My Share of the Task (20 page)

As Al Qaeda increasingly decentralized, the core's practical role changed. It did not act as a central hub of funding or logistical support. If anything, funds flowed from local groups back to Al Qaeda central, though the network was not designed to distribute resources. Rather, each of the local elements became self-resourcing and self-reinforcing, drawing recruits and money on its own. Cut off from central support, these elements rapidly adapted to local conditions.

But Al Qaeda's core still mattered as more than a symbol of the organization's survival. Foreign volunteers increasingly went directly to a battlefield, not through training camps, though directing this flow by endorsing certain fronts remained one lever Al Qaeda's senior leadership retained over the outer network. Moreover, it was still a resource pool, only now it offered men who had a decade or two of experience and specialized training. As jihadists, they had risen to the top of the organization and survived hot conflicts and Western intelligence efforts. They were vulnerable when they circulated battlefields, but less so when they mentored and guided through communiqués. So while decentralization made the core less relevant in day-to-day operations, it made the top leadership in some ways even more valuable, as it sought to preserve the brand and maintain disciplined messaging while often relying on less experienced, less loyal affiliates. But interactions with the center were slow, as CDs or letters literally had to be carried across countries, and leaders could only make some decisions in rare meetings. The jihadists knew communicating by cell phone or e-mail was dangerous.

I concluded there was no single person or place we could strike that would cause Al Qaeda to collapse; there was no coup de main option. But TF 714 could target two of the enemy's surfaces. We had to attack the organization head on as it sprouted up locally while also targeting its upper echelons of leadership. Doing so would deplete the organization of its entrenched expertise and institutional wisdom, although such skills and know-how existed in the increasingly powerful local elements. If onlookers saw that the organization was losing—fleeing territory, hemorrhaging people—its brand would suffer.

While we had some tactical advantages, we were, in some ways, years behind the enemy. Defeating Al Qaeda would be a protracted campaign.

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E
arly on, counterproductive infighting among the CIA, State Department, Department of Defense, and others back in Washington threatened that campaign. No one had less patience for this than did John Abizaid, so he chose his Tampa headquarters to hold the January 2004 conference in which he convened and focused key organizations for the war on terror. The United States was fighting most of the war in General Abizaid's theater, and he was not satisfied with the way it was going. At this meeting, which we later called Tampa I, Abizaid brought together the key intelligence officials and military commanders assigned to hunt Al Qaeda's senior leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I was TF 714's senior representative; General Doug Brown and then–Vice Admiral Eric Olson came from SOCOM; the National Security Agency sent representatives; and my friend for two decades, Dave Rodriguez, then a brigadier, represented the Joint Staff. But the attendee who mattered most for Abizaid's purposes—to free the war on terror from the pettiness of D.C. so we could redouble our focus and cooperation—was CIA director George Tenet.

At the circular table, Abizaid explained his conviction that, two years after 9/11, the United States had lost focus against Al Qaeda. The fight would be longer and more difficult than the initial decimation of Al Qaeda in the opening salvo of the Afghan war might suggest. Our focus, durable commitment, and ingenuity needed to be extraordinary.

“We need a new Manhattan Project,” he said, referring to the American effort during the Second World War to beat the Axis powers in the race for an atom bomb.

It was important, then, when Tenet struck the same chord of renewed commitment and teamwork. “Okay, everybody, let's dedicate ourselves to getting UBL
this year
,” he said, tapping the table with his two forefingers as he said these last two words. His appeal seemed feasible, and the room nodded. I was impressed with Tenet's obvious desire to increase partnership. With that, Tampa I set the precedent for organizing our effort. Abizaid convened the group and ran the meeting, and the CIA sent its top man. It was an important first step toward moving cooperation from gestures to action.

