Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (49 page)

The U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq gave JSOC more opportunities to penetrate Iran. After the invasion, Delta and Orange did quiet work along the Iranian border, particularly in Kurdistan, where Delta quickly made connections with the Asayish—the Kurdish intelligence organization that had one or more spies reporting on the Iranian nuclear program. Delta enlisted the help of other Iraqis as well in its twin campaigns against AQI and Iran's covert operatives, but “the guys with the greatest access and placement were the Kurds,” said a task force officer. “They delivered some fucking huge targets to us.” Delta wasn't the only unit working with the Asayish. “There's a long history between Orange and the Kurds going back to at least the early 1990s,” said a special mission unit officer. JSOC personnel also worked with the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), a militant Iranian exile group that had based itself in Iraq after falling afoul of the ayatollahs' regime in Tehran. The State Department had placed the MEK on its list of designated terrorist organizations, but that didn't stop JSOC from taking an attitude of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” toward the group. “They were a group of folks that could transit the border, and they were willing to help us out on what we wanted to do with Iran,” said a special operations officer.

But JSOC was keen to get more of its own people into Iran.

In 2003, tantalizing information reached the command that caused Dailey and then McChrystal to direct the advance force operations cell to examine ways to infiltrate Iran. JSOC heard that Iran had moved Saad bin Laden and the other Al Qaeda exiles from Afghanistan to a comfortable “country club”-like facility in downtown Tehran, according to a JSOC staff officer. The two JSOC commanders wanted the AFO cell to determine the feasibility of entering Iran, going to the prison in Tehran, and confirming that Saad was being held there. Inside JSOC, it was considered a very high-risk mission. But the AFO personnel were surprised to discover that someone could drive to the Iranian border, show an American passport, get a ten-day tourist visa, and enter the country immediately, whereas if the same person applied for a visa through an Iranian embassy or consulate, “then they're going to pull your Social Security number, then they're going to do the background diligence on you,” said a source familiar with the operation. Nonetheless, the AFO cell's assessment was that it would take at least a year to be able to work up a “legend” (a spy's claimed biography—his cover story) and a cover that would allow a special mission unit operator to enter Iran, get to the prison, gather information, and then leave without attracting suspicion.

McChrystal wasn't happy. “I need it sooner than that,” he said that fall. When the AFO cell came back to him a month later with the same assessment, this time backed up by the new Orange commander, Colonel Konrad “KT” Trautman, McChrystal told Trautman he wanted Orange to take a closer look at how the mission might be conducted sooner.

But while Orange planned, the growing concern over Iran's suspected nuclear program changed the mission from reconnoitering the prison to determining whether fissile material was being produced at certain sites. By spring 2004, Orange had selected a two-person male-female team for a proof-of-concept mission and figured out an effective cover for them. McChrystal approved the plan and sent it up the chain of command. But because it involved undercover operatives on a clandestine mission into a country with which the United States was not at war, Orange also needed the CIA's approval, which proved harder to obtain. “We had a really difficult time getting it approved by the Agency,” said an officer. “They had their own equities to protect.” After the CIA agreed, President Bush gave his okay. The mission finally launched in fall 2004, a delay that appeared to prove the AFO cell correct in its assessment of how long it would take to prepare for such an operation. The operatives' cover was strong enough to get visas through an Iranian consulate, so they dispensed with the idea of driving up to the border and instead flew commercial into a major Iranian city and checked into a hotel. They spent several days taking taxis around and outside the city, and determined that it would not be difficult to get close enough to the suspected nuclear sites to take a soil sample. But on this occasion, they chose not to. “That wasn't the mission,” said the source familiar with the operation. “[The mission] at the time was just to get in and get out.” Upon their return to the United States, the operatives briefed President Bush on their mission, who was duly impressed.
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The United States' occupation of Afghanistan gave U.S. forces access to that country's border with Iran from late 2001 onward. But for several years, risk aversion restricted almost any effort to take advantage of that for human intelligence purposes. It wasn't until 2007 that JSOC started a program to penetrate Iran using trained Afghan surrogates. “It was kind of one of those things … that the rest of the world assumes that we're [already] doing,” said a special operations officer. Nonetheless, the Defense Department considered the program so hush-hush that the officer recalled being ushered into “the room within the room within the room” in the Pentagon to receive a briefing on the topic. The officer's reaction to the briefing was, “You mean we're not doing this already?”

