by Nada Bakos
General Stanley McChrystal is an imposing figure—taller than I am—and he’s not one for small talk.
McChrystal arrived in Iraq with the elite responsibility of commander of the task force. By July 2004, General Michael Flynn was brought on board as the task force intelligence chief. As McChrystal outlined in his book, “Mike’s impact was distinct. He arrived as it became clearer than ever that our fight against Zarqawi was, at its heart, a battle for intelligence.”
It is not a secret now that Mike Flynn is not much of a fan of the CIA. From my perspective, things started to change between our team and his after his arrival. The pace became much more frantic and intel sharing slowed down dramatically. In retrospect, I should have gone to McChrystal to work out what they needed and what we could add instead of relying on interlocutors. There were plenty of people on board willing to work as a team.
I’d seen quite clearly how much door kicking, or raids, the operators did in 2003—but it was clear by the second half of 2004 that the raids had picked up momentum.
By the time I became a targeter, SOF had set up new headquarters at a central Iraq airbase.
When I first visited those headquarters a few weeks after taking over the branch chief position, it was immediately apparent to me just how different this incarnation of SOF was compared to the incarnation there in August when I departed.
Communication gaps were a large reason for my managerial site visit to Iraq soon after being named branch chief of the Zarqawi unit. I was almost relieved to be out of headquarters and back in Iraq. It was my first trip to the country since my stint there as an analyst in 2003, and I couldn’t believe how much seemed to have changed. In Baghdad, the Green Zone felt like a polished little city unto itself. On the military bases I visited, all the toilets flushed. And at the airbase, of course, the nerve center for SOF was unlike anything I’d seen a year before.
There must have been a thousand people at the compound the day I arrived. Next to the hangar housing the command center was a building of similar size. That was the detainment facility, I was told, where night after night operators deposited the haul from their raids. Early on the units had conducted roughly one raid a day. By the time I visited, they were well on their way to ten times that.
As the insurgency, fueled in large part by Zarqawi’s network, took hold in 2004, McChrystal bought into the idea that more doors needed to be kicked. Just as the CIA—the most hallowed intelligence agency in the world—responded to the attacks by stepping outside its established comfort zone and growing its paramilitary capabilities, McChrystal wanted SOF to expand its intelligence capabilities. To dismantle a terror network, he believed his teams needed to be more agile and could build a full intelligence component. SOF wanted more information about potential targets sooner so McChrystal could plan missions faster. This was echoing a long-standing, and not entirely unfair, criticism of the lack of collaboration among all government organizations.
Actionable, life-threatening intelligence collected by the CIA can be immediately shared with the military. But in order for the Agency to share strategic intelligence derived from human assets, CIA protocol dictates that the information has to be scrubbed clean of any detectable clues that might give away the source’s identity. Adhering to that standard is something the Agency takes very seriously—and unlike, say, supplementing official cables with a little back-channel communication to a teammate in the field, jeopardizing an asset’s safety is a line you simply don’t cross. It can get good people killed. All that scrubbing requires a methodical internal process to complete.
That’s not to say we couldn’t share intel collected in real time; we had to be discerning and careful of exposing sources. In addition, handing over raw intelligence from technical collection without context and detailed targeting research could prove an even bigger disaster. If SOF killed somebody simply because his or her name appeared in one of our records, it would have been on our collective shoulders, too, not just those at SOF. Context was important; the link chart on our wall was a reminder that not every rabbit in the hole is important or worth expending resources. Going after the wrong people can backfire tremendously, alienating the local population in addition to burning sources.
