Meanwhile Echo Platoon was moving into battle mode. There was intensive training in stealth, marksmanship, and navigation across the burning sands, where temperatures sometimes reached 115 degrees.
When the operations began they were, like most SEAL missions, conducted at night. And the objectives were often simple—at least they were to the guys who were not actually out there. The orders mostly involved a long walk in, through the night, before busting into a building, locating this or that al-Qaeda terrorist, grabbing him and his immediate cohorts, and bringing them in for questioning and incarceration. If there was heavy armed resistance, the SEALs were to shoot them.
And no chances were ever taken with these killers, who would slit a SEAL’s throat or knife him in the back as soon as they looked at him. Procedures for capture were subsequently harsh: grab him, search and disarm him, then get him on the deck fast—either the easy way or, if necessary, the other way. Hold him down, get the cuffs on him, and tell him to shut up.
None of this could be described as subtle. But this was not a subtle business. At best it was lethal. And the greatest care needed to be taken at all stages of the mission. Matt and Jon had effectively been in strict training for this since they arrived in Coronado three years previously. And now they were judged to be ready to step forward into the footprints of so many heroic young Americans who had gone before them.
Matt remembers the briefing in the evening before they left on an operation—the thoroughness, the maps, and the details of the journey in. It was scheduled for a small town maybe twenty miles outside the base, and the Iraqi security men who were accompanying the platoon were already inside the walls of Camp Schwedler.
A Team leader had already been selected on the rotating basis, a system that would last throughout their tenure in Iraq. Everyone would take night-vision goggles and silenced rifles. The man the SEALs were after was a highly dangerous and known terrorist. The commanders saw no reason to get involved in a firefight when there was a good chance of grabbing him quietly after advancing through the town with the utmost stealth.
Matt would carry the heavy radio; Jon would handle the breaching gear: sledgehammer, bolt cutters, and demo charges. They left on time and drove to a point three miles out from the town. Right there they silenced the engines and then proceeded on foot, making their way to the outskirts.
Staring through their “green eyes,” they found their target house, and Jon ripped off the door by its hinges, using the hooly. They found the bedroom door and opened it more softly, with four of them moving into the room for the immediate surrender they correctly expected when the terrorist woke up, when he found himself looking down the barrels of four assault rifles leveled at him by huge masked men.
He allowed himself to be handcuffed and taken into captivity and back to Camp Schwedler, where he would be held and then transported to Baghdad for interrogation by the US military.
The opening assault by Echo Platoon had gone off in textbook style, but in the coming weeks not every mission would be so flawless. Several times they were betrayed, and the HVI was not in residence when they arrived. Once there was an absolute uproar in the middle of the night when the target was missing, but several of his wives were at home and asleep. The women went berserk with fear when Echo Platoon came calling. Woke up half the town.
And the fact that the SEALs suffered no casualties on their opening missions did not mean the danger was suddenly less. They got out without losing anyone because of their supreme attention to detail, never doing anything carelessly, standing by the rules of the most demanding playbook in the world. No mistakes.
On April 30, however, the whole game changed, and the real Iraq, with all of its seething hatreds, wanton killings, and loathing of Americans, flashed into very sharp focus. Tyler Trahan was killed in action in Fallujah, two days before his twenty-third birthday.
It was a roadside bomb, an IED, ironically, that did it. The bomb appeared safe when it suddenly exploded. Two others died with the young bomb technician, and the incident brought great sadness to everyone at Camp Schwedler, especially Tyler’s skiing buddy, Matt McCabe, and his next-door neighbor, Jon Keefe.
Back in Tyler’s hometown in rural Massachusetts near Fall River, news of his death was greeted with disbelief. The little New England town’s favorite son was gone, and when his flag-draped casket was finally brought home with a full Navy honor guard, literally thousands filed past to pay their respects—family, friends, and legions of local people who just knew about him and his too-short but exemplary career in Dark Blue.
The funeral home stayed open four hours later than planned, until almost midnight, and the funeral mass was no different. The five hundred-seat Catholic church at East Freetown, the church where Tyler was baptized, was filled to capacity one hour before the service began.
There were as many people outside as there were inside, where several Navy SEALs and EOD technicians who had served with Tyler were seated, plus the governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, and US Senator John Kerry. Throughout the mass Tyler’s own baptismal candle flickered softly beside the coffin. It was the saddest day anyone could ever remember.
After the mass a military procession more than a mile long followed the coffin to Massachusetts National Cemetery, located in the village of Bourne, adjacent to Otis Air Base. Tyler was laid to rest with full military honors.
Nearly seven thousand miles away in hot, dusty Camp Schwedler, a less grandiose but perhaps even more poignant ceremony took place for Petty Officer Tyler Trahan. The memorial service was held outside and attended by about one hundred US Navy SEALs and their backup staff, every last one of whom knew him, worked with him, lived close to him, and saw him almost every day. This was his other family.
All four platoons were represented, plus Marines who had worked with him. And for Tyler’s teammates this was an extremely emotional day. The sudden loss of his ski buddy had placed Matt closer to the finality of death than he had ever been. He had also never been more upset.
