In 2006, as the war in Iraq was reaching a fever pitch, a Pentagon employee working on special operations teamed up with a Czech technology entrepreneur who had dabbled in the porn business and devised what they considered an ingenious plan. Knowing that video games played on mobile phones were popular throughout the Middle East, the team wanted to build games that contained positive messages about the United States. But the games weren't just about propaganda. Every download would give the United States a window into the digital comings and goings of whomever was playing it it, a cyber foothold that could allow American spies to potentially track and collect information on thousands of people.
The propaganda/spy campaign was dubbed Native Echo, and it was conceived by Michael Furlong, a colorful civilian employee working for US Special Operations Command, and a company called U-Turn, which was headquartered in Prague and founded by a pro-American Czech national named Jan Obrman, whose parents had fled the Soviets in the 1960s. The idea was to target Middle Eastern teenagers in "high risk/unfriendly areas," and over time to integrate the US messages "into the lifestyle of the targets," ideally to make them more amenable to US armed forces, and to counter the rhetoric of Muslim fundamentalists.
The full account of this previously unreported intelligence operation is found in the new book The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth, by New York Times national security correspondent Mark Mazzetti. The book explores the ways in which the CIA--which before 9/11 had long been out of the business of killing people--and the US military--which had not been the domain of spies--have often changed roles over the past decade. It is filled with characters, like Furlong, who move between the membranes of these two worlds, and find themselves at home in either one.
Mazzetti writes that the first mobile game developed for Native Echo was modeled on the popular Call of Duty series. This new "shooter" game, Iraqi Hero, "took the player on an odyssey through the streets of Baghdad, shooting up insurgents trying to kill civilians in a wave of terrorist attacks," Mazzetti writes. "The goal was to reach an Iraqi police station and deliver the secret plans for an upcoming insurgent attack, plans that had been stolen from a militia group's headquarters."
Native Echo was timed to coincide with the US troop surge in Iraq in 2007. Its "main focus was on combatting the flood of foreign fighters entering Iraq from Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and parts of North Africa," Mazzetti writes.
As an intelligence collection program, Native Echo was both broad and audacious:
"Thousands of people would be sending their mobile-phone numbers and other identifying information to U-Turn, and that information could be stored in military databases and used for complex data-mining operations carried out by the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies. The spies wouldn't have to go hunting for information; it would come to them."
In order to hide the US role in the scheme, "Furlong convinced [U-Turn's] executives to create an offshore company that could receive Pentagon contracts but not be tied directly to the United States," Mazzetti writes. Obrman set up JD Media Transmission Systems, LLC, incorporated in the Seychelles Islands, in order to receive money transfers from the US through a foreign bank account.
Furlong was a master at working the byzantine procurement bureaucracy to further his covert plans. "Taking advantage of a law that allows firms owned by Native Americas to get a leg up when bidding on government contracts, Furlong arranged for U-Turn to partner with Wyandotte Net Tel, a firm located on a tiny speck of tribal lands in eastern Oklahoma," Mazzetti writes.
U-Turn developed two more games for Native Echo--Oil Tycoon, which challenged players to protect vital pipelines and infrastructure, and City Mayor, in which players became urban planners and rebuilt a fictional city destroyed by terrorists. The team came up with various ways to distribute the games, including by hand via memory cards, which could be sold or given away in markets and bazaars, Mazzetti reports. "The way to get far wider distribution, however, was to post the games on Web sites and blogs frequented by gamers in the Middle East. This allowed [Special Operations Command] to monitor how many people were downloading the games and, more important, who was doing it."
Mazzetti concludes that it's hard to know how far Native Echo went, and even how many companies like U-Turn were hired to create propaganda for the military. Furlong came up with other wild ideas, some of which were never approved. But the relationship between the military and U-Turn blossomed, and it offers a concrete illustration of how the armed forces evolved into a network of spies.
