Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (16 page)

So far as the American government was concerned, there were two objectives of greater priority at the other end of the country. These were strategic “decapitation”—the assassination of Iraq’s leadership, starting with Saddam—and the preservation of Iraq’s oilfields. For President Bush, removing Saddam seems to have been a personal issue, linked to his determination to nail any perceived ally of al Qaeda after 9/11. For neocons the war was about oil.

In the event, removing key leaders, a policy of decapitation, won out, if narrowly. It missed its targets but had the unexpected result of triggering a premature ground invasion ahead of the “shock and awe” attack from the air. On 19 March, the U.S. high command received “highly perishable intelligence reporting that Saddam Hussein and several key subordinates were gathered together in a known location…. Unsure if such an opportunity would present itself again,” President Bush authorized a strike by Nighthawk Stealth bombers and Tomahawk cruise missiles.”
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The target was a farm complex known as Dora, identified by the CIA. The only casualty was the CIA’s own spy.
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Within hours, this preemptive attack seems to have triggered an Iraqi plan to sabotage oilfields in the south of the country and offshore in the Gulf, an event that in turn prompted ground force commanders to launch their operation ahead of the agreed deadline and in advance of the air onslaught in yet another gamble. The invasion timetable was brought forward twenty-four hours when Army intelligence analysts, studying images provided by a Predator drone, detected the beginning of sabotage in Iraq’s southern oilfields. As the U.S. Army’s history of the campaign makes clear: “Early on the morning of 19 March, a small group of intelligence analysts located at Camp DOHA, Kuwait, made the key intelligence call that launched the ground war on the 21st. Protecting…the Iraqi oil wells was so important that detecting indications of sabotage was a ‘priority intelligence requirement.’…Determining if the oil wells were in danger of destruction—before they were destroyed—was a vital question and difficult to answer. The decision on when to start the ground war rested on that answer.”
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The oil issue had a further impact on U.S. strategy. The Air Force could not meet the accelerated timetable as it put the final touches to its fine-tuned “shock and awe” assault on Iraq. Turning this problem to its advantage, General Tommy Franks, now chief of CENTCOM, decided that the Iraqis would expect a massive air assault before the main ground attack went in. Reversing the order—ground first, air second—would surprise the enemy. Or so it was hoped. Once more, Special Forces were invoked to save the situation, just as they had been during the Scud attacks in the First Gulf War. It was preceded by an episode that should be worth its place in any history of military intelligence.

The man who alerted the high command to the start of the sabotage was Major David Carstens, an intelligence officer with fifteen years of experience in Haiti, the Balkans, and Afghanistan. Responsible for an elite team of forty analysts, Carstens had learned to distinguish between false reports that the oil wells were on fire (when the flames were normal, precautionary burn-offs) and the real thing. He taught himself by studying video images of Saddam’s destruction of Kuwait’s facilities in 1991. When he received images relayed from a Predator drone of “oil well fires with pressure-backed flames reaching 60–310 feet into the air” on the morning of 19 March 2003, he called senior officers and obtained confirmation for his diagnosis from a civilian oil expert. At 0830 hours he was summoned into the presence of Colonel Steven Rotkoff, his superior.

“Dave, what do you think this is?” asked the colonel. “Do you think it is the beginning of the sabotage we talked about?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dave, I just want to be sure because we are getting ready to launch 60,000 Marines across the border.”

“Yes. I’m sure.”

Shortly thereafter, the authors of
On Point
observe, General Franks gave the ground forces the order to go “and 1 Marine Expeditionary Force attacked to seize the oilfields on the night of the 20th.” They “achieved tactical surprise and quickly secured the oilfields, preventing the Iraqis from igniting more than a few small fires.” Though successful—only nine out of 1,000 oilfields were torched—the operation to save the oil was not straightforward. It required an airborne/amphibious task force comprising U.S. SEALs, Marines, fast Navy craft, helicopters, U.K. Special Boat Service, Royal Marines of 3 Commando Brigade, and Polish Grom commandos trained by the SAS. With 250 men committed, it was the SEALs’ biggest operation since Vietnam.

