Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins Read online

  Ultimately it turned out to be surprisingly easy, the weapon of choice being a Hellfire missile originally developed by the army for use against tanks. The work went quickly: the first successful test firing of a Predator-launched Hellfire took place the following January. A few months later the air force had also devised the satellite-plus-fiber-optic cable system that transmitted the video feed, allowing a pilot sitting in Nevada to fly and shoot from a Predator thousands of miles away.

  “They did it fast,” the air force officer closely involved with the program told me, “and that was a pity. It meant that no one stepped back and thought about what it meant to be able to kill someone from thousands of miles away.” Such pertinent reflections were not widespread in the air force, not to mention the government at large. As George Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission, “The leadership of CIA reasoned that if we could develop the capability to reliably hit a target with a Hellfire missile and could develop the enabling policy and legal framework, we would have a capability to accurately and promptly respond to future sightings of high value targets.”

  It is not surprising, therefore, that when Tom Christie presented his team’s final report on the Predator tests, Report on the Predator Medium Altitude Endurance Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), on October 3, 2001, it did not go down very well. It was only three weeks since the 9/11 attacks. With the airwaves full of bloodthirsty threats and promises of revenge, demand for a weapon that promised to deliver what Tenet wanted was unstoppable.

  The cover letter of Christie’s report, sent to the secretary of defense and the heads of all relevant congressional committees, including Jerry Lewis’, stated straightforwardly that “the Predator UAV is not operationally effective. This conclusion is based on poor performance in target location accuracy, ineffective communications, and limits imposed by relatively benign weather.” The following sixty-four pages spelled out just how and why the machine was so deficient.

  The reaction did not appear until the following morning, but when it did, it arrived with force in the form of Darleen Druyun, the principal deputy undersecretary of the air force, known around the Pentagon as “the dragon lady.” Three years later she would be sentenced to a nine-month prison term for corrupt dealings with the Boeing Corporation, but on that October morning she was still immensely powerful and much feared for her commanding role in negotiating prices in multibillion-dollar contracts. The Pentagon building was still smoking from the devastating impact of American Airlines Flight 11 on 9/11 when Druyun marched into Christie’s third-floor office with, as Christie later related to me, “four or five sycophant generals trailing behind her.” Not known for diplomacy, she came straight to the point. “What the fuck is this?” she shouted at the testing office director. “What do you mean sending out this fucking report saying the Predator doesn’t work? Who is the fucking asshole that wrote this report? I’m going to ream him a new fucking asshole.”

  “Hold on,” retorted Christie, unfazed by her foul language. “Have you found anything in this report that’s wrong?”

  “Er, no,” admitted the official. “But couldn’t you at least take the bit about ‘not operationally suitable’ out of the cover letter? (All present were well aware that this was as far as most officials would ever read.) Christie gave no ground; the letter and report stood. But it didn’t matter; Washington was already entranced by the notion of killing people at a distance.

  In December 2001, President Bush returned to the Citadel, where he had outlined his military program and the virtues of drones two years before. In his speech on this visit he hailed the new weapon and his own prescience: “Before the war, the Predator had skeptics, because it did not fit the old ways. Now it is clear the military does not have enough unmanned vehicles.”

  An old idea had found its time.

  5

  IT’S NOT ASSASSINATION IF WE DO IT

  He was the ultimate high-value target, the man who by virtue of his personal magnetism and force of will had brought about the most destructive war in history. Even when defeat appeared certain, his absolute control of the nation he ruled meant the fighting dragged on, with millions more dying. “As long as Hitler continues to live among them,” wrote Air Vice-Marshal Alan Ritchie of the Royal Air Force in 1944, “the people will have faith and, having faith, they will remain impervious to logical argument or demonstrated fact.… Remove Hitler and there is nothing left.” Ritchie, a former bomber commander, was a senior official in Special Operations Executive (SOE), the clandestine British warfare agency set up by Winston Churchill in 1940 with a mandate to “set all Europe ablaze.” Not only did he believe that the assassination of Hitler would collapse the enemy war machine, but he also became deeply involved in an operation to carry it out.

