Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  “Definitely Cheney, and also Rumsfeld to a lesser extent, viewed the CIA as a weak sister, and that basically they were not politically reliable,” recalled Philip Giraldi, the career CIA case officer. “And, essentially, it was decided that we would go the JSOC route. But of course, the JSOC route has problems. When you use the military as your cutting edge on some of these activities where you’re not at war with somebody, where you’re getting involved with sending people into someone else’s sovereign territory, then you’re opening up all kinds of cans of worms that intelligence agencies were created to avoid.” Covert actions permit US operatives to ignore international conventions and to violate other nations’ domestic laws. US military operations, however, are required by US law to observe international laws, the laws of war and the Geneva Conventions, though the Bush administration clearly did not see it that way when it came to the status of certain military detainees. Using US Special Ops Forces for covert actions could mean they lose their Geneva Convention status, be accused of spying and ultimately be labeled “unlawful combatants.” Critics worried that this would place US armed service members at risk should they be captured, with their captors enabled to ignore the Geneva Conventions’ prohibitions on torture and inhumane treatment, citing the US precedent.

  Although the SSB was officially run by Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, its real taskmaster was Stephen Cambone, a political ideologue recruited by Rumsfeld. A leading neocon, Cambone had first appeared on the Pentagon radar when he ran the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1990. Later, he worked on special projects for Rumsfeld on DoD commissions dealing with missile defense and spacebased weapons. Bringing Cambone on board to help shape the hunter-killer Special Ops program that had been on Rumsfeld’s mind since 9/11 opened the floodgates. Officially, Cambone was Rumsfeld’s special assistant. In reality, he was Rumsfeld’s point man on developing the DoD’s version of the “dark side.”

  When, after 9/11, Rumsfeld sought to wrest control of the Global War on Terror from the CIA, he went to Cambone. In one of his famous “snowflake” memos, on September 23, 2001, Rumsfeld told his staff: “We want to think through designating Special Ops as the global terrorism CINC [commander in chief]. They’ve got a joint intelligence center. The effort has to be global.” That day, Rumsfeld sent Cambone a note, subject: “Capabilities,” asking him to look into “how we can develop additional unconventional capabilities in the Pentagon and troops, like Special Ops, only of a different type. We need greater flexibility and versatility.” Three days later, on the morning of September 26, 2001, Rumsfeld sent Cambone another memo with the subject: “Opportunity.” “Now is the time to fix intel,” Rumsfeld wrote, saying that he wanted to remap the command structure of US forces across the globe, “to reorganize our forces in Europe and Asia, to accelerate Army transformation, to reduce headquarters and to get homeland defense humming. There may be other things we could do as well.”

  Cambone would become a powerful shadow player with access to Rumsfeld and his team. One of his primary jobs would be organizing Special Operations activities aimed at killing and capturing people designated as terrorists or enemies by Rumsfeld and the White House. “They are all cast in the same mode, which is ‘let’s get the most high-tech gadgets for communications and weapons, let’s run these operations at the highest possible level of efficiency, let’s get some really good intelligence, so we can pick out individuals, and we’ll go kill them,’” said Colonel Lang. Rumsfeld had told Cambone, “We need to increase the total number of Special Forces.” In 2002, Cambone began reviewing ways to free up as many shooters as possible. This began with transferring some of the traditional tasks performed by SOFs to the conventional military, such as: training foreign forces, conducting airlift missions and serving as a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) for VIPs in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld and Cambone wanted all SOF hands on deck for kill/capture. Leave the rest to big army.

  In mid-2002, Rumsfeld issued a classified planning order to General Richard Myers, the chair of the Joint Chiefs, advocating a sweeping change in the way JSOC and other Special Ops would operate. Rumsfeld wanted “preliminary pre-clearance” for operations and maximum authority for commanders on the ground to execute missions.