The Way of the Knife is full of stories like this, of people living on the edge between two worlds, frequently not sure how to operate on turf that had long been forbidden. The book is a culmination of Mazzetti's years of reporting on the intersections of the military and the CIA, and it is a forceful, compelling articulation of a new way of war. Mazzetti's reporting has been among some of the most important, in that it has shed light on usually hidden practices, particularly the use of brutal interrogations on terrorist detainees. As the book unfolds, we see how the 9/11 attacks shake the CIA out of their Cold War culture of espionage, and turn the agency into a highly-efficient global killing force.
I spoke with Mazzetti yesterday as he was heading off to New York to begin a book tour. He said that he began working after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and that the first few months of writing were filled with some anxiety, since his journalism beat was now the hottest around. Lots of his competitors were writing books and long magazine articles about the raid. But Mazzetti said that he wanted to write something broader, to show how the long arc of the war on terror has fundamentally changed how the US fights.
"I covered the Pentagon for five years, and then I have been covering the intelligence world since 2006," Mazzetti said. "And really, I realized that I was kind of covering the same beat. The lines that existed before 9/11, where the military did this and the spies did that, really have blurred."
Mazzetti said he's glad to be back at the Times after a 15-month book leave. He had missed the collegiality of an office. Writing a book is solitary business. But in the midst of the project, Mazzetti and his wife, Lindsay, welcomed Max, their first child.
"I can't wait until he is old enough to read this book," Mazzetti writes in his acknowledgments. "I cherish the memories of the mornings we spent together during the first few months, and of the smiles he delivered when I came home at the end of particularly frustrating days of book writing. They put things in perspective."
In the 12 years I've been writing about intelligence, I've heard from more practitioners of the craft than I can remember that women make better spies than men. Better analysts, too. And I don't just hear this from women. Indeed, I think I've heard more male intelligence officers say that their female colleagues' "intuition" and "patience" makes them particularly well suited to the painstaking job of cultivating sources or making sense of fragments of information. The thinking goes that there's something about the way women solve problems versus the way men do it, and something about the way women listen, observe, and even nurture other people that often yields better results.
The evidence to support this theory is, as far as I know, entirely anecdotal. But I've always found it compelling. I recall talking years ago with Michael Scheuer, who ran the CIA unit tracking Osama bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks, that women made up the bulk of his analytic team, and that he thought they'd done a superb job. Was there something about their gender that predisposed them to being better at this kind of work than men? Scheuer seemed to think there was.
Another former intelligence officer shed more light on this idea when he recounted his own experiences tracking terrorist groups for the Army. Erik Kleinsmith, whom I write about in my book, liked to rate analysts using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which assigns people to one of 16 personality types depending on how they process information and make decisions. Kleinsmith thought the best analysts excelled at "sensing"; they tended to solve problems by relying on what they could see and touch in the physical world, on facts. Kleinsmith was a sensor, according to Myers-Briggs, as were most of the analysts on his team—who were mostly women.
Certainly the CIA leadership believes a woman is qualified to lead analysts. Fran P. Moore is the current director of intelligence for the agency, overseeing all its analytical work. And right now, the CIA director, John Brennan, is considering whether to put a woman in charge of the National Clandestine Service, the operational side of the agency. She is now acting in the role. (Her name has not been revealed publicly.) And filmmakers have turned to women as protagonists in spy stories, including Homeland, Zero Dark Thirty, and the upcoming documentary Manhunt, based on the book by Peter Bergen about the hunt for bin Laden.
Women intelligence officers I've heard from don't dispute that their gender gives them some practical advantages, even if they can't put their finger on precisely why. Three former CIA officers took up the discussion this week on the New America Foundation's "In the Tank" podcast. Valerie Plame Wilson, Nada Bakos, and Lindsay Moran, who all had exciting, challenging, and even historic careers in the spy business, thought being a woman gave them a leg up in certain respects.
As a female case officer, "you are less threatening," said Wilson, who was a CIA operations officer for 20 years. "And without going too far over the top, I do think women are more intuitive and much more cognizant of body language, picking up signals, and things that are really important to reading potential recruits."
"There's a lot of patience involved with following some of the issues," said Bakos, who was a CIA targeting officer and helped track Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, work that relied on a fusion of intelligence gathering and analysis, in concert with special forces. "I think women are probably a little bit more patient at pulling the threads and piecing some of this together."