  Along with sabotage, subversion, aid to resistance movements, and other harassing operations against the Germans, SOE was always in search of ways to eliminate leading members of the Nazi hierarchy. By 1944 the agency’s most notable success in this regard had been the elimination of SS General Reinhard Heydrich, the ruler of occupied Czechoslovakia, in 1942. Although Heydrich, one of the cruelest of the Nazi bosses, did die from wounds following an attack by Czech partisans dispatched by SOE, the resulting German reprisals were savage in the extreme. Thousands of Czechs, including the entire male population of the village of Lidice, as well as the last surviving Jews of Berlin, were immediately murdered in revenge. The overall ongoing holocaust accelerated.

  Nevertheless, the leadership of SOE remained eager to find a way to kill Hitler himself, exploring various possibilities, such as blowing up his train or introducing poison into his tea. By June 1944 serious consideration was being given to Operation Foxley, in which a sniper would infiltrate Hitler’s mountain retreat of Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps and shoot him as he took his daily walk, unguarded, to a teahouse a few hundred yards from the main building.

  In view of Hitler’s status in the pantheon of evil, his elimination would seem to be an obvious and unquestioned priority for the Allies, just as killing Osama bin Laden would be, decades later, for Barack Obama. Such was not the case. Even in the midst of total war against a remorseless and vicious enemy, not everyone agreed that Hitler himself should be on any kind of target list. Major-General Gerald Templer, who, as commander of SOE’s German Directorate, would be in immediate charge of the operation, wrote in November 1944 that there was “still a grave divergence of views” on the “desirability and feasibility” of the assassination scheme. The arguments on either side resonate strongly in an age when such targeting has become a fundamental component of U.S. strategy.

  “All experts on Germany,” noted Templer, agreed that Foxley was “unsound and would not be in the interests of the allied cause.” Nevertheless, “among certain members of the SOE Council” and “among the highest in the land in England” were “strong advocates of the operation.” The “highest in the land” had to be a discreet reference to Winston Churchill, himself, who not only had already endorsed the notion of assassinating Hitler but also was enamored of schemes for daring and unorthodox military adventures. The SOE council members referred to by Templer included Ritchie, a former bomber commander with a conviction common to his profession that there was a targeting solution to any challenge. Just as his successors fighting the Vietnam War believed that the destruction of the Thanh Hoa Bridge would solve their problems, and their successors pursuing the war on terror single-mindedly hunted the leadership of al-Qaeda, Ritchie took it as a given that Hitler’s “mystical hold” was all that was keeping his country together. Given Hitler’s absolute domination of Germany and its war machine, who could doubt that getting rid of him would be an unqualified benefit?

  However, there were plenty of people with doubts, and they were in a position to express them. Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Thornley, Templer’s deputy, was a genuine expert on Germany, since he had traveled there extensively in peacetime as a businessman and spoke the language fluently. Joining the army at the beginn
ing of the war, he had risen rapidly through the ranks of SOE, supervising subversion and sabotage inside Germany itself. In clear, simple prose, he laid out his reasons for why killing Hitler would be entirely counterproductive. Merely disposing of the Nazi leader, he wrote, “would almost certainly canonize him and give birth to the myth that Germany would have been saved if he had lived.” Since the overall war aim was to defeat and extinguish Nazism, this would have been a most undesirable development. Furthermore, rather than standing in the way of an Allied victory, Thornley pointed out, the Führer was being extremely helpful. “As a strategist, Hitler has been of the greatest possible assistance to the British war effort.… He is still in a position to override completely the soundest of military appreciation and thereby help the Allied Cause enormously.” Furthermore, he argued, such an act would cause lasting damage to those who carried it out: “It would be disastrous if the world came to think that the Allies had to resort to these low methods as they were otherwise unable to defeat the German military machine. From every point of view, the ideal end to Hitler would be one of steadily declining power and increasing ridicule.” In an age where high-value targeting lies at the core of U.S. strategy against its enemies, Thornley’s reasoned assessment still stands as a model of rational rebuttal against the idea.

