The Kingpin Strategy
Assassination as Policy in Washington and How It Failed, 1990-2015
By Andrew Cockburn
April 29, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - As the war on terror nears its 14th
anniversary -- a war we seem to be losing, given jihadist advances in Iraq,
Syria, and Yemen -- the U.S. sticks stolidly to its strategy of “high-value
targeting,” our preferred euphemism for assassination. Secretary of State John
Kerry has proudly cited the elimination of “fifty percent” of the Islamic
State’s “top commanders” as a recent indication of progress. Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi himself, “Caliph” of the Islamic State, was reportedly seriously
wounded in a March airstrike and thereby removed from day-to-day control of the
organization. In January, as the White House
belatedly admitted, a strike targeting al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan also
managed to kill an American, Warren Weinstein, and his fellow hostage, Giovanni
Lo Porto.
More recently in Yemen, even as al-Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula took control of a key
airport, an American drone strike
killed Ibrahim Suleiman al-Rubaish, allegedly an important figure in the
group’s hierarchy. Meanwhile, the Saudi news channel al-Arabiya has featured a
deck of cards bearing pictures of that country’s principal enemies in Yemen in
emulation of the
infamous cards issued by the U.S. military prior to the 2003 invasion of
Iraq as an aid to targeting its leaders. (Saddam Hussein was the ace of
spades.)
Whatever the euphemism -- the Israelis prefer to call it
“focused prevention” -- assassination has clearly been Washington’s favored
strategy in the twenty-first century. Methods of implementation, including
drones, cruise missiles, and Special Operations forces hunter-killer teams, may
vary, but the core notion that the path to success lies in directly attacking
and taking out your enemy’s leadership has become deeply embedded. As
then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
put it in 2010, “We believe that the use of intelligence-driven,
precision-targeted operations against high-value insurgents and their networks
is a key component” of U.S. strategy.
Analyses of this policy often refer, correctly, to the
blood-drenched precedent of the CIA’s Vietnam-era Phoenix Program -- at least
20,000 “neutralized.” But there was a more recent and far more direct, if less
noted, source of inspiration for the contemporary American program of murder in
the Greater Middle East and Africa, the “kingpin strategy” of Washington’s drug
wars of the 1990s. As a former senior White House counterterrorism official
confirmed to me in a 2013 interview, “The idea had its origins in the drug war.
So that precedent was already in the system as a shaper of our thinking. We had
a high degree of confidence in the utility of targeted killing. There was a
strong sense that this was a tool to be used.”
Had that official known a little more about just how this
feature of the drug wars actually played out, he might have had less confidence
in the utility of his chosen instrument. In fact, the strangest part of the
story is that a strategy that failed utterly back then, achieving the very
opposite of its intended goal, would later be applied full scale to the war on
terror -- with exactly the same results.
The Kingpin Strategy Arrives
At the beginning of the 1990s, the Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) was the poor stepsister of federal law enforcement
agencies. Called into being by President Richard Nixon two decades earlier, it
had languished in the shadow of more powerful siblings, notably the FBI. But
the future offered hope. President George H.W. Bush had only recently
re-launched the war on drugs first proclaimed by Nixon, and there were rich
budgetary pickings in prospect. Furthermore, in contrast to the shadowy drug
trafficking groups of Nixon’s day, it was now possible to put a face, or faces,
on the enemy. The Colombian cocaine cartels were already infamous, their power
and ruthless efficiency well covered in the media.
For Robert Bonner, a former prosecutor and federal judge
appointed to head the DEA in 1990, the opportunity couldn’t have been clearer.
Although Nixon had nurtured fantasies of deploying his fledgling anti-drug force
to assassinate traffickers, even soliciting anti-Castro Cuban leaders to provide
the necessary killers, Bonner had something more systematic in mind. He called
it a “kingpin strategy,” whose aim would be the elimination either by death or
capture of the “kingpins” dominating those cartels.
Implicit in the concept was the assumption that the United
States faced a hierarchically structured threat that could be defeated by
removing key leadership components. In this, Bonner echoed a traditional U.S.
