Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (52 page)

That man was Abu Ghadiya, the nom de guerre of Badran Turki Hishan al-Mazidih,
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an Iraqi of about thirty years of age who ran the largest foreign fighter network in Syria. During the peak of the Iraq War in 2006 and 2007, JSOC estimated Abu Ghadiya was running 120 to 150 foreign fighters
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(including twenty to thirty suicide bombers) a month into Iraq. Thanks to a spy in Abu Ghadiya's camp and to signals intelligence facilitated by an Orange operative's repeated undercover missions to the area, JSOC had been carefully tracking him for months. The task force knew that he occasionally visited Iraq to maintain his bona fides with the fighters, but his regular base in the area was a safe house in Sukkariyah, a village near the town of Abu Kamal, six miles across the border from Al Qaim.

It was to that village the helicopters were now flying. Thousands of feet above, a Predator cast its electronic eye on the objective, transmitting what it saw back to Al Asad, where task force staff crowded around the few computer screens that had the live video feed. (The Task Force West operations center lacked its Balad counterpart's lavishly high-tech accoutrements.) As the helicopters crossed the border, the mission fell under CIA command.
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The raid on Sukkariyah had been nine months in the planning, but it became the only public evidence of a highly successful clandestine campaign waged inside Syria by Orange and other JSOC elements since the earliest days of the Iraq War.

JSOC's history in the Levant stretched back to the work done by Delta and the Army of Northern Virginia during the 1980s. Since then, Delta had maintained a close relationship with Israeli special operations forces, with operators sometimes wearing Israeli uniforms when working in the Jewish state,
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while the unit later known as Orange had gradually deepened its network in the region. After the September 11 attacks raised U.S. awareness of Islamist terror threats, in 2002 Rumsfeld gave JSOC the green light to conduct missions in both Syria and Lebanon. The United States had deep concerns about the Quds Force's operations in the region as well as Hezbollah's huge influence in Lebanon. Special mission unit operators rated Hezbollah, not Al Qaeda, as the “A-team” when it came to Islamist terrorism. “You don't want to mess around with Hezbollah,” said one. “They make Al Qaeda look like a joke.”

Beirut was no longer the battleground it had been in the 1970s and 1980s, but danger still lurked in the shadows. An Army of Northern Virginia operative almost learned this lesson the hard way in October 2002 out walking near the Lebanese capital's famous corniche. Returning from a mission in a nearby country, he was passing through Lebanon in order to conduct activities to maintain his nonofficial cover when three men tried to force him into a car as he took a short cut back to his hotel. The operative, whose background was in Special Forces but who was unarmed, fought back. He managed to wrestle a .22 caliber pistol away from one of the attackers and escape, shot in the midriff. Unwilling to break his cover by going to the U.S. embassy, he called instead, and was put through to the regional medical officer (who worked out of the embassy). Following the doctor's advice, “he literally sewed himself up in the hotel room and then continued with his full counter-surveillance routes,” said a special mission unit source. The operative then went through the laborious process required to cover his tracks before departing Lebanon without breaking cover (other than the call to the embassy), despite suffering from a gunshot wound. He crossed multiple international borders before receiving medical care, a feat of tradecraft and endurance that insiders discussed in whispered tones years later. “Putting people in and getting people out of those environments [requires] very elaborate steps to ensure that they are clean [i.e., with cover intact and not under surveillance] coming out,” said the special mission unit source. “He went through all those elaborate steps and that's why it's legendary.”

As to who had attacked the operative and why, a JSOC staffer familiar with the episode said they were most likely street criminals who saw him as a target of opportunity, rather than Hezbollah members who suspected he was more than he seemed. But an Army spokesman told the author that the operative received a Silver Star “for gallantry in action against an enemy of the United States during the period 19–21 October 2002.”
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The citation for the Silver Star, however, was classified.
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After returning to the United States, the operative briefed Rumsfeld on his exploits. His unit, meanwhile, ensured that in the future operatives under nonofficial cover would have better access to emergency health care.

The close call did little to inhibit JSOC or its newest subordinate unit, Orange, from undertaking equally dangerous missions next door to Lebanon in Syria. JSOC had plenty of reasons for wanting to get inside Syria after the September 11 attacks. One was the knowledge that Syria had chemical weapons and was trying to achieve nuclear capability, perhaps with help from Iran, whose Quds Force was gaining influence in Syria. The 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq soon heralded a new concern: Sunni insurgent groups' use of Syria as a way station en route to Iraq for volunteer militants from the broader Muslim world.

As in Lebanon, there was a significant role for Orange, which in 2003 was just beginning the shift in mind-set and, ultimately, culture that its move to JSOC entailed. The unit's change of command that summer helped accelerate things. The outgoing commander, Colonel Tom Tutt, was an old-school military intelligence officer more comfortable with treating Orange as a national intelligence asset to be used against strategic targets. His replacement, Colonel “KT” Trautman, who had been Tutt's deputy and Orange's sigint squadron commander, thought differently. “He was very tactically focused,” said one officer. “He very much wanted to get into the fight.” In particular, Trautman wanted to modernize the unit's signals intelligence platforms to enable Orange to provide direct, real-time support to JSOC task forces conducting direct action missions. Another officer said Trautman's approach had the support of the unit's rank and file. “Everybody in that organization wanted to get into the fight” and knew remaining a “strategic” asset would have meant “you stay on the sidelines,” he said.

Up to that point, the unit's case officers—personnel certified to recruit sources—were typically human intelligence specialists who had not graduated from its assessment and selection course. Not being traditional operatives, they were viewed rather skeptically in the unit. “The leadership always wanted to get rid of case officers,” said one special mission unit veteran. But once the Army of Northern Virginia came under JSOC, the need for case officers grew. In an effort to meet the demand, Orange expanded the number of selection course graduates it sent to the CIA's field training course at the Farm. The unit also increased the number of personnel it accepted from the other (i.e., non-Army) services (a process that had begun in the late 1990s).

