Authors: Sean Naylor
Indeed, the United States used intelligence that JSOC obtained in Syria as leverage with the Assad regime, presenting it to Damascus in demarches in an effort to pressure Assad to crack down on the foreign fighter networks. Sometimes this was done indirectly via Jordanian government intermediaries and at other times by the U.S. government itself, including on at least one occasion, by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (who had moved to the position in January 2005). But not wanting to reveal to the Syrians that American troops had been spying in their country, the U.S. government told Damascus that the material had been seized in raids on foreign fighter safe houses in Iraq. Disguising and altering the material to conform to that cover story represented a “delicate art,” a special mission unit veteran said. JSOC and the CIA went to great lengths to figure out whether to actually change the documents and photos, or to keep them as they were and tell the Syrians, “This was pulled off this guy's Nokia 3200 cell phone in Baghdadâthis is the guy's name, here's his bus ticket; he laid this all out on who was assisting him. Here's all the evidence. Do something about it. We know they're coming through here.” Sometimes this required technological wizardry. For instance, if the cover story for a photograph taken by an operative in Aleppo was that it was pulled off a foreign fighter's iPhone in Baghdad, it might need to be digitized so that it looked like an iPhone photograph. The Assad regime remained completely ignorant that the intelligence being presented to them was obtained by undercover U.S. troops in Syria. The demarches met with mixed success. The Syrians would only take action if the United States could tie the presence of particular jihadists passing through Syria to a threat to the Assad regime.
This deception was one reason why the United States sometimes chose to use military personnel under a combination of official and nonofficial cover for these missions rather than the more traditional method of paying local sources to conduct them. A second was to protect the technical intelligence upon which the missions were based. “Do you want to let a recruited source or agent know how much data you've got, particularly when some of that stuff's come from NSA collection et cetera?” said the special mission unit veteran. “Because of the sensitivity of the information ⦠it really needs to be an American doing this.” A third reason was that the United States needed to have absolute trust in the intelligence coming out of Syria. So, although Orange had an increasing number of Farm-trained case officers who were certified to recruit and pay sources, the Syria missions did not involve that. They were “almost all CTR [close target reconnaissance], close-in signals intelligence or close-in collection of data,” said the special mission unit veteran.
In the early days operators from the small unit that became Computer Network Operations Squadron sometimes augmented the Orange operatives.
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In at least one case in Syria, a CNOS operator entered Syria as an employee of an international organization. At other times, capitalizing on the popularity of Internet cafés in the Middle East, CNOS operators often posed as businessmen who dealt with communications technologies like cell phones or computers. CNOS also targeted the Iraqi refugee camps in Jordan, most likely using local sources to access the camps.
The Orange operatives' ethnicities would not have immediately marked them as Westerners. The operatives included one or two women, who never went in solo, but accompanied male operatives as part of a pair. Having a man and woman work in tandem proved even more useful in parts of the Arab world than it had in the Balkans. The special mission unit veteran noted that jihadists used women in certain roles in the Middle East because male security personnel were less likely to search under their all-covering garb. “Two can play at that game,” he said. But two-person missions were the exception, rather than the rule. Orange's Syria deployments were “mostly singleton and most without any backup,” he added.
As the program matured, Orange deepened its operatives' cover, in some cases moving them and their families from the United States to countries closer to Syria, which required the Army secretary's approval and the agreement of multiple geographic combatant commanders and station chiefs. The governments of at least some of those countries had no idea that U.S. spies were living under commercial cover there. (The U.S. ambassador and CIA station chief in each nation had to sign off on such arrangements.) The commercial cover operatives never resided in Syria itself, however.
As with their East European counterpart in Delta, the Orange operatives under commercial cover were unknown to many even in their own chain of command and their missions were tightly compartmented even within JSOC. When intelligence generated by the missions was discussed in JSOC's video-teleconferences, “they'd never say where the intel came from,” said an officer. Even in higher-level discussions, the most detailed description would be “Orange assets in Syria,” he said.