Air Force doctrine: that any enemy system must contain “critical nodes,” the
destruction of which would lead to the enemy’s collapse.
In a revealing address to a 2012 meeting of DEA veterans held
to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the kingpin strategy’s inauguration,
Bonner spoke of the corporate enemy they had confronted. Major drug trafficking
outfits, he said, “by any measure are large organizations. They operate by
definition transnationally. They are vertically integrated in terms of
production and distribution. They usually have, by the way, fairly smart albeit
quite ruthless people at the top and they have a command and control structure.
And they also have people with expertise that run certain essential functions of
the organization such as logistics, sales and distribution, finances, and
enforcement.” It followed therefore that the removal of those smart people at
the top, not to mention the experts in logistics, would render the cartel
ineffective and so cut off the flow of narcotics to the United States.
Pursuit of the kingpins promised rich institutional rewards.
Aside from the overbearing presence of the FBI, Bonner had to contend with
another carnivore in the Washington bureaucratic jungle eager to encroach on his
agency’s territory. “DEA and CIA were butting heads,” recalled the former DEA
chief in a 2013 interview. “There was real tension.” Artfully, he managed to
negotiate peace with the powerful intelligence agency, “so now we had a very
important ally. CIA could use DEA and vice versa.”
By this he meant that the senior agency could use the DEA’s
legal powers for domestic operations to good advantage. This burgeoning
relationship brought additional potent allies. Not only was his agency now
closer to the CIA, Bonner told me, but “through them, the NSA.” A new Special
Operations Division created to work with these senior agencies was to oversee
the assault on the kingpins, relying heavily on electronic intelligence.
This new direction would swiftly gain credibility after the
successful elimination of the most famous cartel leader of all. Pablo Escobar,
the dominant figure of the Medellín cartel, was an object of obsessive interest
to American law enforcement. He had long evaded U.S.-assisted manhunts before
negotiating an agreement with the Colombian government in 1991 under which he
took up residence in a “prison” he himself had built in the hills above his home
city. A year later, fearing that the government was going to welsh on its deal
and turn him over to the Americans, Escobar walked out of that prison and went
into hiding.
The subsequent search for the fugitive drug lord marked a
turning point. The Cold War was over; Saddam Hussein was defeated in the first
Gulf War in 1991; credible threats to the U.S. were scarce; and the danger of
budget cuts was in the air. Now, however, the U.S. deployed the full panoply of
surveillance technology originally developed to confront the Soviet foe against
a single human target. The Air Force sent in an assortment of reconnaissance
planes, including SR-71s, which were capable of flying at three times the speed
of sound. The Navy sent its own spy planes; the CIA dispatched a helicopter
drone.
At one point there were 17 of these surveillance aircraft
simultaneously in the air over Medellín although, as it turned out, none of them
were any help in tracking down Escobar. Nor did the DEA make any crucial
contribution. Instead, his deadly rivals from Cali, Colombia’s other major
trafficking group, played the decisive role in the destruction of that drug
lord’s power and support systems, combining well-funded intelligence with
bloodthirsty ruthlessness.
His once all-powerful network of informers and bodyguards
destroyed, Escobar was eventually located by homing in on his radio and gunned
down as he fled across a rooftop on December 2, 1993. Though the matter is open
to debate, a former senior U.S. drug enforcement official assured me
unequivocally that a sniper from the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Delta Force
had fired the killing shot.
Following this triumph, the DEA turned its attention to the
Cali cartel, pursuing it with every resource available: “We really developed the
use of wiretaps,” Bonner told me. Patience and the provision of enormous
resources eventually yielded results. In June and July 1995, six of the seven
heads of the Cali cartel were arrested, including the brothers Gilberto and
Miguel Rodríguez-Orijuela, and the cartel’s cofounder, José “Chepe” Santacruz
Londoño. Although Londoño subsequently escaped from jail, he would in the end
be hunted down and killed. Continued U.S. pressure for the rest of the decade
and beyond resulted in a steady flow of cartel bosses into prisons with life
sentences or into coffins.
Cartel Heads Go Down and Drugs Go Up
The strategy, it appeared, had been an unqualified success.
