Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (32 page)

This is the new face of terror. While Al Qaeda persists in its efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction, its affiliates are concentrating on “niche terrorism”—a fairly low bar for tactical sophistication but a disproportionately high level of psychological and economic impact. And the face of small-bore terrorism is Anwar al-Awlaki, an American born in New Mexico, who has Yemeni and American citizenship and is one of the leaders of AQAP. He speaks idiomatic American in his outreach to extremists and potential future followers in the West. His online propaganda employs four-color visuals and impeccable English. “AQAP now provides its online community with a compelling, comic book experience, one that equips individuals with the tools they need while demystifying the path they must take to become their own Al Qaeda superhero,” said Jarret Brachman, the author of
Global Jihadism
and a terrorism consultant to several government agencies.

Given Awlaki’s shrewd analysis of the West, he is convinced that the creative use of toxins like ricin will inflict massive psychological and economic damage. “AQAP seems satisfied with disruptive attacks, even if less destructive, and they are very creative,” said one senior counterterrorism official. “Awlaki is a very savvy analyst of the West, and he knows that a poison-type attack, even if not mass-casualty, would have a mass effect. He is asking, ‘How can I get into their heads? How can I fuck with them?’”

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AQAP’s strategy forced the Obama administration to rethink its own. On issues of counterterrorism, the handoff from Bush to Obama had been one of change as well as of continuity. Predator strikes? Endorsed and expanded. Defenses on the home front and aboard airliners? Yes. Harsh language, harsh detention techniques? Cancelled. Intelligence briefings to the president? Where Bush had been eager for detailed updates about every threat, Obama understood that the commander in chief should watch trends and should be told of significant operations but should not get distracted by the details, no matter how fascinating—a sensible approach for senior decision makers.

“I think part of the reason for some of the far-reaching measures that were taken after 9/11 was the feeling of extraordinary inadequacy of our information,” said Defense Secretary Gates. “After 9/11, all the filters came off information. So anybody anywhere in the world who made some comment about bombing the United States or getting a weapon of mass destruction—all those reports came straight into the leadership of the country and I think it scared the hell out of them. I mean, they really didn’t know whether there might not be a nuclear weapon of mass destruction set off in New York or in Washington within weeks of 9/11. And because all the filters were off, any comment anywhere in the world that we picked up, shot right to the top. I think there was just overload.” The resulting policy decisions were understandable in a nation traumatized by the death, casualties, and loss of 9/11, Gates said. “A lot of the measures, including the renditions, Guantánamo, the enhanced interrogation techniques—all were out of a sense of desperation to get information because we had so little,” he added.

But history has cast its judgment, and so has Gates. He was the first member of the Bush cabinet to secretly lobby to shut down the prison at Guantánamo Bay. Its value as a source of actionable intelligence on future attacks had diminished over time, because all information has an expiration date stamped to the minute of capture, and that was certainly true of those detainees who had spent years behind bars at Camp X-Ray. But the downside, Gates pointed out, was that Guantánamo gave a powerful boost to Al Qaeda’s global effort to recruit potential jihadists and put American troops at increased risk everywhere they deployed in the Muslim world.

Another challenge to the American counterterrorism effort in the later years of the Bush administration was that the growing number of intelligence and law enforcement agencies in Washington remained in conflict with one another and with the military. Policy makers were unable to impose a unity of effort on all the arms of government power. “In the early days, we were like a drunken octopus trying to solve a Rubik’s cube,” said a seasoned commander of one of the Pentagon’s most secret counterterrorism units. But a measure of control and coordination had been imposed by the time Obama was sworn in. In fact, and for a time, the government was feeling pretty confident.

Then came the Christmas Day attack in December 2009, in which the poorly trained bomber, who had left plenty of clues in his wake, slipped through the system and almost blew up a passenger plane. In the final weeks of the year, American intelligence officials, using spy satellites and communication intercepts, were intently focused on pinpointing the location of Al Qaeda fighters so the Yemeni military could strike them. By doing so, they hoped to prevent attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Yemen, or other targets in the region with American ties. But they had unwittingly left themselves vulnerable to an attack on the homeland itself, for they had assumed that the militants were not sophisticated or ambitious enough to get operatives into the United States. Intelligence analysts had enough information in those days before Christmas to stop the suicide bomber from getting on his flight, yet they did not act. “We didn’t know they had progressed to the point of actually launching individuals here,” John Brennan said at a White House briefing two weeks after the failed attack. “Had that plane gone down, that would have been their version of 9/11,” said a senior American intelligence officer who regularly attends counterterrorism strategy sessions with the president in the White House Situation Room. “Obviously not in scope—but they had to deal with the shock of a potential event. They had to turn at that point, and recognized that there was a different face on the war on terror.”

Obama, celebrating the holiday with his family in Hawaii, was furious at the lapses. Perhaps not surprising, given his cerebral nature, the president did not assign blame to individuals but demanded that the system not fail again. He also sought advice from his senior aides as to what he, as commander in chief, needed to do to make the bureaucracy more effective, more responsive, and more accountable. “He has been much more interested in figuring out analytically what happened, what potentially went amiss, fix whatever went wrong, to close whatever gap or address the lack of capability,” said one senior White House adviser. “So he’ll often ask, ‘What do you need that you don’t have? Is it a resource issue, is it an authority issue, are you doing all you can or is there something you could be doing if you had a policy decision that allowed you to do more?’”

