Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (45 page)

He was also very difficult to catch. “We couldn't figure out how to get the guy,” the officer said. But intelligence that Amin owned a farm west of Rawa on the banks of the Euphrates gave Delta operators an idea. “Some of our sources said, ‘Hey, they're coming up to harvest season and he goes down and he visits the farm certain days literally to watch the workers bring the harvest in,'” the officer said. An assault troop in C Squadron led by Captain Doug Taylor, a former enlisted Delta operator who had received a commission from Officer Candidate School and returned to the unit, proposed snaring Amin by driving up to the Euphrates from Al Asad air base, floating down and across the river in small boats, then posing as workers on his farm. It was a classic out-of-the-box Delta plan: simple, yet elegant. It was also the type of plan that rarely got approved. But the United States was not winning in Iraq. Unconventional ideas that senior commanders would previously have dismissed were now getting a fair hearing. “By that time we had carte blanche to do anything we liked,” said a Delta source. Taylor's plan was given the green light. So it was that he and his men—including several Arabic speakers—found themselves sneaking onto Amin's farm before the day heated up. It was the morning of April 26, 2005.

The operators quickly sequestered the real farmworkers in the farmhouse. Taking the farmhands' places, they worked the fields—even driving a tractor—and waited. After some time, their prey approached. “Ghassan Amin and his two henchmen drove right up to the guys,” said the special mission unit officer. Amin walked to within a couple of feet of an operator and greeted him in Arabic, before belatedly realizing his mistake as the operators whipped out their weapons and took him and his cohorts prisoner. The Delta ruse worked so well that the operators were able to capture several of Amin's Al Qaeda associates in Iraq that day on the farm. “It's like something out of the movies,” said the special mission unit officer. “Many higher officers would [say], ‘Well, you can't be putting Arab garb on and driving tractors out in the field and have anyone fall for that.' Person after person came down to the farm, into the bag.”

The Delta source was more specific in his movie reference, alluding to Kevin Costner's famous quote in
Field of Dreams
. “If you build it, they will come,” he said. “They came and they came and they came.”

The operators eventually sped away with their captives, having successfully completed one of the more colorful Delta missions of the war on terror. Amin, for his part, was cool to the last. “I should have known it was Americans,” he said when he realized he'd fallen for a trick. “Iraqis never work that hard.”
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As the Ghassan Amin mission indicated, by late spring 2005, JSOC's war in Iraq was moving west, in response to the flow of foreign jihadists entering Iraq from Syria. Although the task force estimated that no more than 150 foreign fighters were arriving in Iraq per month, McChrystal had concluded they were playing an outsized role in the Sunni insurgency, which JSOC assessed as having between 12,000 and 20,000 fighters. The foreign jihadists, young men with no familial concerns or patriotic interest in seeing a prosperous Iraq, provided a disproportionate share of the insurgent leadership (with Zarqawi himself—a Jordanian—as the prime example) and almost all the suicide bombers cutting bloody swaths through Iraqi market squares. Once in Iraq, insurgent groups moved them through “ratlines” of safe houses in the towns along the western Euphrates Valley, from Al Qaim, the dusty industrial town on the Syrian border, to Rawa, Haditha, Hit, Ramadi, Fallujah, and Baghdad.
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Realizing that the task force's knowledge of foreign fighter networks beyond Iraq's borders was too shallow, in December 2004 McChrystal established a counterpart at Balad to Bagram's Joint Interagency Task Force-East, specifically to map those networks and to identify high-value targets abroad. The catalyst for the creation of what he dubbed JIATF-West was the December 21 suicide bombing by a young Saudi jihadist of the dining facility at Forward Operating Base Marez in Mosul. The attack killed twenty-two people, including Sergeant Major Robert O'Dell, an Orange operative on a team deployed to Mosul to help the task force element there get a better handle on the foreign fighter problem. Already aware that he needed to gain a greater understanding of the web of imams, financiers, ideologues, facilitators, and fighters that stretched across and beyond the Arab countries and was feeding jihadists into the meat grinder the Iraq War had become, after the Marez bombing McChrystal moved quickly. Within twenty-four hours he had flown from Bagram to Balad and established JIATF-West under Tom DiTomasso's leadership.
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While JIATF-East focused on Pakistan, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, JIATF-West's area of coverage included the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, East Africa, North Africa, Europe, Iraq, and Iran (which it shared with JIATF-East). The two JIATFs stayed small, with staffs of fifteen to twenty-five. Using a “newsroom” open-plan office design, the JIATFs worked to develop what they called a “common operating picture” that was shared with all the government agencies with a stake in counterterrorism. The JIATFs mapped the jihadist networks, but also combined intelligence from many sources to create target folders on wanted individuals. These five-page folders included a biography of the person, a diagram of his social network, a detailed description of his pattern of life, and solid intelligence on his location. Packaged together, that information allowed U.S. decision makers to choose between four courses of action: to continue to do nothing other than keep tabs on the individual; to work with partner nations and their security forces to kill or capture the target; to turn the data over to another country and let it handle the problem; or to act against the target unilaterally.
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But as JIATF-West steadily built its picture of the foreign fighter network outside Iraq, a sharp difference was appearing between JSOC's view of the enemy inside the country and the perspective of Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), the international coalition's conventional military command headed by U.S. Army General George Casey. McChrystal's staff was convinced that Al Qaeda in Iraq, and particularly Zarqawi's access to the foreign fighter networks, presented the biggest threat. Unconvinced, during the first half of 2005 Casey's headquarters continued to focus its attention on “former regime elements.”

