Though the addition of an intelligence brigade to JSOC is a natural consequence of its success and growth, when the Associated Press disclosed the existence of the ICAC to the general public, a spokesman for SOCOM made a point of telling reporters that its functions would not duplicate those of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). Mike Leiter, the director of the NCTC, worked closely with McRaven to make sure the two centers didn’t overlap. “I spent hours with Admiral McRaven on this,” he said. “We saw this as a natural evolution in what they were doing. We sent some of our guys over there, and they sent some of their guys over here.”
Managers at the CIA and the DIA regarded JSOC’s growing footprint with alarm. Some whispered to journalists that JSOC was building a secret intelligence empire without oversight or scrutiny. More prosaically, they feared that the Command’s activities, in both the collection and the analysis of intelligence, would duplicate their own.
Sensing friction, Michael Morrell, then acting director of the CIA; Michael Vickers, the civilian intelligence chief at the Pentagon; and General James Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tried to reduce tension and conflict arising from JSOC’s expansion. In the field, JSOC units and their counterparts at the CIA and the DIA work well together. In Yemen, after some early conflicts, the integration is almost seamless, with JSOC and the CIA alternating Predator missions and borrowing each other’s resources, such as satellite bandwidth. Often, JSOC element commanders will appear on videoconference calls alongside CIA station chiefs—all but unheard of until very recently. Yet some midlevel managers at the intelligence agencies remain resistant to the type of integration envisioned by the National Security Council.
McRaven, much like JSOC itself, is at cross-purposes. He knows that his intelligence assets will not survive budget purges unless they fit well within the rest of the community. Yet he also wants to preserve the razor-sharp edge of the special missions units at a time when, due to publicity and overtasking, it risks being dulled.
∗Ambassador Hull insisted on a signed declaration from General Doug Brown, commanding general of U.S. Special Operations Command, preventing any “kinetic missions from taking place, aside from limited intelligence gathering and civil affairs operations.”
Notes
1. Avery Plaw, “The Legality of Targeted Killing as an Instrument of War: The Case of Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi,” 5th Global Conference on War, Virtual War and Human Security, Budapest, 2008, pp. 3–4, http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ptb/wvw/wvw5/Plaw%20paper.pdf.
2. Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 352.
3. Phillip Smucker, “The Intrigue Behind the Drone Strike,” Christian Science Monitor, November 12, 2002.
4. Michael Smith, Killer Elite: The Inside Story of America’s Most Secret Special Operations Team (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008), 247.
5. Interview with a Marine who was part of a mission in Yemen.
6. Stanford International Human Rights & Conflict Resolution Clinic, Living Under Drones, http://livingunderdrones.org/numbers/
7. Interview with a former senior intelligence official who worked with Blair.
8. Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Revealed: 64 Drone Bases on American Soil, Wired, June 13, 2012, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/06/64-drone-bases-on-us-soil/.
9. National Research Council Committee on Experimentation and Rapid Prototyping in Support of Counterterrorism, Experimentation and Rapid Prototyping in Support of Counterterrorism (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2009), 72.
10. Ibid., 24.
11. Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 222.
12. National Research Council Committee on Experimentation and Rapid Prototyping in Support of Counterterrorism, Experimentation and Rapid Prototyping in Support of Counterterrorism, 20.
13. Interview with a former DIA official.
14. Henry Kenyon, “A Mandate to Innovate in Intelligence Analysis,” Federal Computer Week, March 28, 2011, http://fcw.com/Articles/2011/03/28/FEATURE-Di-Leonardo-Al-Special-Operations.aspx?Page=2.
15. Gareth Porter, “How McChrystal and Petraeus Built an Indiscriminate ‘Killing Machine,’” Truthout, September 26, 2011, http://www.truthout.org/how-mcchrystal-and-petraeus-built-indiscriminate-killing-machine/1317052524.
16. An oblique outline of this dispute can be found in Flynn’s unauthorized essay for the Center for New American Security in January 2010, “Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan,” http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/AfghanIntel_Flynn_Jan2010_code507_voices.pdf.
17. Based on interviews with firsthand participants.
CHAPTER 12
The Known Unknowns
Chris C.” joined the Army after reading about the heroics of Americans in Fallujah. A few months out of West Point, he was deployed on a fifteen-month tour of Iraq as a battalion-level intelligence officer. In order to find insurgents, his soldiers worked from scraps of human intelligence—a rumor here, an overheard conversation there. It’s easy to forget, in an armchair discussion of government secrecy, that the point of intelligence is to learn our enemy’s secrets. In a war zone, no one forgets this. Based in Salahuddin province north of Baghdad, Chris and his team had to share access to a single drone for overhead surveillance. There was no National Security Agency presence and thus no real signals intelligence. Sometimes, a JSOC task force would inform Chris’s commander that they were about to raid a part of the city. “We were told: the Task Force is going into our area, and here is the grid they’re going to hit. I would look at the grid and say, ‘Oh, I know who they’re going to hit, because we’d just been there looking for the same person.’”
