IN SEPTEMBER 2011 a fleet of Predator and Reaper drones took off from a secret CIA base in the Saudi desert. They crossed into Yemen and began patiently tracking a convoy of vehicles that was travelling near the border with Saudi Arabia. America’s spy agency had earlier recruited a source within al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula. He was now providing information about the movements of Anwar al-Awlaki, the group’s chief propagandist and strategist, and the man at the top of the CIA’s wanted list since the killing of Osama bin Laden a few months before.
在2011年9月，一支由“捕食者”和“收割者”无人机组成的机队，从沙特阿拉伯沙漠里的一处中情局秘密基地起飞，跃过边境进入也门，开始耐心地跟踪一个正在也沙边境行进的车队。美国情报机构早先已经在基地组织阿拉伯半岛分支中招募了一名线人，现在由他提供有关安瓦尔•阿尔•奥拉基动向的情报，后者是基地组织宣传和战略负责人，也是本拉登在几个月前被击毙之后，中情局通缉名单上的第一人。
The group had stopped for breakfast but, sensing the circling drones, they rushed back to the cars. Moments later, lasers from the Predators lit up the vehicles and the Reaper launched its missiles. Everyone was killed including al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, the editor of an online jihadist magazine. Both were Americans.
车队停下来吃早餐，但当他们发现无人机正在盘旋，就立刻向汽车奔去。片刻之后，捕食者发射激光照亮了车队，收割者也发射了导弹。所有人都被杀死，包括奥拉基和萨米尔•罕，后者是一份圣战主义网络杂志的编辑。这两人都是美国人。
The targeted assassination of al-Awlaki, who had been behind a number of high-profile plots, from the Fort Hood shootings to the Christmas “underwear bomber” and an attempt to bring down cargo aircraft with exploding toner cartridges, created a minor stir among civil-liberties groups claiming that his citizenship entitled him to “due process”. But for most Americans it was further evidence that the secret war to protect them from their enemies was going pretty well. Drones had become the weapon of choice. To the surprise of some, a programme that had begun under George W. Bush had been dramatically ramped up by Barack Obama. The former Harvard student and Chicago law professor routinely approved what amounted to execution lists provided by John Brennan, his personal counter-terrorism adviser.
奥拉基是一系列倍受瞩目的阴谋之后的主谋，包括胡德堡枪击案，圣诞节“内衣炸弹”以及一次企图用藏有爆炸物的碳粉盒炸毁货机的图谋。对他的定点暗杀行为在民权组织中只激起了少许动静，他们声称奥拉基的国籍决定了他应当享有“正当法律程序”。但对大多数美国人来说，该行动进一步证实了这场防止敌人为害美国的秘密战争打得有声有色。无人机已经成为不二之选。让许多人感到惊奇的是，这项开始于布什任上的行动得到了欧巴马的大力支持。这位哈佛毕业生和芝加哥法学教授定期批准该“干掉”谁，名单则由他的私人反恐顾问约翰•布伦南提供。
Mr Brennan, a former CIA analyst, is now back at the agency as its director. America’s drone campaign has become symbolic of a new kind of shadow war fought, as Mr Brennan has put it, with a “scalpel” rather than a “hammer”. It is the story of this war, waged in far-off lands by spies, special forces and robotised killing machines, that Mark Mazzetti, a Pulitzer-prizewinning New York Times reporter, tells with some verve and much new detail in “The Way of the Knife”.
布伦南先生曾任中情局分析员，现在回到中情局任局长。美国的无人机战争已经成为了新一代影子战争的标志，按布伦南的说法，是用“手术刀”而不是“锤子”。本书《刀锋之路》就是关于这场战争的故事。纽约时报记者，普利策得主马克•马嘉蒂，用些许激情，更多的是内幕，讲述这场由间谍、特种部队和自动杀人机器在偏僻之地进行的战争。
In the last month of 2001, after the attack on the twin towers, the White House put the CIA in charge of a global manhunt. While a lumbering Pentagon cranked itself up to deliver “shock and awe” in Iraq, the agency’s counter-terrorist centre became the hub for a campaign to kill or capture anyone connected with al-Qaeda. Mr Bush loved the aggressive hyperbole of its flamboyant head, Cofer Black. By the time the CIA was done with them, Mr Black promised, bin Laden and his supporters would “have flies walking across their eyeballs”. After nearly a quarter of a century when the CIA, humbled by past blunders and scandals, had been legally forbidden to undertake assassinations, the “black ops” boys were back running the show. At the same time, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, resentful of the CIA’s new primacy in the “war on terror”, was building its own spying organisation. Often the two competed against each other.
在世贸双塔遇袭后不久的2001年12月，白宫决定由中情局负责全球猎杀行动。当动作迟缓的五角大楼忙于在伊拉克实施震慑行动时，中情局的反恐中心成为了捕杀任何与基地组织有关嫌犯的指挥中心。布什先生喜欢时任该部门主管的科菲•布莱克的行事高调与言辞夸张。当时，中情局已经受够了本拉登和他的党羽，布莱克先生誓言：要让他们“眼睛上爬满苍蝇”。此前由于过去的挫折和丑闻让中情局抬不起头来，法律已经禁止实施暗杀将近1/4个世纪了。如今，“黑色行动”的家伙们又回来了。与此同时，唐纳德•拉姆斯菲尔德的五角大楼，对中情局在“反恐战争”中新的领先地位心怀不满，开始建立自己的间谍组织。两个机构常常相互竞争。
Both also turned to private firms, such as Blackwater, that joined the chase for lucrative contracts by hiring former spooks and special-forces types. They provided additional manpower as well as a cloak of deniability for doing stuff that not even the CIA would touch. Mr Mazzetti describes a rogues’ gallery of buccaneering chancers, from Blackwater’s head, Erik Prince, burrowing deep into America’s clandestine establishment, to plausible fantasists such as Michele Ballarin, a Virginia businesswoman who reckoned she could “fix” the failed state of Somalia. There was so much money sloshing around that almost any stunt could get funding (at least for a time) if it had a counter-terror label on it.
