dramatic flourish that appeared to fulfill his campaign promise to close the CIA’s infamous “black sites” established under President Bush, Obama had signed Executive Order 13491 on January 22, 2009. The order required that “the CIA shall close as expeditiously as possible any detention facilities that it currently operates and shall not operate any such detention facility in the future.” To human rights groups, the use of the underground prison appeared a backdoor subversion of that order. After the publication of my report on the prison in the Nation and a subsequent, related article by Jeffrey Gettleman in the New York Times, a coalition of human rights groups wrote a letter to President Obama. The articles, they said, “further call into question whether the United States is in compliance with its obligations to respect, and ensure respect for, international human rights requirements relating to non-refoulement, arbitrary detention, and humane treatment.” Citing Obama’s signing of Executive Order 13491, they told the president, “You made clear your deep commitment to ensuring that counterterrorism operations are conducted with respect for human rights and the rule of law. We urge you to reaffirm that commitment by disclosing, to the fullest extent possible, the nature of U.S. involvement in overseas detention, interrogation, and transfer operations relating to the prison in Somalia, so that there can be meaningful public dialogue regarding the extent to which such operations comply with the law.”

Despite the early rhetoric from President Obama and his surrogates about the need to balance liberty and security, two years into his administration it was clear that the White House had repeatedly chosen national security over civil liberties. And though some of the excesses of the Bush era were ended and others curbed, the kill/capture program was growing, not abating. Many serious questions still loomed over the targeted killing program: Was it actually making America safer? Would these operations result in less terrorism or more? Would the actions taken by the White House in the name of defeating terrorism—drone strikes, assassinations, renditions—actually aid groups like al Shabab, AQAP and the Taliban in recruiting new members and supporters?

IN EARLY 2011, al Shabab was in firm control of a greater swath of Somalia than the Transitional Federal Government, even though the TFG was supported by thousands of US-trained, -armed and -funded African Union troops. In Mogadishu, despite increased US funding and weapons, AMISOM forces were largely confined to their bases. Instead of fighting a counterinsurgency, they opted for regular shelling of al Shabab–held neighborhoods teeming with civilians. JSOC was bumping off militant figures, but the civilian death toll of AMISOM’s shelling pushed some clan leaders to lend support to al Shabab. Meanwhile, the Somali government was viewed as weak, illegitimate or worse.

“Ninety-nine percent of the government are corrupted, immoral, dishonest people, selected by the international community,” Mohammed Farah Siad, a Mogadishu businessman, told me when I visited him at his home near the port of Mogadishu during the summer of 2011. Siad, who had owned his business since 1967, complained of having to regularly pay bribes and of government officials stealing from him and other importers. “I think those people must be selected by being in the category of the worst. The more you are criminal, the more you are a drug abuser, the more you will be selected as member of the Somali parliament.” The government, he declared, existed “to cheat money.” Siad, who adamantly condemned al Shabab and al Qaeda, said that al Shabab was far better organized than the Somali government, and he believed that if the AMISOM troops pulled out, al Shabab would take power. “Immediately, in half an hour,” he exclaimed. “Less than a half an hour.” Somalis, he said, were faced with a choice between the government “thieves” and the al Shabab “criminals.” “We are like orphans,” he concluded.

Al Shabab controlled what “amounted to be about half of Somalia, which is the size of Texas. So you could imagine the large amount of the country—including a portion of Mogadishu, the capital city,” Aynte estimated. It was abundantly clear that if the Somali government was incapable of building police and military forces that could stabilize even the capital, the influence of al Shabab would continue to grow. Each suicide bombing was evidence that the government was vulnerable and every mortar that crashed into civilian areas sent a message that the government—and the US-backed African Union force—was not on the side of the people.

With most Somalis caught between a government they despised and Islamic militants they feared, the Obama administration unveiled what it referred to as a “dual-track” approach to Somalia. It would simultaneously deal with the “central government” in Mogadishu, as well as regional and clan players in Somalia. “The dual track policy only provides a new label for the old (and failed) Bush Administration’s approach,” observed Somalia analyst Afyare Abdi Elmi. “It inadvertently strengthens clan divisions, undermines inclusive and democratic trends and most importantly, creates a conducive environment for the return of the organized chaos or warlordism in the country.”

