Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (21 page)

The U.S. government, of course, fights back. One technique is called false band replacement, whereby the intelligence agencies infiltrate militants’ networks and post their own material to counter extremist efforts onto those same jihadist Web sites. The trick is to copy the trademarks—“Web watermarks”—of Al Qaeda media sites. “All Al Qaeda products appear to go through a chain of preparation and approval,” said one operations officer. “It’s a complex system of validation. This makes messages posted on these sites official. They want to protect their message and brand—in particular from those who might go online in Al Qaeda’s name and write or propose things that are counter-Koranic or non-Halal [not acceptable].” The ability of the intelligence community to persuasively forge Al Qaeda Web postings “does give an opportunity for confusion,” the official said, “if we can post an almost-authentic message. We have learned to mimic their ‘watermarks.’”

This Web spoofing can be used in support of more traditional combat missions. There is at least one case confirmed by American officials in which a jihadist Web site was hacked by American cyberwarriors to lure a high-value Al Qaeda leader to a surreptitious meeting with extremist counterparts only to find a U.S. military team in waiting. In another mission that now is a case study in the classified classrooms for cyberwarriors, the military and its partners in the intelligence community were able to undermine a senior-level Al Qaeda financier by secretly using computer code to take over the cell phones of members of the money network to sow confusion, distrust, and hatred. “We had the ability to hack into their phones and we would text message guys,” said one senior officer familiar with the successful mission. “It was primarily telling them, ‘Hey, brother, another guy is cheating you out of money.’ The bad guys would get this text message and be like, ‘Oh shit!’ It was mainly to sow the distrust and that was at the higher levels of the network. We texted a few of his guys and basically some of his guys gave him up. It was really freaking cool.”

Stories like this are useful for another reason. Many senior military and intelligence officers have pointed out that such broad descriptions of American capabilities are an important part of the “new deterrence.” Terror leaders who know enough to fear America’s technological advantages may come to distrust the electronic messages they receive, which in turn degrades their confidence and their ability to operate—all to America’s benefit. To this day, the associates of the Al Qaeda money boss do not know that one of their key financial networks collapsed under an American cyberattack.

The military and the intelligence community also hire fluent speakers and writers of Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Pashto, and other languages of the Muslim world to spend time in the jihadist online chat rooms. “They go into open forums where they can over time build up credibility and sow confusion,” said one official who works on the program, which the military calls Digital Engagement Teams.

And then there are the efforts to take down the sites themselves. Some are pushed offline by what officials call “rods from the gods,” a highly classified method of sending poisonous code into Web sites to knock them out. In Iraq, where the laws of war were preeminent over commercial regulations and freedom of speech, the military has been effective in attacking terror media centers with more traditional tools of combat. Four media emirs for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia have been killed in Baghdad, and four others met a similar fate in Mosul. From a peak in 2006, when analysts counted more than one hundred fresh jihadist postings per day on sites operated by Iraqi terror cells, American military operations had forced those numbers down to barely a dozen per day by 2010. “With the decrease in online postings, the number of foreign fighters decreased as did donations,” said one military officer. “If global jihadists cannot see the effectiveness of Al Qaeda in Iraq, they don’t want to give their lives or money.” Iraqi detainees have also reported that a drop in postings led to demoralization within their ranks. By comparison, in Pakistan, where the American military did not have the freedom of action it enjoyed in Iraq, four of the six Al Qaeda media emirs running terror Web sites in 2001 were still on the job ten years later.

But if the offending Web site is hosted on a server in the United States or an allied or neutral nation, then the process is more a matter of solicitation than spycraft. If it’s an American server, an office call is made to the Internet service provider by representatives from the Department of Justice, the Department of Commerce, or the Department of the Treasury. If overseas, then an American diplomat stops in. Fearing punitive reprisals for hosting a Web site fomenting lawless violence, most, like the Internet service provider cited earlier, quickly shut down the targeted terror home page. But these firms also want to know under what authority the U.S. government is asking them to break a contract, and they have requested legal protections.

Counterterrorism on the Web is a digital Darwinian process evolving at network speed. In the late 1970s, Ayatollah Khomeini successfully fomented revolution in Iran by using cassette tapes. But tape and video production is labor intensive and requires physical facilities that can be found and targeted. Today, less than 5 percent of violent extremist propaganda travels the globe via “old” media. It’s Terror 2.0 that worries the U.S. government as Al Qaeda transforms itself from a top-heavy, hands-on terror organization capable of launching devastating 9/11-style attacks to one that has contracted out for smaller attacks and serves mostly as inspiration to like-minded groups around the world. The danger of online radicalization is visible in recent headlines: Five college students from suburban Washington, D.C., travel to Pakistan to train to wage jihad. Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army major, kills thirteen soldiers at Fort Hood. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian underwear bomber, almost brings down an airliner on Christmas 2009. And Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani American, parks an SUV filled with fireworks and propane gas primed to explode in Times Square. “They were substantially radicalized on the Internet,” said Art Cummings of the FBI. The traditional model that required a potential terrorist to attend a religious school or indoctrination center in an isolated region of the Middle East is outmoded. “This was all done thousands of miles away,” Cummings adds. But officials note one irony: The increase of online radicalization and training has in some significant ways dumbed down the sophistication of the attacks. Hands-on lessons at an isolated training camp in the tribal areas of Pakistan are far more effective in teaching recruits military and technological skills than instruction via the Web. But the Internet is available to any aspiring militant.

