Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the "Butcher of Fallujah"-and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091) (15 page)

WE WANT THIS MANIAC ALIVE

And Matt, his adrenalin pumping, had his knee rammed into the spine of the most feared terrorist in the Middle East, the Butcher of Fallujah; Echo Platoon's assault Team had captured the mass murderer Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi. ...

T
he bombs of August sent a tremble of new determination through Camp Schwedler. SEAL Team 10, already on red alert after Tyler Trahan's death, was now up and ready to go at even the sound of high explosive over the wall at the old Marine base.

And there were plenty of those sounds. Camp Baharia, now closed after the US troop withdrawal, was a constant target for any demented Islamist going for a place over the bridge, where the sound of trumpets would herald the arrival of his personal virgins.

The departed Marines, out beyond the walls of the SEAL compound, used to be expert at avoiding these weekly outbursts of senseless violence, and they conducted dozens of patrols around their sprawling base. It kept Camp Schwedler out of trouble. But with the Marines gone, the SEALs needed to be doubly vigilant for potential attacks on them.

And still there remained one golden target—Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi. And the SEALs' senior command believed that if they could
grab this al-Qaeda killer, everything would calm down, and the danger of being blown up would be lessened for everyone.

At this time there were regular reports coming in, detailing sightings and tip-offs. And by now they even knew what he looked like. They had poor-quality but useful photographs as well as a solid description of his height and build.

They even knew he'd lost the top part of the little finger of his left hand. But whether the half-size pinkie would lead Ahmad to his doom was anyone's guess. They'd been after him for five and a half years now, since the spring of 2004, and he was still ahead of the game.

And many opinions had been revised. Whereas once US intel had been almost certain the Butcher was moving around surrounded by a virtual army of bodyguards and al-Qaeda commanders, they now believed he was operating within a small entourage, somehow managing to stay under the radar. And like Saddam Hussein before him, no one knew where he would spend the night at any given day in the week.

Terrorist commanders in both Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as in Iraq were always ready to phone their friendly newsroom in the Al Jazeera television network in Doha, Qatar. But mostly they seemed to prefer the old tried and trusted ways of their ancestors—sometimes walking miles and miles over the high peaks of the Hindu Kush, pretending to be poor farmers but actually carrying sometimes priceless information in the saddle bags of their camels, beyond the reach of eavesdroppers.

Osama bin Laden himself had almost certainly issued a warning, so infuriated was he at the now-famous intercept when the Israelis hacked into a conversation between his mother in Saudi Arabia and his own mountain cave. These rare recordings were occasionally played to Fort Meade visitors in order to lighten a normally somber subject.

In Iraq, too, this seemed to explain Al-Isawi's silence on the airwaves. The only facts ever came from “contacts”—Iraqi agents being paid by the Americans. It thus seemed increasingly likely that al-Qaeda's messages, plans, and intentions were being carried across the desert and hidden in the panniers strapped to the camels.

It probably was not the fastest thing al-Qaeda had ever done, but at least they could be certain there was not some electronic technician in nearby Tel Aviv, tuning into the frequencies and going for the same intercepts that revealed bin Laden's mother.

And this was how Al-Isawi managed to stay right under the radar, with the main US progress being either from spies or captured illegal combatants who were prepared to betray him for cash. The Americans had been close to their quarry, no doubt of that, but they still knew no one who had ever seen him.

And the entire population was terrified to admit even an acquaintance with him, so formidable was his reputation as a cold-blooded killer who would have a man's family systematically slaughtered for the slightest sign of disloyalty to al-Qaeda's murderous cause. And that fear also applied to the Iraqi police department.

An update was issued every few days, and the senior commanders shared this with the top SEALs, as most of the new information was geographic, involving possible sightings and likely places where the killer might turn up.

The TOC never slept. The place was open at all hours of the night as the major brains in Camp Schwedler pored over the incoming data on their most wanted man. And there was always a special intensity when anyone mentioned a forthcoming manhunt for Al-Isawi.

