Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (34 page)

 

PART III

BUILDING THE MACHINE

 

15

Invasion

On an April night a small white propeller aircraft descended out of the darkness about 115 miles northwest of Baghdad. The plane had been in the inventory for years but had never before been used for a clandestine infiltration. Now its two Echo Squadron pilots were a hundred miles behind enemy lines searching through their night vision goggles for a place to land. There was no airfield—not even a dirt strip—nearby. But they weren't worried. Up ahead, on the only paved road for miles around, they spotted the glow of an infrared chemical light a 24th Special Tactics Squadron operator had placed where he wanted them to touch down. Aligning the aircraft with the thin black ribbon across the desert, the lead pilot lowered the plane until the wheels screeched on the tarmac and the aircraft came to a rest. Out stepped a lean, athletic man in his early forties. In Delta they called him “Panther” and he was arriving to take charge of a small task force with a big mission. That was nothing new for him. What was unusual was the makeup of his force. For the first time since the Panama invasion a U.S. special operations force was taking tanks into battle, and Pete Blaber was going to lead it.
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Although the U.S. military's failures at Tora Bora and Anaconda meant Al Qaeda's leadership and thousands of its fighters had escaped to Pakistan, it was clear to most in JSOC that the next phase of the Bush administration's “war on terror” would not be a covert campaign against its enemies strategizing in Pakistan's tribal areas, but an invasion of Iraq. The JSOC staff was discussing a potential role for the command in such an operation by the end of 2001. Real planning for it began shortly after Anaconda, when the staffers returned to Pope Air Force Base from Masirah, and, together with their Delta counterparts, were busy dusting off Desert Storm plans and after-action reports for reminders of lessons learned twelve years previously.
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Task Force Brown's aircrews had little doubt where their next battles lay. “All of our training exercises, all of our scenarios were built off an Iraqi scenario” once the unit returned to Fort Campbell in December 2001, a Little Bird pilot said.

December 2002 found the JSOC staff in Qatar taking part in Internal Look, CENTCOM's war game of an Iraq invasion.
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Within three months, Dailey had established his joint operations center at Arar, the same airfield JSOC used during Desert Storm. There, out of sight of the news media and never officially acknowledged, a substantial force was gathering. Not only did it include the usual color-coded elements that formed a JSOC task force, but also a significant contribution from the conventional Army: an infantry battalion from the 82nd Airborne Division, a Patriot air defense missile unit, and a High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, battery. (A truck-mounted version of the Army's tracked Multiple Launch Rocket System, HIMARS could also fit on a Combat Talon. Its mobility made it an ideal fire support platform for a raiding force.) Together, the elements assembling fifty miles from the Iraqi border were called Task Force 20.
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Most of the 160th's 1st Battalion was involved, other than those crews required to stay home and maintain the Bullet package of helicopters ready for a no-notice JSOC mission. “Those guys, they were hating life,” said a Little Bird pilot. “They thought they were going to miss all the action, that this was going to be a fight that was going to be over in a couple of months and they'd miss the war.”

Delta was to be the main special mission unit, having handed Afghanistan off to Team 6 by late 2002.
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The unit's C Squadron, led by Lieutenant Colonel Bill Coultrup, was at Arar waiting for the action to start. But Delta commander Colonel Ron Russell had suffered a brain aneurysm while running around the airfield. With deputy commander Colonel Chuck Sellers back at Bragg, Dailey made Blaber, the unit's operations officer, Delta's acting commander in theater. Team 6's Gold Team was also there.
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If Delta provided Task Force 20's rapier, the Ranger Regiment provided its muscle. The Rangers were there in force because Dailey was planning the command's pièce de résistance, an airborne seizure of Baghdad airport—a classic joint readiness-exercise-style mission for which the task force had conducted large-scale rehearsals at Forts Benning and Bragg prior to deployment. For JSOC's other assigned mission—hunting for Iraq's fabled weapons of mass destruction—Dailey's preferred option was to keep his force at Arar and launch heliborne raids from there.

