Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  Colonel Patrick Lang, who once ran the Defense Intelligence Agency’s global human intelligence operations, concurred with Brennan about the risks of Rumsfeld and Cheney’s innovations in the command structure. “When you made SOCOM a supported command rather than a supporting command, then you’ve freed [JSOC] up to do all kinds of things,” he said. “To do that kind of thing without coordinating with the US ambassador of that country, or with the host country’s government is just kind of banditry, really. I mean, you’re asking for retribution of some kind by somebody on your own turf, against your own people. It’s not a good idea, at all.”

  Critics be damned, though, the JSOC Iraq model was about to go on tour. “You look at our Special Operations Forces, you have the ability to wage war, in a very low key way, and in a way that’s not going to command a lot of congressional oversight,” said Exum. The mindset, he said, was: “You have an empowered executive branch that more or less has license to wage war wherever it needs to, wherever it determines it needs to, worldwide. You’ve got this great hammer, and, you know, why not go hammer some nails?”

  IN EARLY 2005, a behind-the-scenes scuffle broke out between the CIA, CENTCOM and the Pentagon over who should take the lead in targeting al Qaeda in Pakistan after some US intelligence reports suggested that al Qaeda’s number-two man, Ayman al Zawahiri, was believed to be attending a meeting in the tribal area of Bajaur in Waziristan. General McChrystal pushed hard for a JSOC raid to capture Zawahiri, and some CIA officials wanted him to do so without informing the US ambassador in Islamabad, Ryan Crocker. Anthony Shaffer said that he and US Special Operations planners had wanted to conduct such missions without informing the CIA, either. “We felt that there was a likelihood at some point that CIA would—either inadvertently or with knowledge—give the ISI information relating to what we were doing,” he told me. “The idea was, to be blunt about it, to go it alone. We felt that we could not trust the CIA or the Pakistanis, to any great degree.” He added: “There are just some targets the Pakistanis would never cooperate with us to get.”

  The CIA, however, was well aware of this operation. Teams of Navy SEALs and Army Rangers in Afghanistan were actually preparing to board aircraft for the operation, which included as many as one hundred commandos, when the fighting among the CIA, CENTCOM and the Pentagon leadership became so contentious that the operation was grounded. A former CIA officer told the New York Times that as the raid was being debated, he had “told the military guys that this thing was going to be the biggest folly since the Bay of Pigs.”

  Shaffer said that the rules for striking inside Pakistan had “changed dramatically” and “became much more restrictive to the point of where I think it was nearly impossible,” adding, “The format of the war changed under our feet.” General McChrystal, Shaffer said, “continued to push for authority to do things in Pakistan,” adding, “I know for a fact that there was a policy decision made at some level that restricted our ability to do cross-border operations to deal with the things that we all believed from my level was the real issue. Pakistan was the real issue, not Afghanistan.”

  But then, in October 2005, Pakistan suffered a massive 7.6 magnitude earthquake. Some 75,000 Pakistanis died. Millions more were displaced. JSOC and the CIA took advantage of the disorder to fill the country with operatives, contractors and commandos, escaping requisite ISI background checks. According to journalists Marc Ambinder and D. B. Grady, the JSOC intelligence teams that entered Pakistan with the CIA had multiple goals, including the cultivation of informant rings to collect information on al Qaeda, as well as intelligence gathering related to how Pakistan transported its nuclear weapons. The elite US force also aimed to penetrate the ISI.

  “Under a secret program code-named SCREEN HUNTER, JSOC, augmented by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and contract personnel, was authorized to shadow and identify members of the ISI suspected of being sympathetic to al-Qaeda,” Ambinder and Grady wrote. “It is not clear whether JSOC units used lethal force against these ISI officers: one official said that the goal of the program was to track terrorists through the ISI by using disinformation and psychological warfare.”

  Despite this incredible opportunity, neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan would be given top billing in the Bush administration’s war plan. Instead, the top-tier operators from JSOC and the CIA were again redirected to Iraq to confront the rapidly spreading insurgency, which had made a farce of the administration’s claims that US forces would be welcomed as liberators. The CIA’s unit responsible for hunting down bin Laden, Alec Station, was shut down. “This will clearly denigrate our operations against Al Qaeda,” declared former senior CIA official Michael Scheuer, the unit’s first director. “These days at the agency, bin Laden and Al Qaeda appear to be treated merely as first among equals.”

  The head of the CIA’s clandestine operations branch, Jose Rodriguez, reorganized the CIA’s secret US war in Pakistan under the code name “Operation Cannonball.” In theory, it was an attempt to ratchet up the targeting of al Qaeda. But with most of the veteran CIA and Special Ops assets bogged down in Iraq, the operation was largely staffed by inexperienced operatives. “You had a very finite number” of agents with operational experience in the Islamic world, a former senior intelligence official told the New York Times. “Those people all went to Iraq. We were all hurting because of Iraq.” The secret war in Pakistan became largely a drone bombing campaign, described by CIA officers at the US Embassy in Islamabad as “boys with toys.” The drone campaign successfully took out several suspected al Qaeda figures and reportedly narrowly missed Zawahiri, but it also resulted in scores of civilians being killed, sparking protests and outrage among Pakistanis.

