Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  Once JSOC took over, the task force quickly assembled a large operations center, made up of a series of plywood “B-Huts” and tents that functioned as everything from barracks to intelligence facilities. The heart of the base was the Tactical Operations Center, housed in a gigantic tent. As with the Joint Operations Center in Iraq, it was referred to as the “Death Star.” From this base, JSOC would attempt to hunt down and kill or capture the most wanted men in Afghanistan. Bearded Navy SEALs would walk around the base in civilian gear, and almost no one wore any patches to identify them to outsiders. The new JSOC presence didn’t sit well with the Green Berets and other “white” Special Ops guys who had been working for the past several years attempting to build up local connections by spending considerable time traveling throughout Afghanistan’s inhospitable terrain. Unlike the Green Berets, JSOC was not in the country to win any hearts and minds. Once JSOC took charge, the mission would no longer resemble anthropology. It was to be a manhunt, at times an assassination machine.

  Early on in McChrystal’s tenure at JSOC, Shaffer briefed him several times in Afghanistan. Shaffer had been pushing for authority to conduct operations inside Pakistan and had pushed his supervisor to clear ops across the border against al Qaeda havens, saying that “the intel indicates that most of the leadership is probably now in Pakistan.” Shaffer’s superior officer told him that “for now, it’s not an option. Frankly, and this cannot leave the room, McChrystal is trying to get permission,” but “CENTCOM and the Pentagon have told us we have to stay on this side.” McChrystal was determined to change that.

  PAKISTAN AND THE CIA have a long and complicated history, but particularly in the years after 9/11, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had come to accept that it would have to live with the Agency’s operatives running around its territory. At times, the two entities would cooperate, but more often the CIA found itself scrambling to thwart ISI attempts to stymie its operations, while the ISI tried to keep track of all the operatives the United States had working in Pakistan. It was a mutually agreed-upon relationship based on mistrust, dishonesty, backstabbing and, in the end, necessity. When the United States invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, forcing al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership to flee, Pakistan’s tribal areas became the epicenter of Washington’s counterterrorism operations. For certain missions, such as the capture of people suspected of a connection to the 9/11 attacks, Pakistan and the CIA would conduct joint operations. But JSOC believed the CIA was getting played and that the United States would have to operate unilaterally inside Pakistan if it was to break al Qaeda’s safe haven.

  To the consternation of the ISI, President Pervez Musharraf made a secret deal with JSOC in 2002 that allowed US forces to accompany Pakistani forces on raids against suspected al Qaeda cells in the country’s tribal regions. Shaffer was elated. “The question became, of how deep, how severe, we would violate the sovereignty of Pakistan,” he told me. Rules of Engagement for US Army Rangers and other elite “terrorist-hunting units” along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border stated that “entries into PAK [were] authorized” in the following cases: hot pursuit, troops in contact with the enemy, personnel recovery—and action against “the big three”—bin Laden, Zawahiri, and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar—approved by either the CENTCOM commander or the defense secretary. As a “general rule,” these terrorist-hunting forces were to forge no deeper than ten kilometers into Pakistan. US and Pakistani authorities would technically need to be notified soon after any such actions. But the reality was different: central to the operations was Pakistan’s ability to deny foreknowledge and to denounce violations of sovereignty after the fact. The United States would strike and then Musharraf would characterize any US incursions into Pakistan as an “invasion.” But just as the JSOC campaign in Pakistan was getting started, it quickly lost steam after many of the JSOC assets originally focused on Pakistan were, once again, redirected to Iraq to confront the mounting insurgency. As a result, in 2003–2004, Pakistan remained largely a CIA-controlled operation.

