Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (16 page)

That left the three Central Asian republics that bordered Afghanistan to the north: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. The planners considered using Termez, an Uzbek town near the border, but eventually decided to assume JSOC would stage out of Kharsi-Khanabad, another Uzbek air base. Any targets would therefore have to be in northern Afghanistan.

By Monday, September 17, relying on work done in the years prior to 9/11, JSOC's intelligence analysts had produced a list of six potential targets.
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All but one were petroleum facilities or airfields within forty-five miles of the border. The exception was a fertilizer plant in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan's fourth largest city, about forty miles south of the Uzbek border.
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It was that target to which Dailey took a particular shine and on which he told his planners to focus.
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*   *   *

While his planners wrestled with the challenges of mounting a series of assaults on a landlocked country on the other side of the world, Dailey was summoned to Washington to brief the president on the missions JSOC was proposing. Bush had originally been scheduled to visit JSOC, but that trip was canceled out of concern it would give away the nature of the planning under way. Instead, Dailey would brief Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon on September 17.
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(The White House and the Defense Department kept the reason for the president's visit under wraps, instead telling the public that Bush and Cheney were at the Pentagon to get briefed on the call-up of 35,000 military reservists. The visit would be remembered mainly for Bush's comment to reporters that bin Laden was “wanted—dead or alive.”)
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Rumsfeld's office faxed a copy of Dailey's PowerPoint slides to the White House less than an hour before the briefing was set to start. The National Security Council staff had only a few minutes to review the presentation before the presidential motorcade pulled out of the driveway. Frank Miller, a special assistant to Bush and NSC senior director for defense policy, grabbed the slides and glanced through them. He was immediately troubled by a line on a slide that listed options for action in Afghanistan: “Thinking Outside the Box—Poisoning Food Supply.”
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“That struck me as wrong,” Miller said. “Poisoning food supplies would harm innocent civilians and we just weren't going down that road.” It also could be interpreted as implying the possible use of biological weapons, which the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention banned the United States from possessing. Miller quickly checked with a colleague who knew more than he did about the convention. “We agreed that this was not a good thing,” Miller said. When the motorcade reached the Pentagon he grabbed his boss, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who'd been in another vehicle but was also due to attend Dailey's briefing. “I showed her the slide,” Miller said. “I said, ‘This is completely wrong—I don't know what they're talking about, it could potentially get into the areas of the BWC. We don't do this.'” Rice agreed strongly, but the start of the briefing was only minutes away.

“We walked upstairs to the secretary's office and she put the slide in front of Rumsfeld and said, ‘You're not going to show this slide to the president of the United States,'” Miller said. “And he looked at her and took it and walked away without saying a word. And in fact the slide did not get shown in the briefing.”

Off-the-wall ideas such as poisoning the Afghan food supply flourished because JSOC was having tremendous difficulty finding viable targets. A senior member of the Joint Staff attributed this, in part, to a tension between the “culture of JSOC at the time, which was fairly ponderous and enormously heavy in its orientation,” and “the melodramatic reaction of people like Rumsfeld after 9/11 to just ‘do something.'

“The conflict between the two and the pressure … probably produced some fairly bizarre notions,” he said. Indeed, Dailey repeatedly complained to subordinates that “we've got no targets,” said a Delta source. “So he goes up [to Washington], yanks that out of his ass—
poison the fucking food supply
.”

Among the possible missions Dailey did brief in the Pentagon was a Ranger raid on an airstrip attached to a hunting camp southwest of Kandahar owned by a United Arab Emirates military official, but the JSOC commander's priority was an attack on the fertilizer factory, which the planners had named Objective Goat. “This fertilizer factory had gained some legs, and it was obviously gaining legs because Dailey wanted it to,” said a planning cell member. After Dailey delivered the last slide, the room fell quiet. “It was sort of dead because the president's there and all the generals, they're waiting for him to say something,” said Mike Hall, Dailey's top NCO, who was the only enlisted service member there. Bush locked eyes with Hall. “Sergeant Major, some people are going to get hurt,” the president said. “Is it worth it?” Although he had reservations about the initial targets, Hall thought the president was asking about the wider military operation in Afghanistan, so he answered that he thought it was.

