Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (23 page)

And in Saudi Arabia, a government-supported program has enlisted hundreds of Islamic scholars-turned-bloggers to fight online radicalization by challenging the jihadist interpretations of the Koran on extremist social-networking forums. Many of these efforts to counter violent extremism on the Web are just getting off the ground, but there are signs that they may be having at least a temporary impact. Evan F. Kohlmann, who tracks militant Web sites at the security consulting firm Flashpoint Global Partners in New York, said a growing number of extremist forums are now using password-protected sites to thwart hackers and dissenters.

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Striking back at the Al Qaeda message sometimes required American combat skills. One of the most successful efforts was undertaken on the ground in Iraq, in advance of the November 2004 offensive to retake Fallujah, effectively Al Qaeda’s capital in western Anbar Province. The American military was fighting two wars, really, in Iraq: one to tamp down the roiling Sunni-Shia rivalry that risked civil war, the other a terrorist conflict inspired by Al Qaeda. “Fallujah was a festering cancer that was going to have to be dealt with,” said Lieutenant General Thomas F. Metz, who spent fifteen months in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 as the commander in charge of the day-to-day fight across the country.

Metz is a mechanized infantry officer who rose to lead the Army’s III Corps based at Fort Hood, Texas, where the multiple armored divisions under his command would have been the first sent to the Korean Peninsula in the event of a North Korean invasion. Hardly the most opportune training for the new kind of counterinsurgency and terror war under way in Iraq, but Metz had learned as a young man to be resourceful and agile when dealing with adversity. Metz tells a story about his having to find the cash for his first-year uniforms after his acceptance to West Point. (At the time, that was the only cost to entering cadets, since the Army did not want to be in the hole for outfitting those who wash out in the early months under academy pressure.) He won the money in a card game with other would-be cadets.

Metz never doubted that the American, Allied, and Iraqi forces could push Al Qaeda fighters from Fallujah and that civilian casualties could at least be minimized by an information campaign in advance to tell noncombatants to leave the city, which they did by the thousands. But the terrorist media cell run by the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had routinely hammered out a successful narrative that American troops were killing and maiming civilians in Fallujah, in particular women and children. The terror media packages always had graphic images said to have been taken at the hospital in Fallujah. Metz had to silence that narrative before launching his offensive.

“There was an Al Qaeda guy who was always at the hospital showing these wounded children and females that were a result of the attack,” Metz said. “We knew it wasn’t the result of the attack because those kinds of attacks were launched with such precision—somebody has been constantly staring at these targets for a long time, and we knew the target enters that house alone or he is just with bad people. There are no family around, there are no children.” You never get a second chance to tell your story first, Metz knew; no American military spokesman could push back. “You can prove all the facts wrong but it is over with: The perception is all that matters,” he said. “If you are going to make the final assault on Fallujah, you want to ensure that they didn’t have that platform.”

So for the first tactical mission of the Fallujah operation, the Iraqi 36th Commando Battalion, supported by American Special Operations forces, stealthily seized the hospital ahead of conventional troops advancing into Fallujah. And American and Iraqi media were embedded to show the mission in almost real time. “I don’t think, at least in my experience, there are many military operations that you’re doing for the purpose of affecting the information operations,” Metz said. “But we wanted the 36th Commandos to take the hospital—Iraqis taking hospitals, on behalf of the Iraqi people who could be treated if harmed in the assault on Fallujah. They could come to their hospital and be treated at their hospital and it would not be an information operations platform for the enemy.”

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In the Bush administration’s second term, Juan Zarate and other counterterrorism officials were increasingly seeking to capitalize on the intelligence collected in battlefield missions to fuel the high-level campaign to counter the terrorist message. It didn’t always go well. In the spring of 2006, the National Security Council was running a weekly video teleconference among several federal agencies to coordinate what was called strategic messaging. Getting good propaganda to use against Zarqawi in Iraq was important; so senior administration officials who tuned into the American military briefing in Baghdad one day in early May were dismayed to see a senior Army spokesman, Major General Rick Lynch, briefing reporters about a captured videotape produced by Zarqawi and his fighters. The briefing focused on “outtakes” from a video that Zarqawi had aired earlier that were meant to show the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as a fearsome warrior. But the outtakes seized by then–Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal’s Special Operations forces and aired that day were meant to embarrass and humiliate the Iraqi militant leader. They showed Zarqawi wearing white New Balance running shoes under his black jihadi garb and fumbling while trying to fire an automatic rifle. The video also made it clear that Zarqawi and his captains did not know much about weapons safety, and they burned their hands while passing the rifle, its searing hot muzzle first. The video even showed Zarqawi ignoring a call for prayer, something that would shock any pious Muslim. But the briefing itself was the first time that the senior officials in Washington had seen or heard about this video, and they were furious, feeling that the military had blown a golden chance. They believed that the video clips could have been exploited even more effectively if they had been made public by an Iraqi official or reporter. Anything with “Made in the USA” stamped on it could be viewed as tainted. “It was just a missed opportunity,” said Michele Davis, a top communications strategist in the Bush White House.

Even if the release of the Zarqawi video was fumbled by headquarters personnel, the operators commanded by General McChrystal were able to neutralize Zarqawi permanently. Intelligence officials said that the public ridicule infuriated Zarqawi and prompted him to become increasingly irrational and reckless, issuing videotaped speeches on Islamic Web sites, vowing victory against the “crusaders” who had invaded Iraq. His outspoken rants helped the United States track and kill him a month later, on June 7, 2006, in an F-16 air strike at an isolated safe house north of Baghdad.