Everyone knew that one of the burned Blackwater bodies on the Fallujah bridge in 2004 was that of ex-SEAL instructor Scott Helvenston. And that would not be easily forgotten or forgiven. The unspoken pledge was simple: “Scott was one of our brothers. We will, in the end, capture his murderer.” So some SEALs gravitated naturally to the Schwedler ops room because the current activities reflected their own areas of expertise.

One of these was Petty Officer 1st Class Eric, the “rocket scientist” from Georgia Tech, point man, and cartographer—the man whose boots might well hit the sand first when they finally drew a bead on Al-Isawi. Eric loved maps, and probably knew more about the ancient trails and wadis of the Mesopotamian Bedouins than anyone since Alexander the Great, three hundred years before Christ.

Petty Officer 1st Class Rob, the ex-lineman from Penn State, was another. Breacher-supreme, he was also a heavyweight in the brains department and was probably born to be in naval intelligence. He loved the subject—loved piecing together mysteries, running his fingers over the charts, measuring distances, working out where the Butcher might and might not be.

Rob was more than happy to work eighteen hours a day in the TOC, studying the data. He also fancied himself as a professional spy and liked to talk to local people, probing for information and listening for a careless remark that might betray the whereabouts of Al-Isawi. He even had a few shots at recruiting people to join the US intel networks in Iraq. Some of them, according to Matt McCabe, were pretty darn clever.

Working alongside Rob was another highly intelligent SEAL, a junior officer with a similar flare for intel, Lieutenant Junior Grade Jason, who in the end left the Navy to go to law school. Looking back, Matt said, “I have to say the heart and soul of this entire operation belonged to Rob and Jason. Seemed to me they hardly ever went to sleep, just stayed right there in the TOC, poring over information, trying to second-guess this Al-Isawi character.”

On the burning hot afternoon of Monday, August 24, 2009, with the air conditioning in the TOC burning more gas than a launching space shuttle, the big break arrived. A trusted informer came on the line and revealed precisely where Al-Isawi was going to be on the morning of Wednesday, September 2.

It was a remote and secretive place, way out in the Syrian Desert, west of Camp Schwedler, maybe one hundred miles west. Certainly Matt had never been anywhere near it; no one had. No coalition forces had ever set foot in this lawless place. And Eric's huge fingers were flashing over his computer keys like shafts of light trying to pull up a satellite image, nailing down the GPS numbers.

Matt remembered thinking, “If this Al-Isawi has a lot of sentries or radar or night-vision goggles, it's going to be a tough walk in. And we can't fly in or take vehicles because the desert out there will be absolutely silent. I'll bet you could hear a camel fart at a thousand yards.”

Neat turn of phrase, McCabe. But he was right about one thing: the howling twin turbos of the Sikorsky Seahawk, the Navy's version of the Army's Black Hawk, could have awakened the sleeping pharaohs. And Matt's mind raced as he stood with the senior SEAL commanders, trying to visualize the scene as the Seahawks come clattering in to land in that hot desert night, hitherto as silent as outer space.

And there was a reason for Matt's close involvement with the upcoming mission to this apparent al-Qaeda stronghold, miles from anywhere. The young SEAL from Perrysburg, Ohio, was next on the rotation to lead the assault Team on this mission, probably twenty-five men, including the compulsory Iraqi contingent. And their objective would be plain: capture/kill the most dangerous al-Qaeda terrorist operative in the Middle East, Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi.

Matt stood staring at the map. The target area was almost 150 miles from Baghdad, in the middle of the Al Anbar Desert. So far as he could see there was nothing between the Euphrates River all the way west, 580 miles to Amman, the capital city of the desert kingdom of Jordan.

He could see a tiny village along the one single road that leads across that desert—Ar-Rutbah, situated where the road crosses the Hawran Wadi, about fifty miles further west than Al-Isawi's apparent temporary lodgings.

