He Hunted Bin Laden for CIA. Now He Wants Americans Dead.

The former senior CIA official once in charge of the hunt for Osama bin Laden has spent the summer calling for the slaughter of his fellow Americans.

Michael Scheuer calls Black Lives Matter a “terrorist organization” and a “semi-human mob.” On his blog and his podcast, Scheuer rages against a widespread, treasonous conspiracy targeting not only President Trump but the fundamental character of the American republic. It deserves “punishment… we’ve not seen before in this country.” Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year old charged with murder for shooting demonstrators at a Kenosha, Wisconsin, protest, is a “young hero.” If America is lucky, Scheuer wrote last week, “Rittenhouse’s necessary, patriotic, and constitutional actions will power the formation of militias across the United States.” In July, he wrote that “loyal Americans know their domestic enemies, as well as their locations, in detail, and will be able to act swiftly to eliminate them and the threat they pose.”

Scheuer’s advocacy of violence follows a long trajectory. In December, he endorsed the increasingly violent QAnon conspiracy movement, which the FBI has called a potential wellspring of domestic terrorism. Those who deny QAnon’s unhinged hallucinations are, to Scheuer, “coup-ists [and] insurrectionists.” Last month, Scheuer claimed vindication against critics when Trump seemed to acknowledge QAnon. Scheuer has long been comfortable with violence. His career-making 2004 book Imperial Hubris argued that America would need to wage a far bloodier war, including the destruction of civilian infrastructure, unless it divests its imperial role in the Mideast. Sixteen years later, Scheuer’s enemy is domestic. “The only thing I would be upset about if it came to war is that not enough Democrats would get killed,” he said on his podcast in July.

Counterterrorism experts have long since written Scheuer off as a crank. Yet Scheuer’s advocacy of political violence looks disturbingly like a harbinger. Trump’s one-time consigliere Roger Stone urged Trump to declare martial law and jail his critics if he loses the November election. Ally Michael Caputo, now at the Department of Health and Human Services, reportedly invented a left-wing insurrection on a Facebook Live chat. And over the weekend, Trump endorsed federal agents shooting dead a suspect in the killing of a right-wing protester. “That’s the way it has to be, there has to be retribution when you have crime like this,” he told Fox News, echoing a point he made earlier in the summer.

“I think we’ve held our fire for four years, really for me since 1973, since they’ve been killing babies,” Scheuer said, referencing Roe v. Wade. He anticipates massive Democratic voter fraud in November, even though Trump is the one pre-delegitimizing the election. “I just think it’s unreasonable for the Democrats to think that no one will respond to that kind of an attempt to take over the government.”

However untethered Scheuer may be today, the CIA once placed him in crucial roles. He was the first chief of its Osama bin Laden Unit—he named it Alec Station after his son—in charge of analyzing al Qaeda in its pre-9/11 phase, from 1995 to 1999. And not just analysis: During that time, Scheuer ran rendition operations—that is, kidnappings of terror suspects for torture in partner countries—the seed that would sprout into the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program. Scheuer may no longer be respectable enough for the members of the security state that operate the war on terror. But Scheuer represents a phenomenon unfolding this summer across American cities: the war on terror coming home.

CIA alumni distance themselves from Scheuer. Four people who worked with him directly at the agency were unwilling to comment for this story; neither were two others who dealt with Scheuer peripherally.

Some former colleagues expressed a fraternal concern for Scheuer while being unsurprised by his fanatical turn. They remembered a man who they considered exceptionally smart and whose early writings on al Qaeda reflect enduring insight. At a time when prevailing opinion viewed al Qaeda as nothing more than religious fanatics, Scheuer assessed that bin Laden reacted to specific U.S. policy decisions—its hegemonic influence over the Middle East and its governments and the violence that Muslims experienced—that embittered millions of Muslims worldwide. Others prefer that Scheuer not receive any mainstream attention owing to his violent invective.

Few of Scheuer’s contemporaries recall him being as conspiratorial at the agency as he is today. Nor do most interviewed for this story believe the CIA could have spotted warning signs. The exception is Glenn Carle, a retired CIA operations officer who knew Scheuer’s co-workers. “He’s always been an extremist. That’s a psychological characteristic, not a political attribute of his,” Carle said. “Clearly and without exception he’s derogatory, to the point of being grotesque, in his unfairness toward any political figure who shows any temperance.”

Another person who views an essential continuity between the Scheuer of the CIA and the Scheuer of today is Scheuer himself. “I never thought I should care about the enemies of the state,” he said. “My job at the CIA or my job in the little role I have now writing is to make sure the republic survives, in a republican small-r form of government, that the Constitution prevails, that there’s equality before the law and I see all these things disappearing before my eyes. I think it’s a direct line. I never gave a good goddamn about killing an enemy of the United States.”

