Mogadishu
(Sunatimes) Nestled in a back corner of
Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run
by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the
facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings
behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four
corners. Adjacent to the compound are eight large metal hangars, and the CIA
has its own aircraft at the airport. The site, which airport officials and
Somali intelligence sources say was completed four months ago, is guarded by
Somali soldiers, but the Americans control access. At the facility, the CIA
runs a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and
operatives aimed at building an indigenous strike force capable of snatch
operations and targeted “combat” operations against members of Al Shabab, an
Islamic militant group with close ties to Al Qaeda.
As part of its
expanding counterterrorism program in Somalia, the CIA also uses a secret
prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA)
headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being Shabab members or of having
links to the group are held. Some of the prisoners have been snatched off the
streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu. While the underground
prison is officially run by the Somali NSA, US intelligence personnel pay the
salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners. The
existence of both facilities and the CIA role was uncovered by The Nation during an extensive
on-the-ground investigation in Mogadishu. Among the sources who provided
information for this story are senior Somali intelligence officials; senior
members of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG); former prisoners
held at the underground prison; and several well-connected Somali analysts and
militia leaders, some of whom have worked with US agents, including those from
the CIA. A US official, who confirmed the existence of both sites, told The Nation, “It makes complete
sense to have a strong counterterrorism partnership” with the Somali
government.
The CIA presence in
Mogadishu is part of Washington’s intensifying counterterrorism focus on
Somalia, which includes targeted strikes by US Special Operations forces, drone
attacks and expanded surveillance operations. The US agents “are here full
time,” a senior Somali intelligence official told me. At times, he said, there
are as many as thirty of them in Mogadishu, but he stressed that those working
with the Somali NSA do not conduct operations; rather, they advise and train
Somali agents. “In this environment, it’s very tricky. They want to help us,
but the situation is not allowing them to do [it] however they want. They are
not in control of the politics, they are not in control of the security,” he
adds. “They are not controlling the environment like Afghanistan and Iraq. In
Somalia, the situation is fluid, the situation is changing, personalities
changing.”
‘Essentially, the CIA
seems to be operating, doing the foreign policy of the United States,’ said a
well-connected Somali analyst.
According to
well-connected Somali sources, the CIA is reluctant to deal directly with
Somali political leaders, who are regarded by US officials as corrupt and
untrustworthy. Instead, the United States has Somali intelligence agents on its
payroll. Somali sources with knowledge of the program described the agents as
lining up to receive $200 monthly cash payments from Americans. “They support
us in a big way financially,” says the senior Somali intelligence official.
“They are the largest [funder] by far.”
According to former
detainees, the underground prison, which is staffed by Somali guards, consists
of a long corridor lined with filthy small cells infested with bedbugs and
mosquitoes. One said that when he arrived in February, he saw two white men
wearing military boots, combat trousers, gray tucked-in shirts and black
sunglasses. The former prisoners described the cells as windowless and the air
thick, moist and disgusting. Prisoners, they said, are not allowed outside.
Many have developed rashes and scratch themselves incessantly. Some have been
detained for a year or more. According to one former prisoner, inmates who had
been there for long periods would pace around constantly, while others leaned
against walls rocking.
A Somali who was
arrested in Mogadishu and taken to the prison told The Nation that he was held in a
windowless underground cell. Among the prisoners he met during his time there
was a man who held a Western passport (he declined to identify the man’s
nationality). Some of the prisoners told him they were picked up in Nairobi and
rendered on small aircraft to Mogadishu, where they were handed over to Somali
intelligence agents. Once in custody, according to the senior Somali
intelligence official and former prisoners, some detainees are freely
interrogated by US and French agents. “Our goal is to please our partners, so
we get more [out] of them, like any relationship,” said the Somali intelligence
official in describing the policy of allowing foreign agents, including from
the CIA, to interrogate prisoners. The Americans, according to the Somali
official, operate unilaterally in the country, while the French agents are
embedded within the African Union force known as AMISOM.
