Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (12 page)

“From Vietnam to 9/11, the military forgot that every operation has to be a fight for intelligence,” said one veteran of the Special Operations community. “And this came right when the intelligence community was being downsized, too. It took us six to eight years after 9/11 to really relearn that the intelligence you exploit from a mission is just as important as who you might kill on the mission.”

All this information scooped up on the battlefield is sent for translation, analysis, and exploitation to top-secret cybercenters at the CIA and the NSA, exploited by teams to create new strategies for using the information to deter, dissuade, and, it is hoped, defeat terrorists. “If you can learn something about whatever is on those hard drives, whatever that information might be, you could instill doubt on their part by just countermessaging whatever it is they said they wanted to do or planned to do,” said Major General Mark Schissler, whose Pentagon duties have included serving as director of cyberoperations for the Air Force and as deputy director of the antiterrorism policy office for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Terrorists tend to treat the Internet as a shield, not disclosing their whereabouts and using it to spread their ideology and influence. Schissler added, “You may be able to interfere with some of that, interrupt some of that. You can also post messages to the opposite of that.” In this case, counterterrorism experts simply made the decision to release some of the Sinjar information that is true and that they knew would discredit terrorists with mainstream Muslims, like videotapes showing members of Al Qaeda in Iraq training children to kidnap and kill or a lengthy letter written by another terrorist leader that describes the organization as weak and plagued by poor morale.

At the same time, American diplomats abroad and counterterrorism experts at home were able to leverage the information in the documents by quietly working behind the scenes with moderate Middle Eastern governments—and some that had been openly hostile to American policy—to devise new ways to keep potential terrorists off balance, along with the networks that recruit, train, pay, and move them around the region. The attitude was that if these governments knew the truth, then the truth might prompt them to break up the smuggling rings and counsel, or lock up, potential suicide bombers before they even left the country.

The unit that carried out the Sinjar raid was named Task Force 121. The bland designation of the commando unit hid the fact that the American military’s top-tier hunter-killer units had been reorganized for the mission of battling terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, a decision that in its own way was as significant a change of organization and focus as had been undertaken since the end of the Cold War. It was first disclosed in the
New York Times
in November 2003 that General John Abizaid and the senior leaders of the Special Operations community had created a covert force just for hunting Saddam Hussein and key terrorists across the region. In response to the story, Pentagon officials ordered the task force to change its name, and the unit’s number has been redesignated on a regular basis ever since, just to throw off those trying to track its supersecret actions.

Its members are the most elite counterterrorist fighters in the American military, officially labeled “Tier 1” for readiness and with carte-blanche access to the nation’s highest level of intelligence. The task force combines personnel from the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the operational, war-fighting division of the larger Special Operations Command that is charged with organizing, training, and equipping elite forces for all four armed services. The teams are drawn from members of the Army’s Delta Force, the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, and Air Force and Army special aviation units. There is a large talent pool of military intelligence officers as well as officers and analysts from the CIA and the NSA. As the war efforts in both Afghanistan and Iraq deteriorated, the three-star commander of JSOC moved his headquarters forward to Iraq from his base at Fort Bragg. His name was not well known then, but it is now: Stanley A. McChrystal.

On the day in the summer of 2009 that a Senate vote confirmed General McChrystal and elevated him to his new command and he deployed to Afghanistan, he took two reporters from the
New York Times
on a tour of his new “rear headquarters” in a sealed corridor of the Pentagon basement, home for hundreds of planners, operations officers, and intelligence analysts who would be supporting his counterinsurgency and counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan, a place he called “downrange.” The general—a tall, lean, ascetic man who eats one meal every twenty-four hours and listens to audiobooks on his daily long-distance runs to maximize his time—said that the secret to his counterterrorism efforts had been to break down walls that had divided the military and intelligence communities. “Every operation is a fight for intelligence,” he said. And every piece of information gathered on a raid—computers, documents, photographs, videos, interrogations of prisoners, and even the “pocket litter” taken from the militants’ clothes—had to be translated and analyzed quickly so that a follow-up raid could be planned and executed in the few hours before the terrorist’s cronies knew one of their comrades had been taken out of action by the JSOC task force.

The amount of material seized from terrorist and insurgent targets soon grew to an incredible size. The DIA operates exploitation triage centers and massive warehouses for storing intelligence product in the war zones as well as in Qatar and back in the United States. One intelligence analyst said that walking into one of the warehouses for document and media exploitation reminded him of the final scene of
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, when the captured Ark of the Covenant is crated up and rolled into a cavernous storage area that contains all of the government’s other, dangerous secrets. All told, more than two million individual documents and electronic files have been catalogued by media type: hard copy, phone number, thumb drive. Each is inspected by a linguist working with a communications analyst or a computer whiz. The DIA analysts are joined by experts from the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Given the volume, no more than 10 percent of the captured intelligence has ever been analyzed. Intelligence officers say they simply are overwhelmed, and untold quality leads may still be buried in the pile of computers, digital files, travel documents, and pocket litter. Technical and software improvements have made sorting and analyzing the material more efficient, but senior intelligence analysts still laugh at the chaotic early days when just about anything deemed of possible value was swept up and shipped back to exploitation centers. “I remember when we first started taking this stuff, it was coming back in Meals Ready to Eat rations boxes, discombobulated,” said a bemused Defense Department intelligence analyst. “A live grenade came back in one of the boxes. It was shipped back here. This was in the early days when they were just grabbing everything and throwing it in boxes. Dirty underwear, half-eaten food—it was just amazing the crap that came back.”

