Nek Muhammad knew he was being followed.
On a hot day in June
2004, the Pashtun tribesman was lounging inside a mud compound in South
Waziristan, speaking by satellite phone to one of the many reporters who
regularly interviewed him on how he had fought and humbled Pakistan’s
army in the country’s western mountains. He asked one of his followers
about the strange, metallic bird hovering above him.
Less than 24 hours
later, a missile tore through the compound, severing Muhammad’s left leg
and killing him and several others, including two boys, ages 10 and 16.
A Pakistani military spokesman was quick to claim responsibility for
the attack, saying that Pakistani forces had fired at the compound.
That was a lie.
Muhammad and his followers had been killed by the CIA, the first time it had deployed a Predator
drone
in Pakistan to carry out a “targeted killing.” The target was not a top
operative of Al Qaeda, but a Pakistani ally of the Taliban who led a
tribal rebellion and was marked by Pakistan as an enemy of the state.
In a secret deal, the
CIA had agreed to kill him in exchange for access to airspace it had
long sought so it could use drones to hunt down its own enemies.
That back-room
bargain, described in detail for the first time in interviews with more
than a dozen officials in Pakistan and the United States, is critical to
understanding the origins of a covert drone war that began under the
Bush administration, was embraced and expanded by President Barack
Obama, and is now the subject of fierce debate.
The deal, a month
after a blistering internal report about abuses in the CIA’s network of
secret prisons, paved the way for the CIA to change its focus from
capturing terrorists to killing them, and helped transform an agency
that began as a cold war espionage service into a paramilitary
organization.
The CIA has since
conducted hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed
thousands of people, Pakistanis and Arabs, militants and civilians
alike. While it was not the first country where the United States used
drones, it became the laboratory for the targeted killing operations
that have come to define a new American way of fighting, blurring the
line between soldiers and spies and short-circuiting the normal
mechanisms by which the United States as a nation goes to war.
Neither American nor
Pakistani officials have ever publicly acknowledged what really happened
to Muhammad – details of the strike that killed him, along with those
of other secret strikes, are still hidden in classified government
databases. But in recent months, calls for transparency from members of
Congress and critics on both the right and left have put pressure on
Obama and his new CIA director, John O. Brennan, to offer a fuller
explanation of the goals and operation of the drone program, and of the
agency’s role.
Brennan, who began his
career at the CIA and over the past four years oversaw an escalation of
drone strikes from his office at the White House, has signalled that he
hopes to return the agency to its traditional role of intelligence
collection and analysis. But with a generation of CIA officers now fully
engaged in a new mission, it is an effort that could take years.
Today, even some of
the people who were present at the creation of the drone program think
the agency should have long given up targeted killings.
Ross Newland, who was a
senior official at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Va., when the
agency was given the authority to kill Al Qaeda operatives, says he
thinks that the agency had grown too comfortable with remote-control
killing, and that drones have turned the CIA into the villain in
countries like Pakistan, where it should be nurturing relationships in
order to gather intelligence.
As he puts it, “This is just not an intelligence mission.”
FROM CAR THIEF TO MILITANT
By 2004, Muhammad had
become the undisputed star of the tribal areas, the fierce mountain
lands populated by the Wazirs, Mehsuds and other Pashtun tribes who for
decades had lived independent of the writ of the central government in
Islamabad. A brash member of the Wazir tribe, Muhammad had raised an
army to fight government troops and had forced the government into
negotiations. He saw no cause for loyalty to the Directorate of
Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani military spy service that had
given an earlier generation of Pashtuns support during the war against
the Soviets.
Many Pakistanis in the
tribal areas viewed with disdain the alliance that President Pervez
Musharraf had forged with the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks. They regarded the Pakistani military that had entered the
tribal areas as no different from the Americans – who they believed had
begun a war of aggression in Afghanistan, just as the Soviets had years
earlier.
Born near Wana, the
bustling market hub of South Waziristan, Muhammad spent his adolescent
years as a petty car thief and shopkeeper in the city’s bazaar. He found
his calling in 1993, around the age of 18, when he was recruited to
fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and rose quickly through the
group’s military hierarchy. He cut a striking figure on the battlefield
with his long face and flowing jet black hair.