"I was not a mother when I was a spy," said Moran, who was a CIA case officer from 1998 to 2003. "But I realized later when I did become a mother that that maternal instinct kind of plays into it, too. The foreign agents you recruit, you're really taking care of them in a way. . . . You're kind of like a psychiatrist or a therapist to them. You're listening to them. I think women are conditioned from a very young age to sit back and listen in a way that men aren't."
Moran noted an obvious disadvantage for women in the field: Most of the people they're trying to persuade to spy for the US are men. Men they're meeting with in parked cars, or in hotel rooms. "You have to walk a vey fine line between flattering that person . . . [and] at the same time making it clear you're never going to sleep with them."
Of course, the United States hasn't had a woman at the helm of the CIA. Tara Maller, the host of the New America Foundation podcast, has a list of reasons a woman should get the job. I like reason eight: "Plenty of women are qualified for this role." That should be the determining factor. But isn't it interesting to think about what a woman might bring to this job that a man might not? We've had plenty of time to consider the inverse. I suspect, given recent events, that we're soon going to find out what a female director can do.
Ken Anderson and Ben Wittes, two good friends of Dead Drop, are embarking on an intriguing and from my perspective quite welcome new project. They're writing a book that will pull together all the significant speeches Obama administration officials have given on national security law, and then "weave it all back together, creating a synthetic account of the administration’s views that is worth more collectively than the sum of its parts."
Called Speaking the Law, it will be "a kind of handbook on the framework for counterterrorism," using administration officials' own words as the foundation. "Consider it the White Paper the administration has never issued," say Ken and Ben.
I suspect Obama administration officials themselves will be among this book's most avid readers, given the authors' premise, and that journalists and scholars will find it useful as well:
"There is a myth that the administration has had little to say on the subject of its counterterrorism authorities, especially targeted killing and drones--largely because it has declined to release publicly its Office of Legal Counsel targeted killing memoranda. Part of the point of Speaking the Law is to show how wrong this myth really is. The administration has actually said a huge amount. It’s just that it has said a great deal of it orally, and has broken up its utterances among a number of different statements."
The authors are publishing the chapters serially online, and then the Hoover Institution will put out a hardcover version when all the work is finished. The introduction and first chapter are available now.
Reuters reports that the Treasury Department is going to give US intelligence agencies full access to a large amount of financial information that it obtains from banks and other institutions. This includes reports of money transfers that are routinely used to track terrorist and criminal finances around the world.
A plan being drawn up by the Obama administration would link the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) to the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS), which is essentially a classified intranet for the Defense Department and intelligence agencies. Those agencies already have had access to FinCEN data, but only on a case-by-case basis. Now, Reuters reports, agencies like the CIA and the National Security Agency are going to be plugged into the financial data network and have unprecedented ability to roam around.
This would be an incremental change in policy. But don't overlook its significance.
More and more lately, the government is focusing on what agencies do with the data they collect, rather than the means of collection. US law is currently oriented mostly to regulate collection. And practically speaking, the government can collect a lot--a whole lot.
It's all the post-collection activity--the moving and shaping and sharing storing of information--that we know far less about. Who can see it? How long can an agency hold onto it? What kinds of technologies are applied to make sense of it? These are arguably more important questions than how a piece of information was collected if you're truly concerned about protecting privacy and civil liberties, and if you want to know whether that glut of information coming into the system is actually keeping the country safer.
FinCEN is a good example of how collection really isn't novel anymore. It has a massive a massive data set based on routine and voluminous standardized reporting from banks and other financial institutions. It most famously includes so-called suspicious activity reports that institutions are required to file whenever they notice transactions or money transfers that might indicate criminal activity.
This collection occurs on a broad and massive scale. According to the Treasury Department, US financial institutions file more than 15 million suspicious activity reports every year about transactions that exceed $10,000. Only a fraction of them could involve criminal activity. But the end result is that if any significant amount of money moves from one set of hands to another through the US financial system, FinCEN is supposed to know about it.