In Washington, Zarate and his boss, Steve Hadley, the national security adviser, struggled to wrap their arms around effective ways to counter Al Qaeda’s narrative that the United States was at war with Islam. By early 2007, they were holding a series of brainstorming sessions in the Roosevelt Room in the White House, inviting outsiders to meet senior administration officials like Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen. In one meeting, the administration team met with social-network and Internet executives from Silicon Valley. Another convened philanthropists and nonprofit executives from organizations like the Smith Richardson Foundation and the German Marshall Fund. Another session invited marketing experts from Madison Avenue and Fortune 100 companies. Yet another gathered scholars like Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution and Walid Phares of the National Defense University. The sessions stirred provocative discussions but ultimately left many pivotal questions unanswered. Why can’t the United States combat the narrative effectively? Why is the Iraqi enemy using the Internet more effectively than the American military? The government was being whipsawed between two objectives. On the one hand, the administration clearly had to be engaged in countering Al Qaeda’s potent message. But Zarate and his colleagues in the White House also recognized that the U.S. government was not the most credible messenger for this task. “We were struggling with, what does a messaging and ideological battle look like in this new technical and ideological landscape,” Zarate recalled. “The U.S. government just wasn’t prepared and organized to deal with this.”

And the efforts the government did make were tightly managed from Washington, too tightly for some commanders’ liking. General McChrystal complained that the countermessaging campaign was too centralized. “I had the authority to drop a bomb,” he said to his aides, “but I didn’t have authority to send someone an e-mail. I couldn’t send a targeted person, an enemy person, an e-mail. If you centralize too much, you tie everyone’s hands and it doesn’t work.”

By 2008, the National Security Council, working closely with the Pentagon, the military commands in Iraq and Afghanistan, intelligence analysts, and embassy officials, developed a plan to use examples of civilian killings and other atrocities by Al Qaeda or the Taliban to undermine the terrorist groups’ credibility. Strategic-communications specialists seized on terrorist attacks reported in the Western and Arabic-language media, and sent summaries to some two thousand domestic and international reporters, congressional staff members from both parties, think-tank scholars, columnists, bloggers, and government officials in the United States, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Officials picked stories with arresting headlines:

TALIBAN KILL TWO UN DOCTORS, CHILDREN AND A SCHOOLTEACHER

TWO SCHOOLGIRLS BLINDED IN ACID ATTACK

TALIBAN SEIZES BUS, EXECUTES 2 DOZEN PASSENGERS, BEHEADING ONE

TERRORIST ATTACK KILLS 14 CHILDREN ON LAST DAY OF SCHOOL

“The main goal was to create a constant drumbeat of anti–Al Qaeda information that was factual, directly quoted, and heavily sourced with credible, direct links to verify,” said Mark Pfeifle, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications and global outreach. “We put a priority on using photos and video to tell the story with the theme throughout being Al Qaeda and its supporters are killing, maiming innocent Muslims, including women and children.”

Officials in Washington also coordinated with military commanders to exploit operations for their propaganda value. In December 2007, American and Iraqi special operations forces raided a safe house that had been used by Al Qaeda in Iraq to torture their enemies. Within hours of the operation, commanders and diplomats on the ground invited Western and Arabic-language media to tour the safe house, to view the site and talk to victims, to take their photographs, and to hear their personal stories firsthand. The photos and video worked their way into the Iraqi and larger Arabic-language media over time, Pfeifle said.

These campaigns were more effective than earlier efforts. But persuading non-Americans to step forward, often in a war zone, proved challenging. “Sometimes that was difficult as the Afghan or Pakistani or Iraqi public officials and everyday people, for obvious security reasons, many times didn’t want to comment out of fear,” Pfeifle said.

In other locations, the messaging was integrated more seamlessly into existing aid programs. In 2008, the U.S. Agency for International Development spent about $9 million on counterterrorism measures in Mali, an impoverished desert country in West Africa where an offshoot of Al Qaeda was operating. Some of the money went to expand an existing job-training program for women and another one to provide young Malian men in the north with the basic skills to set up businesses like tiny flour mills or cattle enterprises. Some aid trained teachers in Muslim parochial schools in an effort to prevent them from becoming incubators of anti-American vitriol. But the agency also built twelve FM radio stations in the north of the country to link far-flung villages to an early-warning network that sends bulletins on bandits and other threats. Financing from the Pentagon would produce, in four national languages, radio soap operas promoting peace and tolerance. “Young men in the north are looking for jobs or something to do with their lives,” said Alexander D. Newton, the director of USAID’s mission in Mali. “These are the same people who could be susceptible to other messages of economic security.”

In June of that year, the Bush administration’s efforts to counter Al Qaeda’s narrative got a major boost when James K. Glassman was appointed as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. Glassman, a Harvard graduate and a journalist by training, had been the publisher of the
New Republic
magazine and an economics columnist for the
Washington Post
before serving as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Voice of America. Glassman was the fourth appointee to head an office with a troubled past. The first, Charlotte Beers, a Madison Avenue executive, produced a promotional video about Muslims in America that was rejected by some Arab nations and was criticized by many of her State Department colleagues. Her successor, Margaret D. Tutwiler, a former State Department spokeswoman, lasted barely five months. Just before Tutwiler assumed the job, a report issued in October 2003 by a bipartisan panel led by Edward P. Djerejian, an Arab specialist and former U.S. ambassador to Syria and Israel, painted a grim picture of American public diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim world.

Tutweiler was succeeded by Karen Hughes, a longtime Bush aide and confidante who led an aggressive effort to repair America’s poor image in Muslim countries. She set up “rapid-response” teams of communications specialists in the Middle East and elsewhere to counter bad news and defend administration policies around the globe. But Hughes’s emphasis on polishing America’s image and increasing the number of visiting Fulbright scholars failed to make a meaningful dent in Al Qaeda’s growing anti-American narrative.