  As it happened, nothing ever came of Foxley, as Hitler stopped visiting Berchtesgaden after July 1944. In any event, SOE was in reality a surprisingly ineffective operation overall, sometimes shockingly so. From 1941 on, its operations in aid of the French resistance had been largely penetrated by German counterintelligence. Agents parachuting into France were met all too often by an enemy reception committee. Shockingly, even when captured agents managed to use prearranged codes to warn they were in enemy hands, headquarters paid no attention and continued to dispatch brave men and women to inevitable torture and death. Dissolved after the war (though not before a mysterious fire had destroyed much of its financial records), SOE left an enduring legacy not only in espionage fiction but also in the culture of another wartime creation: the Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA. The biographer of OSS Director William Donovan summarized the relationship between the two organizations this way: “Each had much to offer the other—the British experience, training, contacts and special equipment; the Americans, manpower, gold and political reputation.”

  The OSS itself attained legendary status, central to the creation myth of the CIA, although in fact it contributed little in the way of intelligence. For example, though its chief agent in Switzerland, future CIA director Allen Dulles, subsequently made much of his success in inducing the surrender of German forces in northern Italy following months of secret negotiations, this coup preceded the total German unconditional surrender by a mere eight days. The OSS Rome station chief James Jesus Angleton had meanwhile won accolades for recruiting an agent who could supply copies of the Vatican’s secret diplomatic correspondence, including reports from the Papal Nuncio in Japan. These were deemed so valuable and urgent that they were rushed straight to the Oval Office. Sadly, the intelligence turned out to be entirely bogus, concocted by the “agent,” a forger and pornographer, author of such works as the best-selling Amazons of the Bidet.

  The great triumph of Allied intelligence of World War II was the comprehensive cracking of German and Japanese codes (not to mention those of most neutral nations as well). This gave U.S. and British leaders an unambiguous insight into enemy plans and dispositions. But the OSS had no access to this vital tool, having been excluded since inception by the military services that had broken the codes in the first place. Indeed, the prevailing attitude of military intelligence toward OSS was contempt. As General Carter Clarke, who headed the vital military intelligence department known as Special Branch, later scornfully informed me, “The OSS did superb work rescuing downed pilots and other unfortunates in Burma, but if they ever produced any intelligence worthy of the name, I was not aware of it.” Clarke, a salty-tongued Kentucky native who had risen through the ranks of the prewar army, made no secret of his opinion of William Donovan, the flamboyant lawyer who founded and led the OSS through the war. Clarke’s colorful style and views are apparent in his account of an incident when “there were three guys in Dakar that needed to be knocked off, and old Donovan—who was about as useful as a row of tits on a nun—he said, well, the OSS’ll do it. So he went over there and they killed three guys all right, but they were the wrong three. Well Roosevelt damn near had a stroke over that.”

  Special Branch was itself the brainchild of a Wall Street lawyer, Alfred McCormack, a partner in the powerful firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and John J. McCloy, the quintessential insider who became assistant secretary of war in 1940. Following the disaster of Pearl Harbor, intelligence agencies, including OSS, proliferated like weeds in Washington: no less than forty appeared over the following twelve months. Few people even inside the government knew that the Japanese diplomatic code had been broken by a secret army unit and that all Japan’s diplomatic traffic had been read for months before the Pearl Harbor attack, priceless intelligence that had been almost entirely wasted. However, McCloy, together with his immediate superior and fellow Wall Street lawyer Henry Stimson, felt that the best way to analyze discreetly what had gone wrong with prewar intelligence and how to proceed in the future was to consult a fellow Wall Street lawyer. So McCormack was asked to come down from New York and take a look.