Among the men
believed to be held in the secret underground prison is Ahmed Abdullahi Hassan,
a 25- or 26-year-old Kenyan citizen who disappeared from the congested Somali
slum of Eastleigh in Nairobi around July 2009. After he went missing, Hassan’s
family retained Mbugua Mureithi, a well-known Kenyan human rights lawyer, who
filed a habeas petition on his behalf. The Kenyan government responded that
Hassan was not being held in Kenya and said it had no knowledge of his
whereabouts. His fate remained a mystery until this spring, when another man
who had been held in the Mogadishu prison contacted Clara Gutteridge, a veteran
human rights investigator with the British legal organization Reprieve, and
told her he had met Hassan in the prison. Hassan, he said, had told him how
Kenyan police had knocked down his door, snatched him and taken him to a secret
location in Nairobi. The next night, Hassan had said, he was rendered to
Mogadishu.
According to the
former fellow prisoner, Hassan told him that his captors took him to Wilson
Airport: “‘They put a bag on my head, Guantánamo style. They tied my hands
behind my back and put me on a plane. In the early hours we landed in
Mogadishu. The way I realized I was in Mogadishu was because of the smell of
the sea—the runway is just next to the seashore. The plane lands and touches
the sea. They took me to this prison, where I have been up to now. I have been
here for one year, seven months. I have been interrogated so many times.
Interrogated by Somali men and white men. Every day. New faces show up. They
have nothing on me. I have never seen a lawyer, never seen an outsider. Only
other prisoners, interrogators, guards. Here there is no court or tribunal.’”
After meeting the man
who had spoken with Hassan in the underground prison, Gutteridge began working
with Hassan’s Kenyan lawyers to determine his whereabouts. She says he has
never been charged or brought before a court. “Hassan’s abduction from Nairobi
and rendition to a secret prison in Somalia bears all the hallmarks of a
classic US rendition operation,” she says. The US official interviewed for this
article denied the CIA had rendered Hassan but said, “The United States
provided information which helped get Hassan—a dangerous terrorist—off the
street.” Human Rights Watch and Reprieve have documented that Kenyan security
and intelligence forces have facilitated scores of renditions for the US and
other governments, including eighty-five people rendered to Somalia in 2007
alone. Gutteridge says the director of the Mogadishu prison told one of her
sources that Hassan had been targeted in Nairobi because of intelligence
suggesting he was the “right-hand man” of Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, at the time a
leader of Al Qaeda in East Africa. Nabhan, a Kenyan citizen of Yemeni descent,
was among the top suspects sought for questioning by US authorities over his
alleged role in the coordinated 2002 attacks on a tourist hotel and an Israeli
aircraft in Mombasa, Kenya, and possible links to the 1998 US Embassy bombings
in Kenya and Tanzania.
An intelligence
report leaked by the Kenyan Anti-Terrorist Police Unit in October 2010 alleged
that Hassan, a “former personal assistant to Nabhan…was injured while fighting
near the presidential palace in Mogadishu in 2009.” The authenticity of the
report cannot be independently confirmed, though Hassan did have a leg
amputated below the knee, according to his former fellow prisoner in Mogadishu.
Two months after
Hassan was allegedly rendered to the secret Mogadishu prison, Nabhan, the man
believed to be his Al Qaeda boss, was killed in the first known targeted
killing operation in Somalia authorized by President Obama. On September 14,
2009, a team from the elite US counterterrorism force, the Joint Special
Operations Command (JSOC), took off by helicopters from a US Navy ship off
Somalia’s coast and penetrated Somali airspace. In broad daylight, in an
operation code-named Celestial Balance, they gunned down Nabhan’s convoy from
the air. JSOC troops then landed and collected at least two of the bodies,
including Nabhan’s.
Hassan’s lawyers are
preparing to file a habeas petition on his behalf in US courts. “Hassan’s case
suggests that the US may be involved in a decentralized, out-sourced Guantánamo
Bay in central Mogadishu,” his legal team asserted in a statement to The Nation. “Mr. Hassan must be
given the opportunity to challenge both his rendition and continued detention
as a matter of urgency. The US must urgently confirm exactly what has been done
to Mr. Hassan, why he is being held, and when he will be given a fair hearing.”
Gutteridge, who has
worked extensively tracking the disappearances of terror suspects in Kenya, was
deported from Kenya on May 11.
The underground
prison where Hassan is allegedly being held is housed in the same building once
occupied by Somalia’s infamous National Security Service (NSS) during the
military regime of Siad Barre , who ruled from 1969 to 1991. The former
prisoner who met Hassan there said he saw an old NSS sign outside. During
Barre’s regime, the notorious basement prison and interrogation center, which
sits behind the presidential palace in Mogadishu, was a staple of the state’s
apparatus of repression. It was referred to as Godka, “The Hole.”
