First Evidence of a Blunder: 2 Extra Bodies

Washington, United States: The first sign that something had gone terribly wrong was when officers from the CIA saw that six bodies had been pulled from the rubble instead of four.

For weeks, drones had watched the movements of four men around a compound in the Shawal Valley. After the drones struck on Jan. 15, the agency thought that only those four had died.

But when six bodies were taken from the wreckage and hastily buried, it was a clear signal that the spy agency had made a deadly mistake. It took weeks for the extent of the disaster to be revealed: The two additional bodies were those of an American and an Italian hostage. One of them was Warren Weinstein, from Rockville, Maryland, a veteran aid worker who had been held by al-Qaida since 2011.

President Barack Obama said Thursday that his administration was investigating the botched drone strike, carried out in the thickly forested valley that straddles North and South Waziristan in the lawless region of western Pakistan. But serious questions have already emerged - about the intelligence leading up to the strike, about when U.S. officials knew that the hostages had been killed, and about why it took the White House so long to go public with the information.

The weeks leading up to the strike followed a familiar pattern.

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Armed CIA drones launched from a base in eastern Afghanistan flew over the border into the Shawal Valley, a favored hide-out of militants, and settled into a routine of spying on the comings and goings at a compound in the village of Wacha Dara. The drones monitored the "pattern of life" of a group suspected of being militants, believed to be al-Qaida operatives and possibly members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, several U.S. officials said.

Analysts also eavesdropped on cellphone conversations, another step taken to determine the identities of the suspects and what kind of threat they posed.

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In Pakistan, unlike elsewhere in the world, the White House permits the CIA to carry out drone strikes without knowing the identities of the people the agency is trying to kill. These "signature strikes," based on patterns of behavior rather than intelligence about specific people, have been criticized in the past as generating a higher number of civilian deaths.

U.S. officials acknowledged that the Jan. 15 attack was a signature strike, but said that the CIA had assessed with "high confidence" that the compound in the Shawal Valley was being used by al-Qaida operatives. The officials said that before every drone strike - whether in Pakistan or elsewhere - the agency must have "near certainty" that no civilians will be killed.

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The strike was conducted despite Obama's indication in a speech in 2013 that the CIA would no longer conduct such signature strikes after 2014, when U.S. "combat operations" in Afghanistan were scheduled to end. Several U.S. officials said Thursday that the deadline had not been enforced.

At no time during the weeks of surveillance in the Shawal Valley, the U.S. officials said, did analysts detect any signs that the militants were holding Weinstein or Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian aid worker held in Pakistan since 2012.

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It was not until after the drone strike when CIA analysts - poring over drone video feeds, satellite data, electronic intercepts of cellphone conversations and informants' reports - determined that six people had been hauled from the rubble and that there were six graves.

"There were two more burials than we expected, and we didn't know who they were," said one U.S. official briefed on the investigation.

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Then, when the CIA pressed informants on the ground for more information and sifted through more intercepts, analysts began hearing ominous talk that "Westerners" had been killed.

Within weeks of the strike, U.S. intelligence agencies began to pick up information that Weinstein and Lo Porto might be dead - without piecing together that it was the CIA strike that had killed them.

The FBI alerted Weinstein's family in early February that he might have died, according to two U.S. officials and a consultant working on the case, although the FBI was not wholly certain of its information at the time.

"They were hearing reports that he was dead, and thought it was significant enough to tell his wife," said the consultant, who requested anonymity in order to be able to speak about the classified matter. "But she continued to hold out hope."

At that time, the consultant said, the family assumed that if Weinstein had died, it was from an illness. The 73-year-old had looked increasingly gaunt and unwell in successive videos that al-Qaida released during the years the group held him, the most recent this past August, when al-Qaida addressed the man's family directly and said that "Your government wants Warren Weinstein to die in prison so that it may absolve itself of responsibility in his case."

After the FBI alerted the Weinstein family, investigators continued to pursue numerous leads and scraps of information. With no ability to send investigators into the tribal areas to gather evidence or talk to possible witnesses, analysts had to piece together a mosaic of information, including more intercepted electronic communications, to try to come to a firm conclusion.

U.S. officials eventually determined that the two hostages were either in the compound before the surveillance began and were never moved, or had somehow been slipped into the compound during a gap in the U.S. surveillance.

"It was in the course of following up on those intelligence leads, and developing intelligence from a wide variety of sources, that the intelligence community was able to assess with high confidence that Dr. Weinstein had been killed," Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said Thursday.

Initial news media reports about that strike were hazy. Some news outlets suggested that fighters loyal to Hafiz Gul Bahadur, a Taliban-affiliated warlord who holds sway in North Waziristan, had been targeted. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry issued a short statement condemning the drone strike.

Obama was finally briefed about the conclusions of the investigation this month. Intelligence officials also briefed members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees that a strong body of evidence indicated that the two aid workers had been killed in the strike.

On Wednesday, the day before his announcement, Obama called Weinstein's widow, Elaine, and Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister, to notify them that the two hostages had been killed during the CIA operation.

The bodies of Weinstein and Lo Porto remain in Shawal, a long swooping valley walled by snow-dusted peaks. They are buried there along with the bodies of the other four men, not far from the site of the U.S. strike.