Lt. Gen. Joseph Votel, who had replaced McRaven as the head of JSOC shortly after the bin Laden raid, knew exactly what was at stake. Seven months earlier, on May 23, 2013, President Obama had laid out sweeping new guidelines for the use of drones that would take them out of the hands of the CIA and give JSOC control of the controversial program.

The CIA had been expedient when he wanted to kill Awlaki, but now the president wanted to correct what he saw as a decade-long drift and streamline US operations. The CIA would collect and analyze the intelligence, and JSOC would execute the strikes.

In his speech at the National Defense University that Thursday, Obama had publicly wrestled with the errors and mistakes his administration had made over the past four years. Standing on a raised platform in front of a row of American flags, he told the crowd that before any strike takes place, “there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured.” That, the president said, moving his hand up toward his shoulder like a bar, is “the highest standard we can set.”

Still, he went on, “It is a hard fact that US strikes have resulted in civilian casualties.” In a slow, deliberate cadence, the president continued: “For me, and those in my chain of command, those deaths will haunt us as long as we live.”

Not everyone thought the transition was a good idea. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the 80-year-old chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, worried that JSOC wasn’t careful enough.

A couple of months before Obama’s speech, she told a radio reporter that she had watched the CIA “exercise patience and discretion specifically to prevent collateral damage. The military program has not done that nearly as well. I think that’s fact. I think we even hit our own base once.”

Feinstein’s comments were slightly disingenuous. Without a seat on the Armed Services Committee, she didn’t have oversight responsibilities for JSOC or access to its classified after-action reports, but the perception on Capitol Hill was growing that the military made too many mistakes and killed too many civilians.

Votel knew all about the concerns, and apparent errors like the strike in Yemen made the problem that much worse. An athletic-looking 55-year-old with rusty brown hair, Votel dug in to defend the strike dismissing reports of a wedding party as false propaganda put out by al-Qaeda. He had seen the video: dozens of armed men in a long convoy. The strike was clean.

On the ground in Yemen, things looked decidedly different. Muhammad al-Tuhayf knew the tribes and their histories. Driving north to Sanaa on the evening of Dec. 13, he contemplated what came next. A truck, a gun, and a dagger weren’t going to hold the tribes for long.

“The attack was American but the victims were Yemeni. And reaction to the attack wouldn’t hurt the Americans, it would hurt us,” Tuhayf told me. “It would be fitna,” he said, using a loaded Arabic term for chaos and disorder. The Yemeni government was stuck. Either it had to pay for a mistake it didn’t commit with money it didn’t have or deal with the fallout from heavily armed tribes.

By the time Tuhayf and the rest of the shaykhs reached Sanaa that night it was already dark and the governor wasn’t home. The guards clustered in an old shipping container outside the compound took their names, but they wouldn’t let them inside.

Finally, around midnight, the governor, al-Dhahri al-Shadadi, called him back. A short, overweight man in his fifties, Shadadi had spent much of the night driving around Sanaa collecting the money and guns. Yemen was broke, and Shadadi, who still held a rank in the Yemeni military, had to scrounge to come up with the cash, which his secretary bundled together in 1,000-riyal notes and packed in bags.

But the guns were an even bigger challenge. Less than two years after the uprising and the street fighting that went with it, no one wanted to part with their Kalashnikovs. Leaning on contacts at the Ministry of Defense, Shadadai eventually amassed several dozen rifles from various storage depots around the capital.

Down south in Radaa, the bodies were still out in the street, a public spectacle that was meant to shame the government. Shadadi knew exactly what they were doing. He was going to have to pay twice: first, the standard tribal payment for the lives of those killed or injured, and then something called hashm al-dam, or blood shame, for the wrongful deaths of the civilians. On the phone he told Tuhayf everything was set. They would leave the next morning.