In Balad, General Michael Flynn had come to appreciate the wealth of information that intelligence collectors with conventional forces could provide. He recognized that such intel could benefit the regular troops as well as the JSOC task forces. While JSOC soldiers went home every three months, conventional forces were on twelve- to fifteen-month rotations.
General Stanley McChrystal and Flynn knew that JSOC needed to better understand the populations their task forces worked among—an intelligence capability that only units such as Chris’s could provide. Knowing the sinews of a local community could help the U.S. military establish degrees of trust with tribal and authority figures. General David Petraeus, for example, would use early successes by conventional commanders such as General H. R. McMaster, the commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq, to develop his counterinsurgency doctrine. “JSOC, earlier than any other element in the U.S. government, understood the importance of messaging and how actions can influence populations,” said Mike Leiter, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center.1
Officers such as Chris C. had an institutional knowledge of tribes, geography, and environment that had eluded JSOC. Flynn was determined to merge the two systems. “Ninety percent of the intelligence we needed was not in JSOC,” he told one observer in 2010.2
Indeed, Chris’s unit provided the tip that led the JSOC task force to Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi, the spiritual adviser to al-Zarqawi. Chris’s officers had long watched an internecine tribal conflict north of the Tigris River. Just after a firefight, Chris got word that Haj al-Bazari, a high-ranking al-Qaeda operative in Iraq, had been injured and taken to a cousin’s home in the area. A database cross-check revealed that one of al-Bazari’s cousins had a wife who was an ob-gyn. Chris’s team searched her house and found bloody gauze and a truculent doctor refusing to tell anyone what had happened. She was detained. When her husband arrived at the American detention center, he pleaded for her release. He had little money but was a member of a major facilitation network that included former Baathist elements funded by Syria. He offered the Americans information instead.
Chris’s command
er contacted a JSOC task force. They flew in and grabbed the husband and interrogated him. That was the last time Chris heard about the guy until, out of the blue, a JSOC shooter team came by to thank him. (This was another early McChrystal-Flynn innovation: allow units that operate in the shadows to work with units that operate in the sunlight.) “They told me that the guy was a high-level financier and that he had led them to Sheik Abdul Rahman,” he said.
By December 2007, when Chris’s second tour of duty in Iraq began, JSOC task forces were fully integrated with the rest of the effort. Chris’s battalion was assigned to the eastern half of Mosul and was constantly fighting to keep the province from collapsing under the weight of foreign fighters, many from Saudi Arabia. Communicating with the JSOC team in the area, Task Force 9-14 (also known as Task Force North), was much easier than before.
Chris had access to their interrogation reports and worked with a TF 9-14 intelligence officer to devise a strategy for his area of operation: they would target specific midlevel operatives who might lead to the bigger gets. His team produced a steady stream of intelligence reports about local politics and conditions on the ground. Not once was he denied access to JSOC products, and TF 9-14 was literally a phone call away. “Once this started happening, it was just awesome in terms of what we were able to do,” he said.
Here is how a colleague of General Flynn’s described the change in procedures on the ground:
What would normally happen is: the shooters would kick down a door and snatch everyone and drag them to the front room, and then take everything with them, and put it in a trash bag. The bad guys would be taken to a detention facility and the pocket litter would come back to [the intelligence analysts]. Flynn thought this was stupid. Instead, he gave the shooters—think of this—the Delta guys, mini cameras, and schooled them in some basic detective techniques. When you capture someone, take a picture of them exactly where you captured them. Take detailed notes of who was doing what with what. Don’t merge all the pocket litter.
Then, the shooters were supposed to e-mail back an image of the person they captured to Balad [JSOC’s intelligence headquarters], where analysts would run it through every facial recognition database we have, or fingerprints or names, or what have you. We’d get hits immediately. And so our intel guys would radio back to the team in the field, “Hey, you’ve got Abu-so-and-so, or someone who looks like them. See if he knows where Abu–other-person is.”
And that’s what the shooters would do. They’d tell their captured insurgents that for a price, they could help them. A senior JSOC intelligence commander said, “They’d say, I know you, you’re so-and-so. And if you want us to help you, you need to tell us where this other person is. And it would work. And then, when we got a new address, sometimes within twenty minutes of the first boot on the door, we’d have another team of shooters going to another location.” Follow-up interrogations were plotted out like dense crime dramas, with dozens of participants, including some by video teleconference.
Instead of three operations every two weeks, JSOC was able to increase its operations tempo (or “optempo”) significantly, sometimes raiding five or six places a night. This completely bewildered insurgents and al-Qaeda sympathizers, who had no idea what was going on. In April 2004, according to classified unit histories, JSOC participated in fewer than a dozen operations in Iraq.∗ By July 2006, its teams were exceeding 250 a month. McChrystal’s operations center was open for fifteen hours a day, regardless of where he was. There is a strong correlation between the pace of JSOC operations, the death rate of Iraqi insurgents and terrorists, and the overall decline in violence that lasted long enough for U.S. troops to surge into the country and “hold” areas that used to be incredibly dangerous.
