Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the Butcher of Fallujah -and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091)

by Robinson, Patrick

  Slow on conversation but outstanding at cheeseburgers—that was more or less the SEAL verdict on this little corner of the US of A right here in the Rhineland.

  And by 2100 they were back in the aircraft, settling down for another long journey, seven more hours in this flying warehouse. Their route would take them south as swiftly as possible, as all US military transporters avoid flying over the old Eastern European states, preferring to run down the Adriatic Sea, east of the Italian coast, and then angle even more easterly across friendly Turkey before cutting south again over northern Iraq and down toward Baghdad.

  During this time most of the SEALs were asleep, but those who weren’t sipped iced water and laughed at the endless anecdotes Carlton Milo Higbie IV offered as he outlined his plan to retire one day from the SEALs and write a political book.

  The final destination for the C-17 was al-Taqaddum Air Base—known as TQ in military slang—which was fifty miles west of Baghdad and operated by the US Marine Corps. With its two giant runways, both of them more than two miles long, TQ stands on a pancake-flat desert plateau on the shores of Lake Habbinaya, south of the Euphrates. It’s around halfway between Fallujah and Ar-Ramadi and was the main US air hub for men and materiel moving into Anbar Province for Operation Enduring Freedom.

  The SEAL transporter came down through clear skies and landed just before 0700, local time. The sun had already risen above the shimmering horizon of the Syrian Desert, with its parched and dusty wadis.

  By the time they came to a halt the SEALs were wearing body armor and helmets. There was, as yet, no sign of an “Oh shit! scenario,” and they disembarked into a hot, silent wasteland, dead flat, with, as far as the eye could see, no trees or any kind of vegetation. Also, it was hotter than hell.

  Worse yet, it was likely to be home for the next six months. “Holy shit,” said Matt. “Perrysburg suddenly looks like paradise.”

  And he had been there before, briefly, with Carlton, for just a couple of weeks after their training in Stuttgart in October 2007. But he’d forgotten how diabolical it actually was, this colossal sweep of flat, unbroken land, without a rise, a hill, or even a decent gradient. They’d been on the ground for all of four minutes and could all see that desert heat shimmer on the aircraft’s fuselage.

  All they knew about this place involved its population of thousands of frantic tribesmen who were happy to kill each other over some religious differences but would much prefer to kill American military personnel for no reason whatsoever.

  “Is this it?” said Jon, staring at the horizon and shoving back his helmet. “Does anyone actually live here?”

  On the tarmac to meet them was their officer in charge Lieutenant Jimmy and his veteran chief petty officer, Gibby, a great bull of a man, aged thirty-four, platoon chief.

  The biggest man there was Petty Officer 1st Class Rob, a natural-born breacher if ever there was one. This was one smart Navy SEAL. A former second-choice offensive lineman for Penn State, Rob weighed in at 289 pounds and stood six foot five inches in his game socks.

  He was, as his fast mobile position on the Team suggests, a light-footed tiger out there in front of an advancing SEAL Team. And when he swung that sledgehammer at an unsuspecting, barricaded door, the foundations shuddered. He would likely cave in not only the door, its frame, and half the mud wall but also the roof with it. Petty Officer Rob had to think hard to control his own power. His teammates loved him.

  And there they stood, blinking in the dazzling desert light with a hot wind from the south drifting past, blowing little dust storms across the runways. There is nothing more foreign to an American than the Arabian Peninsula.

  Except for the vast oil deposits, much is unchanged since biblical times. Tribal laws have survived down the centuries. You can sense it, feel it, this inner soul of martyrdom, where the residents will go to war—a real, hot, shooting war, red in tooth and claw—over a difference of religious opinion. And not even much of a difference.

  There is a brutality here, where one group of Muslims will think nothing of blowing up an entire marketplace, killing, maiming, and blasting women and children, because the shopping group believed in some variation of the Koran.

