The Secret Sentry (40 page)

For the next three days, a ferocious sandstorm brought all operations to a halt. During it, on the night of March 25–26, the
Iraqis attempted to move up elements of five Republican Guard divisions to positions south of Baghdad. These moves were quickly
detected by SIGINT and other technical sensors, which led to a seemingly never-ending series of air attacks on the Republican
Guards desperately trying to make their way to the front. With the Iraqi air defense system almost completely flattened, American
and British fighter-bombers were able to clobber Iraqi military targets with impunity within minutes after SIGINT fingered
them. By the end of the war, more than four hundred air strikes on Iraqi military targets had been flown based solely on SIGINT
intercepts coming out of NSA.
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By March 28, Major General Buford Blount III’s Third Infantry Division was ready to take on the Medina Division. The upcoming
battle had taken on new importance because on the previous day, SIGINT had picked up the first indications that the Iraqis
had moved what were believed to be chemical weapons from a central stockpile site outside Baghdad to the Medina Division.
American intelligence analysts at the time strongly believed that the weapons in question were 155-millimeter artillery shells
filled with either mustard gas or the nerve agents VX or Sarin.
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That afternoon, the CENTCOM deputy director of operations in Qatar, Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, confirmed the story,
telling reporters, “We have seen indications through a variety of sources . . . [that] orders have been given that at a certain
point chemical weapons may be used.”
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Despite this grave threat, the offensive against the Medina Division in the Karbala Gap proceeded on April 1. By the end of
the day, the lead elements of Blount’s division had advanced to within fifty kilometers (about thirty miles) of Baghdad. The
Iraqis detected the move around their flank almost immediately and reacted as best they could, throwing elements of the Medina
Division into the breach to try to slow down the American attack. These Iraqi countermoves were quickly noted by SIGINT and
other American intelligence sensors. Fifth Corps commander Lieutenant General William Wallace recalled that his intelligence
assets almost immediately detected the Iraqi reaction. “Simultaneous with those reports and that movement, we had UAVs [unmanned
aerial vehicles] flying and identifying those formations. That operational maneuver, in my judgment, enabled the operational
fires of the coalition to really do some major damage on portions of the Republican Guards. And from that point, over the
next twenty-four to thirty-six hours, the number of reports we were getting on destruction of Iraqi armor and artillery formations
was dramatically larger than what we had received earlier in the fight.”
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Blood!

On the afternoon of April 2, as thousands of U.S. troops and hundreds of tanks belonging to General Blount’s Third Infantry
Division surged through the Karbala Gap, a message from the commander of the Republican Guard Medina Division to his subordinate
brigades was intercepted. It contained only three words: “Blood. Blood. Blood.” NSA interpreted the message to mean that “blood”
was the Iraqi code word for use of chemical or biological weapons. General Jeff Kimmons, CENTCOM’s chief of intelligence,
agreed with NSA’s analysis and so informed General Franks.
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The Top Secret SIGINT report from NSA was immediately passed to all se -nior army and marine commanders in Iraq, who placed
their forces on alert. Lieutenant General James Conway, the commander of all Marine Corps forces in Iraq, later recalled,
“Everybody that night slept with their [gas] mask in very close proximity, as well as sleeping in your [chemical protection]
suit.”
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Shortly after the intercept was received, three Iraqi missiles impacted near the forward command post of the Fifth Corps in
central Iraq, setting off the chemical detection alarms. Though it proved to be a false alarm, it is doubtful that anyone
got any sleep that night.
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The intercepted message from the commander of the Medina Division caused more than a fair amount of concern in Washington,
where Pentagon officials were honestly worried that the Iraqis were about to use their purported stockpile of chemical weapons
against the Third Infantry Division. Blount’s troops had already crossed the “Red Line,” fifty miles outside Baghdad, where
U.S. intelligence believed Saddam had authorized his commanders to use chemical weapons against U.S. forces. Senior White
House and Pentagon officials quietly informed selected reporters in Washington that “U.S. forces in Iraq have recently intercepted
increasing amounts of Iraqi communications that appear to allude to the use of weapons of mass destruction.” One unidentified
official ominously told a reporter that the intercepts were worrisome because “there are allusions to using special weapons.
There seem to be a lot more now.”
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The Battle for Objective Peach