In Christopher Lamb and Evan Munsing’s thesis-length assessment of intelligence in Iraq, Secret Weapon, Flynn’s “pivotal” efforts at fusing intelligence and operations, developing real-time reach back to analysts, and the flattening of authority are lauded as “the secret weapon” behind the surge—not some special weapon, as Bob Woodward has hinted. Notably, Flynn is rendered in the piece as “General Brown,” and the authors were not permitted to mention that his team was actually JSOC.3 Such is the nature of the Defense Cover Program—Flynn himself was a target for terrorists and many nation-states.
The problem with being a secret organization is that when a harsh light is cast on questionable activities—even activities performed with patriotic intent or, at least, performed when no better options seemed available at the time—there’s no opportunity for a rebuttal. “We are in a difficult position, in that there’s not much we can do to make the case for ourselves,” William McRaven said in 2010. “There are some things we can try and do to respond to things like Seymour Hersh articles,” referring to the journalist’s allegations that JSOC fostered a culture that resulted in torture and later served as Dick Cheney’s personal assassination force, “but we are constrained.”∗
For all of McChrystal’s advances and achievements, McRaven still inherited a work in progress. Even with all of the attention paid to ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) assets, JSOC had only thirty-three planes to its name, and its drones were making only five orbits per day over Iraq. Fusion cells that worked well in some areas didn’t necessarily work in others. With a new U.S. president, the rules of engagement in Iraq were about to change, and attention would soon shift back to Afghanistan and more decisively toward Africa. The spigots were still open, but JSOC’s bureaucracy was growing overburdened.
One of the earliest problems McRaven had to deal with was the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), signed with Iraq and which forbade the United States from conducting most counterterrorism raids without warrants. Warrants? JSOC doesn’t do warrants—that’s a law enforcement thing. Many in the Command wanted to ignore the SOFA entirely. McRaven, however, insisted that his team figure out a way to fulfill the agreement. To do this, he directed JSOC funds to build mini-courthouses, first in Baghdad and then elsewhere in the country. JSOC flew in JAG (Judge Advocate General) officers from the United States, and McRaven personally briefed the Iraqi leadership, describing the constraints under which JSOC often operated. He asked for their help.
As a result, Iraqi judges were empowered by the U.S. military and began issuing warrants based on the testimony of JSOC intelligence analysts, SEALs, or Delta guys themselves. Occasionally, operatives appeared in the courtroom, though always shielded. More regularly, Iraqis used information collected by JSOC in lieu of an operator being present. McRaven at first faced internal resistance for bringing in the Iraqis—JSOC was supposed to be a secret organization. Yet as operators saw how well the courthouse system worked, they soon dropped their objections and quickly adapted.
Likewise, they adapted to McRaven’s establishment of an Afghan partner unit within JSOC. It consisted mostly of civilians, many without a shred of military experience, and began to accompany JSOC units on raids. This was a particularly important outreach following a JSOC disaster in April 2010, when a Ranger unit killed five Afghan civilians in Khataba, the result of a bad tip from an unreliable source. McRaven took the extraordinary step of personally apologizing to the family and admitting that the men under his command had made a “terrible terrible mistake.” As reported, McRaven, near tears, told an elder, “You are a family man with many children and many friends. I am a soldier. I have spent most of my career overseas, away from my family. But I have children as well. And my heart grieves for you.”4 McRaven figured that the Afghan partner units could prevent these kinds of mistakes—the kind that made the job harder for every soldier, conventional or special operations, who was fighting in Afghanistan. McRaven further reached out to conventional units, asking commanders how his units could better assist their missions.
As of yet, JSOC does not seem to have found the kind of successes in Afghanistan that it did in Iraq. The enemy is different, more embedded in the population. The geography makes intelligence gathering more d
ifficult. And the strategy from the White House is different. Yet as a force multiplier and as a hub of best practices, the Command may have prevented a decisively unwinnable situation from descending into disaster.
When JSOC eventually finds itself in the news for a high-profile failure instead of yet another astounding success, it will not likely be for what it did in Iraq or Afghanistan. Instead, it will be for its operations in countries we are not officially at war with (inasmuch as we “officially” go to war). Covert but deniable operations in non–combat zones often start as “forever” secrets; the whole point is to slip in, kidnap or kill or retrieve or steal, and exfiltrate without leaving fingerprints.
That’s why the most sensitive special missions unit listed on the base directory of Fort Belvoir in northern Virginia is the Mission Support Activity (MSA). It is JSOC’s clandestine intelligence-gathering organization and is formally considered a Tier Two special missions unit, performing Tier One functions.∗ Until 2009, its code name was INTREPID SPEAR, and its cover changes every two years. In 2010, it was known as the U.S. Army Studies and Analysis Activity. Inside JSOC, it’s known as the Activity, or Task Force Orange. Doctrinally, it is responsible for “operational preparation of the environment.” The MSA has several fixed operating locations around the world, including at least five secret bases inside the United States. (A source says the Activity is now funded under the name “Joint Support Activity.”)
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