A CIA drone strike in January that was aimed at a suspected al-Qaeda compound in Pakistan accidentally killed two hostages, including a kidnapped American, U.S. officials said Thursday.
U.S. officials said they didn’t realize until weeks later that two civilians had died in the attack — kidnapped aid workers Warren Weinstein of Maryland and Giovanni Lo Porto of Italy — despite assurances from the CIA at the time of the operation that only al-Qaeda fighters were present.
The CIA had been conducting surveillance on the site near the Afghan border for hundreds of hours, U.S. officials said.
The spy agency later discovered the strike had killed a second U.S. citizen: Ahmed Farouq. U.S. officials said the American had joined al-Qaeda years earlier and was among the suspected militants at the compound.
After the CIA slowly pieced together what had happened, the spy agency’s director, John Brennan, delivered the news to President Barack Obama last week. On Thursday, in brief remarks from the White House, a grim and downcast Obama informed the nation of the botched operation.
“As president and as commander in chief, I take full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations, including the one that inadvertently took the lives of Warren and Giovanni,” Obama said. “I profoundly regret what happened. On behalf of the United States government, I offer our deepest apologies to the families.”
The hostages
Weinstein, 73, had been held since 2011 after being kidnapped in Lahore, Pakistan. Lo Porto, 39, had been in al-Qaeda captivity since 2012.
Obama said he spoke Wednesday with Weinstein’s wife, Elaine, and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to inform them of the bungled operation.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the families of the two hostages will receive U.S. government compensation but declined to provide details.
Obama said the operation was “fully consistent with the guidelines” he has established for counterterrorism strikes against al-Qaeda but that he has ordered “a full review” of what happened.
“It is a cruel and bitter truth that in the fog of war generally and our fight against terrorists specifically, mistakes, sometimes deadly mistakes, can occur,” Obama said. “But one of the things that sets America apart from many other nations, one of the things that makes us exceptional, is our willingness to confront squarely our imperfections and to learn from our mistakes.”
Obama provided only limited details about the operation. He did not specify how or where the hostages were killed or which arm of the U.S. government was responsible.
A CIA spokesman declined to comment.
Two Pakistani intelligence officials, both of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, said they think Weinstein, Lo Porto and Farouq were killed during a Jan. 15 drone strike in the Shawal Valley in North Waziristan, part of Pakistan’s tribal belt.
Other casualties
A statement released this month by al-Qaeda’s media arm also reported that Farouq had been killed Jan. 15 in the Shawal Valley, but it did not identify the little-known figure as an American or make any mention of the hostages.
The CIA has been conducting drone strikes against al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan for more than a decade under a covert program first authorized by former President George W. Bush and substantially expanded by Obama. The strikes have caused widespread public anger in Pakistan for inflicting civilian casualties but have been tolerated by the Pakistani government as part of an unspoken arrangement with the U.S. government.
Although Obama did not mention it in his remarks, a third American was killed in a separate counterterrorism operation in January, the White House acknowledged in a statement.
Adam Gadahn, 36, a California native who converted to Islam and joined al-Qaeda more than a decade ago, was killed in a CIA drone attack in Pakistan within a week of the strike that killed the hostages, U.S. officials said.
Gadahn, who called himself “Azzam the American” and helped run al-Qaeda’s propaganda department, was indicted by a federal grand jury in 2006 on charges of treason.
As with the strike that killed Farouq and the hostages, U.S. officials said they were targeting a suspected al-Qaeda compound and did not realize that an American citizen was there.
Earnest said Obama had not personally approved the operations but that U.S. counterterrorism officials had the authority to conduct them.
Not “high-value”
Earnest described Gadahn and Farouq as al-Qaeda leaders but said the U.S. government had not classified either man as a “high-value target,” meaning they were not considered an imminent threat and otherwise would not have been singled out for a lethal attack.
Al-Qaeda had listed Farouq as a leader of its branch in the Indian subcontinent. U.S. officials said he was born in the United States and moved to Pakistan as a child.
It is not the first time that the U.S. government has killed Americans in drone strikes overseas. In 2011, a CIA drone in Yemen targeted and blew up Anwar al-Awlaki, a New Mexico-born cleric who was a key figure in al-Qaeda’s franchise on the Arabian Peninsula.
Four other Americans, including Awlaki’s teenage son, have died in drone attacks. In each of those cases, however, U.S. officials said they were unaware of the Americans’ presence beforehand and described them as incidental casualties.
Thursday’s disclosure of the accidental deaths was sure to bring increased pressure on Obama to curtail or scale back drone strikes, a signature tactic of his presidency.
