Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (43 page)

In the Iraq task force operations center, the task force commander—usually the Delta commander—and his staff sat at the horseshoe. In the rows behind them sat about sixty more operations officers, intelligence analysts, and liaison officers from other commands. The JOC's space-age, high-tech appearance invited comparisons to science fiction. “We used to call it the Battlestar Galactica,” said an officer who spent several tours in the Iraq task force JOC. Others called it the Death Star. The officer estimated there were thirty to fifty individual workstations in the JOC, all facing nine “monster TV screens … probably sixty-inch TVs arranged in a grid square.” A separate feed ran on each screen. One might have a list of the day's missions, another the feed from Echo's Birdseye aircraft above an ongoing assault, a third the video from another intel asset, and so on. “All of a sudden something would start happening on a target, people would focus on that one screen,” the officer said. The staff called it “Kill TV.” Next door in McChrystal's global ops center, called the Situation Awareness Room, the JSOC commander—or, in his absence, one of his two one-star deputies—sat at the head table with his command sergeant major and intelligence and operations directors on one side and representatives from other agencies and the Iraq task force on the other.
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John Abizaid, who had been McChrystal's brigade commander a decade before when McChrystal commanded an 82nd Airborne battalion, was a strong supporter of the JSOC boss's desire to turn his command into a “network.” But, as McChrystal acknowledged, others he needed to buy into the concept—particularly in the intelligence community—took longer to come around. He pressed ahead regardless, hoping that as the task force produced results, leaders in other agencies would want to leverage its success. To help accelerate the process, he made the entire JOC facility a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF (pronounced “skiff”), so folks from different agencies and task forces could share top secret data quickly and openly—a complete reversal from the mind-set that traditionally dominated special ops and intelligence organizations.
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McChrystal or one of his two one-star deputies were always in Iraq, but from fall 2003 Delta had day-to-day responsibility for running the Iraq task force. (When he focused Delta on Iraq, McChrystal also put JSOC's Afghanistan task force under the alternating command of Team 6 and the Rangers.)
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By late summer 2004, the Iraq task force was divided between the headquarters at Balad, usually led by the Delta commander or his deputy, a Delta squadron task force headquartered at Mission Support Site Fernandez in Baghdad, and smaller Ranger, Delta, and Team 6 elements in Mosul, Tikrit, and other towns, with Task Force Brown's helicopters in support. The British SAS's Task Force Black, based in the Green Zone next door to the Delta squadron, wanted to work closely with JSOC, but the British government's concerns over JSOC's treatment of detainees meant the SAS continued to concentrate on hunting former Saddam regime elements long after McChrystal had refocused on Zarqawi.
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The size of the force would grow over the next several years, commanders would shift locations, and the organizational chart would change repeatedly. But this was all in keeping with McChrystal's precept that it was important for his force not to become wedded to a particular organizational construct or geographic setup. Rather, he wanted his command to be able to adapt on the fly, moving troops and command and control nodes from base to base as the enemy situation morphed.
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McChrystal was running a global enterprise, but after first favoring Afghanistan with time and resources for Winter Strike, he had decided to prioritize the campaign against Al Qaeda in Iraq. “Things were really heating up in Iraq,” said a senior JSOC staff officer. “We shifted the main effort.” Having established his state-of-the-art command center at Balad, taken stock of the challenges confronting him, and taken the measure of the men and women under him, by fall 2004 McChrystal had the pieces in place to realize his ambitious agenda for JSOC and to pit his nascent network against Al Qaeda in Iraq. As the staff officer put it, “That's when JSOC became the JSOC on steroids.”

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Perhaps no individual other than McChrystal himself was more responsible for turning JSOC into an information age war-fighting machine over the next couple of years than Colonel Mike Flynn, who replaced another Army colonel, Brian Keller, as JSOC's intelligence director in July 2004. A wiry, black-haired Rhode Islander equipped with a razor-sharp mind and a willingness to challenge conventional wisdom, Flynn had already enjoyed an impressive career, serving as intelligence director for the 82nd Airborne Division and XVIII Airborne Corps, including a tour in Afghanistan in the latter position when McChrystal was the Corps' chief of staff. But this would be his first special operations assignment.
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McChrystal understood the central importance of intelligence in counterinsurgency and had put in what the military calls a “by name request” for Mike Flynn to become his intelligence chief.
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When Flynn took charge of JSOC's intelligence shop, the command's intelligence capabilities were on the cusp of a quantum leap forward. This revolution was a necessary step in achieving McChrystal's vision. For the task force to get inside Al Qaeda in Iraq's decision cycle, it needed to drastically increase both its intake of all sources of data and the speed with which it molded that information into actionable intelligence. This in turn required improvements in how JSOC obtained and processed all the different types of intelligence, such as imagery intelligence and signals intelligence. But lacking access to significant volumes of either in early 2004, when McChrystal refocused the task force on Zarqawi, Delta made human intelligence a priority.