And what it knows tells investigators a lot about the nature of organized crime and terrorist networks. FinCEN was around before the 9/11 attacks, and it earned a reputation among investigators for being a well-run operation with useful tools for peering into money laundering operations and detecting fraud. After the terrorist attacks, it became the centerpiece in an interagency effort--i.e., a shared information effort--to track down the conduits of terrorist money, and by extension, the terrorist themselves.
In the past few months, there have been other examples of the government shifting attention from collection of information towards analysis and sharing among different agencies, on the theory that the more access analysts and investigators have, the more likely they are to crack a case or find a lead.
The National Counterterrorism Center is now allowed to hold onto information about airline passengers, international travelers, and a host of other categories for five years, a much longer period of time than previously allowed.
The NSA has been sharing more information about cyber security threats with the Homeland Security Department, in an effort to protect critical infrastructure. And in the coming weeks that effort will be extended to the private sector, as the government gives threat signature data to US telecommunications companies, so that they can monitor their networks for malicious code and intrusions.
Each of these changes involves information that the government already collects, legally. But from the administration's perspective, information that sits in once place often loses its value. That explains the shift in policy at FinCEN and elsewhere. The information is flowing more freely now, and the volume and frequency of that flow is going to increase.
The Senate Intelligence Committee and the White House have reached an agreement that will give committee members access to all Justice Department legal memorandums on targeted killings of US citizens. One staff member for each senator will also, for the first time, get to see those memos. Until now, only the senators had access, and only to two memos. With the deal in place, the committee will move forward today, in closed session, with a vote on the nomination of John Brennan to be the next director of the CIA. (Update: The panel moments ago approved Brennan by a 12-3 vote.)
The senators have won the latest battle in the fight for transparency of intelligence operations, and the outcome was predictable. Brennan is the maestro of the administration's targeted killing regime, and he faced an easy path to confirmation if not for the the vociferous objections of some members, who demanded to know why the President thinks he can order the death of an American citizen. Now, the White House will tell them.
The intelligence committee’s victory was partial; the White House still won’t release other memos about the targeted killings of terrorists who aren’t Americans. (Presumably that suits some members just fine.) But does this significant turn of events herald a more aggressive embrace of oversight by the members of the committee, which was established in the mid-1970s to investigate covert and illegal operations by the CIA?
As of the moment, we might hazard a cautionary “yes.”
Many intelligence authorities and historians agree that for the past two decades, the level of oversight and watchdogging by the Senate and its House counterpart has vacillated between anemic and non-existent. "The Senate of the United States and the House of the United States is not doing its job. And because you're not doing the job, the country is not as safe as it ought to be," former Rep. Lee Hamilton, a co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, scolded lawmakers in 2007.
Between 1991 and 2001, the year of the 9/11 attacks, a dozen different bipartisan reports about reforming the intelligence community all proposed starting in the same place: Congress. Since their heyday, the intelligence committees have conducted fewer meaningful investigations of major intelligence programs and controversies, and they have often been distracted by partisan bickering and political sideshows. That made it easier for the CIA to get away with doing more outside the committees’ preview, and with telling members less about it.
Was there ever a halcyon period of bipartisanship and transparency on the oversight committees? Yes, say intelligence historians, in the first few years after the committees were established. Emboldened by outrageous scandals, members embraced their role as watchdogs, and they believed the CIA should be held accountable, through them, to the American public.
"The original focus was really on protecting the rights of Americans. It was on ensuring that intelligence activities were carried out in accordance with laws, regulations, and treaty obligations," Britt Snider, who served as counsel for the Church Committee in 1975 and 1976 and helped draft the Senate resolution that created that chamber's oversight panel, told me in an interview in 2009, when the committees were feuding with the CIA over its interrogation regime.
The post-Church period saw a far more engaged oversight by members han the one described in an exchange between Sen. John Stennis, who in 1973 chaired the Armed Services Committee, and James Sclesinger, then the CIA Director. Scheslinger wanted to brief the chairman on an upcoming operation. Stennis replied, “Just go ahead and do it, but I don’t want to know!”
