Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (39 page)

A week later, the task force found itself in a race to the Syrian border against the convoy thought to contain Saddam Hussein. The convoy won that race, but with Rumsfeld's okay, the helicopters crossed the border and chased it down a couple of miles into Syria. In a confusing situation, the heliborne JSOC troops, supported by an AC-130 gunship, interdicted the vehicles but also got into a firefight with Syrian border guards, in which several guards were wounded. Saddam Hussein was not in the convoy, but relatives of his were. “I think they were cousins of his,” said a source who tracked the battle in Task Force 20's JOC. The task force also conducted an air strike against a group of farmhouses on the Iraqi side of the border, killing at least one person—a pregnant woman—and shot up a Bedouin truck, killing at least two people, according to Patrick Andrade, a photographer embedded with 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which was called to deal with the aftermath of the Task Force 20 mission. A Delta source estimated Syrian casualties at between ten and twenty. “As we approached the Syrian border, everyone just figured, ‘We're on a movement to contact, start firing at everything that moves,'” the Delta source said. Other unconfirmed reports said as many as eighty Syrians died. The task force troops flew the wounded Syrians to a U.S. medical facility in Iraq, where they were treated before being repatriated.

Franks visited Baghdad the next day and reacted with typical bravado after Task Force 20 officials briefed him on the incident. “The Syrians can either make a big deal out of it or a small deal out of it,” he said. “And if they make a big deal out of it, we'll show them what a big deal is.” Syrian protests were restrained. From the task force's perspective, “everyone moved on,” said the Delta source. “It was almost a nonevent.”
8

*   *   *

Delta's A Squadron spent the rest of its tour hunting Saddam. They didn't find him, but on July 22 they got a chance to take down his sons, Uday and Qusay Hussein, who were also still on the run. After being turned away from Syria, they found temporary refuge in Mosul in the home of a sometime supporter of their father. But spooked by the presence in his house of the second- and third-most-wanted men in Iraq (and, perhaps, tempted by the $30 million reward on offer for the pair), their host let Coalition forces know that the brothers were at his home, along with Qusay's fourteen-year-old son and a bodyguard. Delta delayed the mission until the next day as operators gathered a blocking force from the 101st and tried to visually confirm the targets. On July 23, with the building surrounded in broad daylight, an A Squadron sniper nicknamed “Noodle” killed Qusay with a shot through a window. Then a six-man team from A2 Troop with Ivan, a military working dog, entered via the carport and tried to assault up the stairs. But the brothers' well-trained bodyguard, in all likelihood a member of the Special Republican Guard, which Qusay led, drove the operators back with AK fire and a grenade, wounding at least two of them. The bodyguard also killed the dog, which had paused to attack Qusay's corpse. After the operators withdrew, the bodyguard shot and wounded a soldier attached to the 101st company who was standing casually by a Humvee.

Reluctant to attempt another assault, the operators instead asked the 101st to take the building under fire with heavy weapons. OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters from the division's 2nd Squadron, 17th Cavalry Regiment fired rockets at the building, while the ground force peppered it with about ten TOW missiles. The barrage worked. When A2 reentered the building, they found Uday and the bodyguard dead. Qusay's son was still alive—holding a rifle—until an operator shot him. In the operation's aftermath, task force troops reportedly showed more respect to Ivan's corpse than they did to the bodies of the two brothers.

Proud of their role in the brothers' demise, A2's operators had a group photo taken with the source holding a fake check signed by George W. Bush. The squadron command sergeant major, “Grinch,” had ball caps made for his men embroidered with the aces of hearts and clubs, Uday and Qusay's respective ranks in the deck of cards.
9