The dual-track policy encouraged self-declared, clan-based regional administrations to seek recognition and support from the United States. “Local administrations are popping up every week,” said Aynte at the time. “Most of them don’t control anywhere, but people are announcing local governments in the hopes that [the] CIA will set up a little outpost in their small village.”

By mid-2011, “In Washington, American officials said debates were under way about just how much the United States should rely on clandestine militia training and armed drone strikes to fight the Shabab,” according to the New York Times. “Over the past year, the American Embassy in Nairobi, according to one American official, has become a hive of military and intelligence operatives who are ‘chomping at the bit’ to escalate operations in Somalia.”

While the United States ratcheted up both its rhetoric and its strikes against al Shabab, its tactical successes were largely in rural areas outside of Mogadishu. In the Somali capital, the CIA-trained and -funded counterterrorism force brought few tangible gains. “So far what we have not seen is the results,” the senior Somali intelligence official told me in the summer of 2011. He conceded that neither US nor Somali forces had been able to conduct a single successful targeted mission in al Shabab–controlled areas in the capital. In late 2010, according to the official, US-trained Somali agents conducted an operation in an al Shabab area that failed terribly and resulted in the death of several agents. “There was an attempt, but it was a haphazard one,” he recalled. On February 3, 2011, al Shabab broadcast the execution of an alleged CIA informant on its al Kataib television channel.

While the CIA’s newest project in Somalia struggled to achieve any victories, the United States waged its campaign against al Shabab primarily by continuing to support the AMISOM forces, which were not conducting their mission with anything resembling surgical precision. AMISOM regularly put out press releases boasting of gains against al Shabab and the retaking of territory, but the reality was far more complicated.

As I walked throughout the areas AMISOM had retaken in 2011, I saw a honeycomb of underground tunnels once used by al Shabab fighters to move from building to building. By some accounts, the tunnels stretched continually for miles. Leftover food, blankets and ammo cartridges lay scattered near “pop-up” positions once used by al Shabab snipers and guarded by sandbags—all that remained of guerrilla warfare positions. Not only had the al Shabab fighters been cleared from the aboveground areas, the civilians that once resided there were cleared, too. On several occasions when I was there, AMISOM forces fired artillery from their airport base at the Bakaara market, where whole neighborhoods had been totally abandoned. Houses lay in ruins and animals wandered, chewing trash. In some areas, bodies had been hastily buried in trenches with dirt barely masking the remains. On the side of the road in one former al Shabab neighborhood, a decapitated corpse lay just yards away from a new government checkpoint.

In a series of interviews in Mogadishu, several of the country’s internationally recognized leaders, including President Sharif, called on the US government to quickly and dramatically increase its assistance to the Somali military in the form of training, equipment and weapons. Moreover, they argued that without viable civilian institutions, Somalia would remain vulnerable to terrorist groups that could further destabilize not only Somalia but the region. “I believe that the US should help the Somalis to establish a government that protects civilians and its people,” Sharif said. But the United States had little faith in Sharif and other government officials—and with good reason. “If the [Somali government] were doing anything but pocketing all the money that has been given to it, it would have a lot more resources than al Shabab,” said Ken Menkhaus, the Davidson College Somalia scholar. According to the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia, weapons and ammunition given to the Somali government “and its affiliated militias” were increasingly surfacing on the black market and ultimately ending up in the hands of al Shabab. The United Nations estimated that “the Government and pro-Government forces sell between one third and one half of their ammunition” on the black market.

In the battle against al Shabab, the United States did not cast its lot with the Somali government. The emerging US strategy on Somalia—borne out in stated policy, the expanded covert presence and funding plans—was two-pronged. On the one hand, the CIA was training, paying and at times directing Somali intelligence agents who were not firmly under the control of the Somali government, while JSOC conducted unilateral strikes without the prior knowledge of the government. On the other, the Pentagon increased its support for and arming of the counterterrorism operations of non-Somali African military forces.

By 2011, one Somali who was exercising a lot of control over his territory was Indha Adde, the former Islamic Courts Union defense minister and erstwhile al Shabab ally. When I visited him in the summer of 2011, he had rebranded himself as General Yusuf Mohammed Siad and was decked out in a military uniform bearing three stars. He had become a high-ranking officer in the Somali military. While the United States and other Western powers conducted specialized training exercises and armed and equipped the Ugandan and Burundian militaries under the auspices of AMISOM, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, the Somali government could barely pay its own soldiers. The Somali military was underfunded and underarmed, its soldiers poorly paid, highly undisciplined and, at the end of the day, more loyal to their clans than to the central government. That’s how the rent-a-militia program was born. And Indha Adde was a prime example of how it operated.

