Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (48 page)

Life got even harder for Task Force Brown three days later, when Lieutenant Colonel Joe Coale, Delta's B Squadron commander, ordered a mid-afternoon assault on Objective Leadville, another building near Yusufiyah. Again the assaulters faced withering fire the moment the Black Hawks landed beside the objective. Pinned down by heavy machine gun and mortar fire, the operators fought back, with the crew chiefs on the circling Black Hawks pouring minigun fire onto the insurgent positions.

Back at Mission Support Site Fernandez, they woke Task Force Brown's night team early to fly down to relieve the helicopters in the fight, but as the fresh Little Bird crews neared Yusufiyah, they ran into an ambush and the AH-6 piloted by Major Matt Worrell and CW5 Jamie Weeks was shot down, killing both men on Mother's Day. Several other helicopters were so damaged that they had to land. The ground force managed to finally secure the objective and detain four men. They also treated and evacuated four injured civilian women, but the fighting was so fierce they didn't leave the area until darkness had fallen and they had called in a series of air strikes on surrounding buildings.

There was plenty of fallout from the Leadville fight. Joe Coale was replaced as B Squadron commander with Tom DiTomasso, meaning the latter was also the new Task Force Central boss. The battle also marked a turning point in how the task force dealt with heavily defended targets. From then on Delta and Task Force Brown placed less priority on capturing targets and were more willing to use overwhelming firepower early in the fight.
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“I started telling our guys, hey, if you're going in on a target and someone's shooting at you, fucking kill him,” said a task force commander. Another factor behind this mental shift was the frustration the operators experienced at repeatedly encountering and detaining the same people on objectives, because the Iraqi authorities kept releasing them.
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But McChrystal's strategy of eating away at the rings of defense surrounding Zarqawi was paying off. So was his determination to professionalize the task force's interrogation capabilities. By the third week of May, after being subjected to several weeks of skilled, manipulative interrogation, the administrator that the SAS had captured on April 16 and an Al Qaeda in Iraq operative detained at the second April 8 target in Yusufiyah had detailed the group's command structure around Baghdad and identified Abd al-Rahman as Zarqawi's spiritual adviser. For three weeks, the task force monitored Rahman in the hope that he'd lead them to Zarqawi.

He did.

On June 7 a drone tracked Rahman as he was driven north in a silver sedan out of Baghdad. At Mission Support Site Fernandez, DiTomasso and his lead analyst watched as Rahman deftly switched vehicles in heavy traffic, jumping into a small blue truck in a skillful but futile attempt to throw off any surveillance. In Balad, Mark Erwin—by now a full colonel, deputy Delta commander, and Iraq task force commander—directed ISR aircraft from all over Iraq to converge on the area north of Baghdad. It was Erwin's A Squadron that had missed getting Zarqawi because of a drone camera glitch in February 2005. He was determined not to miss out again. The aircraft followed the truck to Baqubah, where Rahman transferred to another truck and continued on to a two-story house in Hibhib, a village only a dozen miles from McChrystal's Balad headquarters. Analysts, operators, and staffers in Fernandez and Balad watched in rapt attention as a stout man in black walked out and took a late afternoon stroll down the driveway before returning to the house. It had to be Zarqawi. An assault team prepared to launch from Fernandez, but Erwin wasn't comfortable with a heliborne raid. Worried that the only good landing zone was so far from the house that Zarqawi might escape into a large grove of date palms, Erwin discussed the situation with McChrystal, then decided to bomb the target and have the Delta team land immediately thereafter.