Several agency veterans recalled what one described as Scheuer’s “rage.” It manifested in two ways. Scheuer clashed with other counterterrorism officials, at the Clinton White House as well as the CIA, and elevated disagreements into litmus tests for who was and wasn’t willing to protect Americans against al Qaeda. Some of his ex-colleagues think Scheuer’s opponents were intransigent, but considered his vitriol to go too far; one called it “batshit crazy.” As well, they saw him express disinterest at civilian deaths that would result from strikes on al Qaeda targets.  “He didn’t care about collateral damage as some of us” did, a different former colleague said.

That was on display in his writings and post-CIA statements. Scheuer called the renditions he designed “the most successful covert operation that’s ever been run by the CIA.” But intelligence work could never substitute for the mass violence that he considered tragically necessary for the U.S. to inflict upon the Muslim world. “[W]e will have to use military force in the way Americans used it on the fields of Virginia and Georgia, in France and on Pacific islands, and from the skies over Tokyo and Dresden,” Scheuer wrote in Imperial Hubris. That included a “Sherman-like razing of infrastructure,” waged against the enemy’s “support base” of civilians, to destroy “roads and irrigation systems; bridges, power plants and crops in the field; fertilizer plants and grain mills.” It remains unclear how such mass immiseration of civilians would have defeated jihadists rather than inspire waves of new ones, as 20 years of a war on terror did.

Before Scheuer left the CIA in 2004, his colleagues saw another quality in him they considered unsettling. He had a tendency to respect “revolutionaries,” as one put it, from the Founding Generation and beyond, who were willing to use violence in pursuit of their interests and beliefs. It led him in Imperial Hubris to describe bin Laden in terms that went beyond a healthy respect for an adversary. “Americans would do well to recall that bin Laden, in Muslim eyes and hearts, is not unlike another man—also, ironically, pious, quiet and dedicated—who strove for four extremely bloody years to destroy the United States, and, in doing so, evoked unprecedented loyalty and love from millions that endures even today.” Scheuer was referring to Robert E. Lee, and did not mean the comparison to damn either the Confederate general or bin Laden.

Asked about his views on bin Laden, Scheuer said he was “very willing to admire anyone who speaks his mind and speaks it with consistency and pointedness. Before the Jesuits became new-era fairies, that’s what the Jesuits taught you to do: speak your mind, and if you believe it, speak it loudly and never back up. That’s why I admired Ron Paul. That’s why I admired Osama bin Laden.”

Scheuer was hardly alone in believing that victory over terrorism was a matter of applying sufficient brutality. That animated Scheuer’s CIA colleagues in the torture program—one of whom he later married. He also shared their belief that the CIA’s valiant sacrifice would inevitably be betrayed by frivolous liberal politicians. During a 2007 congressional hearing, Scheuer testified that journalists who revealed the CIA’s black-site torture chambers and the politicians who criticized them “ought to publicly apologize to the CIA’s men and women who have executed their government’s rendition program.” Those who led the agency were little better. “Expertise is a career killer, especially in the intelligence community. Most prized is the ‘generalist’… conversant in many topics, expert in none, these usually male officers are fast-tracked for senior management,” he wrote in Imperial Hubris. Elected officials receive intelligence briefings from “well-dressed, articulate and politically sensitive dilettantes, and hear nothing from idiosyncratic, intuitive and reality-prone experts.” The result, he wrote, was the “disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

All that gave Scheuer a framework to process the agonizing reality that the war on terror produced neither peace nor victory. The war was doomed not from without, not because the war was doomed to fail, but from within—first from elites who were unprepared to relinquish the American hegemony that bin Laden assaulted; and also from the elites who were unprepared to martial the needed violence that would somehow pacify what he characterized in his book as “much of Islam.”

A key to this step was Barack Obama, whose presidency Scheuer considered both a surrender in the war on terror, particularly after Obama ended the CIA torture program, and the rise of a tyrant. In 2014, he suggested that assassinating Barack Obama was legitimate. Scheuer, by that point, was far outside the respectable conservative mainstream and his media appearances dwindled. By 2015, he was writing that “enough is coming very close to being enough” from a tyrannical government that “allow[s] its citizens to be killed at home because of its refusal to wage war mercilessly.” But all that made him a pioneer of the nationalist critique of the war on terror that Donald Trump offered: against wars made unwinnable by craven elites who were unwilling to use sufficient violence against “radical Islam.”