The CIA was not consistently forthcoming about its work in the shadows--Director Bill Casey and Reagan White House officials deliberately hid details of the Iran-Contra affair from lawmakers. But lawmakers were brought in on some of the agency’s most sensitive and politically risky missions. And the overseers blessed them, if only with their silence.
On March 8, 1984, Casey testified before the Senate committee that the CIA had put mines in Nicaraguan harbors. He told the House committee the same thing five days later. At the time, no one objected, verbally or otherwise. Indeed, for years the committees had been holding closed-door meetings on the CIA’s campaign to undermine Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.
But the lawmakers weren't always paying attention. About six weeks after Casey testified about mining operations in Nicaragua, the details showed up in the press. Angry Senators hauled Casey back before their committee and interrogated him over what the CIA was up to in Latin America. They questioned whether the CIA’s mining constituted an act of war under international law.
Jake Garn, a Republican from Utah and a staunch defender of the agency, was incensed that his colleagues would wash their hands of a mission they had implicitly condoned, now that it had become public He lept to Casey’s defense and declared, “"You're all assholes! The whole Congress is full of assholes! All 535 members are assholes!"
Today, intelligence overseers find themselves back on this tricky ground. The more they learn about the legal rationale for targeted killings, the greater the pressure on the them either to try to stop it it or to go along. No doubt the administration will exert strict controls over what lawmakers can say publicly about what they read.
The deal over targeted killing won’t completely satisfy members who would like to turn the committee back into a stronger check on executive authority. Nor is it a guarantee of public transparency; this is the same body, after all, that refuses to declassify a 6,000-page report about the CIA’s use of brutal interrogations and is investigating filmmakers about how much access they were given to classified information. But the Senate committee is flexing its muscle, more strongly than in recent years and with a clearer purpose.
A non-partisan group of former military officers wants the filmmakers behind Zero Dark Thirty to use any media appearances or acceptance speeches at the Oscars this weekend to call on the Senate Intelligence Committee to release a classified, 6,000-page report on the CIA's so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, which feature prominently in the film.
The group has written to Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Megan Ellison and others associated with the movie urging them to use their turn in the spotlight and "make the case for transparency on this issue..."
Right. Because antagonizing the Senate intel committee is exactly what the ZDT crew wants to do right now. Said committee is investigating whether the CIA gave the filmmakers "inappropriate" access to classified information. And the senators will also look at whether CIA officials made the case that torturing terrorist suspects provided useful intelligence--a case that some observers (this one included) think that the film makes, even though its creators have argued, awkwardly, that it doesn't.
Boal, the screenwriter, and Bigelow, the director, got extraordinary access to CIA and other administration officials during the making of their Oscar-nominated film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, far more than has been afforded to journalists. The Hollywood backlash has been palpable, and perhaps most evidenced by the fact that Bigelow, a previous Oscar winner for her Iraq War film Hurtlocker, was passed over this time for a Best Director nomination.
When I saw the DC screening of Zero Dark Thirty earlier this year, I thought Bigelow and Boal were notably cautious in their remarks about the controversy their film has also generated in Washington. Bigelow, who knew she was under intense official scrutiny, seemed genuinely nervous to be in a room full of politicos, feds, and journalists. And Boal looked as if he was biting his tongue, wanting to rebut his critics but careful not to stir the hornets' nest.
I doubt the writer or the director intend to make themselves public martyrs for government transparency. The harder they push on the Senate Intelligence Committee to say what it knows about torture, the more they open themselves up to questions about what special access the CIA gave the filmmakers. And that is not a conversation they want to have.
If John Brennan is confirmed as the next Director of the CIA--an outcome that appears all but certain--he will be only the third career CIA officer to run the agency in the past four decades. Robert Gates, in 1991, and William Colby, in 1973, were the other two. And the last director who could claim strong ties to Langley was George Tenet, who was nominated by Bill Clinton in 1997, and who'd been the deputy director for only a few years.
Brennan worked for Tenet first in 1999, as his chief of staff, and then as deputy executive director in 2001. In his confirmation hearing this week, Brennan cast himself as a cog in a much greater machine when he explained why, if he personally objected to parts of the Bush-era regime of brutal interrogations, he didn't take action to stop it. He wasn't "in the chain of command" for the program, Brennan told Sen. Saxby Chambliss.