Shortly after prayers, a long line of SUVs and pickups left the governor’s compound in Sanaa. No one knew quite what to expect. Reports from Radaa had the tribes blocking the road again. Shadadi picked up a military escort along the way, but he wanted to avoid antagonizing the tribes any further.

Pulling up well short of the roadblock, he arranged for a quick meeting with tribal leaders. Then everyone reconvened at the municipal meeting hall. Ditching his military uniform for the traditional tribal outfit of a blue blazer over a long white robe with a red-checked shawl draped over his shoulders, Shadadi opened with an apology. “It was a mistake,” he said of the drone strike. “Something went wrong with the intelligence.”

The room was crowded and tense with families of the victims and several tribal representatives. Everyone wanted answers, and Shadadi could hear sobs and whimpers as he spoke. Sitting beside him, dressed in combat fatigues, was a military commander, but this was Shadadi’s meeting. He spoke for the government.

Muhammad al-Tuhayf and the rest of the local shaykhs were already fading into the crowd. They had done their job. The money and guns had made it to Radaa. Now it was up to the governor.

As the day wore on, Shadadi and the rest of the top officials moved into a smaller side room with a handful of representatives from the al-Taysi and al-Amri tribes to work out the details of a deal. Essentially, they were trying to figure out the value of a man’s life.

How much money was each dead man worth? Yemen’s tribal code gave them a starting point: nearly $26,000 per person with another $9,500 for each wounded man. But because of the nature of the deaths — innocent men killed by a drone — the tribes were asking for 11 times that amount.

The 10+1 calculation was a common configuration in Yemeni tribal law, meant to signify guilt and shame while acting as a sort of wrongful death premium. It was the same thing with the guns. The tribes wanted 101 rifles: 100 as compensation and one for banduq al-‘ar, the symbolic “rifle of shame.”

Shadadi listened to the bearded tribal elders respectfully, but he wasn’t about to admit guilt. Shame was a powerful concept in Yemeni society, and the government was weak enough without declaring itself complicit in the deaths of a dozen civilians.

Like the lawyers at the Pentagon, his job was to limit liability. Seated on a floor cushion with his dagger pressing up toward his chin, Shadadi countered the demand for 101 rifles with an addition, tossing in a few extra guns for a total of 105.

The money was trickier. If he agreed to the tribes’ asking price, the government would owe roughly $286,000 per person. Multiply that by each of the 12 dead men and Yemen was looking at a total bill of nearly $3.5 million. And that was before compensating any of the wounded or paying for the damaged cars.

For the rest of the afternoon Shadadi bargained, artfully searching for middle ground. He didn’t want to offend anyone so soon after the strike, but he needed to talk them down. Most of the men were already chewing qat, a leafy stimulant, and several were smoking in the stuffy side room as messengers slipped between the principals and the families waiting in the main hall.

The negotiations were a complicated mixture of ritual and routine. Both Shadadi and the shaykhs were working off an understood script, a guideline of dos and don’ts that had been perfected over the centuries.

Whatever deal they struck inside the room had to be acceptable to everyone outside. Plastic butane lighters repeatedly flicked and sparked as the day wore on, and the pile of discarded qat leaves grew. And then they had it: 12.75 million Yemeni riyals, or roughly $60,000. That was the number, the value of a man’s life.

Shadadi produced a pair of documents, and as soon as the tribal representatives signed, he brought out the 45 million Yemeni riyals, or just over $200,000, that his secretary had packed in bags the night before. That was a down payment.

Together with $4,700 for the six injured men, close to $52,000 for several damaged cars, the total amount Yemen agreed to pay for the mistaken drone strike was almost $800,000. Shadadi told the men not to worry. The remainder of the nearly $600,000 in blood money would be forthcoming.

It wasn’t quite as simple as Shadadi suggested that day. The families waited, but the promised payments never arrived. Four months after the drone strike, in March 2014, I visited Yemen and asked Shadadi about the money. He shrugged as if the situation was beyond his control, saying simply that there were “problems.”

