Manhunt

by Peter L. Bergen

  McChrystal also harnessed technology to transform JSOC’s operations. Through the aggressive and early adoption of video teleconferences (VTCs), McChrystal tied together JSOC’s far-flung operations, which stretched from Balad to Ft. Bragg to Tampa (the headquarters of Special Operations Command), to other key bases, such as at Bagram in Afghanistan, which managed JSOC’s Afghan and Pakistan missions. Gradually, these daily ninety-minute VTCs became worldwide briefings about the fight against al-Qaeda and its allies that also drew in the CIA and State Department officers. The discussions ranged across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, and McChrystal wanted to hear from anyone with real expertise, regardless of rank. One of the senior leaders in the Pentagon who began to listen in on these videoconferences was the chief of naval operations, Admiral Michael Mullen.

  At first JSOC had only one Predator drone in Iraq. So it improvised and leased a couple of small aircraft to which cameras were affixed. As the command grew, JSOC acquired its own dedicated drones so that it could maintain an “unblinking eye” 24/7 over targets.

  The natural tendency of the intelligence community is to hoard information. McChrystal made his teams share intelligence, creating a JSOC intranet that everyone in the command could access, and he teamed with an obscure military intelligence unit in Washington, the National Media Exploitation Center, to turn the large volume of papers, CDs, thumb drives, computers, and other “pocket litter” that his operators were picking up on the battlefield into “actionable intelligence.” JSOC built computer infrastructure so that when units on the battlefield captured anything of interest, they would get it to Balad and the material would then be quickly uploaded to the States, where the staff at the National Media Exploitation Center worked around the clock to turn it into usable intelligence. “We got to a point where they were able to turn things that were large quantities in about twenty-four hours, whereas before it would get lost in the ether,” says one of McChrystal’s deputies. All this required massively increased bandwidth, which JSOC acquired on commercial satellites, building up over the years a significant “farm” of satellite dishes at its headquarters in Balad.

  For JSOC, every mission now became what McChrystal termed a “fight for intelligence.” The intelligence was used to get inside the “decision cycle” of the insurgents so that information picked up on one raid could be used to launch still other raids. Sometimes intelligence recovered from one location led to an assault on another insurgent hideout in the same night.

  JSOC techs were creative. They designed an “electronic divining rod” that would ping only when it was near a cell phone linked to a particular insurgent. The base at Balad was awash in cell phones used by insurgents that had been picked up on raids. But because the base was shielded from electronic eavesdropping, the cell phones were no longer receiving incoming calls, calls that could have provided important clues to other insurgents. So JSOC techs rigged a cell phone base station inside the Balad headquarters so that the phones could start receiving calls again. Once the station was turned on, dozens of the captured phones started ringing and buzzing, netting more leads for JSOC.

  All these measures were taken to create a sequence known as “F3EA,” in which JSOC would “find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze” its insurgent targets. Hiding behind ever-shifting anodyne code names such as Task Force 121, which captured Saddam Hussein, JSOC got results. In 2006 it killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the psychopathic leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. After Zarqawi was killed, President Bush took the unusual step of referring by name to the hitherto shadowy General McChrystal and gushed that JSOC was “awesome.”

  JSOC’s record was not unblemished. In the first year of the Iraq War, at Camp Nama, near Baghdad, a Special Operations task force maintained a prison facility where prisoners were sometimes beaten; thirty-four task force members were disciplined for mistreating prisoners, and the facility was closed in 2004. The same year, McChrystal himself was one of a number of officers who did not disclose that Pat Tillman, the football star turned Army Ranger, was killed in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan, rather than by the Taliban, as the army had initially portrayed it. The army declined to discipline McChrystal because he did try to warn senior officers that Tillman might have been killed by his comrades.

  JSOC went from half a dozen operations a month in Iraq in the spring of 2004 to three hundred a month by the summer of 2006. The work ethic was brutal. At JSOC, the day was “17-5-2”—seventeen hours for work, five hours for sleep, and two hours for everything else. In 2006, McChrystal wrote to all his men: “It will not be about what’s easy, or even what we normally associate with conventional military standards. It will not even be about what is effective. It will be about what is the MOST effective way to operate—and we will do everything to increase effectiveness even in small ways. If anyone finds this inconvenient or onerous, there’s no place in the force for you. This is about winning—and making as few trips to Arlington Cemetery en route to that objective.” McChrystal, who ran JSOC until 2008, saw his wife only one month a year for the five years he was in command. The “battle rhythm” was so brutal that one JSOC officer used to joke, “We lived in Balad and vacationed in Kabul or Bagram.”

  Accounts of why Iraq came back from the brink of an all-consuming civil war in 2007 typically include the generalship of David Petraeus; a more effective counterinsurgency strategy that got U.S. troops off their giant bases and into Iraqi neighborhoods; al-Qaeda’s own spectacular error of enforcing Taliban-style rule on Iraq’s unwilling Sunni tribes; the resulting Sunni tribal Awakening movement that rose up against al-Qaeda; and previous sectarian cleansing that had forced more than four million Iraqis to flee their homes, making it harder for sectarian death squads to find their victims. To that list must be added the work of JSOC, which killed the leaders of the militant sectarian groups, both Sunni and Shia, at an industrial rate.