  And although US troops tried to bring sanity to Iraq, nothing really worked. They are who they are: a couple of paces in front of the ancient Bedouin tribes, but not much more. And now Matt and Jon were in the heart of the War on Terror on the edge of the Syrian Desert, ready to play their part in hunting down the commanders of this weird and secretive killing society, al-Qaeda in Iraq.

  And now a line of US military trucks was advancing to transport the men from Echo Platoon to their new base, Camp Schwedler, a custom-built Navy SEAL stronghold set in the corner of the US Marine Corps’ Camp Baharia. As Marine camps go, this one was in the heavyweight division. Twelve miles around, with a lake that was six miles around, it was home to thousands of troops.

  It was a ninety-minute journey for the SEALs, now sweltering in their body armor but under orders not to remove it. It was, for Jon and Matt at least, a first glance into the accepted method of driving through the Islamic Republic of Iraq: floor it, and keep it right there.

  Those trucks bumped, lurched, and rattled as they sped along the road that led up to Baharia. There is no other way for US troops to move about, so cunning and full of hatred are their enemies. A roadside bomb, an IED placed under the asphalt, a rocket-propelled grenade, explosives, raking fire from an AK-47—the insurgents were everywhere: lean, bearded terrorists, awaiting their chance.

  But hitting a huge truck meandering slowly along a desert road is one thing. Hitting a high-speed military vehicle hurtling along at 70mph plus, packed to the gunwales with armed Navy SEALs—that’s quite another. And the al-Qaeda “warriors” have always been specialists in the sneak attack, not full-on confrontation with US fire and steel.

  Timing a bomb accurately is almost impossible if the target is moving fast, covering one hundred yards of ground every three seconds. And these Muslim IEDs, though lethal, are famously inaccurate. “Abdul the bomb maker” probably was not trained at Textron Defense Systems in Massachusetts. At least he better not have been.

  And so they charged forward, making fast time up to Camp Baharia and, finally, into their new home, named after the fallen Spartan of SEAL Team 4. Camp Schwedler was approximately two hundred yards by two hundred yards, surrounded by four-foot-thick concrete walls that were fifteen feet high and topped with rolled razor wire. Guarding the entrance was what Matt described as “a big-ass two-ton steel gate,” which not even Rob and Jon, both slamming away with their sledgehammers, could possibly have taken down.

  Inside the small desert fortress everything was built purposefully. There were a couple of temporary detainee holding cells that were quite close to the recreation room known as Danny’s, with its video games, movies, and television. Outside there was a barbecue pit, tables, and chairs. Danny’s, for the record, had profound SEAL Team roots, named as it was after the legendary bar on Orange Avenue close to the Coronado base, second home to generations of Special Forces.

  Schwedler had four lines of huts to house the SEALs and support staff, with SEALs on the front end, facing a line of massive heavily armored vehicles in case they had to move fast. Fifty yards further in front, was a long line of smaller military vehicles, all of them ready to go at a moment’s notice. The big mechanics’ workshop was right there.

  At the far end of the compound was the excellently equipped medical room next to the gymnasium and weight room, plus the briefing room and the ready room. Between them was the tactical operation center (TOC), where the senior commanders plotted and schemed the SEALs’ missions.

  Matt was given a hut in the second line, two doors from his buddy Tyler. Jon was right in front of the ace snowboarder, one hut from Sam.

  The camp was on a hair trigger of operational readiness, and the volume of intel coming into the TOC every day never let up. Because half the country wanted the US and coaliti
on troops out of the Middle East forever, this was scarcely surprising.

  A SEAL platoon on active duty is there for a purpose, in this case to capture or kill known al-Qaeda operatives who were against the new Iraqi government and insane with dislike for the American military, which was attempting to put the place back together after the carnage that the late Saddam Hussein caused.

  The idea was never to kill squads of al-Qaeda personnel but rather to capture their top people and interrogate them. SEALs call them the HVIs (high value individuals), these commanders and planners were the ones the SEALs went after—bin Laden’s far-flung henchmen and men with cell phones and Internet connections, not bands of trigger-happy gunmen. The philosophy was quality before quantity.