And then there were basic, frustrating, bureaucratic limitations to our sharing capabilities. Some government organizations, including the Pentagon and the State Department, use a separate database to hold and share classified information. The Agency has for years felt that SIPRNet, the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, has unacceptable vulnerabilities and has instead used its own network for distributing classified material among CIA branches and personnel. The value of that separation was underscored by the WikiLeaks fiasco in 2010, when Private First Class Chelsea Manning illegally pulled 250,000 State Department cables—but not CIA documents—off the network and shared them with media outlets. Having government teams working off different computer networks was a factor in intelligence-sharing failures prior to the 9/11 attacks—and still, a few years later, the sheer clumsiness of the CIA workaround inhibited necessary communication between my team and SOF in Iraq. If SOF asked me for information about a specific person or location, the most efficient way to offer them details was to send them in an e-mail. But there was very little I was actually permitted to disclose in an e-mail.
SOF’s effort to be its own intelligence agency immediately made me uneasy.
In real ways, SOF and the CIA were trying to cover the same ground by expanding in opposite directions. I believed both moves were equally misguided. In much the same way that a CIA analyst shouldn’t try to do a case officer’s job and vice versa, SOF shouldn’t try to be an intelligence agency. And vice versa. Neither organization will ever be able to fully replicate, much less replace, the expertise of the other.
From where I sat, picking apart the enemy in Iraq required an intelligence approach SOF simply wasn’t ready for or capable of. The military doesn’t recruit and train its intelligence personnel the same way the CIA does. Furthermore, at the time I took over the Zarqawi targeting team in Langley, SOF didn’t have the CIA’s technological collection capabilities, or its human assets on the ground. They had terrific soldiers, and we were eager to use whatever information they could gather by kicking down doors, but they simply weren’t seeing the same information we were. The bigger issue was that we both needed desperately to understand the scale of the problem Zarqawi represented.
Zarqawi’s organization had started out as a loosely affiliated network. Now, inside of Iraq, a hierarchy and bureaucracy were taking shape within it similar to those of al Qaida central. I wanted to disrupt and degrade Zarqawi’s group systematically in as few steps as possible. In most cases, I led my team to find shura council members, operations leaders, access players—bomb builders, mission planners, regional leaders, couriers, and perhaps some of Al Qaida in Iraq’s recruiters. In 2003 we had already developed a good idea of who those people were using multiple sources, and it was only a matter of time before we pinpointed where they were as well. When we located one of those terrorists, we needed SOF to execute the mission because they had primacy in Iraq. I wasn’t concerned about every low-level Iraqi foot soldier who once had contact with someone in Zarqawi’s middle management.
SOF was taking a more horizontal approach, looking for insertion points where they could find them. Boom-boom-boom: they were daisy-chaining, grabbing a player and then going after the next viable target that guy knew.
We had a great relationship with SOF on a one-to-one basis; my team members and I could work very effectively with individual SOF operators. We could hold professional, productive videoconferences with our counterparts. I still think very highly of many of those men and women.
Burrowing through to an inner circle like Zarqawi’s, I believed, required the insight that Agency teams achieve only after years of analysis, human intelligence gathering, technical collection, and assistance from foreign partners. We saw very quickly that the SOF military
-style vision led to their misunderstanding individuals’ roles within Zarqawi’s network—if those individuals were part of the network at all. SOF commanders later told reporters that they were hitting the right individuals and raiding the right homes only around 50 percent of the time—and that they were satisfied with that. “Sometimes our actions were counterproductive,” McChrystal acknowledged years later. “We would say, ‘We need to go in and kill this guy,’ but just the effects of our kinetic action did something negative and [the conventional army forces that occupied much of the country] were left to clean up the mess.”
We had tunnel vision, too. Sometimes we were so focused on the network that we weren’t asking the right questions about its activities this hour, this minute—from the station and from SOF. We needed to reinsert ourselves into the process.
Throughout late 2004, as SOF chased its target list, my team’s packages of information increasingly began falling through the cracks. In one particularly memorable example from October of that year, we pinpointed a restaurant in Fallujah as the location where prominent mujahideen council members would be meeting on a specific day and at a particular time. But there was no movement from the military on the package. For reasons I was never clear about, the military simply didn’t act on the information—until the day after the scheduled meeting. What became clear at that point, thanks to video taken from a warplane flying over Fallujah, was that just after midnight on October 12, US bombs reduced the restaurant—and buildings surrounding it—to rubble. But the council members were long gone by the time the bombs dropped; instead, according to reports, it was run-of-the-mill nighttime security guards who were killed in the blast. I was so disgusted that it marked one of the few occasions I instructed my team to send a follow-up cable to Baghdad underscoring the information we’d provided and the deadly results of their lousy follow-through. I wanted to make it clear that this was not our work.