  Although CIA drone strikes became the lead US weapon in Pakistan during this period, JSOC forces did, at times, manage to conduct sporadic ground operations, albeit “with a great deal of protest” from the Pakistanis, according to Shaffer. In a raid in 2006 in Damadola in Bajaur, Navy SEALs from DEVGRU targeted a suspected al Qaeda house and detained several people. “They choppered in, rappelled down and went into the compound,” a former US official familiar with the operation told the Los Angeles Times. “It was tactically very well executed.” Pakistani media sources characterized the operation a bit differently. “American soldiers had violated Pakistani airspace, flown to the village in helicopters, killed eight persons in the home of a cleric Maulana Noor Mohammad, and taken away five others to Afghanistan,” reported journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai.

  With resources spread thin in Pakistan as a result of the intensifying insurgency in Iraq, the Bush administration began outsourcing its war in Pakistan. Enter Blackwater, Erik Prince’s secretive mercenary company already infamous for its work in Iraq. Like the CIA, Blackwater had its own cover: diplomatic security. From the early stages of the launch of the Global War on Terror, its operatives were able to deploy in large numbers to war zones as bodyguards for US officials. Blackwater was the elite Praetorian Guard for the senior officials running the US occupation of Iraq and simultaneously worked for the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA providing security for their operations in hostile zones across the globe.

  The company additionally won contracts for training foreign military forces, including Pakistan’s Frontier Corps, the federal paramilitary force officially responsible for on-the-ground strikes against suspected terrorists or militants in the tribal areas.

  Meanwhile, across the border in Afghanistan, Blackwater controlled four Forward Operating Bases, including the closest US base to the Pakistan border. All of this was very appealing to both JSOC and the CIA.

  According to Shaffer, among Blackwater’s roles for the CIA was training Afghan militias to do cross-border raids into Pakistan, which offered deniability to the United States. “I handled two of their—the CIA/Blackwater—KIAs [killed in action], killed while they were out on a mission... essentially performing a Special Operations mission, training Afghan cadre militia to do cross border stuff,” Shaffer r
ecalled. He added: “This is clearly something they were doing that they didn’t like having talked about.” One of the reasons Blackwater was used, he said, “was to avoid oversight.”

  Many of Blackwater’s elite operatives, particularly those who worked for its most sensitive division, Blackwater SELECT, were veterans of US Special Operations. It wasn’t hard for them, therefore, to serve two masters: the CIA and JSOC. While the CIA was, by mandate, concerned with an array of intelligence functions, JSOC had one central mission worldwide: the killing or capture of High Value Targets, HVTs. In 2006, twelve “tactical action operatives” from Blackwater were recruited for a secret JSOC raid inside Pakistan, targeting an al Qaeda facility. The operation was code-named “Vibrant Fury.” The involvement of Blackwater demonstrated how central the company had become to covert US actions.

  IN 2005, Abu Musab al Zarqawi escalated his merciless campaign targeting Iraqi Shiites as well as Sunni Muslims he perceived as being weak or ineffectual. Al Qaeda’s central leadership, believing that the killing of Muslims by Zarqawi would backfire, reached out to the Jordanian militant. Ayman al Zawahiri wrote to Zarqawi in July 2005. Bin Laden’s deputy heaped praise on Zarqawi for his role in the jihad, while emphasizing that the first goal in Iraq should be to expel the US invaders. The sectarian war against Shiites, Zawahiri declared, was “secondary in importance to outside aggression” and al Qaeda in Iraq should focus on supporting a popular revolt against the Americans. Zawahiri warned Zarqawi:

  In the absence of this popular support, the Islamic mujahed movement would be crushed in the shadows, far from the masses who are distracted or fearful, and the struggle between the Jihadist elite and the arrogant authorities would be confined to prison dungeons far from the public and the light of day. This is precisely what the secular, apostate forces that are controlling our countries are striving for. These forces don’t desire to wipe out the mujahed Islamic movement, rather they are stealthily striving to separate it from the misguided or frightened Muslim masses. Therefore, our planning must strive to involve the Muslim masses in the battle, and to bring the mujahed movement to the masses.

  Zarqawi, however, seemed to pay Zawahiri no mind. In early 2006, Zarqawi’s group formed a Shura Council of the Mujahedeen, which promptly threatened Sunni leaders in Anbar Province—one of the front lines against the United States—that if they did not join al Qaeda, the group would “make you an example to each and every one.” In February 2006, Zarqawi’s group bombed one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, the Askariyya Mosque in Samarra, destroying its famed golden dome. The brief period of a unified national uprising against the Americans in Iraq was over. Zarqawi had made a tremendous tactical mistake by waging a war against the Sunni tribes in Anbar. It pushed the once anti-US tribes into an alliance with the occupation. America gave them arms, money and support in return for fighting Zarqawi’s group. Combined with the US support for Shiite death squads, the United States had succeeded in an Iraqicization of its war on terrorism.

