Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins

by Andrew Cockburn

  In Iraq, JSOC components such as the elite Army Delta Force and Navy Seal Team 6 had been initially engaged in rounding up the “deck of cards,” the leading officials of Saddam Hussein’s defeated regime whose names and faces had been printed up by the Pentagon as playing cards and distributed to soldiers before the invasion. But that was about to change. A new kingpin had appeared on the scene, a suitable candidate to succeed Saddam as the advertised source of all evil in occupied Iraq.

  The Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (a nom de guerre, his real name being Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh) had been a petty criminal in his native country before moving to Afghanistan, arriving too late to join the anti-Soviet jihad but staying on to train with members of al-Qaeda. In early 2003, he was plucked from obscurity by Secretary Powell, who, in his notorious UN address justifying the upcoming attack on Iraq, singled out Zarqawi as the link (nonexistent in reality) between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

  A gifted organizer and propagandist, Zarqawi appreciated that self-promotion, as a ruthless champion of fundamentalism, would attract funds and recruits to his banner. In May 2004, a gruesome video appeared online with the caption “Abu Musab Al Zarqawi slaughters an American,” the American in question being Nicholas Berg, an independent civilian contractor kidnapped in Baghdad the month before whose head Zarqawi sawed off with a carving knife for the benefit of the camera. This and other videos had wide distribution and impact thanks to one of the occupation’s few success stories, the construction of cell-phone networks in Iraq, none of which had existed in the old regime. Inaugurated in February 2004, the Egyptian-owned Iraqna network, which covered Baghdad and central Iraq, was soon attracting subscribers at the rate of 100,000 a month. Insurgents rapidly adopted it as a tool for detonating bombs, while Zarqawi and others utilized its potential for communication and propaganda. Soon, it would become the most essential tool in the U.S. counterinsurgency arsenal.

  Thanks to his carefully crafted public relations campaign, Zarqawi was soon cast in Saddam’s old role in U.S. demonology. In many ways he was ideally suited for the part. Along with his evident psychopathic cruelty, his former association with al-Qaeda bolstered the notion that Iraq and 9/11 were somehow linked, while his foreign origins and the foreign volunteers in his group could be taken as demonstrating that the insurgency was the work of international terrorists, not disaffected Iraqis. To guarantee his high-value status as the cause of all ills, beginning in 2004 the U.S. military mounted a propaganda campaign aimed not only at Iraqis but also at Americans: internal military documents cited the “U.S. Home Audience” as one of the targets of the campaign.

  Paradoxically, having created a larger-than-life high-value target, the military command themselves came to believe in it. By 2005, according to a British report, Zarqawi was dominating the command’s thinking about the war almost to the point of obsession. A participant at the two morning videoconferences held by General George Casey (who replaced Sanchez in June 2004) reported: “[I]t was mentioned every morning [in both venues] in the mistaken belief that if you got him the insurgency would collapse.”

  Marketed as a master-terrorist, Zarqawi was an ideal target for Joint Special Operations Command and its ambitious commander. Rapidly jettisoning the redundant “deck-of-cards” targets, McChrystal set to work reorganizing his command for a confrontation with the foe. JSOC moved out of its initial Camp Nama headquarters at Baghdad airport, where investigators had discovered prisoners being tortured with electric shocks and held in cells the size of dog kennels, to a new headquarters at Balad, the sprawling air force base forty miles from the capital. Impatient with the cumbersome system by which intelligence collected by the elite Delta Force, SEAL, and Ranger units was shipped off elsewhere for analysis, he promoted a “flattened” system in which intelligence was analyzed on the spot and acted on immediately, producing further intelligence for instant analysis, and so on. Communal spirit among the headquarters staff was enhanced by the new working space, a single large room without partitions, in which everyone could watch the fruits of their efforts on “Kill TV,” large plasma screens on the office wall streaming video footage of air strikes and raiding parties in action. It was a very self-contained operational headquarters, with all components of the JSOC machine, including aircraft and helicopters as well as the men of the elite special operations units, together in one facility. Prisoners were also housed there, although for some time British special operations units were forbidden to hand over any prisoners to McChrystal’s command on the grounds that prisoners at the new headquarters were again being held in “tiny” dog kennels.