  The principal effort of JSOC for almost the entire duration of the Iraq War was in Iraq; Afghanistan and Pakistan were relative sideshows. Indicative of this, when McChrystal took command of JSOC in October 2003, he found only 20 of his men in Afghanistan and 250 in Iraq. And six years later, in the spring of 2009, JSOC was still doing only twenty operations a month in Afghanistan. The army’s Delta Force got the main show in Iraq, while the Navy SEALs got Afghanistan, which was somewhat ironic, given the fact that the country is entirely landlocked.

  IT IS NOTORIOUSLY DIFFICULT to become a SEAL. First you have to survive what is generally regarded as the hardest training in the world. The climax of the brutal selection process is the aptly named Hell Week, which involves more or less continuous running, doing push-ups, moving massive logs in teams, swimming considerable lengths in the cold ocean, and sleeping only a few hours over the course of the entire week. Other tests include swimming underwater for fifty yards with your hands tied behind your back and your feet tied together. The dropout rate is 90 percent. Eric Greitens, a Rhodes scholar with a doctorate from Oxford who went on to become a lieutenant commander in the SEALs, recalls of his training, “We had some incredible people come in—high school track stars, intercollegiate water polo players, international-quality swimmers. And a lot of them ended up failing. At the same time, we had guys who had trouble on the runs, guys who had trouble doing push-ups, guys whose teeth would start chattering just looking at the cold ocean, and yet they made it. And one of the reasons why they made it is they had this relentless perseverance.”

  After Hell Week comes Pool Competency training, in which the SEAL hopefuls swim underwater with scuba gear and are attacked by instructors who tear off their mouthpieces and masks and flip off their oxygen tanks. During this test, those who make the cut have to remain calm and figure out how to reestablish their lines to the life-giving oxygen while their bodies are desperate for air. “The point of all that is you are going to push people as hard as you possibly can. You push them to their mental, physical, and emotional limit so that when combat happens, they are ready,” says Greiten
s.

  If it is quite challenging to enter the SEALs, an even greater challenge is to be selected for the SEALs’ premier counterterrorism force, the innocuously named Naval Special Warfare Development Group, based at Dam Neck, Virginia, near the bustling resort town of Virginia Beach. It’s known inside the military as DevGru, and more popularly as SEAL Team 6, and is an elite within the SEAL elite. The men of DevGru, about 250 in total, are battle-hardened and are usually in their mid-thirties. DevGru is divided into squadrons that are named by color: Red, Blue, and Gold are the assault squadrons; Gray handles vehicles and boats; and Black is the sniper team. These squadrons scout other SEAL teams, which number around two thousand men, for those with the particular skills they need.

  DevGru’s base at Dam Neck does not announce itself. Behind the high wire fence that divides the SEALs from the rest of the world is a large dog pound, where the highly trained dogs that accompany the men on their missions live. There is a giant wall to sharpen climbing skills; a hangar full of exceptionally fast boats; other hangars that house experimental dune buggies suitable for driving in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan, and weapons rooms loaded with exotic firearms.

  Even as JSOC became a more agile and deadlier force after 9/11, when it came to sending the SEALs or Delta to kill the leaders of al-Qaeda, political considerations continued to affect decisions about operations. The leaders of the terrorist group were based either in Pakistan, a prickly ally, or in Iran, a sworn enemy, and the political consequences of placing American boots on the ground in either country were large.

  As we have seen, Saad bin Laden and a number of other al-Qaeda leaders moved to Iran after the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Intelligence indicated they lived in the northern Iranian town of Chalus, on the Caspian Sea. In 2002 a SEAL insertion into Chalus was planned and then rehearsed somewhere along the U.S. Gulf Coast. In the end, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Richard Myers, nixed the operation, which had the potential to be Operation Eagle Claw all over again, because the intelligence about where exactly the al-Qaeda operatives were living in Chalus was never precise.

  Three years later, the CIA and JSOC were tracking al-Qaeda’s number three, Abu Faraj al-Libi, who drove around Pakistan’s tribal regions on a distinctive red motorcycle. Intelligence indicated that Libi would be attending a meeting in a small compound in a northern tribal area near the border with Afghanistan, possibly with Ayman al-Zawahiri. A plan was developed to drop in thirty SEALs close to the compound and attack it. McChrystal and CIA director Porter Goss backed the plan, but top Pentagon officials worried about extracting the SEALs and wanted more firepower. The plan mushroomed to include some 150 Army Rangers. As Rumsfeld examined the operation, it began to look more and more like an invasion of Pakistan, something that would be quite politically damaging to Pakistani president General Pervez Musharraf, given the high level of anti-American sentiment in Pakistan. Rumsfeld called off the raid.

