WASHINGTON - Four years ago, as a new al-Qaida affiliate in Yemen was proving itself a potent adversary, the Obama administration made plans to attack it with airstrikes just as the United States had been doing to the terrorist network’s core in Pakistan.
But this time, the White House decided there would be a key difference: The strikes in Yemen would be carried out by the U.S. military, not the CIA.
Two years later, in mid-2011, a mysterious construction project began to emerge in the Saudi desert: an elongated compound with a ribbon of concrete running parallel to the ridgelines of the surrounding dunes. CIA drones were about to enter the skies over Yemen after all.
The change was driven by a number of factors, including errant strikes that killed the wrong people, the use of munitions that left shrapnel with U.S. military markings scattered about target sites and worries that Yemen’s unstable leader might kick the Pentagon’s planes out.
But President Barack Obama’s decision also came down to a determination that the CIA was simply better than the Department of Defense at locating and killing al-Qaida operatives with armed drones, according to current and former U.S. officials involved in the deliberations.
Even now, as the president plans to shift most drone operations back to the military, many U.S. counterterrorism officials are convinced that the gap in capabilities has not been erased.
The issue has taken on heightened significance as Obama imposes new rules on U.S. counterterrorism operations that are designed to give the Pentagon the lead in the targeted killing of terrorism suspects overseas, reducing and perhaps eventually replacing the role of the CIA.
In a major speech Thursday, Obama talked of the seductive appeal of a weapon whose precision and secrecy offer a shield from accountability, saying it can “lead a president and his team to view drone strikes as a cure-all for terrorism.” Turning to Pentagon drones was described as a way to move the campaign out of the shadows of covert operations.
But even those who agree with the decision said it may prove more difficult for Obama to dismantle the CIA’s drone program than it was to shutter its secret prisons, because of the agency’s expertise as well as circumstances that at times enable the CIA to operate in places off-limits to the Defense Department.
“You have to go into this with some concern,” a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official said of the plan. “It didn’t work before. Will it work this time?”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, raised a related concern earlier this year when word of the administration’s plan began to surface.
Feinstein said that she had seen the CIA “exercise patience and discretion specifically to prevent collateral damage” and that she “would really have to be convinced that the military would carry it out that well.”
Critics contend that, despite Obama’s claims of accuracy, the CIA has killed hundreds of innocent civilians, along with as many as 3,000 militants, most of them low-level fighters, in Pakistan and Yemen.
A Yemeni activist, Fareaal-Muslimi, testified before Congress last month that the campaign has been indiscriminate, causing anti-U.S. sentiment to surge. “What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant,” he said. “There is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America.”
Since 2009, when Obama became president, the United States has carried out more than 360 strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, according to data compiled by the Long War Journal website. The CIA has accounted for the vast majority of those, including all 293 in Pakistan, where only the agency flies armed drones.
The drone campaign in Pakistan began under President George W. Bush and escalated after Obama took office. But from the outset, Obama administration officials expressed discomfort with the fact that an intelligence service had absorbed a lethal mission that had traditionally been the responsibility of the military.
In an interview in late 2010, a senior Obama administration official stressed that the CIA was running the drone campaign in Pakistan mainly because the agency was first to develop the technology after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and because Pakistan’s government insisted on secrecy so that it could deny any U.S. operations on its soil.
“It has been in Yemen a different story, a different history, a different evolution,” the official said, making clear that the administration regarded the CIA campaign as an anomaly and saw lethal operations as the province of the military.
U.S. officials cited a list of factors that contribute to the agency’s lethal efficiency. Among them is its expertise at penetrating terrorist groups through networks of informants, and the expertise of officers and analysts who tend to stay in their assignments longer than their military counterparts. The head of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center has been in the job for more than seven years, a time frame in which the Joint Special Operations Command has changed hands three times.
A second senior administration official said drone operations have been precise and accurate, regardless of whether they were carried out by the CIA or military.
Front Section, Pages 3 on 05/27/2013