They may get it soon enough. Late last week bin Laden appeared to be staging his last stand. Afghan fighters, aided by Delta Force and other U.S. and British Special Forces, closed in on the Tora Bora caves, while U.S. warplanes rained down precision-guided bombs as well as a couple of massive 15,000-pound Daisy Cutters. Bin Laden may still slip out through the snowy mountain passes to Pakistan, but President George W. Bush vowed, “We’ll get him.” The only question, it appeared, was when.
Indeed, in Washington war councils and at U.S. military headquarters around the world, attention is already turning to the next targets in the global war against terrorism. Top officials were beginning to talk, with a certain studied circumspection, about using the U.S. military to track down and eliminate key terrorists among Al Qaeda’s far-flung terror cells. With public anger surging again over the bin Laden tape and the president’s approval ratings staying above 80 percent in the latest NEWSWEEK Poll, the Bush administration has, in essence, a political license to kill. Whether a policy of targeting individual terrorist leaders is ultimately wise or even practical is a different and harder question.
No one doubts the necessity of capturing or killing terrorists before they can kill more Americans, perhaps thousands more with nuclear or biological weapons. But identifying, tracking and eliminating specific individuals can be a difficult and dirty business. And history shows that a policy of assassination–or, to use the old CIA euphemism, “executive action”–may ultimately fail or backfire.
By executive orders dating back to the Gerald Ford administration, U.S. officials are banned from plotting assassinations. At National Security Council meetings, officials never use the word “assassinate” or explicitly discuss targeting individuals, according to a knowledgeable source. Instead, officials talk of taking out “command and control” elements, structures and nodes, and of striking “strategically decisive” blows. Administration lawyers have decided that assassination in peacetime as a tool of retribution is outlawed. But attacks on enemy leaders in wartime to pre-empt future attacks–that’s fair game. Says a top U.S. official: “Go back to World War II. Didn’t we target Yamamoto?” (In 1943 U.S. warplanes ambushed and shot down the Japanese fleet commander.) The United States has targeted terrorists before–including bin Laden, whose training camps were hit by cruise missiles in 1998.
Earlier this fall, regional military commanders around the world were instructed, in general and bland terms, to analyze the terrorist threats in their region and to submit options to deal with the most dangerous of them. Their responses were due by the end of November, a deadline that has slipped a month. The options were to include not just military steps but diplomatic, financial and legal ones. Inevitably the regional commanders in chief (CINCs) have had to consider how they will find, target and take out terrorist leaders. NEWSWEEK has learned that one of the CINCs, Pacific commander Adm. Dennis Blair, has told colleagues that he is concerned about preparing “target folders” aimed at specific individuals. Blair is said to be worried about getting the military drawn into a murky and morally dubious world. When NEWSWEEK asked Blair to comment on his reported concerns, his spokesman, Cmdr. John Singley, carefully but pointedly replied, “The CINC believes you raise a serious issue, but he feels it is one for Defense Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld to best address.” Last week, in an interview with Rumsfeld, NEWSWEEK’s Lally Weymouth said to the Defense secretary, “You are said to have instructed the regional commanders to prepare actual plans as to how to kill Al Qaeda leaders.” Rumsfeld, in his usual brusque way, replied: “This is not true. The person who’s got this story is in need of adult supervision.” A senior Pentagon official later offered a more nuanced elaboration: no one in the Pentagon or the regional commands, said the official, has yet drawn up a plan of action. However, targeting individuals is “in my opinion, inevitable,” he said. “Terrorist organizations are not about buildings; they are not about weapons; they are, at their core, human beings. And usually not that many.”
Administration officials make no bones about trying to kill or capture bin Laden and his top lieutenants any way they can. Talking to reporters last week, Rumsfeld stated: “If they surrender, they may come out alive. If they don’t surrender, they may not… It’s kind of their choice. I, personally, would like to see people surrender. I, personally, would like to see us get our hands on them and be able to interrogate them and find out about the Al Qaeda networks all across the globe.” There is a risk, say Pentagon officials, that bin Laden will slip across the border to Pakistan. Smugglers’ trails wind through the snowy peaks. The tribesmen in the wild, lawless mountain region are generally sympathetic to bin Laden. On the other hand, they may be eager to gather the $25 million reward for information leading to his capture.
