Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (14 page)

It was an elegant coincidence, perhaps, that the Activity should take lessons from the DEA in the methods used by drug smugglers. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan revived the Nixonian concept of a war on drugs, but this time, it was more than a metaphor. As the Cold War ended, it gave the armed services of the U.K. and U.S. an identifiable conflict zone and a new raison d’etre. In September that year the Pentagon announced that it would “lead the attack on the supply of illegal drugs from abroad.”
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Like other White House declarations of war on drugs, before and after, it was doomed to fail but it provided the British SAS and American Special Forces including the Activity with an opportunity to test themselves in live operations against a real enemy. Such adventures are sometimes known as “operational exercises.” The principal battleground was Colombia.

Over the next three years, using airborne intercepts siphoned electronically out of the Colombian jungle, the ISA tracked two cocaine barons controlling the apparently omnipotent Medellin Cartel: Jose Rodriguez Gacha and Pablo Gavria Escobar, men whose business turnover was greater than the gross domestic product of some countries, men who commanded private armies equipped with missiles and heavy machine guns, and a ruthlessness matched only by the Mafia. Gacha was the first to die. Thanks to the ISA’s intercepts, a local paramilitary team hit his hideaway, a farmhouse on the border with Panama, with helicopter gunships. Gacha tried to escape into the jungle with his son and five bodyguards. On the ground, a captain in the Anti-Narcotics Police used his SAS training to identify Gacha’s likely escape route. He set up an ambush and waited. Gacha and his party walked onto the guns. There were no survivors. In 1993, it was Escobar’s turn. Again, ISA identified the target’s location and called in a hit team of Colombian police. Some sources suggest that the coup de grâce was delivered by a member of Delta.

The victory over the Medellin cartel triggered the law of unintended consequences. Alfred W. McCoy points out: “After the Medellin cartel’s terror ended with Pablo Escobar’s death in December 1993, the rival Cali cartel’s quiet infiltration of the state culminated in its secret contributions to the 1994 campaign that helped elect President Ernesto Samper and half the Colombian Congress. Within two years, however, Cali’s leaders too were jailed and the traffic fragmented among dozens of smaller syndicates. In this vacuum, the leftist FARC guerrillas and their blood rivals, the rightist paramilitaries, soon captured the drug trade, using rising coco profits to buy arms for civil war…. As FARC’s influence grew, the military countered by backing the violent paramilitaries, particularly the United Self-Defense Forces commanded by Carlos Castano, a former lieutenant to drug lord Pablo Escobar.”
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Not for the first or last time would a finely honed Special Forces team achieve a brilliant tactical success in furtherance of a failed strategy thanks to a political wish-list that was none of its making. The Activity’s pursuit of enemy big fish failed repeatedly in Somalia, Bosnia, and the pursuit of bin Laden as the targets learned to avoid using vulnerable cell phones, relying on human couriers instead. In Somalia in October 1993, the target was Mohammed Farah Aideed, a warlord and clan chieftain disinclined to go along with a Western-imposed plan for nation-building in his country. Allegedly, Italian military sources in Somalia tipped off the wanted man, who eluded capture. The attempt to snatch two of his lieutenants in Mogadishu as an alternative to Aideed resulted in the trauma of Black Hawk Down: the loss of first one helicopter, then another, and eighteen GIs as more assets were thrown into a battle which also took the lives of around 500 Somalis. In Bosnia, from 1996, the big fish that got away was Radovan Karadic, the Serb leader who allegedly presided over the massacre of 8,000 people at Srebrenica, as their UN protectors stood idly by. The British SIS had a plan to assassinate him, never put into effect. Karadic, bearded and disguised as a practitioner of alternative medicine, was finally arrested by Serbian paramilitary police in 2008 after thirteen years on the run and put on trial a year later at The Hague. His chief executioner, Ratko Mladic, was still at large, protected by the Serbian army brotherhood. Bin Laden was repeatedly sighted and targeted by a number of intelligence agencies, notably the CIA, whose historian and critic Tim Weiner quotes an Agency veteran, John MacGaffin: “The CIA knew bin Laden’s location almost every day, sometimes within fifty feet.” But, Weiner records, while at least fifteen American special forces soldiers were killed or injured in training missions for an anticipated assault on bin Laden, “commanders in the Pentagon and civilian leaders in the White House continually backed down from the political gamble of a military mission against bin Laden.”
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The U.S. National Commission’s report on 9/11 confirmed that it was the ghost of Desert One that inhibited conventional military commanders. “General William Boykin, the current deputy under-secretary of defense for intelligence and a founding member of Delta Force, told us that ‘opportunities were missed because of an unwillingness to take risks and a lack of vision and understanding.’…One Special Operations commander [Boykin] said his view of ‘actionable intelligence’ was that ‘if you give me the action, I will give you the intelligence.’”
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CHAPTER 3

