Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (68 page)

The failure left a bitter taste for some of the SEALs. “They weren't allowed to do anything,” the operator said. “They had plans that they could have done, things that they could have tried to stop that boat.… The snipers … were crushed. They knew who the bad guys were. They should have taken the shots, but they obeyed orders. They were crushed.”

Some Team 6 operators blamed McRaven for the failure. “He micromanaged it,” said one, accusing McRaven of disregarding one of the special mission units' key strengths: “Delta and SEAL Team 6 solve tactical problems.” But a retired officer who worked for McRaven for several years said micromanagement wasn't the admiral's style. “One man's micromanagement is another man's attention to detail,” he added.

*   *   *

Less than two months later, Team 6 scored a major success in the same waters without having to fire a shot.

U.S. intelligence had been closely tracking Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a Somali in his mid-twenties who was the senior liaison between al-Shabaab and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which was Al Qaeda's Yemen offshoot. The February 2006 prison breakout of some of its most ardent and experienced members had rejuvenated AQAP. It had become the most active Al Qaeda branch, demonstrating an ambition to strike U.S. targets—particularly commercial airliners—far from Yemen. As a result, JSOC had increased its presence in Yemen and the U.S. government was keen to get its hands on Warsame. JSOC's planners knew either they or the CIA could kill Warsame in Yemen with a drone strike (each organization had its own drones flying over Yemen—the CIA's from southern Saudi Arabia, JSOC's from Djibouti). The JSOC staff also considered capturing or killing him in Somalia. (Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh had made it clear putting U.S. boots on the ground in Yemen for a capture operation was out of the question.) But Warsame was a potentially invaluable source of intelligence and JSOC wanted to grab him alive. In mid-April 2011 Warsame unwittingly presented JSOC with an opportunity to do just that, when he made arrangements to travel on a small boat from Yemen to Puntland, the semiautonomous region of northeastern Somalia. Not only was the United States listening to Warsame's cell phone, however. According to author Daniel Klaidman, “Using local spies, JSOC had been able to penetrate his network and manipulate the timing and logistics of his movements,” meaning that somehow JSOC had arranged for Warsame to be traveling with just one associate and no guards.

On the evening of April 19, 2011, a troop of around twenty-five operators and support personnel from Team 6's Silver Squadron, dressed as regular Navy sailors rather than special mission unit operators, climbed into their rigid hull inflatable boats. Using a traditional wooden ship common to the region to screen themselves until the last possible moment, they boarded the fishing skiff on which Warsame was traveling through the Gulf of Aden. Taken by surprise, Warsame and his companion surrendered with minimal fuss. The mission marked the United States' “first at-sea counterterrorism mission,” according to a senior Team 6 source.

The military held Warsame on the
Boxer
and interrogated him for more than two months before the Obama administration opted to try him in civilian court in New York. As with the Nabhan strike, the mission yielded an intelligence bounty: a laptop, two USB thumb drives, a hard drive, and a memory card. Things got even better for the CIA and JSOC analysts once Warsame began cooperating with his interrogators.
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“That was a huge one because he was carrying back all kinds of material to take to al-Shabaab from AQAP—huge, huge takeaway,” said a senior SEAL officer.

Playing a possible role in the operation was JSOC's own spy-ship-cum-staging-base that the command had operated off Somalia from the winter of 2010–2011. Commanded by a regular Navy officer and known as an afloat forward staging base (the same phrase used for the much larger flattops from which JSOC task forces sometimes operated), the ship fell under Task Force 484, JSOC's task force in the Horn of Africa and Yemen. The ship was leased from the Edison Chouest Offshore firm, and looked like a commercial or scientific craft, but could accommodate operators, SEAL boats, and at least one helicopter. The ship focused mostly on collecting signals intelligence.
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“We would rely on submarines mostly to pop up there and do sigint collection for us, but we needed a full-time platform,” said a Team 6 source. “We couldn't get a Navy ship so we rented and repurposed a civilian ship.… It was loaded in terms of all the latest up-to-date sigint equipment.” The signals intelligence gear was largely manned by experts from Team 6's White Squadron, which provided signals intelligence support personnel—cryptologists (“crippies”) and technical surveillance (TS) troops. (Although it had a squadron designation, White Squadron was commanded by a lieutenant commander, an officer a rank below the commanders who led the other squadrons.)

