The Secret Sentry (42 page)

Beginning in the summer of 2003, special NSA intercept teams and small U.S. Army SIGINT units at Mount Sinjar, in northern
Iraq, and Al Qaim, in western Iraq, kept a quiet vigil on the Syrian border, trying to monitor the flow of foreign fighters
seeking to cross over and join al-Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq.
²⁸

Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the SIGINT collectors, the vast majority of the foreign fighters managed to successfully
evade the U.S. Army units deployed along the border. An army battalion commander stationed on the border in 2003 recalled
that they “weren’t sneaking across; they were just driving across, because in Arab countries it’s easy to get false passports
and stuff.” Once inside Iraq, most of them made their way to Ramadi, in rebellious al-Anbar Province, which became the key
way station for foreign fighters on their way into the heart of Iraq. In Ramadi, they were trained, equipped, given false
identification papers, and sent on their first missions. The few foreign fighters who were captured were dedicated— but not
very bright. One day during the summer of 2003, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Arnold, a battalion commander stationed on the Syrian
border, was shown the passport of a person seeking to enter Iraq. “I think he was from the Sudan or something like that— and
under ‘Reason for Traveling,’ it said, ‘Jihad.’ That’s how dumb these guys were.”
²⁹

Iran was a particularly important target for NSA after the fall of Baghdad. According to a former NSA official, the agency
was able to read much of the sensitive communications traffic of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), which
gave U.S. intelligence analysts some vivid insights into Irani an policy on Iraq, as well as details of Irani an clandestine
intelligence operations inside Iraq. But according to news reports, this extremely sensitive NSA program was badly damaged
in the spring of 2004 by none other than America’s longtime “expert ally” against Saddam Hussein, Ahmed Chalabi, the leader
of the Iraqi National Congress (INC). These reports stated that Chalabi and other senior members of the INC had secretly provided
Iranian intelligence officials with details of U.S. political and military plans in Iraq, and NSA intercepts reportedly showed
that the head of the INC intelligence organization, Aras Habib, was on the payroll of the Iranian intelligence service. Based
on this intelligence information, on May 20, 2004, U.S. troops raided Chalabi’s home and the offices of the INC in Baghdad.
³⁰

Then in early June, news reports in the
New York Times
based on leaks from U.S. intelligence sources indicated that in mid-April, Chalabi himself had told the Baghdad station chief
of MOIS that NSA had broken the codes of the Iranian intelligence service. Perhaps not believing Chalabi, the Iranian official
reportedly radioed a message to Tehran with the substance of Chalabi’s information using the code that NSA had broken. According
to the news reports, the Ira ni ans immediately changed their codes, and in a stroke eliminated NSA’s best source of information
about what was going on inside Iran.
³¹

NSA’s overall performance during the first year of the war in Iraq has been described by a number of senior military commanders
as “disappointing.” Among the most serious of the complaints was that NSA overemphasized SIGINT collection directed at Iraq’s
neighbors Iran and Syria, as well as the internal machinations of the U.S.-backed Iraqi government, at the expense of coverage
of the Iraqi insurgency movement.
³²

Fight for Allah! SIGINT and the Battle of Fallujah

SIGINT’s first important test in Iraq came in 2004 during the Battle of Fallu-jah, which pitted thousands of U.S. Marine infantrymen
backed by tanks and fighter-bombers against an equally large number of Iraqi insurgents and foreign fighters in a bloody street-by-street
battle to decide who controlled the city, which was in the heart of al-Anbar Province, a stronghold of the Sunni insurgency
ever since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Between May 2003 and March 2004, an overextended brigade of the Eighty-second Airborne
Division gradually lost control of the city to the Iraqi insurgents and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s foreign fighters. By November
2003, the security situation in Fallujah had become so precarious that the last remaining units of the Eighty-second had to
withdraw, which allowed the insurgents and foreign fighters to control the city, to the consternation of Washington and U.S.
military commanders in Baghdad.

