Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (17 page)

But all was not quiet on the western front, all the time. Unconfirmed reports suggest a fierce battle near Qaim, close to the Syrian border, in which SAS soldiers and Green Berets fought Republican Guards for control of a chemical fertilizer plant once suspected of being a nuclear facility.
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There is no public collateral to support a claim that on 22 March, in the same area, an Australian patrol of six SAS men took on an Iraqi force of between thirty and fifty, killing twelve, forcing the rest to surrender without any losses.

Meanwhile, the main coalition forces thrust from the south, up the Euphrates and main supply routes toward Baghdad, encountered their heaviest resistance, less from the regular Iraqi army than the paramilitary fedayeen, fundamentalists who would later continue the fight as guerrillas after the regulars accepted defeat. Repeatedly, at such places as Nasiriyah and Najaf, fanatical paramilitaries deserted their natural battlegrounds—urban areas—to expose themselves to American firepower during frontal attacks on allied supply lines. But in spite of such determined resistance, the advance paused only briefly as Coalition air power, night vision, and electronic surveillance made this an unequal contest. Baghdad fell on 9 April. Hostilities against the Baathist regime officially ended on 30 April. On 1 May, on board the carrier
Abraham Lincoln
, President Bush announced victory. Behind him, a banner proclaimed: “Mission accomplished!” In one important sense, that was correct. Regime change had happened and Paul Bremer was about to take over as Bush’s proconsul in Baghdad. The fighting was not over by a long way, but the nature of the conflict had changed, decisively. From mid-April, this was no longer a war between nation-states but an insurrection led by several factions against the new order, one in which Special Forces would turn their strategy around 180 degrees, from acting as a destabilizing force to one that picked off opponents of government and defended the status quo.

The opposition included an army without leadership, pensions, promotion or future, and access to many tons of armaments. From having the initiative and a fine-grained plan of attack, U.S. forces were now plunged into a conflict with no front line and no fixed military doctrine. Instead, it involved a chaotic war of modern cowboys, a free-play contest in which the man, or woman, who was quickest on the draw was the one who lived to fight another day. It was Northern Ireland all over again, complete with car bombs, but on a grander scale and the added horror of suicide bombers. The first phase of the war had lasted twenty-one days and cost America 109 soldiers killed in action, with 116 wounded and unfit for further service. Phase II, the counter-insurgency war, from 1 May 2003 until 31 August 2010, when America’s combat mission would end, would see around 4,000 body bags returning home. (The author’s estimated figure is conservative and could well be greater. It was unlikely to be less.)

The top priority of the counterinsurgency (“coin”) campaign was the former enemy’s leadership, starting with Saddam Hussein and his sons, Uday and Qusay. The difference now was that leaders of the regime were no longer targets for death in battle, unless they chose that road to glory, but were fugitives from victor’s justice. Having eluded Tomahawk missiles and smart bombs dropped on his palace and a remote farm during the official war, Saddam would be tried by an Iraqi court and clumsily hanged for crimes against humanity on 30 December 2006. Uday and Qusay would opt for the glory road on 22 July 2003.

The hunt for all “high-value targets” was spearheaded by a dedicated team of various SF skills, from close-in surveillance to silent killing, known as Task Force 20, later redesignated Task Force 121 and then Task Force 145. Delta’s C Squadron made a point of picking up anyone closely connected to the Hussein clan in Tikrit, a town full of the dictator’s kin. They got lucky when one of these revealed Saddam’s hideout. By 6
P
.
M
., under cover of darkness, the Army had a 600-man cordon around the area. The sharp end of this operation was run not by Special Forces but by Colonel James B. Hickey, son of Irish immigrants, a scholar-soldier and boss of a conventional unit, 1st Brigade, 4th Infantry Division. At 8:30
P
.
M
., 150 meters from Hickey’s command post, some of his men searched a run-down adobe hut that contained a camp bed. It might have been a tramp’s shelter but for the $75,000 in a box beneath the bed.

Nearby, one of the hunters noticed an abnormality in ground levels. Closer examination revealed a polystyrene trap door covered by a kitchen mat. Ready for a firefight, one of the soldiers pried the lid open, ready to hurl a grenade into the void. Then two supplicatory hands appeared. Saddam responded to the soldiers’ challenge not with gunfire but an announcement that deserves its place in the history of bathos: “My name is Saddam Hussein,” he said in English. “I am the President of Iraq and I want to negotiate.”

