Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (70 page)

The operators who exited the back of the Combat Talon realized in midair that they couldn't make it to their primary drop zone. “There was so much fog they had to go to an alternate drop zone,” said a Team 6 source. For the experienced freefall jumpers this was no great obstacle. Using microphones and earpieces fitted to their helmets, they were able to discuss the change in plans while in midair, and still managed to land far enough away from the camp that the pirates never heard or saw them. The SEALs then moved on foot to the camp so stealthily that the nine kidnappers guarding the hostages had no idea they were under attack until it was far too late. A couple of pirates managed to get some harmless shots off before the SEALs were on top of them, killing all nine with ruthless efficiency as two operators sprinted through the gunfight to cover the hostages with their bodies. Grabbing the hostages, they moved on foot for several minutes to a pickup zone. There Task Force Brown helicopters landed in swirling dust and flew them to Galkayo's airport, where a Combat Talon waited to fly them to Djibouti.
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The rescue of Buchanan and Thisted exemplified some of the capabilities and skills JSOC and Team 6 had been perfecting since—and in some cases before—September 11. The positioning of drones over the camp was a testament to the belief of Stan McChrystal and Mike Flynn in the power of the “Unblinking Eye.” That President Obama felt comfortable enough to give the go-ahead for the mission was a function of the confidence he had in JSOC, a confidence that was the product of hard work successive JSOC commanders had done building relationships with the White House over two administrations. The perfectly executed freefall jump was a direct result of the time and energy Team 6 had invested in preparing for such missions. “That [mission] would not have been as successful as it was had we not done that profile hundreds and hundreds of times already,” said a Team 6 source. The decision to land at an offset location (the “Y”), as opposed to jumping directly onto the objective (the “X”), was based on hard lessons learned from a decade of trial and error in combat. The operators' ability to creep up undetected to the camp—also highlighted during Team 6's October 2010 rescue of the kidnapped American engineer in Afghanistan—was also a skill honed over countless previous missions. The appearance of the Task Force Brown helicopters many hundreds of miles from a friendly air base was a testament to the 160th's vaunted ability to fly its helicopters to wherever the mission demanded “plus or minus thirty seconds” anywhere on the globe. According to one special operations source, the operation to retrieve Buchanan and Thisted became “the gold standard” of hostage rescues within JSOC.

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As the twenty-first century stretched toward the middle of its second decade, JSOC had firmly established itself at the top of not only the U.S. military food chain, but also, arguably, the interagency hierarchy inside the Washington Beltway.

To achieve that, successive JSOC commanders had leveraged an organization that McChrystal originally established in 2004 with a more limited mandate. That organization began life as the Joint Reconnaissance and Targeting Force, or JRTF, and was the brainchild of then Colonel Mike Nagata, according to a veteran of the organization. (Other sources credit a slightly wider array of individuals.) The purpose was to achieve a level of synergy among the burgeoning reconnaissance elements of the different JSOC units. At the time, Delta, Team 6, and the Rangers each had units dedicated to deep reconnaissance and advance force operations, and each was growing in size: Delta was expanding Operational Support Troop into what became G Squadron; Team 6 was nurturing Black Squadron from humble beginnings into what would become the unit's largest formation; and the Ranger Reconnaissance Detachment was taking on a broader range of missions and growing into a company designed along the same lines as a Delta reconnaissance troop. All of these reconnaissance units had missions that overlapped with each other and with those of Orange, which saw itself as the premier outfit when it came to clandestine intelligence gathering operations.

