Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins

by Andrew Cockburn

  “Things changed when we got Zarqawi,” the former Pentagon-based specialist in high-value targeting told me. “Morale was getting a little low, at least in the military, up to that point. There was a kind of fatigue setting in—I remember people were saying ‘It’s always failing, maybe it’s not worth it.’ After all, we’d had fifty HVTs on the Iraq blacklist in 2003 and hadn’t killed a single one of them. We hadn’t gotten Osama bin Laden, or Mullah Omar. So Zarqawi was the first really high-value guy we got, and we had several successes shortly after that. Zarqawi—that was when it changed.”

  A week after their leader’s death, al-Qaeda in Iraq named his successor, an Egyptian with an impressive jihadi record named Abu Ayyub al-Masri.

  Zarqawi had been dangerous. Al-Masri was worse.

  Whereas Zarqawi, as a former associate told American interrogators, had the prime goal of fighting for the Sunnis in Iraq, al-Masri saw Iraq as only part of a wider war against the West. Al-Masri repaired relations with al-Qaeda’s distant senior leadership in Pakistan, boosted his group’s revenues from various criminal enterprises, and cracked down on careless cell-phone use. He insisted on truthful reports from subordinates and improved the group’s digital operations. Suicide bombers were put to work editing and uploading propaganda videos while they waited to carry out their terminal mission. IED attacks and American casualties went into a steep upward curve.

  The U.S. military did not mount a propaganda operation to raise al-Masri’s profile.

  9

  KILLING EFFECTS

  In the summer of 2005, a small group of Americans gathered in the Jordanian desert to test a revolutionary weapon. If it worked, they expected to change the shape of the ongoing war next door. Among the testing party was Rex Rivolo, still working as a senior analyst with the Institute for Defense Analysis.

  The weapon was an airplane, a very small, cheap, simple plane designed to fly low and slow. Built by a Jordanian company, the $200,000 Seeker looked like a helicopter but with high wings and a pusher propeller behind the fuselage so that the view from the cockpit was wide and unobstructed. It could stay in the air for as long as 7 hours and 15 minutes, land on a narrow road or the open desert, and refuel with regular 87-octane gas from any gas pump. Its camera could transmit infrared and daylight color imagery direct to the SUV that served as its ground station. The pictures could be screened on an ordinary PC. It carried a pilot and an observer, and required a maintenance crew of just one. With an enhanced camera and other accoutrements the entire system still came to no more than $850,000, less than a third of the price of a Predator (which required a support staff of 168) and a tiny fraction of the bill for an air force jet fighter.

  Underlying the simplicity was a subtle concept. As weapons systems became more complex and expensive, they were bought in progressively fewer numbers. Because such systems were costly and scarce, their control tended to be pushed ever higher up the military hierarchy. But of course at that level control is exercised through mechanisms that are themselves complex and expensive. Think General Franks and his link to the trailer in the CIA parking lot, which was in turn linked via satellite to the Predator, which he could fire only after asking his lawyer, the secretary of defense, and the president. Meanwhile, U.S. soldiers, especially road convoys, were being shredded by a proliferation of roadside bombs. Rivolo and his teammates, led by a former navy F-18 pilot named Dan Moore, believed that an aircraft that could be bought in quantity and efficiently watch over a convoy or whatever else required attention would make a profound difference.

  Their experiment, in which Jordanian Special Forces “ambushed” road convoys protected by the Seeker, was a great success. Time and again, the attacks were thwarted by warnings easily communicated from the plane to the ground commander. The aircrew, as the test report noted afterward, could scan an entire area with the naked eye (using night-vision goggles when it was dark) and then use the sensor to focus on objects of particular interest. A drone, as the report noted, “would require systematic search of the same wide area through a small aperture (the soda straw), which would make the mission much more difficult or impossible to conduct from a UAV ground station.”