This place was not coming up on any of the regular Iraqi city maps. There was no record of any commerce or even local government. One military chart suggested Saddam Hussein may have built a few structures out there when he was on the run, but there were no photographs and no map references.

Matt and his buddies could only think it was something like that al-Qaeda training camp that Saddam had constructed north of his hometown of Tikrit. A patrolling SEAL Team had discovered it five years ago, and some of the guys were sure it was a replica of the same camps they'd located in Afghanistan.

Whichever way the situation was examined, Echo Platoon's target area would be as close to Nowhere Central as it was humanly possible to get. This was part good and part bad. The pluses were that with a
bit of luck, no one would be expecting them, not out there at the end of the world, where probably no Westerner had ever been.

The less attractive aspect of the assault was that they may run into heavy defenses, set up years ago but still lethal—heavy machine guns, grenades, rockets, and possibly even missiles. Also, they had no way of finding out what kind of bodyguard force would surround this Al-Isawi villain. Finally, they were unlikely to find out who he was meeting with.

The platoon humorist, unnamed here for security reasons, offered, unhelpfully, that ol' Al-Isawi “might just have a hot date with some local belly dancer ... you know, Shakira of the Desert!”

In truth, this somewhat relieved the tension, which was inevitably building as the Echo Platoon SEALs pondered the great unknowns of this forthcoming black operation to be conducted on the night of September 1-2.

They worked all through the day and long into the night. The CO named the operation Objective Amber, and designated a twenty-five-man team, comprising only eight SEALs plus the compulsory Iraqis' SWAT to take part. But the local terror of Al-Isawi was such that they did not dare tell the Iraqis who it actually was they were going after.

Otherwise the Iraqis would most certainly have refused to go and probably would not have signed the warrant, not that it would have stopped Team 10 from going in. Not after this long a time.

The senior commander put in a request for further satellite photographs of the area, but even with CIA backing, these requests were difficult because they required specific action at the National Reconnaissance Office in Chantilly Virginia, from where the United States' space satellite programs are controlled.

Surveillance of desert townships and installations are invariably problematic because everything is similar in color—that kind of scrubland brown, blending with a grayish brown, with hardly any perceptible difference among the sand, the sparse dusty vegetation, and solid concrete or packed mud. At least, not from twenty-two thousand miles straight up.

And this remote and desolate place was likely to be even more difficult than normal to photograph clearly because it had obviously been
purposefully built not so long ago specifically to avoid the piercing, prying eye of US surveillance as the satellites passed silently overhead.

If the men of SEAL Team 10 somehow received some clear-cut aerial pictures of this al-Qaeda stronghold, giving them at least a ground map shot from above ... well, they'd be darned lucky. And they all knew it.

This would require a major change in direction for the Chantilly satellite lenses that flew over Iraq because they would, logically, be concentrated on the main insurgent cities, like Basrah, Baghdad, and Fallujah. To move them around at short notice to focus on a wide stretch of godforsaken desert—that was a very big request.

Out there, over the dry wadis of outer Anbar Province, there was scarcely one single landmark except the endless road cutting across the sand on the ancient camel route to the northwestern hills of Jordon.

Matt and his teammates figured out that, because of the noise, they dare not bring those Seahawks in any closer than three miles. That would mean a helicopter ride from Camp Schwedler of approximately forty-five minutes and then a three-mile walk over rough sandy terrain in the pitch dark while carrying a lot of equipment.

“That's one and a half hours,” said Matt.

“And you can expect a firefight when you get there,” said the CO. “They've gotta have defenses ready, with a guy as important as Al-Isawi in residence.”

No one argued with any of that. But the prospect of a firefight was bad. Because if they were pinned down by heavy machine gunfire, trying to assault what might be a low-built village, Al-Isawi would have time to make a break for it. Although unlikely, he might even have access to some old getaway vehicle, and if he did, the SEALs would not hesitate to take it out, with a LAW rocket (a light, anti-armor weapon). But that was just one more item to carry.