While Washington went to great lengths to shield its support for Somali warlords and militias, it was a barely masked public secret in Mogadishu that its proxies from Ethiopia, Kenya and AMISOM were making deals with warlords similar to those brokered with the CIA’s Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism in the early 2000s.

As the United States focused on its own unilateral kinetic ops, the Somali government and AMISOM turned to some unsavory characters in a dual effort: to independently build something vaguely resembling a national army and—much in the way the United States attempted with its Awakening Councils in the Sunni areas of Iraq in 2006—to purchase strategic loyalty from former allies of the current enemy. Indha Adde was given a military rank, despite never having served in an official army, while others were given government ministries in return for allocating their militia forces to the fight against al Shabab. Several were former allies of al Qaeda or al Shabab, and many had directly fought the US-sponsored Ethiopian invasion or had rallied against the US-led mission in Somalia in the early 1990s that culminated in the Black Hawk Down incident. Other militias were little more than proxies for the Ethiopian or Kenyan governments, both of which are heavily backed by Washington. In 2011, Indha Adde had become sort of a hybrid of his former selves, an Islamic warlord who believed in Sharia law, taking money and weapons from AMISOM and cultivating friendly relations with the CIA.

Large parts of Mogadishu were not accessible without Indha Adde’s permission, and he controlled one of the largest militias and possessed more technicals in the city than any other warlord. His mechanic, who built specially weaponized pickups for Indha Adde’s forces (and bore a striking resemblance to Mr. T), was said to be the best in Mogadishu. With a senior military rank and a flow of modern weapons, Indha Adde was more powerful—and, at least as far as he saw it, respectable—than ever. As I sat outside one of Indha Adde’s homes, waiting for his entourage to prepare to head out for the front lines, a white Toyota Corolla pulled into the drive. Within moments, box after box of fresh ammunition was being unloaded.

Indha Adde took me to several front lines where his militia was fighting al Shabab. As we made our way to various positions, we were repeatedly fired on by al Shabab snipers. A few months earlier, Indha Adde’s personal bodyguard was shot in the head as he stood in front of his boss in a battle with al Shabab fighters. According to witnesses, Indha Adde slung the man’s body over his shoulder, carried him to a secured area, picked up an automatic weapon and then charged at his killers. “One night I fired 120 AK-47 rounds, four magazines and 250 machine gun bullets. I am the number one fighter on the front lines,” he told me as we walked through the bombed-out remains of a neighborhood his men had recently retaken from al Shabab. Unlike the forces from AMISOM, Indha Adde did not wear any body armor, and he regularly stopped to take calls on his hands-free mobile. “The role of general is two-way street. In a conventional, well-funded war, the generals lead from behind with orders,” he declared. “But in a guerrilla war, as we are in, the general has to be at front line to boost the morale of his men.”

As we walked alongside trenches on the outskirts of Bakaara market, once occupied by fighters from al Shabab, Indha Adde’s entourage stopped. In one of the trenches, the foot of a corpse poked out from a makeshift grave consisting of some sand dumped loosely over the body. One of Indha Adde’s militiamen said the body was that of a foreigner who fought alongside al Shabab. “We bury their dead, and we also capture them alive,” Indha Adde told me in his low, raspy voice. “We take care of them if they are Somali, but if we capture a foreigner, we execute them so that others will see we have no mercy.”

I asked Indha Adde why he was now fighting on the side of the United States and against his former al Shabab allies, and he spat what sounded like memorized verses without skipping a beat: “Foreign international terrorists came into our country, started to kill our people. They killed some of our fathers, raped our women and looted our houses. It is my obligation to defend my people, my country and my religion. I have to either liberate my people or die in the course.” The militants from al Qaeda and al Shabab changed, he said, not him. “The terrorists are misinterpreting the religion,” he said. “If I would have known what I now know—that the guys I was protecting were terrorists—I would have handed them to the CIA without asking for any money.”

