Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (34 page)

In subsequent years, during the Iraq War and beyond, British Special Forces continued to suffer from lethal under-investment while saddled with the usual level of risk. The formula that worked best was a combination of American logistics and SAS knowhow, plus the effective alliance with Delta Force. In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.K. Special Forces (UKSF) became an organic part of America’s Special Force structure. But an increasing number of SAS soldiers quit the army to join the profitable private security market, particularly during the Iraq bubble, 2003–2009. But some resignations reflected a deeper malaise, a loss of morale caused by lack of resources and consequent deaths. Here are some examples:

1. On 30 January 2005 a Royal Air Force Special Duties Hercules was brought down by small arms fire near the forward SAS base at Balad, Iraq. The British Defense Ministry (MoD) had chosen not to fit explosive suppressant foam around the plane’s fuel tanks. One tank exploded, blowing off the plane’s starboard wing. Nine airmen and a soldier died unnecessarily. A few hours earlier, the aircraft had delivered fifty SAS soldiers to Baghdad.
   
2. On 2 September 2006 an RAF Nimrod aircraft—an intelligence platform essential to effective special operations on the ground—caught fire soon after an air-to-air refueling operation 23,000 feet over Kandahar. Fuel is thought to have leaked into a bomb bay where it was ignited by a hot pipe. The Nimrod exploded with the loss of twelve airmen and two Special Forces soldiers. A civilian coroner found that the Nimrod had never been airworthy.
   
3. At dusk on 20 November 2007, a “notoriously unreliable” radio system prevented the crews of four SAS helicopters from communicating with one another as they shadowed a terrorist team at low altitude. One of the machines crashed as it flew blind through a dust cloud. A valve to prevent fuel spillages did not work. The Puma helicopter—later described as “unairworthy”—went ablaze after hitting the ground. Two SAS men died. An inquest found that the immediate cause of the deaths was pilot error due to extreme stress, compounded by poor equipment.
   
4. In June 2008, an Intelligence Corps operator, Corporal Sarah Bryant, was on a mission in Helmand province, Afghanistan, escorted by three SAS Reservists, in vulnerable, thin-skinned “Snatch” Land Rovers when they were killed by a roadside mine. Their commander, Major Sebastian Morley, said that “chronic underinvestment” in military equipment was to blame for the deaths. The MoD, he said, “has blood on its hands.” He resigned from the Army. Elsewhere in Helmand, many more conventional British soldiers, on foot and in vehicles, were killed by Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) laid by the Taliban.
   
5. In a false economy, the U.K. Foreign Office halted a $4 million helicopter support program, maintaining four Russian-made “Hip” helicopters that enabled the SBS to operate with Afghan commandos in raids on drug barons and Taliban guerrillas. The Foreign Office hoped Uncle Sam would pick up the tab to maintain the helicopters and got it wrong. Simultaneously Defense Chiefs were boosting Special Forces numbers with a new Brigade Reconnaissance Force to be attached to each of the army’s front line fighting brigades.
   

MoD incompetence in procuring military equipment was becoming notorious. In August 2008 the
Sunday Times
revealed an internal report suppressed by the Ministry, which asked: “How can it be that it takes twenty years to buy a ship, or aircraft, or tank? Why does it always seem to cost at least twice what was thought? Even worse, at the end of the wait, why does it never quite seem to do what it was supposed to?”
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Another procurement scandal arose from a decision to buy eight Special Forces Chinook helicopters from Boeing in 1995. Reliable reports suggest that the MoD and Royal Air Force insisted they knew better when it came to designing avionics software for these aircraft. Warnings from Boeing of incompatibility were ignored. In the fiasco that followed, the machines were moth-balled in air-conditioned hangars after delivery in 2001 until 2007. At that point, the MoD decided to settle for a less sophisticated version capable of basic operations in good visibility. The cost of the new fleet had increased from GBP 259 million to at least GBP 500 million. The first aircraft was expected to enter service in 2010 after a fifteen-year delay. Meanwhile, U.K. soldiers were being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan because their mobility depended on road vehicles that were a soft target for IEDs. The MoD tried to blame Boeing, alleging that the U.S. company had deliberately withheld software codes needed to make the Chinooks perform as contracted.
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In 2006, the U.K. Treasury capped the number of soldiers available for an offensive against the Taliban around Musa Qala, where, at one point, a favorite enemy target was guarded by just thirty men. Former SAS commander Brigadier Ed Butler, leading the operation, told members of parliament that he had just enough troops—3,300—to hold the line “but we couldn’t sustain a higher tempo.” Lack of helicopters meant that “the Taliban forced us off the road,” using asymmetric tactics to ambush his men with roadside bombs.
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By 2009, U.S. military planners were considering ceding Musa Qala and other areas of southern Helmand to the Taliban, more effectively to secure more densely populated areas of the province in line with General Stanley McChrystal’s new doctrine.