Less than a month later, on August 17, the task force captured Ali Hassan al-Majid al-Tikriti, better known as “Chemical Ali,” a cousin of Saddam responsible for gassing Kurds who rose up against the regime in the 1991 Gulf War's aftermath. The deck of cards' king of spades, Ali was the fifth-most-wanted man in Iraq.
10
“We had been tracking Chemical Ali's girlfriend,” said a Delta source. “We had her on sigint, had her on humint, and we found her gathering passports for Chemical Ali and all the rest of his family to go to Syria—fake passports. So we finally picked her up one night and pretty much told her, ‘Hey, you either tell us where he is or you're going to go away for a long time.'” The woman quickly gave up Tikriti's location: a tall apartment building “a couple of blocks” from Delta's squadron in downtown Baghdad. The operators waited until very early morning, then picked or forced the lock on his door and silently entered the apartment. They found Tikriti sound asleep in bed. Using the barrel of his M4 assault rifle, an operator nudged him. Tikriti opened his eyes to see the green glow of several operators' night vision goggles staring down at him. “He pissed his pants right there in bed,” the Delta source said.

But as the task force worked its way down the list of fifty-five “former regime elements,” a different enemy was setting flame to the kindling provided by an Iraqi population humiliated by a foreign occupation. Two days after Chemical Ali's capture, a suicide car bomber attacked Baghdad's Canal Hotel, headquarters of the United Nations effort in Iraq, killing Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. special representative in Iraq, and at least twenty-one others. A similar attack on the hotel on September 22 caused the United Nations to pull out of Iraq altogether. The bombers were sent by a new entrant into the Iraq armed conflict, the Jordanian Islamist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Into the growing anarchy stepped a new JSOC commander. On October 6, Dell Dailey handed off command to Major General Stanley McChrystal in a bland ceremony in a parachute packing facility on JSOC's compound at Pope Air Force Base.

In light of the events of the next several years, it's interesting that command of JSOC wasn't McChrystal's first wish at that stage of his career. He had hoped to be given the 82nd Airborne Division and wondered aloud about whether he was the right choice to lead JSOC.
11
But at forty-nine, McChrystal had already built an impressive résumé that in retrospect made him a perfect candidate to head the organization. His multiple tours in the Rangers, culminating with two years commanding the regiment between 1997 and 1999, combined with almost three years as a staffer in JSOC's operations directorate (including the 1991 Gulf War), had taught him how JSOC worked; his most recent assignment as the Joint Staff's vice director of operations had given him an insight into the inner workings at the highest levels of the Pentagon. But as McChrystal was only too aware, one item missing from that résumé was any time spent in the special mission units, many of whose members were, as he admitted, still of the opinion that the JSOC headquarters was as much a hindrance as a help.
12

A few days after taking command of JSOC, McChrystal flew to Tampa to meet with General John Abizaid, who had replaced Franks as CENTCOM commander, and General Doug Brown, who'd taken Holland's place at Special Operations Command. The meeting with Abizaid produced two agreements. McChrystal requested, and Abizaid agreed, that he would deal with McChrystal personally on any issue to do with JSOC forces in the Central Command region, even if a deputy, rather than McChrystal himself, was running the show in Iraq or Afghanistan at the time. Second, McChrystal agreed to Abizaid's request to conduct a major operation in eastern Afghanistan, where Central Command had reports of the presence of senior Al Qaeda leaders.
13

Within three weeks of taking command, McChrystal departed for an orientation tour of JSOC elements in Iraq and Afghanistan.
14
The forces he visited were by now stretched thin by the nonstop commitments of the “global war on terror.” When Zarqawi's terrorist bombing campaign in Iraq took hold in late summer, the Pentagon directed Delta to prepare to assume a security role at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. This threatened to burden the unit, just as the requirement to provide bodyguards for Karzai had hampered Team 6 in Afghanistan, so Delta pushed back hard, telling Rumsfeld he had to choose between having his premier counterterrorist force protecting the embassy or actually fighting terrorists in Iraq.
15
The tasking soon went away, but the ongoing commitment to Iraq was straining JSOC, which now had to man task forces in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as a headquarters and an on-call force in the United States ready to respond to an 0300 counterterrorism or 0400 counter-proliferation mission. “We were tapped out,” a retired special operations officer said, adding that JSOC had to request help from the services' special operations components—Air Force Special Operations Command, Army Special Operations Command, and Navy Special Warfare Command—to help fill its manpower needs.
16