“We said, ‘Okay, we're on it,'” said a Delta source. “We got AFO going, our [reconnaissance] going, every guy that had been trained as a case officer. We knew we've got to find sources, start hunting.” Delta had advantages over the CIA in building source networks in war-torn Iraq: not only were its operators more used to working in a combat zone, but they could more easily plant themselves on small bases from which the conventional military was operating all over Iraq.
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By early 2004, the CIA was also positioning small numbers of officers on military bases,
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but tension had continued to grow between the Agency and JSOC over the latter's exploding intelligence requirements and capabilities. Later that year, in an effort to build bridges with the Agency, McChrystal made Flynn his liaison at the CIA's Baghdad station,
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which was now the largest in the world.
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Delta's ability to conduct low-vis operations using its fleet of locally acquired cars was impressive, but the unit was determined to go one better. In the absence of an effective Iraqi intelligence service, Delta created its own. The unit recruited and trained carefully selected Iraqis to conduct intelligence operations on the task force's behalf. Perhaps borrowing the CIA's name for the Afghans the Agency hired for one of its counterterrorism pursuit teams in Afghanistan, Delta called its Iraqi agents the Mohawks. Delta used these brave Iraqis, who numbered in the dozens and for the most part lived on Coalition bases, to conduct close-target reconnaissance—in essence, getting as close to a person or building of interest to JSOC as possible—where sending in non-Iraqis would entail too high a risk. For such missions, the Mohawks sometimes used Delta's “camera cars”—local vehicles in which the unit's “techs” had installed hidden cameras in much the same way that major auto manufacturers disguised backup cameras in their vehicles. “It's the same color as the car but it's still a camera,” an operator said. In addition to close-target reconnaissance, the Mohawks' other primary mission was source recruitment. They also elicited information simply by talking with family members and other acquaintances on the telephone. Sometimes they would accompany conventional forces on patrol, which allowed the Mohawks to enter houses, talk with locals, and even recruit sources without attracting attention.

Non-Delta personnel familiar with the Mohawk program gave it high marks. A task force intelligence source called the program “very important” and “probably the best relationship [we had] as far as enabling Iraqis.” It was actually safer to have a Mohawk live on military bases in Iraq, where he could hide in plain sight among the large number of local hires working there, than it was to meet him in a safe house or other location outside the wire. “He knows the area, he's vetted,” the intelligence source said. “He can work his own cover story … better than if he's seen coming out of a house in the neighborhood that's directly tied to the U.S.” Mohawks lived at Mission Support Site Fernandez in the Green Zone, at the task force's base in Mosul, and at other installations across Iraq. But living on the bases only slightly mitigated the obvious and substantial risk involved in being a Mohawk during a time of open warfare between the Coalition and the Zarqawi-led Sunni insurgency. Despite the care Delta took to teach the Mohawks proper tradecraft, the Iraqi agents sometimes paid a heavy price for siding with the task force.
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“Occasionally we'd get the reports of one of the Mohawks being kidnapped and I know a couple of them got killed,” said a task force officer.

The Mohawks also targeted insurgents using Internet cafés in operations run by Delta and two even more shadowy units. All followed roughly the same template: Mohawks would enter the Internet café without arousing suspicion and upload software onto the computers. Sometimes the software was of the keystroke recognition type, at other times it would covertly activate a webcam if the computer had one, allowing the task force to positively identify a target.

The insurgents often thought they were exercising good communications security by sharing one account with a single password and writing messages to each other that they saved as drafts rather than sending them as email. But the keystroke tracking software meant JSOC personnel in the United States were reading every word. The task force would wait until the target established a pattern, then act. “When you're ready to deal with him, when that password is [typed] it would trigger a ‘Shitbag 1 is at café 6 at computer 4, go get him' [order],” said a source familiar with the missions.

Locally recruited Iraqi agents—or sometimes low-vis U.S. operators—would track the insurgent far enough away from the Internet café to minimize the chances of other enemies figuring out how the Americans had located their target. (Often, operators would identify the target's most likely route away from the café and lay in wait to ambush him.) As with most task force missions, the operators usually snatched the wanted individual without a fight. “Generally when the shootout happened it was either, A, foreign fighters that wanted to fight, or, B, you fucked something up,” said a Delta operator. “We snatched tons of dudes that had guns on them. Why didn't they shoot? Because we didn't give them time.” Delta ran “hundreds” of missions like this, he said. But Delta wasn't the only unit using these tactics. They were pioneered by a Delta offshoot called the Computer Network Operations Squadron, which was the brainchild of two technologically gifted Delta soldiers in the unit's Technical Surveillance Element called Scott and Keith who by the late 1990s were experimenting with what would later be called cyber operations. “They started as just two dudes in the [Delta headquarters] building that were computer savvy, and then it grew from there,” said a Delta operator. “Before I even had email, they were hacking email. And they were incredibly effective.”

Scott, a Special Forces weapons sergeant turned Delta communications expert from California, was a technological savant with a particular interest in—and aptitude for—supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) computer systems, which run processes in multiple industrial facilities simultaneously. Higher-ups recognized the potential in what a JSOC staff officer described as his “unbelievable talent.” “This was just a dude who said he could hack some email and then the next thing you know he's running his own program, getting funded,” the Delta operator said. In the first years after the September 11 attacks, the “program” became a stand-alone unit. It started as a small yet effective troop, but by 2007 had grown into the Computer Network Operations Squadron—headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, with a troop at Fort Meade and another at the CIA's Langley headquarters—and reporting straight to the JSOC commander. The military kept CNOS in JSOC “because we want it to operate in areas that are not necessarily … where we're currently at war,” said a military intelligence officer. “We want it to operate around the globe [pursuing] national objectives.” By 2006 the unit was “cruising” but heavily committed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to two other sources familiar with the unit.

For some of the most dangerous—and kinetic—cyber operations in Iraq, the squadron provided information to the Interagency Support Activity, a short-lived unit created in early 2006 after an Afghanistan proof-of-concept the previous year. It consisted of: Mohawks; CIA Ground Branch paramilitary personnel and contractors; Delta, Team 6, and Orange operators; plus a few Canadian and British operators. Although notionally a combined JSOC-CIA force, the unit reported to the Agency's Baghdad station chief. “This was how the pesky networks were broken in Iraq,” said a source familiar with the Activity's missions. “The ones we couldn't get with sigint and we couldn't get with humint, basically the really disciplined ones.” One Activity team targeted the leaders of Sunni insurgent rings managing the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq from Syria. The other went after the heads of Shi'ite networks run by Iranian intelligence.