Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

4. The Boss: Ali Abdullah Saleh

YEMEN, 1970–2001; WASHINGTON, DC, 2001—When the planes slammed into the World Trade Center, Ali Abdullah Saleh knew he needed to act fast. The Yemeni president was famous in intelligence circles as a wily survivor who had adeptly navigated his way through the Cold War, deep tribal divisions in his country and terrorism threats, largely unscathed. When 9/11 happened, Saleh was already in trouble with the United States following the bombing of the USS Cole off the port of Aden in southern Yemen, and he was determined that 9/11 would not mark the beginning of the end of his decades-long grip on power. As the Bush administration began to map out its plans for a borderless war in response to 9/11, Saleh hatched a plan of his own with one central goal: to hold on to power.

Saleh became Yemen’s leader in 1990, following the unification of the north, which he had ruled since the 1970s, and the Marxist government based in Aden, in the south. In Yemen, he was known as “The Boss.” Colonel Lang, who served for years as the US defense and army attaché to Yemen, first met Saleh in 1979. Fluent in Arabic, Lang was often brought into sensitive meetings as a translator for other US officials. Lang and his British MI-6 counterpart would often go hunting with Saleh. “We would drive around with a bunch of vehicles, and shoot gazelle, hyenas,” Lang recalled, adding that Saleh was a “reasonably good shot.” Of Saleh, Lang said, “He’s really a very charming devil,” describing Saleh’s multidecade rule as “quite a run, in a country where it’s ‘dog-eat-dog.’ It’s like being the captain on a Klingon battle cruiser, you know? They’re just waiting.” Saleh, Lang said, proved a master of playing tribes against each other, co-opting them at crucial moments and outsourcing his problems. “There’s a precarious balance all the time between the authority of the government and the authority of these massive tribal groups. The government normally only controls the land its forces sit on, or where it’s providing some service that the tribal leaders and population wants, like medical service, or education. So you end up with a lot of defended towns, with a lot of checkpoints around them, and little punitive expeditions going on, all the time, by the government around the country, to punish people with whom they are quarreling over some issue.”

During the mujahedeen war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, thousands of Yemenis joined the jihad—some of them coordinated and funded directly by Saleh’s government. “They were all sent to Afghanistan to face the former Soviet invasion and occupation,” Saleh asserted in an interview with the New York Times in 2008. “And the USA forced friendly countries at that time, including Yemen, the Gulf states, Sudan, and Syria, to support the mujahedeen—they called them freedom fighters—to go fight in Afghanistan. The USA used to strongly support the Islamist movement to fight the Soviets. Then, following collapse of Soviets in Afghanistan, the USA suddenly adopted a completely different and extreme attitude towards these Islamic movements and started to put pressure on the countries to have confrontation with these Islamic movements that were in the Arab and Islamic territories.”

When the jihadists returned to their home country, Saleh gave them safe haven. “Because we have political pluralism in Yemen, we decided not to have a confrontation with these movements,” said Saleh. Islamic Jihad, the movement of Ayman al Zawahiri, the Egyptian physician who rose to become bin Laden’s number-two man, based one of its largest cells in Yemen in the 1990s. Saleh clearly did not see al Qaeda as a major threat. If anything, he saw the jihadists as convenient sometime allies who could be used for his own domestic agenda. In return for allowing them to move freely and train in Yemen, Saleh could use jihadists who fought in Afghanistan in his battle against southern secessionists and, later, against Shiite Houthi rebels in the north. “They were the thugs that Saleh used to control any problematic elements. We have so many instances where Saleh was using these guys from al Qaeda to eliminate opponents of the regime,” Ali Soufan, the former senior FBI agent who worked extensively in Yemen, told me. Because of their value to Saleh’s domestic agenda, “they were able to operate freely. They were able to obtain and travel on Yemeni documents. Saleh was their safest base. He tried to make himself a player by playing this card.”

The consequence of this relationship was that as al Qaeda expanded during the 1990s, Yemen provided fertile ground for training camps and recruitment of jihadists. During the Clinton administration, this arrangement barely registered a blip on the US counterterrorism radar outside of a small group of officials, mostly from the FBI and CIA, who were tracking the rise of al Qaeda.