  Rumsfeld’s goal was to reorganize the structure of US Special Operations Forces, blowing up barriers to allow for fast, lethal, global operations with no bureaucratic meddling from anyone who did not have a need to know. The Special Mission Units (SMUs) of JSOC, Delta Force, which was officially known as CAG, or Combat Applications Group, and SEAL Team 6, were attractive to Rumsfeld because they were accustomed to operating autonomously, even in the old days of regional commands being responsible for all troops operating in their Area of Responsibility. These SMUs formed the National Missions Force and were permitted to operate discreetly and globally without coordinating with the conventional command authorities. Rumsfeld wanted to make this model apply to all Special Ops Forces.

  “Today we’re taking a number of steps to strengthen the U.S. Special Operations Command so it can make even greater contributions to the global war on terrorism,” Rumsfeld declared. “Since 1987 the Special Operations Command has been organized as a supporting command, meaning it provides warriors and materiel to the various regional combatant commanders, who then plan and direct missions.” No more. From now on, Rumsfeld asserted, SOCOM would be its own boss—with a headquarters in Tampa, Florida, and regional “Theater Special Operations Commands” that could organize hits and other direct actions on a rolling basis. Rumsfeld said this was necessary because of “the nature of the enemy and the need for fast, efficient operations in hunting down and rooting out terrorist networks around the world.”

  In 2003, Rumsfeld created a new portfolio for Cambone, one that had never existed in the Pentagon’s civilian bureaucracy before, undersecretary of defense for intelligence. The new position was referred to internally as “defense intelligence czar”—and it came with unprecedented authority, as it forced all of the previously independent intelligence entities of the Pentagon to report directly to Cambone. This included the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists charged that the position was part of a drive “to shift the intelligence community’s center of gravity further into the Pentagon.” What this meant in real terms was that 85 percent of the nation’s total intelligence budget would be under Cambone’s control, with the CIA director controlling just 12 percent. “Rumsfeld wasn’t an evil man” a former aide to a Special Operations commander told me. “Rumsfeld had vision. He allowed people like Cambone to manipulate shit.” Conventional uniformed military leaders reportedly despised Cambone, with one senior army officer quipping early in Cambone’s tenure, “If I had one round left in my revolver, I’d take out Stephen Cambone.”

  Cambone’s right-hand man was a legend in the dark world of covert military operations, Major General William “Jerry” Boykin, an original member of Delta Force who went on to serve in both JSOC and the CIA. He’d spent his entire career in the shadows of US foreign policy, engaged in unattributable operations across the globe. As Boykin saw it, “Through the 1980s and 90s, SOFs saw great opportunities to get boots on the ground, to prepare the battleground, to shape the environment, and to collect intelligence” but only received “approval for less than 10 percent of the opportunities that existed.” These opportunities, he asserted, “were missed because of an unwillingness to take risks and a lack of vision and understanding of the benefits for preparing the battle space ahead of time. There was also a fear of consequences.” Boykin believed that US counterterrorism operations had become subservient to intelligence standards that required nearly 100 percent certainty of the target and that civilians would not be killed. He said he rejected the term “actionable intelligence.” “Give me action,” Boykin declared. “I will give you intelligence.”

  Some, though, warned of the risks of this approach. Running
US Special Operations Forces in CIA-type operations and “expanding their role in the way Rumsfeld intends could be very dangerous for U.S. foreign policy,” argued Jennifer Kibbe of the Brookings Institution, adding that using Special Ops Forces was “much easier than using the CIA. And this facility seems to appeal to Rumsfeld.” It meant that Special Operations “can conduct covert operations abroad without local governments’ permission and with little or no congressional oversight or recourse. If Rumsfeld gets his way, administration hawks may soon start using special forces to attack or undermine other regimes on Washington’s hit list.”