By late 2004, we could see SOF approaches in Iraq becoming a quintessential example of how a tactical military operation can directly oppose a larger counterterrorism strategy. By necessity we had to allow some bad guys to continue to operate, because a slash-and-burn approach does not make trust and intelligence sharing possible. This meant keeping bad actors in place for the time being so they could inadvertently continue providing the CIA with valuable intelligence. I understand that highly trained operators find that approach disagreeable. But my team got equally tired of SOF complaining, “Why don’t you have any new information for us?” and having to respond, “Well, the other day you killed the guy we were getting the information from.”
Even as SOF units executed a growing number of raids throughout 2004, it was convenient for some in the government to downplay the threat that foreign extremists were posing to American interests in Iraq. Particularly as President Bush’s reelection approached, the quest to justify the original invasion meant that the administration often discounted the enemy on the ground as insurgents—merely frustrated Baathists and “former regime elements,” a phrase that seemed to pop up everywhere. A second category, that of the aggrieved, opportunistic local fighter, was acknowledged, but beyond that there was resistance to publicly attributing much of the violence to the third and most important faction: Sunni jihadists and other foreign elements tied to groups such as Zarqawi’s.
That April, in the midst of the president’s reelection campaign, I watched Bush defend his Iraq strategy in a prime-time news conference: “I feel strongly it’s the course this administration is taking that will make America more secure and the world more free and, therefore, the world more peaceful. It’s a conviction that’s deep in my soul.” Actual reports from the ground, however, left me no reason to be optimistic about the way the battle in Iraq was likely to evolve.
At the start of 2004, there were reports of some twenty-five attacks in Iraq per day; by late that year, there were approximately sixty per day. More than 160 US soldiers had been killed in the three months following the official handover of power—more than the entire number of soldiers killed during the war itself. By September, total US military fatalities in Iraq had passed one thousand. Those obviously weren’t popular statistics, but they were accurate. Ginny was counting as many as one hundred disparate insurgent cells taking online credit for the violence. Many of those were fly-by-night groups that were little more than talk, vanishing as quickly as they appeared. But understanding which if any of them had to be taken seriously became an ongoing chore that illuminated a larger, dangerous point: Sunni strongholds showed—at least initially—broad popular support for destabilizing elements such as Zarqawi’s network.
I could then see what Zarqawi did: Iraq was home to nearly 5.5 million Sunnis, more than a million of traditional military age. If Zarqawi could mobilize—by evoking grievances over wrongful detainment, perhaps, or the killing of a family member—even an infinitesimal percentage of them, he’d have at the ready a fighting force many thousands strong. It was true that Zarqawi’s group was still maturing in its ability to foment violence in Iraq, but among enemy organizations, his prospects were clearly the brightest. He was the most public face of the killings that were disrupting the coalition occupation—only more so once bin Ladin acknowledged Zarqawi’s oath of bayat in an audio recording that October. Describing the Jordanian as “the prince of Al Qaida in Iraq,” bin Ladin called upon al Qaida sympathizers “to listen to him and obey him in his good deeds.” It only made sense that aggrieved Sunni Iraqis would align themselves accordingly.
My team sensed that Zarqawi might be shifting his center of power south, away from the mountain ranges of Kurdistan and into a more central location: the so-called Sunni Triangle, northwest of Baghdad. In particular, by late 2004 we identified Fallujah, a city of three hundred thousand in the heart of the triangle, as a safe haven for extremists and their sympathizers. Our intelligence showed hundreds of non-Iraqi Arabs moving into the city during that year, bringing with them two Zarqawi trademarks: loads of cash and a militant vision of Islam. Our sources on the ground told us that the incoming Arabs compared themselves to the muhajirun— the earliest Muslims who followed Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina. The locals in Fallujah, they said, played the part of the ansar, or the helpers in Medina who’d once taken in the muhajirun.