At the end of the meeting, I proposed translating this enthusiasm into military gains by bringing to bear all of the potential intelligence resources of the U.S. government. “
In no class of warfare,” C. E. Callwell had written a hundred years earlier, about the “small wars” of the nineteenth century, “is a well organized and well served intelligence department more essential than in that against guerrillas.” The same qualities that made intelligence so important when countering guerrillas then—the difficulty of finding the enemy, of striking him, and of predicting his next move and defending against it—were increased a hundredfold when trying to counter terrorists in the age of electronic communication and car bombs. I began to see that in addition to rewiring our own force, we had to make our relationship with the intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA, deeper and broader. Based on an assumption that we could not be a SOF-only task force, or even a military-only task force, I had earlier accepted Bill McRaven's recommendation that we seek to form a true joint interagency task force (JIATF). While the concept of a JIATF was not new, it would prove a transformative step for TF 714.

I explained to the group that this JIATF would be a way to fuse the various intelligence agencies' specialties in order to better understand the enemy. It would leverage the CIA's “human intelligence” from spies and sources; the National Security Agency's intercepted signals; the FBI's forensic and investigative expertise; the Defense Intelligence Agency's military reach; and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's (NGA) dazzling mapping ability.

Previous attempts at this fusion had existed before and after 9/11 with varying success. But for counterterrorism efforts, while the intelligence was collected in theater, it was typically consolidated in the United States. This allowed for centralized analysis by the limited community of experienced counterterrorism (CT) professionals and senior-level decision making for the sensitive, high-risk operations periodically required. But proximity to Washington also had costs. The Beltway culture compelled, or allowed, the agencies to be less collaborative. Valuable information that might slide across a table downrange had to cross miles and clear bureaucratic hurdles back in the States. In Washington, the myriad essential but competing priorities, from bureaucracy to family life, always slowed action.

For this reason, the JIATF would bring analysts from each agency into the same literal tent—and that tent would be on a base in Afghanistan or Iraq. Obviously, this would enable intelligence to be analyzed downrange, close to the fight, making the process faster and the information potentially more relevant. Less obvious but more important, having the analysts live and operate forward, teamed with counterparts from other agencies, decreased the gravitational pull of their headquarters back in D.C. and dramatically increased the sense of shared mission and purpose. It was extraordinarily powerful for analysts to share information, to brief operators on their assessments, to hear the rotors of an assault force launching on their information, and then to debrief together after the operation.

Very quickly after the conference, the JIATF took its place at Bagram in a tent next to others originally erected for Operation Winter Strike but now permanent fixtures at the old Soviet air base. The goodwill and camaraderie that brimmed in the room in Tampa undersold just how big a challenge it would be to get the agencies—through their representatives in that tent—to work together. And while the day-to-day leadership inside the JIATF tent fell to our most deft TF 714 members, much of my next four and a half years was consumed with shoring up support at the top levels by keeping participation in the JIATF and our wider task force a top priority.

No alliance could be as infuriating or as productive as my relationship with the CIA. We worked more closely with it than with any other agency, and the effort tried the patience of both sides. Some of my closest friendships at the end of the fight were with CIA partners. In a frame on my wall at home I have a note, written on a page torn from a small notebook while in the back of a helicopter flying over Kunar in 2005. The man who scratched the note was a CIA officer who became a close comrade and friend. The note reads: “I don't know the Ranger Creed. But you can bet your sweet ass I won't leave you!”

And yet more than once, my most trusted subordinates had to stop me, in moments of utter frustration, from severing all ties with our “Agency brothers,” repeating back to me my own guidance to preserve our relationships through specific conflicts. I knew my Agency partners had equally mixed sentiments about me, and I admired them for their tolerance. On my initial October tour, I had visited the CIA headquarters at Langley, as well as the posts downrange where we had liaisons. Depending on the locale and the personalities, special operations and the CIA worked together only marginally better than they had during Operation Eagle Claw in 1980. At best, we were fighting parallel, fractured campaigns against Al Qaeda; ours had to be a unified fight.

