Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (26 page)

Mature terror networks that want to move larger sums internationally do have to accept the visibility of the modern financial system, which makes them susceptible to notice, tracking, and penalty by governments, including the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Juan Zarate had been particularly successful in this kind of financial detective work. “At Treasury, we used financial information and tracks to lead to terrorist cells and networks, worked to disrupt and dismantle funding networks and aggressively freeze assets,” he said. As government analysts crack the relationships in the money-transfer arm of a militant organization, “The question is, which key person to affect?” said one American official. “There are more lawyers involved in this effort than shooters.” The goal is to identify and sanction any individual who has influence on a financial network at multiple levels or is involved with several militant money networks. That’s simple financial theory: economies of scale.

“The important person in this chain is the one with the relationships, whose skill set is required to find and hide the money, who knows the laws and customs necessary to move it around,” said one intelligence community money tracker. “He might not be so willing to so quickly enter the hereafter as a hard-core Jihadi, and so is susceptible to pressure and probably easier to find and arrest.” The death of Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, Al Qaeda’s chief financial officer, in May 2010 from an American missile strike in northwest Pakistan underscored how removing a vital link in the terrorist chain can seriously disrupt the entire network. Yazid was one of Al Qaeda’s founders and was considered by American intelligence officials to be the organization’s number-three leader, behind bin Laden and Zawahri.

Even before Yazid’s death, American intelligence officials said that Al Qaeda was in such tight financial straits that it was requiring its operatives to pay for their own room and board, training, and weapons. Yazid’s demise put a serious dent in Al Qaeda’s ability to tap its donor Rolodex and forced the group to turn to more junior financial facilitators who lacked Yazid’s contacts and his understanding of the most effective ways to move money. “More than anyone else, Yazid possessed links to the deep-pocketed donors in the Arabian Peninsula and beyond who have historically formed the backbone of al Qaeda’s financial support network,” said Stuart A. Levey, the undersecretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, soon after Yazid was killed. “Wealthy donors gave their money and, more important, placed their trust in Yazid, which makes him exceedingly difficult to replace.”

By 2010, however, many millions of dollars were still flowing largely unimpeded to extremist groups worldwide, and the Obama administration was exasperated by frequent resistance from allies in the Middle East to combating the problem. As revealed in the secret State Department cables originally obtained by WikiLeaks, terrorist financiers use a cunning array of strategies to fill their coffers, including kidnappings for ransom in North Africa, the harvesting of drug proceeds in Afghanistan, and fund-raising at religious pilgrimages to Mecca, where large amounts of currency change hands. One episode that ignited particular concern occurred in August 2009 in Yemen, when armed robbers stormed a bank truck on a busy downtown street in Aden during daylight hours and stole 100 million Yemeni
riyals
, or about $500,000. American diplomats said the sophistication of the robbery and other indicators bore the hallmarks of an Al Qaeda mission. A February 2010 cable to Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said that “sensitive reporting indicates that al Qaeda’s ability to raise funds has deteriorated substantially, and that it is now in its weakest state since 9/11.” But many other cables noted the terrorist group’s knack for generating money almost at will from wealthy individuals and sympathetic groups, including charities, throughout the Middle East while often outfoxing counterterrorism officials with a bewildering spectrum of money-shifting schemes. “Emerging trends include mobile banking, pre-paid cards, and Internet banking,” the cable observed.

In recent years, officials in the Bush and Obama administrations have sounded upbeat about their advances in disrupting terrorist financing. But internal State Department cables offer a more pessimistic view, with blunt assessments of the threats to the United States from money flowing to militants affiliated with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and other groups. A classified memo sent by Secretary of State Clinton in December 2009 singled out residents of Saudi Arabia and its neighbors, all allies of the United States, as the chief financial supporters of many extremist activities. “It has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority,” the cable said, concluding that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”

Of course, this was the same Saudi Arabia that is a staunch military and diplomatic ally of Washington. Saudi spies have funneled information about suspected terrorist plots involving militants in neighboring Yemen to the United States and its European allies. They provided the tip that helped uncover the October 2010 plot to blow up American-bound cargo planes with computer printer cartridges packed with explosives. By that time, American officials said that Saudi Arabia was taking actions that they had long hesitated to take or had resisted, including holding financiers accountable through prosecutions and making terrorist financing a higher priority. A leading group of Saudi religious scholars issued a fatwa against terrorist financing in May 2010, and the Saudis created a new financial intelligence unit.

But even with this progress, “terrorist funding emanating from Saudi Arabia remains a serious concern,” according to a cable in February 2010 written by diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh. The diplomats expressed frustration that the Saudis remained “almost completely dependent on the Central Intelligence Agency for names, addresses and other direction on terrorist financing.” They said in an earlier cable that while the Saudis appeared earnest in wanting to stanch the flow of terrorist money, they often lacked the training and expertise to do it. “Their capabilities often fall short of their aspirations,” read this cable from November 2009. The cables reveal that Saudi leaders appear equally resigned to the situation. “We are trying to do our best,” one cable quoted Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, who led the Saudis’ antiterrorism activities, as telling Holbrooke in a May 2009 meeting. But, the Saudi prince said, “If money wants to go” to terrorist causes, “it will go.”

The diplomatic cables offered similarly grim views about the United Arab Emirates (“a strategic gap” that terrorists can exploit), Qatar (“the worst in the region” on counterterrorism), and Kuwait (“a key transit point”). Secretary Clinton stressed the need to “generate the political will necessary” to block money to terrorist networks—groups that she said were “threatening stability in Pakistan and Afghanistan and targeting coalition soldiers.”