The two key questions were whether or not the dead men were civilians and the origins of the compensation cash. Yemen had already determined the strike was a “catastrophic mistake,” but the US was still undecided and that seemed to be affecting the payout. Four months after it fired the missiles, JSOC was still trying to figure out what exactly had happened in the strike.

Three years earlier when McRaven’s men had killed Jabir al-Shabwani, the Yemeni deputy governor, JSOC had lacked the on-the-ground assets to investigate. Not much had changed under Votel. They still couldn’t visit the scene or interview survivors. But this time the US was at least going to try to find out what happened.

Votel had the strike video along with the rest of the pre-raid intelligence, and, according to the Associated Press, he asked an Air Force general to lead the investigation. As a way of checking his work, the White House ordered its own review from the National Counterterrorism Center.

Both investigations were forced to rely almost completely on pre-strike video taken from drones, a challenging proposition that, a bit like trying to view the world through a soda straw, often leaves out more than it reveals — in this case, apparently the bride. What no one disputed is that the footage showed a convoy of vehicles full of armed men. The question remained: Who were they? Bridal escorts with beards and guns, or al-Qaeda fighters?

The Yemeni government had negotiated as if the victims were civilians — not al-Qaeda — fronting $220,000 and promising much more for what it said was a US mistake. But Votel was still pushing back, insisting the strike had hit legitimate targets. And as long as he did so, the money remained unpaid.

Several outside observers — ranging from nongovernmental organization workers to international lawyers — believe there may be a connection between the US reviews and the delay in payments. They suspect that, instead of collecting and delivering money from the Yemeni government, men like Tuhayf and Shadadi are actually being used as fig leaves to disguise US involvement in the payouts.

The idea — if this is indeed what is happening — seems to be part of the strategy to put a local face on a controversial program. This is why, as WikiLeaks revealed, Yemen agreed to lie about the drones under President Ali Abdullah Salih. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Salih told Gen. David Petraeus in early 2010, according to the cable.

Funneling money for US mistakes through the Yemeni government would be just one more false front in the drone wars, a way to strengthen the local government and deflect criticism at home. It would also raise serious questions about the wide gulf between what the US claims publicly and what it seems to recognize privately.

In a war without borders, against an enemy without a uniform, what constitutes a civilian? For years, as journalists Jo Becker and Scott Shane showed in the New York Times, the US has been giving itself the benefit of the doubt, operating on the assumption that every military-age male it killed was a militant.

In a drone strike, you are guilty until posthumously proven innocent. The burden rests on families of the dead, uncles and brothers, who often live in remote regions and have little understanding of how to petition the US government. Payment by proxy would allow the US the wiggle room to have it both ways, counting the dead as militants while paying for them like civilians. Its own record remains clean while aiding an ally abroad.

The US has engaged in this sort of maneuver before. In the aftermath of the 1989 Operation Just Cause to capture Manuel Noriega, it gave money directly to the Panamanian government to dispense to civilians.

And in Yemen, following the disastrous 2009 attack that wiped out the Bedouin encampment, the US transferred money to Salih’s government to compensate the victims and their families. At least that’s what one Yemeni official I spoke with said. US officials tell a different story.

As late as April 2013, a Pentagon spokesman was still claiming that the Department of Defense had not made any “payments” in Yemen. It is unclear whether this was simply a semantic evasion — the US making money available to the Yemeni government as opposed to making direct payments — or if no US government money had gone to civilian victims in Yemen.

Either way, one month after the Pentagon spokesman made that statement to Cora Currier, then of ProPublica, President Obama gave his counterterrorism speech in which he acknowledged that there had been both drone strikes and civilian casualties in Yemen.

But when I reached out to government officials earlier this spring and summer to see if the acknowledgment of civilian casualties in Yemen meant that the US had also made condolence payments, no one would answer. Gone were the flat denials of April 2013, but there was nothing to take their place.