There were other glaring shortages. British paratroopers in Afghanistan had to borrow .50 caliber ammunition for their Browning machine guns from American and Canadian allies. An officer involved said: “The ammo we had was rubbish. It just kept jamming. At one point we refused to go out [on patrol] because it was so bad. If we had not got that [Canadian] ammo we would certainly have lost a lot of people.” The defective bullets were believed to come from the Czech Republic or Pakistan, at a cost of sixty U.S. cents, compared with $1.50 per round for British, Canadian, and American material. The Paras’ complaints were rejected at first. “They [higher command] refused to believe it was all crap until Special Forces got involved,” the anonymous officer told a journalist. “After that we had…new stuff within a week.”
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In spite of this mess, the MoD enlarged the scale and scope of U.K. Special Forces on American lines. In 2004 what had started life in Northern Ireland as 14 Intelligence Company became the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, for which women as well as men were recruited for covert, close intelligence gathering. Initially, the SRR targeted Islamist fundamentalists in U.K. following the London bombing attacks of July 2005. Four years later, a British minister admitted that the government had overreacted to the threat of Islamist bombs in Britain. In a febrile atmosphere, misidentification by the new team contributed to the killing of an innocent Brazilian on the London subway by police marksmen. At around the same time an SF group named 18th (UKSF) Signal Regiment, modeled on America’s ISAF, was secretly set up.

U.K. Special Forces quick reaction teams now included personnel from the SAS, Special Boat Service, Special Reconnaissance Regiment, 18th Signals, and bomb disposal experts who were also trained as parachute-commandos. Sometimes dressed in civilian clothes, they responded to emergencies within the U.K., using two civilian executive jets and civilian helicopters, probably flown by aircrew from the RAF’s Special Duties Flight (known as 7 Squadron) as a change from flying ageing Chinooks.

The U.K.’s reorganized Special Forces Group was enlarged even further in 2005 by a Joint Special Forces Support Group similar to the U.S. Army’s Rangers, to give extra firepower in SAS snatch operations, hostage rescue, and backup for covert intelligence missions. The SFSG was constructed around 1 Parachute Regiment, the Red Berets, famous for their self-belief and aggressive approach to almost any situation. With other elements including Marine Commandos, the new group was expected to be a force of 1,200 men when it became fully operational. Its high-tech communications enabled it to receive instant intelligence from bases in the U.K.

UKSF was further enlarged in 2009 with the creation of new reconnaissance companies in a Brigade Reconnaissance Force. A company of 150 BRF soldiers would be used as a forward screen for conventional fighting units, possibly in an attempt to contain rising casualties from multiple IED booby traps. Total BRF strength was 900, augmenting the existing Special Forces Group. The manpower source of the new SF team, in an overstretched “Green Army,” was not clear. Though the entity that now emerged bore an even stronger resemblance to America’s Special Operations Command, Britain’s lamentable failures to provide adequate equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan was a sad contrast with its efforts to upgrade and enlarge its Special Forces capability in line with U.S. developments.

The mismatch of military aspiration and reality sometimes provoked a breakdown in trust and a failure of the civil/military compact where it mattered, on the battlefield.

In 2007, the rancor resulted in the resignation of an unidentified SAS Commanding Officer, a lieutenant-colonel, in Iraq and Afghanistan. His habit of leading his men from the front provoked a smear that he had defied superior orders.
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A year later, the resignation of Major Sebastian Morley following the loss of one of his teams was another protest that became public knowledge. In Afghanistan, the SAS depended increasingly upon reservists and retired officers, one of whom joked: “You can depend on me not to run from the enemy. I can’t run very fast these days.”