The chain of command, and Brennan's position in it, has defined his working life. Brennan spent nearly three decades as a career intelligence officers. He held a series of significant posts, but he never rose to the most senior, political ranks of leadership. That's one reason why, when the incoming Obama administration floated his name for CIA Director in 2008, some old CIA hands were skeptical. Nothing against Brennan, some of them explained at the time, but he'd never been the deputy director, nor even executive director. His last significant job before leaving government for a brief stint in the private sector was as director of the newly formed Terrorist Threat Integration Center, the predecessor to the National Counterterrorism Center. Again, not an insignificant job, but not an obvious launching pad to one of the most important jobs in the United States government.
What a difference four years and a kill list make. Whereas Brennan's nomination for CIA Director once seemed implausible, now it seems so obvious. Books will be written (some are now) about how Brennan's four years as Obama's counterterrorism adviser seasoned him, changed him, and made the chief architect of the global drone campaign the logical candidate to take over the helm of the CIA.
But for now, it's instructive to remember Brennan's history as a career government employee, as a man who spent years in service regardless of who was the commander-in-chief. Indeed, that may be the best way to understand how he'll run the CIA.
Brennan's resume is well-documented. Stints as an analyst, a briefer, as a case officer in the field, the station chief in Riyadh. But it's perhaps his time in Washington, in those years when he served in fairly senior ranks and then briefly left government, that give the best clues to his future. These positions were rungs in a career ladder, yes. But some of them were thankless jobs, particularly director of the TTIC/NCTC. I covered the organization when it was first stood up, and like so many post-9/11 "centers," there was an air of uncertainty and desperation about the place. It's always hard being the new kid on the bureaucratic block. Would the center get enough funding? Enough people? Would it have sufficient clout in the intelligence community?
The initial answers were no, no, and no, but that's always how it is for a new organization. Running a place like that, when you know everyone's either against you or ambivalent about your success, must do something to a person. It must be forging. I don't know what it did to Brennan, but I suspect it was a stark reminder of the hierarchies of power. And he was smart enough to know that if anything went south on his watch (i.e., another terrorist attack), all the fingers would be pointed at the new guy. "We built this center to prevent the next 9/11. Why did you fail us?" Going from such a vulnerable position to the heights of power, at the White House, and becoming in the process arguably the most powerful man in the intelligence community...well, that must also change a person.
I had a long sit-down interview with Brennan in 2008, when he was an adviser to the Obama campaign and the chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, a sort of social and professional club for intelligence veterans. I asked him if there was one particular path that he thought was most productive in addressing the spread of terrorism. Consider his response in light of the man Brennan has become, the Drone Master:
"A lot of these issues, including counterterrorism, cannot be solved with kinetic force. I am a strong proponent of trying to focus more of our efforts on the upstream phenomenon of terrorism. I make the analogy to pollution. We learned that pollutants kill us when they get into the water we drink or the fish we eat or the air we breathe. But I think we also learned that we have to go upstream to identify and eliminate those sources of pollution. Terrorism is a tactic, and we have to be more focused upstream. Since 9/11, understandably we've focused downstream, on those terrorists who might be in our midst or trying to kill us, the operators. I think there needs to be much more attention paid to those upstream factors and conditions that spawn terrorists."
I doubt Brennan has abandoned that philosophy. But it's clearly not driving current policy. Still, in our interview, Brennan demonstrated a nuanced understanding of how many different components of government would have to work together to address the terrorism in the way he imagined. He said he was an advocate of reviewing "governance structures," and finding ones that "transcend administrations." He had, in other words, a bureaucratic answer to a strategic problem, and arguably a political one.
In his new perch at the CIA, Brennan will have to marshall that spirit of cooperation in a way that wasn't required at the White House. He's running an agency now. A powerful one, for sure, but one of many in a larger system. No doubt he will find the task more manageable and agreeable than his predecessor, Gen. David Petraeus, who never seemed to adapt to life without four stars on his shoulder.