Not everyone in the CIA agreed. For those people, the relationship with us was good because it was limited. Their hesitance was understandable. Many of them were skittish as the military—led by TF 714—began to take a more active role in the counterterror effort. The entire CIA had about as many people as a single military division, and some feared that when the Department of Defense directed its immense resources toward counterterrorism, it would overwhelm the CIA, reducing their role. Some maintained a legitimate concern that our proposal ran contrary to how the Agency operated, as Langley had been the furnace of their intelligence work, while security concerns meant that they maintained a light footprint forward. Others had a more instinctive cultural aversion that fueled their intense professional territoriality. As the junior varsity, thundering in loud and large, TF 714 was liable to muck up their careful spy work, and we would have leaks. I had to clench my teeth at one meeting when a not particularly impressive ex-military CIA officer smugly said, “Welcome to the war on terror.” Building a durable relationship was an exercise of persistence and patience more than brilliance.

Government agencies signaled their feeling toward TF 714's expanding presence in their community through the caliber of representatives they sent to the JIATF and the orders they gave them. Some sent their best talent; others deployed people they wouldn't miss. They deployed some talented people with instructions to be polite, but narrowly limited their cooperation; a few others came fully committed to the team.

With this mixed influx of people, the JIATF was an early step in expanding TF 714 beyond its traditional core elements, and the diversity brought its ups and its downs. Participants came with fascinating stories or created them by their actions. A young navy lieutenant told me of her Afghan birth and how she'd fled the Soviet invasion with her family as a young child, riding on the back of a donkey through the Khyber Pass. Now an American citizen, she was back, and her determination carried a buzz felt by those she worked alongside. Another officer, gifted in intelligence analysis but less so in weapons, accidentally discharged his M16 rifle inside the JIATF tent. No one was hurt, but the bullet pierced a fire extinguisher, and out of the gaping “wound” white foam spewed into the NGA's computer servers, which stored all of the map data for the task force, ruining one of our key databases of information. Although it became a much-loved anecdote within the command, it wasn't funny at the time.

For many, the JIATF was an entirely new experience, in some ways an adventure. Whether fresh out of school and only weeks out of their host agency's training, or nearing retirement, few were accustomed to the demanding rhythm and spare living of deployments. Away from the ties, traffic, and fluorescent-lit cubicle pens of D.C., they found themselves living crudely and briefing broad-shouldered operators who, often in a matter of hours, and sometimes in minutes, would launch on missions using the intelligence the JIATF provided. For most of the twenty-five to thirty-five people working there, this was the most exhausting, frustrating, but deeply rewarding work of their career.

The JIATF at Bagram was not a tipping point for our effectiveness, but it was an essential step forward. It wasn't until 2005 that the JIATF and its counterpart created at Balad that year really began to hit their stride as nodes for focused analysis and hubs to connect the contributing organizations. The stand-up of the JIATF that spring began the process of turning TF 714 from a collection of niche strike forces into a network able to integrate diverse elements of the U.S. government into a unified effort.

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A
s we built our new network, Zarqawi used his to spark the recrudescence of a bloody, centuries-old hatred. After a spring attack on the Shia in southern Iraq, a French diplomat in Baghdad summed up the terror in his report: “
We have recently seen a horrible example of the Wahhabis' cruel fanaticism in the terrible fate of Imam Hussein,” meaning the holy Shiite mosque in the city of Karbala. His reaction would be a familiar lament to any observer of the Iraq war.

Yet the attack the Frenchman described had occurred in the spring of 1802, when Wahhabis were a new puritanical Sunni movement, led by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an Arabian desert preacher who believed that Islam had been diverted, deceived, and made weak. Only strict Koranic literalism would restore Islamic society to its pure, strong form. Wahhabis had come north to Iraq from the Nejd and Hejaz as part of Ibn Saud's army, which he was using to
conquer the peninsula. That day in Karbala was a chance to enforce one of the Wahhabis' precepts: The Shia were infidels, corroding the nation of Islam. Their mosques were monuments of idolatry, their rituals blasphemy. And this demanded action.