Given this background, the surprise is that UKSF continued to function as successfully as it did. In Iraq, the regular 22 SAS Regiment was praised by General David Petraeus as he stepped down from command there in 2008. He said: “They have helped immensely in the Baghdad area, in particular, to take down the al Qaeda car bomb networks and other al Qaeda operations in Iraq’s capital city…a phenomenal job.” He recalled how SAS soldiers rented a pink pickup truck, discarded body armor, and drove through traffic to catch a key target. “It was brilliant. They have exceptional courage and exceptional savvy. I can’t say enough about how impressive they are in thinking on their feet.”
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Working with the Iraqi special force trained by Delta, two SAS squadrons destroyed two Sunni car bomb groups in Baghdad, killed hundreds of key al Qaeda players, and rescued several hostages. Richard Williams, a former Commanding Officer of 22 SAS, claims: “When we went into Iraq with the Delta Force in November 2006, more than 142 bombs per month were being detonated. By December 2007, that was down to two a month. We took out more than 3,000 bombers.”
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For close-target reconnaissance operations, his soldiers dressed as locals, grew beards, dyed their skin brown and black if necessary, and used contact lenses to change the color of their eyes. They wore the fake gold watches favoured by Iraqi men and adopted their swaggering walk. Near the Syrian border, they intercepted foreign jihadis, killing twelve in one encounter. Inspired by the example of an earlier SAS generation and advised by Lieutenant-General Sir Graeme Lamb, they used jesuitical techniques to persuade some enemy personnel to defect. In 2009, Lamb retired from active service and was promptly hired by General Stanley McChrystal, U.S. commander in chief in Afghanistan, to run a program of reconciliation carefully targeted on Taliban leaders. Alongside the use of Special Forces to limit civilian casualties while killing the enemy, the new strategy employed covert negotiations with some of them, a pattern followed by the British in Northern Ireland.

Petraeus was not alone in praising the SAS in Iraq. General Sir Richard Dannatt, head of the British army at the time, said that coalition Special Forces, including the British elements, had confronted “al Qaeda and their mass-suicide tactics” and defeated them in Baghdad. “Al Qaeda didn’t defeat itself in Baghdad,” he said. “It was defeated, substantially defeated.”
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But the bombers returned just six weeks after the Iraqi government took control of its own internal security on 30 June 2009. By then, the SAS contingent was in Afghanistan, and U.S. forces still in Iraq were withdrawn to fixed bases outside Iraqi cities.

The regular 22 SAS Regiment was aware that Afghanistan was a tougher proposition than Iraq. The regiment’s former commanding officer, Richard Williams, had been among the first Special Forces soldiers to get his boots on Afghan soil six weeks after 9/11 in 2001. By 2009, the situation had not improved. Primitive, illiterate, insular, suspicious of strangers, its public institutions including the police generally corrupt, Afghanistan was not a place where friendship could be bought, even if money changed hands. It was also a place of shifting loyalties. In 2007 six key Taliban commanders were killed by British Special Forces including the SBS. The bodies they discovered in one compound in Helmand included that of a man whose identity documents revealed that he was also an officer in the Pakistani Army. Britain’s refusal to expose this case infuriated Afghan President Karzai, who saw it as confirmation of covert Pakistani backing for the Taliban. Lieutenant Colonel Chris Nash USMC confirmed that in June 2007, Pakistani military forces flew repeated helicopter missions to resupply Taliban fighters during a fierce battle against an American training team embedded with Afghan Border Police. A raid into Pakistan by U.S. Special Forces triggered a diplomatic row in which Pakistani officials denounced “a gross violation of Pakistan’s territory.”
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The raid was the first step in a radical new strategy pursued by the newly elected President Obama and his choice of the Special Forces expert, General Stanley McChrystal, to direct operations in a contiguous battleground now known as “Af-Pak.” In a parallel diplomatic offensive, Obama let loose Richard (“Bulldozer”) Holbrooke as his special envoy to the region. When Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari tried to buy off Islamists in the tribal areas on the North West Frontier, permitting Sharia to replace state law, Zardari was left in no doubt of Washington’s displeasure. At this point, the Islamists over-reached themselves and launched an offensive out of the Swat Valley to a town only sixty miles from the capital, Islamabad. During the preceding eighteen months, Taliban terrorists had murdered 2,500 civilians in Pakistan. Zardari at last identified the true threat to his country and sent in the Army in another attempt to bring the region under control. Almost a million refugees fled from the war zone.