“The bunker is there,
and that’s where the intelligence agency does interrogate people,” says
Abdirahman “Aynte” Ali, a Somali analyst who has researched the Shabab and
Somali security forces. “When CIA and other intelligence agencies—who actually
are in Mogadishu—want to interrogate those people, they usually just do that.”
Somali officials “start the interrogation, but then foreign intelligence
agencies eventually do their own interrogation as well, the Americans and the
French.” The US official said that US agents’ “debriefing” prisoners in the
facility has “been done on only rare occasions” and always jointly with Somali
agents.
Some prisoners, like
Hassan, were allegedly rendered from Nairobi, while in other cases, according
to Aynte, “the US and other intelligence agencies have notified the Somali
intelligence agency that some people, some suspects, people who have been in
contact with the leadership of Al Shabab, are on their way to Mogadishu on a
[commercial] plane, and to essentially be at the airport for those people.
Catch them, interrogate them.”
* * *
In the eighteen years
since the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident in Mogadishu, US policy on
Somalia has been marked by neglect, miscalculation and failed attempts to use warlords
to build indigenous counterterrorism capacity, many of which have backfired
dramatically. At times, largely because of abuses committed by Somali militias
the CIA has supported, US policy has strengthened the hand of the very groups
it purports to oppose and inadvertently aided the rise of militant groups,
including the Shabab. Many Somalis viewed the Islamic movement known as the
Islamic Courts Union, which defeated the CIA’s warlords in Mogadishu in 2006,
as a stabilizing, albeit ruthless, force. The ICU was dismantled in a US-backed
Ethiopian invasion in 2007. Over the years, a series of weak Somali
administrations have been recognized by the United States and other powers as
Somalia’s legitimate government. Ironically, its current president is a former
leader of the ICU.
Today, Somali
government forces control roughly thirty square miles of territory in Mogadishu
thanks in large part to the US-funded and -armed 9,000-member AMISOM force.
Much of the rest of the city is under the control of the Shabab or warlords.
Outgunned, the Shabab has increasingly relied on the linchpins of asymmetric
warfare—suicide bombings, roadside bombs and targeted assassinations. The
militant group has repeatedly shown that it can strike deep in the heart of its
enemies’ territory. On June 9, in one of its most spectacular suicide attacks
to date, the Shabab assassinated the Somali government’s minister of interior
affairs and national security, Abdishakur Sheikh Hassan Farah, who was attacked
in his residence by his niece. The girl, whom the minister was putting through
university, blew herself up and fatally wounded her uncle. He died hours later
in the hospital. Farah was the fifth Somali minister killed by the Shabab in
the past two years and the seventeenth official assassinated since 2006. Among
the suicide bombers the Shabab has deployed were at least three US citizens of
Somali descent; at least seven other Americans have died fighting alongside the
Shabab, a fact that has not gone unnoticed in Washington or Mogadishu.
During his
confirmation hearings in June to become the head of the US Special Operations
Command, Vice Admiral William McRaven said, “From my standpoint as a former
JSOC commander, I can tell you we were looking very hard” at Somalia. McRaven
said that in order to expand successful “kinetic strikes” there, the United
States will have to increase its use of drones as well as on-the-ground
intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations. “Any expansion of
manpower is going to have to come with a commensurate expansion of the
enablers,” McRaven declared. The expanding US counterterrorism program in
Mogadishu appears to be part of that effort.
In an interview with The Nation in Mogadishu,
Abdulkadir Moallin Noor, the minister of state for the presidency, confirmed
that US agents “are working with our intelligence” and “giving them training.”
Regarding the US counterterrorism effort, Noor said bluntly, “We need more;
otherwise, the terrorists will take over the country.”
It is unclear how
much control, if any, Somalia’s internationally recognized president, Sheikh
Sharif Sheikh Ahmed , has over this counterterrorism force or if he is even
fully briefed on its operations. The CIA personnel and other US intelligence
agents “do not bother to be in touch with the political leadership of the
country. And that says a lot about the intentions,” says Aynte. “Essentially,
the CIA seems to be operating, doing the foreign policy of the United States.
You should have had State Department people doing foreign policy, but the CIA
seems to be doing it across the country.”
