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Obama seized on Cartwright’s words to lay down his own marker. “That’s where I am,” he said. He told his assembled advisers that he was committed to getting bad guys—terrorists who posed a clear and demonstrable threat to Americans—but that he wanted “options” that were precise. The signature strike against Al-Shabab was a no go.

Cartwright, on the other hand, was on an upward trajectory within the corridors of the White House. What would emerge in early 2009 was an unusual alliance that would serve to guide Obama through the shadow wars: Cartwright would join Obama’s top counterterrorism aide, John Brennan, in advising the president about terrorist targets, the three forming a kind of special troika on targeted killings.

Tribesmen mourn for people killed in an alleged U.S. drone strike in Pakistan. (Thir Kahn / AFP-Getty Images)

By this time, Brennan had already established himself as an imposing figure in the White House. Massively built, with closely cropped hair, a ruddy complexion, and deep-set eyes that could appear menacing at times, “Mr. Brennan,” as he was referred to deferentially by junior White House staffers, was seen as “the real thing,” a bona fide CIA terrorist hunter who had been on the trail of Osama bin Laden for a decade. “He is like a John Wayne character,” David Axelrod said. “I sleep better knowing that he is not sleeping.”

In the coming months and years, Brennan and Cartwright would find themselves pulling the president out of black-tie dinners or tracking him down on a secure phone to discuss a proposed strike. Obama could be known to muster a little gallows humor when Cartwright or Brennan showed up at the Oval Office unannounced. “Uh-oh, this can’t be good,” he would say, arching an eyebrow. One of Brennan’s least favorite duties was pulling Obama away from family time with his wife and daughters for these grim calls.

The three men were making life-and-death decisions, picking targets, rejecting or accepting names put forward by the military, feeling their way through a new kind of war—Obama’s war. But such decisions took their toll. In quiet conversations with his advisers, the president would sometimes later reflect on whether they knew with certainty that the people they were targeting posed a genuine and specific threat to American interests.

Similar angst and debate was coursing through the administration as a whole. Every targeted killing, in fact, had to be lawyered—either by the CIA’s attorneys, in the case of agency operations, or by other lawyers when the military was involved. If any two men typified the assertion of law in the terror wars, it was Harold Hongju Koh and Jeh C. Johnson. As the top lawyers at the State Department and the Pentagon, respectively, they exercised considerable influence over counterterrorism operations. But their ideological differences—Koh a liberal idealist who had served as the Clinton administration’s top human-rights official, and Johnson a pragmatic centrist and former prosecutor—colored their legal interpretations. Koh could be brusque and tactless with his colleagues, though he would just as easily break into boyish giggles when something amused him. Johnson, a former partner in a white-shoe Manhattan law firm, was restrained in manner, and a deft inside operator.

For most of Obama’s first term, the two men fought a pitched battle over legal authorities in the war on al Qaeda. Like Johnson, Koh had no problem going after AQ’s most senior members. But things got murkier when the military wanted to kill or capture members of other jihadist groups. Johnson took a more hawkish position, arguing that the United States could pursue AQ members or “co-belligerents” more expansively. The two men battled each other openly in meetings and by circulating rival secret memos.

Despite their differences, both men were grappling with the same reality: their advice could ensure death for strangers who lived thousands of miles away—or spare them. It was an especially unlikely turn for Koh, a former dean of Yale Law School. At Yale he had memorized the names and faces of his students, bright-eyed idealists who wanted to use the law to improve the world. Now he studied highly classified PowerPoint slides that detailed the intelligence against individual terrorist targets. (The military dryly called them “baseball cards.”) “How did I go from being a law professor to someone involved in killing?” he wondered.

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