When the Americans
invaded Afghanistan in 2001, he seized an opportunity to host the Arab
and Chechen fighters from Al Qaeda who crossed into Pakistan to escape
the American bombing.
For Muhammad, it was
partly a way to make money, but he also saw another use for the arriving
fighters. With their help, over the next two years he launched a string
of attacks on Pakistani military installations and on American
firebases in Afghanistan.
CIA officers in
Islamabad urged Pakistani spies to lean on the Waziri tribesman to hand
over the foreign fighters, but under Pashtun tribal customs that would
be treachery. Reluctantly, Musharraf ordered his troops into the
forbidding mountains to deliver rough justice to Muhammad and his
fighters, hoping the operation might put a stop to the attacks on
Pakistani soil, including two attempts on his life in December 2003.
But it was only the
beginning. In March 2004, Pakistani helicopter gunships and artillery
pounded Wana and its surrounding villages. Government troops shelled
pickup trucks that were carrying civilians away from the fighting and
destroyed the compounds of tribesmen suspected of harboring foreign
fighters. The Pakistani commander declared the operation an unqualified
success, but for Islamabad, it had not been worth the cost in
casualties.
A ceasefire was
negotiated in April during a hastily arranged meeting in South
Waziristan, during which a senior Pakistani commander hung a garland of
bright flowers around Muhammad’s neck. The two men sat together and
sipped tea as photographers and television cameras recorded the event.
Both sides spoke of
peace, but there was little doubt who was negotiating from strength.
Muhammad would later brag that the government had agreed to meet inside a
religious madrasa rather than in a public location where tribal
meetings are traditionally held. “I did not go to them; they came to my
place,” he said. “That should make it clear who surrendered to whom.”
The peace arrangement
propelled Muhammad to new fame, and the truce was soon exposed as a
sham. He resumed attacks against Pakistani troops, and Musharraf ordered
his army back on the offensive in South Waziristan.
Pakistani officials
had, for several years, balked at the idea of allowing armed CIA
Predators to roam their skies. They considered drone flights a violation
of sovereignty, and worried that they would invite further criticism of
Musharraf as being Washington’s lackey. But Muhammad’s rise to power
forced them to reconsider.
The CIA had been
monitoring the rise of Muhammad but officials considered him to be more
Pakistan’s problem than America’s. In Washington, officials were
watching with growing alarm the gathering of Al Qaeda operatives in the
tribal areas, and George J. Tenet, the CIA director, authorized officers
in the agency’s Islamabad station to push Pakistani officials to allow
armed drones. Negotiations were handled primarily by the Islamabad
station.
As the battles raged
in South Waziristan, the station chief in Islamabad paid a visit to Gen.
Ehsan ul Haq, the ISI chief, and made an offer: If the CIA killed
Muhammad, would the ISI allow regular armed drone flights over the
tribal areas?
In secret
negotiations, the terms of the bargain were set. Pakistani intelligence
officials insisted that they be allowed to approve each drone strike,
giving them tight control over the list of targets. And, they insisted
that drones fly only in narrow parts of the tribal areas – ensuring that
they would not venture where Islamabad did not want the Americans
going: Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, and the mountain camps where
Kashmiri militants were trained for attacks in India.
The ISI and the CIA
agreed that all drone flights in Pakistan would operate under the CIA’s
covert action authority – meaning that the United States would never
acknowledge the missile strikes and that Pakistan would either take
credit for the individual killings or remain silent.
Musharraf did not
think that it would be difficult to keep up the ruse. As he told one CIA
officer: “In Pakistan, things fall out of the sky all the time.”
A NEW DIRECTION
As the negotiations
were taking place, the CIA’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, had
just finished a searing report about the abuse of detainees in the CIA’s
secret prisons. The report kicked out the foundation upon which the CIA
detention and interrogation program had rested. It was perhaps the
single most important reason for the CIA’s shift from capturing to
killing terrorism suspects.