  The exercise was a triumphant endorsement for putting human eyes and brains close to the battlefield rather than filtering information through layers of imperfect video, fallible communications, and command bureaucracies. Accordingly, the team concluded their report by recommending that the plane be put into service in Iraq and Afghanistan. They printed multiple copies of the report and prepared to distribute them around the Pentagon. The response was swift. Orders came down that all copies were to be collected by a senior official in IDA and destroyed immediately. Higher authority evidently did not want publicity for a successful demonstration of a cheap and effective counterinsurgency weapon.

  Meanwhile in Iraq that summer of 2005, bomb attacks edged past forty a day. The country was awash in explosives, largely in the shape of artillery ammunition looted from Saddam’s arsenals. Thanks to what had been a very capable education system and a universal military draft, there were large numbers of technically proficient Iraqis with military training ready to resist the occupation with a cheap, easily obtained, and highly effective weapon. Improvised explosive devices, a term originally coined by the British when combating the IRA in Northern Ireland, had already plagued U.S. soldiers during the ill-fated Somalia expedition ten years earlier. A strongly worded after-action report on the Somalia mine experience had even described the ubiquitous U.S. Army Humvee as a “death trap” when struck by a mine. A decade later, soldiers and marines were dispatched to patrol Iraqi roads in these same vehicles, with predictably bloody results. Just as the blue force commander had been discommoded by Van Riper’s unexpected use of messages via motorcycles and mosque minarets, so too American generals were now nonplussed by guerrillas using doorbell ringers and cordless phones to detonate bombs made from recycled artillery shells. Even more confusingly, the enemy was not a single snake with a head that could be cut off but a plethora of self-contained groups around the country.

  In June 2004, General John Abizaid, overall commander in the Middle East, called for a Manhattan Project (the original World War II program to build the atomic bomb that had employed 135,000 people) to find a solution to the threat of the homemade bombs. Naturally, such urgency could prove highly lucrative for some. In November 2003, for example, Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Hughes, an army officer who had recently returned from Iraq, was commanded by his superior in the Pentagon to “stop the bleeding” from bomb attacks. Hughes had experience in the counterterror world and accordingly sought out some old friends, graduates of Special Operations units—“people who know how to shoot people,” as he described them to me—who were now working with a small Virginia-based security company, Wexford Group International. Hughes arranged a $20 million contract for Wexford to deploy teams to Iraq who, when they encountered an IED, were to “track, hunt down, and kill those who emplaced it, built it, financed it, and finally those who were actually responsible for it.” Soon, a number of teams, at a cost, according to Hughes, of some $200,000 per man, were in place in Iraq. By 2006 the company’s revenue had grown 500 percent to $60 million. The following year, still flush with counter-IED contracts, employee-owned Wexford was bought by CACI, a billion-dollar security contractor notorious for supplying interrogators to Abu Ghraib, for $115 million.

  To detonate their bombs by remote control, attackers were using low technology such as garage door openers and radio-controlled toys. The United States responded with high technology, which was good news for many. The well-connected EDO Corporation, for example, which boasted several retired three- and four-star officers on its board and important politicians on its list of PAC recipients, garnered a handsome contract to produce a jammer that would block the detonator’s radio signals. Adapting a system originally developed by the army for use against radio-detonated artillery shells, EDO soon began churning out thousands of $100,000 Warlock j
ammers. By early 2005 they were being mounted on Humvees and other vehicles. When they were switched on and working, bomb-triggering radio signals were indeed masked from the bombs by the jammer. As rush orders for more and higher-powered Warlocks poured in, EDO revenues soared from $356 million in 2003 to $715 million in 2006.

  Unfortunately, not only did the jammers mask the bomb-detonator’s signals, they also cut off all radio contact between the soldiers they were protecting and the outside world. Brandon Bryant, a “stick monkey” (drone sensor operator), witnessed the lethal consequences one day while watching streaming video of a military convoy in northern Iraq in 2005. The picture on his screen revealed what was almost certainly a mine buried in the road ahead of the vehicles; insurgents had burned a tire to melt the tarmac, leaving a telltale heat signature. From Nevada, Bryant and his fellow crewman tried frantically to alert the soldiers as they rolled inexorably toward the buried bomb. Their efforts were in vain; the convoy was deaf to outside warning thanks to its own technology. As Bryant watched in agonized frustration, the first vehicle rolled over the bomb without mishap. The second exploded in a ball of flame, killing two soldiers and wounding three more.

