Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (44 page)

The Activity teams lived in a collection of safe houses separated from each other and from other Coalition forces. When on a mission, the six or so Americans on each team dressed as Iraqis. Fair-toned personnel wore skin-darkening makeup. Their Internet café missions followed the same pattern as Delta's, with one crucial difference: the Activity teams, which did not have the layers of backup and enablers that habitually supported JSOC's strike elements, always planned to kill their targets. “I do not know of one who was captured,” said the source familiar with the missions, which were even more secret than Delta's. “Under forty-five people in the country knew this was going on,” the source said.

The Activity lived a short, violent life. The CIA disbanded the teams in September 2006, partly because the general level of violence in Iraq was increasing and the Activity was taking casualties, partly because JSOC was eviscerating the Sunni networks to such an extent that targeting Internet cafés was no longer yielding results, but also because the United States decided it had better uses for the teams' talented Iraqi sources.
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Task Force Orange also got into the act, using two Hispanic operatives who spoke excellent Arabic. “They could walk into any Internet café and pass themselves off as a college student or a low-level businessman,” said an officer familiar with Orange missions. “If it was a more cosmopolitan section of Baghdad, we would target those [cafés]. If it was one of the more suburban areas where everybody knew everybody going in and out of that Internet café then we wouldn't try to do it. But the NSA and the CIA would come to us and say, ‘Okay, here's a map. We need this place, this place, this place, and this place all covered.' And we would send guys out and they would do that in a heartbeat.”

Despite the intrepid Internet café operations, however, the breakthroughs that made the biggest difference for JSOC were in the areas of imagery and signals intelligence. In both fields, the task force needed far more aircraft, particularly of the fixed wing variety, than it had in late 2003. McChrystal and his staff worked hard to lay their hands on aircraft that were ready for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions or could be reconfigured for them. Under McChrystal, the staff became more involved than it had been under Dailey in supporting the strike forces, especially in regard to making ISR aircraft available. “He realized his job as the big boss was to give assets to the smaller bosses,” a Delta source said. The task force's ISR fleet went from Echo's single helicopter in mid-2003 to forty aircraft of fifteen different types within the next two years.
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The aircraft belonged mostly to Echo, Task Force Orange, and Task Force Silver (the Air Force covered air unit), and together were known as “the Confederate Air Force” (perhaps in a nod to Orange's nickname as “The Army of Northern Virginia”).
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McChrystal's unquenchable thirst for ISR coverage, together with the control JSOC had gained over the unit it now called Task Force Orange, had major ramifications for the Fort Belvoir special mission unit. By 2004 more than half of Orange, and a lot more than half of its aircraft, were committed to Iraq. “Our capability was just that more advanced, we provided that resource that you really couldn't get with anything else,” said a field grade officer familiar with Orange's operations. But in order to commit Orange to the war in Iraq, McChrystal had to overcome powerful bureaucratic opposition, particularly from the National Security Agency, which had paid for many of Orange's capabilities in the expectation that they would be used for the NSA's national-level missions, rather than in down-and-dirty urban fights in Iraq. “The NSA did not want to have the aircraft in Iraq,” said the officer. “They wanted to do other things [with them].”
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Opposition to the reorientation of Orange also came from high inside the special operations world. “That organization wasn't designed to do tactical intelligence for JSOC—they pirated it,” said a retired special operations officer. “This was supposed to be a strategic asset that was doing serious stuff.”

Orange bought six single-engine turboprop aircraft, stripped the insides, and refilled them with signals intelligence gear.
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The unit experimented with putting the packages on Black Hawks, but found that for the sensors to work properly, the helicopters could get no further than 3,000 feet aboveground and a mile or two away from the target—close enough to be spotted by alert insurgents. The planes, however, could perform the mission at up to 15,000 feet above ground level and five miles away.
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“You had no idea I was around,” the field grade officer said.

While much of the Confederate Air Force provided real-time imagery of targets, Orange's aircraft were there to provide signals intelligence, primarily targeting the insurgents' use of Iraq's burgeoning cell phone networks. Before the U.S. invasion, there were almost no privately owned cell phones in Iraq, as they were illegal under Saddam Hussein.
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But the toppling of the dictator resulted in exponential growth of the cell phone market. By May 2005, about 1.75 million Iraqis had cell phones, a number that continued to grow.
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Mid- and lower-level Iraqi insurgents, particularly those fighting for Zarqawi, seemingly could not resist the immediacy of communicating by cell phone. As a result, McChrystal's network expended much energy on developing and using technological means to exploit a potentially rich source of signals intelligence.

The cell phone networks made such a fat collective target that several different organizations inside and outside the task force attacked it, including Delta (and particularly Echo Squadron), Orange, and the NSA. During the first three years the task force achieved several cell phone-related technological breakthroughs that together represented what a Task Force Brown officer described as “a game-changer.”

