WASHINGTON
— About once a month, staff members of the congressional intelligence
committees drive across the Potomac River to C.I.A. headquarters in
Langley, Va., and watch videos of people being blown up.
As
part of the macabre ritual the staff members look at the footage of
drone strikes in Pakistan and other countries and a sampling of the
intelligence buttressing each strike, but not the internal C.I.A. cables
discussing the attacks and their aftermath. The screenings have
provided a veneer of congressional oversight and have led lawmakers to
claim that the targeted killing program is subject to rigorous review,
to defend it vigorously in public and to authorize its sizable budget
each year.
That
unwavering support from Capitol Hill is but one reason the C.I.A.’s
killing missions are embedded in American warfare and unlikely to change
significantly despite President Obama’s announcement on Thursday that a
drone strike accidentally killed two innocent hostages, an American and an Italian. The program is under fire
like never before, but the White House continues to champion it, and
C.I.A. officers who built the program more than a decade ago — some of
whom also led the C.I.A. detention program that used torture in secret
prisons — have ascended to the agency’s powerful senior ranks.
Although
lawmakers insist that there is great accountability to the program,
interviews with administration and congressional officials show that
Congress holds the program to less careful scrutiny than many members
assert. Top C.I.A. officials, who learned the importance of cultivating
Congress after the resistance they ran into on the detention program,
have dug in to protect the agency’s drone operations, frustrating a
pledge by Mr. Obama two years ago to overhaul the program and pull it
from the shadows.
Perhaps
no single C.I.A. officer has been more central to the effort than
Michael D’Andrea, a gaunt, chain-smoking convert to Islam who was chief
of operations during the birth of the agency’s detention and
interrogation program and then, as head of the C.I.A. Counterterrorism
Center, became an architect of the targeted killing program. Until last
month, when Mr. D’Andrea was quietly shifted to another job, he presided
over the growth of C.I.A. drone operations and hundreds of strikes in
Pakistan and Yemen during nine years in the position.
In
secret meetings on Capitol Hill, Mr. D’Andrea was a forceful advocate
for the drone program and won supporters among both Republicans and
Democrats. Congressional staff members said that he was particularly
effective in winning the support of Senator Dianne Feinstein, the
California Democrat who was chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee until January, when Republicans assumed control of the
chamber.
Ms.
Feinstein for years has tried to beat back criticism of the program
from some liberal Democrats and human rights groups who have raised
questions about civilian casualties. C.I.A. officials have assured her,
she has said, that there are hardly any civilian deaths in the strikes.
“The
figures we have obtained from the executive branch, which we have done
our utmost to verify, confirm that the number of civilian casualties
that have resulted from such strikes each year has typically been in the
single digits,” Ms. Feinstein said in 2013.
But
the recent accidental deaths of the hostages are only the latest
example of how difficult it is for the C.I.A. to know exactly whom it is
killing. The White House provided a public accounting of the deaths
only because the victims were Westerners. The government has never
offered a detailed explanation of attacks that witnesses say killed
women and children.
The
confidence Ms. Feinstein and other Democrats express about the drone
program, which by most accounts has been effective in killing hundreds
of Qaeda operatives and members of other militant groups over the years,
stands in sharp contrast to the criticism among lawmakers of the now
defunct C.I.A. program to capture and interrogate Qaeda suspects in
secret prisons.
But
both programs were led by some of the same people. The C.I.A. asked
that Mr. D’Andrea’s name and the names of some other top agency
officials be withheld from this article, but The New York Times is
publishing them because they have leadership roles in one of the
government’s most significant paramilitary programs and their roles are
known to foreign governments and many others.
When
Ms. Feinstein was asked in a meeting with reporters in 2013 why she was
so sure she was getting the truth about the drone program while she
accused the C.I.A. of lying to her about torture, she seemed surprised.
“That’s a good question, actually,” she said.
Mr.
D’Andrea was a senior official in the Counterterrorism Center when the
agency opened the Salt Pit, a notorious facility in Afghanistan where
prisoners were tortured. His counterterrorism officers oversaw the
interrogation and waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri
and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. His actions are described in the withering Senate Intelligence Committee report about torture that was released late last year, although he was not identified publicly.
The
drone program has been largely immune from the criticism in Congress
that other C.I.A. programs have attracted. In 2009, for example, when it
became public that the agency had once hired the private security firm
Blackwater to hunt and kill suspected terrorists, a member of Congress
called Mr. D’Andrea a “murderer” during a private briefing, even though
the Blackwater program had never carried out any lethal operations. Mr.
D’Andrea was furious about his treatment, a former colleague recalled.