That would change on October 12, 2000, following a massive David versus Goliath attack on a billion-dollar US warship, the USS Cole, which had docked in the port of Aden to refuel. Shortly after 11:00 a.m., a small motorboat packed with five hundred pounds of explosives sped up to the ship and blasted a massive forty-by-forty-foot hole in the Cole’s side. The attack killed seventeen US sailors and wounded more than thirty others. “In Aden, they charged and destroyed a destroyer that fearsome people fear, one that evokes horror when it docks and when it sails,” bin Laden later said in an al Qaeda recruitment video, reciting a poem one of his aides had written. The successful attack, according to al Qaeda experts, inspired droves of new recruits—particularly from Yemen—to sign up with al Qaeda and similar groups.

The FBI agents who traveled to Yemen in the aftermath of the attack were heavily monitored by Yemeni authorities and were greeted at the airport by Yemeni special forces pointing weapons at them. “Yemen is a country of 18 million citizens and 50 million machine guns,” reported John O’Neill, the lead FBI investigator of the Cole bombing. He later said, “This might be the most hostile environment the FBI has ever operated in.” In the summer of 2001, the FBI had to pull out completely after a series of threats against its agents and an alleged plot to blow up the US Embassy. “We regularly faced death threats, smokescreens and bureaucratic obstructions,” recalled Soufan, who was one of the FBI’s lead investigators. Saleh’s government generally obstructed the US investigation into the bombing, but he was hardly the only source of frustration for the investigators. “No one in the Clinton White House seemed to care about the case,” recalled Soufan. “We had hoped that the George W. Bush administration would be better, but except for Robert Mueller, the director of the F.B.I., its top officials soon sidelined the case; they considered it, according to Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, ‘stale.’”

Soufan and a handful of US counterterrorism officials watched as the Cole bombing strengthened bin Laden’s position. “The Strike on the Cole had been a great victory,” observed Lawrence Wright in his definitive book on al Qaeda, The Looming Tower. “Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan filled with new recruits, and contributors from the Gulf states arrived carrying Samsonite suitcases filled with petrodollars, as in the glory days of the Afghan jihad.” A week before 9/11, Saleh had boasted on Al Jazeera that his government had not allowed the FBI to interrogate or question any senior Yemeni officials about the attack. “We denied them access to Yemen with forces, planes and ships,” declared Saleh. “We put them under direct monitoring by our security forces. They respected our position and surrendered to what we did.”

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, posed a new challenge to the relationship between Saleh’s regime and the United States. Although he had been in power since the late 1970s, in the aftermath of 9/11, Saleh’s world could have easily crumbled in an instant. “Those who make war against the United States have chosen their own destruction,” President Bush declared four days after 9/11. “Victory against terrorism will not take place in a single battle, but in a series of decisive actions against terrorist organizations and those who harbor and support them.” The “harbor” part was taken as an ominous warning by Saleh—and rightly so.

The presidential findings and other directives issued by Bush after 9/11 had authorized the CIA and US Special Operations Forces to fight al Qaeda across the globe wherever its operatives were based. As US forces pushed into Afghanistan, Special Operations Forces and the CIA continued to track the movements of al Qaeda operatives with the aim of targeting them for kill or capture wherever they landed. After the United States swiftly overthrew the Taliban government in Kabul, many of the foreign fighters affiliated with bin Laden found themselves on the run and seeking refuge. One of the key safe havens they found was in the wilds of Yemen.

The Bush administration put Yemen on a list of potential early targets in the war on terror and could have swiftly dismantled Saleh’s government, despite Saleh’s cocky pre-9/11 declaration that “Yemen is a graveyard for the invaders.” Saleh was determined not to go the way of the Taliban, and he wasted little time in making moves to ensure he wouldn’t.

The first was to board a plane to the United States.

In November 2001, President Saleh arrived in Washington, DC, where he held talks with President Bush and Vice President Cheney, as well as FBI director Robert Mueller and CIA director George Tenet. He told anyone who would listen that Yemen was on the side of the United States. The media were brought into the White House for a photo session of the two leaders smiling and shaking hands. In his meetings with Bush, Saleh emphasized Yemen’s “condemnation of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. and Yemen’s denunciation of all forms of terrorism” and referred to his country as “a principal partner in the coalition against terrorism.”