After several email exchanges with different officers at the Pentagon stretching out over several weeks, I was finally referred to a spokesperson at the National Security Council who refused to address the question and gave a legalese-laden statement instead: “Although we will not comment on specific cases, were non-combatants killed or injured in a US strike, condolence or other ex gratia payments, such as solatia, may be available for those injured and the families of those killed.”

The spokesperson went beyond the standard Glomar response (“we can neither confirm nor deny”), refusing to answer or in any way engage in questions about Yemen, even after I pointed out Obama’s acknowledgment of drone strikes and civilian casualties in Yemen as well as stated US policy to compensate victims. The more I pushed, the shorter the replies. Eventually, I was referred back to the Pentagon, which also refused to address questions about Yemen.

Other agencies and departments were similarly vague. At one point, I received a phone call from an official at US Central Command in Tampa, which oversees all US military operations in the Middle East. He explained that he had been unable to find any documents relating to my Freedom of Information Act request.

No one, he said, knew anything about “payments in Yemen.” He suggested I ask the State Department. FOIA requests to State and US Special Operations Command have, to this date, gone unanswered.

President Obama has repeatedly confirmed that the US has carried out drone strikes in Yemen and that some of those strikes have resulted in civilian casualties. That is fact, as is the stated policy that the US compensates the families of those victims. But whether or not this has happened in Yemen, or how it is administered, no one will say.

But Tuhayf and Shadadi got the money and guns from somewhere. Yemen has been struggling for years. But things have gotten worse since the 2011 uprisings that eventually forced President Salih to step down.

The new government has had trouble paying government salaries, and earlier this year Yemeni officials took to CNN to beg for fuel, claiming the military was about to run out of gas in its fight against al-Qaeda. More recently, the government instituted a series of austerity measures, including limits on overseas travel and expense claims.

Part of the problem is that the law surrounding civilian casualties is a mess. Much of the legal framework goes back to World War I, one of the last times new technology had raised serious questions about military responsibility and what we now term “collateral damage.”

During World War I, which Yale University legal historian John Witt calls the “first automobile war,” the US shipped more than 100,000 vehicles across the Atlantic to the Western Front. In France, young GIs unused to driving on foreign roads were crashing at an alarming rate, destroying private property, and all too often killing civilians.

Realizing that the French population was key to the war effort, Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, requested legislation that would allow him to pay for US mistakes. Within months, Woodrow Wilson had signed into law a bill that by World War II would evolve into the Foreign Claims Act.

But because of the nature of the fighting in World War I — the car crashes were happening behind the trenches of well-defined front lines — the original legislation had been written with a combat exclusion, which meant that the US only paid if the accident happened in a noncombat situation. In other words, if a US soldier killed a civilian on his way to the bar, the man’s family could be paid; if the soldier was on his way to a battlefield, the family got nothing.

As the nature and technology of war changed in the second half of the 20th century, particularly in Vietnam, the US increasingly started to rely on a one-off system of “condolence payments,” which allowed it to make reparations even when civilians were killed as a result of a combat operation. But unlike the Foreign Claims Act, there was no real structure to these payments. They were discretionary and left up to each individual commander. And since the money came out of each unit’s operating budget, not everyone saw the strategic value of paying.

Things got even more difficult when the US started flying drones. Without troops on the ground, correcting and compensating for mistakes became much more challenging. Drones could fire missiles, but they couldn’t redress grievances.

Patrick Leahy, the 73-year-old Democratic senator from Vermont, knew all about the problem. He had been working on the issue for decades. After Operation Just Cause and the capture of Manuel Noriega, Leahy sought assistance for what he calls “the innocent victims of war” whose homes were destroyed and who died in the operation.

He pushed for legislation, trying to create a bookend to Pershing’s World War I law, but couldn’t get the votes. But Leahy kept pushing, sinking deeper into one more lonely campaign. For much of his career, he had fought for the banning of landmines, even helping to write a 1996 Batman comic, Death of Innocents, warning of their dangers.