ONE OF THE MORE POWERFUL FORCES that emerged in Somalia’s anti–al Shabab government-militia nexus was Ahlu Sunna Wal Jama (ASWJ), a Sufi Muslim paramilitary organization. Originally founded in the 1990s as a quasi-political organization dedicated to Sufi religious scholarship and community works—and avowedly nonmilitant—ASWJ viewed itself as a buffer against what it saw as the encroachment of Wahabism in Somalia. Its proclaimed mandate was to “preach a message of peace and delegitimize the beliefs and political platform” of “fundamentalist movements.” It ran madrassas and taught Koranic memorization. The sect’s prayer services, which featured a lot of group chanting, more closely resembled an evangelical Sunday service than conventional Friday prayers at mosques throughout the Muslim world.

In 2008, al Shabab began targeting Ahlu Sunna leaders, carrying out assassinations and desecrating the tombs of ASWJ’s elders. Al Shabab considered ASWJ to be a cult whose practices of celebrating the dead and speaking in tongues were heresy. After much debate within the ASWJ community, militias were formed to take up arms against al Shabab. At the beginning, its fighting force of undisciplined clan fighters and religious scholars left much to be desired. Then, quietly, Ethiopia started arming and financing ASWJ, as well as providing its forces with training and, eventually, boots on the ground. By early 2010, ASWJ was widely seen as an Ethiopian—and therefore US—proxy. In March 2010, after heated debate within its community, ASWJ signed a formal cooperation agreement with the Somali government.

One of the prime beneficiaries of ASWJ’s new status as a paramilitary militia was Abdulkadir Moalin Noor, simply known as “the Khalifa,” or the successor. His father, a widely revered holy man, died in 2009 at the age of ninety-one and had designated Noor as the new spiritual leader of the movement. Noor was educated in London and managed his family’s business investments outside of Somalia. When his father died, he left his life of safety and comfort to return to Mogadishu, where he was given the title of minister of state for the presidency. Noor, however, still enjoyed the luxuries of the West. He rolled around Mogadishu in an armored SUV with animal skins over the seats. He set up a wireless Internet network in an ASWJ camp outside of the capital that didn’t have indoor plumbing and his Koran was housed in a shiny new iPad. He showed me an e-mail from Ethiopia’s minister of foreign affairs on his recently acquired white iPhone.

Noor, who regularly met with Western officials and intelligence agents, declined to outline who exactly was funding ASWJ from the outside, but he did single out the United States as Somalia’s “number one” ally. “I’m here to thank them, because they are helping us, fighting against the terrorists,” he told me. “What about on a military level?” I asked him. “I don’t want to mention a lot of things,” he replied. “But, they are in deep, deep. They are working with our intelligence, they are giving them training. They are working with the military personnel. They have special trained forces fighting against al Shabab here. I don’t want to disclose—but I know they’re doing a good job. They do have people here, fighting al Shabab. And by the help of Allah, we hope this mayhem will end soon.”

By mid-2011, the ASWJ militias had emerged as some of the most effective fighters battling al Shabab forces outside of Mogadishu, winning back territory in the Mudug region and several other pockets of the country. But, like most powerful paramilitary groups in Somalia, there was far more to the group than met the eye.

The UN Monitoring Group on Somalia declared that some ASWJ militias “appear to be proxies for neighboring States rather than emergent local authorities.” ASWJ also received support from Southern Ace, a private security firm. Technically registered in Hong Kong in 2007 and run by a white South African, Edgar Van Tonder, Southern Ace committed “egregious violations of the arms embargo” on Somalia, according to the United Nations, and “also began to explore prospects for arms trafficking and engaged in horticultural experiments aimed at the production of narcotic drugs, including marijuana, cocaine and opium.”

Between April 2009 and early 2011, according to the United Nations, “Southern Ace and its local associates recruited and operated a well-equipped, 220-strong militia…supervised by a dozen Zimbabweans and three Westerners, at an estimated cost of $1 million in salaries and at least $150,000 in arms and ammunition. The result was one of the strongest forces…with the potential to change the balance of power in the area.”

Southern Ace began acquiring arms from the weapons market in Somalia, including scores of Kalashnikovs, heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and an antiaircraft ZU-23 machine gun with 2,000 rounds of ammunition. The company’s arms purchases “were so substantial” that local officials “noted a significant rise in the price of ammunition and a shortage of ZU-23 rounds.” Some of the weapons were mounted on four-wheel drive vehicles and pickup trucks. The company also imported to Somalia “Philippine army-style uniforms and bullet-proof jackets in support of their operations,” according to the United Nations.