BLOOD, OIL, AND DOLLARS

A
merica’s affair with Iraq took a serious turn when Saddam Hussein confronted April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, on 25 July 1990. It was the start of a confrontation with an Arab powderkeg that was to continue to drain Washington’s military resources twenty years later. Saddam had not forgotten Irangate and the aid supplied to his Iranian enemy as part of Oliver North’s arms-for-hostages deal four years earlier. Now he complained that Kuwait, with American complicity, was stealing Iraqi territory and oil. Alongside expressions of respect, he added menace: “I do not belittle you but…yours is a society which cannot accept 10,000 dead in one battle.” Eight days later, Iraq invaded Kuwait.

This war, like the one that followed in 2003, was essentially about oil. In 1990, U.S. experts noted that Iraq controlled more than 10 per cent of the world’s accessible oil reserves. Invading Kuwait added another 9.6 per cent to Saddam’s resources. If he were to follow this through and invade Saudi Arabia, it would give him almost 26 per cent more. The arithmetic was very bad news for Western economies. Oil was still the issue in 2003. Four years after the second Gulf War, Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve and an icon of capitalism, wrote: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
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For the allied build-up that followed Saddam’s seizure of Kuwait in August 1990, five months were needed to create an expeditionary force of almost a million men and women, poised to strike in January 1991 from bases in Saudi Arabia. The process was perceived by bin Laden’s fundamentalists as defilement of sacred land, made worse by the presence of healthy American females, armed, booted, in uniform and driving trucks on the streets of Riyadh. The local morality police were not pleased. One was unwise enough to challenge an American Amazon who happened to be a karate black belt. He lost and discovered horizontality. Virtually no place in this massive invasion force, the biggest since Vietnam, was allocated to allied Special Forces. The U.S. C-in-C, General Norman (“The Bear”) Schwarzkopf, made no secret of his reservations about SF operations, which he saw as pin-prick initiatives, marginal to the main action.

He told journalists during the buildup: “The Vietnam experience left a lot of scars. I was on the Cambodian border at a time when the rules were that the enemy could attack across the border and beat up on you and do anything he wanted. But when you started to get the upper hand you weren’t allowed to chase him. That’s not my favorite way to fight a war. When you go to war, you’re going to war all the way.” General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, shared Schwarzkopf’s opinion: “Light and lethal is good but you also need heavy and lethal.” Powell’s belief in overwhelming force gave his name to the Powell Doctrine. But it was a decision by the JCS, faced with the first Scud attacks on Israel, that finally tipped the balance in favor of giving Special Forces a limited role in this conflict.

