Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (63 page)

But Team 6 kept up its HAHO training, ready for a similar mission, especially if bin Laden—or UBL, as JSOC personnel often referred to him—was spotted in the tribal areas. “We were always training for it,” said a senior Team 6 source. “We had a package always on alert to go get UBL with a jump option. If we found him, guys would parachute in—launch in a Talon from Bagram, get their gear on, HAHO, go to altitude, fly across border, twenty-five or thirty kilometers in, land and do the strike, and the rest of the squadron would come in via [helicopters] after it was over. Lots of planning for those.”

The troop designated for the HAHO mission was kept on a very short string at Bagram during the first few years. “Then we, the operators, realized, ‘Hey, this is futile—why don't we go out and do some other stuff?'” recalled a Team 6 SEAL. So the string gradually loosened to allow the troop to conduct other missions, so long as it could be back at Bagram ready to go within twenty-four hours. No matter where the troop was in Afghanistan when bin Laden was spotted, the mission would launch from Bagram, because that was where the troop kept its freefall gear.

To hide the fact that the unit had this capability available, Team 6 continued to avoid conducting freefall missions in Afghanistan whenever possible. There were some notable exceptions, however. In 2005 the task force got solid intelligence on the location of what a senior Team 6 source described as several “mid- to-upper-level” Al Qaeda figures in eastern Afghanistan. The mission fell to Red Squadron's designated HAHO troop, led by Lieutenant Commander Francis “Frank” Franky. The troop opted to jump in. “It was a big deal for us to use that package because that package was supposed be only for UBL,” said another Team 6 operator. The mission was a big success. The troop jumped in and conducted “an extremely arduous long patrol” before catching the Al Qaeda personnel asleep, said the senior Team 6 source. “They nailed it,” he said. “That was a big AQ windfall for us. We found all kinds of intel and we captured about seven dudes.”

Another HAHO mission later that year did not turn out as well. On August 31 the Taliban abducted David Addison, a former British soldier working as a security adviser for a road-building project in western Afghanistan. JSOC soon had located Addison and his captors in a cave in Farah province, but time appeared to be running out. “We had some sort of report that they were going to kill him,” said the senior Team 6 source. The task force quickly put together a rescue plan dubbed Operation Big Ben. The plan, which required a night jump into very rugged mountainous terrain, did not meet with universal acclaim, even from Commander Mike Goshgarian, the Blue Squadron commander, whose operators would be jumping. “Gosh was really against it,” said a Team 6 officer. But Bill McRaven, JSOC's deputy commander for operations and the senior JSOC official in Afghanistan, was “really jazzed on it,” so the mission was a go, he said.

While ISR aircraft kept the cave under observation, the HAHO troop flew on a Combat Talon from Bagram on September 3 and jumped into the night. Another troop's worth of special operators flew to a military airfield in Herat, from where the plan would have them fly to the objective on Chinooks, arriving almost simultaneously with the HAHO troop.

When the operators landed, “it was like the dark side of the moon,” the officer said. “Boulders everywhere, big boulders, and they came down between the boulders.” No jumper was seriously hurt—“We were very, very, lucky,” he said—but when the operators reached the objective, all they found was Addison's body in the cave with his throat slit. The failure was a reminder that even as JSOC's ability to conduct other types of direct action raids and to hunt high-value targets was steadily improving, hostage rescue—the command's original raison d'être—remained a desperately difficult, unforgiving mission profile.

Team 6 continued to hone its freefall expertise. Its operators considered themselves the best exponents of HALO and HAHO missions in the U.S. military. But the capability did not come without a cost. On February 13, 2008, Senior Chief Petty Officer Tom Valentine, the troop chief for Blue Squadron's 1 Troop, died in a HAHO training accident in Arizona during the troop's workup prior to deploying to Afghanistan as the bin Laden “package.”
5
An investigation determined that Valentine's parachute lines became so entangled he was unable to cut away his main chute and deploy the reserve. Three weeks later, Chief Petty Officer Lance Vaccaro, a SEAL going through Team 6's selection and training course, also died during freefall training in Arizona when his main chute failed to open and he did not deploy his backup chute in time.
6

But for all the resources expended on training for such high-risk missions, during the first few years after the fall of the Taliban, JSOC's cross-border operations existed only in the operators' minds. The only people JSOC was sending into Pakistan were sources recruited from Afghanistan and Pakistan's border regions, said a source who served in the Bagram operations center. “We weren't really sending any of our guys over the border,” he added.