And almost everyone shared his grief. Because every serving member of the Special Forces understands what they all owe to the bomb disposal experts. These sophisticated explosives technicians have saved countless lives, more than anyone can calculate.
And every last time they achieve their objective, they have put their own life on the line. There is nothing—repeat, nothing—more upsetting for a Navy SEAL than the death of one of these iron-nerved bomb experts, blown up in the line of duty.
It’s a way of life, and a darned hard one at that. Because IEDs in Iraq are all over the place. SEAL Teams working at night may discover one, hidden as a booby trap. They cannot go forward, right past it, and they sure as hell cannot just leave it there for others to be blown to pieces.
Step forward the EOD, men like young Tyler, with their soft tread, ultrasensitive stethoscopes, wire cutters, and steady fingers as they try to identify the detonator and listen for the electronic pulse that will betray its timing. Everyone stands back while he works. No one’s heart even pretends to beat. Scarcely a breath is drawn.
And then there’s the soft click as the EOD cuts the electronic wire. And everyone braces for the blast—flat to the ground, with heads down or against a wall. When it doesn’t come and guys like Tyler move back, sweating, they’re usually grinning cheerfully. Especially Tyler. He was always laughing, particularly when he’d just saved everyone’s life.
A naval chaplain flew up for his service. The guys from the long rows of huts had organized a system to play hymns throughout the base, and they also played a video of Tyler, one last glance at the life of one of the best explosive technicians in the Teams and, by the definition of his calling, a friend to them all.
At the end they all stood up and clapped. It was an emotional round of applause from the toughest men on earth for all that he had done. Tyler Trahan was that good a guy.
Meanwhile the insurgent attacks on the Shi’ite community continued. And once more the name of Ahmad Hash
im Abd Al-Isawi moved to the forefront. On May 20 a massive bomb was hurled into a neighborhood takeout restaurant in Baghdad, killing no fewer than twenty-nine people. And once more US military intel suspected the planning at least bore the hallmarks of Al-Isawi, the man they’d been hunting for five years.
The question was: Had he moved his center of operations from Fallajuh to Baghdad? For a while it seemed so, because three weeks later another huge car bomb detonated in a marketplace in the southern desert city of Al-Batha, about twenty-five miles west of Nasiriyah, well over one hundred miles from Baghdad.
This was not the action of some vengeful Sunni individual, lashing out at a known Shi’ite township. This was a well-organized, big, expensive blast that killed at least twenty-nine people and injured seventy others, almost all of them women shoppers and their children.
It blew the entire market to smithereens, and the police immediately blamed al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq, both of which intended to reignite the sectarian religious war on the lines laid out by the late fanatic Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
And again both British and US intelligence believed Al-Isawi was deeply involved, becoming near certain two days later when Harith al-Obaidi, head of the Iraqi National Accord, the largest Sunni block in the legislature, was assassinated in a Baghdad mosque along with his secretary and three bodyguards.
That looked like a revenge attack. And then, less than two weeks later, another major bomb, strapped to a motorbike, blew in a market in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad, killing seventy-six people. That happened a few days before all US troops were scheduled to withdraw from Iraqi cities.
But on June 30 a bomb in Kirkuk, 160 miles north of Baghdad, killed another thirty-three people. And Iraqi politicians were considering a major rethink, while every coalition spy in the country was desperately trying to locate Al-Isawi and possibly put an end to this mass slaughter of innocent citizens from one end of Iraq to the other.
Aside from the normal weekly atrocities in Fallujah itself, there were no further national-scale attacks, although SEAL Teams were out there all the time, searching for the al-Qaeda hard men, especially Al-Isawi.
But they never got near him.
As July progressed, so did Al-Isawi’s profile, and by now it was widely accepted that he was surrounded by a heavyweight team of bodyguards and an al-Qaeda cell that seemed capable of moving around the country at will, striking where and when they wished.
Somewhere, somehow, they must have left an electronic footprint, but despite a thousand professional leads and another thousand call-ins, they never nailed the terrorists down. And when they thought they were onto something, it always turned out to be a phantom.
“We were seeking him here and seeking him there,” said Jon, “but the sonofabitch was always just off the charts.”
Al-Isawi was on the move, no doubt about that, but his ferocious reputation and ability to scare people to death with threats against their families continued. And so did reports that he still made his HQ in the teeming ghetto streets of Fallujah.
Was he back in Baghdad on July 31 when bombs went off outside five Shi’ite mosques, killing twenty-nine people? No one knew the answer to that, but suspicions ran high. And toward the end of August there was another spate of cold-blooded bombings that again suggested organized, expensive killing—Al-Isawi’s specialty.
First, a truck bomb sufficiently powerful to collapse an elevated highway detonated outside the Ministry of Finance and killed thirty-five people. Three minutes later an even bigger truck bomb, probably one thousand pounds, blew the Foreign Ministry asunder, wiping out sixty more people. Individuals could not achieve this kind of heavy-weapon attack because it required substantial financial backing from a proper source, either national or from a wealthy fanatic like bin Laden.