The president had begun a series of weekly sessions on countering violent extremism, and these took on a new focus, a fresh discipline, and a palpable urgency as 2010 began. There had never been a lack of attention to the threat, the president’s advisers maintained. But the sessions often had the air of a tutorial, introducing a new concept, a new capability, or a new legal tool. That changed after the Christmas bombing attempt. One participant recalled a lengthy discussion in the supercharged atmosphere of early 2010 on whether the role of bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s central leadership hiding in Pakistan actually had diminished and was less capable of executing a catastrophic attack or whether they were just as dangerous in their role as the most recognizable terrorist brand name and as an inspiration to other potential jihadists. “Is Al Qaeda just Kleenex?” the president asked, provocatively. And, if Al Qaeda is only a trademark, how should American counterterrorism efforts adapt to the new “business model”?

The newly energized sessions, which earned a nickname among White House staff as Terror Tuesdays, would last up to an hour and were held in the Oval Office or, if too many principals or deputies attended, the meeting was moved to the Situation Room. Participants would begin each week with an overview of counterterrorism intelligence that focused on the homeland and then moved on to risks to American interests around the globe. “The president is very clear in setting expectations and making sure when something is a high priority and that he wants a report back on what actions have been taken,” said one senior official with a seat at the table.

Other Tuesday sessions were more succinct: “He gives homework assignments,” according to one of those participating. “He grades our work at the next session. You know, ‘What did we do about this, did we follow up on that?’ So, in that sense, it is a very good mechanism in ensuring high-level visibility on these threats, but not just for the president but also for the principals. Many times their bureaucracies are working these issues hard day in and day out, but having the principals briefed up and joining the president on these issues ensures that the departments and agencies bring their best to the table.”

The same sense of discipline and focus was brought to the intelligence side of the president’s briefings as well. “There is a conscious effort now to give him a structured brief on the nature of the threat, near, medium, long-term for radicalization,” said a senior intelligence official. While Bush showed an appetite for tactical and operational details—the number of spies working against Al Qaeda in Pakistan or which missions had been carried out in the previous twenty-four hours—Obama wanted to understand the strategic nature of the threat and demanded to know when his personal orders were required to break through resistance across the intelligence and security community to make things work at the tactical and operational level.

One veteran counterterrorism official said that Obama often prods officials to break down the barriers to sharing information between departments, called “stovepipes” in Washington vernacular: “That is a very familiar point that he makes as he is faced with the problems we are facing on a daily basis, that we are not sitting in stove-pipes, that we are not underresourced in a time of fiscal austerity.”

A case in point: Before heading off for the holidays in the hours before the Christmas Day attack, Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, was running down a checklist with the National Counterterrorism Center’s Michael Leiter. One item was how the national security bureaucracy could help manage the looming budget crisis by trimming $35 million from the counterterrorism center’s budget. After Christmas, their first conversation was all about how to spend an extra $100 million that the White House budget office suddenly found to finance the center’s operations.

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Prior to the Christmas Day attack, the Obama administration had been too many steps behind Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In tracking the ricin plot, it felt it was a step ahead, and officials would continue to monitor it throughout 2010. And in dealing with the threat posed by homegrown extremists who have allegiances to Muslim lands overseas, administration terror fighters pledged to be ahead even of leading indicators. Clearly, the rise of AQAP underscored the increasing importance of Al Qaeda’s affiliates around the world and the impact they and Al Qaeda itself were having on Americans heeding the siren call of extremism. But what was actually happening at home?

Another Terror Tuesday in the White House. This time the agenda was al-Shabab, a terror cell based in Somalia that was loyal to Al Qaeda. In July 2010 it carried out its first attack outside Somalia’s borders, claiming credit for the suicide bombings at two popular nightspots in Kampala, Uganda, where soccer fans had gathered to watch the final match of the World Cup. With a large population of Somali Americans in the United States, Obama and his advisers knew that the recruitment of some of them was a matter of grave concern. The problem had two prongs: Disrupt any terror plotting by Shabab that could threaten the United States and its allies but do it in a way that gave Somali Americans no fuel for radicalization.

“Part of the way is just messaging,” said one senior official who attended the session. “Showing that we don’t necessarily seek to dictate the outcome of events in Somalia beyond what the democratic process has for Somalia. So, we don’t seek to destroy you, we don’t have any plan to destroy the entirety of the Shabab movement.”

The debate took a dark turn when some around the table lobbied for bombing Shabab training camps, given that intelligence had identified the locations, with GPS coordinates ready for the cruise missiles. Some argued that killing or incapacitating two hundred Shabab extremists would be a good thing for America’s counterterrorism efforts. Others argued that such a strike would serve to inflame a new and wider circle of Somalis at home and in the United States.

A compromise was struck: An execute order would be considered only if a high-value target—a senior Shabab leader, a visiting emissary of Al Qaeda, or a member of a cell who was training for a credible attack on the West—was present in the camp inside Somalia. But the debate revealed an enduring contradiction of American counterterrorism policy: Cruise missiles are easy; preventing radicalization is hard. There is no magic bullet for the latter task, and outreach programs, such as an effort by the Department of Education to train teachers in the urban Midwest about how to watch for radicalization among Somali American youth, have to be handled with great sensitivity. But such efforts can only mitigate the problem of radicalism, especially when impressionable young men see or hear about innocent people who have been killed by American operations in Muslim countries.

“Collateral damage” is a powerful fuel for radicalization, and U.S. officials are well aware of the risk inherent in each mission when innocent people are killed or wounded. “When we kill somebody, there is going to be someone else to take their place,” said Leiter. “And it is relatively easy to take someone off the battlefield. But there is something that is less satisfying about starting a program that engages young Somalis to prevent radicalization; that is softer and mushier, and to many it is a less interesting conversation.” He described how, in interagency meetings, a discussion of hunting terrorists is immediately relevant and exciting for many participants. Bureaucratic battles and lack of progress on the concepts of preventing terrorism are less exciting; the results are hard to discern and quantify. Officials celebrate the elimination of each terrorist even though he may be rapidly replaced, but those are the victories you can measure.