Hickey, embarrassed by media acclaim back home in America, dismissed the coup in a television interview. “It pretty much went off as we had planned and we got the guy we were looking for,” he said. The soldier who discovered Saddam’s hole has never been identified. There were no citations or medals for this man. It was a minor anomaly, perhaps, but the sort of thing that gave rise later to a seemingly plausible conspiracy theory, that the real heroes of the hunt for Saddam were not Americans but Kurdish Peshmerga. There was another loose end. Senior officers advised CNN that “it is unclear whether anyone will receive the $25 million bounty on Saddam because the information leading to his capture came under duress and from more than one person.” Major General Ray Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, told the network: “Over the last ten days we brought in about five to ten members of these [Tikriti] families, who were then able to give us even more information and finally we got the ultimate information from one of these individuals.”
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Five months before Saddam surrendered so ignominiously, his sons had died in a hail of gunfire. From mid-July, the Hussein brothers had been hiding in a fortified compound in Mosul, a city that had resisted American occupation. British SAS soldiers, well practiced in the arts of concealment and deception, dressed as locals and speaking excellent Arabic, as well as electronic surveillance, had confirmed the presence of the two wanted men. The original tip had come from an inside source for whom a bounty of $15 milllion for each of Saddam’s sons had proved greater than his loyalty to a defeated leader.

The use of bounty in this way originated in a U.S. Supreme Court judgment of 1873, legalizing the role of bounty hunters. In 2007 a British barrister representing the U.S. government in a case heard in London confirmed that it was acceptable under American law to kidnap people if they were wanted for offenses in America. “The U.S. does have a view about procuring people to its own shores which is not shared,” he said.
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In November 2009, an Italian court sentenced twenty-three former CIA agents up to eight years in prison for their part in abducting a terrorist suspect, Abu Omar (aka Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr), an Egyptian on a Milan street, in February 2003.
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The practice of paying bounty was widely used in Pakistan during the War on Terror, resulting in some suspects becoming “rendered” for interrogation elsewhere.

In the case of the Hussein brothers, no local legal framework existed. No U.S. warrant seems to have been issued for their arrest. They were about to be taken into custody, therefore, as enemy combatants. It was not a very subtle process. Rather than follow the SAS style of stealth, silence, darkness, distraction, and sudden, shocking force, the Delta Force team, backed up by a cordon from 101st Airborne Division, positioned an Iraqi interpreter in the street, equipped with a bullhorn, ordering the brothers to come out with their hands up.
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It might have been a remake of a 1935 black-and-white movie about the G-men, starring James Cagney. The Hussein brothers, faithful to their role in the drama, responded with a burst of ill-directed automatic fire that wounded a civilian spectator. Delta failed to take the fugitives alive. This was not surprising since “in the end,” after a four-hour gunfight, “it took almost all the firepower the Army could muster—TOW (wire-guided anti tank missiles), Kiowa helicopter rockets and Mk. 19 grenade launchers—to punch through the fortress-like inner walls of the villa and kill Uday Hussein and his brother, Qusay.”
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With the end of conventional warfare, the counterinsurgency pattern that emerged followed a pattern: huge bribes available to defectors and informers, occasional arrests, and, less frequently, the use of timely information to kill a particularly dangerous opponent by Special Forces combined with air power. Seven fugitives, former Baathist leaders, got the message and gave themselves up. By 2005 only eight of the fifty-five people on “Iraq’s Most Wanted” list, identified with the help of playing cards at the beginning of the campaign, were still at large. The majority, thirty-five, were pursued and captured. The fate of three was unknown though one, Saddam’s right-hand man, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, was rumored to have died in an air raid. The two Hussein brothers were the only ones on the original list to have been killed by Coalition forces.

With the
ancien regime
accounted for, the insurgency came under different brand names. Embittered former Army officers and Baath Party officials constituted only one of these. Much more dangerous were the emerging sectarian forces of the former Sunni ruling class, notoriously led by a Jordanian psychopath whose nom de guerre was Abu Musab al Zarqawi, and the Shi’ite Mahdi Army loyal to the charismatic preacher Moqtada al-Sadr. Al-Sadr’s family traditionally opposed the Saddam regime. The two private armies represented ancient fault lines in a country invented by the U.S., Britain, and France after the First World War following the collapse of the Ottoman empire. Their potential for trouble, post-Saddam, went unnoticed during the planning of Operation Iraqi Freedom. With the conventional war officially over, the job of containing the activities of Sunni and Shi’ite terrorism—a mirror image, to some, of the IRA/Loyalist war—would keep U.S. and U.K. Special Forces busy for years, until final Western withdrawal.