There were other al-Qaeda commanders high on the US suspect list, but none with quite the fearsome reputation of Al-Isawi. Somewhere he was out there. And every time one of these outrageous examples of savage, nondescript sectarian killing took place, the name of the man who had burned four Americans alive jumped right up on every computer screen in US intelligence.
And the question asked but never thoroughly answered was always the same: Where the hell is he? Because Al-Isawi has slipped through a dozen nets, so someone was obviously warning him of approaching danger.
And although it was always possible there was a double agent in the US system, there was nothing quite so suspicious as that Iraqi police HQ in downtown Fallujah, the place where all the warrants were read, signed, and filed in the presence of civilian workers.
But the existence of a double agent remained a worrying possibility. And almost all of the active combat Special Forces noted that only about 10 percent of the warrants, which gave Iraqi permission for the SEALs to go in and capture/kill an HVI with known al-Qaeda connections, were acted upon. The rate of turn-downs that Task Force West, the SEALs’ central command located in Ramadi, issued constantly mystified both Matt and Jon.
It was never easy for the support Teams as they tried to gauge what was valuable and what was simply not worth the risk. But so often those signed warrants came back with a blue stamp in the middle: “Not approved.”
“In general terms about eight of us or even more had risked our lives,” said Jon, “driving right through the worst part of Fallujah to get those signed warrants. And most times we were then told not to bother. Someone knew a lot more than us.
“Right here we’d have a known bad guy, with details of where he’d be tonight. We had Iraqi police approval to go in and get him. But our own guys were forbidding it.
“Now ... we’re SEALs, and we trust our senior command implicitly because they’re always concerned with our safety. But this was a mystery to us. And we concluded they were mostly acting on a negative tip-off, stuff we could not have known—not to go, ambush being planned, suspect moved on.
“Whatever. It seemed to us a lot of Iraqis were out there helping the Fallujah Butcher.”
And all the SEALs wanted was a chance to get a shot at the little bastard.
4
WE WANT THIS MANIAC ALIVE
And Matt, his adrenalin pumping, had his knee rammed into the spine of the most feared terrorist in the Middle East, the Butcher of Fallujah; Echo Platoon’s assault Team had captured the mass murderer Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi. ...
The bombs of August sent a tremble of new determination through Camp Schwedler. SEAL Team 10, already on red alert after Tyler Trahan’s death, was now up and ready to go at even the sound of high explosive over the wall at the old Marine base.
And there were plenty of those sounds. Camp Baharia, now closed after the US troop withdrawal, was a constant target for any demented Islamist going for a place over the bridge, where the sound of trumpets would herald the arrival of his personal virgins.
The departed Marines, out beyond the walls of the SEAL compound, used to be expert at avoiding these weekly outbursts of senseless violence, and they conducted dozens of patrols around their sprawling base. It kept Camp Schwedler out of trouble. But with the Marines gone, the SEALs needed to be doubly vigilant for potential attacks on them.
And still there remained one golden target—Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi. And the SEALs’ senior command believed that if they could grab this al-Qaeda killer, everything would calm down, and the danger of being blown up would be lessened for everyone.
At this time there were regular reports coming in, detailing sightings and tip-offs. And by now they even knew what he looked like. They had poor-quality but useful photographs as well as a solid description of his height and build.
They even knew he’d lost the top part of the little finger of his left hand. But whether the half-size pinkie would lead Ahmad to his doom was anyone’s guess. They’d been after him for five and a half years now, since the spring of 2004, and he was still ahead of the game.
And many opinions had been revised. Whereas once US intel had been alm
ost certain the Butcher was moving around surrounded by a virtual army of bodyguards and al-Qaeda commanders, they now believed he was operating within a small entourage, somehow managing to stay under the radar. And like Saddam Hussein before him, no one knew where he would spend the night at any given day in the week.
Terrorist commanders in both Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as in Iraq were always ready to phone their friendly newsroom in the Al Jazeera television network in Doha, Qatar. But mostly they seemed to prefer the old tried and trusted ways of their ancestors—sometimes walking miles and miles over the high peaks of the Hindu Kush, pretending to be poor farmers but actually carrying sometimes priceless information in the saddle bags of their camels, beyond the reach of eavesdroppers.
Osama bin Laden himself had almost certainly issued a warning, so infuriated was he at the now-famous intercept when the Israelis hacked into a conversation between his mother in Saudi Arabia and his own mountain cave. These rare recordings were occasionally played to Fort Meade visitors in order to lighten a normally somber subject.
In Iraq, too, this seemed to explain Al-Isawi’s silence on the airwaves. The only facts ever came from “contacts”—Iraqi agents being paid by the Americans. It thus seemed increasingly likely that al-Qaeda’s messages, plans, and intentions were being carried across the desert and hidden in the panniers strapped to the camels.
It probably was not the fastest thing al-Qaeda had ever done, but at least they could be certain there was not some electronic technician in nearby Tel Aviv, tuning into the frequencies and going for the same intercepts that revealed bin Laden’s mother.
And this was how Al-Isawi managed to stay right under the radar, with the main US progress being either from spies or captured illegal combatants who were prepared to betray him for cash. The Americans had been close to their quarry, no doubt of that, but they still knew no one who had ever seen him.
Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the Butcher of Fallujah -and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091) Page 10