  And the wanted list grew almost by the hour. Not just the jihadist bomb makers who had been responsible for so much destruction but also the bomb distributers—men who journeyed through the night across the desert, delivering high explosive designed to blow young Americans to pieces. There was a vast network of al-Qaeda staff involved in their planning and operational procedures.

  And every day American intel field officers either tracked them down or received tip-offs or evidence of sightings, all of which needed to be followed up, checked, and then hit, and hit hard. That’s what the SEALs were there for, but great caution was required, because they were always headed directly into harm’s way.

  And although all SEAL platoons are essentially fearless, their commanders are strongly averse to sending these highly trained special forces on what might become suicide missions. The TOC in Camp Schwedler would need a lot of cast-iron facts before unleashing the might of Echo Platoon onto the local suspects.

  The procedures for setting up and then executing a Special Forces attack was time consuming and almost unbearably thorough. And the SEAL senior commanders were relentless in ensuring that the guys had a fighting chance of hitting their target, getting out, and getting home, with their HVIs either dead or alive.

  The very first step was almost as dangerous as the last, because the Americans were working under strict rules. For every SEAL on any mission they had two Iraqis working alongside. That was Iraqi Special Weapons and Tactics (ISWAT) in action, trained by the SEALs as decreed by Foreign Internal Defense (FID).

  And no matter how urgent the mission, the SEALs were required to first obtain warrants of approval from the Fallujah police headquarters, situated way downtown in this poisonous, bomb-blasted hotbed of insurgent anger.

  Broadly, that meant the SEALs had to risk their lives to get permission to risk their lives again. The first time Jon made the journey to collect the warrants he was stunned by the security that surrounded the police HQ; the whole building was barricaded and guarded against the world, the result of years of al-Qaeda attacks on police premises all over Iraq.

  The fact that they sent SEALs on what appeared to be a mere errand was a measure of the danger involved. But sending anyone into Fallujah who was less than a combat warrior was impossible. Not if you wanted to see them again.

  The SEALs took characteristic precautions from the very start of each downtown journey, which were now regarded as so menacing that they were formally classified as a combat operation. They started by lashing down the standard ammo cans in the back of the vehicle in case they got hit by a hurled bomb or an RPG, which could blast a standard can into a lethal missile that might kill them all, especially if it were full.

  Comms systems were primed, seatbelts were fastened with five-point harnesses tight, and machine guns were ready. At least two vehicles would conduct this operation, with four armed SEALs in each—weapons drawn, always in attendance.

  And three miles outside the town, the drivers hit the accelerators, and with eight miles to go—five of them through treacherous enemy territory—according to Matt, we “hauled ass every yard of the way.”

  They braked and swerved, shot up onto the sidewalk and back down again, and never gave the enemy one moment to set up. They howled through street markets, horns blaring, scattering chickens, and terrifying goats. They shoved cattle out of the way, occasionally camels, as they dodged oncoming traffic.

  Shoppers in the markets moved aside and vendors retreated into baskets of fresh vegetables as the US Navy SEALs sped their way through town, weaving and bumping, and God knows what else. Just keep going—fast. That’s all.

  “It wasn’t any fun either,” recalled Jon. “And no one was laughing. This was hostile territory, and we half expected a friggin’ bomb to land right behind the driver. Screw that.”

  When they arrived at police HQ they left two guys on guard, weapons drawn, and the other two raced to the bolted and barred front door, where guards let them in. The warrants were sometimes waiting, sometimes not, but they eventually were signed, issuing Iraqi approval for American action against their joint enemies in al-Qaeda.

  There was always a quick handshake and a polite greeting for the local police chief, and then the Americans raced outside, scrambled back into the vehicle, and burned rubber on the rough sandy ground as they sped back the way they had come—through the five miles of alien streets, where everyone hated them and where death might await around any corner as it had for so many other members of the US armed forces.