  IN 2004, the officials running the White House and Pentagon global manhunt issued a series of classified orders that would, when combined, prove to be an enduring blueprint for US assassinations and disregard for the sovereignty of nations the world over. The post-9/11 infighting between the CIA and Rumsfeld over who would be the prime entity responsible for running the manhunt and global wars had hit a defining moment. To fund the dramatically expanding scope of JSOC’s operations, Rumsfeld asked for a 34 percent increase in the Special Ops budget, from $5 billion to $6.7 billion. It was 2004 that secured JSOC’s place at the head of the counterterrorism table, a position it would keep through Republican and Democratic administrations. Seeking free rein for Special Operations Forces, President Bush developed an assertion that he and his successor, Barack Obama, would provide verbatim to Congress annually to justify the borderless war strategy that made the world a battlefield. “I will direct additional measures as necessary in the exercise of the right of the United States to self-defense and to protect U.S. citizens and interests,” Bush declared. “Such measures may include short-notice deployments of special operations and other forces for sensitive operations in various locations throughout the world. It is not possible to know at this time either the precise scope or duration of the deployment of U.S. Armed Forces necessary to counter the terrorist threat to the United States.”

  In early 2004, Rumsfeld signed a secret order that would streamline JSOC’s ability to conduct operations and hit targets outside of the stated battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. Known as the Al Qaeda Network Execute Order, or AQN ExOrd, it allowed for JSOC operations “anywhere in the world” where al Qaeda operatives were known or suspected to be operating or receiving sanctuary. The order, which remains classified despite attempts by journalists to obtain it, reportedly named fifteen to twenty such countries, including Pakistan, Syria, Somalia, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, as well as several other Gulf nations. The AQN ExOrd was drafted in 2003, primarily by the Special Operations Command and the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict and was promoted by Wolfowitz and Cambone as a justification for special forces operating covertly—and lethally—across the globe. Part of the order provides for what a Special Operations source called “hot pursuit,” similar to how some state police are permitted to cross borders into another state to pursue a suspect. “That’s essentially what they have where they’re chasing someone in Somalia and he moves over into Ethiopia or Eritrea, you can go after him,” the source told me. The order was signed in the spring of 2004, but it took fifteen months for Rumsfeld to get “presidential approval” from the White House. Part of the delay was a result of “bureaucratic drag,” but the CIA also offered up resistance, seeing it as another encroachment on its mandate as the lead agency tracking al Qaeda after 9/11.

  The insertion of Special Ops personnel into US embassies under the cover of Military Liaison Elements (MLE) was extremely controversial with the CIA and State Department. But JSOC personnel were not limited to those operating with official cover. It also had operatives deploying in various countries under “non-official cover,” at times using fake identities backed up by falsified passports, sometimes from other nations. Their job was to help prepare the battlefield for JSOC operations, and they often did not coordinate with the CIA or the ambassadors. If the SOCOM “presence in U.S. embassies abroad is an effort to pave the way for unilateral U.S. military operations or to enable defense elements to engage in covert action activities separate from the CIA, U.S. problems abroad will be certain to increase significantly,” said John Brennan, a career CIA officer who spent a quarter of a century at the Agency and at the time ran the National Counterterrorism Center. The use of MLE posts as cover for JSOC, combined with Cambone’s intelligence operation, was seen by some on the civilian side of the war effort as a dangerous precedent. But Lieutenant General Boykin, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, shot back at t
he program’s critics, blasting what he called “an assumption that what the secretary is trying to say is, ‘Get the CIA out of this business, and we’ll take it.’ I don’t interpret it that way at all.” Instead, he asserted, “The secretary actually has more responsibility to collect intelligence for the national foreign intelligence program” than “the CIA director.”

  It was during this period that Rumsfeld, Cambone and JSOC ran roughshod over the “covert” versus “clandestine” divide and did so with the backing of the White House. The Pentagon began defining “coordination” with the CIA as giving the Agency a seventy-two-hour heads-up that JSOC would be conducting an operation, and Cambone altered the definition of military “deployment orders,” which are required to be provided to Congress. Cambone issued new guidelines that asserted the right of Special Ops Forces to “conduct clandestine HUMINT operations” before alerting Congress. Not only was the CIA being boxed out of operations it historically held sovereignty over, but the use of JSOC to conduct intelligence operations kept Congress even further at bay. Combined with the Copper Green program, this effectively meant that JSOC was free to act as a spy agency and a kill/capture force rolled into one. Even some well-connected Republican allies of the White House were disturbed by what they were witnessing. “Operations the CIA runs have one set of restrictions and oversight, and the military has another,” a Republican member of Congress “with a substantial role in national security oversight” told the Washington Post. “It sounds like there’s an angle here of, ‘Let’s get around having any oversight by having the military do something that normally the [CIA] does, and not tell anybody.’ That immediately raises all kinds of red flags for me. Why aren’t they telling us?”

