Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (9 page)

The “new deterrence” strategy identified other kinds of “territory” that extremists hold dear: psychological and public relations territory that matters more to terrorists than actual physical land. What matters most to terrorists is their reputation and credibility with other Muslims. If a seed of doubt can be planted in the mind of Al Qaeda’s strategic leadership that an attack would be viewed as a shameful murder of innocents or, even more effectively, that it would be an embarrassing failure, then the order may not be given. During the months of debate, many government officials said these “new deterrence” efforts represent a second-best solution. Their preferred way to combat terrorism remained to capture or kill extremists. But killing extremists just puts new extremists in their place since it creates more glory for the terrorists. If the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have proved one thing, it is that America cannot kill its way to victory.

Critics in the Bush administration who clung to this strategy of capture or kill derided talk of a “new deterrence” as irrelevant, even naïve. They preferred to discuss Cold War strategies of massive retaliation, since the “new deterrence” is not about massive retaliation but about small steps and a relentless effort at persuasion. Such critics are lost in a misreading of the past, Pavel and Kroenig argued. After the tragedy of 9/11, the United States copied Cold War strategy by punishing those who organized the attacks and their benefactors—surprising any who thought the United States was a paper tiger—by invading Afghanistan to rout Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It was a textbook example of retaliation, and for a time it knocked Al Qaeda completely into remission. That the swift victory in Afghanistan was not rapidly followed by an implementation of these new counterterrorism strategies only argues for their value as Al Qaeda and Taliban have regrouped in sanctuaries in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan along the Afghan border, where they continue to train new recruits, including Europeans and Americans, and plot new attacks.

Part of deterrence strategy is to make sure that the other side knows that America will stop at nothing to punish it. Senior Bush administration and military officials said that if a terrorist group were to execute an attack on the United States, its allies, or interests with biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons, then the president had the option of massive retaliation against those terrorists, those they hold dear, and any who assisted them. Ironically, the most difficult part of this top-secret planning was how to communicate to terrorists that the United States actually had been restrained in its actions against certain terrorists out of respect for the sovereign territory of the countries in which they resided, notably Pakistan. But those restraints would be cast aside after a catastrophic attack, top officials insisted.

And no longer is it the case that the U.S. government might not know whom to blame in a terrorist attack. Much effort is being spent on perfecting technical systems that can identify the source of unconventional weapons or their components regardless of where they are found or detonated—and on letting nations around the world know that America has this ability. Every batch of nuclear materials has a specific chemical identity that it picks up in production, as unique a marker as a fingerprint or DNA. Using records held at the UN or gathered by American intelligence, the United States is very confident that it can identify the source of radioactive materials in an attack, even if carried out by a stateless group. Thus, it is argued, a dictator with a nuclear arsenal will not be able to hide behind an anonymous terrorist organization if he aids the attack by supplying nuclear materials.

The first public indication that the Bush administration was expanding the traditional view of nuclear deterrence came in a brief statement by President Bush in October 2006, following a test detonation of a nuclear device by North Korea. Bush said North Korea would be held “fully accountable” for the transfer of nuclear weapons or materials to any nation or terrorist organization. Over the next months, work continued across the government, focused in the National Security Council, until the president had formally approved an expanded deterrence policy. Stephen J. Hadley, who had succeeded Condoleezza Rice as national security advisor, wanted to trumpet the decision and openly define this more detailed and nuanced version of the strategy, but he chose to do so in a speech on the West Coast, at Stanford University, on February 8, 2008, with no mainstream media in attendance. The Hadley address generated no significant press coverage and therefore went unnoticed by America’s allies and adversaries.