The Confederate Air Force planes carried gear that when flown close to a cell phone tower allowed those on board to log in passively and see a real-time record of every phone making a call. Task force personnel could then search for numbers in which they were interested, and the database would tell them if those phones were in use, and if so, where. “We'd pinpoint the location, we'd go hit the target,” said an operator. The cell phone tower info might guide the task force to a particular city block. At that point, the operators would use an “electronic divining rod,” a handheld paddlelike sensor that could be programmed to detect a specific phone and would beep increasingly loudly as it got closer to the device.
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The divining rod could even detect a phone that had been turned off, although not one with the battery and SIM card removed. Indeed, not only could the task force's electronics specialists find a phone that had been turned off, they also figured out how to turn it on remotely so it became a microphone, broadcasting everything it was picking up back to the task force. They could also “clone” a cell phone without having the original phone in their possession, allowing the task force to send and receive texts, for instance, as if they were the phone's owner. In addition, Delta made extensive use of handheld SIM card readers that allowed operators who found a cell phone while searching a suspect's home to quickly remove the card, copy it in the machine, and put it back in the phone, often without the suspect realizing it had been taken out and copied. Sometimes operators would pretend they hadn't even found the phone, to hide the fact that they now had a record of all its owner's contacts.
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Operators invented software that allowed it to conduct “nodal analysis” that quickly mapped out insurgent networks based on an analysis of insurgents' cell phone traffic.
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The NSA placed all the signals intelligence information on the Real Time Regional Gateway (RTRG), an interactive signals intelligence clearinghouse that task force personnel could query using phone numbers they'd just derived from raids, and be rewarded with a set of new leads that the system would spit back. According to authors Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, the RTRG also allowed task force members to monitor signals intercepts as they were happening and led to “a tenfold increase” in the speed with which operators gained access to the intelligence.
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Despite the NSA's objections to JSOC's co-opting of Orange, the agency became a critical partner in the effort to break Iraq's cell phone networks open as a source of intelligence. By late 2003, an NSA cryptologic support group was collecting the metadata—dialing information, but not the content—of all calls made in Iraq. After McChrystal moved his headquarters to Balad, the NSA put a liaison team in the command center.
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Realizing that their cell phones made them vulnerable, the insurgents recruited what a task force officer described as “pretty sophisticated communications engineers” to protect them from surveillance. In 2003, they had already figured out how to reconfigure high-powered cordless phones into a sort of walkie-talkie network. “They thought they had this private little communications hotline … that no one could read because it wasn't operating at a cell phone level, but we figured that one out pretty fast,” said the officer. “That was a major coup, finding it … and then using that information.” It was a short-lived success. By the next year, the insurgents had all but given up using the technique.

Through 2004, McChrystal's force of personality gradually melded all these disparate parts—the motley fleet of ISR aircraft; the growing ability to use insurgents' digital communications against them; the “Death Star” JOC at Balad, increasingly peopled by staffers and liaisons from other parts of McChrystal's network; the unsurpassed skill and tenacity of special mission unit operators, the Rangers, and the Night Stalkers—into a dynamic process that became known as F3EAD: Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze, Disseminate. Finding and fixing involved the ISR assets identifying and then locating a target—usually a person—in time and space. Finishing—capturing or killing—the target was the job of the direct action forces: the special mission unit operators, Rangers, and Task Force Brown aircrews. Exploiting and analyzing the mission's intelligence haul, which could mean anything from deciphering papers, phones, and computer gear to interrogating prisoners, was the work of operators and, especially, intelligence personnel at all levels. Immediately after that analysis was concluded—which might take weeks in 2003 and a couple of hours by 2006—the results were disseminated around the network to drive more operations. At its core, the process required a much tighter and smoother coordination between intelligence and operations than had been the norm, even in JSOC.

It's worth noting that veterans of the hunts for Pablo Escobar and Balkan war criminals argued that McChrystal and Flynn were essentially reinventing a wheel that those much smaller task forces had already designed. Published accounts that “attribute to McChrystal and Flynn this great transformation where now we integrate things” ignore history, a Delta source said. “It's like, dude, that's Colombia.” Similarly, “the multi-agency sharing of intelligence and technology, [the] breaking down of the walls between the different interagency partners that was done later [by McChrystal in Iraq] was demonstrated under [Jerry] Boykin's leadership” during JSOC's hunt for Balkan war criminals in the 1990s, said a senior special operations officer familiar with those missions.

The F3EAD acronym did not roll off the tongue, but it was still easier to say than to do. Lives were lost and much blood spilled as the task force ramped up its operational tempo, fighting to get inside the Zarqawi network's decision cycle. Getting JSOC to adopt the McChrystal/Flynn mind-set was not without its challenges. As the task force amassed intelligence on a target, there was often tension between those who wanted to keep watching it to see what more they could learn about the enemy network and those who wanted to strike the target immediately, even if it meant exposing assets that had led to the target in the first place.
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These arguments were usually settled on the side of those wanting to act quickly, on the grounds that there was as much or more intelligence to be gained from striking a target than there was from simply watching it. “Strike to develop” became a task force catchphrase.
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“Our fight against Zarqawi was, at its heart, a battle for intelligence,” McChrystal later wrote.
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But once JSOC had perfected the F3EAD “machine,” it became self-sustaining, said a Special Forces officer who observed the process firsthand. Occasionally, the task force would tinker around the margins of the model, “but while they were doing that the machine kept running,” he said. “Unless you could prove you could do something better, you didn't fuck with the machine.”

 

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Snake Eyes

The Euphrates lapped against the sides of the small boats as, cloaked in darkness, they pulled up to the riverbank beside the farm in Anbar province. The men in the boats wore kaffiyehs and looked from a distance like local farmhands. But they weren't. They were Delta operators on a mission to capture a top Zarqawi lieutenant—a mission of the type others said would never succeed.

The man they were after, Ghassan Amin, was close enough to Zarqawi to have recently arranged for a relative to host the Al Qaeda in Iraq supremo for five days. Amin was Zarqawi's enforcer in Rawa, a strategically important town on the north bank of the Euphrates that he ran as his personal fiefdom. With its bridge across the river, Rawa was key terrain for Zarqawi. Whoever controlled the town could influence the flow of foreign fighters from Syria into the dense urban battlefields of Fallujah, Ramadi, and Baghdad. His forces having destroyed the Rawa police station, Amin's effective counterintelligence network allowed him to terrorize the town's population of about 20,000. “He … used to publicly execute one person—snitch—per week in the market,” said a senior special mission unit officer. “We saw him on a Predator shoot a source [of ours] right in the head in his vehicle. He was a bad, bad guy.”