Blaber, unsurprisingly, disagreed. Just as he had with regard to Afghanistan, the Delta officer advocated putting forces on the ground in Iraq to “develop the situation.” Dailey and his more cautious staffers recoiled from this suggestion. Anxious about the risks that sending a raiding force into Iraq would entail, they had no interest in sending a small, lightly armed and armored task force into Iraq's vast western desert. They would remind Delta operators eager to launch into Iraq of the case of Bravo Two Zero, the eight-man British SAS patrol in Desert Storm that was compromised, leading to the deaths of three operators and the capture of four others. To Delta, Dailey's attitude was simple:
You can't operate behind enemy lines
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Blaber thought Dailey and his nervous staffers were overestimating the risks. “Guys, you're fighting a past war again,” the Delta officer told them in a briefing at Arar, before listing five assets available to Delta in 2003 that were not available in 1991: precision-guided munitions in the form of the shoulder-launched Javelin antitank missile, which would allow operators to engage tanks from stand-off range, and Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or JDAMs, which were “smart” bombs dropped by jets; small unmanned aerial vehicles a raiding party could launch to check for dangers over the next terrain feature; new, highly mobile trucks that carried generators and large quantities of fuel; trained dogs (with air-conditioned kennels) to help secure a perimeter; and battlefield interrogation teams to produce instantly actionable intelligence. Together these assets were “game-changers,” he told the staffers. Blaber's men knew it. The operators were itching to roam across western Iraq. “We begged, borrowed, and begged some more just to get in,” a Delta source said.

Dailey threw Blaber a bone and agreed to let him send a small task force organized around Coultrup's C Squadron across the border as part of the Scud-hunting mission that Central Command had given 5th Special Forces Group, which had set up shop at Jordan's Prince Hassan Air Base, also known as H-5. In mid-March, Blaber, Coultrup, and Colonel Frank Kearney, who was still the operations director for JSOC and Task Force 20, flew there on covered aircraft from Arar to meet with 5th Group commander John Mulholland and his 1st Battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Chris Haas, with whom Blaber had worked closely before and during Anaconda. British SAS and SBS elements also attended the meeting.

Dailey's guidance to Blaber was clear: “You have one mission: find Scuds.” (Because Scuds could be used to fire chemical warheads, U.S. military personnel often used the word to refer not just to the missiles but Saddam's WMD program.) But Blaber and his colleagues had other ideas. The acting Delta commander's order to Coultrup was classic Blaber: “Develop the situation.” Despite Dailey's expectation that Delta would limit itself to poking around missile sites in the western desert, Blaber had designed Coultrup's force to go all the way to Baghdad.

“So this was like a secret mission, but secret from our own people, because we knew we weren't going to find any WMDs and we weren't going to find any Scuds,” a Delta source said. New communications technology could reduce their vulnerability, he told the other commanders. Noting that they all carried Iridium satellite phones, Blaber suggested they type each other's numbers into the speed dial. If one task force came under attack, its commander should immediately text the word “baseball” to the others, who would converge on the location, thus reducing the risk of having small elements operating independently in the desert. “We will become a swarm,” Blaber said.
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On the moonless night of March 19, TF Brown pilots fired the first rounds of the war against Iraq. Their targets were the scores of small buildings known as visual observation posts from which Iraqi forces monitored the western and southern borders with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Flying from Arar, a pair of DAPs headed northwest to destroy the posts facing Jordan, while ten Little Birds—eight AH-6s and two MH-6s—flew north and northeast to take out the posts along the Saudi border. The Little Birds were divided into “Black Swarm” teams. In tactics developed the previous year during exercises across the American Southwest and at Fort Knox, Kentucky, each MH-6 was teamed with four AH-6s, divided into two pairs. As they approached the border, the pairs would separate, one pair going into a holding pattern while the other attacked the border posts with the MH-6, which would spot targets with its forward-looking infrared (FLIR) sensor and use a laser designator to identify them for the AH-6s. (All Little Birds had been fitted with FLIR systems since returning from Afghanistan, but the AH-6 crews had removed theirs to allow the aircraft to carry more munitions.) Once the first pair of AH-6s had fired all their ammunition, the second pair would take over. The tactic was a variation on that used in Prime Chance, the 1987 operation against the Iranians in the Persian Gulf, with an important twist: each Little Bird team could call on a pair of Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II ground attack aircraft (better known as “Warthogs”) to take care of larger targets with Maverick missiles and 30mm cannon fire.