So later that year, in October 2008, the task fell to Rumsfeld’s successor as secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, to put America’s adversaries on notice that the United States would hold “fully accountable” any country or group that helped terrorists to acquire or use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Gates’s speech before the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington was the Bush administration’s most expansive in trying to articulate a vision of deterrence for the post-9/11 world. It went beyond the Cold War notion that a president could respond with overwhelming force against a country that directly attacked the United States or its allies with unconventional weapons. “Today we also make clear that the United States will hold any state, terrorist group or other non-state actor or individual fully accountable for supporting or enabling terrorist efforts to obtain or use weapons of mass destruction—whether by facilitating, financing or providing expertise or safe haven for such efforts,” Gates said. To be sure, Gates left the door open to diplomatic and economic responses as well as military ones in this expanded concept of deterrence, but he was far more explicit than the president had been in 2006 in saying that the administration would extend the threat of reprisal for the transfer of nuclear weapons or materials to all countries, not just North Korea, and he also expanded the threat to nations or groups that provide a broader range of support to terrorists.

Gates’s speech was viewed as a landmark in America’s “declaratory” policy of a new concept of deterrence. But the secret history proved the odd machinations of government. Gates had intended the speech to focus on nuclear modernization and the obligation of the military to secure and safely handle the nuclear arsenal as a sacred trust, but when the White House heard of his proposed topic, he was ordered to rewrite the address to include a section that finally and formally and publicly broadcast the new deterrence concepts, which had expanded since the Bush statement and had gone unheard in the Hadley speech.

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In the years since Matt Kroenig’s initial briefing in July 2005, the new strategy to deter terrorist attacks has been incorporated into a new, broader counterterrorism strategy that includes muting Al Qaeda’s message, turning the jihadist movement’s own weaknesses against itself, and illuminating Al Qaeda’s missteps whenever possible. A bombing of a hotel in Jordan in which the victims were Muslims at a wedding party? Publicizing this attack from November 2005 played perfectly into the strategy. Strapping suicide vests to teenagers lured away from a Baghdad mental asylum to kill Iraqi police and shoppers in an outdoor market? What Muslim could support that? Statistics that showed Al Qaeda’s post-9/11 attacks had killed and wounded far more Muslims than Christians. What sort of jihad could that be?

“The artful presentation of Al Qaeda as an international movement with groups acting in concert all over the world—that, too, has deteriorated,” said Richard Barrett, a former member of the British spy agency MI6, who is now the coordinator of the Al Qaeda/Taliban sanctions monitoring team for the UN. “Al Qaeda has not been able to sustain that image in the short term, if only because most of the targets that terrorist groups attack are now essentially local, and are no longer so clearly linked to some sort of global agenda. And the environment within which Al Qaeda is operating is far less friendly both towards Al Qaeda as an organization and towards its stated goals and objectives, and even in some ways it has become hostile to Al Qaeda. Public opinion seems definitely to have turned against it.”

The emerging belief that terrorists may be dissuaded from action by various forms of deterrence underscores the shift in the nation’s thinking since Bush’s 2002 national security strategy document asserted that traditional aspects of deterrence would fail against a committed terrorist. “What we’ve developed since 9/11 is a better understanding of the support that is necessary for terrorists, the network which provides that support, whether it’s financial or material or expertise,” said Michael E. Leiter, a top counterterrorism official in the Bush and Obama administrations. “We’ve now begun to develop more sophisticated thoughts about deterrence looking at each one of those individually. Terrorists don’t operate in a vacuum.”

Leiter is an outstanding example of the nation’s newest generation of terrorist fighters, many of whom took unusual paths into the counterterrorism world. He grew up in Englewood, New Jersey, the son of a Holocaust survivor, and once considered becoming a New York City police officer. Leiter’s academic career mirrors President Obama’s own: he graduated from Columbia University (the president’s alma mater) and Harvard Law School, where he followed in Obama’s footsteps as president of the
Harvard Law Review
. He spent six years in the Navy between college and law school, flying E-6B “Prowler” radar-jamming planes for the Navy over Bosnia and Iraq. After law school, Leiter was a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and was at the court on 9/11, watching on television as the World Trade Center collapsed. “It hit very close to home for me,” he once told National Public Radio, noting that he had attended his senior prom at the twin towers and was sworn into the Navy there. Leiter went on to become a lawyer for the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague, playing a key role in bringing Bosnian war criminals to justice. He also served as a federal prosecutor in northern Virginia, handling a wide variety of federal crimes, including narcotics offenses, organized crime, racketeering, and money laundering.