  Given immediate access to the so-called magic intercepts—there was no nonsense about waiting for security clearance in those days, at least not for a Cravath partner—McCormack soon reported back. Uncowed by his high-level audience, he began by noting that the intercepted material had made it perfectly clear that the Japanese were likely to attack Pearl Harbor, and therefore he asked, “Why were the principal units of our Navy herded together in a harbor from which they could not escape?” The mistakes, he stated baldly, had not been made by the local commanders (who were already being scapegoated for the disaster) but in Washington. Despite this frankness (unthinkable in today’s intelligence bureaucracy), McCormack’s suggestion that a special and very carefully selected unit be set up to handle the priceless intelligence was heeded. “To do the work well,” he wrote afterward, “a man must have not only a broad education and background of information but must have more than his fair share of astuteness, skepticism and desire to solve puzzling problems; and he must have a capacity for laborious detail work that very few people have.” The people he had in mind were smart lawyers like himself, many of whom were from the same Cravath firm and almost all of whom were graduates of Yale and Harvard law schools.

  The new unit, Special Branch, was soon up and running, commanded by the above-mentioned Carter Clarke, with McCormack as his deputy. As Clarke put it to me many years later, “He furnished the brains, and I did the hatchet work.” Hatchet work apparently included not only fighting necessary bureaucratic battles but also executing sensitive missions for Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall, especially when they concerned threats to the great secret of the broken enemy codes. Thus in 1944 Clarke was dispatched by Marshall to dissuade presidential candidate Thomas Dewey from revealing that the United States had been reading Japanese messages before Pearl Harbor. Dewey had learned of this, Clarke explained to me, from General Hugh Drumm, a disappointed candidate for Marshall’s post as army chief of staff.

  Despite the vital necessity of preserving the supreme secret of the broken codes, it gave way to an overwhelming desire to kill a particular enemy leader. Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto had devised and commanded the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, America’s greatest-ever naval defeat, thereby earning demonization in domestic U.S. propaganda as “our chief individual enemy, next to Adolf Hitler, leather faced, bullet headed, bitter-hearted Isoroku Yamamoto.” By the spring of 1943, however, the Japanese advance had been stemmed. Yamamoto had been decisively beaten in the Midway battle, and more recently at Guadalcanal. Early that April, U.S. naval cryptograph
ers in Hawaii (one of whom was the future Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens) decrypted a message detailing the Japanese commander’s itinerary for a forthcoming inspection tour. American commanders saw an opportunity for revenge. Orders came from on high—by some accounts, from President Roosevelt himself—to “get Yamamoto.” His plane was accordingly intercepted and shot down over the Solomon Islands on April 18, 1943, by U.S. long-range P-38 fighters, a feat that rapidly prompted dangerous leaks imperilling the precious secret of the codes.

  Yamamoto’s death made little or no difference to the course of the war. His successor as commander continued his strategy of piecemeal attacks on the advancing Americans, who as usual in such matters claimed that his death had impacted enemy morale, as always an unverifiable claim. However, the attack would thereafter be cited as a positive example of the merits of high-value targeting.

  Overall, the partnership between the ruthless (he thought the commanders at Pearl Harbor should have been executed the morning after the attack) and foul-mouthed Clarke and the white-shoe lawyer McCormack was a great success, in large part because its leaders had direct relationships with the high command, specifically Clarke with General Marshall and McCormack with McCloy. By the end of the war the operation had vastly expanded, covering all theaters in Europe as well as in Asia in profitable partnership with the principal British intelligence service MI6, which itself controlled the legendary code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park. Its Pentagon offices were the most secret and closely guarded in the building, save for perhaps the adjoining suite of offices, the Washington headquarters of the Manhattan Project.

  As veterans of Special Branch told me many years later, by the summer of 1945, the team monitoring Japan, which included the eminent scholar and later ambassador Edwin Reischauer, had become convinced that the regime was ready to give up, providing only that the emperor be retained. According to these veterans, this conclusion was relayed to McCloy, who therefore argued at the highest levels that there was no need to drop the atomic bomb. Obviously, his well-informed efforts were of no avail, given that President Truman and his political advisers, as McCloy himself later confirmed to me, were determined to use the new weapon. “I remember when we got the news of Hiroshima,” Edward Huddleston, a Special Branch veteran, told me four decades later. “There was incredible shock in the office. People were saying things like ‘for god’s sake, why?’ We all knew perfectly well that the Japanese were only looking for some assurance that we wouldn’t hang the emperor, which was what they got in the end anyway.”