Rise of the Predators: A Secret Deal on Drones, Sealed in Blood
By MARK MAZZETTI
Published: April 7, 2013
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 Mr.
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.
Mr. Muhammad and his followers had been killed by theC.I.A., 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 theTaliban who led a tribal rebellion and was marked by Pakistan as
an enemy of the state. In a secret deal, the C.I.A. 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 Obama, and
is now the subject of fierce debate. The deal, a month after a blistering
internal report about abuses in the C.I.A.'s network of secret prisons,
paved the way for the C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Obama and his new C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan,
to offer a fuller explanation of the goals and operation of the drone
program, and of the agency's role.
Mr. Brennan, who began his career at the C.I.A. and over the past four years
oversaw an escalation of drone strikes from his office at the White House,
has signaled that he hopes to return the agency to its traditional role of
intelligence collection and analysis. But with a generation of C.I.A.
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 C.I.A.'s headquarters in
Langley, Va., when the agency was given the authority to kill Qaeda
operatives, says he thinks that the agency had grown too comfortable with
remote-control killing, and that drones have turned the C.I.A. 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, Mr. 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, Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. 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.
C.I.A. 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, Mr. Musharraf ordered his
troops into the forbidding mountains to deliver rough justice to Mr.
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 cease-fire 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 Mr. 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. Mr. 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 Mr. Muhammad to new fame, and the truce was
soon exposed as a sham. He resumed attacks against Pakistani troops, and Mr.
Musharraf ordered his army back on the offensive in South Waziristan.
Pakistani officials had, for several years, balked at the idea of allowing
armed C.I.A. Predators to roam their skies. They considered drone flights a
violation of sovereignty, and worried that they would invite further
criticism of Mr. Musharraf as being Washington's lackey. But Mr. Muhammad's
rise to power forced them to reconsider.
The C.I.A. had been monitoring the rise of Mr. 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 Qaeda operatives
in the tribal areas, and George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. 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
C.I.A. killed Mr. 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 C.I.A. agreed that all drone flights in Pakistan would
operate under the C.I.A.'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.
Mr. Musharraf did not think that it would be difficult to keep up the ruse.
As he told one C.I.A. officer: "In Pakistan, things fall out of the sky all
the time."
A New Direction
As the negotiations were taking place, the C.I.A.'s inspector general, John
L. Helgerson, had just finished a searing report about the abuse of
detainees in the C.I.A.'s secret prisons. The report kicked out the
foundation upon which the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program had
rested. It was perhaps the single most important reason for the C.I.A.'s
shift from capturing to killing terrorism suspects.
The greatest impact of Mr. Helgerson's report was felt at the C.I.A.'s
Counterterrorism Center, or CTC, which was at the vanguard of the agency's
global antiterrorism operation. The center had focused on capturing Qaeda
operatives; questioning them in C.I.A. 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.
Mr. Helgerson raised questions about whether C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. officers began
looking for an endgame to the prison program. One C.I.A. operative told Mr.
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 C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. were glad that the agency had gotten out of the
assassination business long ago. Three years before Mr. Muhammad's death,
and one year before the C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. officers had ascended to leadership positions,
having joined the agency after the 1975 Congressional committee led by
Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, which revealed extensive C.I.A.
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 C.I.A. chose to
conduct.
The debate pitted a group of senior officers at the Counterterrorism Center
against James L. Pavitt, the head of the C.I.A.'s clandestine service, and
others who worried about the repercussions of the agency's getting back into
assassinations. Mr. 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 C.I.A.'s deputy director, who the 9/11
commission reported had raised concerns about the C.I.A.'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 C.I.A.
to kill were quickly swept side.
The Account at the Time
After Mr. 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 Mr. 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 C.I.A., a Secret
Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth," to be published by Penguin Press
on Tuesday.
A version of this article appeared in print on April 7, 2013, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: A Secret Deal on Drones, Sealed in
Blood.
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Received on Sun Apr 07 2013 - 15:51:31 EDT