“When Pablo Escobar was on the run, for all practical purposes, his organization
started going down... ultimately it was destroyed. And that's the strategy we
have called the kingpin strategy,” crowed Lee Brown, Bill Clinton’s “drug czar,”
in 1994.
In public at least, no officials bothered to point out that if
that strategy’s aim was to counter drug use among Americans, it had achieved
precisely the opposite of its intended goal. The giveaway to this failure lay
in the on-the-street cost of cocaine in this country. In those years, the DEA
put enormous effort into monitoring its price, using undercover agents to make
buys and then laboriously compiling and cross-referencing the amounts paid.
The drugs obtained by these surreptitious means, however, were
of wildly varying purity, the cocaine itself often having been adulterated with
some worthless substitute. That meant that the price of a gram of purecocaine
varied enormously, since a few bad deals of very low purity could cause wide
swings in the average. Dealers tended to compensate for higher prices by
reducing the purity of their product rather than charging more per gram. As a
result, the agency’s price charts showed little movement and so gave no
indication of what events were affecting the price and therefore the supply.
In 1994, however, a numbers-cruncher with the Institute for
Defense Analysis, the Pentagon’s in-house think tank, began subjecting the data
to more searching scrutiny. The analyst, a former Air Force fighter pilot named
Rex Rivolo, had been tasked to take an independent look at the drug war at the
request of Brian Sheridan, the hardheaded director of the Defense Department’s
Office of Drug Control Policy who had developed a healthy disrespect for the DEA
and its operations.
Having tartly informed DEA officials that their statistics
were worthless, mere “random noise,” Rivolo set to work developing a statistical
tool that would eliminate the effect of the swings in purity of the samples
collected by the undercover agents. Once he had succeeded, some interesting
conclusions began to emerge: the pursuit of the kingpins was most certainly
having an effect on prices, and by extension supply, but not in the way
advertised by the DEA. Far from impeding the flow of cocaine onto the street and
up the nostrils of America, it was accelerating it. Eliminating kingpins
actually increased supply.
It was a momentous revelation, running entirely counter to law
enforcement cultural attitudes that reached back to the days of Eliot Ness’s war
against bootleggers in the 1920s and that would become the basis for
Washington’s twenty-first-century counterinsurgency wars. Such a verdict might
have been reached intuitively, especially once the kingpin strategy in its most
lethal form came to be applied to terrorists and insurgents, but on this rare
occasion the conclusion was based on hard, undeniable data.
In the last month of 1993, for example, Pablo Escobar’s once
massive cocaine smuggling organization was already in tatters and he was being
hunted through the streets of Medellín. If the premise of the DEA strategy --
that eliminating kingpins would cut drug supplies -- had been correct, supply to
the U.S. should by then have been disrupted.
In fact, the opposite occurred: in that period, the U.S.
street price dropped from roughly $80 to $60 a gram because of a flood of new
supplies coming into the U.S. market, and it would continue to drop after his
death. Similarly, when the top tier of the Cali cartel was swept up in
mid-1995, cocaine prices, which had been rising sharply earlier that year, went
into a precipitous decline that continued into 1996.
Confident that the price drop and the kingpin eliminations
were linked, Rivolo went looking for an explanation and found it in an arcane
economic theory he called monopolistic competition. “It hadn’t been heard of for
years,” he explained. “It essentially says if you have two producers of
something, there’s a certain price. If you double the number of producers, the
price gets cut in half, because they share the market.
“So the question was,” he continued, “how many monopolies are
there? We had three or four major monopolies, but if you split them into twenty
and you believe in this monopolistic competition, you know the price is going to
drop. And sure enough, through the nineties the price of cocaine was plummeting
because competition was coming in and we were driving the competition. The best
thing would have been to keep one cartel over which we had some control. If your
goal is to lower consumption on the street, then that’s the mechanism. But if
you’re a cop, then that’s not your goal. So we were constantly fighting the cop
mentality in these provincial organizations like DEA.”