The focus on the fertilizer factory was hugely controversial within JSOC. Dailey's rationale was that Al Qaeda might be using it to produce chemical weapons. CIA human intelligence suggested the production of urea and ammonia, both used in the manufacture of such weapons. Imagery indicated the site was surrounded by seven guard towers and other fighting positions. Intelligence analysts said the towers were manned by a security force of fifty personnel working in shifts. That was enough for Dailey.
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Tommy Franks was likewise persuaded.
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But the planning cell dismissed this notion. “None of us had a lot of confidence in that target,” said a cell member. The notion that Al Qaeda was producing chemical weapons was a “giant leap” from the available intelligence, he said. “I just remember us going through the motions, going, ‘It's got to get better than this.'”

Several senior figures on the JSOC staff and in Delta, the unit slated to lead the assault, shared the planners' disdain for the target and couldn't believe Dailey was allowing it to consume JSOC's time and energy while strategic targets like bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders were still at large in Afghanistan. “We were like, ‘We've got to think outside the box here, guys,'” said a Delta source. “‘Let's get away from this … JSOC mentality of setting up another massive JRX, and let's do things that matter.'” Instead, he said, “We spent all our time planning this massive raid on that empty target.” The critics thought JSOC should focus on hunting bin Laden and working with the CIA to insert teams with the Northern Alliance. Coherent change detection, a technique that measures the differences in images of the same location captured by satellite-mounted synthetic aperture radar, supported their skepticism of the fertilizer plant.
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“The coherent change detection sensors were all focused on this thing,” the Delta source said. “So after four days, this thing that was being briefed to the president as, ‘Yes, there are guards there, we believe the guard force is small but highly trained, they patrol the perimeter and that part is going to require some combat power'—well, coherent change detection detected no movement … no vehicles, nothing.”

One of the loudest voices arguing against the Mazar target was that of Lieutenant Colonel Pete Blaber, a tall, lean former Ranger who'd joined Delta a decade earlier and had a reputation for speaking his mind. The personality conflict between Dailey, who, not unusually for a career special operations aviator, favored a process-oriented approach,
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and Blaber, a supremely self-confident climbing and hiking enthusiast who viewed the military decision-making process as something close to a waste of time,
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would reverberate through the next two years of JSOC's history. But for now Dailey held the whip hand as JSOC's two-star commander while the naysayers wore the oak leaves and eagles of majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels, so the plan to attack the fertilizer factory moved inexorably forward.

*   *   *

It was late evening in the cramped, windowless space that served as the planning cell's main briefing room. The utilitarian furniture was strewn with empty coffee cups, full spit cups, and open laptops bearing red stickers warning that classified information was contained therein. Maps covered the walls. About fifteen sleep-deprived men sat in the harsh electric light listening to a tall, dark-haired colleague in his mid-thirties.

Seated were the operations officers from most of JSOC's units, a few staffers from the command, as well as Colonel Joe Votel, commander of the Ranger Regiment, and Dell Dailey. Briefing was Major Tom DiTomasso, Delta's B Squadron operations officer and the planning cell's senior Delta representative. As a lieutenant, DiTomasso had led a Ranger platoon in Mogadishu, the last high-profile JSOC battle. Now he was proposing how to fight the next one.

The target was the fertilizer plant. Under pressure to find a target JSOC could hit soon, Dailey had selected the target but told the planners he was open to ideas about how to strike it. DiTomasso's plan was classic Delta: stealthy, elegant, and lethal: a small number of operators would freefall parachute into the area, hit the factory hard and fast in specific locations, and then have TF Brown pick them up with the mission complete. “It was very low-vis,” said an officer who was there. “They'd never have known what hit them and from where.”