  The operation ran twenty-four/seven, three shifts a day. Although he was a two-star general overseeing a far-flung operation, McChrystal immersed himself in the day-to-day battle, working right next to officers, planning and directing the night’s raids, and often accompanying them himself. A videoconference, starring the general—one camera was trained on McChrystal throughout—and linking thousands of people across the globe, from intelligence agencies in Washington (timed to suit their convenience) to forward-operating bases in the mountains of Afghanistan, occupied several hours of his day and consumed unimaginable amounts of bandwidth. By 2007, writes McChrystal in his memoir: “[T]he O&I (operations and intelligence) was a worldwide forum of thousands of people associated with our mission.”

  This was indeed net-centric warfare in action, complete with all the esoteric (and costly) technology associated with the concept. The underlying premises of the revolution in military affairs had been that information is the key to victory and that it is possible to have near-perfect intelligence concerning the enemy, thereby enabling precise military operations, including the targeting of precision weapons with accurately predicted effects. Tellingly, McChrystal, at that time and since, liked to repeat the mantra “it takes a network to defeat a network,” referencing the theories propounded by think tankers John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, academic popularizers of “netwar” and staunch adherents of Andrew Marshall and the revolution.

  Successful net warriors of course demand “information dominance” (Arquilla served as a Pentagon adviser in that field during the Kosovo conflict). But despite repeated promises, such high-level target intelligence never quite materialized, as had been apparent in Vietnam, 1991 Iraq, and the Balkans. The arrival of the cell phone in war zones held out the prospect of a giant leap forward, rendering it possible, in theory at least, to map the enemy network, to determine desirable targets, and to target them. In the days of Task Force Alpha, sensors were distributed across the landscape in hopes that they would detect the enemy and signal his whereabouts. Later, as with JSTARS, the sensors became airborne. Now the enemy was obligingly carrying their own sensors—cell phones—with them at all times, not only continually broadcasting their location but also continually updating connections among individuals in the target network: who was calling whom, how often, who got the most calls, and so on.

  In the 1990s the leadership of the Drug Enforcement Agency had forged a profitable relationship with the National Security Agency following its adoption of the kingpin strategy. JSOC under McChrystal’s command similarly turned to the powerful National Security Agency, exploiting its technological resources and bureaucratic clout. NSA, under the ambitious command of General Keith Alexander, responded readily, instituting a program called Real Time Regional Gateway to collect every Iraqi text message, phone call, and email on the principle that it was better to “collect the whole haystack” rather than look for a single needle.

  No less prized than the actual recordings was the “metadata” of all calls made and received. So-called traffic analysis has long been an intelligence tool: the British, for example, used it in World War II to track German submarines via their radio transmissions even when unable to read the actual messages. Now, computer-aided analysis made it possible to display instantly patterns of communication within the relevant population. By looking at these links it supposedly became possible to construct int
ricate diagrams of the enemy network.

  First, however, it was obviously essential to find out people’s phone numbers. Zarqawi was unlikely to list his number in the phone book, and neither would anyone else of interest. That was where a classified technology developed by NSA and known by a variety of names, including Triggerfish, Stingray, and IMSI Catcher, was introduced. These devices in essence mimic a cell tower, getting a cell phone or cell phones, even when several kilometers away, to connect and thereby reveal the respective number(s) and location(s). Portable (very little power is needed to override the real tower’s signals) and functioning even when the targeted phones are inside buildings, this technology rapidly became central to JSOC’s manhunts. “It’s simple,” a former intelligence operative in Iraq explained. “I’ve walked past buildings with the device in my backpack and scooped up the numbers of all the people inside. So you have the numbers. Then, later, when we went to get one of those people, the device pings his phone and tells us where he is.” The devices, also known generically as “virtual base-tower receivers,” could be carried not only by a person or vehicle but also in a pod mounted on a drone.

