Abu Ali al-Harithi had been near the top of the CIA's wanted list since the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000. Two suicide bombers had rammed a small explosive-laden boat into the destroyer while it was docked in Aden's harbor, killing seventeen American sailors. Harithi, a veteran militant who had personally trained recruits into skilled fighters, was believed to have orchestrated the attack. A joint US-Yemeni manhunt had failed to capture him in 2001. He knew the terrain of Marib intimately and moved among tribal networks that were difficult for outsiders to penetrate. When the NSA intercepted his satellite phone signal that November morning and pinpointed his location at a farm, the CIA scrambled its Predator from a nearby base. Analysts tracked Harithi as he left in a vehicle with five companions. After confirmation of his identity, Tenet ordered the strike with direct authorization from US Central Command deputy commander Michael DeLong.

DNA analysis of the wreckage confirmed the deaths of Harithi and four other jihadists. But one body carried an unexpected complication. A man initially identified as Ahmed Hijazi turned out to be Kamal Derwish, a Yemeni-American from Lackawanna, New York, who had been the ringleader of the so-called Lackawanna Six, a group accused of attending an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. Derwish was an American citizen. The CIA initially denied any knowledge of his presence in the vehicle. Later reporting by the Washington Post's Dana Priest revealed the agency had known, but justified the killing on the grounds that anyone associating with Harithi was a legitimate target. His death marked the first killing of an American citizen by the US government during the war on terror, setting a legal and moral precedent that would be invoked again years later when a CIA drone killed Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011.

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh had authorized the strike on one condition: it must remain secret. Yemen's government floated cover stories to journalists -- the vehicle had been carrying a propane tank, or had struck a landmine. For two days, the fiction held. Then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, reportedly on orders from Donald Rumsfeld and looking for a pre-election victory, told CNN that the US had conducted the strike and praised it as a success against al-Qaeda. The reaction in Yemen was volcanic. A survey by the Yemen Times found ninety-three percent of residents in the capital, Sanaa, disapproved. Eighty-five percent called it a violation of sovereignty. Anti-American protests swept the country, and authorities temporarily shut down the US embassy. Saleh was enraged, telling American general Tommy Franks the leak would cause him major problems. He banned further drone strikes over Yemeni airspace for the remainder of the Bush presidency.

Harithi's death dealt al-Qaeda in Yemen a significant blow. Neither of the group's next two leaders was prepared to take over, and by September 2003, the de facto successor had surrendered. From 2003 to 2006, the network appeared defeated. But the reprieve proved temporary. Imprisoned militants radicalized younger inmates, and a 2006 prison escape freed key operatives who rebuilt the organization into al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which attacked the US embassy in 2008. The tactical victory at Marib had not produced the lasting strategic result Washington had hoped for. What it did produce was a new way of war. Learning from the Wolfowitz leak, subsequent administrations wrapped their drone campaigns in secrecy. Under President Obama, targeted strikes expanded into Pakistan, Somalia, and deeper across Yemen. The strike that began on a desert road in Marib in 2002 became the template for a global program of remote killing whose legal, ethical, and strategic consequences remain fiercely debated.