  Over at the State Department, Powell and Wilkerson began seeing the effects of this new, parallel operation being run out of the Pentagon. “Early in the so-called ‘Global War on Terror,’ we were encountering things like ambassadors calling or e-mailing, or messaging or cabling, that they had people walking around their capital cities, who were white people, six foot five, males, nineteen-inch biceps, and it didn’t take too long for the ambassador to figure out who these people were, and why were they there,” recalled Wilkerson. “We began to have to press Rumsfeld as to what he was doing, sending these Special Operating Forces around the world, without alerting the country team, without alerting our ambassador, the chief of mission in the country. It got to the point where we actually had a death down in South America where one of these people got a little bit inebriated one night and pulled his weapon and he killed a taxi driver in that country, and we had to whip him out of the country real quickly.” Wilkerson added: “I am not even sure Rumsfeld knew some of the [operations] that the vice president’s office was” running.

  “It grew and went out of control under the vice president. It kinda went wild,” Cannistraro, the former senior CIA officer, told me. “There were people at the Pentagon given the responsibility to run ‘special Special Operations,’ that didn’t go through the regular chain of command, and that were kept separate from coordination with CIA, or the State Department, or other elements of the US government. And that was all justified on the basis that 9/11 meant that we were in a war, and this war would require special measures to deal with. And it got out of control. There were a couple of places where, because they weren’t coordinated, they weren’t informed, they killed people that were not real targets. They were wrong.” He added, “It happened, frequently.”

  The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence would eventually conclude that the Pentagon had “shown a propensity to apply the [Preparing the Battlespace] label where the slightest nexus of a theoretical, distant military operation might one day exist.” For some career army officers who had served in the conventional military, the developments they were witnessing inside the Pentagon felt ominous. “We know that the Geneva Convention was thrown under the bus, so to say, pretty early,” Colonel Douglas Macgregor told me. Macgregor was a decorated army officer who led the most famous tank battle of the 1991 Gulf War. He was on the Pentagon team that was charting out the early stages of Iraq War planning in 2001 and 2002. He said he was disturbed by what he was witnessing inside the DoD as Cheney and Rumsfeld began building up the SSB and JSOC. “To be perfectly blunt with you, I stayed away from it. I didn’t want to be involved in it, and I wasn’t interested in participating in it, because I had this fear that we were ultimately breaking laws,” he said. “Whether those laws were our own, or they turned out to be the Geneva Convention, or the ‘Law of War’ as we in uniform call it. One would have expected someone to stand up and say, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Secretary, Mr. Cambone, General Boykin, you don’t have the authority to suspend the Geneva Convention. That has been ratified by the United States Senate.’ But, we have another problem. We have no interest in the Senate, in holding anyone accountable and enforcing the laws,” he asserted. “So if you have no one in any branch—whether it’s judicial, legislative or executive—who’s interested in upholding the law, then you can do pretty much what you want. And I think that’s ultimately what’s happened.”

  Elsewhere in the military, there was great consternation at the possibilities for disaster presented by this newly forming power being asserted by Rumsfeld and Cheney and the global adventure they were plotting for US Special Operations Forces. “By entering the friendly country with military forces in execution of a military mission, the U.S. has committed an act of war even though our interest lies not with them but in the terrorist headquarters,” noted Colonel Kathryn Stone in a July 2003 report for the US Army War College:

  Most of the world has come to look at CIA de facto wars as a way of life because most powers benefit from their own CIA-equivalents operating in foreign countries, with nothing to be gained politically by claiming an act of war when another’s covert action is discovered. The world, however, is not likely to tolerate the U.S. throwing its regular military muscle around in a covert fashion. The world will rightly ask: Where does it stop? If the U.S. employs SOF to conduct deniable covert action, then is the next step a clandestine tomahawk missile strike, or maybe even a missile strike whose origin is manipulated to conceal U.S. fingerprints?

  Colonel Stone’s analysis would later prove prophetic, but such concerns were buried away. “I think a lot of ‘back-dooring’ went on and as a result they got a lot of running room. The President was kind of passive, in his first term he let them get away with a lot of stuff, and they had their own idea how to do things, which is much like the way the Israelis do things,” recalled Colonel Lang. “You know, the famous ‘Cheney one percent’ thing—if there’s any doubt, you kill ’em. That’s basically it, either capture them, or kill them. And that’s what they did for a long time.”