There were other sources of tension between McChrystal's task force and the conventional U.S. military forces in Iraq. Conventional commanders tired of having their patient efforts to build relationships with Sunni communities in their areas of operation disrupted by destructive task force raids over which they had no control. The regular military was also jealous of JSOC's disproportionate share of scarce, in-demand ISR assets, particularly Predators. It didn't help that although Casey outranked McChrystal, the task force's chain of command ran directly to Central Command in Tampa, rather than to Multi-National Force-Iraq.
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In other words, the U.S. military's two principal war-fighting commands in Iraq were fighting different wars.

A rapprochement of sorts was achieved in May. A devastating series of well-coordinated attacks by Zarqawi's men across Anbar and Baghdad in April caused Casey to belatedly recognize the extent of the threat posed by Al Qaeda in Iraq and designate the organization as the Coalition's number-one enemy. At about the same time, in a conversation with Casey, McChrystal offered to shift his task force's focus to the west to support a major conventional effort to combat Zarqawi's forces closer to the Syrian border.
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The move guaranteed an even bloodier confrontation between JSOC and Al Qaeda in Iraq. McChrystal was dramatically raising the stakes, but felt he had no choice.

By fall 2004, the JSOC commander had determined that what he termed “a strict decapitation” strategy—i.e., one aimed only at capturing or killing Zarqawi and other very senior insurgents—was unlikely to succeed. Instead, he focused the task force on eviscerating Al Qaeda in Iraq's middle level of leaders. By stripping Al Qaeda in Iraq of its experienced day-to-day management structure faster than it could be replaced, McChrystal aimed to knock the Zarqawi network off its stride. Flynn's radical redesign of the task force's intelligence structure enabled this, but it was nonetheless a very labor-intensive approach requiring a massive increase in operational tempo. At the time, JSOC's Iraq task force's ground elements consisted of a Delta squadron headquartered with an assault troop in Fernandez (Task Force Central) but with teams distributed around Sunni cities like Tikrit and Mosul, with Ranger elements in support. (The Delta/Ranger element in Mosul became Task Force North.) To enable him to expand westward while keeping the pressure on the rest of Zarqawi's network, in summer 2005 McChrystal brought in a second Delta squadron from Bragg, and installed a SEAL Team 6 troop and squadron command cell plus a Ranger platoon at Al Asad as Task Force West. He also deployed an almost complete Team 6 troop from another squadron to Iraq, broke it up, and spread its operators around different Green teams. All this involved moving some Team 6 and Task Force Brown forces from Afghanistan to Iraq.
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McChrystal's announcement of his plan to “surge” forces into Iraq in order to facilitate a campaign in the western Euphrates Valley did not go over well with the task force's combat elements. “Not a lot of people were on board with McChrystal's expansion,” said a Task Force Brown source. “They felt we were already too involved in Iraq.” McChrystal acknowledged that Delta operators met his “highly controversial decision” with “initial intransigence.” The general's relations with Delta had been characterized by mutual wariness since he had taken command of JSOC. Visiting the unit compound at Bragg soon after assuming command, he felt like an outsider, which he was, having never served there. Many in Delta had traditionally viewed JSOC headquarters as one that added much bureaucracy and little operational value. But McChrystal had at least two things working in his favor: as a Ranger, he was an alumnus of the regiment from which Delta drew an increasing percentage of its operators; and he wasn't Dell Dailey. Many in Delta found