Task Force Black

by Mark Urban

  Off the hallway, behind doors with combination locks, were the offices of both the divisional and the brigade commanders. The more senior of the two officers, a major-general, was meant to handle the big picture, liaising with the Iraqis or Americans as well as up the national chain of command to Permanent Joint Headquarters back at Northwood. On this day, though, the general was out of the country. The commander of 12 Brigade, Brigadier John Lorimer, an able officer formerly of the Parachute Regiment, was there and in charge of formulating a response.

  After Campbell and Griffiths had been taken away by the Iraqi police, their movements had been followed. The car carrying the other members of HATHOR detachment had remained briefly on the scene without being spotted by the Iraqis. They tracked their colleagues to the Jamiat, then raced off to get more soldiers from a Quick Reaction Force at Basra Palace.

  As this information was fed back, two communications systems were in operation. The HATHOR detachment signaller was constantly in touch with Balad, and was also relaying situation reports to the green army. This single soldier stood at the centre of the information as the first phase of the crisis developed. And while troops and MI6 people at the Palace all began making preparations, they needed definite guidance about what to do.

  It was not long before the Predator tasked by the JOC appeared over Basra, relaying live pictures back to Balad. The British division did not at that time have the necessary equipment to downlink these pictures. They relied instead on a Sea King helicopter equipped with a television surveillance system known as Broadsword. Since the pictures from Broadsword could not be watched in Balad or most British locations in Basra city, the system’s operator on board the Sea King, a member of the army’s Brigade Reconnaissance Force, became, like the special forces signaller at the Palace, another key figure, a thread by which the two captured men’s lives dangled. For if the SAS prisoners’ whereabouts was lost, their lives might soon be forfeited too.

  Inside the Jamiat, things were going badly for Campbell and Griffiths. They had been beaten up during capture and stripped of their equipment. The men were filmed and the pictures released to the world media. They were described as spies apprehended on their way to carrying out a terrorist attack. Across the Hayyaniyah and the other baking bastions of the Shia militias, word spread of the sensational capture.

  Not long after the Predator had arrived on station, different images grabbed the attention of everyone watching. The bloodied captives in the Jamiat were shown, as were the weapons, radio and other equipment taken from their car. The political sensitivity of the incident had just increased exponentially.

  At the airport, Major Chappell, the OC of A Squadron, arrived in Lorimer’s office. He had not returned to Baghdad with the rest of his squadron following the arrest operation a few days before and, hearing of the Jamiat crisis, he had gone to urge swiftness upon the brigade commander. The SAS wanted its men out as quickly as possible, but they were also worried that the TV images and charges of spying or terrorism levelled against them meant a show trial or some even more summary form of Iraqi justice was on the cards.

  Lorimer’s hands had been tied by PJHQ, which advised him not to take any step that might inflame the situation. He did, however, send a negotiating team to the Jamiat and put a cordon of British infantry around it, aiming to block the main routes to and from the compound.

  On that same September day, dozens of SAS soldiers, their families and friends had gathered near the regiment’s base at Hereford for the consecration of a new special forces graveyard. The regiment had long buried its fallen at St Martin’s, a nearby church. The churchyard was running out of space so the regiment had decided to create its own burial place.

  Few outfits in the British army devote less energy to spit and polish than the SAS, but this was one of those occasions when padres, ladies in hats and soldiers in spotless uniform were mingling. When the time came for the ceremonial unveiling, the serenity of the occasion was disrupted by mobile phone calls and text messages.

  Such is the nature of the special forces grapevine that communications from Iraq started coming through to officers and senior NCOs in their service dress. The place was soon alive with rumours. What were the army going to do to get Campbell and Griffiths out? Not much, many members of the regiment concluded.

  At PJHQ, consternation at the early TV pictures of the two captured men was followed by shock as shots appeared of the soldiers forming the cordon around the Jamiat coming under attack from angry crowds. Rumour had spread around the Hayyaniyah with dizzying speed, leading thousands of militant inhabitants onto the streets. Rioting broke out, with petrol bombs and bullets – both real and rubber – traded. As Molotov cocktails hit a Warrior armoured vehicle, Sergeant George Long of the Staffordshire Regiment tumbled out of his turret, ablaze with burning petrol. The images of him rolling off the vehicle were for many viewers in Britain the clearest possible indication that they should not accept government assurances that everything was going to plan in southern Iraq.

  The British embassy’s response to this emergency was to use its official channels to request the men’s release. An order to this effect was issued by the Iraqi Interior Ministry, but duly ignored by the officers at the Jamiat. Remarkably, according to a number of people involved in the day’s drama, neither the British embassy nor the divisional HQ at Basra nor PJHQ in Britain saw fit to inform the Coalition – that is, the American – command about what was going on. Despite the appearance of alarming TV images throughout the day, the British division in Basra had not asked General Casey, the top commander in Baghdad, what it should do or even informed him as to how they might rescue the men. One senior British officer reflects, ‘The whole command relationship broke down because nobody, officially, told the Americans what was going on, although of course they knew through JSOC.’