  The men did not have to die; their jammers were already irrelevant. Less than two months after their introduction, the Iraqi insurgents largely stopped using radio signals and switched to other methods. The bomb that Bryant saw explode was almost certainly detonated by a nearby “triggerman” via a buried command wire. Soon, Iraqi highways became so strewn with old detonator wires that bomb makers simply recycled them. Meanwhile, jammer production rolled on. In September 2007 the giant defense contractor ITT announced it was buying EDO for $1.7 billion. By that time practically every Humvee in Iraq was sporting two $100,000 Warlocks.

  Thanks to the weight of tradition and its obligations to corporate partners, the U.S. military machine was clearly adapting more slowly than its light-footed opponents, incapable of absorbing unconventional concepts such as the Seeker, which could at a pinch have landed on the highway and warned the doomed vehicle. The Warlocks may have been profitable for EDO, but even bigger money flew overhead in systems such as Compass Call Nova, a $100 million cornucopia of electronic wizardry assembled by the $10 billion contractor L-3 Communications under the aegis of Big Safari, the secretive air force unit that had overseen development of the Predator drone. Originally designed to jam the communications of a Warsaw Pact army rolling across Germany, these aircraft now patrolled the roads and towns of Iraq and Afghanistan at the significant cost of $34,000 per hour, seeking not only to jam the tiny, distant pulse of a garage door opener before it could detonate a $25 bomb but even to “predetonate” buried bombs before they could harm any friendly forces.

  Amid the torrent of resources being flung at the bomb problem, Rex Rivolo got an invitation to go to Iraq. It came from Jim Hickey, the colonel who had led the final successful search for Saddam and who thought cutting off the head of a snake made the rest of the snake less viable. Soon after that triumph, Hickey’s tour in Iraq had ended, and he was posted back to Washington, temporarily assigned to IDA, the Pentagon think tank where Rivolo worked. As well as being a fighting soldier who relished combat, Hickey was also a military intellectual. Fluent in Russian, German, and French, he liked nothing better than a weighty discussion on operational intelligence and similar topics. By the fall of 2005, however, he was keen to return to the war zone and assess progress. Like Rivolo, he had a habit of delivering home truths regardless of the rank of the listener, a trait that was not necessarily beneficial to his career. Perhaps because he recognized a kindred spirit, he got the former fighter pilot assigned to accompany him on a battlefield investigation of the IED problem.

  In mid-October 2005, the pair flew into Baghdad. Skipping the headquarters briefings, they headed out into the field, touring beleaguered army bases across Iraq, a dark and ugly world far removed from Washington, or the requisitioned Baghdad palaces from which the U.S. generals thought they were managing the war.

  “It was a terrible trip,” recalls Rivolo. “We went from base to base to base, sleeping in sleeping bags in the corner of dirt fields. Stuff that I would have done gladly when I was twenty, not when I was sixty.” But he found out a lot, mostly because of whom he was with. Hickey was from the tribe, someone whom the combat soldiers recognized as one of their own. “Hickey knew everybody,” explained Rivolo. “Once you showed up with Hickey, they would tell you the truth. If you showed up without Hickey, they wouldn’t tell you anything. Normally when you show up and say ‘we’re a team from the Pentagon and we’re here to investigate,’ they just blow you off because they don’t trust you. But once you show up with one of them, you’ve been anointed.”

  So officers and men in the forward operating bases talked freely about the realities of the war: the pointless “presence patrols” they were ordered to lead through the hostile streets, enclosed in their steel vehicles while waiting for the searing blast of an IED; the futility of panaceas such as the million-dollar observation balloon that could spot mine layers but couldn’t tell ground troops where they were; the eighteen-year-old female air force reservist left alone for an entire night guarding an incinerated corpse in a bombed-out Humvee while different headquarters bickered over who was responsible for rescuing her.

