Despite the Pakistani military’s claims that it was “absolutely absurd” that the strike had been carried out with U.S. assistance, the eyewitness quoted in the Dawn article claimed to have heard a drone flying overhead just prior to Muhammad’s assassination. The witness also claimed that the victim was speaking on a satellite phone at the time of his death. It should be recalled that Harethi was previously tracked down in Yemen by the NSA after he used a cell phone. It seems likely that Muhammad was killed by a drone after making the same mistake. Clearly the Pakistani military was trying to deflect criticism away from itself for collaborating with the infamous CIA by claiming the strike as its own.
Regardless of who actually assassinated Muhammad, no anti-American protests followed his death because the Pakistanis were successful in their efforts to take credit for the assassination. But CIA drones were operating from Pakistani soil at this time; in January 2003 a Predator had crashed after takeoff at the Jacobabad airfield in Baluchistan.27
The drones’ presence was even more evident almost a year after Muhammad’s death, when another terrorist was killed in the region, this time a top al Qaeda agent named Haithem al Yemeni. Yemeni was next in line to replace the number-three man in al Qaeda, Abu Faraj al Libbi, who had been arrested by the Pakistanis. Upon his arrest, Libbi had been interrogated and was said to have given details of Yemeni’s movements. These were then given to the CIA, which used a drone to assassinate Yemeni while he was riding in a car driven by a local Taliban warlord named Samiullah Khan.28 Yemeni was said to have been killed near Mir Ali, North Waziristan, on or before May 13, 2005, after being under surveillance by the CIA for more than a week. CIA officers had monitored his movements for several days in the hopes that he would lead them to bin Laden or Zawahiri, but decided to kill him after fearing that they would eventually lose him.29
At the time, a Cable News Network (CNN) analyst pointed out that if the word of Yemeni’s death at the hands of a CIA drone spread, it could “create political problems for the Pakistani government, which has been quietly cooperating with U.S. efforts to round up or kill al Qaeda operatives.”30 News of the assassination would of course be a public relations disaster for the Pakistani government, whose citizens were among the most anti-American people in the world, should it become known that government officials had given the CIA carte blanche to hunt its enemies on their territory
A National Broadcasting Company (NBC) source shed some important light on the relaxed procedures behind the covert campaign: “Sources told NBC News that the CIA has all the approvals necessary within its counterterror center in Langley, Va., to fire missiles within Pakistan when an al-Qaida target is spotted. The agency does not have to check with the White House or with Pakistani authorities or the CIA director. The purpose is to expedite rapid action in the field in case the opportunity is time sensitive.”31 This little noticed news was actually very important. In effect the Pakistanis and the White House had given the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (actually located in Tysons Corner, Virginia, not Langley) the green light to fire at will in the effort to assassinate targets in Pakistan, without seeking approval from either government.32
Years later President Musharraf admitted to giving the CIA permission to carry out surveillance with drones but denied giving the organization the right to fire missiles.33 This retroactive denial does not, however, seem plausible in light of the subsequent drone campaign carried out during his tenure as president. It is more likely that Musharraf gave the Americans full authority to hunt terrorists as part of his new relationship with them but kept this agreement hidden from his own people. The Pakistani authorities had thus come a long way since their days of supporting the Taliban. The CIA had also come a long way since September 4, 2001, when Director Tenet worried about issues related to how the U.S. government and others would react when Arab terrorists began being assassinated. Clearly the CIA was now actively hunting terrorists operating from the autonomous “Talibanistan” zone in the FATA, which was officially claimed by the Pakistani government.
Not all voices were in favor of this new cooperation in killing terrorists in Pakistan. The human rights group Amnesty International issued a statement after the killing of Haithem al Yemeni that said,
Amnesty International fears that, if the circumstances of these killings have been reported accurately, the USA has carried out an extrajudicial execution, in violation of international law. Amnesty International reminds the USA that it has condemned such unlawful actions when carried out by other states in the past. It calls upon the USA to end immediately all operations aimed at killing suspects instead of arresting them, investigate all past suspected cases of extrajudicial executions, and revoke all orders that may allow extrajudicial execution.34
Despite such calls for an end to the assassination campaign, the cooperation between Pakistan and the United States in carrying out the killings was expanded. In fact, NBC reported that the drone attack on Yemeni had actually been preceded by several strikes on sites in Pakistan described as terrorist training camps.35 This was not surprising considering the growth in terrorist camps in the FATA since the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001. According to one source, the Taliban and al Qaeda eventually established as many as 157 terrorist training camps throughout the FATA.36 Numerous terrorist attacks, including the 2002 Bali bombings, the 2003 Istanbul bombings, and the 2005 bombings in London, could be traced to these camps. The CIA feared that future 9/11s were being plotted in the terrorist camps in the FATA and continued to monitor them by means of high-flying drones.
Word that the reconnaissance drones were armed may not, however, have gotten out yet. That would change with the next assassination: the killing of the new number three in al Qaeda, Abu Hamza al Rabia, in November 2005. Rabia had been involved in two terrorist plots to kill President Musharraf.37 Before his death, one Pakistani source stated that he had been playing hide-and-seek with the CIA.38 In fact, he had survived a drone strike on November 5, 2005, that had reportedly broken his leg and killed his wife and child.39 Then he and four bodyguards, two of them Syrian, were mysteriously killed on November 30, 2005, at 1:45 a.m. in a village located near the capital of North Waziristan, Miranshah. Rabia died in an unexplained explosion that destroyed the mud-walled compound where he was living at the time.
In response to media inquiries about the possible role of a Predator in Rabia’s death, a Pakistani intelligence official ambiguously stated that the terrorist had been killed while “working with explosives.”40 But such comments directly contradicted eyewitnesses who reported seeing white streaks flying from the sky into the house.41 One witness reported, “I heard more explosions and went out to the courtyard, and when I looked up at the sky, I saw a white drone. I saw a flash of light come from the drone followed by explosions.”42
The truth came out when a local Pashtun freelance journalist named Hayatullah Khan was hired by the U.S. television show Frontline and traveled to the scene with a camera. There he filmed local villagers holding pieces of shrapnel with the words “U.S. Guided Missile, Contact Serno, AGM-114” clearly visible on them.43 Hayatullah’s pictures were subsequently broadcast around the world and deeply embarrassed the Pakistani government, which had sought to downplay its covert working relationship with the CIA.