Concerned that the units were starting to replicate each other's capabilities, McChrystal originally wanted to pool the reconnaissance assets so they would support all his units. However, relieving the special mission unit and Ranger commanders of their own reconnaissance elements would have been a tough sell, so instead McChrystal and the unit commanders agreed to establish a small task force—the JRTF—whose function would be to plan and, perhaps, command and control, reconnaissance operations that supported JSOC missions. JRTF was “supposed to be the [organization] that tied together [and] synchronized reconnaissance efforts worldwide outside of Iraq and Afghanistan,” said a special operations source familiar with its birth. The task force's staff was to be drawn from each of JSOC's major ground units, with the idea that when a potential reconnaissance challenge presented itself, each unit would have a representative in the JRTF who could explain what unique capabilities his or her unit could bring to solving the problem. The task force started small, with barely a dozen members. The JRTF was based at Fort Belvoir, collocated with Orange, because McChrystal thought it needed to be close to one of the special mission units, and Colonel Konrad Trautman, Orange's commander at the time, argued that his unit was the most logical choice. When JRTF officially stood up in the late spring of 2004, Trautman became dual-hatted as commander of both JRTF and Orange. The organization took the place of the advance force operations cell in JSOC headquarters. However, friction soon developed between the JRTF staff and Orange, whose personnel derided their new neighbor as “Junior Task Force.”

By the end of 2008, JRTF had outgrown its Fort Belvoir quarters and had moved into an office building in Arlington, Virginia. In keeping with McChrystal's vision of a networked force, JRTF had also begun to exchange liaisons with the major government agencies whose work might have a bearing on JSOC's missions. It had taken on the roles of JSOC's original JIATF's East and West, at Bagram and Balad respectively, which each closed down. “The premise was [that before JRTF] there was no organization holistically looking at the GWOT [global war on terror] as a whole, as it were, the targets outside the major combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan,” a JRTF source said. “What does the rest of the structure, of the enemy order of battle, look like?” JRTF did not have an action arm, but its growing staff would travel abroad, meet with representatives of other U.S. government agencies, as well as foreign governments, “and facilitate operations outside Iraq and Afghanistan,” the source said. As the organization increasingly focused on this work with other government departments, it acquired a bulky new name: the Joint Interagency Task Force-National Capital Region, or JIATF-NCR.

The JIATF-NCR commander was a colonel or Navy captain who reported to the JSOC commander. He did not have the authority to task operational units in the field. Instead, if he wanted surveillance of a certain target, for instance, he made a recommendation to that effect to the JSOC commander. The organization, whose staff had grown exponentially, also took up data mining. “You've got an entire floor of the building which is nothing but computers,” said a U.S. Special Operations Command staff officer who visited the organization. The staff officer described a demonstration the JIATF-NCR staff gave visitors: “Mohammed So-and-So gets on a plane … and you get all his travel documents immediately, up there on the screen … now they give you the manifest of every flight he took … over the last six months … you get the complete manifest of all five flights, and you find out five other guys were all on the same five flights … and then you cross-reference them … and somehow you find out that three of the five are from the same village in Yemen, two or more were in prison together.… It's multiple agencies feeding [it] and I was fascinated that we [Special Operations Command and JSOC] were in the lead, because 80 percent of what they were putting up there was domestic stuff.” (A JSOC staffer credited a program called TRADEWIND with giving JIATF-NCR the ability to call up somebody's travel records immediately.)

A veteran of the organization said it had achieved some major targeting successes, starting with some of the Predator strikes in Yemen. However, the Special Operations Command staff officer said, the organization did not exist just to give JSOC targeting data. “If the FBI can pick up a guy landing at Dulles Airport, they do that as well,” the officer said. Indeed, by late 2014 JIATF-NCR's mission had evolved away from targeting, and it existed largely to gain concurrence among other government agencies for specific missions.
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JSOC had overhauled its headquarters' intelligence infrastructure to address the weaknesses that hobbled it in the aftermath of September 11. In late 2008 McRaven had established the JSOC Intelligence Brigade (JIB), a 600-person unit based at Fort Bragg and commanded by a colonel or a Navy captain. Originally conceived by McChrystal to allow the JSOC intelligence director to focus “up and out,” while the JIB commander focused “down and in,” in the words of a JSOC staff officer, the JIB included a full complement of collection, analysis, and dissemination capabilities, including airborne and ground collection platforms, as well as analysts, interrogators, and other specialists in signals, imagery, and human intelligence and counterintelligence. The JSOC director of intelligence remained the command's senior intelligence officer, but his job was to advise the JSOC commander on intelligence missions that the JIB commander executed with his panoply of intelligence capabilities.
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“You need a commander to be responsible for training, maintaining, commanding and controlling those kinds of assets,” said a former senior JSOC officer. “Staff guys can't do that.”