The ship also came in handy whenever Team 6 needed to conduct an OTB (“over-the-beach”) mission in Yemen or Somalia. “What we keep on that thing [are] our boats, our mechanics, a lot of our support dudes, and then the force will jump in,” said another Team 6 source. “Sometimes they'll jump boats in … but usually it's out there so all you have to do is jump in the force.”

By the time Team 6 captured Warsame, Yemen had become a major focus of U.S. counterterrorism efforts. With JSOC's operations in the country—code-named Copper Dune—now under Team 6's command, the task force there enjoyed some success responding to the threat of suicide bombers in Sana'a by using Marine AV-8B Harriers to strike the suicide bombers' safe house north of the capital, and a combination of Harriers and submarine-launched cruise missiles to target AQAP camps in fall 2009. However, Yemeni president Saleh's calculus that his people could tolerate air strikes but not American boots on the ground meant that JSOC's presence in Yemen remained modest. JSOC's numbers rose slowly before being capped at about fifty personnel by Ambassador Gerald Feierstein, who ran the Sana'a embassy from 2010 to 2013. Known collectively as Team Sana'a, the JSOC element had nonetheless grown too large to remain in the embassy proper and moved into new quarters close by. The team was commanded by a Team 6 troop commander, an officer holding the rank of lieutenant commander. His military chain of command ran through Task Force 484, which from 2009 was the name for the Team 6–led task force in the Horn and Yemen, but he also answered to the CIA chief of station in Sana'a, who, in the 2009–2010 timeframe, was JSOC's old friend Spider.

Team 6's Black Squadron, its advance force operations unit, provided most of the JSOC personnel, with some support from regular assault teams. Delta's Echo Squadron also had a contingent there with four Mi-17 helicopters painted in Yemeni military colors. They were there to fly Yemeni forces on counterterrorism missions, but when Saleh permitted them to fly, which wasn't often, it was mostly for training, not combat operations. In an effort to persuade Saleh that JSOC could conduct effective, stealthy missions in Yemen itself, Team 6 ran a demonstration in which operators flew in from Djibouti and conducted a high-altitude, low-opening parachute jump into the desert. The exercise went smoothly, but Saleh remained unmoved.

The task force also had a few personnel undercover performing advance force operations. These included “a couple of … Delta shooters that became Arabic speakers, and they were sensational,” said a JSOC source. They and the occasional Team 6 AFO operator worked with female operators from Delta's G Squadron performing low-visibility urban reconnaissance in Sana'a and Aden, much of it focused on collecting signals intelligence from cell-phone networks and Internet cafés.
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Into this intelligence stream flowed the information gained from JSOC's April 2011 capture of Warsame. From the U.S. perspective, a benefit of getting Warsame was the detailed intelligence on the movements, security measures, and pattern of life of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and Islamic cleric who had become a major player in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and thus a high-priority target for the United States. Awlaki's citizenship resulted in much debate in the Obama administration and the wider foreign policy community about the appropriateness and legality of targeting him, but Obama had few qualms. Indeed, the president was particularly focused on Awlaki, pressuring his national security team to find and fix the charismatic terrorist.
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JSOC had a golden opportunity to kill Awlaki on May 5, 2011, just three days after the Abbottabad raid. Awlaki and at least one companion were driving through a rural part of Shabwah, southeast of Sana'a. Unbeknownst to them, JSOC was tracking them and had lined up three different types of aircraft ready to take a shot. First up was an MC-130W Dragon Spear, a special operations refueling version of the C-130 Hercules retrofitted with a weapons package. The Dragon Spear fired a Griffin missile at Awlaki's truck, but missed due to a problem with its targeting pod. It was out of the fight. As the vehicle raced to evade the barrage, a Marine Corps Harrier jet took its turn, but just nicked the vehicle's rear fender. Those monitoring the Predator feed in Sana'a, Fort Bragg, and the Pentagon watched in amazement as the truck emerged from the fireball and continued across the desert. Short on fuel, the Harrier had to depart. JSOC still had a Predator in the sky. Such drones had eviscerated Al Qaeda's midlevel leadership in Pakistan's tribal areas. But Awlaki was not so easily killed. He had called for help and two brothers who were colleagues in AQAP sped to rendezvous with Awlaki under some trees in a small valley. There, unseen by the JSOC staff watching the video feed, they switched vehicles with Awlaki and his driver, then the two vehicles departed in different directions. The drone followed Awlaki's original vehicle, now with the brothers inside, and destroyed it, killing them. Awlaki escaped.
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By the time the next chance to target Awlaki—Objective Troy—arrived at the end of September, the CIA had taken charge of the drone program in Yemen. The opportunity came about when Awlaki made the mistake of remaining in one place for two weeks, far longer than normal. Combined with human intelligence from at least one Yemeni source and the usual array of signals intelligence assets, this allowed the combined CIA-JSOC team to find and fix the cleric in Al Jawf province, northeast of Sana'a.
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This time the United States was determined not to let Awlaki slip through their fingers. The Agency flew several Reaper drones from a base in Saudi Arabia. (The MQ-9 Reaper was a larger and more heavily armed version of the Predator.) Circling above the compound to which Awlaki had been tracked, they provided a comforting level of redundancy for the CIA planners.