In April, Zarqawi’s men had helped repel a coalition advance into the city after the highly publicized murders of four US contractors there. We’d received reports of residents in Fallujah spotting Zarqawi downtown, and many of the angry Sunnis in the city seemed happy to provide a new base for rebel fighters in Iraq. As the network of foreign fighters successfully recruited Iraqis to join their cause, Zarqawi’s influence in Iraq became further entrenched, and his evil metastasized.
In a stroke of luck for my team, however, by late 2004 some of Zarqawi’s men were beginning to wear out their welcome among nonmilitant Fallujans. Many longtime residents bristled at the extreme interpretation of religion, and the correspondingly heavy hand of punishment, being imposed upon them. Dissent among the ranks meant that we were able to recruit further assets to act as our eyes and ears on the streets—though we knew we had to be careful. In a few instances, those accused of spying for US intelligence agencies were murdered on the spot by Zarqawi’s men. I felt much better knowing that Tom was overseeing that side of our work.
In late 2004, we caught a major break when Iraqi police arrested Umar Baziyani, a former head of Ansar al-Islam, with whom Zarqawi had originally allied in Iraq. Baziyani had split with Ansar and followed Zarqawi when the Jordanian pledged bayat to bin Ladin. At the time he was arrested, Baziyani was “emir” of Baghdad—one of the most prestigious roles in the newly formed Al Qaida in Iraq. That much we knew. But Zarqawi ran a very different organization from al Qaida. He wasn’t as stringent about a hierarchy; his nodules of contact were more like concentric circles—hard for us to draw to their ends or discern their beginnings. Baziyani had the sort of organizational chart we needed—and days of interrogations by SOF yi
elded a wealth of information.
At this point, Baziyani confirmed to interrogators that Al Qaida in Iraq was in fact headquartered in Fallujah, though Zarqawi himself split his time largely between Baghdad and Ramadi—the two southern corners of the Sunni Triangle—farther west. Fallujah, positioned directly between the two, was a convenient location where Zarqawi could meet with his top deputy, a Syrian named Mahi Shami.
Like Shami, Baziyani was Syrian. None of those closest to Zarqawi, including his bodyguard and driver, was Iraqi. Purportedly following the example of Prophet Muhammad, who married his closest companions’ daughters, Zarqawi had married the daughter of one longtime Palestinian associate. Following suit, Zarqawi’s key deputies also married one another’s daughters. The top of his network was very much a fanatical, interconnected family—and, according to Baziyani, they had given much thought not only to expanding their network’s reach but also to succession plans in the event that high-ranking personnel were captured or killed.
To that end, Baziyani told his interrogators, they had established nine regional operations throughout Iraq, in locations such as western Anbar Province; the Kurdish northeast, along the border with Iran; and the Sunni stronghold of Mosul, near the border with Syria. Baziyani also told his interrogators that each region had an “emir,” who organized food and shelter for the men under his charge with money that flowed down from the top. Those regional cells were allowed to operate largely autonomously.
With affiliates capable of striking virtually anyplace in Iraq, Zarqawi’s constellation next needed a collection of military commanders to plan large-scale attacks and to help local Sunni sympathizers repel coalition advances. There were seven of those commanders, Baziyani said, in strongholds such as Fallujah, Mosul, Baghdad, and Anbar and Diyala Provinces, as well as in al-Qaim, a small town on the western border of Iraq that provides a gateway to—and from—Syria. In total, Baziyani estimated, Zarqawi had some fourteen hundred fighters at his disposal. By the time he formally aligned with al Qaida, the attacks Zarqawi claimed credit for had killed 675 Iraqis and forty US, British, and coalition soldiers and wounded more than two thousand people.