  Rumsfeld and his aides knew the CIA’s paramilitary arm was far too small to conduct a global war, and once the case was made to Bush that the Special Operations Command should have a global mandate as its own command, it was a done deal. In addition to Rumsfeld’s AQN-ExOrd, he persuaded President Bush to insert language into National Security Presidential Directive-38 (NSPD-38) that would codify SOCOM’s global role in finding, fixing and finishing off terror suspects. NSPD-38’s declassified description is as the “National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace.” Yet the directive, which remains classified, gave unprecedented latitude for JSOC to hit across the globe, effectively pre-authorizing lethal operations outside of any stated battlefield. “There are a lot of things in NSPD-38 that are not cyber related,” a Special Operations source told me, adding that authorization for Special Ops activities “were slipped in before signature.” Among these was a “broad authorization to launch Find, Fix, Finish operations with SOCOM in the lead.” He added that the classified directive was a “close hold” and estimated that “there are maybe five copies [that are] all in the physical NSC office space. Everyone jokes about the man-sized safe.”

  The global manhunt that JSOC was now fully empowered to engage in had multiple tracks. JSOC developed target lists of various al Qaeda figures they had authority to pursue globally, lists of “irreconcilables” who could be assassinated, others they would allow to move freely in an effort to gather intel on their contacts or cells. Although some may have seen what was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan with TF-121 as scandalous, it was in many ways the definitive vision of the type of wars Rumsfeld and Cheney had longed for: no accountability, maximum secrecy and total flexibility.

  Scott Horton, the human rights lawyer, said the program “parallels something that the OSS [Office of Strategic Services] did during the Second World War, and that CIA did subsequently. Now, to a certain extent, the function is not unusual. It’s not unusual for the military to have commandos who, in a theater of war, will seek out enemy command and control, with the purpose of identifying them and then killing them. And yes, that could be walking into a café and shooting somebody. And that would be traditional, authorized warfare.” But, he added, “What’s different here, is that suddenly the theater of war has become the entire globe—it’s become everywhere. And they’re looking at the possibility of assassinating people in Hamburg, Germany, in Norway, in Italy, as well as in Morocco, Jordan, Senegal, Turkey, Yemen, the Philippines and places in the African Horn. And, I’d say, in terms of law—it’s pretty plainly illegal once you’re outside of the normal theater of war.”

  At the end of 2004, Rumsfeld wrote a memo to his top advisers, including Cambone and Douglas Feith. It was classified FOUO, For Official Use Only, with the subject “Preparation of the Battlespace.” In the memo, Rumsfeld wrote that he was concerned that “the old phrase ‘preparation of the battlespace’ may no longer be appropriate terminology.” Today, Rumsfeld declared, “the entire world is the ‘battlespace.’”

  THE USE OF WEAPONIZED DRONES was still in its nascent stage in the global US wars, but surveillance drones had been in operation for years. The JSOC task force began using a system McChrystal’s intelligence deputy Mike Flynn referred to as “The Unblinking Eye,” in which drones and other aircraft would hover in a “long dwell airborne stakeout” to “apply multisensor observation 24/7 to achieve a greater understanding of how the enemy’s network operates by building a pattern of life analysis” that could be used to conduct raids. Using what Flynn called “nodal analysis,” patterns of movement were developed by tracking people suspected of being affiliated with an insurgent group or cell. Nodal analysis, Flynn believed, would have “the effect of taking a shadowy foe and revealing his physical infrastructure for things such as funding, meetings, headquarters, media outlets, and weapons supply points. As a result, the network becomes more visible and vulnerable, thus negating the enemy’s asymmetric advantage of denying a target.” He added, “The payoff of this analysis is huge but requires patience to allow the network’s picture to develop over a long term and accept the accompanying risk of potentially losing the prey.” Finally, the task force would conduct “vehicle follows,” where they would monitor the movement of vehicles believed to be used by insurgents. At times, the task force would use three combat air patrols to surveil a target or a group of people. “It is not enough to have several eyes on a target—several eyes are needed on a target for a long period,” Flynn asserted. This approach would allow for “persistent surveillance of a target while simultaneously developing the network’s pattern of life through nodal analysis and vehicle follows. It gives the finishing force commander more options than merely killing or letting an observed enemy go; with sufficient ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance], a ground force commander can demonstrate much greater operational patience, thus allowing a larger insurgent network to emerge.” What differentiated the JSOC forces from the conventional military, Flynn said, was that big army “forces tend to cover disparate targets for a shorter period than SOF, which tend to focus collection on a smaller number of targets for much longer.” JSOC needed to understand “pattern[s] of life of an enemy network.”

