Dirty Wars (34 page)

The Special Operations Command also began working on a program for monitoring suspected or known insurgents. It was straight out of a sci-fi film. Known as “
Continuous Clandestine Tagging
Tracking and Locating,” or CTTL, it involved using advanced biometrics and chemistry to develop a long-range facial recognition program as well as a “Human Thermal Fingerprint” that could be isolated for any individual. They also used a chemical “
bioreactive taggant
” to mark people by discreetly swabbing a part of their body. The taggant would emit a signal that JSOC could remotely monitor, enabling it to track people 24/7/365. It was like a modern version of the old spook's tracking devices made famous in films, where spies would weave them into an enemy's clothes or place them on the bottom of a vehicle. The taggant allowed JSOC to mark prisoners and then release
them to see if they would lead the task force to a potential terror or insurgent cell. Putting them on nonprisoners was a greater challenge, but it happened. The use of such technology, along with the accelerated pace of the killings and captures, would inspire President Bush's declaration that “
JSOC is awesome
.”

While Iraq was vacuuming up most of the US counterterrorist resources, the White House and Pentagon continued on with their twilight wars elsewhere across the globe, and the war in Afghanistan festered, all but forgotten. Bin Laden was still at large, as were many of his top deputies, with Bush's “Wanted Dead or Alive” pronouncement relegated to a source of scorn and a symbol of a failing yet spreading war. Taliban leader Mullah Omar was underground, while Pakistan was heating up and Somalia and Yemen were increasingly showing up on the counterterror radar.

As the US body count in Iraq increased as a result of the widening insurgency, President Bush would
press commanders
on how many people they had killed on any given day. The conventional generals would often balk at the question, but the answer from the JSOC crew was unequivocal. When asked how many Iraqis the task force killed in Iraq, McChrystal's intelligence chief, Mike Flynn, replied, “Thousands,
I don't even know how many
.” In Iraq, the task force had started to fulfill Rumsfeld and Cheney's wildest dreams of what a streamlined, well-funded, secret force could do—and accomplish away from the prying eyes of Congress and the media, or even the CIA.

Although Rumsfeld and Cheney had already been circumventing the conventional military chain of command and coordinating directly with JSOC, they now had all the pieces of their puzzle in place. The task force that had been built up and refined in Afghanistan and Iraq was going to take its actions global and away from declared battlefields. McChrystal began establishing a network of
JSOC liaison offices
in a variety of Middle Eastern and other countries to avoid relying on—or working with—US embassies or CIA station chiefs. “The
Department of Defense is very eager
to step up its involvement in counterterrorism activities, and it has set its sights on traditional CIA operational responsibilities and authorities,” asserted Brennan, who at the time ran the National Counterterrorism Center. “Quite unfortunately, the CIA's important lead role in many of these areas is being steadily eroded, and the current militarization of many of the nation's intelligence functions and responsibilities will be viewed as a major mistake in the very near future.” In the wake of the WMD scandal in the lead-up to the Iraq War, veteran intelligence professionals were already concerned that the independence of the CIA's analysis was being compromised to adhere to political agendas. With JSOC being used as a parallel intelligence operation to the CIA—and one with its own force to act free
of independent review—the potential for abuse of substantial and secretive military power was significant.

Colonel Patrick Lang, who once ran the Defense Intelligence Agency's global human intelligence operations, concurred with Brennan about the risks of Rumsfeld and Cheney's innovations in the command structure. “When you made SOCOM a supported command rather than a supporting command, then you've freed [JSOC] up to do all kinds of things,” he said. “To do that kind of thing without coordinating with the US ambassador of that country, or with the host country's government is just kind of banditry, really. I mean, you're asking for retribution of some kind by somebody on your own turf, against your own people.
It's not a good idea
, at all.”

Critics be damned, though, the JSOC Iraq model was about to go on tour. “You look at our Special Operations Forces, you have the ability to wage war, in a very low key way, and in a way that's not going to command a lot of congressional oversight,” said Exum. The mindset, he said, was: “You have an empowered executive branch that more or less has license to wage war wherever it needs to, wherever it determines it needs to, worldwide. You've got this great hammer, and, you know,
why not go hammer
some nails?”