But in the years after Sept. 11, compensating families became more than just a moral cause. It also made strategic sense. Not only would payments preempt much of the false propaganda that Votel and JSOC were worried about, but they would also minimize the backlash that was helping al-Qaeda recruit. There seemed to be an easy fix to an obvious problem.

The Senate could simply allocate money directly to the Pentagon. That way individual commanders would be off the hook, and the military could create an office to handle the payments and chart the civilian casualties.

No longer would there be such a wide gulf between the administration’s estimates of civilian casualties and everyone else’s best guess. Now there would be transparency, and the US could finally uphold standards that, as President Obama often says, “reflect our values.”

What Leahy wanted to do was put the whole issue of condolence payments on solid legal footing. This would give the whole issue “some consistency based on legal guidelines instead of trying to reinvent the wheel each time,” Leahy’s longtime aide, Tim Rieser, explained to me recently.

That reinvention had not always gone well. When the US went to war in Afghanistan and then Iraq, the Department of Defense banned condolence payments in both countries on the grounds that they went against local customs. Months later, after learning more about the countries it had invaded, the Pentagon reversed itself. Condolence payments, it turned out, were indeed a part of both cultures.

Leahy wanted to avoid these type of mistakes, and he directed Rieser, a former public defender, to spearhead the effort in Congress. But just like in the 1990s, no one wanted new legislation. JSOC hated the idea of another law, which meant that the Armed Services Committee did as well.

Each time Leahy tried to get a bill through the committee, someone blocked it. Eventually he gave up on that option and turned to the National Defense Authorization Act. But it was the same story there. Both times he tried — in 2012 and 2013 — it got stripped out.

A century earlier, at the height of World War I, the US needed barely a year to enact new legislation for the protection of civilians. But more than 12 years into the drone wars, Congress still couldn’t agree on a single bill. Of course in World War I, Black Jack Pershing was pushing for the law; JSOC was blocking this one.

The turning point for Leahy and Rieser came after their second failure with the NDAA in 2013. On Sept. 25, Marla Keenan, a 37-year-old managing director of a scrappy young NGO called Center for Civilians in Conflict, headed over to the Pentagon for a meeting.

Along with Leahy and Rieser, Keenan had been lobbying the Pentagon for years. It was always the same. The military lawyers listened respectfully, thanked her for her thoughts and then ushered her out the door.

As soon as she got home, Keenan called Rieser to brief him on the meeting. “They don’t want it,” she said in reference to the new legislation. “They get the argument, they just don’t want it.”

Keenan thought the Pentagon had earmarked passages of the text to make it searchable. That’s why it always got stripped out. The Pentagon knew it was coming. “They’re ready for us,” she told Rieser. “It’s never going to get through.”

Rieser listened to her vent, but he had a new idea. For the past few months, he had been thinking through congressional procedures and contemplating options. And now he laid out his new plan for Keenan. Leahy sat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Rieser thought that the frenzied aftermath of the government shutdown in October 2013 gave them an opening to try something innovative.

He was working on slipping the provision directly into the appropriations bill. The shutdown had pushed everything back, and with the budget bill months overdue, it just might work. Essentially, what Rieser was laying out on the phone was a giant end run around the Pentagon’s defenses to give the department money it didn’t want.

On Jan. 13, 2014, a month after the drone strike in Yemen, the Appropriations Committee finally revealed its long-overdue budget. Presented as an “omnibus” package — Latin for “all” — each member of Congress got to vote “yes” or “no” on all 1,582 pages of the massive compromise.

Nothing could be stripped out; either everything went through or nothing did. That was the setup — an all-or-nothing bill against a ticking clock — that Rieser used to turn his language into law. No one from the Pentagon had time to find it, let alone block it.

More than 300 pages into the bill, the single paragraph, innocuously titled Section 8127, and its eight subsections, taking up just over two pages of text, were easy to miss.