  Rumsfeld and Cheney were beginning to build up the infrastructure for waging an unaccountable, global war—and JSOC would be their prized weapon. They needed a forward-leaning general to run their secret war. They would find their man in the form of General Stanley McChrystal, US Army Ranger.

  The Troublemaker: Stanley McChrystal

  THE UNITED STATES, 1974–2003; IRAQ, 2003 —Stanley McChrystal was the son of an army general. He enrolled at West Point Military Academy in 1972, where he said he earned a reputation for being a “troublemaker.” He partied hard and seemed eager for action. One night, McChrystal and some friends staged a mock raid on one of the buildings on campus, using actual guns and balled-up socks as grenades. McChrystal was nearly shot by campus security and was later disciplined for his actions. A file full of disciplinary demerits, however, did not stand in the way of McChrystal making battalion commander. He graduated from West Point in 1976, finished Special Forces School at Fort Bragg in 1979 and commanded a Green Beret unit from 1979 to 1980, though he did not deploy during the most high-profile missions that were conducted during his early military career. “I missed Panama and Grenada and it bothered me,” McChrystal recalled. “You always wonder how you’ll do.” In the years following West Point, McChrystal pursued a dual track that would earn him a reputation for being a “warrior-scholar.” He picked up a master’s degree in national security and strategic studies from the US Naval War College and another in international relations from the Salve Regina University. McChrystal rose through the ranks of the Rangers and served with Airborne units as well as Special Forces.

  In 1986, McChrystal became the commander of the 3rd Battalion 75th Ranger Regiment and, by all accounts, revolutionized the training regime for Rangers, modernizing the technology available to its forces and increasing the tempo of physical training and for night operations. McChrystal’s first known work with a JSOC team was in the lead-up to the 1991 Gulf War, when he served as the army special operations action officer for Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. While McChrystal was deployed to the Gulf to help coordinate special operations, he would spend the war in Saudi Arabia and at Fort Bragg. At the time McChrystal was entering the world of dark ops, he acknowledged, “I’ve never shot anyone.” Instead, he would focus on the planning and execution of missions, developing leadership skills and moving up through the Specia
l Ops ranks.

  By the late 1990s, McChrystal had become the commander of the Rangers. Dalton Fury, who led a Delta Force team hunting bin Laden in Afghanistan, served as a staff officer under McChrystal in the Rangers before moving over to Delta. “My Ranger peers and I had a unique opportunity to see the good and the bad in [McChrystal]. I think if McChrystal were wounded on the battlefield, he would bleed red, black, and white—the official colors of the 75th Ranger Regiment. He is 110% US Army Ranger,” Fury recalled. “Even with a bum back and likely deteriorating knees after a career of road marching and jumping out of planes he doesn’t recognize the human pause button.” Fury noted that as a Ranger, “McChrystal was considered a Tier II subordinate commander under the Joint Special Operations functioning command structure. The highest level, Tier I, was reserved exclusively for Delta Force and Seal Team 6. This always seemed to bother McChrystal. His nature isn’t to be second fiddle to anyone, nor for his Rangers to be considered second-class citizens to the Tier 1 Special Mission Units.”

  Indeed, McChrystal fought for years to advance the position of the US Army Rangers in the Special Ops machinery, refusing to view them as a “farm team” for Delta Force. “The Rangers were, and still are, just as skilled in their Mission Essential Tasks as are the Tier I units in theirs,” recalled a former Ranger who served under McChrystal. “He believed that losing quality officers and noncommissioned officers to what many considered the true tip of the spear outfits—those granted the most funding, most authority, and given the premier targets—hurt the Regiment.” As Fury explained, in McChrystal’s eyes, “the Rangers were just as skilled in their primary mission of Airfield Seizures and Raids as Delta was in land based Hostage Rescue or the SEALs were in assaulting a ship underway.”