[The rapid expansion of the drone program has blurred long-standing boundaries between the CIA and the military. Lethal operations are increasingly assembled a la carte, piecing together personnel and equipment in ways that allow the White House to toggle between separate legal authorities that govern the use of lethal force.]
By Greg Miller
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| U.S. Air Force/GETTY IMAGES - A crew chief from the 46th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron completes post-flight inspections of the RQ-1 Predator after one of its sorties in Balad Air Base, Iraq. The RQ-1is a medium-altitude, long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle. |
The Obama administration’s counterterrorism accomplishments are most
apparent in what it has been able to dismantle, including CIA prisons and
entire tiers of al-Qaeda’s leadership. But what the administration has
assembled, hidden from public view, may be equally consequential.
In the space of three years, the administration has built an
extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of
suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The
apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs
on the East Coast, virtual Air Force cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine
bases in at least six countries on two continents.
Other commanders in chief have presided over wars with far higher
casualty counts. But no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret
killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals.
The rapid expansion of the drone program has blurred long-standing
boundaries between the CIA and the military. Lethal operations are increasingly
assembled a la carte, piecing together personnel and equipment in ways that
allow the White House to toggle between separate legal authorities that govern
the use of lethal force.
In Yemen, for instance, the CIA and the military’s Joint Special
Operations Command pursue the same adversary with nearly identical aircraft.
But they alternate taking the lead on strikes to exploit their separate
authorities, and they maintain separate kill lists that overlap but don’t
match. CIA
and military strikes this fall killed three U.S. citizens, two of whom
were suspected al-Qaeda operatives.
The convergence of military and intelligence resources has created
blind spots in congressional oversight. Intelligence committees are briefed on
CIA operations, and JSOC reports to armed services panels. As a result, no
committee has a complete, unobstructed view.
With a year to go in President Obama’s first term, his
administration can point to undeniable results: Osama bin Laden is dead, the
core al-Qaeda network is near defeat, and members of its regional affiliates
scan the sky for metallic glints.
Those results, delivered with unprecedented precision from
aircraft that put no American pilots at risk, may help explain why the drone
campaign has never attracted as much scrutiny as the detention or interrogation
programs of the George W. Bush era. Although human rights advocates and others
are increasingly critical of the drone program, the level of public debate
remains muted.
Senior Democrats barely blink at the idea that a president from
their party has assembled such a highly efficient machine for the targeted
killing of suspected terrorists. It is a measure of the extent to which the
drone campaign has become an awkward open secret in Washington that even those
inclined to express misgivings can only allude to a program that, officially,
they are not allowed to discuss.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Select Committee
on Intelligence, described the program with a mixture of awe and concern. Its
expansion under Obama was almost inevitable, she said, because of the
technology’s growing sophistication. But the pace of its development, she said,
makes it hard to predict how it might come to be used.
“What this does is it takes a lot of Americans out of harm’s way . . . without
having to send in a special ops team or drop a 500-pound bomb,” Feinstein said
in an interview in which she was careful to avoid explicit confirmation that
the programs exist. “But I worry about how this develops. I’m worried because
of what increased technology will make it capable of doing.”
Another reason for the lack of extensive debate is secrecy. The
White House has refused to divulge details about the structure of the
drone program or, with rare exceptions, who has been killed. White House and
CIA officials declined to speak for attribution for this article.
Drone war’s evolution
Inside the White House, according to officials who would discuss
the drone program only on the condition of anonymity, the drone is seen as a
critical tool whose evolution was accelerating even before Obama was elected.
Senior administration officials said the escalating number of strikes has
created a perception that the drone is driving counterterrorism policy, when
the reverse is true.
“People think we start with the drone and go from there, but
that’s not it at all,” said a senior administration official involved with the
program. “We’re not constructing a campaign around the drone. We’re not seeking
to create some worldwide basing network so we have drone capabilities in every
corner of the globe.”
Nevertheless, for a president who campaigned against the alleged
counterterrorism excesses of his predecessor, Obama has emphatically embraced
the post-Sept. 11 era’s signature counterterrorism tool.
When Obama was sworn into office in 2009, the nation’s clandestine
drone war was confined to a single country, Pakistan, where 44 strikes over
five years had left about 400 people dead, according to the New
America Foundation. The number of strikes has since soared to nearly 240,
and the number of those killed, according to conservative estimates, has more
than quadrupled.
The number of strikes in Pakistan has declined this year, partly
because the CIA has occasionally suspended them to ease tensions at moments of
crisis. One lull followed the arrest of an American agency contractor who
killed two Pakistani men; another came after the U.S. commando raid that killed
bin Laden. The CIA’s most recent period of restraint followed U.S. military
airstrikes last month that inadvertently killed 24 Pakistani soldiers along the
Afghan border. At the same time, U.S. officials have said that the number of
“high-value” al-Qaeda
targets in Pakistan has dwindled to two.
