Greg Miller
By Greg Miller
Four years ago, as a new Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen was proving itself a potent adversary, the Obama administration made plans to attack it with airstrikes just as the United States had been doing to the terrorist network’s core in Pakistan.
But this time, the White House decided there would be a key difference: The strikes in Yemen would be carried out by the US military, not the CIA. Two years later, in mid-2011, a mysterious construction project began to emerge in the Saudi desert, an elongated compound with a ribbon of concrete running parallel to the ridgelines of the surrounding dunes. CIA drones were about to enter the skies over Yemen after all.
The change was driven by a number of factors, including errant strikes that killed the wrong people, the use of munitions that left shrapnel with US military markings scattered about target sites and worries that Yemen’s unstable leader might kick the Pentagon’s planes out.
But President Barack Obama’s decision also came down to a determination that the CIA was simply better than the Defense Department at locating and killing Al Qaeda operatives with armed drones, according to current and former US officials involved in the deliberations.
Even now, as the president plans to shift most drone operations back to the military, many US counterterrorism officials are convinced that gap in capabilities has not been erased.
The issue has taken on heightened significance as Obama imposes new rules on US counterterrorism operations that are designed to give the Pentagon the lead in the targeted killing of terrorism suspects overseas, reducing and perhaps eventually replacing the role of the CIA.
In a major speech on Thursday, Obama talked of the seductive appeal of a weapon whose precision and secrecy offer a shield from accountability, saying it can “lead a president and his team to view drone strikes as a cure-all for terrorism.” Turning to Pentagon drones was described as a way to move the campaign out of the shadows of covert operations.
But even those who agree with the decision said it may prove more difficult for Obama to dismantle the CIA’s drone programme than it was to shutter its secret prisons, because of the agency’s expertise as well as circumstances that at times enable the CIA to operate in places off-limits to the Defense Department. “You have to go into this with some concern,” a former senior US counterterrorism official said of the plan. “It didn’t work before. Will it work this time?”
Sen Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, raised a related concern earlier this year when word of the administration’s plan began to surface. Feinstein said that she had seen the CIA “exercise patience and discretion specifically to prevent collateral damage” and that she “would really have to be convinced that the military would carry it out that well.”
Critics contend that, despite Obama’s claims of accuracy, the CIA has killed hundreds of innocent civilians, along with as many as 3,000 militants, most of them low-level fighters, in Pakistan and Yemen.
A Yemeni activist, Farea Al Muslimi, testified before Congress last month that the campaign has been indiscriminate, causing anti-US sentiment to surge. “What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant,” he said. “There is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America.”
Since 2009, when Obama became president, the United States has carried out more than 360 strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, according to data compiled by the Long War Journal website. The CIA has accounted for the vast majority of those, including all 293 in Pakistan, where only the agency flies armed drones. The drone campaign in Pakistan began under President George W Bush and escalated after Obama took office. But from the outset, Obama administration officials expressed discomfort with the fact that an intelligence service had absorbed a lethal mission that had traditionally been the responsibility of the military. In an interview in late 2010, a senior Obama administration official stressed that the CIA was running the drone campaign in Pakistan mainly because the agency was first to develop the technology after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and because Pakistan’s government insisted on secrecy so that it could deny any US operations on its soil.
“It has been in Yemen a different story, a different history, a different evolution,” the official said, making clear that the administration regarded the CIA campaign as an anomaly and saw lethal operations as the province of the military.
The US military’s elite Joint Special Operations Command was already flying drones over Yemen from a base in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. Using drones, warships and conventional aircraft, JSOC had already launched a flurry of strikes against Al Qaeda targets.
The first had come on December 17, 2009, just three days after Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was designated as a terrorist organisation by the US government. That initial attack, which involved missiles fired from a US warship, was inauspicious.The strike killed 14 Al Qaeda operatives but also 35 women and children, including several who later died after stepping on unexploded cluster munitions, according to Amnesty International and other outside accounts.