Law enforcement and intelligence officials describe a new, worrisome, and very dangerous trend. Aware that their Web sites are monitored, their cell phones tapped, and their cybercafés an easy target for surveillance, terror operatives are now increasingly communicating over the Internet via real-time video games. As X-Box and Wii and other online gaming systems offer opportunities for global pickup competition to gamers, extremists also have learned to log on at designated times to carry out their business during game programming and thereby use the chatter of countless other online users to mask themselves. Terrorist conference calls carried out over Internet gaming systems are nearly impossible to monitor. “There are tens of millions of people playing at one time,” said one American counterterrorism official. “So hard to track.” The NSA operates sophisticated electronic programs that listen for and locate suspect action via terror-related key words, but the language of online video war games exactly parallels, and covers, the language of violent, religious extremists. “They are talking about terrorist operations, but in play,” the official said, making code-word tracking and tagging nearly impossible. Another trick terrorists are suspected of using is called steganography, whereby documents, operational orders, and planning guidance are miniaturized and hidden as an electronic dot embedded in an image on an otherwise innocuous Web site. It is the Internet version of a dead drop and nearly impossible to find in the global forest of Web pages.

It is a game of hide-and-seek with deadly consequences. Advocates for keeping quiet watch over the Web sites say the Internet is a honey pot attracting jihadists, with large amounts of information to be gathered by monitoring those who swarm. “You know, I could put up filters for every single one of those people, start banging them against current data, start using language filters to see which of them talk about violence and Jihad,” said one senior counterterrorism officer. He ticked off the government’s array of sensitive programs to monitor the adversaries’ use of the Internet. “I could start using software network tools to see which of them are connected with each other based on phone records,” he said. “I could do a million things with that stuff.”

6

COUNTERING AL QAEDA’S MESSAGE

By the spring of 2009, the United States and its allies had made significant progress in disrupting Al Qaeda’s ability to plan and carry out major operations from its safe havens in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Increasingly deadly CIA drone strikes and improved intelligence sharing between American and Pakistani spy agencies were squeezing Al Qaeda leaders in their mountain hideouts. But Al Qaeda and the other extremist groups still had the United States on the defensive in the ideological battlefield, whipping up anti-American sentiment and attracting a steady stream of new recruits and financial backing with a simple but venomously potent message to their followers: America is at war with Islam.

In June of that year, the new American president sought to counter that message and deter the spread of terrorist ideology with an even stronger narrative of his own: An African American named Barack Hussein Obama was standing on the podium in a Muslim capital as the leader of the United States. Obama came to Cairo on June 4, 2009, pledging “a new beginning.” While America would continue to fight terrorism, he said, terrorism would no longer define America’s approach to the Muslim world.

“We will, however, relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security—because we reject the same thing that people of all faiths reject: the killing of innocent men, women, and children,” Obama said, speaking in forceful tones. “And it is my first duty as president to protect the American people.” A few minutes later, Obama pivoted and took aim at Al Qaeda, signaling a shift in how the United States would confront it more directly and how America would frame a new narrative to chip away at Al Qaeda’s legitimacy in the eyes of Muslims while appealing to their broader interests.

“They have killed in many countries,” Obama said. “They have killed people of different faiths—but more than any other, they have killed Muslims. Their actions are irreconcilable with the rights of human beings, the progress of nations, and with Islam. The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind. And the Holy Koran also says whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind. The enduring faith of over a billion people is so much bigger than the narrow hatred of a few. Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism—it is an important part of promoting peace.”

Obama’s words were translated almost instantly into fourteen languages and posted on Web sites and blogs around the world. They were transmitted by text message to mobile phones in more than 170 countries. Staff members at more than 100 American embassies and consulates fanned out afterward to hold post-speech debates, conduct hundreds of media interviews, and pay visits to universities, mosques, and madrassas, with the goal to put a local American face on the president’s promise of “a new beginning.”

Obama sought to capitalize on his biography and the power of his own words to shift perceptions of the United States in the Muslim world and to deter a spreading terrorist ideology. The Bush administration, particularly in its waning months and with prodding from officials like Juan Zarate of the National Security Council, had embraced a broader counterterrorism strategy that included challenging Al Qaeda’s messages and highlighting Al Qaeda’s missteps whenever possible. But with the long-running war in Iraq, an expanding conflict in Afghanistan, and the damning images of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo still fresh in people’s minds, Bush’s credibility with Muslims was near zero.

After taking office, Obama quickly distanced himself from some of the harshest counterterrorism policies of the Bush administration. He barred “enhanced” interrogation techniques and announced that the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, would finally close (a promise he has since had to put on hold). Even the rhetoric changed in the new administration with the phrase “countering (or combating) violent extremism” replacing the “the war on terror” in official documents and pronouncements.

Rather than lecture the Muslim world, as members of the Bush administration often did, Obama sought to amplify credible Muslim voices to teach and condemn the evils of violent extremism. The challenge facing the United States, however, remains how to support these efforts without tainting them with a public embrace. A linchpin of the countermessaging strategy was to focus on Al Qaeda and its affiliates rather than on a wide range of terrorist organizations and hammer away at the group’s hypocrisy and failures while at the same time offering a positive alternative. This is a war of ideas where the goal is not so much to promote America but to destroy Al Qaeda’s credibility. Some of this strategy is being carried out in secret war rooms created by the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence agencies. Small cells of intelligence analysts prowl the Internet, hunting for examples of Al Qaeda excesses and mistakes: the bombing of a school in Jordan, the killing of women and children by a suicide bomber in Algeria, the slaughter of dozens of civilians by a car bomb in an open-air market outside Baghdad. These upsetting events can be exploited in countermessaging that is transmitted not just by American officials but also by radio broadcasts and speeches by more credible Muslim voices, including respected clerics, throughout the Islamic world.