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Striding out of the Baghdad International Airport arrivals terminal, dressed in a suit and fresh off the flight from Tehran, the fifty-something Iranian was looking for a taxi on a warm April night in 2009. As he scanned the street, a small plane high above the airport filmed him, transmitting video in real time to a strike force of Rangers and SEALs, who had parked four Stryker wheeled armored vehicles and two nondescript Toyota HiLux trucks in a covered area used by taxis waiting to pick up fares at the airport. The Iranian dialed a number on his cell phone. Using data from that call, the Rangers confirmed his identity within moments. Loading into the HiLuxes, about half a dozen Rangers moved a short distance forward before dismounting quickly and encircling the Iranian. Surrounded by heavily armed soldiers from one of the world's premier light infantry regiments, the Iranian did not appear in the least flustered. He just laughed, before coming up with perhaps the worst insult he could think of. “Are you guys Jews?” he asked (probably equating “Jews” with “Israelis”). “What?” the Ranger platoon leader asked. The Iranian said he asked “because surely the Americans aren't stupid enough to detain me.”

His self-confidence was no false bravado. The situation typified a Gordian knot of a problem the United States faced in Iraq. The Rangers' target was a senior figure in Iran's powerful covert operations organization: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force. Carrying a diplomatic passport, he had come to Iraq as part of Iran's campaign to destabilize its neighbor by distributing training, bombs, and money among not only Shi'ite militias—the natural allies of the Shi'ite theocracy that governed Iran—but even Sunni insurgent groups. However, the Quds Force's vast web of alliances throughout Iraq's Shi'ite political structure meant any American moves against its operatives were matters of extraordinary sensitivity. The Quds Force operative had laughed at his would-be captors, said a U.S. officer, “because he knew he was protected.”
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Established during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, the Quds Force combined the roles of intelligence collection and covert action for Iran, taking the lead in the Islamic Republic's special operations and proxy wars in the Middle East and beyond. It was the power behind Lebanon's Hezbollah organization and now sought to weaken Iraq and kill U.S. troops in the country. The Quds Force was divided into departments or corps, with each corps having a geographic area of responsibility. Department 1000, or the Ramazan Corps, was in charge of operations in Iraq. It was the Quds Force commander, Qassem Suleimani, rather than the foreign minister, who set Iran's Iraq policy.

Suleimani wielded power in Iraq via a complex and shifting web of proxy forces. These included: the Badr Organization, which began as the Iranian-funded and -led armed wing of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI; firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's militia, Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM, or the Mahdi Army), and in particular, its even more extremist and violent offshoots referred to by the Coalition as “special groups”; Asaib Ahl al-Haq (the League of the Righteous); the al-Gharawai Network in southeastern Iraq's Maysan province; and Khatab Hezbollah. Suleimani found the Badr Organization (previously called the Badr Brigades or the Badr Corps) particularly useful. Badr and its parent organization, SCIRI, had a historic relationship with the Quds Force dating back to their years spent exiled in Iran during Saddam Hussein's rule. They also had close ties to many Iraqi members of parliament. The Quds Force used the Badr Organization for intelligence collection as well as militia activities, with its proxies in the organization passing information directly to Quds Force handlers.

Iran's strategic goal of destabilizing Iraq created some strange bedfellows, with the Quds Force—the covert arm of Iran's Shi'ite theocracy—even cozying up to Sunni insurgent networks. “It was 100 percent ‘Are you willing to kill Americans and are you willing to coordinate attacks?'” said an officer who studied the Quds Force's approach closely. “‘If the answer is “yes,” here's arms, here's money.'” The officer compared this approach to that employed by the CIA in the 1980s, when the Agency armed and funded the Afghan mujahideen in their war against Soviet occupiers and their Afghan communist allies. The Quds Force also conducted information operations in Iraq, working via the Internet and the news media, with the goals of: influencing any status of forces agreement between the U.S. and Iraqi governments governing the future role of U.S. forces in Iraq; effecting a reconciliation between warring Shi'ite factions; and focusing those Shi'ite groups on attacking only Coalition forces.
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In early 2005, the Quds Force introduced a new weapon onto the Iraqi battlefield: the explosively formed projectile (EFP), a sort of roadside bomb that sent a jet of molten copper slicing through Coalition armored vehicles. EFP use increased 150 percent in 2006, inflicting 30 percent of U.S. casualties from October through December.
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By early 2007 some U.S. intelligence estimates held that as many as 150 Iranian operatives were in Iraq.
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For several years large sections of the U.S. government had seemed in denial
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about the extent of the Quds Force's activities, but after years of reluctance to confront the Iranians, the U.S. chain of command could no longer ignore the toll in blood extracted by the Quds Force. In summer 2006 Rumsfeld directed McChrystal to use special operations forces to target Shi'ite death squads.
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George Casey, the MNF-I commander, who had no authority to give orders to JSOC forces, followed up with his own request for McChrystal to go after the Shi'ite groups, especially those supported by Iran.
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“It came down from the top once we … started recovering EFPs in Sadr City that were stamped from Iranian manufacturing facilities,” said a Ranger officer, referring to the teeming Shi'ite neighborhood in east Baghdad.