In the meantime, the secret CIA base in Saudi Arabia was beginning to take shape. US and Saudi officials said the kingdom had been pushing the United States to ramp up its involvement in neighbouring Yemen, particularly after an August 2009 attempt by a suicide bomber to kill Saudi counterterrorism official Muhammed bin Nayef. Two years later, when White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta and other US officials presented a plan to build a drone base in Saudi Arabia, the royal family didn’t flinch, according to US and Middle Eastern officials involved in the discussions.
The idea was a provocative one. A founding grievance for Al Qaeda was the presence of US military forces in the Islamic Holy Land in the 1990s. Now the United States was about to install its signature counterterrorism weapon, the symbol of a campaign that had inflamed anti-American sentiment among millions of Muslims. Saudi officials were undaunted and even conjured a plausible cover story. If the facility were discovered, the kingdom would say it was a delivery station for construction materials needed to build a fence along the Saudi-Yemen border.
“There was no worry or thinking of blowback,” a Middle Eastern official said. “There was the urgency of turning around a situation in Yemen that was very dangerous.” The contours of the base blend into the desert topography so inconspicuously that the facility is nearly impossible to detect from wide-angle satellite images. But magnifications reveal a lengthy runway and clamshell hangars used at other airstrips by the United States to house drones. The Saudi government imposed conditions, including full authority over the facility and assurances that there would be no US military personnel on site. The operation would be run by the CIA and Saudi intelligence, who for years had jointly operated a fusion center in Riyadh.
Feeding targeting intelligence to JSOC drones was not seen as a valid option, in part because doing so would require military approvals that could bog down a process requiring split-second decisions, officials said.
“The military’s culture is very uncomfortable with someone not in the chain of command handing them a target package and saying, ‘Hit this,’ “ said Jeremy Bash, who served as a senior aide to Panetta at the Pentagon and the CIA. The first CIA flights began in August 2011. Six weeks later, Awlaki was killed in a CIA strike. In many ways, the push to restrain the CIA is driven by the perceived costs of its counterterrorism emphasis, concern that the agency’s focus on lethal operations has diverted it from its traditional intelligence-gathering and analysis mission.WP-BLOOMBERG
By Greg Miller
Four years ago, as a new Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen was proving itself a potent adversary, the Obama administration made plans to attack it with airstrikes just as the United States had been doing to the terrorist network’s core in Pakistan.
But this time, the White House decided there would be a key difference: The strikes in Yemen would be carried out by the US military, not the CIA. Two years later, in mid-2011, a mysterious construction project began to emerge in the Saudi desert, an elongated compound with a ribbon of concrete running parallel to the ridgelines of the surrounding dunes. CIA drones were about to enter the skies over Yemen after all.
The change was driven by a number of factors, including errant strikes that killed the wrong people, the use of munitions that left shrapnel with US military markings scattered about target sites and worries that Yemen’s unstable leader might kick the Pentagon’s planes out.
But President Barack Obama’s decision also came down to a determination that the CIA was simply better than the Defense Department at locating and killing Al Qaeda operatives with armed drones, according to current and former US officials involved in the deliberations.
Even now, as the president plans to shift most drone operations back to the military, many US counterterrorism officials are convinced that gap in capabilities has not been erased.
The issue has taken on heightened significance as Obama imposes new rules on US counterterrorism operations that are designed to give the Pentagon the lead in the targeted killing of terrorism suspects overseas, reducing and perhaps eventually replacing the role of the CIA.
In a major speech on Thursday, Obama talked of the seductive appeal of a weapon whose precision and secrecy offer a shield from accountability, saying it can “lead a president and his team to view drone strikes as a cure-all for terrorism.” Turning to Pentagon drones was described as a way to move the campaign out of the shadows of covert operations.
But even those who agree with the decision said it may prove more difficult for Obama to dismantle the CIA’s drone programme than it was to shutter its secret prisons, because of the agency’s expertise as well as circumstances that at times enable the CIA to operate in places off-limits to the Defense Department. “You have to go into this with some concern,” a former senior US counterterrorism official said of the plan. “It didn’t work before. Will it work this time?”
