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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Seymour M. Hersh discusses the ins and outs of investigative journalism.
Sometime on Sunday, November 3rd, an unmanned American Predator reconnaissance aircraft, flying out of a base in Djibouti, fired a Hellfire missile at an automobile in Yemen that was believed to be carrying an Al Qaeda leader named Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi. A joint American and Yemeni intelligence team had been tracking al-Harethi, and the order to fire was not given until the car was isolated, far from any other traffic--and from any witnesses--as it sped through a vast tract of desert in Marib province. Al-Harethi was in the car, along with five other men. All of them were killed.
The operation entailed a high level of technical cooperation and trust between the Americans and the Yemenis. The joint intelligence team, working out of a situation room in Yemen--a Yemeni official would say only that the site was not visible from the air--had been tracing al-Harethi's satellite telephone calls for weeks. Al-Harethi clearly was aware of the danger and frequently changed telephones and numbers; five cell phones were found on his body. Yemeni security officials arrived at the scene shortly after the blast--a helicopter had been standing by--and removed the bombed-out car. They took the bodies to a military hospital in Sanaa, Yemen's capital, where American officials collected DNA samples for processing at a military laboratory in the United States.
By the next day, Bush Administration officials had begun informing journalists that the Predator had made its first Al Qaeda kill outside Afghanistan. Some journalists were also told that al-Harethi, long sought for a role in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Aden harbor, in the fall of 2000, was on a list of "high-value" targets whose elimination, by capture or death, had been called for by President Bush. (A Defense Department consultant told me that, as of this fall, seven high-value Al Qaeda targets--"top guys that they're really after"--have been designated for elimination by the Bush Administration. According to the Yemeni official, there are still two high-value targets in Yemen.)
The Hellfire was meant for al-Harethi, but, Yemeni and American officials told reporters, the five passengers in the car had terrorist ties as well. Four of them belonged to the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army, an outlawed terrorist sect that had links to Al Qaeda, and the fifth had been identified as Kamal Derwish, an Arab-American who grew up near Buffalo and, according to the F.B.I., recruited American Muslims to attend Al Qaeda training camps. There is no indication that American or Yemeni officials knew in advance who was in the car with al-Harethi. The Yemeni official told me that there was no thought of blockading the highway and attempting to capture al-Harethi and his passengers, because he had evaded earlier attempts and because "it was suspected that they were going to a target." The official said, "From past experience, this was the most effective way."
The intelligence about al-Harethi that day had been superb. The Yemeni official told me, however, that earlier there had been two intelligence "mistakes" that almost resulted in targeting innocent Bedouins. In one case, the joint-intelligence center found a group of Bedouins whose armed pickup trucks--pickups are the main mode of travel in the desert--included at least one vehicle that was mounted with a heavy machine gun. The Americans were about to hit the truck with a Predator, the Yemeni official said, "but we had someone tracking it, too. He was asked by phone, 'Who are those people?' He said, 'Bedouins. Not Al Qaeda.' "
The Yemeni official also said that the al-Harethi operation had produced valuable diplomatic information. For example, the car bearing al-Harethi and his colleagues had Saudi plates, which led investigators to believe that al-Harethi had been shuttling back and forth along Yemen's border with Saudi Arabia. According to the official, al-Harethi had obtained operating funds from Saudis. Apparently, they...
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