  The implications of these developments in tracking technology were thrilling, at least to the NSA and its partners. An NSA document dated March 3, 2005, and later released by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden asks rhetorically:

  What resembles “LITTLE BOY” [one of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan during World war II] and as LITTLE BOY did, represents the dawn of a new era (at least in SIGINT and precision geolocation)?

  If you answered a pod mounted on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that is currently flying in support of the Global War on Terrorism, you would be correct.

  If and when everything worked as planned, the drones would not only help locate targets via their cell phones but also stream video of them and their locations before they finally broadcast dramatic imagery of their destruction for screening to an appreciative audience on Kill TV. But of course things did not always go as planned. Clearly, a lot depended on the phone being correctly associated with the target. But the target might easily have passed his phone on to someone else, or the original link between phone and person could be in error.

  Technology, whether in the form of signals intelligence or pictures, was always central to JSOC, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq. Artful jockeying of high-level connections back in Washington ensured McChrystal a disproportionate share of technical resources: at one point the entire non-JSOC U.S. force in Iraq had just one Predator drone for all purposes. The forceful Irishman, Michael Flynn, McChrystal’s intelligence chief, elevated this hoarding of resources to a matter of doctrine, claiming that “Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance [predominantly drones] are most effective against low-contrast enemies (i.e. people) when massed.… It is not enough to have several eyes on a target—several eyes are needed on a target for a long period.” By these statements he meant that he needed three Predator drones watching a target 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Given that 168 support staffers were required to keep one Predator 24-hour Combat Air Patrol in the air, this was clearly an expensive undertaking.

  A high-ranking British visitor to JSOC’s Balad operation commented that it smacked of “industrial counterterrorism.” He did not mean it as a compliment, but many in the system took it as one. Some spoke approvingly of the “machine.” McChrystal himself could wax lyrical about his creation. Reminiscing years later about happy days at Balad, he described his impressions thus:

  … as night fell, the operations center hummed with serious, focused activity. Soon, the rumble of helicopters and aircraft, some throaty, some a high whine, bounced across the darkened gravel and off the cement walls and barriers of our compound. The sound grew in layers, building like a chorus singing a round, as one set of rotors, propellers, or jet engines came alive, joined the cacophony, and then departed the airfield. Gradually, the chorus dissipated until silence returned to the darkened base.

  The entire operation was very self-contained and secretive, with little news seeping into the outside world of what was going on apart from discreet references by privileged insiders. Even other components of the occupation regime were largely left in ignorance; McChrystal communicated with the regular forces only at the highest level. A “flimsy” (a printed message on a secure fax) would arrive each morning in the Baghdad military headquarters’ SCIF (Secure Compartmented Information Facility), the repository for especially secret material detailing the previous night’s JSOC raids. The paper had to be destroyed in the classified shredder by noon at the latest. “It was bad stuff,” said one former inmate of the SCIF who made a point of perusing these short-lived documents. “They were really running riot, shooting up rooms-full of people, massacring families, night after night after night.”

  Such mayhem denoted what McChrystal later described as an artful shift in strategy. Despite the resources directed against him, Zarqawi had survived and expanded his operations, helping to kill hundreds of Shia in suicide bomb attacks and most dramatically blowing up the much-venerated Al-Askar Shi’ite shrine in Samarra in February 2006. The revised JSOC strategy, according to McChrystal, was to “disembowel the organization by targeting its midlevel commanders. They ran AQI day to day and retained the institutional wisdom for operations. By hollowing out its midsection, we believed we could get the organization to collapse on itself.”