  The men under McChrystal’s command were growing increasingly frustrated with the political impediments preventing them from going over the border into Pakistan, where al-Qaeda’s leaders were hiding. In 2006, Frances Townsend, Bush’s top counterterrorism advisor, took up McChrystal’s standing offer to meet with his officers and senior enlisted men at Ft. Bragg. They sat around a U-shaped table and Townsend told the group, “You can’t hurt my feelings. I’m from New York, I don’t have any, so this is only going to be worth the trip if you tell me what your concerns are.” Their frustrations poured out: the inability to cross the border; the lack of good tactical-level intelligence on al-Qaeda’s leaders; and, most fundamentally, the question: “Who’s in charge of finding bin Laden?” Was it the CIA, which didn’t have much of a capacity to operate in the war zone along the Afghan-Pakistan border? Or was it JSOC, which wasn’t being given good intelligence on al-Qaeda’s leaders? Townsend told them that outside the theater of war the CIA was in charge, but in the war zone JSOC would necessarily have to take the lead, and concluded by saying, “So it’s the difference, in military-speak, between the supporting and the supported command.” Townsend could see that the group wasn’t buying this explanation. “The fact is that it’s difficult for me to explain, how do you think that translates to the guy on the ground? If it’s hard to explain here, in the United States, how hard do you think it is to operate in that environment? And by the way, that ought to tell you why we’d not been effective.” Townsend went back to the White House and began to push for more CIA officers deploying overseas with the military, and to loosen the rules around the use of drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

  On August 11, 2006, commanders from the Taliban and al-Qaeda met to discuss increasing the tempo of operations in eastern Afghanistan, in particular joint missions the following year in Nangarhar province. In July 2007, JSOC received intelligence that bin Laden himself might cross the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan to go to a summit meeting of militants in Nangarhar in his old stomping ground of Tora Bora. The CIA noticed that there was a significant buildup of al-Qaeda and Taliban forces there. The Pentagon planned an attack involving long-range bombers, but as the B-2 stealth bombers were in flight, commanders ordered them to return because of concerns about both the intelligence on bin Laden and possible civilian casualties from a large-scale bombing raid. Instead, JSOC mounted a smaller operation over the course of three or four days that killed several dozen militants in Tora Bora.

  Just as he had in the winter of 2001, bin Laden again seemed to have vanished like a wraith.

  11 COURSES OF ACTION

  IN DECEMBER 2010, CIA director Leon Panetta again briefed President Obama about the “collection” effort in Abbottabad, presenting videos of the compound and an account of what it looked like from the ground based on the observations of those who had seen it. Despite the continuing uncertainties about who was living at the compound—at one point Obama said, “For all we know this could be some sheikh hiding from one of his wives”—the president’s interest was by now very much piqued. Obama said, “I want to hear back from you, Director Panetta, when I get back from the holidays. Let’s make sure that we pull this string as quickly as possible. If he’s there, time is of the essence.” President Obama then departed for his usual Christmas vacation in Hawaii.

  Obama recalls that he now wanted an even sharper picture about what was happening in the Abbottabad compound and who was living there: “If we were going to embark on any kind of assault on this compound … we had to make darn sure that we knew what we were talking about.”

  In late January 2011, CIA officials were surprised to discover that an Indonesian militant named Umar Patek, one of the conspirators in the 2002 bombings of Bali, had recently shown up in Abbottabad and had been arrested there by Pakistani security services. Patek had gone to Abbottabad to meet someone on the fringes of al-Qaeda who worked in the city post office. What to make of this? After all, al-Qaeda’s leaders had paid tens of thousands of dollars to the Bali conspirators. Analysts went back and forth about why Patek had chosen to travel from Southeast Asia to Abbottabad, a relatively obscure Pakistani city. In the end they concluded it was just one of life’s strange coincidences.

  That same month, the CIA analyst John, who had been at 90 percent for some time, in his confidence that bin Laden was at the compound, concluded that the intelligence had reached a tipping point. He went to Panetta and said, “We have to act now. Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti might not be there next month. The intelligence is not going to get any better.” Panetta then went to the president and told him that one of his top bin Laden watchers was telling him, “Either we need to move or this particular intelligence might dissipate.” Obama told Panetta, “I would like to have options to go against this compound.”

  Around this time, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency used its minute reconnaissance of the compound to produce a digital computer-aided design (CAD) file of the type that engineers use in drawing up blueprints. From that CAD file, a four-by-four-f
oot model of the suspected bin Laden compound was constructed that was accurate down to the last tree. The model even included two tiny toy cars that represented the white Jeep with a spare tire and the red van that the Kuwaiti and his brother drove. The model became a vital prop at the CIA and White House for discussions about who was living on the compound and in which location, and later for talking through the planning of the various military options. General James Cartwright, then the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, recalls, “That was a good vehicle for us as we planned the various options to then sit down with that model and say … ‘This is how we would come at it; this is what would happen in this courtyard or this house.… Here’s how we would have more than one avenue of approach on what we thought were the target-inhabited buildings.’ ”

  Obama asked the CIA to work up some conceptual options for what to do about the Abbottabad compound. Now that the possibility of military action had entered the picture, Panetta and senior Pentagon official Michael Vickers decided to bring another person into the secret. In late January, Vickers called Vice Admiral William McRaven in Afghanistan, who for the past three years had run JSOC. Vickers and McRaven had known each other for three decades and had worked intensively together for the past four years, as Vickers was the civilian overseer of JSOC.