Since November 2007, Leiter has led the National Counterterrorism Center, the government’s central clearinghouse and analytical hub for intelligence on terrorist threats. He is one of a handful of influential counterterrorism figures who carried over to the Obama administration from the Bush administration, and he likes to tell a story that illustrates how political affiliations are buried in his line of work.

At the end of President George W. Bush’s final intelligence briefing in January 2009, the discussion turned to who was staying on in the Obama administration and who was leaving. “Someone asked me what I thought about going to work for the Democrats and Obama,” Leiter recalled, “and I said, ‘Sir, I am not a Republican.’”

President Bush looked at him and asked, “Well, you voted for me, right?”

Leiter was in a jam: “I was stuck and had to say, ‘Well, I voted for your dad once.’”

As the analysts walked out of the Oval Office, Bush pulled Leiter aside. “He put his arm on my shoulder,” Leiter recalled, “and said, ‘Keep up the fight.’”

3

THE EXPLOITATION OF INTELLIGENCE

Sunset in the badlands of modern terrorism, the Sunni Triangle north of Baghdad.

A red mist matching the crimson sky at twilight floated toward First Lieutenant Garry Owen Flanders. Except this was not the fine grit of the typical Iraqi sandstorm, the kind that inflamed your eyeballs, crusted your throat until your voice dropped half an octave, locked up computers, blinded radars, grounded helicopters, and made a mystical palette of light filtered through pastel crud. This red mist was blood and bile and body parts Osterized by an explosive suicide vest detonated just seconds before by a man captured by Flanders and his platoon.

Flanders was just twenty-three years old and only a couple of weeks into platoon command on the ground in Iraq. Before deploying with the Cavalry, he had time to get used to the kidding about his name: Garry Owen Flanders. “The Garryowen” is the title of the whistle-and-drum-and-fiddle drinking song, an Irish quick-step really, adopted by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer as the marching cadence of his 7th Cavalry Regiment. Flanders’s father, Joseph, who served in the Cavalry in Vietnam, chose the one hundredth anniversary of Custer’s Last Stand as his wedding day. When he and his wife had a son, his name was an obvious choice and one of pride. “The epitome of the word ‘cavalry’? That would be my father,” Flanders said. He followed his dad into the Army and into the Cav, and his first assignment after commissioning was with the 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment. In the lottery of fate and the dictates of Army planning, his unit was reassigned as the 1st Battalion of the legendary 7th Cavalry Regiment, Custer’s heir. And the battalion adopted the historic regimental flag of the 7th Cav as well as “The Garryowen” melody as its anthem. “Everybody said, ‘You have got to go over to the battalion headquarters now. You just got to go over and see it.’ My name was written all over everything,” Flanders recalled. Patches now bore his name, as did signposts all over the headquarters. Jokes about the coincidence of name and unit followed him to Iraq when he deployed as part of the 1st Cavalry Division out of Fort Hood, Texas. “In this whole big Army, this had to happen to me,” he said. “But it was a wonderful icebreaker.”

As the sun was setting at about 6:00 p.m., Flanders set off in a convoy of four up-armored Humvees moving west out of Taji, a focus of terrorist and insurgent violence about twenty miles north of Baghdad. The percussion of homemade land mines—known as improvised explosive devices (IEDs)—had set the tempo. “We were hit by an IED, a small IED,” Flanders thought, going down his mental checklist, ticking off the enemy’s successes—a soldier’s disciplined method used to stay sharp. “A route clearance team in same vicinity, hit with an IED and one Killed in Action. Just to the north: found several IEDs, one booby trapped. Horribly injured explosive ordnance disposal team trying to defuse. Unit to our north, Charlie Troop, 1st of the 7th Cav, their vehicle hit a deep-buried IED. Four killed.” All in just seventy-two hours, all in a patrol area no bigger than six miles by six miles.