By a piquant coincidence, the general commanding British forces in the Gulf was Sir Peter de la Billiere, a lifelong SAS soldier, who labored to persuade his American partner to accept a role for Special Forces. The SAS were not given their chance until almost a week after the shattering allied air offensive began on 17 January 1991. In general, in spite of total dedication and courage by British SAS non-commissioned officers, their regiment did not have a good war in Iraq (see chapter 7). Both U.S. and U.K. Special Forces put much effort, and took huge risks, to find the Scuds. In one case, a tanker carrying hundreds of gallons of fuel was misidentified, in darkness, for a mobile Scud launcher and destroyed. The presence of Western commandos deep inside Iraq, before the main ground offensive, prompted a change of tactics by the Iraqis. They withdrew their missiles further north, putting Israel out of Scud range. An NCO from the U.S. Air Force 24th Special Tactics Squadron was greeted by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney: “So you’re one of the men who kept Israel out of the war.”
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The opening salvoes of the Gulf War were fired by soldiers of 101st Airborne air assault division, flying heavily armed Apache helicopters. Eight of them, guided by two U.S. Air Force MH-53 helicopters capable of blind-flying, wiped out Iraqi radar sites, blinding the country’s air defense system. One of the first SF operations on 25 January (D+8) was a largely British Special Boat Service (U.K. SEALs) attack on Iraqi ground communications less than twenty miles from Baghdad. Deep-buried cables had to be dug up and then destroyed. The SBS team of twenty was augmented by three Green Berets and a USAF combat controller, Master Sergeant Steve Jones, to handle close air support. They cut out a length of the cable for expert analysis, then detonated 400 pounds of high explosive. “In 90 minutes the SBS had crippled the Iraqi communications grid with no casualties. The lieutenant leading the team grabbed one of the markers for the cable route and presented it to General Schwarzkopf on their return.”
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This was a remarkably short ground war—just 100 hours—and inevitably left Special Forces, given their late start, on the sidelines. Observers noted that although Iraqi militia units (the fedayeen) sometimes fought bravely, even fanatically, the regular army—aside from local actions at Nasaryiah and elsewhere—imploded. After Saddam’s reference to 10,000 dead in one battle and the Iraqi Army’s sacrifices in the war with Iran, it was an enigma. Was the Iraqi Army’s apparent change of personality due to the most remarkable Special Forces/CIA operation of all, and the most uncelebrated? In May 2003, General Tommy Franks, Assistant Division Commander (Maneuver) with the 1st Cavalry Division during Desert Storm, was interviewed by
Defense News
editor Vago Muradian. A reliable summary of that interview suggests that before the first Gulf War began, “U.S. Special Forces had gone in [to Iraq] and bribed Iraqi generals not to fight.” Franks was quoted: “I had letters from Iraqi generals saying, ‘I now work for you.’”
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The article quoted an anonymous “senior official” (possibly American) saying: “What is the effect you want? How much does a cruise missile cost? Between $1m and $2.5m. Well, a bribe is a precision-guided missile. It achieves its aim. But it’s bloodless and there’s zero collateral damage.” Another told the journal: “We knew how many of these Iraqi generals were going to call in sick.” General Franks’s own memoir
American Soldier
makes no reference to this episode

There was also the anomalous political end to this war, leaving Iraq’s regime, including enough military force intact and fit to fight an internal war against dissident Marsh Arabs in the South and Kurds in the North. A theory circulated at that time suggested that once Kuwait’s sovereignty was restored, Saddam’s Iraq was still needed as a counterweight to likely Iranian domination of the Gulf region. However, if bribery was the secret weapon of Desert Storm, it might provide an alternative theory to explain Saddam’s survival for another twelve years.

By the time America and Britain resumed their onslaught on Iraq, the world had changed. The gulf between the two wars was more than chronological. The post-9/11 world was a different place in which the clash of cultures, led from the West by a president who believed in a crusade, was worldwide and open-ended, and tailor-made for irregular military forces. A war had been fought successfully in Afghanistan against the Taliban, apparently confirming that. Yet in 2003, dismantling Saddam Hussein’s regime along with his alleged weapons of mass destruction was a misplaced experiment in “invasion lite,”
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turning upside down the post-Vietnam policy known as the Powell doctrine. This, as the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee report on the Tora Bora battle points out, advocated “overwhelming and disproportionate military force to achieve concrete political gains.”

Anyone who took part in operation Desert Shield will recall that the counter-attack on Iraq following Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait in 1990 required an American expeditionary force of 500,000 to occupy only a small part of Iraq. The first men in during the days immediately after the invasion—a tripwire force of the 82nd Airborne—shared a mordant joke about the “General Custer battle plan.” Some fatalistic Saudi males were said to believe in the “Insh’Allah”—“If God Wills”—battle plan. By contrast, the invasion of 2003 was an act of faith, or worse, one that depended on the belief that 248,000 soldiers could seize and hold down five times as much territory as Desert Storm by audacity, speed, and deception.

Pentagon planners led by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gambled on the hope that Iraqis would greet Westerners as liberators and that within three years, only 5,000 U.S. soldiers would be needed in the country.
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Other unstable elements in the invasion gamble included the decision of Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, to disband the regular Iraqi Army, losing control of its armories and to purge the Baathist apparatus that ran the country’s civil, secular government. Priority was given to safeguarding oil assets. As Sir David Manning, Tony Blair’s foreign policy adviser, told a U.K. inquiry: “It took us completely by surprise and judging from my conversations with Dr. Condoleezza Rice, it took her by surprise too. It was a mistake. The assumption that the Americans would have a coherent plan after the war was obviously proved to be unfounded.”

