Task Force Black

by Mark Urban

  Back in the UK, at the Pontrilas training area, near Hereford, the special forces were conducting one of their gruelling selection courses. The same basic challenge of mental and physical endurance awaited those who wanted to join the SAS, SBS, or the new Special Reconnaissance Regiment. These units, along with the two Territorial Army SAS regiments and special forces signal regiment, all came under direction of Peter Rogers as Director of Special Forces. In addition, a battalion of paratroopers were also being placed under his command, having re-rolled to become the Special Forces Support Group. Due to the expanding size of this empire, Rogers had been promoted to major-general.

  Rogers, an Oxford graduate, had started his career in the Parachute Regiment before serving as a troop commander in the SAS and leading a squadron in the SBS. He was lofty of stature and attitude: highly intelligent, he knew exactly what he wanted to do with his directorate. Few in the SAS whom I spoke to in writing this book have a kind word to say about Rogers. Another senior officer, who assisted in his promotion, describes Rogers ruefully as ‘very cerebral, a cold fish. My conversations with him were never easy. I can’t imagine that he got on well with soldiers.’

  A self-confessed fan of the DSF from an intelligence background counters that Rogers understood the workings of the secret world very well. As for the man’s sometimes abrasive style, ‘He is an antagoniser by nature. He will meet you and try to unsettle you. As soon as he is with you, he is testing you – it’s conversational reconnaissance by fire.’ Certainly, Rogers liked to surprise or wrong-foot people, another critic describing him as ‘a yoga-practising special forces type’.

  Meeting Stan McChrystal in Washington that summer, things had not gone well. The Americans were already disappointed by the UK’s refusing their June request for Task Force Black’s support. When McChrystal had explained to Rogers what he was trying to achieve by ratcheting up the tempo of operations, so that the suicide bombing cells were hit every night, Rogers had queried whether this ‘industrial counterterrorism’ could work. The term ‘industrial counterterrorism’ ended up being used approvingly by many in special operations to describe the McChrystal approach – but Rogers had not meant it as a compliment.

  Richard Williams, meanwhile, had built a great relationship with McChrystal. The Commanding Officer of the regular SAS, boundlessly energetic and among the most aggressive field commanders in anyone’s army, had come to look upon McChrystal with intense admiration. The American’s long stints in Iraq dealing with every aspect of his command, his personal presence on many raids – despite holding a two-star general’s rank – and his missionary certainty that his new concepts for fighting a war could win success had all won Williams over, say those who watched them work together.

  In Balad or Baghdad and elsewhere Williams and McChrystal would chew over how they could get the SAS fighting alongside Delta as a fully integrated member of the team. The SAS commander had been convinced by those working in Task Force Black that the FRE mission was a complete waste of his people. So they went through the checklist: Britain was worried about the JSOC prison at Balad (the TSF). Work had been done to rebuild the cells so that they met British-approved standards – but it would take time and several visits by British officials for this to be confirmed. If the UK was concerned about mistreatment of detainees there, why not contribute an on-site interrogation team to ensure that there was no foul play? Rogers had also declined to adopt US rules in calling in air strikes or artillery fire (he considered them too loose), but surely there was a way around this too?

  Williams’s advocacy of this closer relationship with the Americans was, says someone well briefed on the arguments with DSF, ‘the last straw’. The Director of Special Forces had a long list of grievances: Rogers felt the SAS commander was an obstacle to his plans to ‘rebalance’ special forces between Iraq and Afghanistan, with Hereford giving up its role in the latter country to the SBS; and the DSF also felt that Williams was cold-shouldering the newest member of the family, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. But it was increasingly strident advocacy on the Iraq mission that caused Rogers to act. He summoned Williams to see him during selection at Pontrilas, and told the SAS commander that he was recommending his transfer. News of this bombshell soon spread through the senior ranks of the army. Some COs are occasionally removed, but for the head of the regular army’s SAS to be stood down was unprecedented.