Stunned by the indecisiveness at the highest levels of American command in Iraq, McChrystal focused on problems within his powers to fix. After visiting JSOC's sixteen-person team in Mosul and a similar cell in Tikrit, he realized his 250-person task force in Iraq was divided into isolated elements with little connectivity to each other and no efficient process for turning potentially valuable documents and digital devices seized on missions into intelligence to be cycled back to the strike elements—the Delta troops and Ranger platoons—to drive more raids. As if to underline the growing threat to U.S. forces, on October 25 an insurgent RPG downed the trail aircraft in the flight of two TF Brown Black Hawks returning McChrystal from Mosul to Baghdad. Because the general had left most of his party in Baghdad, the aircraft was empty except for the crew, all of whom survived.
17

During those first months after the fall of Baghdad, JSOC had access to only one Predator, and even that was flown by pilots back in the States. But the senior Delta officers in-country, first Blaber and then Christian, realized they had at least a partial solution to the lack of aerial intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) at their fingertips: the helicopters of the unit's E Squadron, equipped with the Wescam ball. “We said ‘Let's get the fucking Wescam ball over here,' and that was a major breakthrough in Iraq,” recalled a Delta source. E Squadron shifted its main effort to Iraq, deploying its small air force of fixed wing planes, standard Army Black Hawks, and at least one Mi-17, all affixed with the Wescam ball and other top secret sensors. (A standard Black Hawk, without an air-to-air refueling probe that is a 160th Black Hawk's unique signature, provided a sort of cover in Iraq, as regular Army aviation units were flying so many of them.)

It soon became the norm for an E Squadron Black Hawk with the call sign “Birdseye” to go up for eight hours every night to provide ISR support to the task force's missions. The helicopters didn't support daytime missions, as the risk of being seen and compromising missions was too great, but flying at about 8,000 to 10,000 feet, they were invisible at night. “They'd be blacked out,” said a special operations aviator. “You couldn't even hear them.” The Birdseye pilots would narrate what they were seeing on their video, which they also transmitted in real time to task force vehicles on the ground and back to the JOC. This mission fell to E Squadron for a simple reason: its crews were the only personnel that the operators on the missions trusted to be able to know what tactical information they needed. “It always boiled down to who did Green trust to give them what they wanted,” said the special ops aviator.
18

Through fall 2003, the task force stuck assiduously to their assigned mission, hunting “former regime elements,” as around them Iraq descended into bloody tumult. For Delta, the primary focus was Saddam Hussein. By December, A Squadron, now led by Mark Erwin, sensed they were closing in on their quarry. “We were getting a lot of intel,” said an operator. “We had rolled up on our rotation anybody who was even remotely close to Saddam: chicks he liked to bang, their husbands, his butler, his tailor, his inner circle, his cooks. We had gone through all those guys and we knew we were getting close.”

*   *   *

In November McChrystal moved to Bagram to oversee what became Winter Strike, the operation he'd promised Abizaid. Winter Strike was in some ways the last hurrah of the JRX-style mind-set that held sway under Dailey. “We went there and set up the Taj Mahal,” a JSOC staff officer said. The Afghanistan task force, which had shrunk to about 200 personnel, increased tenfold. But the massive operation was a bust. McChrystal's forces—Rangers and Team 6 SEALs, mostly—swept through Nuristan and Kunar provinces without snaring any senior enemy leaders. The new JSOC commander quickly realized that this sort of large, laboriously planned operation was not the route to victory.
19

Then, with McChrystal back at Pope and nine days after Coultrup's C Squadron had replaced A Squadron in Iraq, the task force there got its big break when it captured Mohammed Ibrahim Omar al-Musslit, a trusted Saddam confidant, in Baghdad on December 12. Under intense interrogation, Musslit coughed up the information that the deposed dictator was in the town of Dawr, across the Tigris from his hometown of Tikrit. The next day, C Squadron moved north to Tikrit, bringing Musslit with them.

By this point in the war, JSOC had expanded its command structure to accommodate two full-time, one-star deputy commanders. With three flag officers, JSOC could keep one each in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pope. Rear Admiral Bill McRaven was the deputy commander running JSOC operations in Iraq. He called McChrystal from the BIAP operations center and told him that the task force had actionable intelligence on Saddam's whereabouts.