Administration officials said the expansion of the program under
Obama has largely been driven by the timeline of the drone’s development.
Remotely piloted aircraft were used during the Clinton and Bush
administrations, but only in recent years have they become advanced and
abundant enough to be deployed on such a large scale.
The number of drone aircraft has exploded in the past three years.
A recent study
by the Congressional Budget Office counted 775 Predators, Reapers and
other medium- and long-range drones in the U.S. inventory, with hundreds more
in the pipeline.
About 30 of those aircraft have been allocated to the CIA,
officials said. But the agency has a separate category that doesn’t show up in
any public accounting, a fleet of stealth drones that were developed and
acquired under a highly compartmentalized CIA program created after the Sept.
11 attacks. The RQ-170 model that recently crashed in Iran exposed the agency’s
use of stealth drones to spy on that country’s nuclear program, but the planes
have also been used in other countries.
The escalation of the lethal drone campaign under Obama was driven
to an extent by early counterterrorism decisions. Shuttering the CIA’s
detention program and halting transfers to Guantanamo Bay left few options
beyond drone strikes or detention by often unreliable allies.
Key members of Obama’s national security team came into office
more inclined to endorse drone strikes than were their counterparts under Bush,
current and former officials said.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, former CIA director and
current Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, and counterterrorism adviser John O.
Brennan seemed always ready to step on the accelerator, said a former official
who served in both administrations and was supportive of the program. Current
administration officials did not dispute the former official’s characterization
of the internal dynamics.
The only member of Obama’s team known to have formally raised
objections to the expanding drone campaign is Dennis Blair, who served as
director of national intelligence.
During a National Security Council meeting in November 2009, Blair
sought to override the agenda and force a debate on the use of drones, according
to two participants.
Blair has since articulated his concerns publicly, calling for a
suspension of unilateral drone strikes in Pakistan, which he argues damage
relations with that country and kill mainly mid-level militants. But he now
speaks as a private citizen. His opinion contributed to his isolation from
Obama’s inner circle, and he was fired last year.
Obama himself was “oddly passive in this world,” the former
official said, tending to defer on drone policy to senior aides whose instincts
often dovetailed with the institutional agendas of the CIA and JSOC.
The senior administration official disputed that characterization,
saying that Obama doesn’t weigh in on every operation but has been deeply
involved in setting the criteria for strikes and emphasizing the need to
minimize collateral damage.
“Everything about our counterterrorism operations is about
carrying out the guidance that he’s given,” the official said. “I don’t think
you could have the president any more involved.”
Yemen convergence
Yemen has emerged as a crucible of convergence, the only country where
both the CIA and JSOC are known to fly armed drones and carry out strikes. The
attacks are aimed at al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemen-based affiliate
that has eclipsed the terrorist network’s core as the most worrisome security
threat.
From separate “ops centers” at Langley and Fort Bragg, N.C., the
agency and JSOC share intelligence and coordinate attacks, even as operations
unfold. U.S. officials said the CIA recently intervened in a planned JSOC
strike in Yemen, urging its military counterpart to hold its fire because the
intended target was not where the missile was aimed. Subsequent intelligence
confirmed the agency’s concerns, officials said.
But seams in the collaboration still show. After locating Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen this fall, the CIA quickly
assembled a fleet of armed drones to track the alleged al-Qaeda leader until it
could take a shot.
The agency moved armed Predators from Pakistan to Yemen
temporarily, and assumed control of others from JSOC’s arsenal, to expand
surveillance of Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric connected to terrorism plots,
including the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day
2009.
The choreography of the strike, which involved four drones, was
intricate. Two Predators pointed lasers at Awlaki’s vehicle, and a third
circled to make sure that no civilians wandered into the cross hairs. Reaper
drones, which are larger than Predators and can carry more missiles, have
become the main shooters in most strikes.
On Sept. 30, Awlaki was killed in a missile strike carried out by
the CIA under Title 50 authorities — which govern covert intelligence
operations — even though officials said it was initially unclear whether an
agency or JSOC drone had delivered the fatal blow. A second U.S. citizen, an
al-Qaeda propagandist who had lived in North Carolina, was among those killed.
The execution was nearly flawless, officials said. Nevertheless,
when a similar strike was conducted just two weeks later, the entire protocol
had changed. The second attack, which killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, was
carried out by JSOC under Title 10 authorities that apply to the use of
military force.
When pressed on why the CIA had not pulled the trigger, U.S.
officials said it was because the main target of the Oct. 14 attack, an Egyptian
named Ibrahim al-Banna, was not on the agency’s kill list. The Awlaki teenager, a
U.S. citizen with no history of involvement with al-Qaeda, was an
unintended casualty.