  Rogers took his case to General Sir Mike Jackson, Chief of the General Staff, or head of the army, and other senior officers. It did not take the DSF long to discover that his plan did not command widespread support. Rogers cited the personality clashes between himself and Williams, and the generals told their Director of Special Forces that he would have to get along. ‘Jackson took soundings,’ recalls one observer of those fateful days in the Ministry of Defence. ‘This was early days in Williams’s command. If you fired him, you had to have a convincing replacement who was better and we didn’t.’

  At an army cricket match that September the two men made their uneasy peace. Williams agreed to abandon long-standing SAS objections to giving up deployments in Afghanistan. That would become the SBS’s war (at least until the Iraq deployment was wound up). The SAS would specialise in Iraq. Williams backtracked on rebalancing; Rogers on his attempt to get rid of his subordinate. But having placed the SAS’s operational eggs in the Iraqi basket, the resolution of outstanding differences with JSOC became all the more important. Events on the ground underlined that too.

  On 25 August Delta Force had suffered another costly reverse in the Upper Euphrates. Three of its seasoned operators and one Ranger had been killed when their vehicle was blown up. This brought to six the number of Delta operators killed in three months. Many others had been badly wounded. McChrystal could not have needed the SAS’s help more.

  Asking one senior US figure connected with these issues about this difficult time, he referred to Williams as ‘a superb commander; very gracious, very forthcoming, we shared a lot of briefings. Whenever he asked for something we found ourselves able to deliver.’ What did the same American make of Rogers? He would say only, ‘At the field level the [UK–US] relationship is almost seamless. The higher up you go, people get involved in all sorts of foolishness.’

  Despite these tensions, the American side of the relationship remained ready to help the SAS, even if the Brits could not reciprocate fully. Just how far JSOC would go to do this would be illustrated by events unfolding on the streets of Basra.

  6

  THE JAMIAT

  Early in the morning there is still some relief from the suffocating, heavy heat of a Basra summer’s day. Even in September the thermometer regularly tops 50° Celsius, but in the still half-light, as the bakers prepare their samoun and carters start hefting produce to shops that are not yet open, there are hours when it is a few degrees cooler. In this early morning scene, cars driven by British operators moved easily through the light traffic. Out of sight in their battered wagons were automatic weapons, anti-tank rockets and sophisticated communications equipment. The soldiers themselves had darkened their skins and wore cheap, locally bought shirts over their T-shirts. Their features were hardly local and a couple even had blue eyes, but from a distance they could pass. Their lives depended on their skill at blending in. The SAS was on the ground in Basra and on that morning, 19 September 2005, the cars’ occupants comprised the regiment’s entire presence in the city.

  ‘They were building a pattern-of-life picture,’ recalls one colleague. Their target was an Iraqi police officer called Captain Jafar. He was one of the men who ran the Serious Crimes Unit, an outfit that Basrawi bazaar rumour linked with all manner of vice, corruption and brutality. Among British soldiers and police trying to mentor the IPS, the joke was that Jafar’s squad had not yet realised they were meant to prevent serious crime, rather than perpetrate it. The cars made their way through Old Basra, south-west on the Zubayr road before turning northwards to the place where their target worked, the Jamiat polic
e station. This compound sat in the eastern part of the city where the sprawling estates of the Hayyaniyah and Jamiat, areas where there was strong support for radical militias, abutted the city centre.

  The man in command of the surveillance that morning was Staff Sergeant Campbell, who was also OC of the regiment’s residual presence in Basra, codenamed Operation HATHOR. With him in his car was Lance Corporal Griffiths. In a different vehicle were other men. The only further member of the HATHOR detachment on that particular morning, a signaller rather than a badged member of the SAS, was back at Basra Palace, monitoring the progress of the mission.