While the Somali
officials interviewed for this story said the CIA is the lead US agency on the
Mogadishu counterterrorism program, they also indicated that US military
intelligence agents are at times involved. When asked if they are from JSOC or
the Defense Intelligence Agency, the senior Somali intelligence official
responded, “We don’t know. They don’t tell us.”
In April Ahmed
Abdulkadir Warsame, a Somali man the United States alleged had links to the
Shabab, was captured by JSOC forces in the Gulf of Aden. He was held
incommunicado on a US Navy vessel for more than two months; in July he was
transferred to New York and indicted on terrorism charges. Warsame’s case
ignited a legal debate over the Obama administration’s policies on capturing
and detaining terror suspects, particularly in light of the widening
counterterrorism campaigns in Somalia and Yemen.
On June 23 the United
States reportedly carried out a drone strike against alleged Shabab members
near Kismayo, 300 miles from the Somali capital. As with the Nabhan operation,
a JSOC team swooped in on helicopters and reportedly snatched the bodies of
those killed and wounded. The men were taken to an undisclosed location. On
July 6 three more US strikes reportedly targeted Shabab training camps in the
same area. Somali analysts warned that if the US bombings cause civilian
deaths, as they have in the past, they could increase support for the Shabab.
Asked in an interview with The Nation in Mogadishu if US
drone strikes strengthen or weaken his government, President Sharif replied,
“Both at the same time. For our sovereignty, it’s not good to attack a
sovereign country. That’s the negative part. The positive part is you’re
targeting individuals who are criminals.”
A week after the June
23 strike, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan,
described an emerging US strategy that would focus not on “deploying large
armies abroad but delivering targeted, surgical pressure to the groups that
threaten us.” Brennan singled out the Shabab, saying, “From the territory it
controls in Somalia, Al Shabab continues to call for strikes against the United
States,” adding, “We cannot and we will not let down our guard. We will
continue to pummel Al Qaeda and its ilk.”
While the United
States appears to be ratcheting up both its rhetoric and its drone strikes
against the Shabab, it has thus far been able to strike only in rural areas
outside Mogadishu. These operations have been isolated and infrequent, and
Somali analysts say they have failed to disrupt the Shabab’s core leadership,
particularly in Mogadishu.
In a series of
interviews in Mogadishu, several of the country’s recognized leaders, including
President Sharif, called on the US government to quickly and dramatically
increase its assistance to the Somali military in the form of training,
equipment and weapons. Moreover, they argue that without viable civilian
institutions, Somalia will remain ripe for terrorist groups that can further
destabilize not only Somalia but the region. “I believe that the US should help
the Somalis to establish a government that protects civilians and its people,”
Sharif said.
In the battle against
the Shabab, the United States does not, in fact, appear to have cast its lot
with the Somali government. The emerging US strategy on Somalia—borne out in
stated policy, expanded covert presence and funding plans—is two-pronged: On
the one hand, the CIA is training, paying and at times directing Somali
intelligence agents who are not firmly under the control of the Somali
government, while JSOC conducts unilateral strikes without the prior knowledge
of the government; on the other, the Pentagon is increasing its support for and
arming of the counterterrorism operations of non-Somali African military
forces.
A draft of a defense
spending bill approved in late June by the Senate Armed Services Committee
would authorize more than $75 million in US counterterrorism assistance aimed
at fighting the Shabab and Al Qaeda in Somalia. The bill, however, did not
authorize additional funding for Somalia’s military, as the country’s leaders
have repeatedly asked. Instead, the aid package would dramatically increase US
arming and financing of AMISOM’s forces, particularly from Uganda and Burundi,
as well as the militaries of Djibouti, Kenya and Ethiopia. The Somali military,
the committee asserted, is unable to “exercise control of its territory.”
That makes it all the
more ironic that perhaps the greatest tactical victory won in recent years in
Somalia was delivered not by AMISOM, the CIA or JSOC but by members of a Somali
militia fighting as part of the government’s chaotic local military. And it was
a pure accident.
Late in the evening
on June 7, a man whose South African passport identified him as Daniel Robinson
was in the passenger seat of a Toyota SUV driving on the outskirts of Mogadishu
when his driver, a Kenyan national, missed a turn and headed straight toward a
checkpoint manned by Somali forces. A firefight broke out, and the two men
inside the car were killed. The Somali forces promptly looted the laptops,
cellphones, documents, weapons and $40,000 in cash they found in the car,
according to the senior Somali intelligence official.