At his confirmation, Brennan signaled that he's willing to play nicely with others, and that he actually looks forward to it. In his opening statement, he spoke about the man who is technically going to be his boss, another intelligence pro with a storied career:
"It would also be a tremendous privilege to serve with Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, who has mentored literally legions of intelligence professionals ever since his service in Vietnam. ... He and I share identical views on the role of intelligence and the importance of giving current and future generations of intelligence professional the support they need and so richly deserve."
No disrespect to Gen. Clapper or any of his predecessors. But I don't think that any CIA Director has ever spoke so fondly of the DNI. And if he did, I'm sure he didn't mean it.
"It would be the greatest honor of my professional life" to head the CIA, Brennan said. I don't doubt him. He has demonstrated considerable political skill in making it this far. And that will be essential at Langley. But for Brennan, this is more than a prestige job. It's a homecoming. And it's important to view his actions in the coming months and years through that lens.
John Brennan's confirmation hearing for CIA Director has suddenly become a lot more consequential.
In the past few days, we've gotten a window into Brennan's role in the Bush-era terrorist interrogation program--it looks more significant than previously reported--and now comes a leaked Justice Department "white paper" that describes the administration's rationale for why targeted killings of U.S. citizens, a program that Brennan has overseen, are legal.
The revelations in both documents seem obviously engineered to put Brennan in the hot seat about two controversial programs, one of which, targeted killings, some members of the Senate Intelligence Committee still believe they have insufficient information. So, now we know the likely frame for Thursday's confirmation hearing, and I presume that some significant debate will turn on the question of what constitutes an "imminent threat."
The leaked Justice Department white paper arguably attempts to redefine what most people would consider the common sense definition of imminent threat--that is, an enemy is about to take up arms against you, or is preparing to attack you. Think bombers readying for takeoff, or a foreign nation basing missiles within range of the United States or its allies.
But that's not the kind of imminence the administration is looking for when deciding whether to kill a U.S. citizen. Indeed, the white paper argues that it would have made no sense to wait for the 9/11 hijackers to board airplanes before moving with lethal, preemptive force against them, had that been an option.
The paper argues that terrorist groups are always plotting, and that they would presumably strike if they had the opportunity. So if someone is a member of Al Qaeda, or an affiliate, he by definition poses a threat to America. But that doesn't mean said terrorist is poised to strike, and therefore, in a given moment, constitutes an imminent threat. Does it?
Now we enter a gray area that this white paper is unable to clear up.
"Imminence must incorporate considerations of the relevant window of opportunity, the possibility of reducing collateral damage to civilians, and the likelihood of heading off future disastrous attacks on Americans," the white paper states in a section that addresses the central issues. (The question of imminence comprises much of the 16-page document.) Nothing in that sentence tells you when a terrorist is judged to be an imminent threat. Rather, it describes the considerations government officials must make when determining whether to kill him now. Or, imminently.
"Thus, a decision maker determining whether an al-Qa'ida operational leader presents an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States must take into account that certain members of [AQ] (including any potential target of lethal force) are continually plotting attacks against the United States; that [AQ] would engage in such attacks regularly to the extent it were able to do so; that the U.S. government may not be aware of all [AQ] plots as they are developing and thus cannot be confident that none is about to occur; and that, in light of these predicates, the nation may have a limited window of opportunity within which to strike in a manner that both has a high likelihood of success and reduces the probability of American casualties."
This paragraph could be summed up as "a list of reasons not to not kill a terrorist."
The white paper attempts to give some more detail on the decision-making process for concluding that someone is, in fact, imminently threatening the United States. But it's thin.
"A high-level official [the white paper never specifies that this must be the President] could conclude, for example, that an individual posts an 'imminent threat' of violent attack against the United States where he is an operational leader of [AQ] or an associated force and is personally and continually involved in planing terrorist attacks against the United States."
Ok, we're getting somewhere. You're an operational leader of a terrorist cell, you're a very dangerous guy.
"Moreover, where the [AQ] member in question has recently been involved in activities posing an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States, and there is no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities, that member's involvement in [AQ's] continuing terrorist campaign against the United States would support the conclusion that the member poses an imminent threat."