That isn't to say that no JSOC personnel were in Pakistan after the AFO missions in the tribal areas finally ended. There were, but they were based in the Islamabad embassy. The command installed a team of about half a dozen personnel at the embassy working for a senior Orange officer, who reported directly to McChrystal. “He was working with our intel agencies and [the Pakistani military] trying to figure out where high-level Al Qaeda guys were in the Northwest Frontier Province,” said a source familiar with the mission. While some JSOC personnel in Islamabad functioned mostly as liaisons, Orange also had multiple signals intelligence teams working out of Islamabad with the Pakistani military. “Orange definitely flew [their planes] in Pakistan and they had certain collection capabilities,” said a senior Team 6 source. In addition to the collection packages on the aircraft, Orange also used “a handheld collection capability … to help the Paks,” he said. However, Pakistan continued to keep a tight rein on JSOC's operations, so none of this activity was “unilateral”—i.e., done without Pakistan's consent. “There was nothing that Orange could do without the Pak permission,” the Team 6 source said. “It was always with the Paks.”

“You can't do anything unilateral in that country,” said another special mission unit member. However, the same source declined to say whether Orange had ever placed personnel in Pakistan under nonofficial cover.

In late spring of 2004, there was an embarrassing incident involving a Delta sergeant major who was working as the JSOC team leader's senior enlisted adviser in Pakistan. Security guards at the Islamabad Sheraton Hotel where the sergeant major was staying searched his car and found hand grenades. “He had just come from the Northwest Frontier Province and I think he'd been driving around, so instead of dropping this stuff off at the embassy [as] he should have done, he drove straight to the hotel,” said a source familiar with the episode. The team leader fired the sergeant major.

To get around Pakistan's constraints, as the decade wore on, Orange also flew Beechcraft civilian-style propeller planes based in Afghanistan along, but not over, the Pakistan border. The planes contained a “Typhoon Box” into which dozens of phone numbers of interest to JSOC had been entered. The box would register whenever one of them was in use, and then locate the phone.
7

*   *   *

In the fall of 2005 Team 6 finally got the chance to cross the border, albeit on foot rather than via parachute. A Gold Squadron troop walked about ten kilometers across the border toward a compound they had named Objective Cottonmouth near the village of Dandi Sedgai in North Waziristan. The targets were Al Qaeda facilitators that intelligence suggested would be meeting at the compound.

The raid turned into a significant firefight. The SEALs killed “about six or eight” militants, said a senior Team 6 officer. One operator was shot in the calf. The wound forced him to medically retire. Another operator was shot in the head. His helmet deflected the round, but the force of impact flipped him over, injuring his ankle. “Cottonmouth was a good shootout,” said a senior Team 6 operator. The SEALs captured four men and loaded them onto the Task Force Brown Chinooks that landed to take the operators back to Afghanistan. At first the SEALs didn't think their captives were valuable. “We used to call them dirt farmers,” said the senior Team 6 officer. “We thought they were useless. The longer we held them, the more we got on AQ.”

Within a few weeks, the “dirt farmers” had given up intelligence that allowed the United States to target Al Qaeda's third in command (which was fast becoming the most dangerous job in the organization), Abu Hamza Rabia. On December 1, 2005, a CIA drone killed Rabia and at least one other militant in the village of Asoray, near Miram Shah.