The missions into Syria were also kept from almost everyone in the U.S. embassy in Damascus. “The chief of station, the ambassador will know they're in there and maybe the chief of ops in the station, and that's about it,” the special mission unit veteran said. The operatives had an emergency action plan if they were compromised. “Your best course of action is not to break cover,” he said. “Always stick to whatever and whomever you're portraying and the legend.” Even if the Syrians caught the operatives and threw them in jail, they were forbidden from acknowledging that they were American spies. It would be up to the U.S. government whether or not to claim them.
The Orange operatives in the Levant were working in areas where spies for Israel were “constantly getting rolled up,” the special mission unit veteran said, which partly explained why the missions into Syria and Lebanon were “episodic.” If, for instance, the Syrian security services pulled in a network of Israeli sources for questioning, JSOC would want to know what tipped the Syrians off before sending its own operatives back in. Perhaps in part because of this caution, no Orange operative or mission in Syria was compromised, a remarkable record, “since Syrian intelligence is really good,” the special mission unit veteran said. “They're looking for spies all the time.” But there were some close calls. In one case an operative “had a recording device battery kind of melt and explode and just burn the shit out of [his] pocket” while he was on Syrian public transport, the SMU veteran said. “He just held his pants out and it was just like burning the tar out of them as he's riding this bus out of there.”
The missions enabled JSOC to build a detailed picture of the network that moved jihadists from Aleppo and Damascus airports through the Syrian section of the Euphrates River Valley until they crossed into Iraq near Al Qaim. After several years, one name stood out as Zarqawi's master facilitator in Syria: Abu Ghadiya.
The United States tried to bring diplomatic pressure to bear on Syria, sending Dell Dailey (the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism from June 2007 to April 2009) on a tour of Arab capitals asking governments to use their leverage with the Assad regime. The U.S. government also gave its Iraqi counterpart intelligence about Abu Ghadiya's activities, leading the Iraqis to lobby the Syrians to do something about him. The Syrian government initially refused to take action, perhaps because keeping Abu Ghadiya in position allowed the regime to closely track the foreign fighter network in its country. “He ran the network,” said a senior JSOC official. “It was easier for Syrian intelligence to keep their eyes on him.” Frustrated with the Syrians' inaction, Petraeus himself volunteered to fly to Damascus and confront Assad about Abu Ghadiya. President Bush rebuffed the offer in a video-teleconference with the general. In the end, the Assad regime tired of Abu Ghadiya's presence within their borders and let the U.S. government know it would essentially look the other way if U.S. forces targeted him. The Bush administration handed the mission to JSOC.
But to some, it appeared that JSOC needed a little prodding to strike Abu Ghadiya. By 2008 both Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command had established interagency task forces at their respective Tampa headquarters to track foreign fighters. (Scott Miller headed SOCOM's.) They prioritized Abu Ghadiya on the grounds that multiple intelligence sources had identified him as the principal facilitator of foreign fighters headed to Iraq, and removing him would help create the pause in the foreign fighter flow that Petraeus wanted. Working together, the two task forces drew up a concept of operations for a mission against Abu Ghadiya. But the Tampa task forces had only “asking authority,” not “tasking authority.” They couldn't issue orders to other organizations. When they asked JSOC to act, JSOC demurred, arguing it didn't have enough assets to conduct a raid while maintaining its operational tempo in Iraq. But JSOC attempted to present CENTCOM and SOCOM with a catch-22, claiming that because Abu Ghadiya was already on its target list, nobody else could launch a mission against him. This didn't sit well with acting CENTCOM commander Lieutenant General Marty Dempsey. He told JSOC, essentially, “if you don't do something, we will,” said a CENTCOM source. That threat caused JSOC to prioritize Abu Ghadiya.
For at least nine months, JSOC focused its intelligence collection on the foreign fighter kingpin. The planners knew that although he made his home in Zabadani,
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about thirty kilometers northwest of Damascus, he repeatedly visited the safe house near Abu Kamal, sometimes traveling on into Iraq. They hoped he'd enter Iraq while under surveillance, but he never did. The alternative was to strike while he was at the safe house. An Orange operative made multiple solo trips to Sukkariyah undercover to keep tabs on Abu Ghadiya. Among his tasks was to position and move equipment that allowed the NSA to precisely locate Abu Ghadiya's cell phone in a particular building. JSOC also had access to a spy in Abu Ghadiya's inner circle who was originally recruited by Syrian intelligence.
In planning a strike into Syria, albeit one just a few miles over the border, the task force intelligence analysts had to determine the likely reaction times of the Syrian air force, border guards, and air defense networks. While the United States had given senior Syrian officials in Damascus a heads-up that a raid might be in the offing, the Syrian troops along the border were none the wiser. But Syrian air defenses were oriented on Israel and Turkey, not longtime ally Iraq, while U.S. intelligence reported that Syrian air force pilots were flying no more than a handful of times a month. “They weren't sitting on strip alert,” said a military intelligence source. Task force planners estimated that the operators could spend at least ninety minutes on the objective before trouble arrivedâ“an enormous amount of time for the task force,” he said.
But for JSOC to launch, the spy in Abu Ghadiya's camp had to report that the wanted man was at the safe house. Abu Ghadiya's cell phone also had to be on and emitting from that location. There were several false starts. “A lot of us spent a lot of sweat equity planning it and actually going out to Al Asad multiple times to get this guy,” said the military intelligence source. It finally all came together on October 26, 2008.
The Task Force Brown crews had about thirty-six hours to prepare for the mission. After crossing the border, the flight to the objective lasted no longer than fifteen minutes. Located in a tiny hamlet, the target building was a single-story flat-roofed structure. The helicopters took no fire as they approached. The Black Hawks landed, disgorging operators who sprinted to the building, where they suppressed resistance from Ghadiya and a handful of his fighters within ninety seconds, killing between six and twelve militants
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without suffering any wounded or killed themselves. The operators spent about an hour doing “sensitive site exploitation,” which amounts to collecting as much material of intelligence value as possible, before calling for the Black Hawks to return, loading Abu Ghadiya's body aboard a helicopter,
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and flying back to Al Asad. As the intelligence analysts had predicted, no Syrian security forces showed up while the operators were on the ground.
While Orange continued to operate in the Levant, its presence there declined within two years as Iran became a higher priority. Delta, however, increased its commitment to the region.
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It was January 2002 in Afghanistan. Snow covered the mountains that surrounded Bagram air base, where, in a frigid electrical closet, FBI special agent Russ Fincher and New York Police detective Marty Mahon were interrogating Ali Abdul Aziz al-Fakhri, a Libyan known by his nom de guerre, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. One of the highest-level Al Qaeda figures captured by that point in the war, Libi had run the group's Khalden training camp in eastern Afghanistan. Fincher and Mahon built a relationship of trust with Libi, who talked freely. In particular, he divulged what a military source who was in Bagram at the time described as Al Qaeda's “multi-phased” plans to regroup after being forced from its safe haven in Afghanistan. The first phase was to flee across the border to Pakistan's tribal areas, but to be prepared for further movement. Assuming they would not be safe for long in the tribal areas, Al Qaeda leaders' ultimate goal was to reconstitute their force in the next best potential sanctuaries: Yemen and Somalia.
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History and geography argued in favor of believing Libi. East Africa and Yemen had been the sites of Al Qaeda's most sensational attacks prior to September 11, 2001. On August 7, 1998, the group staged almost simultaneous truck bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing more than 200 people, the vast majority of them locals. On October 12, 2000, Al Qaeda conducted a suicide boat attack on the
Cole,
a U.S. Navy destroyer, killing seventeen sailors and blowing a hole in the ship while it was at harbor in the Yemeni port of Aden. The United States knew, therefore, that Al Qaeda already had roots in the region. It also knew that Yemen was Osama bin Laden's ancestral homeland.