  Although General Petraeus would be credited years later with “winning” the Iraq War through a troop “surge,” he had also, along with Zarqawi, helped to destroy Iraq and create a sectarian bloodbath that would live on well past the US occupation. Petraeus would continue his rise to prominence and power within the US national security apparatus, but Zarqawi’s days were numbered. In June 2006 JSOC found, fixed and finished the Jordanian terrorist. On June 7, members of the task force deployed in a palm grove in Hibhib, to which US and Jordanian intel had traced Zarqawi. Some of the commandos descended on the village after scaling down ropes dangling from helicopters. Within moments, the task force had the village surrounded. According to Iraqis on the scene, the US forces came under fire from a home situated in a date grove, sparking a brief firefight. The American forces decided not to take any risks to their personnel and called in an F-16, which fired a laser-guided five-hundred-pound bomb on the house. An identical strike hit the home a short time later. Zarqawi was dead.

  “A Lot of It Was of Questionable Legality”

  SOURCE: “HUNTER” —Despite the fact that I began covering US wars in the 1990s, spending extensive time in Yugoslavia and Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, JSOC was not on my radar until well after the US occupation of Iraq was under way. I had no sense of the scope of JSOC’s operations or how it interacted (or didn’t) with conventional military units or the CIA. My personal gateway into JSOC was through sources I had developed while working on my investigation into the private military contractor Blackwater, which employed an abundance of former Special Ops men, including many who had worked with JSOC and the CIA. In several of the Blackwater stories I was chasing, JSOC’s name was popping up regularly. As I began investigating what was becoming an increasingly global covert war, I received an electronic communication from a man who could help make sense of this highly secretive world. When we first began communicating, I was a bit paranoid about him. My computer had just been hacked and I had received a series of threatening phone calls and e-mails pertaining to my work on Blackwater and on JSOC. So when he reached out to me, the timing seemed suspicious.

  He presented himself to me as a patriotic American who believed in the Global War on Terror but said he was deeply concerned about the role that Blackwater was playing in it. He had read my book on the company, seen me on TV, and decided to get in touch. Initially, he didn’t say anything about JSOC. We just talked about Blackwater. When I would press him on his own role in various US wars, he would change the subject or be so vague in his descriptions that he could have been almost anyone in any unit. Eventually, after we communicated through encrypted electronic methods for a few months, I came to believe that he was genuinely interested in helping me understand what the JSOC world was about. After we built up trust, he told me he would talk to me about what he does on one condition: we do it in person.

  I decided to call him “Hunter” because when I finally met him, it was at a dingy motel a stone’s throw from Fort Belvoir in Virginia, the home of JSOC’s intelligence wing. The motel was called “The Hunter.” It turned out to be an appropriate venue for the first of what would be many meetings over the years. Hunter had served under General McChrystal, Admiral McRaven and various Special Ops task force commanders, and he had a front-row seat for the secretive organization’s operations at the most transformative moment in its history.

  There is not much I can publicly reveal about what Hunter did or does because of the tight-knit nature of the Special Ops community and because I gave him my word that I would never compromise his identity. The members of that community almost never speak to reporters, and certainly not about some of the most sensitive operations they have conducted. What I can say is that after I began meeting with Hunter, I eventually pressed him to give me evidence that he was who he said he was and had participated in or witnessed the events he gave me information about. Over the years, he would show me his various DoD badges and evidence of his clearances, as well as photos of himself in countries around the world. I vetted his documents with knowledgeable sources, while concealing his identity, and verified that he was the real deal. Beyond saying that he worked with JSOC and on several classified task forces involving operations on acknowledged and unacknowledged battlefields, there is little more that I can, in good faith, share about him.

  Over the course of several years and scores of meetings and conversations, Hunter shared with me his analysis of JSOC’s rise. He was clear that he would not divulge classified information to me and would not compromise the integrity of any operations. He told me he has great reverence for General McChrystal and Admiral McRaven and described the people who make up JSOC as the best warriors available to the United States, calling them “people that have a true belief in the nation and our ideals.” He described the training required to produce SEALs, Delta Force and other operators as the most rigorous on the planet. These Special Mission Units “are given a large degree of autonomy to execute direct action, special reconnaissa
nce counterterrorism missions on behalf of the United States Government, almost exclusively in secrecy.” Because of the nature of their work and the secrecy surrounding it, he said, “there is a potential for abuse there.”

  Hunter attributed JSOC’s rise to prominence as the lead antiterrorism force after 9/11 to a belief within the Bush administration and the Special Ops community that the CIA was not up to the task of waging a global war. “There was a deep dissatisfaction with the level of human intelligence, and paramilitary operations that were being conducted on behalf of the Agency, and over time the Joint Special Operations Command, in effect, became a paramilitary arm of the administration, in that it would do the bidding of top policy makers in pursuit of political goals,” he told me in one of our early meetings. After 9/11, JSOC’s “mandate was expanded, significantly, and the funnel, if you will, was turned on. And there was billions upon billions of dollars poured into the Special Operations Command, which was then, in turn, directed to JSOC. And that coincided with a much greater latitude and freedom of movement—autonomy.”