In a curious attempt to conceal the true nature of the attack, the United States gave the Pakistani military advance notice of the operation so that the Pakistanis could hit the same target with Cobra attack helicopters immediately following the drone strike.
8
Bizarrely, the Pakistani military then concocted a second cover story blaming the deaths on the premature detonation of a bomb it said the militants were building. The deception worked briefly. National Public Radio carried an interview with BBC correspondent Zaffar Abbas in which Abbas reported:

“The Pakistani authorities say there was an explosion inside a house which later on they said was a hideout of al-Qaeda operators in the region. And the suggestion has been that probably they were making some kind of a bomb or explosive device over there which went off. But the local tribesmen over there say that it was part of the Pakistani military's operation in which a number of helicopter gunships were used and rockets were fired at this place. And five people died, two of them believe[d] to be foreign militants, and one of them was Hamza Rabia.”
9

But within a couple of days news organizations had figured out the truth.
10

Six weeks later, JSOC was involved in another strike in the tribal areas, this time a rare foray over the border by U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle attack jets. The target was a dinner that intelligence suggested would be attended by Zawahiri and other senior Al Qaeda leaders. “We thought it was [Al Qaeda's] two through five,” said a JSOC source. The F-15Es were controlled by JSOC, but as they crossed the border they were placed under Title 50 of the U.S. Code, which governs covert operations, so technically they were flying for the CIA.

The pilots' aim was perfect. The intelligence said the dinner was going to occur in a corner room of the compound. “I watched that corner room disappear and nothing else in that building was impacted,” said the JSOC source. “It was brilliant precision targeting.” There was only one problem. The dinner had already ended and the guests had departed. “They'd all left just before that,” the source said. Reputable news organizations such as
The Washington Post
reported that the strike “killed more than a dozen people,” none of them members of Al Qaeda. (However, those same news organizations also described the incident as a drone strike.)
11
The JSOC source was skeptical of such accounts. “Some of those killed were complicit as hell,” he said.

In the summer of 2007, U.S. intelligence had what it considered its best lead on bin Laden since the Al Qaeda leader's escape in 2001. The intelligence suggested that bin Laden would be attending a meeting in Tora Bora. JSOC put together Operation Valiant Pursuit. The 160th increased the number of helicopters in Afghanistan from five to eleven. The rest of the plan dwarfed that contingent. Five B-2 Spirit stealth bombers carrying eighty bombs apiece were to pummel Tora Bora. The Team 6 operators who had trained to capture or kill bin Laden were relegated to bit part players in what one senior military officer derided as a “carpet bombing” operation. In the end the expected mass gathering of Al Qaeda leaders never occurred and the mission did not launch. But for years afterward there was grumbling in some quarters that the time it took to gather such a large force together had let an opportunity slip.
12

*   *   *

After taking command of JSOC in June 2008, Bill McRaven wanted to reenergize the hunt for senior Al Qaeda targets thought to be in Pakistan's tribal areas. The intelligence that supported the search had gone stagnant and the JSOC commander wanted to “shake it up” by taking actions that resulted in phone chatter or other actions on the part of Al Qaeda personnel that would give the United States more targets. “We determined we needed to do a campaign plan,” with the goal of launching a series of raids into the tribal areas, said a JSOC source. In effect, JSOC was trying to re-create the success of its man-hunting campaign in Iraq, which was predicated on the idea that when intelligence was in short supply, it was better to raid possible targets in an effort to “pressure the network” than it was to sit back and wait for perfect intelligence to appear. The task force came up with about eight locations that represented JSOC's best guess as to the whereabouts of Al Qaeda “associates” in Pakistan, the JSOC source said. A debate ensued over whether it would be better to hit the least important target first, or to start at the top of the chain and work down. Team 6 leaders argued for hitting the highest-ranking target first, on the grounds that the political reaction in Pakistan to news of U.S. ground forces conducting a combat operation on Pakistani soil might mean that one mission was all the task force would be allowed. McRaven disagreed. He wanted to hit the lowest priority target first, to desensitize the Pakistanis to the strikes and demonstrate how well JSOC could execute them. McRaven was the boss, so his view prevailed.