Dirty Wars Read online

  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 comm
and? 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.