WASHINGTON — In the predawn hours of Jan. 29, a CIA Predator aircraft flew in a slow arc above the Pakistani town of Mir Ali. The drone’s operator, relying on information secretly passed to the CIA by local informants, sent the first of two Hellfire missiles toward a cluster of mud-brick buildings.
The missiles killed Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda commander and a man who had repeatedly eluded the CIA’s dragnet. It was the first successful strike against al-Qaeda’s core leadership in two years, and it involved, U.S. officials say, an unusual degree of autonomy by the CIA inside Pakistan.
Having requested the Pakistani government’s official permission for such strikes on previous occasions, only to be put off or turned down, this time the U.S. spy agency did not seek approval. The government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was notified only as the operation was underway, according to the officials, who insisted on anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities.
Officials say the incident was a model of how Washington often scores its rare victories these days in the fight against al-Qaeda inside Pakistan’s national borders: It acts with assistance from well-paid sympathizers inside the country but without getting the government’s formal permission beforehand.
It is an approach that some U.S. officials say could be used more frequently this year, particularly if a power vacuum results from Monday’s election. The administration also feels an increased sense of urgency about undermining al-Qaeda before President Bush leaves office, said one official familiar with the incident.
Both U.S. and Pakistani officials have repeatedly sought to obscure operational details revealing that key decisions are sometimes made in the U.S., not in Islamabad. Some Pentagon operations have been undertaken only after intense disputes with the State Department, which has worried that they might inflame Pakistani public resentment; the CIA itself has sometimes sought to put the brakes on because of anxieties about the consequences for its relationship with Pakistani intelligence officials.
U.S. military officials say, however, that the uneven performance of their Pakistani counterparts increasingly requires that Washington pursue the fight however it can, sometimes following an unorthodox path that leaves in the dark Pakistani military and intelligence officials.
Top Bush administration policy officials — who are increasingly worried about al-Qaeda’s use of its sanctuary in Pakistan to dispatch trained terrorists to the West — have quietly begun to accept the military’s point of view, according to several sources familiar with the context of the Libi strike.
“In the past, it required getting approval from the highest levels,” said one former intelligence official involved in planning for previous strikes. “You may have information that is valid for only 30 minutes. If you wait, the information is no longer valid.”