That seems a reasonable conclusion to draw, presuming that the evidence of previous activities is sound. I doubt anyone would argue that a terrorist who has attempted to kill Americans, but who has failed, won't try to do so again.
But nothing in the white paper constitutes a check list of all the requirements or characteristics for becoming an imminent threat in the government's eyes. Does the high-level official rely on visual identification of a target from drone footage? Intercepted communications showing X degrees of separation to a known terrorist group? Human tips? Some combination of the above? Is two out of three enough?
We're not likely to hear anything about these specifics, not in an open, unclassified hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee. And the white paper doesn't go there.
"This paper does not attempt to determine the minimum requirements necessary to render" a lawful targeted killing, it states. So, this paper can be described as the legal rationale for targeted killing in theory, if not as practiced by the Obama administration today. This is not a new revelation. (Indeed, the white paper references some speeches on this subject by senior administration officials.) But the introduction of the white paper into the public domain creates many new dynamics, and not just for Brennan's upcoming confirmation hearing.
One last point that may have implications beyond the realm of counterterrorism. Does the administration think its legal rationale for targeted killings is flexible enough to be applied to non-terrorist threats to national security? Could it justify, say, killing a member of a hacker collective whom the government believes is trying to take down a power grid with a cyber attack?
The white paper "does not assess what might be required to render a lethal operation against a U.S. citizen lawful in other circumstances," it states. So, the paper doesn't say the rationale could not be used against hackers. It just doesn't assess the question at all. If the potential breadth of the rationale does come up at Brennan's hearing, we'll be in the land of "hypotheticals," and in Washington, those are always easy to dodge.
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Book reviews, roundups of current titles, and interviews with authors are going to be a regular fixture on Dead Drop. But I also want to alert readers to books you are going to be seeing on shelves in the future, maybe in a few months, or even a few years.
Today I'm launching a regular feature, spotlighting interesting national security-themed titles on the horizon. There's some reader service here, in that I hope this helps you better curate your probably long reading list. But there's also a bit of intelligence gathering. Publishers routinely announce deals they have just signed with authors, and those deals give you a ground-level insight into what ideas are selling in the book business, what stories are hot, and what topics publishers are betting are so salient that you'll want to read about them a few years from now, which is about how long it will take books that are now being written to get to market.
So, here are some upcoming reads that might interest Dead Drop readers. Keep in mind that book titles and publishing dates are often tentative.
The Man Who Was George Smiley, by Michael Jango (Biteback Publishing)
A biography of the author and MI5 officer John Bingham, the 7th Baron Clanmorris, who was the real-life inspiration for John Le Carre's fictional spymaster.
Pub date: February 2013
Lone Wolf Terrorism: Understanding the Growing Threat, by Jeffrey D. Simon (Prometheus Books)
Simon, who has more than a quarter century of experience studying terrorism, examines the motivations and backgrounds of those who strike terror on their own, independent of an organized group.
Pub date: February 2013
The Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, by Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady (Wiley)
Two close observers of the national security apparatus investigate how the government keeps secrets, and why "real secrets can't be kept, trivial ones are held forever, and sensitive ones are far too susceptible to political manipulation."
Pub date: April 2013
The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth, by Mark Mazzetti (The Penguin Press)
The New York Times reporter draws from his beat to write about the evolution of the CIA and U.S. special forces into "competing covert manhunting and killing operations."
Pub date: April 2013
Wilson, by A. Scott Berg (Putnam)
The long-awaited biography of Woodrow Wilson from the author of many books on larger-than-life Americans, including Katharine Hepburn and Charles Lindbergh. Berg also wrote a definitive biography of Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor of Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Pub date: September 2013
Brothers Forever, by Tom Sileo and Col. Thomas Manion (Da Capo Press)
Sileo, a military writer, and Manion, a retired Marine colonel, tell the story of his Marine son, Travis Manion, and his Naval Academy roommate, Navy SEAL Brendan Looney. The two men are not buried next to each other in Arlington National Cemetery. President Obama spoke about them during Memorial Day remarks in 2011.
Pub date: Spring 2014