IN EARLY
2005, a
behind-the-scenes scuffle
broke out between the CIA, CENTCOM and the Pentagon over who should take the lead in targeting al Qaeda in Pakistan after some US intelligence reports suggested that al Qaeda's number-two man, Ayman al Zawahiri, was believed to be attending a meeting in the tribal area of Bajaur in Waziristan. General McChrystal pushed hard for a JSOC raid to capture Zawahiri, and some CIA officials wanted him to do so without informing the US ambassador in Islamabad, Ryan Crocker. Anthony Shaffer said that he and US Special Operations planners had wanted to conduct such missions without informing the CIA, either. “We felt that there was a likelihood at some point that CIA would—either inadvertently or with knowledge—give the ISI information relating to what we were doing,” he told me. “The idea was, to be blunt about it, to go it alone. We felt that we could not trust the CIA or the Pakistanis, to any great degree.” He added: “There are just some targets the Pakistanis
would never cooperate
with us to get.”

The CIA, however, was well aware of this operation. Teams of Navy SEALs and Army Rangers in Afghanistan were actually preparing to board aircraft for the operation, which included as many as one hundred commandos, when the fighting among the CIA, CENTCOM and the Pentagon leadership became so contentious that the operation was grounded. A former CIA officer told the
New York Times
that as the raid was being
debated, he had “told the military guys that this thing was going to be the
biggest folly
since the Bay of Pigs.”

Shaffer said that the rules for striking inside Pakistan had “changed dramatically” and “became much more restrictive to the point of where I think it was nearly impossible,” adding, “The format of the war changed under our feet.” General McChrystal, Shaffer said, “continued to push for authority to do things in Pakistan,” adding, “I know for a fact that there was a policy decision made at some level that restricted our ability to do cross-border operations to deal with the things that we all believed from my level was the real issue. Pakistan was the real issue, not Afghanistan.”

But then, in October 2005, Pakistan suffered a massive 7.6 magnitude earthquake. Some 75,000 Pakistanis died. Millions more were displaced. JSOC and the
CIA took advantage of the disorder
to fill the country with operatives, contractors and commandos, escaping requisite ISI background checks. According to journalists Marc Ambinder and D. B. Grady, the JSOC intelligence teams that entered Pakistan with the CIA had multiple goals, including the cultivation of informant rings to collect information on al Qaeda, as well as intelligence gathering related to how Pakistan transported its nuclear weapons. The elite US force also aimed to penetrate the ISI.

“Under a secret program code-named
SCREEN HUNTER
,
JSOC, augmented by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and contract personnel, was authorized to shadow and identify members of the ISI suspected of being sympathetic to al-Qaeda,” Ambinder and Grady wrote. “It is not clear whether JSOC units used lethal force against these ISI officers: one official said that the goal of the program was to track terrorists through the ISI by using disinformation and psychological warfare.”

Despite this incredible opportunity, neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan would be given top billing in the Bush administration's war plan. Instead, the top-tier operators from JSOC and the CIA were again redirected to Iraq to confront the rapidly spreading insurgency, which had made a farce of the administration's claims that US forces would be welcomed as liberators. The CIA's unit responsible for hunting down bin Laden, Alec Station, was shut down. “This will clearly denigrate our operations against Al Qaeda,” declared former senior CIA official Michael Scheuer, the unit's first director. “These days at the agency, bin Laden and Al Qaeda appear to be treated merely as
first among equals
.”