Unfortunately, perishable SIGINT on Iraqi military activities was not making its way to field commanders. While CENTCOM and
the Third Army intelligence staff in Kuwait continued getting the best intelligence available about the strength and capabilities
of the Iraqi armed forces from NSA and other national intelligence agencies, it did not filter down to the army division,
brigade, and battalion commanders slugging it out with the Iraqis. The Third Infantry’s Major Erik Berdy recalled that, despite
the excellent intel available, “it still never felt like we had a true picture of who we were fighting, how they were fighting
and what their intent was behind it all.”
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Only after the war did the U.S. military learn that its much-hyped “network centric warfare” electronic communications system,
which was supposed to push intelligence down to the commanders on the battlefield in real time, did not work. During key battles,
army frontline commanders literally did not know which Iraqi forces they were facing, despite the fact that their superiors
in Kuwait did.
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A perfect example of this phenomenon was the role SIGINT played in the battle for the strategically important Al-Qa’id Bridge
over the Euphrates River, thirty kilometers (about nineteen miles) southwest of Baghdad, on April 2–3. At four thirty p.m.
on April 2, a reinforced armored battalion of the Third Infantry Division under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Ernest “Rock”
Mar-cone seized the bridge, which opened Baghdad to attack by the hard-driving Third Infantry, coming up fast from the rear.

Marcone’s orders were to hold the bridge until the reinforcements from his brigade arrived. But the relief force had to take
a less direct route to the bridge, leading Marcone’s force to stick it out overnight in its exposed defensive positions.

Marcone, who had been told the bridge was undefended, recalled later that the “intel picture was terrible . . . I knew there
would be Iraqis at the bridge, but I didn’t know how many or where.” As it turned out, he had no way of knowing that there
were thousands of heavily armed Iraqi army soldiers all around him.
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At about nine p.m., Marcone was warned by a FLASH-precedence message that SIGINT indicated that the Iraqi Third Special Republican
Guard Commando Brigade had just sortied from the Baghdad International Airport, to his north, with orders to attack his position
and retake the bridge. Marcone immediately repositioned his forces as best he could in order to face the expected Iraqi infantry
counterattack. But what SIGINT and all other intelligence sources missed was that two armored brigades belonging to the Republican
Guard Medina and Nebuchadnezzar Divisions, totaling between five thousand and ten thousand men with T-72 tanks, were then
converging on Marcone’s tightly stretched defensive positions from the south.
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Under attack by vastly superior forces during the period beginning at two a.m., Marcone’s unit held out against the Iraqi
tanks and troops. Despite being repeatedly beaten back and suffering catastrophically heavy casualties, the Iraqi commander
continued to press his attack, but Marcone’s M1A1 Abrams tanks, with better armor and night vision capability, beat off the
Iraqi T-72 tanks. By five thirty a.m., the Tenth Brigade of the Medina Division had ceased to exist as a fighting unit, and
radio intercepts revealed that the brigade commander had been killed by an air strike on his command post.

The Bridge over the Diyala Canal

SIGINT proved its value once again on April 7, when the lead elements of the Third Battalion of the Fourth Marine Regiment,
First Marine Division, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Bryan McCoy, prepared to seize another vitally important bridge, over
the Diyala Canal, over which the rest of the marine division would cross before driving on into Baghdad.
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Just as McCoy began his attack, an Arab linguist at GRSOC intercepted messages indicating that Iraqi artillery was preparing
to ambush McCoy’s force by raining down heavy fire on it.
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The reaction was immediate. According to a U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command account of the action, which deleted
all of the salient details of who was involved in the action or where it was transpiring, “An Army strategic group [GRSOC]
immediately notified a Marine battalion that it was advancing into the impact zone of an artillery ambush on a bridge. The
battalion command [McCoy] immediately redeployed his forces to cross the river at another location.”
⁶¹
Unfortunately, the move did not take place fast enough. A barrage of Iraqi 155-millimeter artillery shells began falling on
his position. Tragically, one of the Iraqi shells scored a direct hit on an armored assault vehicle, killing two marines and
wounding four others. But it could have been far worse but for the warning provided by GRSOC.
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Los Endos