Small teams of American and British commandos are hunting for bin Laden. They carry thermal-imaging devices and night-vision scopes that allow them to snoop in all weather at all times. Delta Force snipers also carry a .50-caliber rifle with a round so powerful it can take out a car, as well as a man. The ground forces have high-tech eavesdropping devices to overhear bin Laden’s walkie-talkie conversations with his lieutenants. There were reports last weekend that bin Laden’s distinctive voice had been detected by the electronic sleuths. (U.S. reconnaissance assets include a plane called the RC-135 Rivet Joint, which can easily pick up short-range radio broadcasts.)
If he gets out of his cave alive, bin Laden could try to strike south, hugging the border all the way to Iran. But he will have to hope that he does not run into one of the U.S. Marine patrols that are starting to move up from Camp Rhino in the south near Kandahar. A NEWSWEEK reporter with the Marines was recently told that no provision was being made to take and hold prisoners of war. (The policy was reversed later in the week and crude pens were set up.) The reporter asked a leatherneck what he would do if he and his men captured a Qaeda fighter. Take him prisoner? The grunt responded with a laugh, “Prisoner?” By law, American soldiers cannot shoot an enemy soldier who clearly surrenders. Nonetheless, the Marines interviewed by NEWSWEEK said that they were in no mood to take prisoners. In front of Charlie Company at Camp Rhino, a sign declared: CAMP JUSTICE FOR AMERICA. A document called “the New Constitution” read: “We the people of the United States of America are going to kick your a–.” Would the Marines step in to stop executions of Taliban or Qaeda soldiers by the Afghan forces? “That’s a tough question,” replied Marine Maj. Jim Parrington. “We are not going to put ourselves in a position to observe that.”
Americans have long preferred to look the other way when it came to assassination and other shadowy practices. From time to time, American spies or Special Forces have employed foreign surrogates to do what the Soviets used to refer to as “wet work.” A recent example is revealing: in December 1995, in central Bosnia, a group of Croat soldiers at a roadblock opened fire on a car full of mujahedin, Arab fighters who had come to support the Muslim cause. Such killings were not unusual in Bosnia, even among forces formally on the same side, but this one was different. Only a week before, an American military officer had spoken with the Croat soldiers who opened fire on the car. Interviewed by NEWSWEEK’s Colin Soloway, the officer would not reveal what he said at the meeting, but with a wink he added that one of the men in the car had been a Libyan wanted for his role in the truck bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Recently a Bosnian news magazine quoted a former Bosnian counterintelligence officer who said that a U.S. officer had contracted the Croats to assassinate the Libyan terrorist. (American authorities justified the assassination under a little-known 1993 “lethal finding” signed by President Bill Clinton that gave permission to target terrorists.)
Carrying out assassinations–or indeed any kind of military operation–in a foreign country is an exceedingly delicate operation. Host countries do not look kindly on American hit squads roaming their cities. Generally speaking, U.S. allies prefer to use their own police and intelligence forces to round up and, if need be, eliminate terror suspects. Recently, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines rejected an offer by President Bush to send U.S. Special Forces to work with Filipino police to target and capture terrorists from the Abu Sayyaf group, which is at least loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda. U.S. Green Beret teams are now in the Philippines, but solely as unarmed advisers.
Such tricky issues of American intrusion on national sovereignty are among the considerations weighing on America’s regional military commanders, the CINCs who act as virtual viceroys in some parts of the world. A cautious concern for diplomacy, for not acting unilaterally as an arrogant superpower, is desirable and healthy, says a former high-ranking official in the Clinton administration. “I hope someone is drawing lines,” says the official. “You don’t want CINCs dropping into Yemen, popping someone in the head and leaving again. That would be a big reach from where we’ve been.” The notion that America is “at war” with terrorists is not justification enough, says the official. “We have a war on drugs, too, but we don’t kill drug lords.” (The former official did add, however, “we have proxies who do.”)
The U.S. military has generally preferred massive operations to stealthy hit jobs. “Of course the war on terrorism will involve us targeting individuals around the world,” says Gen. Wesley Clark, former commander of U.S. European forces. “The military view is that by and large it is not going to be done by the military. It ought to be done by the CIA and others, and we would be prepared to support if directed to do so.” The military’s insistence on going in massively or not at all has made it a balky, perhaps overly cautious force in recent years. “You couldn’t get them to do anything,” says the former Clinton official. “And they’d undermine attempts by the agency to run special ops that required military support. The military’s plan would be so unwieldy you couldn’t do it.” The official notes that the CIA flies Predator drone spy planes with a team of only a dozen operators, while the military requires several times that number.