双方都会求助于私人公司，比如黑水，雇佣前间谍或特种部队之类的人手来竞争利润丰厚的合同。对于中情局都不会碰的脏活，他们会一边增加额外人手，一边矢口否认。马嘉蒂先生的书中满是恶棍和投机分子，从深深卷入美国秘密机构的黑水老板埃里克•普林斯，到如米切尔•巴拉林这样花言巧语的幻想家，她是弗吉尼亚州商人，自称可以“解决”失败国家索马里的问题。大把的金钱就这样挥霍出去，差不多各种噱头都能搞到资金支持（至少是一段时间），只要它贴上了反恐的标签。
But it was the CIA that was and is the big gorilla in the shadow war. Although hurt by the intelligence failures over Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the CIA’s usefulness to Mr Bush’s White House helped it to recover quickly. Some in the agency worried about the direction of travel, but its political masters were happy to give it cover for most of what it was doing. This included the rendition of terrorist suspects to “black sites”, a network of secret jails in countries outside American legal jurisdiction where prisoners could be tortured and locked up indefinitely without trial. Even when investigative journalists and human-rights groups began to expose some very nasty goings-on in 2005, it was not until Mr Obama became president four years later and signed executive orders banning “enhanced interrogation” techniques, as well as seconding the closure of the CIA’s overseas detention sites, that the agency changed course.
然而中情局才正是影子战争中的大猩猩，过去是现在还是。虽然在萨达姆•候赛因并不存在的大规模杀伤性武器上的情报失误让中情局很是受伤，但对布什时期的白宫甚是有用让它很快恢复了元气。中情局内部有些人对前进的方向感到担忧，但它的政治高手们也乐于把它做的大部分事情隐藏起来。其中包括将恐怖嫌犯送往“黑据点”，这是一个秘密监狱体系，位于美国司法管辖之外的国家，囚犯在这里会遭到折磨，无限期拘押而不进行审判。即使调查记者和人权组织从2005年开始曝光了一些非常可怕的事情，直到四年后欧巴马就任总统，才签署行政命令禁止“突击审讯”，并且支持关闭中情局在海外的拘押场所，这时中情局才改变了方向。
If the capture bit of “capture and kill” was becoming too difficult, the killing was getting easier thanks to both the increasing number of drones that were now available and the expanding network of intelligence sources on the ground to guide them to their human targets. It is a paradox for liberals that the big increase in drone attacks on al-Qaeda camps in North Waziristan (with their inevitable civilian casualties) presided over by Mr Obama was a direct consequence of his attempts to drain the moral and legal swamp left by the previous administration.
如果说“俘获与杀死”中的俘获越来越难，杀死倒是简单多了。这有赖于无人机数量的增长，以及地面上引导无人机攻击目标的情报网络的拓展。这对于自由主义者来说是一个悖论，一方面在欧巴马手上对北瓦济里斯坦基地组织营地的无人机攻击大幅增加，于是不可避免地有平民伤亡；而另一方面，他试图摆脱前任留下的道德和法律泥沼，直接结果却是增加无人机。
The drone campaign still receives uncharacteristic bipartisan support in America and is credited with severely damaging al-Qaeda. But concerns about it are growing, and not just from civil-liberties groups. Mr Obama wants to bring greater transparency and legal rectitude to the way America goes about eliminating its foes, while Mr Brennan appears to want to hand over the operation of lethal drones to the Pentagon. This is partly because it has a clearer military chain of command and partly because there is a growing feeling that the CIA should be doing a bit less killing and a bit more traditional spying. As Mr Mazzetti notes, the obsession with counter-terrorism left the agency woefully flat-footed over the Arab spring and with inadequate assets to support the administration’s strategic rebalancing towards Asia.
无人机行动仍然受到美国两党少见的共同支持，也的确沉重打击了基地组织。但对它的担忧也日渐增长，而且不仅仅是民权团体。欧巴马先生希望在美国消灭敌人上做到法律公正，并且透明度更高，布伦南也似乎想把无人机攻击行动交给五角大楼。部分是因为五角大楼有更清晰的军事指挥体系，部分也是因为有种感觉越来越明显，即中情局应该少做一点杀戮，多做一点传统的情报工作。正如马嘉蒂先生写到，对反恐的偏执不幸让中情局在阿拉伯之春上措手不及，在对美国政府亚洲平衡战略上的支持也缺乏力度。
Almost the last word in the book goes to one of the architects of the drone campaign, Richard Blee. Now retired from the CIA, he says: “In the early days, for our consciences, we wanted to know who we were killing before anyone pulled the trigger. Now, we’re lighting these people up all over the place…if we are going to hand down death sentences, there ought to be some accountability and some public discussion about the whole thing.” The new American way of war is here, but the debate about it has only just begun. In “The Way of the Knife”, Mr Mazzetti has made a valuable contribution to it.
在书的末尾，是无人机行动的奠基人之一理查德•布利的话，他现已从中情局退休。他说：“从前，我们出于良心，希望在抠下扳机前知道要杀的是谁。现在不管这些家伙藏在哪里我们都能照得一清二楚…如果我们要对某人执行死刑，应该对整个事情有个说法，也要有些公开讨论。”新的美国战争之路就在这里，但对它的争论才刚刚开始。通过《刀锋之路》，马嘉蒂先生做出了很有价值的贡献。