Backed by Ethiopia and Southern Ace, ASWJ conducted a series of major offensives against al Shabab that the United Nations alleged were supported through violations of the arms embargo. Although Ethiopia and the United States undoubtedly saw ASWJ as the best counterbalance to the rhetoric of al Shabab and al Qaeda, in just three years they transformed a previously nonviolent entity into one of the most powerful armed groups in Somalia. “To a certain extent, the resort to Somali proxy forces by foreign Governments represents a potential return to the ‘warlordism’ of the 1990s and early 2000s,” a UN report soberly concluded. Such practices, it added, “historically proved to be counterproductive.”

SOUTHERN ACE WAS HARDLY the only mercenary company to intervene in Somalia. No modern US war would be complete without the involvement of Blackwater founder Erik Prince. Even though his company’s crimes and scandals were closely associated with the neoconservatives and the Bush era, Blackwater forces continued to play a significant role in the CIA’s global operations under the Obama administration. With Blackwater under intense investigation and his top deputies indicted on federal conspiracy and weapons charges, Prince left the United States in 2010 and relocated to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, a major hub for the mercenary industry and the war-contracting business as a whole. Prince had close ties to the royals, particularly the crown prince of Abu Dhabi. He said he chose Abu Dhabi because of its “great proximity to potential opportunities across the entire Middle East, and great logistics,” adding that it has “a friendly business climate, low to no taxes, free trade and no out of control trial lawyers or labor unions. It’s pro-business and opportunity.”

From his adopted home in the UAE, Prince continued his mercenary activities. He left the United States, he said, to “make it harder for the jackals to get my money,” adding that he wanted to explore new opportunities in “the energy field.” A few days before Christmas 2010, Prince landed at Mogadishu’s international airport, disembarked a private jet and was taken to the VIP lounge, where he met with unidentified individuals for an hour. He then got back aboard his jet and took off. “We have been hearing more and more about Blackwater’s ambitions to make its mark in Somalia,” a Western official told me at the time.

Prince had long been interested in building a privatized counterpiracy force that could deploy off the coast of Somalia. In late 2008, he was in talks with more than a dozen shipping companies about hiring Blackwater to protect their ships and vessels through the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden. In 2006, he had purchased a 183-foot vessel, the McArthur, and transformed it into an antipiracy mother ship that could be equipped with Little Bird helicopters, inflatable boats, thirty-five private soldiers and a .50-caliber machine gun. “We could put vessels out there and go and stop fishing boats the pirates are using a lot cheaper than the Navy could using a billion and a half to two billion dollar war ships,” Prince said. The European Union, he said, was “out there with 24 ships, trying to cover 2 million square miles of ocean in the Indian Ocean dealing with Somali pirates. That comes out to 80,000 square miles per vessel. That’s just not getting it done.”

Prince suggested that his force could operate like the privateers during the American Revolution. “A privateer was a private ship, with a private crew, with a private master and they would receive a hunting license. It’s called a Letter of Marque. It’s actually provided for in the Constitution,” Prince declared in a speech shortly before he left for the UAE. “They were allowed to go hunt enemy shipping and they did very well. Even General Washington was an investor in one of those privateer operations.”

There was no doubt that piracy was expanding off Somalia’s coast. Pirate attacks continued to climb during the second half of 2010—from September 2010 to January 2011, the number of hostages held by pirates rose from 250 to 770. Pirates had begun demanding increasingly exorbitant ransoms and were using commandeered “mother ships” to carry out more ambitious attacks.

In January 2011, US soldiers conducted a counterpiracy incursion inland, snatching three young Somali men and bringing them aboard a ship for questioning. Soon after, the head of CENTCOM’s naval forces, Vice Admiral Mark Fox, suggested that the United States should employ counterterrorism measures in the fight against Somali piracy. Citing the increasing sophistication of the pirates’ technology, as well as their links to al Shabab, Fox spoke of countering nascent pirate attacks inland. “Al Shabab is responsible for a lot of training activity and camps and that sort of thing in Somalia,” he declared. “The pirates use these things. There cannot be a segregation between terrorist activity, in my mind, and counter-piracy.”

Although Fox may have been overstating links between al Shabab and the pirates—many accounts indicate that al Shabab was extorting from the pirates more than it was coordinating with them—he was correct that the pirates were becoming bolder.