The most bloodthirsty guerrilla leader, Zarqawi was an acolyte of Osama bin Laden who wanted to outdo his better-educated mentor in the politics of horror. Zarqawi’s triumphs included his beheading, personally, of a 62-year-old British civil engineer, Kenneth Bigley, and Nicholas Berg, a jobless 26-year-old American from West Chester, Pennsylvania. Zarqawi deliberately engineered suicide bomb attacks on civilian Shia areas, including shrines and mosques, in order to provoke a religious war between the communities. The atrocity that finally marked the beginning of the end of his career, and his life, shocked the Arab world, including, it was rumored, bin Laden. On the evening of 9 November 2005 three suicide bomb attacks on separate hotels in Amman, capital of Jordan, killed around seventy people including guests at a wedding party. Most of the dead were Sunni, the people Zarqawi claimed to lead in Iraq. One American was killed. A former British SAS commander, a veteran of the French Foreign Legion on his way to Iraq, survived because he was shielded from the blast by a concrete pillar in the room where the wedding banquet bomb exploded.

From this point on, Jordan’s intelligence service joined a hunt already controlled by Task Force 145, a group that loosely covered four autonomous Special Forces teams, one of which, Task Force Black, was built around a British SAS squadron and support forces from the U.K.’s Parachute Regiment. Task Force West had as its core the SEAL unit known as DEV-GRU. Task Force Central was a Delta squadron with Rangers as backup, and Task Force North was a Ranger battalion attached to a Delta cadre. The driving force behind this small empire was the boss of Joint Special Operations Command, Lieutenant General Stan McChrystal, later put in command of a new U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.

Prior to the Amman bombs, Task Force 145 had come close to capturing Zarqawi several times. By August 2005, the team had captured or killed 200 of his most loyal fighters. The man himself proved almost as elusive as bin Laden. He escaped one ambush by driving at speed through a checkpoint manned by Rangers before they could react. At other times he melted away dressed as a woman or a policeman. In April 2006, Zarqawi released a video that presented him as a figure as charismatic as bin Laden, delivered with all the flowery rhetoric—” Where are the lions of Anbar? Where are the lions of Salah ud-Deen?” (or Saladin)—that comes with the Arabic language.

Task Force 145 was closing in on his circle. The same day that the video was released, a Special Forces team attacked a house in Yusufiyah, twenty miles from Baghdad, killing twelve of Zarqawi’s men. Zarqawi himself was now worth $25 million to a lucky bounty hunter. Helped by a prisoner picked up on the border with Jordan in May, satellite intercepts probably provided by the NSA, and a Predator drone, the hunters identified the chink in Zarqawi’s armour. This was his spiritual adviser, Abdul-Rahman. Thanks to the Jordanians, the team had collateral for the movements of people close to their quarry. One was a courier known as Mr. X. When both Rahman and X turned up in a hamlet thirty miles north of Baghdad, Delta force moved in for the kill. On the evening of 7 June, from the cover of date and palm trees, they watched as Zarqawi’s people came and went from the farmhouse, where their target was about to share dinner with his inner circle, including Rahman and X.

Using the license given them by McChrystal, the team did not seek clearance from higher authority for their decision to kill Zarqawi and anyone close to him. They summoned a passing Air Force F-16 to bomb the house. This it did with cool precision, with two 500-pound bombs from 20,000 feet. According to one eyewitness, Ali Abbas, a local laborer: “We saw the bodies of two women that had been fleeing away from the blast…. Another body was totally destroyed and in pieces. Then we heard a moan coming from another part of the house. We found the body of a big man, middle-aged. There was life in him still. It took seven of us to move him out…. He just moaned over and over again. He had an injury to the back of his head.”
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First Iraqi security forces, then seven U.S. helicopters descended on the scene. It seemed as if Zarqawi, on a stretcher, would still refuse to die. He became briefly conscious and recognized the uniforms looming over him. He tried to roll off the stretcher as if to make a final escape. When he did so, it was into the next world. Next day, a newly elected Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, said the $25 million dollar reward would be honored. “We will meet our promise,” he said enigmatically. While Special Forces pursued the strategy of decapitation, Iraq descended steadily into growing chaos between 2004 and 2007. Abu Khalaf, Zarqawi’s successor as leader of the Sunni terrorist movement (calling itself “al-Qaeda in Iraq”), commanded an army of 12,000. Khalaf was killed by SF Task Force 88, including British SAS, in Mosul on 24 June 2008.