The specific hunter-killer-exploitation missions were planned, and the commandos themselves were based inside a giant military airfield north of Baghdad, which during the height of insurgent violence was hit so often by enemy fire that its nickname was “Mortar-itaville.” The task force compound was walled off, a sign of the deep, dark, “black” units based there; it was off-limits to all non–task force military personnel, including even the Special Forces that operate on the “white” side to train Iraqi commandos and hunt the second tier of insurgent and terrorist targets.

Every night during the peak of the surge in Iraq in 2007, General McChrystal’s troops carried out as many as a dozen raids on terrorist leaders, senior insurgent fighters, and top militia officers. The after-action reports of these raids were the first thing that General David H. Petraeus, the senior commander in Baghdad, read the next morning at dawn before he met with his advisers and wrote assessments for Washington. The vast majority—between 80 percent and 90 percent—of the missions were aimed at Al Qaeda–allied targets, while the rest attacked other extremist elements. Before major missions, a team of intelligence analysts would be on standby to exploit the material. If a big haul was expected, a “sensitive-site exploitation team” would be organized and would fly out with the Special Operations troops, setting up an ad hoc analytical cell in a tent or in an abandoned building near the attack site. The intelligence was not only used to find new targets and fresh missions but also employed in the high-level campaign to counter the terrorist message.

The focused missions of American commando teams were a combat solution to the threat that Michael Vickers, the Pentagon boss for Special Operations and low-intensity conflict, described as “more atomized—the individual guy who is bombing you every day.” In Iraq, by 2007, “we had overwhelming force so that is how insurgents fought us. Faced with that kind of threat, that is where these counternetwork operations came in. It’s the ‘F3EA.’ Find. Fix. Finish. Exploit. Analyze—and now! It’s intelligence-driven operations and the use of technology, in particular persistent surveillance—an unblinking eye—that lets you conduct a sustained campaign. One mission leads to another. We didn’t know how to do these kinds of operations before 9/11. A lot of intelligence investments we had made came together in 2007.”

But amid the messy business of averting disaster in the war in Iraq in 2007, the Sinjar raid was unheralded, though it is considered one of the task force’s greatest successes and it validated the investments advocated by Vickers. Like all victories, it began on very different fields of combat. The Taji haul was a classic example of what can be accomplished by low-tech, boots-on-the-ground operations, which are and have always been a fundamental part of intelligence collection, though not many have proved to be so productive. But this is a two-front war in which the technical and human sides of intelligence gathering often intersect. In future wars involving the United States, there will be even greater interaction between local operations and high-tech intelligence gathering. One example of the latter is Sinjar, which was supported by a U.S. facility in a country that, apparently, dares not say its name.

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Even from a great distance, the most distinctive landmark of the air base is not its military runways, some of the longest in the world, or the massive American air operations center there, but the large, double-tent structure that provides shade from the blazing desert sun over the outdoor recreation area that is the hub of social life for the American pilots, bombardiers, maintenance personnel, and intelligence officers based in this Persian Gulf state. A pair of giant, four-story-tall, beige cones explains why the unusual structure, visible from miles away, is referred to as The Bra by the airmen. Meeting at The Bra is what the Air Force crew members do most every night, gathering for camaraderie and karaoke after the blast-furnace Gulf sun has set. Best of all perks is the chit card issued on the first day of every month. While American ground combat forces throughout the Middle East operate under General Order No. 1, which forbids any consumption of alcohol in the combat zone, the American Air Force personnel assigned to this base can get two drinks a day, beer or wine, making the whole scene feel like a desert update of sailing the high seas with the Royal Navy as the grog ration was ladled out.

But serious business is done here, including command of all the airborne surveillance assets that nailed the Sinjar target set. American reporters who are granted access to the base must sign security agreements that forbid them from revealing its location. Odd, since a Google search for “Combined Air Operations Center” yields almost eighty thousand hits, many of them from official Defense Department sites and American military press releases identifying the location and describing the missions carried out there. (Although the official name of the headquarters overseeing American and allied aviation missions in the Middle East now is Combined Air and Space Operations Center, the old acronym, CAOC, pronounced KAY-ock, remains in standard use.)

The CAOC was quietly moved from its home in Saudi Arabia to its new location in the Persian Gulf in 2003, partly owing to restrictions on combat missions imposed by the Saudis but in no small measure to remove an irritant that had become a major propaganda cause for Muslim extremists: the presence of an American war-fighting headquarters in the same desert kingdom that was the protector of Islam’s holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, the original grievance of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network.

The first CAOC looked like a gymnasium-sized garage occupied by hundreds of computer geeks who ate and slept at their terminals and simply uncoiled more electronic cable across the floor every time a new friend came over with yet another computer terminal to do homework. The giant electronic maps identifying and locating every single American and allied aircraft throughout the region were impressive, as were the six giant monitors showing real-time surveillance video feeds from Iraq and Afghanistan. But the place was so crummy looking that a member of a visiting congressional delegation actually asked a commander why he couldn’t order someone to get a vacuum cleaner and give the headquarters a good dusting. The answer was that everyone feared the second-order effects of bringing in a cleaning crew with vacuums and brooms, because so much fine desert sand had entered the structure that kicking it up might bring the system down, halting air operations over Iraq and Afghanistan that were vital for protecting troops in contact with the enemy and gathering intelligence on adversary actions. The problem was solved when the headquarters moved into its new, multimillion-dollar structure; the replacement CAOC has a series of airlocks and blowers that were ostensibly installed to keep out poisons in a chemical or biological attack (the Pentagon has the same system, as official tour guides will tell you) but really put there simply to protect the sensitive computer systems from natural grit.