In interviews, senior U.S. officials acknowledged that the two
kill lists don’t match, but offered conflicting explanations as to why.
Three senior U.S. officials said the lists vary because of the
divergent legal authorities. JSOC’s list is longer, the officials said, because
the post-Sept. 11, 2001, Authorization for Use of Military Force, as well as a
separate executive order, gave JSOC latitude to hunt broadly defined groups of
al-Qaeda fighters, even outside conventional war zones. The CIA’s lethal-action
authorities, based in a presidential “finding” that has been modified since
Sept. 11, were described as more narrow.
But others directly involved in the drone campaign offered a
simpler explanation: Because the CIA had only recently resumed armed drone
flights over Yemen, the agency hadn’t had as much time as JSOC to compile its
kill list. Over time, officials said, the agency would catch up.
The administration official who discussed the drone program
declined to address the discrepancies in the kill lists, except to say: “We are
aiming and striving for alignment. That is an ideal to be achieved.”
Divided oversight
Such disparities often elude Congress, where the structure of
oversight committees has failed to keep pace with the way military and
intelligence operations have converged.
Within 24 hours of every CIA drone strike, a classified fax
machine lights up in the secure spaces of the Senate intelligence committee,
spitting out a report on the location, target and result.
The outdated procedure reflects the agency’s effort to comply with
Title 50 requirements that Congress be provided with timely, written
notification of covert action overseas. There is no comparable requirement in
Title 10, and the Senate Armed Services Committee can go days before learning
the details of JSOC strikes.
Neither panel is in a position to compare the CIA and JSOC kill
lists or even arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the rules by which
each is assembled.
The senior administration official said the gap is inadvertent.
“It’s certainly not something where the goal is to evade oversight,” the
official said. A senior Senate aide involved in reviewing military drone
strikes said that the blind spot reflects a failure by Congress to adapt but
that “we will eventually catch up.”
The disclosure of these operations is generally limited to
relevant committees in the House and Senate and sometimes only to their
leaders. Those briefed must abide by restrictions that prevent them from
discussing what they have learned with those who lack the requisite security
clearances. The vast majority of lawmakers receive scant information about the
administration’s drone program.
The Senate intelligence committee, which is wrapping up a
years-long investigation of the Bush-era interrogation program, has not
initiated such an examination of armed drones. But officials said their
oversight of the program has been augmented significantly in the past couple of
years, with senior staff members now making frequent and sometimes unannounced
visits to the CIA “ops center,” reviewing the intelligence involved in errant
strikes, and visiting counterterrorism operations sites overseas.
Feinstein acknowledged concern with emerging blind spots.
“Whenever this is used, particularly in a lethal manner, there
ought to be careful oversight, and that ought to be by civilians,” Feinstein
said. “What we have is a very unique battlefield weapon. You can’t stop the
technology from improving, so you better start thinking about how you monitor
it.”
Increasing reach
The return of armed CIA Predators to Yemen — after carrying out a
single strike there in 2002 — was part of a significant expansion of the
drones’ geographic reach.
Over the past year, the agency has erected a secret drone base on
the Arabian Peninsula. The
U.S. military began flying Predators and Reapers from bases in Seychelles and
Ethiopia, in addition to JSOC’s long-standing drone base in Djibouti.
Senior administration officials said the sprawling program
comprises distinct campaigns, each calibrated according to where and against
whom the aircraft and other counterterrorism weapons are used.
In Pakistan, the CIA has carried out 239 strikes since Obama was
sworn in, and the agency continues to have wide latitude to launch attacks.
In Yemen, there have been about 15 strikes since Obama took
office, although it is not clear how many were carried out by drones because
the U.S. military has also used conventional aircraft and cruise missiles.
Somalia, where the militant group al-Shabab is based, is
surrounded by American drone installations. And officials said that JSOC has
repeatedly lobbied for authority to strike al-Shabab training camps that have
attracted some Somali Americans.
But the administration has allowed only a handful of strikes, out
of concern that a broader campaign could turn al-Shabab from a regional menace
into an adversary determined to carry out attacks on U.S. soil.
The plans are constantly being adjusted, officials said, with the
White House holding strategy sessions on Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia two or
three times a month. Administration officials point to the varied approach as
evidence of its restraint.
“Somalia would be the easiest place to go in in an
undiscriminating way and do drone strikes because there’s no host government to
get” angry, the senior administration official said. “But that’s certainly not
the way we’re approaching it.”
Drone strikes could resume, however, if factions of al-Shabab’s
leadership succeed in expanding the group’s agenda.
“That’s an ongoing calculation because there’s an ongoing debate
inside the senior leadership of al-Shabab,” the senior administration official
said. “It certainly would not bother us if potential terrorists took note of
the fact that we tend to go after those who go after us.”
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