Early in the war against terrorism, Central Command (CENTCOM), the Florida-based headquarters responsible for military operations in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, was slow to give the green light to hit certain targets. In mid-October, for instance, Navy Capt. Shelly Young, the judge advocate general for CENTCOM’s Gen. Tommy Franks, vetoed a bombing attack on a Taliban convoy of SUVs, according to an administration source. The target was so obvious that General Franks’s lawyers were worried about a trap: had the Taliban invited an attack on women and children to create TV images of atrocity? “No CINC wants to be accused of war crimes,” says the source, “so they’re very careful.”
At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld is known to have leaned hard on General Franks and the other commanders to be more aggressive and imaginative. It was Rumsfeld who pushed Franks to send in more Special Forces commandos to work with the Northern Alliance to coordinate attacks with U.S. bombing raids. Rumsfeld is said by close colleagues to have become frustrated with the sometimes ponderous military mind-set. The Defense secretary wants to make greater and more effective use of elite Special Forces who have been trained in “snatch and grab” operations. Rumsfeld’s barely concealed impatience reflects a widely shared view that modern-day military commanders have become risk-averse. Says former senator Warren Rudman, a Korean War combat veteran: “If Patton were a CINC, he wouldn’t be concerned.”
On the other hand, there are many military men with strong memories of the moral compromises and ultimate futility of American intervention in Vietnam. Jeff Smith, former general counsel of the CIA and a West Point graduate, knows of classmates who still have trouble sleeping because of their involvement in the Phoenix Program, a brutal Vietnam counterinsurgency program that resulted in thousands of assassinations of Viet Cong and their sympathizers. “Americans are not assassins,” says Smith. “There is a good reason for the ban on assassinations. The United States stands for the rule of law. I’m troubled by the U.S. engaging in assassinations because it creates a precedent that assassinations are a legitimate tool of international behavior.” He worries that terrorists and outlaw governments will be encouraged to take aim at American leaders. Others worry that if terrorist leaders feel personally threatened, they will lash out in rage. Senator Rudman scoffs at that argument, noting that Al Qaeda has already signaled its desire to send suicide bombers flying into the White House and the Capitol. “How the hell more angry can they get?” asks Rudman.
There is one more argument against assassination plots: they are difficult to carry out and often fail. The CIA’s history of botched attempts to knock off Fidel Castro in the 1960s (hiring the Mafia, using exploding cigars) would be funny if it weren’t tragic. In Congress, the oversight committees set up after those plots were revealed in the mid-1970s are watching closely to guard against repeat disasters–even as the agency has been unleashed. Sen. Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, says the CIA has been “given the go-ahead by presidential order to untie their hands and take the shackles off. They were told to get moving, basically, and given the backing of the president and Congress to do whatever it took.” An intelligence source tells NEWSWEEK that the money available for bribing foreign officials and paying informants has increased by a factor of 10 since September 11, while rules restricting the CIA from dealing with torturers and murderers have largely been wiped away. Nonetheless, says Shelby, “I would be careful in just assassinations per se. That’s a double-edged sword.” U.S. forces, he says, should pursue Al Qaeda, and “if they resist, kill them. If they surrender, let’s take them into custody. As far as sending in a hit team to take these guys out, I don’t know about that.” He says the intelligence committee would be briefed on any such operations, though, he concedes, “there are always things we don’t know.”
No one is suggesting a return to the old days of “plausible deniability,” when the CIA would manfully take the blame for blown or bungled intelligence operations. These days, intelligence operatives don’t want to be left holding the bag: they demand signed orders that go right to the highest levels. Privately, top spooks still worry that operations that seem bold and fully justified in the current atmosphere of retribution will look tawdry and scandalous to later generations. These officials fear they will wind up in the dock before indignant senators during some future investigation.
A long-term policy of assassination can produce at best mixed results. After the Palestinian terror group Black September slaughtered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Israeli intelligence set out to find and kill every one of the murderers. The Israelis succeeded. Some of their operations were brilliant, surgical in their execution. In the late'80s an Israeli commando team came from the sea to hit a Black September leader at his beachfront home in Tunisia. The Palestinians knew that the Israelis had carried out the hit–as opposed to a rival Palestinian faction–because the man’s wife and child were spared by the assassins. On the other hand, an Israeli hit squad also eliminated an innocent waiter in Norway by mistake.
It’s impossible to say that Israel’s policy of methodically eliminating terrorists has worked to stop terrorism. Indeed, the Israelis appear to be caught in a vicious cycle of tit-for-tat. But sometimes an embattled nation has no choice: it has to kill or be killed. President Bush and his top advisers will face some exceedingly difficult life-and-death decisions in the months ahead. They may never know if they succeeded in heading off further attacks on America. But they will know if they’ve failed.