Still, Leahy and Rieser tried to keep the Pentagon’s concerns in mind. The new law remained voluntary — what lawyers call “ex gratia” — only this time at the level of the secretary of defense. It was a first step, but not one everyone thought went far enough.

The US was still under no legal obligation to compensate the families of civilians it killed, and indeed the text stated that it only could dispense cash if the recipient were deemed “friendly to the US” Although how exactly commanders were to make this determination in the aftermath of a drone strike, when the US had no personnel at the strike site, was left unclear.

The Pentagon had the money; now it needed a program. But ultimately what comes next is up to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. If he doesn’t want to spend the money, he doesn’t have to. But to not spend the money allocated under Section 8127 would seem to break with US policy on compensating civilian victims, and that is much different than a series of private blocks from anonymous lawyers.

The problem for Hagel is that the money in 8127 comes with a catch: an annual report on the number of cases of civilian casualties considered and the amounts paid to their families. A written record and congressional reports would force the Pentagon’s mistakes out into the open. And for the quiet professionals, there is a big difference between covert cash and public scrutiny.

When I emailed the Pentagon to see if Hagel had reached a conclusion on establishing an office for the prevention of civilian harm, a spokesman wrote back: “Currently, the Department is working on a way ahead in regards to that provision of the appropriations bill. In the meantime, we can continue to execute condolence payments as necessary under the provisions of previous legislation.”

At the time 8127 and the rest of the budget bill was signed into law, Votel was still adamant that JSOC had not made a mistake in Yemen. Even if Hagel started a program, the US wouldn’t owe any money. Votel was certain that Badani, the curly-haired Yemeni target, had been part of the convoy. But when the bodies were sorted, Badani’s was missing.

Iona Craig, a freelance journalist with years of experience in Yemen, visited the site six days after the strike and survivors told her they thought the US had been after someone else, a local man named Nasir al-Hattam. They didn’t know Badani. He wasn’t from the area, and he certainly hadn’t been part of the convoy.

None of them had even heard of him. Anonymous American and Yemeni officials initially claimed that Badani had been wounded in the strike. Months later that assessment seemed to change, and Badani was described as having “escaped unharmed,” which was why no one could find his body.

In Yemen, al-Qaeda is a diverse group, drawing on several different tribes across the country, which means that most big drone strikes usually result in a laundry list of tribal names. The Dec. 12 strike had only two: al-Taysi and al-Amri, the wedding tribes.

Earlier this spring, on a gray day in West Point, N.Y., President Obama returned to the issue of drones and civilian casualties. “We must uphold standards that reflect our values,” he told the cadets at the US Military Academy.

Once again, he repeated his pledge that the US carried out strikes only when there was near certainty of no civilian casualties. “For our actions should meet a simple test,” he said. “We must not create more enemies than we take off the battlefield.”

In time, the results of the two reviews of the strike came back. One was clean and the other inconclusive. As Ken Dilanian, then of the Los Angeles Times, reported in May, the CIA had informed JSOC prior to the strike that it didn’t have confidence in the intelligence that Badani was part of the convoy.

But for some reason, JSOC ignored the tip and carried out the strike anyway. Months later, the US still wasn’t sure who it killed that day in Yemen. Without anyone on the ground, it had no way to posthumously prove that the dead were innocent. And if they were guilty, Votel and JSOC were innocent.

Shortly after the reviews were returned, the US officially added Shawqi al-Badani to its “specially designated global terrorist” list and Obama nominated Votel for his fourth star and a promotion. On July 23, a voice vote in the Senate confirmed Gen. Votel as the new commander of US Special Operations Command.

Around the same time, the families of the dead men received word that the rest of the nearly $600,000 in blood money was ready to be picked up. This time there would be no Tuhayf or Shadadi to transport the money south, just a message to appear at the Central Bank in Sanaa. Four days later the families had their checks.

Shuaib Almosawa aided in the research for this piece.