  The Special Operations Command also began working on a program for monitoring suspected or known insurgents. It was straight out of a sci-fi film. Known as “Continuous Clandestine Tagging Tracking and Locating,” or CTTL, it involved using advanced biometrics and chemistry to develop a long-range facial recognition program as well as a “Human Thermal Fingerprint” that could be isolated for any individual. They also used a chemical “bioreactive taggant” to mark people by discreetly swabbing a part of their body. The taggant would emit a signal that JSOC could remotely monitor, enabling it to track people 24/7/365. It was like a modern version of the old spook’s tracking devices made famous in films, where spies would weave them into an enemy’s clothes or place them on the bottom of a vehicle. The taggant allowed JSOC to mark prisoners and then release them to see if they would lead the task force to a potential terror or insurgent cell. Putting them on nonprisoners was a greater challenge, but it happened. The use of such technology, along with the accelerated pace of the killings and captures, would inspire President Bush’s declaration that “JSOC is awesome.”


  While Iraq was vacuuming up most of the US counterterrorist resources, the White House and Pentagon continued on with their twilight wars elsewhere across the globe, and the war in Afghanistan festered, all but forgotten. Bin Laden was still at large, as were many of his top deputies, with Bush’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” pronouncement relegated to a source of scorn and a symbol of a failing yet spreading war. Taliban leader Mullah Omar was underground, while Pakistan was heating up and Somalia and Yemen were increasingly showing up on the counterterror radar.

  As the US body count in Iraq increased as a result of the widening insurgency, President Bush would press commanders on how many people they had killed on any given day. The conventional generals would often balk at the question, but the answer from the JSOC crew was unequivocal. When asked how many Iraqis the task force killed in Iraq, McChrystal’s intelligence chief, Mike Flynn, replied, “Thousands, I don’t even know how many.” In Iraq, the task force had started to fulfill Rumsfeld and Cheney’s wildest dreams of what a streamlined, well-funded, secret force could do—and accomplish away from the prying eyes of Congress and the media, or even the CIA.

  Although Rumsfeld and Cheney had already been circumventing the conventional military chain of command and coordinating directly with JSOC, they now had all the pieces of their puzzle in place. The task force that had been built up and refined in Afghanistan and Iraq was going to take its actions global and away from declared battlefields. McChrystal began establishing a network of JSOC liaison offices in a variety of Middle Eastern and other countries to avoid relying on—or working with—US embassies or CIA station chiefs. “The Department of Defense is very eager to step up its involvement in counterterrorism activities, and it has set its sights on traditional CIA operational responsibilities and authorities,” asserted Brennan, who at the time ran the National Counterterrorism Center. “Quite unfortunately, the CIA’s important lead role in many of these areas is being steadily eroded, and the current militarization of many of the nation’s intelligence functions and responsibilities will be viewed as a major mistake in the very near future.” In the wake of the WMD scandal in the lead-up to the Iraq War, veteran intelligence professionals were already concerned that the independence of the CIA’s analysis was being compromised to adhere to political agendas. With JSOC being used as a parallel intelligence operation to the CIA—and one with its own force to act free of independent review—the potential for abuse of substantial and secretive military power was significant.