JSOC began targeting Iranian proxies in Iraq in October 2006.
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The new missions were collectively described within the command as “countering malign Iranian influence.” Between November 2006 and January 2007, McChrystal's task force conducted two such missions.
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In the first, on December 21, operators descended on Objective Clarke, the Baghdad compound of SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz Hakim. Inside the compound they found and detained Iranian Brigadier General Mohsen Chirazi, who directed all Quds Force operations in Iraq, and the colonel who served as the Quds Force's chief of operations. After strong protests from Iranian and Iraqi political leaders, JSOC released the pair nine days later.
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In the second mission, the task force launched a combined air and ground assault on Objective Twins, an Iranian diplomatic compound in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil, in the early hours of January 11. The Delta operators were hoping to snare Mohammed Jafari, the deputy head of Iran's Security Council who was playing a key role in the Iraq campaign, and General Minjahar Frouzanda, the Revolutionary Guard's intelligence chief. Neither target was present in the walled compound, however. Instead, the operators detained five lower-ranking Revolutionary Guard personnel who became known as “the Irbil five,” and who provided valuable intelligence under interrogation.
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The Quds Force struck back January 20, with a carefully planned attack on the Karbala Provisional Joint Coordination Center, a compound manned by U.S. and Iraqi troops in central Iraq. The League of the Righteous, one of the Iranians' most dangerous proxy forces, carried out the attack, driving eight black SUVs and wearing U.S. uniforms to gain access to the compound. They killed one U.S. soldier on the spot and kidnapped four, only to execute them shortly thereafter while making their escape.
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By the time General David Petraeus replaced George Casey as commander of Multi-National Force-Iraq on February 10, 2007, what had been a one-sided campaign on the part of the Quds Force and its Iraqi agents had become a war. “It was clear [from] theater-level and above intelligence that these guys were active proxies for Iran—they were doing Iran's bidding in Iraq,” said an Army civilian who spent time in Iraq. “When Dave Petraeus was commander in Iraq, he was determined to stop that.” As usual, when the problem seemed beyond others' ability to solve, the force to which the Pentagon turned was JSOC.

But after Rumsfeld (in one of his last decisions before resigning effective December 18, 2006) ordered him to go after the Iranians, McChrystal struggled to figure out how to accommodate what was essentially a doubling of his mission. His Iraq task force, at the time called Task Force 16, was fine-tuned to go after Sunni insurgent networks, with a particular focus on Al Qaeda in Iraq. All its intelligence analysts, interrogators, and even operators had become experts on that target set, which was keeping them fully occupied. By early 2007, JSOC estimated its forces had killed about 2,000 Sunni insurgents. But that hard-earned expertise was of limited utility against the Iranians and their proxies, at least according to some in JSOC. A Task Force 16 interrogator “wouldn't know the first question to ask one of these guys,” said a senior special mission unit officer. John Christian, the Task Force 16 commander at the time, asked not to be given the additional mission of targeting the Quds Force and its allies, for fear TF 16 would lose its laserlike focus on Al Qaeda in Iraq. McChrystal shared his concern. The general did not want to add the Shi'ite groups to Task Force 16's target set, nor to split off some of that task force to focus solely on those militias.
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“We were getting bled out in Baghdad by the EFPs that were being brought over by Iran … but McChrystal wasn't willing to pull assault forces from what he perceived to be the real fight strategically,” said a Ranger officer. “So he asked for additional assets.”