The plan was for the drones to strike Awlaki while he was driving far from any noncombatants. A force comprised of operators from Team 6's Red Squadron; one Delta operator; CIA Ground Branch operatives; and Yemeni counterterrorism personnel was to land in an Echo Squadron Mi-17 to exploit the site as soon as the drones struck. On September 30, as Awlaki and his colleagues finished breakfast in a small mud house and walked outside to climb into their vehicles and drive away, the CIA was sure it finally had its man. Its confidence stemmed from an extraordinary combination of human and technical intelligence: the Agency had gained access to Awlaki's vehicle and equipped it with a hidden video camera that was transmitting live, so the CIA's watchers actually saw Awlaki getting in the backseat. While this sort of work can be done by having U.S. or local operatives sneaking up to the car and installing the gear when nobody's watching, that wasn't how the CIA accomplished their feat in the case of Awlaki. “The easiest way … is to have a source who brings you the car, which is what the Agency would prefer … and they did have a source very close to Awlaki,” said a JSOC source. “You can do the install inside your comfortable garage and then give the car back to the source and he's gone.”

With 100 percent confidence that they had their target in their sights, the Agency's decision makers got impatient and gave the order to strike before the vehicles had gone very far. The drones fired a dozen Hellfire missiles at Awlaki, destroying his vehicle and killing him and several colleagues, including another American, Samir Khan, the editor of AQAP's online magazine,
Inspire
. But the CIA had “fired about forty-five minutes early,” meaning the exploitation team had no chance to land to gain intelligence from the site before locals overran it, said a JSOC source. The helicopter carrying the JSOC and Agency personnel turned around in midflight.
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Extortion 17

The moon had set and the sky was black as the insurgents on a corner turret of a compound 200 meters south of the Logar River scanned the darkness for targets. Looking north, they could see the gray outlines of the mud-brick villages dotting the strip of vegetation that in daylight ran like a green ribbon through the center of the valley, but now was just another shade of black. For years the valley had been inhospitable to invaders. U.S. soldiers built a combat outpost there in spring 2009, but never succeeded in controlling more than a thousand meters around the tiny base, which they abandoned two years later. Now the Americans were back. For hours their airplanes had been circling above the valley, clearly audible in the still of the night. There were also two types of helicopter in the air: the large, twin-rotor ones, a pair of which had landed to the northeast four and a half hours previously, depositing dozens of soldiers who were now scouring a village compound; and the smaller attack helicopters, which the men on the tower had heard firing at their colleagues north of the river.

The helicopters were prize targets for the insurgents, but shooting down a blacked-out helicopter on a dark night using the rudimentary sights on a heavy machine gun or a rocket-propelled grenade launcher was not easy. The Taliban in the valley were getting closer, however. Two months previously they had volley-fired more than a dozen rocket-propelled grenades at one of the twin-rotor helicopters, forcing it to abort its mission and leave the valley.