The plan impressed several of those listening, but not Dailey, who wanted a much bigger extravaganza as JSOC's first mission of the war. “What in the hell kind of bullshit is that?” yelled the JSOC commander. “We ain't doing that.”

“Dailey absolutely like a laser blew Tom out of the water,” said the officer. “Essentially stripped him in front of God and everybody about what a dumb idea that was.” Those present got the message. Despite his professed openness to out-of-the-box thinking, Dailey wasn't interested in tactical solutions that weren't big, JRX-style operations. “He eviscerated Tom right then and there for a plan that most people thought could have worked,” said the officer. The planners went back to work, under the strong impression that for JSOC's first combat operation of the twenty-first century, stealth and secrecy were not only not required, they were to be avoided.
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*   *   *

On September 19, Dailey visited Benning, where the planning cell and other key individuals were holding a series of scaled-down rehearsals (called “rock drills”) of the raid on Objective Goat and other proposed missions. The plan had morphed to one in which thirty-six hours of air strikes would precede a nighttime air assault on Kunduz Airfield in northeast Afghanistan (deemed a psychological operations target) and near-simultaneous strikes by fixed wing and helicopter gunships against a petroleum plant. On the third night, Delta and the Rangers would stage out of Kharsi-Khanabad, raid the fertilizer factory, take chemical samples, and then depart via one or more MC-130s that would land close by, before the Air Force dropped a BLU-82 “daisy cutter” bomb to destroy the complex. The mission was due to take place as soon as September 26.
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The strike against the factory was a key element of the plans Franks and Dailey briefed to Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon September 20. But serious doubts persisted.
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The two generals were due to brief Bush the next day.
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Deeply dissatisfied with what he'd heard, Rumsfeld had Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith draft a memo to set the stage for the president. The memo made clear not only the priority now attached to the fertilizer plant target, but the shaky foundations upon which the plan rested. “We may come up empty-handed,” it said. “Can't count on finding proof of chemical weapons production in the fertilizer factory that is our prime target.”
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Early the next afternoon, Franks and Dailey traveled to the White House to brief the president. Also present were Vice President Cheney, Rumsfeld, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Henry “Hugh” Shelton, and Air Force General Richard Myers, the Joint Chiefs vice chairman who would succeed Shelton when the latter retired in October. “The secret JSOC part of the operation” was “a big part of the plan,” according to Shelton. But the briefing was also notable for a shift in emphasis since Shelton presented options to Bush and the National Security Council at Camp David September 15. That brief had focused on possible conventional military attacks—mostly cruise missile and air strikes—and left the president and his advisers underwhelmed. But now Franks proposed inserting Special Forces teams into Afghanistan to advise and assist the Northern Alliance in their war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
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Such a mission would be a classic example of “unconventional warfare,” which means using guerrilla forces to overthrow a hostile government and is a doctrinal Special Forces mission. While Dailey and his staff had been focused on the fertilizer factory, plans were under way to make their “white” special ops counterparts the centerpiece of the war in Afghanistan.

But no matter how thin the evidence that anything nefarious was occurring at the fertilizer factory, JSOC not only kept planning to assault it, but that plan became increasingly elaborate. Under Dailey's direction, JSOC was reverting to what it knew best: a massive JRX-style operation involving as many of its component units as possible.

Some argued for missions that went beyond this restrictive template. Lieutenant Colonel Steve Schiller, TF Brown's operations officer, proposed using a small force to seize Bagram air base, about forty miles north of Kabul. A former commander of the 160th's Little Bird gunship company, Schiller wanted to stage Little Bird raids and other missions from Bagram into northeastern Afghanistan, where bin Laden was presumed (correctly) to be hiding. But Dailey had no interest in taking the air base early on, let alone launching Little Bird missions from it. A former Black Hawk pilot, the general was skeptical that Little Birds, with their limited range and power, had much to offer in a vast country consisting largely of deserts and mountains.
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