  Such an approach indicated the influence of social network analysis, a fast-growing discipline in the world of counterterrorism in which esoteric algorithms were deployed to probe the structure and dynamics of enemy organizations. A leading pioneer had been the mathematician and social scientist Valdis Krebs, who deployed such analysis on the 9/11 hijackers’ relationships with each other to demonstrate, by using elaborate diagrams, that their conspiracy was undetected because they adopted a low profile and kept to themselves. Central to this approach was the focus on what was called relational analysis—the links between different “nodes” rather than “attributes”—meaning who or what these nodes actually were (so heaven help a pizza-delivery store owner getting a lot of calls from a terrorist cell). Thanks to such studies, the business of assassination, or targeted killing, could move beyond a crude fixation with killing enemy leaders to more elaborate scenarios for “shaping” the enemy network by killing carefully selected individuals whose elimination would make the entire structure more fragile and thus easier to disrupt. This theoretical approach was becoming ever more fashionable, spreading into every nook and cranny of the national security apparatus. A classified study commissioned by the Pentagon’s Strategic Command in 2008 found that there were no less than “185 separate Attack the Network efforts across the military that are not consolidated, centralized, or coordinated.” The study’s authors referred to this structure as “ad-hocracy.”

  Following such an operation, the social network charts, based on the intelligence monitoring of the network’s phone links, showed the disappearance of such links, indicating that the network had been disrupted. But the vanished links might have been equally likely indications that survivors had sensibly concluded that they should stay away from the phone and find some other way to get in touch. The network had not fragmented, even though it might have looked as if it had on intelligence diagrams of the network, which of course showed only those links known to intelligence. As Keith Dear, a Royal Air Force intelligence officer formerly serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, has acutely pointed out: “Targeted killing is often justified by the display of a social network chart before and after a targeted killing in order to explain how the group fragmented.” But, he explained, the charts ignored the fact that the group was probably using other ways to communicate. “The illusion that they fragment is based on the acceptance of the abstraction [of the chart] as reality.”

  While the happy operation at Balad was doing its work, another campaign was under way to promote the notion that the United States could turn the tide of the war by adopting COIN, a doctrine
of counterinsurgency that emphasized the cultivation of popular support as an essential tool. David Petraeus, the ambitious officer who parlayed COIN as a means to a rapid ascent through the ranks, succeeded in enshrining its precepts into an official U.S. Army Field Manual, FM3-24, published to rapturous public acclaim in December 2006. In the section devoted to “targeting,” intelligence analysts are required to identify “targets to isolate from the population, and targets to eliminate … the targeting board produces a prioritized list of targets and a recommended course of action appropriate with each.”

  McChrystal’s shift to targeting midlevel commanders would appear to have rested on this sort of carefully considered approach. However, as a former Pentagon analyst with an institutional memory stretching back to the days of the Phoenix program observed to me with some amusement, “You could suggest any set of targets and say their loss would collapse the organization—low level, middle level, top level, it can all be made to seem equally valid. In the end it always comes down to this: the poor sap with the most links gets iced!” Seeking to verify such a cynical conclusion, I asked a JSOC veteran who had worked closely with McChrystal in Iraq if there had indeed been a thought-out plan as to whom to target, with careful consideration of how that would affect the enemy network. “No,” he replied after pondering the matter for a few seconds, “it was all kind of ad hoc.” Fundamentally, McChrystal’s campaign was following the same trajectory of previous “critical node” campaigns stretching back to the strategic bombing of Germany in World War II.

  Ultimately, Zarqawi was run to earth and killed, though largely thanks to old-fashioned human intelligence rather than elaborate technology. His isolated safe house, located thanks to a tip-off, was hit with two precision-guided 500-pound bombs, shortly after which he expired. At the subsequent press briefing the military displayed a twice life-size matte photo-portrait of the dead jihadi in a large gilt frame that reminded some who viewed it of a hunting trophy. President Bush, who had promoted McChrystal to three-star rank in February, called with congratulations. The New York Post headlined “Gotcha!” and Newsweek, in its cover story, speculated that Zarqawi’s demise might be a “turning point in the long, frustrating war on terror.”