The greatest impact of
Helgerson’s report was felt at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, or
CTC, which was at the vanguard of the agency’s global antiterrorism
operation. The centre had focused on capturing Al Qaeda operatives;
questioning them in CIA jails or outsourcing interrogations to the spy
services of Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and other nations; and then using
the information to hunt more terrorism suspects.
Helgerson raised
questions about whether CIA officers might face criminal prosecution for
the interrogations carried out in the secret prisons, and he suggested
that interrogation methods like waterboarding, sleep deprivation and the
exploiting of the phobias of prisoners – like confining them in a small
box with live bugs – violated the United Nations Convention Against
Torture.
“The agency faces
potentially serious long-term political and legal challenges as a result
of the CTC detention and interrogation program,” the report concluded,
given the brutality of the interrogation techniques and the “inability
of the U.S. government to decide what it will ultimately do with the
terrorists detained by the agency.”
The report was the
beginning of the end for the program. The prisons would stay open for
several more years, and new detainees were occasionally picked up and
taken to secret sites, but at Langley, senior CIA officers began looking
for an endgame to the prison program. One CIA operative told
Helgerson’s team that officers from the agency might one day wind up on a
“wanted list” and be tried for war crimes in an international court.
The ground had
shifted, and counterterrorism officials began to rethink the strategy
for the secret war. Armed drones, and targeted killings in general,
offered a new direction. Killing by remote control was the antithesis of
the dirty, intimate work of interrogation. Targeted killings were
cheered by Republicans and Democrats alike, and using drones flown by
pilots who were stationed thousands of miles away made the whole
strategy seem risk-free.
Before long the CIA would go from being the long-term jailer of America’s enemies to a military organization that erased them.
Not long before, the agency had been deeply ambivalent about drone warfare.
The Predator had been
considered a blunt and unsophisticated killing tool, and many at the CIA
were glad that the agency had gotten out of the assassination business
long ago. Three years before Muhammad’s death, and one year before the
CIA carried out its first targeted killing outside a war zone – in Yemen
in 2002 – a debate raged over the legality and morality of using drones
to kill suspected terrorists.
A new generation of
CIA officers had ascended to leadership positions, having joined the
agency after the 1975 congressional committee led by Sen. Frank Church,
D-Idaho, which revealed extensive CIA plots to kill foreign leaders, and
President Gerald Ford’s subsequent ban on assassinations. The rise to
power of this post-Church generation had a direct impact on the type of
clandestine operations the CIA chose to conduct.
The debate pitted a
group of senior officers at the Counterterrorism Center against James L.
Pavitt, the head of the CIA’s clandestine service, and others who
worried about the repercussions of the agency’s getting back into
assassinations. Tenet told the 9/11 commission that he was not sure that
a spy agency should be flying armed drones.
John E. McLaughlin,
then the CIA’s deputy director, who the 9/11 commission reported had
raised concerns about the CIA’s being in charge of the Predator, said:
‘‘You can’t underestimate the cultural change that comes with gaining
lethal authority.
“When people say to me, ‘It’s not a big deal,”’ he said, ‘‘I say to them, ‘Have you ever killed anyone?’
“It is a big deal. You
start thinking about things differently,” he added. But after the Sept.
11 attacks, these concerns about the use of the CIA to kill were
quickly swept aside.
THE ACCOUNT AT THE TIME
After Muhammad was
killed, his dirt grave in South Waziristan became a site of pilgrimage. A
Pakistani journalist, Zahid Hussain, visited it days after the drone
strike and saw a makeshift sign displayed on the grave: “He lived and
died like a true Pashtun.”
Maj. Gen. Shaukat
Sultan, Pakistan’s top military spokesman, told reporters at the time
that “Al Qaeda facilitator” Nek Muhammad and four other “militants” had
been killed in a rocket attack by Pakistani troops.
Any suggestion that Muhammad was killed by the Americans, or with American assistance, he said, was “absolutely absurd.”
This
article is adapted from “The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army,
and a War at the Ends of the Earth,” to be published by Penguin Press on
Tuesday.