While President George W. Bush often vowed to cut off financing for militants and pledged to make financiers as culpable as the terrorists who carried out plots, President Obama has struck a more muted public position on the issue as he has tried to adopt a more conciliatory tone with Arab nations. The Obama administration has used many of the same covert diplomatic, intelligence, and law enforcement tools as its predecessor and set up a special task force in the summer of 2009 to deal with the growing problem. While federal officials can point to some successes—prosecutions, seizures of money, and tightened money-laundering regulations in foreign countries—the results have often been frustrating, the cables show. Even as the United States urged its Persian Gulf allies to crack down on suspected supporters of terrorism, these countries’ leaders have pushed back. In private meetings, they accused American officials of heavy-handedness and of presenting thin evidence of wrongdoing by Arab charities or individuals, according to numerous cables. Kuwaiti officials, for example, resisted what they called “draconian” measures sought by the United States against a prominent charity and dismissed allegations against it as “unconvincing.”

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The same goal of neutralizing financiers held true for the gun runners, explosives procurers, and weapons handlers. “The guys who are doing the weapons transfers? This became a blinding flash of the obvious to us,” said one commander with multiple tours tracking terror networks in the Middle East. “These guys aren’t part of a terrorist network; they are just running guns. They are just trying to make money. So you could take apart another strand of that network—the gun runners and the guys who would provide the ammunition and stuff like that. It’s easy to put the squeeze on them. They were just in it for making cash.”

Another linchpin of a terror network is the religious leader who blesses an attack. Heavenly reward will not await a suicide bomber unless his death and those of his victims is deemed halal, in keeping with Islam’s sacred Sharia law. Each militant network has a Sharia emir, usually at the level of a sheik or mullah. According to one military officer with command experience in Iraq, the cleric is the essential piece of the puzzle: “Take him out, and suicide bombings from that network are frozen until he is replaced. Suicide bombers won’t go ahead with a mission without the blessing.”

Targeting experts at Central Command also made a specialty of toying with the egos of terror commanders, upgrading and downgrading the hefty federal bounties offered for Al Qaeda, Taliban, and other insurgent captains. “They are very proud,” said one action officer. “Hubris is a sin. We can play to their psychology.” To be sure, senior leaders like bin Laden or Zawahri were viewed as too sophisticated to fall for the ploy. “But with a midlevel commander, it has great tactical effect,” the officer said. Here’s how it works: Military and intelligence analysts draw up a list of high-value targets. There is a public announcement that the bounty on a particular terrorist leader’s head has been slashed. Word is whispered in the local markets that the commander isn’t worth a higher reward because he has been injured or has been deemed incompetent. “This smokes him out,” said the Central Command officer. “If we think they are wounded, we can pull the money, as if to say he’s dead. He’ll try and do something that brings him up on the net. He wants to say I’m alive. He wants to prove he is still important and worthy of the higher bounty.” Even senior members of Al Qaeda’s global network have been suckered by the ruse and have been picked up after they made themselves more visible not long after the bounty on their heads was reduced. General McChrystal was fond of telling his subordinates in Special Operations units, “When a person moves, that’s when we can get them. If they sit in a hole and are not taking any chances, we can’t get them.”

There is another tactic to reduce enemy effectiveness. “You have to take the people with specialized expertise off the battlefield,” Michael Leiter said. “You can have strategic effect. What appear to be tactical wins can have strategic effect.” He cited the death of Abu Khabab al-Masri, one of the lead planners in Pakistan for Al Qaeda’s program to develop or obtain chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons (CBRN). “That had, we believe, a strategic effect on Al Qaeda’s ability to come up with complicated CBRN,” Leiter said. “So, there are times where what seems like just a guy can really change the whole outlook.”

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The military will go to the ends of the earth to get those militants and their networks. They go to the tiny desert nation of Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. It may not be the end of the world, but you can see it from there. Which is why the American military scraped the hard rock and sandy soil; rebuilt a former French Foreign Legion base, Camp Lemonier; and quietly installed a couple of thousand troops on a mission that is a model for how the Pentagon tries to get ahead of the terrorists before they have a chance to plant their colors and set up networks in inhospitable, barely governed places.

The emphasis is on a near-invisible military presence that is not a political burden on host governments. In this place where American forces never were based before, they now operate from a Spartan forward position within easy reach of the wild, ungoverned swaths across the Horn of Africa that prove attractive to terrorists seeking a safe haven. To an unusual degree, the mission has lashed together the government’s entire national security structure. Officers there describe a high level of cooperation among conventional military forces, the more secretive Special Operations teams, and the American intelligence community. Representatives from other government agencies, including customs and agriculture, routinely pass through.

Despite fractures between the United States and some of its closest allies over the war in Iraq, the Djibouti mission is cited as an example of smooth coalition cooperation. The American-led ground force closely coordinates with the international naval armada plying waters just offshore to deter and, if required, to interdict terrorists who may try to sneak past. That naval mission swaps command among allies, giving them a stake and a share of the effort. With small forces keeping the pressure on terrorists who may try to operate across a huge corner of the world, the mission at Camp Lemonier has attracted the attention, and the praise, of the nation’s most senior military commanders.

High-level military and intelligence officers, pressed by the accountants back in Washington to explain the cost of a base in the middle of nowhere that rarely fires a shot, argue that it represents part of the “new deterrence,” one carried out by troops and civilian analysts and a healthy dose of public works engineers. If America didn’t have such a focused effort in that particular piece of geography, it could lead to new terrorist safe havens and certainly would invite the movement of terrorists and perhaps even new training camps, the officers maintain. The mission has settled into a quiet rhythm since Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa was established in late 2002 at a base so primitive that the most serious security threat comes from attacks by hyenas and jackals that do not heed the barbed wire and guard towers that rise from the hardscrabble desert floor around the base.