The head of the CIA's clandestine operations branch, Jose Rodriguez, reorganized the CIA's secret US war in Pakistan under the code name “Operation Cannonball.” In theory, it was an attempt to ratchet up the targeting of al Qaeda. But with most of the veteran CIA and Special Ops assets bogged down in Iraq, the operation was largely staffed by inexperienced
operatives. “You had a very finite number” of agents with operational experience in the Islamic world, a former senior intelligence official told the
New York Times.
“Those people all went to Iraq. We were all
hurting because of Iraq
.” The secret war in Pakistan became largely a drone bombing campaign, described by CIA officers at the US Embassy in Islamabad as “
boys with toys
.” The drone campaign successfully took out several suspected al Qaeda figures and reportedly narrowly missed Zawahiri, but it also resulted in scores of civilians being killed, sparking protests and outrage among Pakistanis.

Although CIA drone strikes became the lead US weapon in Pakistan during this period, JSOC forces did, at times, manage to conduct sporadic ground operations, albeit “with a great deal of protest” from the Pakistanis, according to Shaffer. In a raid in 2006 in Damadola in Bajaur, Navy SEALs from DEVGRU targeted a suspected al Qaeda house and detained several people. “
They choppered in
, rappelled down and went into the compound,” a former US official familiar with the operation told the
Los Angeles Times.
“It was tactically very well executed.” Pakistani media sources characterized the operation a bit differently. “American soldiers had
violated Pakistani airspace
, flown to the village in helicopters, killed eight persons in the home of a cleric Maulana Noor Mohammad, and taken away five others to Afghanistan,” reported journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai.

With resources spread thin in Pakistan as a result of the intensifying insurgency in Iraq, the Bush administration began outsourcing its war in Pakistan. Enter Blackwater, Erik Prince's secretive mercenary company already infamous for its work in Iraq. Like the CIA, Blackwater had its own cover: diplomatic security. From the early stages of the launch of the Global War on Terror, its operatives were able to deploy in large numbers to war zones as bodyguards for US officials. Blackwater was the elite Praetorian Guard for the senior officials running the US occupation of Iraq and simultaneously worked for the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA providing security for their operations in hostile zones across the globe.

The company additionally won contracts for training foreign military forces,
including Pakistan's Frontier Corps
, the federal paramilitary force officially responsible for on-the-ground strikes against suspected terrorists or militants in the tribal areas.

Meanwhile, across the border in Afghanistan, Blackwater controlled four
Forward Operating Bases
, including the closest US base to the Pakistan border. All of this was very appealing to both JSOC and the CIA.

According to Shaffer, among Blackwater's roles for the CIA was training Afghan militias to do cross-border raids into Pakistan, which offered deniability to the United States. “I handled two of their—the CIA/Blackwater
—KIAs [killed in action], killed while they were out on a mission... essentially performing a Special Operations mission, training Afghan cadre militia to do cross border stuff,” Shaffer recalled. He added: “This is clearly something they were doing that they didn't like having talked about.” One of the reasons Blackwater was used, he said, “was to avoid oversight.”

Many of Blackwater's elite operatives, particularly those who worked for its most sensitive division,
Blackwater SELECT
, were veterans of US Special Operations. It wasn't hard for them, therefore, to serve two masters: the CIA and JSOC. While the CIA was, by mandate, concerned with an array of intelligence functions, JSOC had one central mission worldwide: the killing or capture of High Value Targets, HVTs. In 2006, twelve “tactical action operatives” from Blackwater were recruited for a secret JSOC raid inside Pakistan, targeting an al Qaeda facility. The operation was code-named “
Vibrant Fury
.” The involvement of Blackwater demonstrated how central the company had become to covert US actions.

IN
2005, Abu Musab al Zarqawi escalated his merciless campaign targeting Iraqi Shiites as well as Sunni Muslims he perceived as being weak or ineffectual. Al Qaeda's central leadership, believing that the killing of Muslims by Zarqawi would backfire, reached out to the Jordanian militant. Ayman al Zawahiri wrote to Zarqawi in July 2005. Bin Laden's deputy heaped praise on Zarqawi for his role in the jihad, while emphasizing that the first goal in Iraq should be to expel the US invaders. The sectarian war against Shiites, Zawahiri declared, was “
secondary in importance
to outside aggression” and al Qaeda in Iraq should focus on supporting a popular revolt against the Americans. Zawahiri warned Zarqawi: