Authors: Sean Naylor
A series of high-profile episodes in 2010 and 2011 brought this issue to the fore. In the most notorious and controversial incident, on February 12, 2010, Rangers conducted a night raid on a compound in Gardez, the capital of Paktia province in eastern Afghanistan. The raid was based on mistaken intelligence that insurgents in the compound were preparing for a suicide bomb operation. But rather than insurgents, the compound belonged to a local police detective, Mohammed Daoud Sharabuddin, who was hosting a party to celebrate the naming of his newborn son. Daoud had been through numerous U.S. training programs and was, essentially, an American ally. He wasn't even Pashtun, the ethnicity from which the Taliban is drawn almost exclusively. But when Daoud and his fifteen-year-old son went outside to see who was in their yard at 3:30
A.M.,
they were shot. In a chaotic scene, the shooting continued, and within moments seven Afghans lay dead or dying, including two pregnant women.
The surviving family members later accused the JSOC troops of trying to hide evidence of what had happened by digging bullets from the women's bodies with knives. ISAF headquarters put out a series of erroneous reports that said that the men killed had been insurgents and that the women were victims of “honor killings” by the “insurgents.” The ISAF reports also sought to damage the reputation of Jerome Starkey, a Kabul reporter for
The Times
of London, who had started to uncover the deception. The affair came to a bizarre conclusion when, in an extraordinary scene, McRaven himself, accompanied by a large retinue of U.S. and Afghan troops, showed up at the family's home in Gardez with a sheep he was ready to sacrifice in a ritualistic apology. The family invited Starkey and photographer, Jeremy Kelly, to witness the event. Their reporting documented JSOC's involvement.
Several years later, exactly why the JSOC forces raided the compound remained unclear, as the commands involved had failed to release any records of the event.
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But the incident and others in which civilians were killed by air strikes called in by forces on the ground, resulted in a number of changes. Among these was that JSOC forces were required to do a “call-out” before assaulting a target at night, meaning that they had to surround a compound and then give anyone inside an opportunity to surrender. This was tremendously unpopular with the strike forces,
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who felt it gave insurgents a chance to destroy phones and other material that could help the task force map the Taliban network and lead to other targets. “You're really ceding the upper hand to the enemy,” said a senior Team 6 operator, who added that Team 6 strike forces sometimes ignored the call-out requirement. “If we were sure the bad guy was in there, we weren't going to do a call-out,” he said. “We weren't giving him an opportunity to destroy evidence or anything else. We were doing an assault.”
Another requirement, which predated the Gardez massacre, was that JSOC would work with Afghan special operations forces on every mission. The Afghan force, recruited from the Afghan Commando units trained by U.S. Special Forces, was called simply the Afghan Partner Unit, or APU. In 2009, the Bagram headquarters insisted that every mission include at least five APU soldiers. By late 2010, that number had increased to seven. Views of the APUs' usefulness varied among strike forces. A Ranger officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan commented that APU troops were “very tough, much tougher than the Iraqi military.” But JSOC was too focused on training the APU troops to clear buildings, he said. If the United States wanted to leave behind a special operations force capable of hunting down Taliban after an American withdrawal from Afghanistan, it should have concentrated instead on training the APU on human intelligence skills, as the U.S. military's departure would deprive the APU of the signals and imagery intelligence assets that drove so many JSOC raids. “We should be focusing them on developing a source network, because that's going to be their only lifeline,” he said.
Another Ranger said his strike force only brought along APU soldiers “for show” so that the task force and, ultimately, ISAF press releases, could boast that each raid had been “Afghan-led.” The strike force would place a Ranger in charge of the Afghan troops on each mission. The Afghans rarely took part in the fighting. “They would just sit in a corner or hide in a room,” the Ranger said. However, he said, that was not the message transmitted up the chain of command: “Was it reported like that on the radio? No, but the higher-ups, as long as I reported it right, they were cool with that.⦠I would always say, âAPU conducting call-out.' They would radio back, âOkay, good.' Were the APU conducting the call-out? No. âAPU entering the compound.' Were the APU entering the compound? No.”
The Ranger acknowledged that other Ranger platoons and Delta troops made more of an effort to get their assigned Afghans involved, but he said Rangers in general were resistant to training and mentoring Afghan forces, which he viewed as a job for Special Forces. “They were a means to an end,” he said of the APU. “They helped us get out the door.”
The view from the top of the chain of command looked very different. In a March 7, 2012, appearance before the House Armed Services Committee, McRaven, who by then had received his fourth star and been made head of U.S. Special Operations Command, defended night raids as “an essential tool for our special operations forces.” But, since the previous summer, “we have really Afghanized our night raid approach,” he added. “The Afghans are in the lead on all our night raids,” McRaven continued. “They are the ones that do the call-outs, asking people to come out of the compounds, they are the first ones through the door, they are the ones that do all of the sensitive site exploitation.”
The civilian casualty, or “civcas,” episodes put Petraeus in a difficult position. He was a strong advocate for JSOC, having seen and benefited from the command's effectiveness as the Coalition commander in Iraq. But he also knew Hamid Karzai's patience was wearing thin. “He would just take ass-whipping after ass-whipping when he'd go to talk to Karzai about the civcas stuff,” said a senior member of Petraeus's staff. “It was stuff that didn't seem like it needed to happen, if you will. They didn't have to whack these guys.” A senior JSOC officer would brief Petraeus every week on the command's activities, and the command's liaisons, who sat a thirty-second walk from his office, spoke with him every dayâa validation of McChrystal's insistence on placing talented liaisons in every headquarters that mattered to JSOC. “He spoke their language,” said the senior member of Petraeus's staff. “He was very comfortable around those guys.⦠He was a big supporter of what they did, but ⦠he was just as hard on them too. When they fucked something up he made them atone for their sins.”
The task force committed one of its more egregious “sins” on October 8, 2010, when it tried to rescue British aid worker Linda Norgrove, who had been abducted on September 26. Intelligence traced her location to a compound about 7,000 feet up a mountainside in the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan's Kunar province. Two years previously, the task force had conducted a successful hostage rescue of an American engineer kidnapped in central Afghanistan. In that episode, dubbed Operation Prometheus, Team 6 operators had landed about three miles from the kidnappers' hideout and patrolled through heavy snow to sneak up on and shoot both guards and rescue the engineer.
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The Norgrove mission fell to a troop from Team 6's Silver Squadron, the unit's newest assault squadron. As part of the significant expansion of JSOC, Delta and Team 6 were each directed to create a fourth line squadron, notwithstanding the fact that they found it hard to fill their three existing squadrons. Over the course of a couple of years, Team 6 built Silver Squadron by running an additional assessment and selection course, then adding a fourth team to each of the three existing assault squadrons, slowly filling the fourth troop with operators and then moving the three additional troops into the new squadron.
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The troop that conducted the mission was, with one or two exceptions, filled with seasoned operators and commanded by “a very experienced guy,” according to a senior Team 6 operator.
Unlike the operation to rescue the engineer, the geography of the area did not allow for the rescue force to land at an offset location and move on foot to the objective. Instead, it would have to fly straight to the target. The 160th's 4th Battalion flew the mission with Chinooks. There was nowhere to land, so the operators fast-roped down to the ground.
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A manned ISR aircraft overhead gave the SEALs second-by-second updates of what it saw. The aircraft reported a figure moving in the bushes. But what the observers in the plane had missed was that the man they'd spotted was dragging Norgrove behind him. On the ground, two SEALs reacted to the new information in different ways. Neither realized that the hostage was in the bushes. The aircraft's last report was that she was in the building. “It all comes down to decision making in that moment,” said a senior Team 6 operator. A team leader who had climbed onto the roof saw the kidnapper and fired. At the same moment, another SEAL threw a grenade at the movement in the bushes. The team leader's shot almost certainly killed the kidnapper, but the grenade killed Norgrove. At the time, however, almost nobody on the objective or watching in the operations centers realized that a grenade had caused the explosion.
It took a few seconds for the awful news to reach Bagram. At first the SEALs reported “Jackpot,” meaning they'd found Norgrove. “You hear âJackpot!' Everybody's like, âYes!' in the whole room,” said a source who was in the operations center. The next words cut the celebrations cruelly short: “⦠administering CPR at this time.” The atmosphere in the operations center deflated. “You just knew something went wrong,” said the source.
At first nobody fully understood the truth about what killed Norgrove. Because the operators had been briefed that the kidnappers might be wearing suicide vests, the team leader who fired at the man dragging Norgrove thought that his bullet must have detonated such a vest on the kidnapper, causing the explosion. Even the operator who threw the grenade and his shooting buddy on the team, who was the only other person who knew about the grenade, didn't realize that the grenade had killed Norgrove, in large part because the team leader was so convinced that the kidnapper he'd shot had somehow blown up and that Norgrove had died in that explosion. When the troop returned from the objective to Jalalabad, the grenade thrower and his shooting buddy kept their mouths shut during the mission debrief. This meant that the story told to the British government, Norgrove's parents, and the news media was that a suicide vest explosion killed Norgrove. Shortly after the JSOC task force had put out this official version of events, the operator who threw the grenade finally informed his team leader that he had thrown a fragmentation grenade. “That's when it hit the team leader that, âOkay, I didn't just shoot a dude that had a vest on, my own teammate threw a grenade,'” said a Team 6 source. The team leader was “horrified,” according to a senior Team 6 operator, but rather than report what he knew immediately, he retreated to his living quarters for about another forty hours. “He didn't [report it] because he doesn't want to damage the reputation of the command,” said the senior operator. “And throughout the whole next day he's chewing on it.”
Meanwhile, Kurilla, JSOC's Afghanistan task force commander, had been poring over the video of the mission and realized that someone had thrown a grenade. “Once you see the video, it's unmistakable,” said a Team 6 source. He called the squadron commander and command master chief up to Bagram and showed them the video. They returned to Jalalabad and called in the team leader. He had already decided to tell what he knew, but it was too late. The wheels of investigation had begun to turn.
Norgrove's death in a U.S. mission was already front page news in the United Kingdom and the United States, and a major embarrassment for Petraeus, who was about to travel to the U.K. for a visit planned in advance of the rescue effort. The general called Norgrove's parents and British prime minister David Cameron in the wake of the failure. Kurilla and others from JSOC had briefed Petraeus in the immediate aftermath of the mission. “That day there was just a steady stream of those guys coming in and out,” said the senior Petraeus staffer. The revelation that it was a Team 6 operator that had inadvertently killed Norgrove only exacerbated the awkwardness and the anger. “There was some tension in there,” said the senior staffer. “They had a great chance to save this lady and we ended up whacking her.⦠People were a little pissed ⦠that the story didn't come out right the first time” with regard to how Norgrove was killed, the staffer said. “When it turned out that it was one of our guys, it was just âHoly shit.' That was definitely a low time for JSOC because they'd built up some equity pulling off missions and then this was a low point for them.”
The failure of the Norgrove operation was enormously painful and frustrating for the task force, the members of which knew that they had been one unnecessary mistake away from one of the most difficult, daring hostage rescues in U.S. history. It was “a very gutsy operation,” said a Team 6 operator. “There's not another force that could have done it.” But it also prompted some introspection in Team 6.
The operator who had thrown the grenade was on his first Team 6 deployment, and had previously been warned about throwing grenades on missions, said a senior Team 6 operator. “They counseled him but didn't do anything,” he said. “They probably should have moved him on.” But there were other factors behind the mission failure. Silver Squadron did no hostage rescue training during its pre-deployment workup, the senior Team 6 operator said. Instead, the team focused on “combat clearance” techniques. “[In] hostage rescue clearance, there is no scenarioâno scenarioâwhere you grab a grenade,” the operator said. The same was not true for combat clearance. “So you've got a brand-new guy that made it through selection, gets to the squadron, and doesn't do any hostage rescue training beforehand. So he goes on deployment and he performs as trained.” The senior Team 6 operator called into question the decision to use Silver Squadron for the mission: “If you haven't trained to it in six months, you don't do it.”