McChrystal's aggressiveness a welcome change from what they perceived as Dailey's overly cautious approach. Nevertheless, when McChrystal gathered his commanders in May 2005 to explain his rationale for the surge, he encountered little enthusiasm. Delta officials' immediate concern was that operations in western Anbar would put them much farther from immediate medevac and other support than their missions in Baghdad had. But they were also worried that deploying two of Delta's three ground squadrons simultaneously would disrupt—perhaps permanently—the carefully controlled schedule that kept one squadron deployed, one on alert at home, and one resting, refitting, and training.
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“Green thought they were already getting tapped out,” said the Task Force Brown source. The surge west also required a considerable effort from Task Force Brown, which had most of its aircraft at Balad with a small detachment at Fernandez. Built as it was around just the 1st Battalion of the 160th, Brown did not have the flexibility that Blue, Green, and Red enjoyed by virtue of each having three separate ground maneuver elements.
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Nor was everyone gung ho about the increased tempo at which McChrystal expected teams to operate. While individual squadrons, battalions, and lower echelons all had their own personalities and approaches, some in Delta were reluctant, first, to expand their target set to include lower-ranking Al Qaeda in Iraq fighters, and, second, to hit objectives immediately, rather than observe them to gain intelligence. Of the three primary assault forces—Delta, Team 6, and the Rangers—Delta, manned largely by operators in their thirties and forties, was the unit most associated with “tactical patience.” This created particular problems in Iraq and then Afghanistan when McChrystal placed Ranger battalion commanders in charge of task forces that included Delta teams.
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But McChrystal would not be denied. Through a combination of his forceful personality and the support of key subordinates like Chris Faris, the Delta command sergeant major, and Scott Miller, who replaced Sacolick as Delta commander early that summer, McChrystal made the surge work.
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“You've got to give McChrystal credit because he fought through all of that, all the resistance … and essentially won,” said the TF Brown source.

The stakes were high. McChrystal warned Abizaid the task force's casualty rate would likely rise. But McChrystal also knew “failure in Iraq was tangibly close.” Responsibility for naming the move west belonged to John Christian, back in Iraq for another tour as task force commander. The moniker he chose captured the nature of the gamble: Operation Snake Eyes.
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Delta began mounting raids from Al Asad in late May. The surge forces began arriving in July 2005, but by then McChrystal's grim prediction regarding casualties had come true. In a May 31 raid on what McChrystal described as “a fortified enemy position” in Al Qaim, Sergeant First Class Steven Langmack became the first Delta operator killed in action in more than two years when small arms fire struck him down. The thirty-three-year-old Special Forces communications sergeant had only joined Delta the previous year. McChrystal's reference to the “fortified enemy position” is instructive. The insurgents were getting wise to Delta's tactics and were strong-pointing their safe houses in expectation of task force raids. Two and a half weeks later, B Squadron operators assaulted another house in Al Qaim, unaware the insurgents had built a bunker inside it. A volley of automatic weapons fire met the operators as they stormed in, killing Master Sergeants Bob Horrigan and Michael McNulty. The assault team withdrew and called in an air strike on the building, but the damage to the unit's sense of invincibility had been done.
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