  When the topic of conversation came around to ways of defeating the bombs, everyone was in agreement. “They would have charts up on the wall showing the insurgent cells they were facing, often with the names and pictures of the guys running them,” Rivolo remembers. “When we asked about going after the high-value individuals and what effect it was having, they’d say, ‘Oh yeah, we killed that guy last month, and we’re getting more IEDs than ever.’ They all said the same thing, point blank: ‘[O]nce you knock them off, a day later you have a new guy who’s smarter, younger, more aggressive and is out for revenge.’”

  For Rivolo, this sounded all too familiar. The U.S. strategy to overcome the Iraqi insurgency looked like a rerun of the DEA’s kingpin strategy. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more it seemed that the insurgency had a lot in common with the narcotics business. In each case, the activity was carried out by a number of organizations, each with a similar hierarchy. All of them shared the same objective: for the drug dealers it was selling drugs and making money, whereas for the insurgents it was keeping Iraq in a state of chaos, killing Americans, and hopefully gaining power. They were “self-organizing,” meaning that no outside force had set them up, and they were “self-healing,” meaning that when they were damaged by the loss of a member, they adjusted by compensating with recruits and promotions. Most fundamentally, both activities induced different trade-offs between risk and reward at different levels. The bosses of the cocaine cartels accepted a lot of risk because the rewards were so huge: billions of dollars. The insurgent leaders directing IED attacks were equally immune to risk because they were driven by ideology and therefore willing to die for the cause.

  Lower down, the trade-offs shifted. In the drug business, pilots had been willing to fly cocaine base from Peru to Colombia for little reward because there was minimal risk. Once that risk went up, as it did when they started getting shot down, the reward for the pilots became insufficient, and they refused to fly. In the insurgency it was people who were working for the money, such as the men digging holes to bury the bombs, who were susceptible to increased risk.

  Returning to Washington, Rivolo briefed his superiors on his conclusions, bluntly suggesting that the “attack-the-leaders” strategy enjoying the highest priority was “completely unproductive.” Far better, he insisted, to concentrate on those lower down. Later, he would calculate the precise degree of risk involved in planting a bomb. When just fewer than 70,000 bombs had been placed in Iraq, four hundred Iraqis had been killed or wounded while planting those bombs. Therefore, the probability of getting killed or wounded while planting a bomb was 1 in 175, or just under 0.6 percent. In addition, many of those killed or wounded had been do
ing something in addition to planting the bomb, such as engaging in a firefight with U.S. forces. So, he concluded triumphantly, the risk of simply planting a bomb was close to zero! That was why, he noted, people were doing it for as little as $15.

  The emplacers, along with the “triggermen,” who actually detonated the bomb when a suitable target presented itself, were the frontline troops of the insurgency. Although there were dozens of separate IED networks, they tended to operate in the same way, which was to hand the emplacers a bomb and give them a month to use it, wherever and whenever they chose. In a sense, the insurgents had the same advantages as the system Rivolo and his colleagues had tested in the Jordanian desert, or that Pierre Sprey had in mind for the A-10 close-support plane so many years before. Those were based on the belief that the only way to have what the German army had called “finger-tip feel” for the battlefield was to have a thinking human brain right there, with the maximum facility to observe and react. The crews in the planes could pick up footprints in the snow, or notice vehicles driving in a suspicious pattern, or people walking faster past a particular building as if they knew that it contained something dangerous such as a weapons cache or a bomb factory. The bomb planters and triggermen were similarly ideally placed to watch their enemy and react immediately to any change in the situation. Both were “bottom-up” approaches to war, very different from the centralized “top down” system embodied in official doctrinal notions such as Operational Net Assessment, or for that matter drones controlled from a trailer in Nevada, multiple time zones away.