The rules of engagement allowed the pilots to target any Iraqi with a weapon. Firing sometimes from two or three miles away, the DAPs and Little Birds cut down dozens of people. Resistance was minimal and ineffective.
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An AH-6 pilot said his team took no return fire. “It was pretty much like shooting ducks in the water,” he said.

Friendly fire was perhaps a greater threat to the helicopter crews. Before the missions, TF Brown planners and crews were given maps overlaid with the paths of each cruise missile strike scheduled for that night, “so we didn't fly into one,” said a pilot. The squiggly lines “looked like a jellyfish,” he said. But the maps were to ensure that the crews weren't the ones getting stung. “We had to plan our flight routes around it because basically they're flying at our altitude,” the pilot said. “You didn't want to be in formation with one of those.”

As the DAPs and Little Birds were systematically destroying the visual observation posts and the first bombs were falling on Baghdad, a seventeen-vehicle column from Arar blasted a hole in the forty-foot berm marking the border and crossed into Iraq, the first U.S. ground force to do so. Inside the fifteen Pinzgauers and two SUVs (included for their low-vis characteristics) were about seventy-five personnel, including Delta's entire C Squadron, led by Coultrup. Pete Blaber's dream was alive. Task Force Green was in the fight.
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The flights targeting the visual observation posts marked the start of the U.S. invasion, but the aircrews were not the first JSOC personnel to cross the border. Prior to the invasion, a single U.S. intelligence operative—a former Delta operator still working for the unit—climbed into a black SUV in Amman, Jordan, and began the fifteen-hour drive to Baghdad, where he would become JSOC's only nonofficial cover agent in the enemy capital.

Born and raised in Eastern Europe, the agent had high Slavic cheekbones and eyes that became slits when he smiled. He had moved to the United States as a teenager, joining the Army in the 1970s before being selected into Delta early enough to take part in Eagle Claw. An operator who served with him in the early 1980s recalled “a funny, outgoing guy” with a heavy accent. “He was so East European,” the operator said. “He slouched a little bit, he wasn't real buff. But he ran—he was fast.” The East European remained in the Unit through the 1980s, joined Operational Support Troop in the early 1990s, then disappeared into the training, evaluation, and operational research (TEOR) department, where older NCOs went when they no longer wanted to put up with the rigors of being in an operational squadron. For that reason, other operators sometimes referred to TEOR as “travel everywhere or retire.” But the department, manned largely by personnel with technical and technological expertise, was responsible for supplying operators with one-of-a-kind gear, particularly for covert missions. “If you need a camera that can hide in a ‘rock' or you need to have an attaché case rigged with a microphone on it,” you visit the department, said a Delta source. “They developed all kinds of cool breakthrough products, the foundation of which were always off-the-shelf technology.”

At some point the East European left the uniformed Army to become a nonofficial cover operative, or NOC (pronounced “knock”): an intelligence officer working under a cover identity as something other than a U.S. government employee (in the East European's case, as a businessman). This is one of the most hazardous types of intelligence work, because the operative does not enjoy diplomatic immunity. The East European continued to report to Delta in his new role, but few of his old comrades knew about it. “This is totally compartmented at the Unit,” said a Delta source. The agent rarely, if ever, visited the compound. An operator who had served with him in the 1980s had no idea that he'd become a nonofficial cover operative. “I just made an assumption that he'd moved on,” the operator said.

For years he “lived his cover,” spending time in his native country, even returning there for medical treatment as well as to meet sources. He traveled globally, including weeks-long trips to Latin America, Iran, and Turkey to build his cover, in addition to Iraq, which he visited repeatedly in the 1990s to support Delta's counter-proliferation mission, in particular the Unit's role in the U.S. component of the United Nations inspections. “Everybody else who did the inspections had nothing even close to being that deep or protected,” said a Delta source.