In March 2004, the Eighty-second was replaced by the First Marine Division, which was tasked with reasserting control over
Fallujah and the rest of al-Anbar Province. The insurgents in Fallujah were well aware of the marines’ preparations for a
massive conventional assault backed by tanks, artillery, and air strikes. The only question was when.
³³

On March 31, less than two weeks after the marines arrived, a mob in Fallu-jah killed four American security contractors,
mutilated the bodies, and hung them from a bridge for all to see. In response, on April 4 the marines sent in two thousand
troops, backed by heavy artillery and air strikes, but the ferocious battle that ensued ended on April 9 when the newly elected
Iraqi government; Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, the chief of the Co alition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad; and Washington
became concerned about unacceptable numbers of civilian casualties caused by the air strikes.
³⁴
After the marines withdrew from Fallujah, the insurgents were once again in control of one of the largest cities in Iraq.
The few agents that the marines managed to recruit and infiltrate into Fallujah were never heard from again.
³⁵

Given the failure of HUMINT, SIGINT and unmanned reconnaissance drones became the principal providers of intelligence about
what was going on inside the besieged city. The U.S. Marine SIGINT unit, the Third Radio Battalion, had just arrived in-country
and was still trying to learn the terrain and its targets on the fly. By the time it arrived, there were eight thousand marines
crammed into a massive tent city, Camp Fallujah. The Marine SIGINTers were confined inside the defensive perimeter of the
base, enduring hundred-degree temperatures (except when working in their air-conditioned ops center) as well as frequent rocket
and mortar attacks on the base, until they rotated out in October 2004.
³⁶

During this period, they set about gathering intelligence about the insurgents and quickly discovered that al-Zarqawi’s foreign
fighters, unlike their more security-conscious Iraqi counterparts, consistently chatted away on their ICOM walkie-talkies
and cell phones. Al-Zarqawi’s inexperienced fighters were later to pay a terrible price for their lack of communications security.
³⁷

The marines occasionally used a small armored patrol as bait to get the insurgents chattering on their walkie-talkies and
cell phones. A marine infantry commander recalled that “these ‘bait and hook’ methods worked like a charm” because the SIGINT
operators could determine the exact locations where al-Zarqawi’s fighters were concentrated in Fallujah. “This is all bad
guys,” said Captain Kirk Mayfield. “Every sigint [electronic intercept], every humint [infor mant report] tells us this is
where all the foreign fighters hang out.”
³⁸

On September 26, intercepted cell phone calls identified the location of a meeting of senior al-Zarqawi operatives inside
the city. An unmanned Predator reconnaissance drone surveyed the target and passed on the coordinates to three fighter-bombers
from the aircraft carrier USS
John F. Kennedy
. The air strike destroyed the building and killed everyone inside, including a Saudi named Abu Ahmed Tabouki, one of al-Zarqawi’s
most senior commanders in Fallujah.
³⁹
Two weeks later, after a Predator identified the house inside Fallujah from which the cell phone calls of another gathering
of senior insurgent leaders were originating, two F-16 fighter-bombers were ordered to destroy the house with GBU-38 bombs.
⁴⁰

On the night of November 7, ten thousand American troops from the First Marine Division and the army’s First Cavalry Division
launched the offensive, designated Operation Phantom Fury (Al Fajr), to retake Fallujah.
⁴¹
The army and marine troops, supported by tanks, artillery, and air strikes, smashed into the insurgent defenses on the northern
outskirts of Fallujah and began inexorably pressing the insurgents back toward the center of the city. Intercepted cell phone
calls indicated that the insurgents could not hold back the onslaught. Lieutenant Colonel James Rainey, who commanded one
of the army mechanized battalions leading the attack, told an interviewer, “If you’ve heard any of the enemy radio intercepts,
they clearly show that the enemy was panicking and reeling from this attack.”
⁴²

