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At the Pentagon even Johnson felt stressed by the institutional impulse to always do more, not less. Like Koh, he wondered whether he could withstand the heavy pressure exerted by the military to expand operations. After approving his first targeted killings one evening, he watched the digital images of the strike in real time—“Kill TV,” the military calls the live battlefield feed. Johnson could see the shadowy images of militants running drills in a training camp in Yemen. Then suddenly there was a bright flash. The figures that had been moving across the screen were gone. Johnson returned to his Georgetown home around midnight that evening, drained and exhausted. Later there were reports from human-rights groups that dozens of women and children had been killed in the attacks, reports that a military source involved in the operation termed “persuasive.” Johnson would confide to others, “If I were Catholic, I’d have to go to confession.”

In early 2010, on a secure conference call with Obama’s top counterterrorism advisers, Johnson stunned many of his colleagues when he nixed the targeted killings of members of Al-Shabab. The decision came just as the military was ramping up its operations in Somalia. Pentagon officers left the meeting without saying a word to Johnson. It was a lonely moment for an ambitious lawyer who was used to getting along with his uniformed colleagues. But he did have one supporter: Koh told Johnson this was his “finest moment.”

‘Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency’ by Daniel Klaidman. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 304 p. $18.29

The amity didn’t last, however. The military kept up its pressure on Johnson, and mounted a fierce campaign to persuade him to change his position on Al-Shabab. Officers brought him intelligence and “threat streams” about terrorist activities, and told him “bad things” would happen if they couldn’t act first. Johnson understood the political risks. There would be an uproar if Al-Shabab launched a successful attack against the United States and it later turned out that Obama administration lawyers had declared the group off limits. Finally, some months after Al-Shabab militants bombed a soccer stadium in Uganda, killing 74 people, he changed tack.

The Koh-Johnson rivalry was reignited during a secure call with the White House in the fall of 2010. The military wanted to hit three top Al-Shabab leaders. The two lawyers agreed on a pair of the targets, but Koh differed on the case of Sheikh Mukhtar Robow. He had studied the intelligence and saw credible evidence that Robow represented a less extreme faction of Al-Shabab that was opposed to attacking America. While Johnson was fine with targeting Robow, Koh forcefully insisted that the “killing would be unlawful.” Robow was removed from the targeting list. But the pressure to expand the list rarely lets up. After Al-Shabab’s top leader swore his organization’s allegiance to al Qaeda earlier this year, Obama officials renewed their earlier debate. Robow’s life again hangs in the balance.

One targeted killing that inspired little angst was the raid on Osama bin Laden in May 2011. Rather, its success got everyone itching to intensify the fight. Brimming with confidence, the generals believed they could deliver a “knock-out blow” to al Qaeda and its most dangerous affiliate, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen. The military began talking about “running the table” in Yemen, while the CIA began pushing to expand its signature strikes both there and in Somalia. It was the same approach Admiral Mullen and some top generals had backed in the first weeks of Obama’s administration but which the president had rejected. Obama at that time had wanted to stay “AQ-focused,” as he put it, and not unnecessarily widen the conflict.

But in May 2011, the military proposed killing 11 AQAP operatives at once, by far the largest request since it stepped up operations in Yemen. The Arab Spring’s turmoil had spread to the country, and al Qaeda was moving quickly to take advantage of the chaos. Gen. James Mattis, who heads U.S. Central Command, warned darkly of an emerging new terror hub in the Horn of Africa. Obama and a few of his senior advisers, however, were wary of getting dragged into an internal conflict—or fueling a backlash—by targeting people who were not focused on striking the United States. Obama and his aides reduced the target list to four people, all of whom were eliminated.

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