CIA expanding its use of drone strikes in Africa

DIRKOU, Niger - The CIA is poised to conduct secret drone strikes against al-Qaida and Islamic State insurgents from a newly expanded air base deep in the Sahara, making aggressive use of powers that were scaled back during the Obama administration and restored by President Donald Trump.

Late in his presidency, Barack Obama sought to put the military in charge of drone attacks after a backlash arose over a series of highly visible strikes, some of which killed civilians. The move was intended, in part, to bring greater transparency to attacks that the United States often refused to acknowledge its role in.

But now the CIA is broadening its drone operations, moving aircraft to northeastern Niger to hunt Islamist militants in southern Libya. The expansion adds to the agency’s limited covert missions in eastern Afghanistan for strikes in Pakistan, and in southern Saudi Arabia for attacks in Yemen.

Nigerien and U.S. officials said the CIA had been flying drones on surveillance missions for several months from a corner of a small commercial airport in Dirkou. Satellite imagery shows that the airport has grown significantly since February to include a new taxiway, walls and security posts.

One U.S. official said the drones had not yet been used in lethal missions, but would almost certainly be in the near future, given the growing threat in southern Libya. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the secretive operations.

A CIA spokesman, Tim Barrett, declined to comment. A Defense Department spokeswoman, Maj. Sheryll Klinkel, said the military had maintained a base at the Dirkou airfield for several months but did not fly drone missions from there.

The drones take off from Dirkou at night - typically between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. - buzzing in the clear, starlit desert sky. A New York Times reporter saw the gray aircraft - about the size of Predator drones, which are 27 feet long - flying at least three times over six days in early August. Unlike small passenger planes that land occasionally at the airport, the drones have no blinking lights signaling their presence.

“All I know is they’re American,” Niger’s interior minister, Mohamed Bazoum, said in an interview. He offered few other details about the drones.

Dirkou’s mayor, Boubakar Jerome, said the drones had helped improve the town’s security. “It’s always good. If people see things like that, they’ll be scared,” Jerome said.

Obama had curtailed the CIA’s lethal role by limiting its drone flights, notably in Yemen. Some strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere that accidentally killed civilians, stirring outrage among foreign diplomats and military officials, were shielded because of the CIA’s secrecy.

As part of the shift, the Pentagon was given the unambiguous lead for such operations. The move sought, in part, to end an often awkward charade in which the United States would not concede its responsibility for strikes that were abundantly covered by news organizations and tallied by watchdog groups.

However, the CIA program was not fully shut down worldwide, as the agency and its supporters in Congress balked.

The drone policy was changed last year after Mike Pompeo, the CIA director at the time, made a forceful case to Trump that the agency’s broader counterterrorism efforts were being needlessly constrained. The Dirkou base was already up and running by the time Pompeo stepped down as head of the CIA in April to become Trump’s secretary of state.

The Pentagon’s Africa Command has carried out five drone strikes against al-Qaida and Islamic State militants in Libya this year, including one two weeks ago.

The military launches its MQ-9 Reaper drones from bases in Sicily and in Niamey, Niger’s capital, 800 miles southwest of Dirkou.

But the CIA base is hundreds of miles closer to southwestern Libya, a notorious haven for al-Qaida and other extremist groups that also operate in the Sahel region of Niger, Chad, Mali and Algeria. It is also closer to southern Libya than a new $110 million drone base in Agadez, Niger, 350 miles west of Dirkou, where the Pentagon plans to operate armed Reaper drone missions by early next year.

Another U.S. official said the CIA began setting up the base in January to improve surveillance of the region, partly in response to an ambush last fall in another part of Niger that killed four U.S. troops.

The Dirkou airfield was labeled a U.S. Air Force base as a cover, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential operational matters.

Despite U.S. denials, a Nigerien security official said he had concluded that the CIA launched an armed drone from the Dirkou base to strike a target in Ubari, in southern Libya, on July 25. The Nigerien security official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified program.

A spokesman for the Africa Command, Maj. Karl Wiest, said the military did not carry out the Ubari strike.