Close readers of Bob Woodward’s books about the Bush administration may recognize the MSA’s code name during the first months of the war in Afghanistan: GREY FOX. GREY FOX operators were on the ground with CIA paramilitaries and special operations forces shooters within days of September 11, 2001. They were instrumental in the capture of Saddam Hussein. (In the famous photograph of Saddam crawling out of his spider hole, you can see the boot of an MSA operator.) Included in the MSA’s numbers are elite signals intelligence collectors (their procurement history includes a lot of commercial radio scanners), pilots, and, to a lesser extent, case officers, interrogators, and shooters. They gather intelligence for counterterrorism operations, but some are cross-trained to kill.
In 2001, the MSA, then known, confusingly enough, as the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), was the bastard child of the U.S. Army. It had survived years of controversy and scrutiny, including several congressional attempts to shut it down, scandals involving extralegal activities, and financial improprieties. It was underutilized and poorly integrated with the rest of the force’s intelligence services. In 2003, over the strenuous objection of army leadership, Marshall Billingslea transferred the ISA to JSOC. Its new command quickly changed the ISA’s designation and cover name and put it to work. (The unit’s last known cover name was changed after a reporter used the phrase in an email to a Pentagon official. This constituted an operational breach sufficient to warrant the termination of a dozen security contractors.) Billingslea did not intend for the MSA to engage in direct action missions. Rather, he believed that the Tier One teams could benefit from the battlefield intelligence-gathering skills that the MSA could bring to bear.
After Billingslea left the Pentagon, however, the incessant demands on JSOC would turn the MSA into something resembling a Tier One unit, with members tasked with missions that involved the direct collection of intelligence for the sake of intelligence—something that American law has a problem with, or, at least, the laws that civilians are allowed to see. The MSA was never designed to be a tactical unit per se, but intelligence and military officials confirm that after 9/11 they executed direct action missions in Somalia, Pakistan, and several other countries. Congress was largely kept in the dark, and to some extent it still is. In 1982, after the ISA/MSA’s creation, Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, not shy about flexing the Pentagon’s muscles, worried that “we seem to have created our own CIA, but like Topsy, uncoordinated and uncontrolled.” An organization with such a secret mandate had to have accountability as its essence, Carlucci wrote in a memo, but “we have created an organization that is uncontrolled.”5
As the Mission Support Activity expanded under JSOC’s purview, it began to execute missions independently and outside of declared war zones. In countries such as Yemen, Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia, Task Force Orange gathered intelligence directly, technically reporting to the CIA, whose operations were ostensibly based on covert action findings but in reality adhered to the Al Qaeda Network Exord, an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Members of the MSA staffed new military liaison elements (MLEs) installed by SOCOM in U.S. embassies around the world, much to the consternation of the State Department. (The use of MLEs was significantly curtailed when Robert Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary, although a 2010 SOCOM budget document includes a line item for their funding in Africa.)
The MSA, with a budget of $80 million, trains its personnel to be essentially dropped into denied areas and to operate more or less on their own. Some MSA elements operate highly specialized surveillance and reconnaissance planes, such as a heavily modified RC-12 Guardrail (code name: LIBERTY BLUE), used for years to track al-Qaeda operatives as they meander through the deserts of North Africa. Others zip around terrorist training camps in MH-6 Little Birds, small helicopters used extensively by the U.S. Army.
In two countries with which the United States is not at war, according to three former U.S. officials with knowledge of its operations, MSA elements were tasked with tracking and killing specific terrorist targets. Technically, only the CIA can do that—which was why SEAL Team Six was very publicly placed under the titular authority of CIA director Leon Panetta when it conducted the bin Laden raid, even though Admiral McRaven and a Navy captain managed the operation. Under U.S. law, the military’s intelligence activities outside war zones are restricted to Title 10 of the U.S. Code. The CIA, meanwhile, operates under Title 50, which permits covert action, including targeted assassinations of terrorists, so long as a covert action finding has been transmitted to Congress.
Given the secrecy associated with the MSA missions, it is not clear whether the CIA had full cognizance of what the Defense Department was doing, particularly in the early years of the global campaign against transnational terrorism. In places such as Africa, “the authorities were fucked up and no one knew who was in charge,” a still-serving JSOC officer said in an interview. This would change around 2004, as JSOC and CIA objectives diverged. Seizing the initiative, General McChrystal increased the Command’s footprint in Nairobi, Kenya; Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti; and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. JSOC focused its efforts on “intelligence collection and target development.”6 In 2006, JSOC went kinetic in Somalia, actively hunting for al-Qaeda leader Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan. He was killed in 2009.
Shortly after 9/11, one MSA case officer was nearly killed while following a target (much as a CIA case officer might) in Beirut, when he was kidnapped outside his hotel. He escaped, shot his attackers, and wound up receiving—secretly—a medal for his valor. The number of case officer types hired by the MSA ramped up after 9/11 and is slowly spinning back down. Yet JSOC’s human intelligence–gathering activities continue to expand—and this is not a secret. A recent official job solicitation reports that the Command is recruiting “[a] Human Intelligence Operations Officer, responsible for planning and executing highly specialized, mission critical HUMINT requirements for JCS Directed Operations and contingency plans. Coordinates the de-confliction, registration and management of Title 10 and Title 50 recruited HUMINT sources.”