  This entire business of driving through unfriendly Arabian streets was a thoroughly nerve-wracking experience. This was like Bahrain, 2005, at another forward SEAL base south of the capital, Manama. Any time those SEALs were going anywhere from out of the US Air Base at Muharraq Island, they had to go through the middle of town. And back then it was darn near as bad as it was in Fallujah—at least it was in spirit if not in active high explosive.

  The citizens of Manama were fed up to the back teeth with the American military, and there were even areas where the locals hung out black flags from homes and shops signifying Americans not welcome. It was similar in Yemen, not quite so intense in Saudi Arabia, but again very obvious in areas of Damascus in Syria and certainly worse in Gaza City, Israel.

  Fallujah never needed those black flags. Every house was a black flag. The SEALs saw the whole place as one massed enemy redoubt. And every time the Camp Schwedler intel guys thought they’d located a possible target, the SEALs had to race straight through the middle of this hostile city to get Iraqi permission to attack ... huh?

  That was just the way it was. And in fairness to the Iraqi police, they rarely if ever refused to sign the warrants because, of course, they were under attack as well. And they were granted a major voice in finalizing who should be taken down. But when push came to shove US Navy SEALs carried out the actual operation.

  When Echo Platoon first arrived there were heavy briefings day after day, lecturing the men on Iraqi customs, the likely tactics of their enemy, and the standard SEAL operational procedures to deal with every conceivable occurrence.

  They were shown lists and photographs of the most wanted terrorists and reports of previous attempts to detain them, both successful and unsuccessful. Like all US military postmortems, they were searching in the extreme, trying to pinpoint what had worked and what had failed. Many lessons had been learned, but some of these al-Qaeda commanders remained on the loose, several for many months.

  There were two or three still free after several years. And one of these was the murderer Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi, the Butcher of Fallujah, who had been evading capture for almost five years. There were others too. Matt recalls reading up on one al-Qaeda tribesman who they’d gone after twenty times and had still not located—not because the SEALs had been outfought or outwitted but simply because the villain was not where he was supposed to be.

  The al-Qaeda networks had become more and more efficient. And the reason for this was not only obvious; it was god awful. The Americans and their coalition partners were forced, politically, to reveal almost all of their plans to the Iraqi police in order to get the agreed warrants signed.

  This was, in one sense, a reasonable method of ensuring mutual cooperation, but in another se
nse it was like standing up on your hind legs and begging for a betrayal. No one knew what the hell was going on inside those barricaded police buildings. And yes, most of the Iraqi personnel genuinely wished the US security forces well.

  But in the shady world of espionage, be it in rain-swept night streets of Moscow or the hot and sandy terrorist enclaves of the Middle East, it still takes only one mole. Just one solitary person working quietly, listening to his superiors, or copying down those warrants for the whole thing to come unraveled.

  For the SEALs finally to capture or kill one thoroughly dangerous member of al-Qaeda, any scheme will simply flounder if someone tells him the Americans are coming at this time, in this place, with this intention.

  Of course US intel was keenly aware of the problem, but nothing could be done—not against politicians who had made up their minds that US-Iraqi relations were always more important than mission secrecy.

  From the SEALs’ point of view this was doubly bad. Not only were their missions likely to come up empty, but the risk of enemy ambush was plainly heightened. The dread of a heavily armed terrorist fighting force actually waiting for your arrival is not much fun.

  But it was a daily fact of life for the residents of Camp Schwedler. And it always meant intensive briefings, maps, charts, warnings, black spots, and long walks into the zone under full gear and weapons because the noise of car or aircraft engines was always too loud and too risky in the silence of the desert nights.

  Like most terrorist operations, it was a guessing game. Hard facts were rare, but the one that stood out over long periods of study were al-Qaeda and Taliban attacks on Iraqi police personnel, attacks in which the staff were targeted, usually so well that it must have been conducted with inside information. It took Matt and Jon very little time to view the police HQ in downtown Fallujah with consummate mistrust.