The capture of the bridges over the Euphrates River and Diyala Canal meant that Baghdad was doomed. Intercepted radio traffic
revealed that the decimated Iraqi military was in its death throes, with the few remaining Republican Guard units deployed
around Baghdad collapsing almost without a fight. The isolated Iraqi units that tried tostand up to the advancing American
forces were quickly destroyed by artillery and air strikes within minutes of their radio operators going on the air. SIGINT
revealed that what was left of Saddam Hussein’s regime refused to accept the fact that they had been defeated. As late as
April 8, the day before Baghdad fell, intercepted Iraqi satellite phone messages showed that Hussein’s son Qusay, the Republican
Guard commander, continued to believe that Iraq was winning the war, with Republican Guard commanders telling him of “high
American casualties and defeats of the allied forces in various cities.”
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During the final skirmishes inside Baghdad between the U.S. Army and what was left of the Iraqi Army and Republican Guard,
SIGINT was used to find former members of Hussein’s government. On April 7, a B-1B bomber dropped four bombs on the al-Saa
restaurant in the tony Mansour district of west Baghdad, where intelligence sources indicated Saddam Hussein and two of his
sons were meeting. Inspection of the ruins found eighteen dead bodies, all of them unfortunate customers of the restaurant.
But Saddam and his sons were not among the casualties. One source suggests that air strikes on Saddam’s reported locations
were prompted by NSA intercepts of the Thuraya satellite phone used by Saddam Hussein and his key aides. NSA had long been
able to locate people using Thuraya satellite telephones by triangulating on the signal emanating from the phone’s global
positioning system chip. NSA had used this technology to track the movements of al Qaeda terrorists and other high-value targets
around the world, even when these individuals were not using their telephones.
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Conclusions

Declassified documents and interviews with former U.S. military commanders all generally agree that SIGINT performed well
during the three weeks of Operation Iraqi Freedom, in some cases brilliantly, as in the case of the near-complete decapitation
of the Iraqi air defense system during the first days of the invasion.

NSA did a superb job of getting its SIGINT product to senior U.S. military commanders as soon as it became available. The
Iraq Operational Cell within NSOC at Fort Meade did a remarkable job of packaging and reporting the latest SIGINT coming in
from NSA’s worldwide network of listening posts designed specifically for the use of field commanders in Iraq through its
secure intranet system, known as NSANet. The flood of timely and valuable information in Top Secret/COMINT e-mails from NSA
“was almost too much,” one se -nior CENTCOM intelligence officer recalled. “Nobody else in the community gave that kind of
service.”
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Virtually all senior American military commanders also praised the quantity, quality, and timeliness of NSA’s intelligence
production before and during the invasion.
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But little has been made public about the fact that Iraqi communications security procedures prior to the invasion were highly
effective and denied NSA and the U.S. military SIGINT units access to Iraqi military communications traffic.
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Army and marine division commanders in the field and their subordinate brigade and battalion commanders were less than satisfied
with SIGINT from NSA and the military intelligence organizations under their command during the invasion. As the desperate
and heroicstand of Colonel Marcone’s unit at Al-Qa’id Bridge demonstrated, the perennial problem of getting really useful
intel to units at the sharp end had yet to be solved.
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Some of these officers wondered if some sort of “digital divide” accounted for most SIGINT intel going to army and corps commanders
and little if any going to division commanders and their subordinates.
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