On February 16, 2011, Abduwali Muse—the lone pirate prosecuted for the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama, was sentenced to thirty-three years in prison. Two days later, an SOS was sent from a personal yacht, the SV Quest, owned by California residents Jean and Scott Adam. They were captured, along with Seattle-based crewmates Phyllis Macay and Robert Riggle, 275 miles from the coast of Oman. An ad hoc flotilla of naval vessels from the US 5th Fleet began trailing the Quest soon after its capture was reported, supported by helicopters and unarmed surveillance drones. The rescue mission caught up to the Quest in international waters between the northernmost tip of Puntland and the Yemeni island of Socotra.

By the next day, President Obama had authorized the use of lethal force. But in all the ways that the takedown of the pirates who took the Maersk Alabama was a success, the mission to liberate the passengers on board the Quest was a disaster.

An unusually large, unwieldy band of nineteen pirates had boarded the yacht, making the succinct “three shots, three dead pirates” conclusion of the Alabama rescue impossible to replicate. So the stalemate continued until two pirate representatives from the Quest willingly boarded one of the ships to negotiate with the FBI. The talks soon stalled, and FBI agents detained the pirates. The next morning, a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at one of the Navy ships, before gunfire erupted within the yacht. Two pirates were killed. US forces then sprang into action: two motorboats carried fifteen Navy SEAL commandos to the yacht, where intense hand-to-hand combat ensued. Two pirates were killed by the SEALS, one shot and the other stabbed. It was already too late for the hostages. Two had died, and the others had suffered fatal gunshot wounds. It is unclear whether the hostages had been executed or caught in the crossfire.

In a telephone press conference, Admiral Fox stated that the hostages were shot prior to the boarding and violent clearing operation. A BBC correspondent who spoke with the pirates reported that they took credit for killing the captives but had done so only after the US Navy fired the first shots, which killed the first two pirates. The fifteen remaining pirates were taken into US custody, and fourteen were later indicted on charges of piracy and kidnapping (one was a juvenile and was determined not to have been a central player in the hijacking).

Manifesting one of the qualities that defined Blackwater’s ascent, Erik Prince again saw opportunity in crisis. In 2009, Blackwater had inked a deal with the government of Djibouti to operate the antipiracy ship McArthur from its territory (the ship was later sold to a Saracen International subsidiary). The arrangement was the result of a series of meetings between Djiboutian officials, Prince and Cofer Black, the former head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, who at the time was a senior executive at Blackwater. Initial estimates indicated that the company could make about $200,000 per escort job for shipping companies. The crew would consist of thirty-three US citizens, including three six-man shooter teams that would operate on a continual rotation. “Blackwater does not intend to take any pirates into custody, but will use lethal force against pirates if necessary,” according to a classified US diplomatic cable on the agreement, noting that Blackwater “has briefed AFRICOM, CENTCOM, and Embassy Nairobi officials.” The cable added that there was “no precedent for a paramilitary operation in a purely commercial environment.”

Somalia’s piracy industry was based in the semi-autonomous Puntland region, which had little interest in cooperating with the US-backed government in Mogadishu. The Puntland authorities were facing mounting pressure from the international community to crack down on the pirates, and a local Islamic militant movement was threatening its ability to sign lucrative oil and mineral exploitation contracts with large corporations. Somalia is home to significant deposits of “uranium and largely unexploited reserves of iron ore, tin, gypsum, bauxite, copper, salt, natural gas, likely oil reserves,” according to the CIA. In late 2010, Puntland’s government announced that it was creating its own counterpiracy/counterterrorism force, saying that it had received funding from an anonymous donor nation from the Gulf. It was later revealed that the anonymous donor country was none other than the UAE and that the company that had been contracted to train the security force was bankrolled by one of its newest residents, Erik Prince.

The company, Saracen International, was run by several veterans of the mercenary firm Executive Outcomes and had offices and shell companies in multiple countries, including South Africa, Uganda, Angola and Lebanon. Among the key figures in the company was Lafras Luitingh, a former officer in apartheid South Africa’s Civil Cooperation Bureau, a notorious security force known for hunting down and killing opponents of the apartheid regime. According to a confidential intelligence report from AMISOM, Prince was “at the top of the management chain of Saracen” and “provided seed money for the Saracen contract.” According to the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia, Prince and Luitingh met in Washington, DC, in October 2009, and the two then met with officials from Abu Dhabi. The UAE also hired a former US diplomat, attorney Pierre-Richard Prosper, who had served as the ambassador at large for war crimes issues under President Bush, and an ex-CIA officer, Michael Shanklin, the former CIA Mogadishu station chief. By late 2010, Saracen was training a 1,000-member counterpiracy force in northern Puntland. The force also began preparing to take on Islamic militants who were threatening big-business opportunities. The Islamic militants had complained that they had been “cut out of energy exploration deals” in their region. “You cannot have oil exploration if you have insecurity,” declared Mohamed Farole, the son and adviser of Puntland’s president, Abdirahman Mohamed Farole.