The Kingpin Strategy Joins the War on Terror
Deep in the jungles of southern Colombia, coca farmers didn’t
need obscure economic theories to understand the consequences of the kingpin
strategy. When the news arrived that Gilberto Rodríguez-Orijuela had been
arrested, small traders in the remote settlement of Calamar erupted in
cheers. “Thank the blessed virgin!” exclaimed one grandmother to a visiting
American reporter.
“Wait till the United States figures out what it really
means,” added another local resident. “Hell, maybe they’ll approve, since it’s
really a victory for free enterprise. No more monopoly controlling the market
and dictating what growers get paid. It’s just like when they shot Pablo
Escobar: now money will flow to everybody.”
This assessment proved entirely correct. As the big cartels
disappeared, the business reverted to smaller and even more ruthless groups that
managed to maintain production and distribution quite satisfactorily, especially
as they were closely linked either to Colombia’s Marxist FARC guerrillas or to
the fascist anti-guerrilla paramilitary groups allied with the government and
tacitly supported by the United States.
Much of Rivolo’s work on the subject remains classified. This
is hardly surprising, given that it not only undercuts the official rationale
for the kingpin strategy in the drug wars of the 1990s, but strikes a body blow
at the doctrine of high-value targeting that so obsesses the Obama
administration in its drone assassination campaigns across the Greater Middle
East and parts of Africa today.
Rivolo was, in fact, able to monitor the application of the
kingpin strategy in the following decade. In 2007, he was assigned to a small
but high-powered intelligence cell attached to the Baghdad headquarters of
General Ray Odierno, who was, at the time, the operational U.S. commander in
Iraq. While there he made it his business to inquire into the ongoing targeting
of “high-value individuals,” or HVIs. Accordingly, he put together a list of
200 HVIs -- local insurgent leaders -- killed or captured between June and
October 2007. Then he looked to see what happened in their localities following
their elimination.
The results, he discovered when he graphed them out, offered a
simple, unequivocal message: the strategy was indeed making a difference, just
not the one intended. It was, however, the very same message that the kingpin
strategy had offered in the drug wars of the 1990s. Hitting HVIs did not reduce
attacks and save American lives; it increasedthem. Each killing quickly prompted
mayhem. Within three kilometers of the target’s base of operation, attacks over
the following 30 days shot up by 40%. Within a radius of five kilometers, a
typical area of operations for an insurgent cell, they were still up 20%.
Summarizing his findings for Odierno, Rivolo added an emphatic punch line:
“Conclusion: HVI Strategy, our principal strategy in Iraq, is counter-productive
and needs to be re-evaluated.”
As with the kingpin strategy, the causes of this apparently
counter-intuitive result became obvious upon reflection. Dead commanders were
immediately replaced, and the newcomers were almost always younger and more
aggressive than their predecessors, eager to “make their bones” and prove their
worth.
Rivolo’s research and conclusions, though briefed at the
highest levels, made no difference. The kingpin strategy might have failed on
the streets of American cities, but it had been a roaring success when it came
to the prosperity of the DEA. The agency budget, always the surest sign of an
institution’s standing, soared by 240% during the 1990s, rising from $654
million in 1990 to over $1.5 billion a decade later. In the same way, albeit on
a vaster scale, high-value targeting failed in its stated goals in the Greater
Middle East, where terror recruits grew and terror groups only multiplied under
the shadow of the drone. (The removal of al-Baghdadi from day-to-day control of
the Islamic State, for instance, has apparently done nothing to retard its
operations.) The strategy has, however, been of inestimable benefit to a host
of interested parties, ranging from drone manufacturers to the CIA
counterterrorism officials who so signally failed to ward off 9/11 only to adopt
assassination as their raison d'être.
No wonder the Saudis want to follow in our footsteps in Yemen.
It’s a big world. Who’s next?
Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor of
Harper’s Magazine. An Irishman, he has covered national
security topics in this country for many years. In addition to publishing
numerous books, he co-produced the 1997 feature film The Peacemaker and
the 2009 documentary on the financial crisis American Casino. His
latest book is
Kill
Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (Henry
Holt).
Copyright 2015 Andrew Cockburn.