While the Saleh show played out in public, with the Bush administration portraying Saleh as an ally in the newly branded “Global War on Terror,” behind closed doors senior US officials were brokering agreements with Saleh to expand the US footprint in Yemen. During his meetings in Washington, which included visits at his personal suite at the Ritz Carlton Hotel on Twenty-second Street by Mueller and Tenet, Saleh was presented with an aid package worth up to $400 million, in addition to funding from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Crucially for the United States, it would also include expanding the training of Yemen’s special forces. It was this training that would permit US Special Forces to deploy inside Yemen while allowing Saleh to save face domestically. As part of Saleh’s deal with the Bush administration, the United States set up a “counterterrorism camp” in Yemen run by the CIA, US Marines and American Special Forces that would be backed up by the US outpost in the nearby African nation of Djibouti, which also housed Predator drones. Tenet also arranged for the United States to provide Yemen with helicopters and eavesdropping equipment. Crucially, Saleh also gave Tenet permission for the CIA to fly drones over his territory.

“Saleh knew how to survive,” said Dr. Emile Nakhleh, a former senior CIA intelligence officer. During his decades in power, had Saleh “learned how to speak the language of the Cold War, to endear himself to us and other Western countries by speaking the anti-communist language.” After 9/11, Saleh “learned very quickly” that he had to speak the antiterrorism language, Nakhleh added.

“So he came here seeking support, seeking financing. But, Saleh, from day one, years back, never thought that terrorism posed a threat to him. He thought that Yemen was basically a platform for al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations and that the real target was al Saud, the House of Saud. So he found ways to deal with them,” Nakhleh told me. “And yet, he would come here or speak to us in a language we would like and would understand, but then he would go home and do all kinds of alliances with all kinds of shady characters to help him survive. I don’t think he really honestly believed that al Qaeda posed a serious threat to his regime.”

Colonel Lang said Bush “was so taken with President Saleh as a personable, friendly, chummy kind of guy, that Bush was in fact quite willing to listen to whatever Saleh said about, ‘We like you Americans, we want to help you, we want to cooperate with you,’ that kind of business, and was quite willing to send them foreign aid, including military aid.” During his meeting with President Bush in November 2001, Saleh “expressed his concern and hope that the military action in Afghanistan does not exceed its borders and spread to other parts of the Middle East, igniting further instability in the region,” according to a statement issued by the Yemeni Embassy in Washington at the end of the visit. But to keep Yemen off Washington’s target list, Saleh would have to take action. Or at least give the appearance of doing so.

Saleh’s entourage was given a list of several al Qaeda suspects that the Yemeni regime could target as a show of good faith. The next month, Saleh ordered his forces to raid a village in Marib Province, where Abu Ali al Harithi, a lead suspect in the Cole bombing, and other militants were believed to be residing. The operation by Yemeni special forces was a categorical failure. Local tribesmen took several of the soldiers hostage and the targets of the raid allegedly escaped unharmed. The soldiers were later released through tribal mediators, but the action angered the tribes and served as a warning to Saleh to stay out of Marib. It was the beginning of what would be a complex and dangerous chess match for Saleh as he made his first moves to satisfy Washington’s desire for targeted killing in Yemen while maintaining his own hold on power.

Soon after Saleh’s Washington meetings, the United States established a task force for the Horn of Africa and Gulf of Aden. In late 2002, some nine hundred military and intelligence personnel would be deployed to a former French military outpost, Camp Lemonnier, in Djibouti, under the name Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa (CJTF–HOA). Located just an hour from Yemen by boat, the secretive base would soon serve as a command center for covert US action in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula and would serve as the launch pad for the CIA and JSOC to strike at will outside the declared battlefield of Afghanistan.

As construction began on Lemonnier, the United States beefed up the presence of military “trainers” inside Yemen. Although officially in Yemen to modernize Yemen’s counterterrorism forces, the Americans quickly set out to establish operational capacity to track al Qaeda suspects to find and fix their location so that US forces could finish them off. “Over the years, there’d been a number of kinds of people that were dubious characters from the American point of view that had taken shelter in Yemen. And Saleh plays his own game, very much, so he variously offers people shelter and a place to refuge,” recalled Colonel Lang. “So it was known that there were people in the country who were inimical to the United States, and they started tracking where these people were.” A year after Saleh’s meeting with Bush at the White House, the US “trainers” would set up their first “wet” operation.