The hiring unit is JSOC’s Directorate of Operation, Security, and Intelligence Support Division at Fort Bragg, which includes all of JSOC’s intelligence assets, with the exception of the MSA. The effectiveness of the MSA operations is difficult to determine, but their legality is an easier question to answer. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the Defense Department ran the show, using traditional authorities granted to it under Title 10 of the U.S. Code. Outside the war zones, the CIA had primacy. United States law is fairly explicit about this: covert action to collect intelligence cannot be led by the military, in part because the oversight mechanisms aren’t set up to monitor them.
Under the large umbrella of “preparing the battlefield,” which later became “preparing the environment” (an environment being a bigger thing than a battlefield), and based on their successes elsewhere, there was reluctance in the Bush administration to de-conflict cases where the CIA and JSOC had different ideas about what they wanted to do in a country where the president had signed a finding. For example, the CIA objected to a JSOC Somalia mission at the last moment in 2003; the National Security Council sided with SOCOM. The CIA had legal authority, but SOCOM had, by presidential fiat, the lead in terms of counterterrorism. When the twain diverged in thinking, significant interagency conflicts resulted.
When it came to unleashing JSOC in countries with which the United States was not at war, the NSC was cautious. Terrorists on the target lists were fair game pretty much anywhere in the world, and the sovereignty of several countries was quietly disregarded as tiny hunter-killer teams invaded. Large-scale military involvement, however, was iffier, and although the White House had embraced the kinetic success of JSOC in Iraq, it would not endorse the same type of resource surge into places such as East Africa, to which terrorists were fleeing. This was maddening for JSOC commanders: they were “lawnmowers,” chopping the heads off of al-Qa
eda. They had successfully disrupted Iranian attempts to use Hezbollah to destabilize any number of operations—and now Washington was suddenly very cautious? There was a resource crunch too. General Doug Brown of SOCOM didn’t have the resources he needed for foreign internal defense operations in Africa, “and that vacuum could be, and was, in some cases, filled by Al Qaeda,” he told a historian.7
JSOC’s role in some of the more legally marginal elements of the war on terrorism had brought unwanted attention and significant friction with the State Department. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice encouraged ambassadors in countries where JSOC operated with impunity to speak up. One was Peru, where a DEVGRU operator with red hair (his nickname was “Flamer”) got into a physical dispute with some locals. JSOC wanted the CIA to help exfiltrate him from the country. The CIA refused, and JSOC had to scramble its own assets to collect its sailor. Why was JSOC in Peru? It’s not clear. The NSC, not wanting to unleash JSOC’s capacity in areas outside the war zone and cognizant of the publicity that the units were getting, began to pull back on the reins.
The United States believes that in the summer of 2007, as many as three hundred al-Qaeda-trained fighters fled to the Horn of Africa. Though JSOC was on the ground, missions were highly restricted by an overly cautious Washington. “Flynn watched, literally, because they had these guys tracked, as hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters went to Somalia and into Yemen and elsewhere in the Horn and got better trained,” a senior military official said. It would take a new president and a new classified presidential order to unleash JSOC’s global strike capability again.
Lieutenant General Michael Flynn is the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the top intelligence officer for the Department of Defense. He has dominion over the newly established Defense Clandestine Service, a military counterpart to the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. David Petraeus, now retired from the Army, served as the CIA’s director. Admiral William McRaven is the commander of Special Operations Command. The men who sharpened the tip of America’s spear now run the entirety of the arsenal.
As for the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, there is virtually nowhere they cannot go, no one they cannot target, and nothing they cannot track. They serve at the pleasure of the president of the United States and operate with minimal oversight and public exposure only with the greatest of successes or the worst of tragedies. Congress keeps insisting on more insight into JSOC missions, and the Command is showing some leg. The United States has never had such a weapon, and the president has never had such power. The question is what happens next. Does every president from here on use his or her authority responsibly? Or does power breed overconfidence and, ultimately, carelessness? Misdirected force can redound with terrible consequence to national security, and the president hoisted with his own petard.
∗This figure was confirmed by a senior military official who asked to remain anonymous.
∗We were given the JSOC commander’s direct office phone number by a source. McRaven picked up on the first ring.
∗A former Navy SEAL, Jack Murphy, has called MSA a Tier One unit, alongside Delta and DEVGRU, but U.S. Special Operations Command does not classify it as such.
Notes
1. Author’s interview with Michael Leiter.
2. Based on interviews with firsthand participants.
3. Christopher J. Lamb and Evan Munsing, Secret Weapon: High-Value Target Teams as an Organizational Innovation (Washington, DC: National Defense University, 2011).
4. “U.S. Military Offers Sheep in Exchange for Afghanistan Deaths,” Christian Science Monitor, April 8, 2010, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2010/0408/US-military-offers-sheep-in-apology-for-Afghanistan-deaths.
5. Memorandum to the Deputy Under Secretary for Policy, from Frank Carlucci, secretary of defense, May 26, 1982, accessed from the National Security Archive website, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB46/document7.pdf.