Oil protection in southern Iraq was a two-pronged affair. Swooping in by helicopter, a
Sunday Times
team reported, “British and U.S. forces dropped behind enemy lines north of Basra and struck south…. Other forces moved on Umm Qasr, a port just over the border from Kuwait whose deep-water docks were seen as vital for bringing in humanitarian aid…. In the al-Faw peninsula to the east, helicopters were skimming low through the night, ferrying U.S. and British commandos over the border…. AC130 gunships circled giving fearsome covering fire as the commandos established beachheads….”
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The most daring attacks were on two vulnerable oil platforms offshore, fifty miles apart. One was taken by an elite SEAL team known by the acronym DEVGRU (for the enigmatically named “Development Group”). The second rig was targeted by a Polish commando known as “Grom” (“Thunderbolt”). Twenty men moved by fast open craft fitted with machine guns until they were within a mile of the target. They then switched to a pair of dinghies propelled by silenced engines and, finally, paddles. As they nosed against the steel supports of the rig, a diving team slid under the water to check for demolition charges. This time, the intelligence was correct. The explosives were found, carefully unpicked and made safe. The rest of the team, observing no signs of life on the rig, began the long climb up the structure using, according to one source, magnets as a climbing aid on the smooth superstructure.

Exactly on time, a U.S. Black Hawk helicopter flying just above sea level swept up and hovered as the SEAL snipers on board it lined up their night sights on the rig. Guards appeared, possibly alerted by a telephone that rang in their watchroom. The snipers picked them off as if this was a duck shoot. Three minutes later, the operation was over, the rig secured.
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The SEALs’ extraordinary marksmanship was demonstrated to the world on 12 April 2009 when Captain Richard Phillips, captain of a U.S. container ship, was held hostage by Somali pirates. Beaten off the vessel, three of the pirates escaped in one of the ship’s lifeboats, taking Phillips with them. As ransom negotiations began, the hijacked lifeboat was held in tow by a U.S. warship. In the darkness, the SEALs parachuted into the sea and were picked up. Subsequently, when it seemed that Phillips—held with an AK-47 to his head—was about to be executed, three SEAL snipers, perched on superstructure above the tail of the towing vessel, fired simultaneously, killing three pirates. The fourth surrendered. Synchronised sniping to eliminate multiple targets is a finely honed art. If it works, it ensures that no enemy survives to kill a hostage. But in this case it was complicated by the movement of both ships involved, separated by thirty meters, and reliance on night sights.
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It was not only the route through the maritime minefields of the Shatt al Arab that made the ground invasion of Iraq on 21 March 2003 a high-risk option. Only one major ground formation—3rd Infantry Division—was ready to move at H-hour on G (for ground force operations) Day. As the official history confirms, when the 3rd ID advanced to cross the berm originally erected to stave off a second Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, “it was the only Army division ready to fight out of the four that the original plan required. The remaining units were still moving into the theater, linking up with their equipment, or moving forward to attack positions.” In spite of that, “the ground war actually started two days before formal air operations began…General [Tommy] Franks made the deliberate decision to start the ground fight before some of the designated forces were available and ready for combat. He balanced the strategic, operational, and tactical benefits of a rapid, early advance against the risk inherent in not having sufficient combat power to achieve the campaign’s objective at the start of operations. The tensions within this balance affected the campaign’s execution and are a defining characteristic of the entire operation.” In retrospect, the importance of Special Forces operations in the north of the country, pinning down thirteen Iraqi divisions (approximately 130,000 men), was even greater than most commentators appreciated at the time.

Initial SF maneuvers involving Delta Force, Australian and British SAS soldiers, U.K. SBS, and American Green Beret Alpha teams had started around forty-eight hours or more before. The initial heliborne assaults were on Iraqi command posts and vital communications. As in the first Gulf War in 1991, the teams identified and dug up fiber optic cables on which the enemy depended for secure communications.