Sen Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, raised a related concern earlier this year when word of the administration’s plan began to surface. Feinstein said that she had seen the CIA “exercise patience and discretion specifically to prevent collateral damage” and that she “would really have to be convinced that the military would carry it out that well.”
Critics contend that, despite Obama’s claims of accuracy, the CIA has killed hundreds of innocent civilians, along with as many as 3,000 militants, most of them low-level fighters, in Pakistan and Yemen.
A Yemeni activist, Farea Al Muslimi, testified before Congress last month that the campaign has been indiscriminate, causing anti-US sentiment to surge. “What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant,” he said. “There is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America.”
Since 2009, when Obama became president, the United States has carried out more than 360 strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, according to data compiled by the Long War Journal website. The CIA has accounted for the vast majority of those, including all 293 in Pakistan, where only the agency flies armed drones. The drone campaign in Pakistan began under President George W Bush and escalated after Obama took office. But from the outset, Obama administration officials expressed discomfort with the fact that an intelligence service had absorbed a lethal mission that had traditionally been the responsibility of the military. In an interview in late 2010, a senior Obama administration official stressed that the CIA was running the drone campaign in Pakistan mainly because the agency was first to develop the technology after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and because Pakistan’s government insisted on secrecy so that it could deny any US operations on its soil.
“It has been in Yemen a different story, a different history, a different evolution,” the official said, making clear that the administration regarded the CIA campaign as an anomaly and saw lethal operations as the province of the military.
The US military’s elite Joint Special Operations Command was already flying drones over Yemen from a base in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. Using drones, warships and conventional aircraft, JSOC had already launched a flurry of strikes against Al Qaeda targets.
The first had come on December 17, 2009, just three days after Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was designated as a terrorist organisation by the US government. That initial attack, which involved missiles fired from a US warship, was inauspicious.The strike killed 14 Al Qaeda operatives but also 35 women and children, including several who later died after stepping on unexploded cluster munitions, according to Amnesty International and other outside accounts.
In the meantime, the secret CIA base in Saudi Arabia was beginning to take shape. US and Saudi officials said the kingdom had been pushing the United States to ramp up its involvement in neighbouring Yemen, particularly after an August 2009 attempt by a suicide bomber to kill Saudi counterterrorism official Muhammed bin Nayef. Two years later, when White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta and other US officials presented a plan to build a drone base in Saudi Arabia, the royal family didn’t flinch, according to US and Middle Eastern officials involved in the discussions.
The idea was a provocative one. A founding grievance for Al Qaeda was the presence of US military forces in the Islamic Holy Land in the 1990s. Now the United States was about to install its signature counterterrorism weapon, the symbol of a campaign that had inflamed anti-American sentiment among millions of Muslims. Saudi officials were undaunted and even conjured a plausible cover story. If the facility were discovered, the kingdom would say it was a delivery station for construction materials needed to build a fence along the Saudi-Yemen border.
“There was no worry or thinking of blowback,” a Middle Eastern official said. “There was the urgency of turning around a situation in Yemen that was very dangerous.” The contours of the base blend into the desert topography so inconspicuously that the facility is nearly impossible to detect from wide-angle satellite images. But magnifications reveal a lengthy runway and clamshell hangars used at other airstrips by the United States to house drones. The Saudi government imposed conditions, including full authority over the facility and assurances that there would be no US military personnel on site. The operation would be run by the CIA and Saudi intelligence, who for years had jointly operated a fusion center in Riyadh.
Feeding targeting intelligence to JSOC drones was not seen as a valid option, in part because doing so would require military approvals that could bog down a process requiring split-second decisions, officials said.
“The military’s culture is very uncomfortable with someone not in the chain of command handing them a target package and saying, ‘Hit this,’ “ said Jeremy Bash, who served as a senior aide to Panetta at the Pentagon and the CIA. The first CIA flights began in August 2011. Six weeks later, Awlaki was killed in a CIA strike. In many ways, the push to restrain the CIA is driven by the perceived costs of its counterterrorism emphasis, concern that the agency’s focus on lethal operations has diverted it from its traditional intelligence-gathering and analysis mission.WP-BLOOMBERG