Something that didn't change was Orange's frequent role as the tactical arm of the NSA, which funded most of the unit's signals intelligence budget via the Consolidated Cryptologic Program. Another constant was the unit's obsession with secrecy. “Everybody in the unit was on the Department of the Army Special Roster, which means they didn't exist,” said a retired special ops officer. Orange was still headquartered at Belvoir, but its three squadrons—“Operations” (sometimes referred to as “Humint” or “Ground”), “Sigint,” and “Mission Support,” as well as its supporting aviation elements—were spread around the Washington area, in some cases operating from clandestine locations including an office building near Fort Meade.

In 2003, Orange had teams in Saudi Arabia, the Horn of African and South America, among other locations. “Outside of Afghanistan and Iraq, Orange had everything else in the world,” said a special mission unit officer. “Everything. That unit was maxed out.” Partly because the other units were so tied up in Iraq and partly because Orange itself was adopting a more tactical pose, the unit's ground squadron, made up largely of Special Forces soldiers, tried to muscle its way into a direct action role, or at least that was how it appeared to other units. This led to friction with Delta and Team 6 operators, who had long regarded such missions as their sole preserve. “Everyone thinks they're a trained shooter,” complained a Delta operator. “Orange doesn't want to do AFO anymore. They want to be the finishing force.… When they go somewhere to do the find and the fix, they're trying to fuck the Unit out of the finish. It'll never work.”

That, however, was not the case in Syria. There, the personnel Orange sent in were unarmed and were largely commercial cover operatives, meaning they posed as businessmen and had what a special mission unit veteran called “established presence” in the region. (Until 2003, all the Army of Northern Virginia's commercial cover operatives were in Operations Squadron's B Troop. The squadron's other three troops, A, C, and D, used only official cover. Then D Troop, which had only been reestablished in the late 1990s after a long hiatus, saw its mission change from one that used official cover to one that availed of nonofficial cover. Its operatives went abroad using commercial cover in places like Jakarta, Sulu Province in the Philippines, and Morocco. But D Troop had a hard time getting official backing for missions into denied areas like Syria, which remained the preserve of B Troop.) During the middle of the decade, Orange had fewer than a dozen personnel operating under commercial cover, about half a dozen of whom were conducting the Syrian operations.

Those missions actually began in the months prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. The intent was to ensure the United States had “eyes and ears all around Iraq” by the time the conventional forces drove north across the Kuwait-Iraq border, said a JSOC staffer. By late summer 2003, Orange operatives and other JSOC personnel were infiltrating Syria to focus on two target sets: any evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had moved weapons of mass destruction to Syria ahead of the allies' invasion of Iraq; and the foreign fighter networks already establishing roots in Syria to support the Iraq insurgency. Rumsfeld had to personally approve the missions, which were carried out under the auspices of the CIA's chief of station in Damascus. Tasked to locate the foreign fighter safe houses and get proof that the networks were operating in Syria, the operatives were not starting from a blank slate. They were often led to a particular safe house by a suspect's IP router address that U.S. intelligence had already obtained. Because the United States wanted to keep this ability secret, while still proving to the Syrian regime that it knew what was going on at a particular location, the operatives' mission was to gather more tangible evidence, often by photographing safe houses, hotels, mosques, and bus stops used by foreign fighters. These missions combined high technology with classic espionage tradecraft: cover identities and counter-surveillance practices that included ducking into public bathrooms to change disguises—including wigs—to throw off any tail. “I go in a public restroom, do a quick [disguise swap] and I come out as a seventy-year-old man because I've got the bald head,” said a special mission unit veteran. In theory, anyone tailing the hirsute man who entered the bathroom would ignore the bald guy coming out. Meanwhile, “you're off and onto public transportation, going to do an operational act.” Sometimes that act was even more dangerous than secretly photographing jihadists in public. On occasion, operatives would pick the locks of Al Qaeda safe houses, filming and photographing what was inside, and presumably copying the contents of any digital devices they found. “They had guys on the ground basically breaking into the people's apartment and getting information,” said a special ops source familiar with the missions. “Talk about close target recce.… That's pretty frickin' ballsy.… Two people with a lockpick kit and a camera. If they would have been caught, they were done.”

The operatives also placed automatic cameras and other recording devices disguised as everyday items to monitor safe houses and other locations. One new piece of gear they used was the Cardinal device, developed by the Defense Intelligence Agency's science and technology department and operated in conjunction with the National Security Agency, which programmed the devices to work in groups that configured and reconfigured their own networks.
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Designed to take photos only when triggered by movement sensors, the device stored the pictures before transmitting them via satellite uplink at preset times. “The original plan was to use them for establishing patterns of life,” a senior JSOC official said. However, the device was neither popular with operatives nor productive in terms of actionable intelligence.

Another new piece of kit the operatives employed was a camera designed to evade detection by the security cameras the jihadists used at their safe houses. “Those [security] cameras can see infrared cameras,” said a source familiar with the operations. (Many cameras use infrared for some functions.) “So if you plant a camera to spy on them, they can see the infrared source, the camera. So we developed a camera that did not use [infrared].” Although JSOC tested the new cameras in 2004 in very low light conditions in Afghanistan, they were designed for clandestine operations in an urban environment. On at least one occasion, the new cameras worked spectacularly. “We caught guys going into a Syrian office building, I believe it was in Damascus, and they were like head dudes of this fighter network,” said the source. “The State Department walked into [Syrian president Bashar] Assad and friggin' put the photographs down … and said, ‘You're supporting this. This is the evidence right here. Here are the friggin' pictures.'”