U.S. forces thought they had won the bitter struggle, and intercepted messages from the insurgents such as “It’s useless.
Fallujah is lost” seemed to confirm that.
⁴³
But the insurgents and foreign fighters inside Fallujah did not quit, falling back before the steadily advancing U.S. forces.
The punishment that they took while desperately trying to stem the American advance was horrific. They fought on for eleven
more days, until they were finally overwhelmed by the numerically superior marine forces. Hundreds of Iraqi insurgents and
foreign fighters had been killed, but the cost in American lives was steep. More than seventy marines died in the fighting
for Fallujah, and hundreds more were wounded. The battle may have been won for the moment, but radio intercepts and interrogations
of captured fighters revealed that two thousand insurgents, including almost all of al-Zarqawi’s senior commanders, had managed
to escape from the city
before
the battle. It was the midlevel leadership and their troops who had stayed behind and fought.
⁴⁴

After the battle, the army and marine units were ordered to withdraw from the city and turn their positions over to units
of the ill-equipped and poorly trained Iraqi army and Iraqi national guard. Within a matter of days, cell phone intercepts
showed that al-Zarqawi’s foreign fighters and the Sunni insurgents had quickly moved back into Fallujah and had retaken control
of the city from the Iraqi forces. Angry marine intelligence officers shared with reporters intercepted telephone calls showing
that the insurgents had managed to get through the marine and Iraqi cordon around Fallujah by blending in with the refugees
returning to the city. So in the end, the Battle of Fallujah, like Operation Anaconda two years earlier, ended up being nothing
more than an illusory and costly victory.
⁴⁵

They’re Back! The Taliban Resurgence

In Afghanistan, the U.S. military’s SIGINT effort, although with a fraction of the size of the resources available in Iraq,
continued to improve slowly as time went by. But far too often, an intercept that would have enabled a U.S. unit to take out
a medium-value target “using his cell phone to coordinate and call in attacks on coalition forces” had to be called off. With
unfortunate frequency, a unit found and engaged the enemy but was forced to withdraw without completing its mission because
of a lack of personnel. Trying to run this “secondary” war with manifestly insufficient U.S. forces proved to be an exercise
in futility.
⁴⁶

Still, U.S. Army SIGINT units in Afghanistan got better at exploiting the Taliban’s low-level walkie-talkie traffic. A Green
Beret officer put it bluntly: The Taliban were “using simple communications methods . . . This is not the Cold War. We’re
not using super high-tech stuff to pick up SIGINT and things like that. Once we get on the right frequencies and get a trusted
interpreter to translate that for us, it turns out to be a very good tool.”
⁴⁷

By 2004, most of the major U.S. Army firebases along the fifteen-hundred-mile Afghan-Pakistani border had their own small
SIGINT unit, distinguished by the cluster of antennae erupting from the rooftop of the base’s barbed-wire-enclosed operations
building. The largest were located just outside Kandahar and at Forward Operating Base Salerno, on the outskirts of the border
town of Khowst. And all the Green Beret base camps spread throughout southern Af-ghanistan had small teams of Green Beret
and Navy SEAL SIGINT operators providing tactical SIGINT support for Special Forces reconnaissance teams patrolling the region
along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
⁴⁸

When the radio scanners at one of the firebases picked up traffic from the Taliban’s Japanese-made ICOM walkie-talkies (which
usually had a range of five miles or less in the rugged terrain), it usually meant that there was a Tal-iban rocket or mortar
team somewhere in the vicinity, clinging to a nearby ridgeline to call in the coordinates of its target to nearby gunners.
⁴⁹

At the army firebase at Shkin, in southeastern Afghanistan, the base’s SIGINT operators became quite adept at catching Taliban
gunners preparing for such attacks. Within minutes of the operators’ intercepting the transmissions, artillery fire or air
strikes were pummeling the location of the Taliban mortar team. The result was, as an army report notes, that the Taliban
was “forced to shift from accurate mortar fire to much less accurate longer range rocket fire from less advantageous firing
positions across the border” in Pakistan.
⁵⁰

Inside Afghanistan itself, SIGINT was proving to be an increasingly important defensive tool, providing warning of impending
Taliban attacks on U.S. Army patrols. Marine Gunnery Sergeant Michael Johnson remembered a helicopter assault during which
insurgents were baiting a trap for Afghan forces when they went out on an operation. “We’d intercept communications of their
radio communications that they were going to ambush that platoon. Within a minute they had contact.”
⁵¹