  By mid-afternoon the SAS, through Major Chappell at the Basra end and Lieutenant-Colonel Williams in the UK, were pressing hard for a rescue operation. It was at this point that they paid dearly for the command arrangements put in place two years earlier, under which SAS operations in Iraq were run through the Chief of Joint Operations at Northwood. Nobody, however, could be found in authority to approve the mission. Major Chappell could not get through to the CJO’s mobile phone. It later went around the SAS that the senior officer had switched it off because he was playing golf.

  The special ops people in Iraq knew that the police inside the Jamiat were preparing to withstand an attack. Men were being brought in with rocket-propelled grenades, and warned about a possible British helicopter assault. Given the mayhem in the streets outside, those holding Campbell and Griffiths might well have been wondering whether their prisoners were too hot to handle. They had withstood the pressure from a British negotiator and their own interior ministry to release the captives, but at length, with difficulties multiplying for them, the police decided that it would be better if the men were not in their custody.

  At the airport, after hours of consideration, and with little meaningful guidance from the UK, Brigadier Lorimer authorised an attack on the Jamiat. It would be spearheaded by Challenger tanks and Warriors. In his initial orders he gave no authority for the troops to enter any other building or compound.

  At this time, the Iraqis decided to move Campbell and Griffiths. Knowing that there were ‘eyes in the sky’ above the compound, they put dishdashas (long Arab shirts that come down to the ankle) on the prisoners, and threw blankets over their heads as they moved them to vehicles in the yard outside. It was a forlorn hope for the SAS men to think that they might be seen by one of the orbiting aircraft. But as they were forced into the waiting vehicles a struggle broke out.

  With the amount of trouble going on in the streets around the Jamiat, the solitary Broadsword operator in the helicopter up above the city might easily have been looking elsewhere, trying to help some of the soldiers who were engaged in running gun battles with the Shia militia. But he saw the scuffle in the courtyard and zoomed in
. As the vehicles moved off, the American Predator was not on station and so everything depended upon the man hunched over his screen in the Sea King, relaying verbally what he could see to those who listened below.

  Each new piece of intelligence caused A Squadron to tailor its rescue plan. Having arrived at Basra airport, its members commandeered some vehicles and went to the outskirts of the city, a couple of miles from the Jamiat, where they began their assault preparations. When word reached them that their two comrades had been taken through the cordon around the Jamiat to a house not far away, they altered their plan accordingly. A couple of blades would go with the green army armour to the Jamiat, while the main ground assault force would hit the house where Campbell and Griffiths were being held. Those involved in the events of 19 September 2005 still debate whether this second part of this plan, the house assault, was ever specifically authorised by Brigadier Lorimer.

  There is disagreement too about whether the SAS had reason to believe its men were about to be executed. Intercepted communications, however, revealed that Campbell and Griffiths had been transferred to a radical fringe group called Iraqi Hezbollah. If the militants were abandoning the constraints forced upon them by keeping the men in police custody, it was certainly not a good sign.

  *

  At 9 p.m., the order was given for the armoured column to move in. Warriors and Challengers sped past the crowds near the Jamiat, while A Squadron’s assault force moved towards its own target.

  Brigadier Lorimer’s armour burst into the police station, driving over cars and a couple of flimsy temporary buildings for good measure. The Iraqi police condemned it as vandalism and wanton destruction. One of the tank drivers later told friends it was the best evening of his life.

  When the blades hit the house to which their comrades had been tracked by the Broadsword, it was eerily quiet. They blew in doors and windows and stormed the place only to find ‘the guys had been left there in a locked room. So the assault went in without resistance.’ The squadron would later speculate that neighbourhood ‘dickers’ or lookouts had warned those in the house, who made good their escape. There was relief all round as the troops involved in the mission returned to base. But the reckoning for the Jamiat was just beginning.

  It was immediately obvious that the Iraqi political figures in the city, who stood to benefit from humiliating the British, would be livid. Mohammed al-Waeli, Governor of Basra Province, described the assault on the Jamiat as ‘barbarous’. His relationship with the British army was already difficult – one senior officer in Basra, describing Mr Waeli to me a few weeks after the incident, termed him ‘a crook and a bastard’. But once the name-calling died down there was a big problem. The Governor ordered his police force to end all cooperation with the British.

  The Jamiat affair demonstrated more clearly than ever that the Basra police needed more mentoring and supervision, not less. Yet in the weeks afterwards British soldiers who turned up at Iraqi police stations in order to inspect them or mount joint patrols were often turned away or even threatened. Sometimes they succeeded in browbeating a few officers out on to the streets with them. The IPS in the city had become a focus of overt conflict instead of the people who would help the British out of Iraq. In Whitehall they still believed ardently in a ‘conditions-based withdrawal’ where security improvements would allow Britain to turn its four provinces to Provincial Iraqi Control (‘Pic’), allowing their troops to move into the background or, in the jargon of the time, ‘operational overwatch’. Following the Jamiat incident, the path to improved security, Pic and operational overwatch seemed to have reached a dead end.

  British officers did not only feel the wrath of Governor Waeli. During the next day’s Huddle, just after his morning Video Tele-Conference, General Casey took his British deputy commanding general to task. This rebuke, witnessed by several senior figures in the Coalition military setup, ‘left a bad taste’.