By May 2011, Saracen’s Puntland operations were well under way: at the Bandar Siyada base near Bosaso, 470 soldiers and drivers had completed training. Plans were in place to equip the force with three transport aircraft, three reconnaissance aircraft, two transport helicopters and two light helicopters. The projected force, according to the UN Monitoring Group, would be the best-equipped indigenous military force anywhere in Somalia and the second-largest externally supported military effort after AMISOM. Photographic evidence indicated that Saracen personnel had already been deployed for VIP security and humanitarian operations.

Saracen also brokered a deal with President Sheikh Sharif’s administration in Mogadishu to build a personal security detail for the president and other senior officials. Saracen’s Mogadishu operations were visible by October 2010. Luitingh, Shanklin and a small group of Saracen personnel traveled to Mogadishu on October 5. Over the next three weeks they received four armored vehicles, complete with machine-gun turrets, from the UAE. It seemed that President Sharif and his prime minister had been making secret deals with Saracen and at least five other private companies that had set up shop around Mogadishu’s international airport. These conspicuous activities quickly aroused the suspicions and concerns of AMISOM forces and Somali politicians. AMISOM’s commander, Major General Nathan Mugisha, expressed concern about “unknown armed groups in the mission area,” in reference to Saracen’s operations. Meanwhile, Somali lawmakers announced at the end of 2010 that they were demanding the suspension of contracts with private security contractors, claiming that they had no idea what the contractors had actually been hired to do.

Just as Prince and Saracens’ latest private war was getting under way, scandal hit. The UN Monitoring Group declared that Saracen had been operating in flagrant violation of the arms embargo on Somalia, concluding in its report that “notwithstanding Southern Ace’s short-lived and unsuccessful attempts at arms dealing and drug trafficking, the most egregious violation of the arms embargo by a private security company during the course of the UN Monitoring Group’s mandate was perpetrated by Saracen International, in association with an opaque web of affiliated entities.” The UN Monitoring Group suggested that Saracen’s continued operations could actually increase support for local Islamist militias and, possibly, al Shabab. “Saracen’s presence has increased tension in north-eastern Somalia,” it concluded. A year later, in response to a subsequent UN report, Saracen’s lawyer accused the monitoring group of publishing “a collection of unsubstantiated and often false innuendo.”

In early 2011, when Prince’s involvement in Saracen became public, his spokesman, Mark Corallo, said that Prince was merely compelled by humanitarian imperative to help “Somalia overcome the scourge of piracy” and claimed he had no financial stake in Saracen’s work.

“We don’t want to have anything to do with Blackwater,” Somalia’s information minister, Abdulkareem Jama, told the New York Times, recalling Blackwater’s killing of innocent Iraqis at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007. “We need help, but we don’t want mercenaries.” Jama didn’t mention that he was among the Somali officials present during negotiations around the Saracen deal.

In the spring of 2011, Puntland announced that it was suspending Saracen’s operations, pending approval by the United Nations. But a senior Somali official told me that the company was still discreetly operating in Mogadishu, working with Somali security forces. Among the other private security companies based at the Mogadishu airport were AECOM Technology Corporation, OSPREA Logistics, PAE, Agility, RA International, International Armored Group, Hart Security, DynCorp, Bancroft and Threat Management Group. Some of them trained Somali security services or supported AMISOM, while others provided logistical support for aid groups and journalists. Some companies, like Bancroft, were well known, but the roles of some others were secret and their activities shielded from effective oversight. In that way, they fit in perfectly in Somalia. They were also convenient for Washington. “We do not want an American footprint or boot on the ground,” said Johnnie Carson, the Obama administration’s lead official on Somalia.

Despite the increased role of the CIA and JSOC and the use of warlords-turned-generals and mercenary firms, the greatest tactical victory won in recent years in Somalia was delivered not by AMISOM, the CIA or JSOC, or by any US-backed indigenous forces, but by members of a militia fighting as part of the Somali government’s chaotic local military. And it happened purely by accident.