Obama’s Drone Revamp Gives Military Bigger Responsibility, Keeps CIA Role

By ADAM ENTOUS and GORDON LUBOLDU
June 16, 2016 

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Long-promised plan seeks to give the U.S. military the lead and increase transparency

WASHINGTON—A long- promised plan by President Barack Obama to shift control of drone campaigns around the world gives the U.S. military more responsibility but retains a Central Intelligence Agency role in the targeted-killing program, according to officials briefed on the arrangement.

Mr. Obama’s plan settles a three-year turf battle among the CIA, the Pentagon and a divided Congress over whether the time has come to scale back the CIA’s quasi-military role 15 years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The revamp stops short of giving the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command the full control of the drone wars that its congressional backers have sought. It also deals a setback to advocates inside and outside the administration for ending CIA involvement in lethal action so the agency can refocus on its core mission of gathering and analyzing intelligence.

The turf fight between JSOC and the CIA over drones highlights how government agencies and their supporters in Congress compete with one another for counterterrorism resources and, in this case, authority over the coveted role within the bureaucracy of pulling the trigger.

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A burqa-clad Yemeni woman walked in March past graffiti in San’a, Yemen, protesting U.S. drone operations.PHOTO: YAHYA ARHAB/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

When JSOC argued for taking over the program, the CIA and its allies pushed back. Mr. Obama settled for a compromise that gives JSOC control in most conflict areas but lets the CIA operate its own armed drones in at least two of them.

Under the White House plan, the CIA will keep its drone fleet and continue to run its covert targeted-killing program in the tribal areas of Pakistan, though the scope of the campaign there has narrowed significantly in recent years, the officials said.

In Yemen, the CIA will continue to fly its drones in search of wanted militants alongside JSOC’s drones. But under the White House compromise, JSOC will assume control of the CIA aircraft midflight and launch the missiles to take out the targets, the officials said.

The last-minute handover from CIA to JSOC in Yemen means the U.S. military will technically be responsible for all strikes in the country—even when the CIA’s drones and intelligence are used. That would allow the operations to be disclosed after the fact, whereas they would remain covert if the CIA launched the missiles.

In keeping with Mr. Obama’s 2013 pledge to give the U.S. military the lead and to increase transparency of U.S. drone operations, the plan puts JSOC in control of targeted-killing campaigns in other conflict areas, including Libya and Somalia, as well as the active war zones in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. In those theaters, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies provide support to JSOC.

White House National Security Council spokesman Ned Price declined to comment on the details of Mr. Obama’s drone plan, which the administration intended to keep secret.

But Mr. Price said: “The president has been clear that we must be more transparent about both the basis of our counterterrorism actions and the manner in which they are carried out. As part of this commitment to transparency, the president has said that he will increasingly turn to our military to provide information to the public about our efforts.”

Spokesmen for the CIA and the Pentagon declined to comment.

Jennifer Gibson, staff attorney at the human rights group Reprieve, said the move won’t protect civilians in countries where the U.S. uses armed drones, calling it a “mere shift in who pulls the trigger.”

Mr. Obama gave the CIA free rein when he came into office in 2009 to ramp up its drone campaign in the tribal areas of Pakistan and kill suspected militants threatening U.S. forces in neighboring Afghanistan.

The CIA’s aggressive approach decimated al Qaeda, but it also fueled anti-American sentiment in Pakistan, undercutting U.S. efforts to use billions of dollars in aid to encourage Islamabad to close ranks with Washington against militant groups.

“When we were growing up, we learned the American values that were preached and you always thought that the Soviets were the bad guys and the Americans were the good guys,” Pakistani politician Imran Khan, a former cricket star, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “That image is gone.”

Mr. Obama’s call to “transition” the drone program to the U.S. military from the CIA dates back to a major address at the National Defense University in May 2013.

Mr. Obama concluded that the lack of transparency surrounding the drone campaigns fueled misperceptions in Pakistan and Yemen that the strikes caused large numbers of civilian casualties, undermining U.S. credibility.

CIA strikes are covert operations, preventing U.S. officials from discussing them publicly. Shifting control of the drone programs to the U.S. military would give officials the leeway to talk about the operations after the fact, at least in vague terms, to counter the narrative that the U.S. was being heavy-handed.

Aides say Mr. Obama didn’t appreciate at the time of his National Defense University speech how intently the CIA and its backers in Congress would resist the proposed changes.

A behind-the-scenes battle ensued, pitting JSOC and its congressional allies against the CIA and its allies in the House and Senate intelligence committees. JSOC and its supporters wanted to take ownership of the drone wars and sideline the CIA. “Give it to us,” a U.S. official said of JSOC’s message to Congress.

JSOC had wanted to develop its own targeting information rather than rely on the CIA’s out of concern that the military would be blamed for any mistakes, the officials said.

The CIA and its congressional allies pushed back, arguing that JSOC didn’t have the capabilities to find high-value targets and then launch precision strikes that minimized the risk of civilian casualties. They pointed to strikes in Yemen by JSOC that drew fire from human-rights groups for causing civilian deaths.

Shifting control to JSOC would be dangerous, the CIA’s backers in Congress argued, asserting that a strike was 99% intelligence-gathering, which was in the spy agency’s wheelhouse. For CIA leaders, the drone program was a source of institutional pride that bolstered the spy agency’s standing in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks and criticism over its handling of intelligence on Iraq.

Officials say JSOC has gradually expanded its intelligence-gathering capabilities, closing the gap with the CIA in some areas.

In 2013, administration officials privately advocated “sunsetting” the CIA’s drone campaign in the tribal areas of Pakistan at the end of 2014, when Mr. Obama hoped to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan. Those withdrawal plans were scrapped, along with talk of ending the CIA program in the tribal areas of Pakistan in the near term.

U.S. officials said Mr. Obama never pledged to end the CIA’s role in the drone campaign. Rather, they said, he has gradually scaled back the scope of the CIA’s program in Pakistan’s tribal areas by limiting the number of targets on the spy agency’s so-called kill list.

But outside those areas of Pakistan, Mr. Obama has signaled his preference to use JSOC, rather than the CIA, to take out high-value targets, as he did in May when U.S. military drones killed Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.

Write to Adam Entous at adam.entous@wsj.com and Gordon Lubold atGordon.Lubold@wsj.com