But he received no similar personal attacks for his leadership of the
drone program.
It
was two years ago that Mr. Obama gave a speech pledging to pull the
targeted killing program from the shadows, and White House officials
said they wanted to shift the bulk of drone operations from the C.I.A.
to the Pentagon, with the stated intent of making the program somewhat
more transparent. But the intelligence committees have resisted the
plan, in part because Mr. D’Andrea and other top agency officials have
convinced lawmakers that the C.I.A. strikes are more precise than those
conducted by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command.
As
part of a bureaucratic reshuffling last month by John O. Brennan, the
C.I.A. director, Mr. D’Andrea has been replaced as head of the drone
program by Chris Wood. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Mr. Wood held
leadership roles in Alec Station, the group that led the hunt for Qaeda
suspects and was central to the interrogation program. He ultimately was
in charge of that unit and would later serve as station chief in Kabul.
Most recently, he supervised all operations in Afghanistan and
Pakistan. Mr. Wood now runs a targeted killing program that is the
subject of multiple investigations that Mr. Obama announced last week.
And
yet the president has given no indication that he intends to shut down
the drone program, and both he and his aides continue to praise it as a
method of warfare that offers the White House an alternative to messy
wars of occupation like in Iraq and Afghanistan. A leitmotif of Mr.
Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012 was his administration’s success in
killing high-ranking Qaeda operatives in Pakistan — even if it was
never mentioned that the C.I.A. was doing the killing.
Despite
the drone program reforms that Mr. Obama announced in May 2013, White
House officials have shown little enthusiasm for ensuring that many of
them are adopted. It is the C.I.A., not the Pentagon, that continues to
carry out of all of the drone strikes in Pakistan and most of those in
Yemen. An internal administration proposal to create a counterterrorism
center at the Pentagon, modeled after the C.I.A. unit that runs the
drone strikes, was quietly scrapped.
When
Mr. Brennan, a former top White House counterterrorism adviser who
remains close to Mr. Obama, became C.I.A. director in late 2013, he
announced an intention to dial back the paramilitary operations that
have transformed the agency since the Sept. 11 attacks. His goal, he
said during his confirmation hearings, was to refocus the agency on the
traditional work of intelligence collection and espionage that had
sometimes been neglected.
But
that effort too is slow going, and Mr. Brennan has not pushed
forcefully for moving drone operations away from the C.I.A., something
he advocated when he was in the White House during Mr. Obama’s first
term. In a sign of the continued prominence of military operations
inside the agency, Mr. Brennan recently named Greg Vogel, a former
agency paramilitary officer, to take over the C.I.A.’s vaunted
Directorate of Operations. That position has traditionally gone to
C.I.A. officers who ascended the ranks because of their success in
traditional espionage work.
Mr.
Vogel, identified in news accounts as “Spider” and in a memoir by the
former C.I.A. Director George J. Tenet as “Greg V.,” was one of the
first C.I.A. officers to enter Afghanistan when the war began in 2001.
He was credited during that time with saving the life of Hamid Karzai,
the future Afghan president, during a bomb strike. He later served as
the C.I.A. station chief in Kabul and eventually became the head of the
agency’s Special Activities Division, which runs many paramilitary
operations.
The
C.I.A. launched its first drone strike in Pakistan in 2004, at a time
of growing concern in the government about abuses inside the agency’s
detention and interrogation program. Many in Congress expressed horror
at the grim details of torture carried out in the secret C.I.A. prisons,
even if some senior lawmakers had been briefed about many of the
interrogation methods during the birth of the program in 2002.
Operatives
in the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center drew a lesson from this
experience. They have given regular briefings to the intelligence
committees about the drone strikes and made sure to have both committee
members and their staffs visit the C.I.A. to watch the drone videos.
Sometimes,
lawmakers have used the briefings to ask questions about why specific
terrorism suspects have not yet been killed, and to express their dismay
that the C.I.A. is not being aggressive enough in its killing
operations. One such instance was in 2013, when senior Republicans on
the House and Senate intelligence committees were furious after they
heard that the C.I.A. had not yet killed Mohanad Mahmoud Al Farekh, an American citizen who had become a top Qaeda operations officer and was hiding in Pakistan.
At
the time, there was a debate in the government about whether Mr. Obama
should authorize another drone strike against an American citizen — the
first since the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011 — and whether it might be possible to capture, rather than kill, Mr. Farekh.
The
Republican lawmakers, Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina and
Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, said during the closed sessions
that the administration was being timid, and urged that Mr. Farekh be
hunted and killed.
He was eventually arrested by Pakistani security forces the next year, and is on trial in Brooklyn.
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