  In the hours after the storming of the Jamiat, when the entire British effort in Iraq seemed to be tottering, senior officers and ministers were noticeable by their absence from broadcast media in the UK. The capture of the HATHOR men and subsequent assault on the police station had generated a torrent of comment. It fell to Brigadier Lorimer to appear on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme to justify his actions.

  ‘I became more concerned about the safety of the two soldiers after we received information that they had been handed over to militia elements. As a result I took the difficult decision to order entry to the Jamiat police station,’ said the brigadier, adding that ‘by taking this action we were able to confirm that the soldiers were no longer being held by the IPS. An operation was then mounted to rescue them from a house in Basra.’

  Even this version reflected the difficulty of the position that Whitehall and PJHQ had placed the brigadier in. Those involved are quite clear: the SAS house assault was planned before the Jamiat raid but executed at the same time. Some even characterise the attack on the police compound as no more than a diversion. But the brigadier’s words reflected the bureaucratic state of play on 19 September – he had been authorised only to move against the police station itself, as outlined in his initial orders. Later, John Reid, the Secretary of State for Defence issued a statement backing the troops. But officers who had taken part in the events spoke with great anger about the way their brigadier had been left as the solitary voice justifying their actions, while those in Whitehall silently made their assessment of the political damage.

  Issues of media handling should not have mattered too much, given the successful outcome, but they revealed deeper truths. These events caused bitterness in the SAS. At Hereford, in the hours before the rescue, there had been dark rumblings that the entire regiment should go on strike if their colleagues were not brought out – or rather that they should refuse to operate in Iraq if the government was going to be so weak. As one member reflects, ‘The incident brought out a huge number of issues: the infiltration of the IPS by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and the lack of will on the UK’s part to name but two.’ As for the Americans, he adds, they reflected that the apparent lack of British determination to confront that infiltration of the police or even save their own men were explicable ‘as part of their [the British] stubborn move to operational overwatch’.

  It was this feeling, flagged up explicitly by Steve Vincent in his last column from Basra, that the British were, by their inaction, actually making things worse in the city, that gained currency in the American military. From General Casey downwards, there was a suspicion that the British were so determined to get out as soon as they could that the increasingly ugly ground realities of southern Iraq could not be allowed to get in the way.

  As far as A Squadron was concerned, many were quite happy to leave the mess down south to the green army. The HATHOR detachment remained in place, mainly supporting MI6, but a commitment of only a few blades was an acceptable price to maintain this relationship. The rest of Task Force Black could return to its focus of developing operations in and around Baghdad, where the ‘forward-leaning American approach’ was more to their liking.

  There was, though, a reckoning even within the SAS about the Jamiat. Some were beginning to feel that the surveillance reconnaissance skills that had for so long set them apart, earning the esteem of the Americans, might no longer be possible in such dangerous environments. If even Staff Sergeant Campbell, a denizen of the Surveillance Reconnaissance Cell, had been compromised and captured, what future was there for such operations? And if surveillance reconnaissance was a busted flush, could the regiment find new missions?

  There was one last reckoning from the Jamiat; it was political. On 5 October a group of diplomatic correspondents filed into the press briefing room at the Foreign Office in London. It was a regular event, being conducted on background terms. The journalists would refer to their briefer only as ‘a senior British official’, or in other similarly roundabout ways. Their speaker that morning was William Patey, the British Am
bassador to Iraq who was on one of his regular trips home because of the presence in London of Iraq’s President.

  As the meeting got under way it became clear that Patey, normally careful in his diplo-speak, had some very blunt things to say about what was happening in southern Iraq, and in particular about Iran’s role in creating this situation. He reflected on the Iranian nuclear issue, and the election in June 2005 of a tough, ideological new President, Mahmud Ahmedinejad. He alleged that Iran was supplying insurgent groups in Iraq with sophisticated new bombs that had already claimed the lives of eight soldiers and two civilian security guards, and said the Iranians might be ‘sending a message’ about the nuclear issue. They might also be acting to frustrate Britain’s objectives, Patey commented: ‘If Iran wants to tie down the coalition in Iraq, then that is consistent with supplying insurgent groups.’

  This accusation brought terse – and predictable – denials from the foreign ministry in Tehran. But the Ambassador had let the genie out of the bottle, and the following day the Prime Minister joined the fray when asked at a Downing Street news conference with the visiting Iraqi President about the alleged help being given to insurgents by Iran.

  ‘There have been new explosive devices used – not just against British troops but elsewhere in Iraq,’ said Tony Blair. ‘The particular nature of those devices lead us either to Iranian elements or to Hezbollah… however, we can’t be sure of this.’

  This statement from Blair put the issue significantly higher up the international agenda, and the Americans soon followed suit with their own condemnation. But, as the Prime Minister had hinted, there was a lack of clarity about the intelligence concerned. By making public an issue that was then being hotly debated in secret by the professionals, Blair may simply have been venting his frustrations, albeit at the risk of embroiling himself in further controversy involving the words ‘Iraq’ and ‘intelligence’.