6. Sean D. Naylor, “Years of Detective Work Led to Al-Qaeda Target,” Army Times, November 21, 2011.
7. John Gresham, “The Year in Special Operations,” interview with General Doug Brown (ret.), Defense Media Network, 2010.
CHAPTER 13
The Structure of Secrecy
Area 51 isn’t the only place where the bodies are buried, the aliens are imprisoned, and flying saucers are kept. Some secrets are kept near Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Crystal City, Virginia. The restaurant and the secret share the eleventh floor of a federal office building easily accessed by anyone. Its neighbors include the Special Inspector General for Reconstruction in Afghanistan, the National Security Division of the FBI, and what used to be the Counter-Intelligence Field Activity of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Each of those offices, however, advertises itself when you get close. Armed guards with loaded rifles, motion sensors, and barriers serve as a neon warning sign that visitors are not welcome.
But not this secret. Near the elevator and through the glass windows is what appears to be a dentist’s office. It’s not. A careful observer might notice a single distinguishing feature: a copy of The Starfish and the Spider, a book about organizational theory that successful contemporary military and intelligence officers have come to see as a bible. (The theory is that an organization is best structured like a starfish, which can regrow a function if it is injured or sliced off, as opposed to a spider, which operates from a centralized brain.)
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, as the Department of Defense and the U.S. intelligence community struggled to adapt to their new counterterrorism mission, a group of forward-thinking U.S. Air Force intelligence and technology types—some of them military, some civilian—approached a few trusted members of the defense appropriations committee in Congress. They identified a problem: the military and intelligence community’s technology and acquisition infrastructure was far too cumbersome to equip war fighters and intelligence officers. The enemy would always have a tactical advantage simply because of the checks and balances, and byways and folkways, that were built into the system.
They had a solution: a new research, development, and testing office, reporting directly to a few policymakers and military officers. The office would have a single mission: solve technological problems quickly, without the vagaries of the bureaucracy getting in the way. The organization would be secret. It would not accept ownership of its products, and it would have no pride of authorship. It would not be established as a program office, or even as a special access program, because in both cases it would be swept under the umbrella of either Title 50 of the U.S. Code (the laws of the military) or Title 10 (the laws of the intelligence community). As a free agent, it could serve both communities without restraint. Funding that was the easy part. So many Air Force programs exist in two different universes: the budget line item and the real-life entity. The Defense Department has enough discretion to move money around, particularly if it is directed toward an entity that was created to elude by federal acquisition laws, as this organization was.
Now seven years into its existence, this organization has been the germ laboratory for several transformational counterterrorism technologies. It stood up NIGHT FIST, the joint Air Force–CIA cell that allowed for real-time monitoring of dangerous targets, even through dense fog or clouds. It perfected the RFID tracking and tagging materiel used to kill more than ten thousand terrorist suspects and their enablers. It invented, with the help of a contractor, a reconnaissance technology that can spot seemingly inert improvised explosive devices from high-flying drones. This organization has worked with the National Security Agency to perfect a method of extracting telephone numbers from cell phones previously considered destroyed.
One soldier attached to an intelligence brigade at the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command put it to us this way: “Suddenly, when we realized we needed it, we had tracking and tagging. And come to think of it, we really didn’t know where it came from, or how we got it so fast.”
The organization is a
ccountable to virtually no one. Occasionally, a staffer will brief members of Congress about a particular program—but they will be identified as belonging to a different organization entirely.
“The big picture? I don’t know if anyone in Congress really needs to have the big picture,” was how someone who works for this organization told us. Had the entity been set up in a way that Congress could perform the type of oversight it wants to, “nothing would have gotten out to the field. Nothing.” This person continued, “We exist because we have to exist.”
We tried to protest, naming five other government entities that are supposed to do the same thing. One of them is even called the Rapid Equipping Force. “Too slow,” was the response.
Indeed, as we tenderly verified the existence of this organization with people who would know—good people, law-abiding intelligence officials, generals, and admirals—not a single person disputed the premise.
The group is now called the Special Capabilities Office and is located in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD/SCO). It is responsible for providing the technology that keeps soldiers safe and the al-Qaeda network from solidifying. The organization spends a fraction of one percent of the entire DOD budget. Its head is Brian Hibbeln, a physicist and former senior scientist at the National Reconnaissance Office.
The nature and rationale for the organization raises questions about the concentrated, unexamined exercise of executive power, and about the hapless bureaucracy so thoroughly dysfunctional and incapable of keeping pace with the needs of the intelligence community that the community’s only recourse is an extralegal (though not illegal) structuring.∗ If the DOD, or a small group of people within the DOD, know—not just believe, but know, know for a fact—that they cannot perform their mission under the current regime of secrecy and oversight, and if the only way the country can be protected and soldiers lives saved is to create a secret entity: if all of those things are true, then solving the problem with secrecy is a hopeless endeavor. Organizations like the SCO exist in a way that raises questions about everything we think we know about government secrecy, and especially congressional oversight, which accordingly seems cosmetic and a simulacrum of a system that checks itself and balances competing principles.
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