“The JIB formalized a lot of talent,” said a Team 6 officer. “It enabled [them] to get a lot more bodies and to do a lot more formal training in a more consistent manner.”

Meanwhile, in the wake of the U.S. military's departure from Iraq, JSOC and its component units embraced a role that would increasingly see them working closely with the CIA and other intelligence agencies in countries in which the United States was not officially at war. As a result, JSOC continued to expand its espionage capabilities, which were already threatening the CIA's traditional turf. (By 2008, the military had surpassed the Agency's ability to place case officers under nonofficial cover abroad, according to Ishmael Jones, the pen name of a retired CIA nonofficial cover case officer.) For example, in 2014 Orange was largely focused on a global mission to counter what JSOC called the Iranian Threat Network, which included the Quds Force as well as organizations that often acted as Iranian surrogates, such as Hezbollah. And although thousands of JSOC personnel remained busy in Afghanistan, by 2014 Team 6 and Delta had only one troop each in the country. Operations elsewhere indicated the way ahead. In particular, the two missions that occurred two hours and 3,000 miles apart on October 5, 2013: Delta's dawn seizure of Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, also known by his nom de guerre, Abu Anas al-Libi, from outside his home in Tripoli, and a failed attempt by Team 6 in Baraawe, Somalia, to capture Abdikadir Mohamed Abdikadir, otherwise known as Ikrimah, a senior al-Shabaab figure believed to be behind the September 21 attack on Nairobi's Westgate Mall that killed at least sixty-seven people.

The Delta mission, in the capital of a country—Libya—with a weak central government, was smooth, professional, and bloodless. After entering Libya over the beach with Team 6's help, the operators snatched Libi—wanted for his suspected role in Al Qaeda's 1998 embassy bombings, and because intelligence indicated that he was setting up a new Al Qaeda cell in Tripoli—by using two vans to block his car as he returned home from dawn prayers. The operators yanked Libi from his vehicle and sped off with him within sixty seconds. The use of vans with darkened windows suggested that Delta had advance force operations personnel in-country preparing for the mission before the rest of the operators arrived, while the timing of the snatch indicated extensive surveillance of the target to establish his pattern of life.

Team 6 operators almost pulled off an equally impressive tactical feat that morning in Somalia, when they came ashore before dawn and crept toward Ikrimah's house. They had nearly succeeded in entering the building unnoticed when a guard emerged to smoke a cigarette, wandered back inside, and then returned with an assault rifle and began firing. There were enough SEALs to storm the house, but, after the squadron commander on the scene told the task force headquarters in Djibouti that doing so would likely result in the deaths of women and children, the SEALs decided to abort the mission. They withdrew to their boats on the beach and left.
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Delta's low-visibility campaign in Libya continued, and on June 15, 2014, the unit again hit the headlines when it seized Islamist militia leader Ahmed Abu Khattala, a ringleader of the September 11, 2012, attack on Benghazi's U.S. consulate. The raid had been a long time in the planning.

JSOC had had a presence in Libya—called Team Libya—since the Arab Spring uprising against Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Team Libya was part of Task Force 27, which was led by Delta and operated in the Middle East and North and West Africa.
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When Islamist militiamen overran the Benghazi consulate and attacked a nearby CIA outpost, killing Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, two Delta operators—one of whom was a Marine—were part of a seven-person team sent from Tripoli that night to mount a rescue mission for the State Department and CIA personnel who had taken refuge in the CIA facility about a mile from the burning consulate. Both operators received high awards for their role in getting the Americans to safety: the Distinguished Service Cross for the Army operator, Master Sergeant David R. Halbruner; and its Navy equivalent, the Navy Cross, for his Marine colleague (whose name was not publicized). “Throughout the operation, Master Sergeant Halbruner continually exposed himself to fire as he shepherded unarmed civilians to safety and treated the critically wounded,” reads the citation for Halbruner's award. “His calm demeanor, professionalism and courage [were] an inspiration to all and contributed directly to the success of the mission.”
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