  Campbell was a highly experienced operator, decorated for his work in Northern Ireland, who had served with the regiment’s Surveillance Reconnaissance Cell, the in-house centre of knowledge and training in the dark arts of seeing without being seen. Placed in charge of the small HATHOR detachment, Campbell had a bewildering array of tasks and masters.

  One role was supporting the operations of the Secret Intelligence Service. HATHOR protected case officers who were meeting their sources in the city and brought agents in to meet their handlers, as well as mounting surveillance operations to develop the information those spies provided. It was a difficult job that had, for example, resulted in one member of the HATHOR detachment briefly being charged with murder after pursuing and killing an Iraqi after a shooting incident when the troops were in the city with their MI6 counterparts.

  Much of the detachment’s job consisted of target development: operations designed to validate intelligence, ‘finding and fixing’ the targets for strike operations, including those involving the deployment to Basra of Task Force Black reinforcements from Baghdad. On 19 September HATHOR was actually developing a picture for another player, the ‘green army’, the visible force of around 8500 who were, at that time, trying to hold the ring in an increasingly lawless southern Iraq.

  British army commanders in the city had at last determined that Captain Jafar should be arrested. However, the army did not think it should be done at the Jamiat police station. Some in the SAS later suggested that this was because the chain of command did not want the embarrassment of admitting that the IPS, Britain’s gangplank out of Basra, was rotten. There can also be little doubt that trying to arrest Jafar from the headquarters of the Serious Crimes Unit could easily touch off a firefight, in which British soldiers might kill their nominal allies in the Iraqi police. So HATHOR’s mission was intended to prepare that arrest somewhere away from the Jamiat. They needed to find Jafar’s home or some other convenient point. The task was one with a highly specific objective for, as one experienced SAS operator in Basra notes, serials like that on 19 September ‘were always done for actionable intelligence because of the risks involved in going out’. On this occasion the risks were to prove disastrous, not only for the men involved but for the whole British effort in Iraq.

  *

  By the late summer of 2005 the tentacles of militia power had spread through much of Basrawi life. Some, such as the Badr Brigade, had actually been allowed to act openly by the British since mid-2003. Others, such as Muqtada al-Sadr’s Jaish al Mehdi, existed in a never-never land where, despite 2004’s spasms of extreme violence, they had to be shown limited tolerance in order to help attempts to build political support for the embattled Iraqi government. In the southern city at the confluence of Iraq’s two great rivers, this acceptance of the militias’ power had disastrous effects for the police and wider community.

  The consequences of militia assertiveness and British acquiescence were best catalogued by a New Yorker called Steve Vincent. He set himself up at the Marbid Hotel in the city centre at a time when almost none of the British journalists considered it safe to do so. Vincent’s blog and articles written in the middle months of 2005 described a city in which young women at the university were beaten or killed for dressing immodestly, bitter political rivalries between militias were played out within a penetrated police force, and where British mentors often chose to look the other way. A small wiry reporter who had set aside his writing on the Greenwich Village art scene after 9/11, Vincent became increasingly impassioned about how the people of Basra, in particular its women, had been abandoned to what he called ‘Islamo-fascism’. In ‘Switched Off in Basra’, a fateful dispatch printed by the New York Times on 31 July, Vincent observed:

  An Iraqi police lieutenant… confirmed to me the widespread rumors that a few police officers are perpetrating many of the hundreds of assassinations… that take place in Basra each month… meanwhile, the British stand above the growing turmoil, refusing to challenge the Islamists’ claim on the hearts and minds of police officers. This detachment angers many Basrans. ‘The British know what’s happening but they are asleep, pretending they can simply establish security and leave behind democracy,’ said the police lieutenant who had told me of the assassinations.

  Vincent was particularly angered by the fact that, in training and arming the police while doing little to challenge the growth of militia power within its ranks, ‘the British are in effect strengthening the hand of Shiite organisations’.