Special Forces patrols emerged like desert ghosts to meet the incoming invaders. On 22 March, the second day of the ground invasion, an American cavalry team approaching the city of As Samawah encountered a group of small pickup trucks mounted with heavy machine guns, flying large American flags. “They were an SOF team conducting linkup. The team had been in the town for several days conducting reconnaissance and surveillance…. The SOF troopers effected the linkup in accordance with an established recognition signal worked out with the special forces liaison element. The SOF team confirmed that the bridges were intact and not wired for demolition. The SOF troops had developed a contact in town who reported on the infiltration of Republican Guard troops in town and the presence of paramilitary forces as well.”
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The risk of fratricide, given the ambiguous appearance of Special Forces mingling on the battlefield with friendly forces, never goes away in this kind of warfare. American SF tried to minimize it by carrying tracking devices that enabled a joint command to avoid confliction. Sometimes it required heroic intervention on the ground. Special Forces soldiers often took the risk of becoming targets from their fellow Americans when they intervened in stand-offs between one U.S. force and another.

This super-cool approach was sometimes misapplied. One infantry team faced with an obstacle was joined by SF soldiers who proposed, before the firefight began, talking to tribal chiefs, “the men with beards” to settle the affair peacefully. It was a Woody Allen moment. Earlier arrivals on the scene had come under heavy fire and could not believe what the SF proposed. When the Special Forces men also encountered a withering barrage, they dressed in full battle kit and went to work to do the business the hard way.

Some SF operations became media spectaculars, good for morale back home. These included the removal from an Iraqi hospital of Private 1st Class Jessica Lynch by Special Forces supported by Marines and the subsequent recovery of other lost personnel including two valuable Apache pilots. Lynch and some of her comrades, part of a supply convoy, came under fire near An Nasiriyah on 23 March. A multiple road crash resulted, fatally injuring two men. Another two died after capture in unknown circumstances. Lynch, seriously injured, was alive but unconscious. Her captors took her to a hospital in the city, where she received medical care. The official history records: “On the evening of 1 April 2003, SOF, supported by marines, assaulted the hospital in which Private Jessica Lynch was being treated. Although there have been news stories subsequently suggesting that the assault was unnecessary since Iraqi troops had left the day before, one fact is clear: the SOF brought Lynch out.”

Alongside the northern campaign and oil protection, allied Special Forces mounted a major operation in the west of the country to reduce the threat that Iraqi Scud missiles might be unleashed yet again, indiscriminately against Kuwait or Israel. This vast area, thousands of square miles of desert, became the exclusive preserve of a family of Special Forces units from the U.S., Britain, and Australia known as Task Force Dagger, under the command of General “Shooter” Harrell. In their search, they were disappointed. There is no publicly available evidence that any Scuds were fired during this war, though seventeen smaller weapons—the Ababil-100, with a range of 90 miles and a payload of 300 kg—were aimed from the Basra area at coalition assembly points in Kuwait. They missed their targets or were intercepted by defensive Patriot missiles. But as in the first Gulf War, 1991, it was the fear of what-might-happen that made the Scuds a potent psychological weapon.

The campaign in the west opened on the night of 20 March with sorties against border positions by Little Bird helicopters, which shot up their targets and returned unscathed. Iraqi soldiers got the message and began evacuating airfields that the allies needed as forward operational bases. Fired up and ready for battle, British and Australian SAS soldiers, arriving from Jordan by Chinook or desert vehicles to occupy the bases (known as H2 and H3), met little or no resistance. They probably experienced a sense of anticlimax. Certainly that was how an American close air support expert, Technical Sergeant Ed Shulman, felt about target H3. He said: “We had a team in place watching H3 as the rest of us were converging on the airfield. They watched a thirty-vehicle convoy leaving H3 and they couldn’t get permission to hit it. The FOB [forward operational base] was saying, ‘Don’t fire until you are fired upon. Don’t initiate contact.’”
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As time passed and no Scuds were found, though around 100 possible launch sites were inspected, more aggressive tactics were permitted. Meanwhile, the abandoned airfields were crowded with Allied C-130 transports and Chinook helicopters. The once-mighty Iraqi Air Force was nowhere to be seen. The auguries were good for the U.S. 75th Airborne Rangers to parachute into yet another desert air base, H1, an operation that went smoothly enough on 25 March.