Planning for the war of 2003 began soon after a tiny band of Special Forces operators, combined with an even smaller advance party from the CIA’s Special Operations Group, achieved a lightning victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan, using local surrogate militia and air power as force multipliers. It was an attractive formula: not many U.S. lives at risk and maximum benefit to be derived from America’s superior (and vastly expensive) technology, a process best described as Invasion Lite/Capitalism Heavy. When America and its allies, led by the U.K., invaded Iraq in 2003 the same formula was employed, though on a larger scale. Ahead of the main invasion, a Special Operations Group team helped construct a Kurdish guerrilla army. SOG also identified potential targets for U.S. air power and built the sinews of escape routes for airmen shot down over enemy territory. The Special Operations Command component, meanwhile, was increased from 350 Green Berets to 10,000, welded onto the big, regular battalions in Iraq.

Special Operations commanders wanted to prove that their small units (typically, a twelve-man Operational Detachment Alpha, or ODA) could play a significant role in a large-scale conventional campaign. For them the war was an experiment that largely succeeded in establishing their style of soldiering as the way to the future, the major growth industry of the American military and a larger slice of the Pentagon budget. The reverse happened. As the war developed, the regular army often operated in support of Special Forces, rewriting the norms of the game. As an official history points out: “Integrating these formations raised the kinds of issues expected when units do not habitually train together. SOF and conventional infantry approach the battlefield from two fundamentally different perspectives. Moreover, the Army’s doctrine on how to integrate SOF and conventional units is not mature enough to provide adequate guidance. Additionally, since they had not trained with each other to any degree, they had not developed the trust and procedures so critical to working through the unknown issues. Finally, the command and control relationship created potential for disagreement since conventional forces are traditionally the supported force and not the other way around…. But the troops worked through these frictionpoints.”
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Before the invasion, key roles identified for Special Forces were to protect Iraq’s oil facilities by preventing the environmentally disastrous sabotage inflicted on Kuwait by Saddam’s troops in 1991; to provide forward reconnaissance for conventional ground forces; and to stalk the most-wanted leaders, starting with Saddam and his two sons. U.S. and allied SF accomplished all those things. But a more crucial strategic victory was achieved out of sight, against the odds and in a situation not anticipated by planners. The plan had been that an attack by British and American forces from the north, across Turkey into the Kurdish region of Iraq, would pin down thirteen Iraqi divisions otherwise available to resist the advance on Baghdad from the south.

This scheme was blocked at the last moment by Turkey’s refusal to permit its territory to be used in this war. Ankara probably calculated that if—as happened—the Americans armed Turkey’s Kurdish enemy in northern Iraq, then the strategy would leave the Turks with a legacy of trouble. America responded to this crisis by calling on 5,200 SF soldiers, including a British Special Boat Service team, to lead 70,000 Kurdish guerrillas against thirteen Iraqi divisions. A division is around 10,000–12,000 men. In the most critical battles, an average of two SF soldiers was allocated to 360 guerrillas.
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In northern Iraq, as in Afghanistan and Orwell’s
Animal Farm
, some animals were more equal than others. The apparent inequality in manpower was smoothed over by the West’s ability to call down fire from heaven, without a politically embarrassing allied body count.

America enjoyed some street cred among the Kurds. After Saddam Hussein’s defeat in the Gulf in 1991, his forces punished the Kurds for their support of the Coalition’s offensive, Operation Desert Storm. It was not the first time the Kurds were hammered. In 1988, Saddam had used poison gas in an indiscriminate attack on Halabja. In April 1991, three battalions of the 10th U.S. Special Forces Group had been sent on a UN humanitarian mission to provide shivering refugees with food and shelter. General John R. Galvin asserted: “The Group saved a half million Kurds from extinction.”
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A number of officers and NCOs from the 10th were still serving when their advance guard sneaked into northern Iraq ahead of the main invasion in 2003. The Kurds greeted them as trusted friends. As in Afghanistan, the Green Berets were met and supported by officers from the CIA’s paramilitary team, the Special Activities Division (SOG). The Kurdish welcome was probably tempered by the CIA’s doomed attempt, in 1995, to stir up a Kurdish rebellion against Saddam that ended in disaster. Hundreds of Kurdish agents were executed.