Upon discovering that
the men were foreigners, the Somali NSA launched an investigation and recovered
the items that had been looted. “There was a lot of English and Arabic stuff,
papers,” recalls the Somali intelligence official, containing “very tactical
stuff” that appeared to be linked to Al Qaeda, including “two senior people
communicating.” The Somali agents “realized it was an important man” and
informed the CIA in Mogadishu. The men’s bodies were taken to the NSA. The
Americans took DNA samples and fingerprints and flew them to Nairobi for
processing.
Within hours, the
United States confirmed that Robinson was in fact Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a
top leader of Al Qaeda in East Africa and its chief liaison with the Shabab.
Fazul, a twenty-year veteran of Al Qaeda, had been indicted by the United
States for his alleged role in the 1998 US Embassy bombings and was on the
FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list. A JSOC attempt to kill him in a January
2007 airstrike resulted in the deaths of at least seventy nomads in rural
Somalia, and he had been underground ever since. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton called Fazul’s death “a significant blow to Al Qaeda, its extremist
allies and its operations in East Africa. It is a just end for a terrorist who
brought so much death and pain to so many innocents.”
At its facilities in
Mogadishu, the CIA and its Somali NSA agents continue to pore over the
materials recovered from Fazul’s car, which served as a mobile headquarters.
Some deleted and encrypted files were recovered and decoded by US agents. The
senior Somali intelligence official said that the intelligence may prove more
valuable on a tactical level than the cache found in Osama bin Laden’s house in
Pakistan, especially in light of the increasing US focus on East Africa. The
Americans, he said, were “unbelievably grateful”; he hopes it means they will
take Somalia’s forces more seriously and provide more support.
But the United States
continues to wage its campaign against the Shabab primarily by funding the
AMISOM forces, which are not conducting their mission with anything resembling
surgical precision. Instead, over the past several months the AMISOM forces in
Mogadishu have waged a merciless campaign of indiscriminate shelling of Shabab
areas, some of which are heavily populated by civilians. While AMISOM regularly
puts out press releases boasting of gains against the Shabab and the retaking
of territory, the reality paints a far more complicated picture.
Throughout the areas
AMISOM has retaken is a honeycomb of underground tunnels once used by Shabab
fighters to move from building to building. By some accounts, the tunnels
stretch continuously for miles. Leftover food, blankets and ammo cartridges lay
scattered near “pop-up” positions once used by Shabab snipers and guarded by
sandbags—all that remain of guerrilla warfare positions. Not only have the
Shabab fighters been cleared from the aboveground areas; the civilians that
once resided there have been cleared too. On several occasions in late June,
AMISOM forces fired artillery from their airport base at the Bakaara market, where
whole neighborhoods are totally abandoned. Houses lie in ruins and animals
wander aimlessly, chewing trash. In some areas, bodies have been hastily buried
in trenches with dirt barely masking the remains. On the side of the road in
one former Shabab neighborhood, a decapitated corpse lay just meters from a new
government checkpoint.
In late June the
Pentagon approved plans to send $45 million worth of military equipment to
Uganda and Burundi, the two major forces in the AMISOM operation. Among the new
items are four small Raven surveillance drones, night-vision and communications
equipment and other surveillance gear, all of which augur a more targeted
campaign. Combined with the attempt to build an indigenous counterterrorism
force at the Somali NSA, a new US counterterrorism strategy is emerging.
But according to the
senior Somali intelligence official, who works directly with the US agents, the
CIA-led program in Mogadishu has brought few tangible gains. “So far what we
have not seen is the results in terms of the capacity of the [Somali] agency,”
says the official. He conceded that neither US nor Somali forces have been able
to conduct a single successful targeted mission in the Shabab’s areas in the
capital. In late 2010, according to the official, US-trained Somali agents
conducted an operation in a Shabab area that failed terribly and resulted in
several of them being killed. “There was an attempt, but it was a haphazard
one,” he recalls. They have not tried another targeted operation in Shabab-controlled
territory since.
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The CIA’s Secret Sites in Mogadishu, Somalia
The CIA presence in Mogadishu is part of Washington’s intensifying counterterrorism focus on Somalia, which includes targeted strikes by US Special Operations forces, drone attacks and expanded surveillance operations