  The power of these truths was such that somebody decided to act. A couple of days after the New York Times piece appeared, Vincent and his female interpreter Nouriya Itais were stopped on one of the city’s main streets in full view of the early evening crowd. The armed men who took them were dressed as policemen, and bundled the pair into a police car. After cruising around, beating them and calling Itais ‘a whore and a pig’ for being with an American, their hands were tied. They were then thrown out onto the street and shot. Itais survived, but Steve Vincent became the first American journalist to be killed covering the insurgency in Iraq. For the New York Times, it was naturally a big story. The paper’s stringer in Basra, a 38-year-old father of three named Fakher Haider, filed several reports on what had happened, capturing local feeling that Vincent had been murdered because he had exposed the ugly nexus of Shia extremism, criminality and infiltration of the police. On the day that the HATHOR detachment began its ill-fated mission against Captain Jafar, Fakher Haider was murdered.

  It had taken Staff Sergeant Campbell and his team just a few hours to complete their task. One colleague comments that ‘the incident happened when the serial was finished and the guys felt they couldn’t get any more of value’. But as they drove towards one of the main thoroughfares to the east of Basra, everything unravelled.

  Iraqi police had spotted the surveillance. Tension was running high because a few days earlier a leading member of Jaish al-Mehdi had been arrested during a large British army strike operation. Whether or not the militia’s supporters in police uniform realised there was a connection between the surveillance cars out that morning and the earlier arrest, HATHOR had in fact helped prepare it. A Squadron had only returned to Baghdad a couple of days earlier, following that raid. But on the morning of 19 September, the special forces soldiers on the ground were bereft of their SAS colleagues’ support.

  The IPS set up a checkpoint and stopped the car containing Campbell and Lance Corporal Griffiths. Moving in to pull them out, there was a brief firefight. The SAS shot at least one policeman and drove off. With Iraqi police vehicles in pursuit, they radioed Basra Palace, informing the signaller that there had been a contact. But their car was no souped-up wolf in sheep’s clothing – it was a cheaply bought Iraqi banger. ‘There was a point where they felt they couldn’t outpace the pursuers,’ notes one SAS soldier. ‘They wanted to try and talk their way out of it.’ They laid down their weapons and got out of the car and the Iraqi police bundled the British soldiers into their own vehicles. Two SAS men were in the bag.

  At the Joint Operations Centre in Balad, it was breakfast time. Key people worked nights, when the raids went in. During the early part of daytime those players were usually asleep and lesser mortals manned the shop floor in the quieter hours. Then the call from Basra came. Someone was sent to wake Colonel James Grist who, as CO of Delta Force, ran the JSOC operation
in Iraq. People began to filter in and the place began to crackle with the tension of an unexpected operational situation. The British liaison team, intelligence people, psychological operations (psyops) staff, all began to move about the JOC with focus and purpose.

  Grist was soon on the scene and briefed by the specialists represented in the JOC. Decisions were taken swiftly. A Predator was scrambled from its base at Baghdad, but the propeller-driven drone was built for endurance not speed: it would take two and a half hours to reach Basra. It was clear that Campbell and Griffiths might have to be rescued. Colonel Grist offered British commanders the services of a squadron of Delta. This was a gesture of American solidarity that would be remembered within the SAS long afterwards, but Task Force Black wanted to get its own people on site as soon as it could.

  At the MSS in Baghdad, there was a buzz of activity. Some twenty members of A Squadron, a platoon of British paratroopers from the recently deployed Special Forces Support Group, four signallers and a medic – more than fifty men in all – packed their kit, readied their weapons and headed out to the airport. There, an RAF Hercules was prepared for action. Within a few hours of the incident in Basra both the Hercules and the Predator were in the air and heading south.

  At the headquarters of Multi-National Division South East at Basra airport, the scene was quite different. There, officious notices were stuck to the coffee tables telling soldiers to clear up their mess, and in the airy hallway forces public relations posters proclaimed Anglo-Iraqi friendship. These realities, of a mission bound by rules and politics, were to define the staff ’s response to the apprehension of the two British soldiers.