A series of mishaps nearly derailed the plan. A Task Force Brown helicopter engine failed to start at Fernandez. Then, one of two F-16s that the task force planned to use to bomb the house had to break off for an air-to-air refueling; the other swooped toward the house but didn't release a bomb, because Task Force Central hadn't worded the bombing command properly. Finally, at 6:12
P.M
., the second F-16 dropped a laser-guided 500-pound bomb on the house and followed it less than two minutes later with another bomb. The house disintegrated. A cheer erupted in the Balad operations center. Eighteen minutes later, Delta operators arrived on Little Birds to find Iraqi police loading Zarqawi on a gurney. Holding the police at gunpoint, the operators realized Zarqawi was still alive, but suffering from severe internal blast injuries. He died in front of them.
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The next several days were a blur of energy for McChrystal and the Iraq task force. The bombing, which also killed Rahman, another man, two women, and a girl, was the trigger for the task force to launch synchronized raids that night on the three vehicles in which Rahman had ridden en route to the house and the fourteen buildings he'd visited while under surveillance. The aim of the raids was to crush what one JSOC staffer called Zarqawi's “internal network” in one night.
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The task force also plundered the rubble in Hibhib for intelligence, which added to the spike in missions. A particularly satisfying find was a handwritten document saying that the American strategy in the Triangle of Death was succeeding and senior Al Qaeda leaders could no longer count on it as a refuge.
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Zarqawi's death caused an inevitable sense of satisfaction at all levels of command, from Task Force Central to the very top. President Bush rang McChrystal on the night Zarqawi died to congratulate him.
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But any hopes that his death would signal an immediate downturn in the violence went unfulfilled. Al Qaeda in Iraq quickly promoted Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the Egyptian who had been Zarqawi's deputy, to replace his late boss, and the monthly civilian death tolls for the second half of 2006 all rose above the highest monthly tally (June) for the first six months of 2006, a trend that continued well into 2007.
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McChrystal's assessment was blunt: “We had killed Zarqawi too late.”
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As the violence spiraled ever higher, the task force strove to keep pace. By 2006, the “Unblinking Eye” concept that began with Delta's A Squadron and a single Predator in early 2004 had reached full fruition. At Flynn's direction, the task force aimed to have up to three ISR aircraft watching a target simultaneously. Indeed, it often had enough of such aircraft over Baghdad and the major cities in Anbar that when a car bomb went off, analysts could pull the video feeds from aircraft overhead and watch them in reverse, to trace the car's route back to its start point.
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The dynamo that McChrystal and Flynn had built was now operating almost on automatic. In August 2004, the task force had conducted eighteen missions. In August 2006 it conducted more than 300.
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Strike forces now aimed to conduct the “analyze” and “disseminate” parts of the F3EAD process within an hour of coming off target. “McChrystal would say, ‘We have to operate at the speed of war,'” said a Ranger officer. “‘Faster, faster, faster.'”

The task force was growing. It routinely included a “white” Special Forces company that specialized in direct action missions. Each Special Forces group had such a company, called a combatant commander's in-extremis force, or CIF (pronounced “siff”), because it was designed to give a regional combatant commander an on-call counterterrorist force in case the JSOC task force was unavailable. The CIFs, which had a training relationship with Delta, all rotated through Iraq in support of McChrystal's task force. In 2006, McChrystal also gained an 82nd Airborne Division paratroop battalion, known as Task Force Falcon. With its reinforcements thrown into the fray, his task force continued its furious pace through the fall.
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But one of its most notable fights was a defensive one. On November 27, a daytime air-vehicle interdiction mission targeting an Al Qaeda in Iraq foreign fighter facilitator went awry when an RPG downed an AH-6 between Taji and Lake Tharthar about fifty kilometers northwest of Baghdad. (The assault force was en route to a larger site in the desert to wait for the target's vehicle when this happened.) Outnumbered and outgunned by insurgents who arrived in truck after truck, the assault force found itself with no shelter in the flat desert. The force's remaining AH-6, piloted by CW5 Dave Cooper, did much to hold them off, repeatedly strafing the insurgents. Cooper was credited with turning the tide of the battle, and later received a Distinguished Service Cross for his efforts. The ground force remained at the site until darkness, but tragedy struck when an F-16 supporting the embattled force flew too low and crashed, killing its pilot.
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Other raids that month focused on Ansar al-Sunnah, a Kurdish-led Islamist group that was allied with, but not formally part of, Al Qaeda in Iraq. The Coalition's efforts to reconcile some Sunni insurgent groups, thus isolating Al Qaeda in Iraq, included an effort to divide Ansar al-Sunnah from AQI.
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But although JSOC (and much of the rest of the U.S. national security community) had focused almost exclusively on Iraq's Sunni insurgency, in particular on Al Qaeda in Iraq, since 2004, a different threat was emerging. Arguably a greater threat to U.S. forces and interests in the region than Iraq's Sunni insurgency, it was an enemy that would hark back to JSOC's birth, but for which its Iraq task force was singularly unprepared: Iran.

 

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A New Campaign Against an Old Enemy

It was July 25, 2004. Violence was escalating in Iraq, the Taliban were reasserting themselves in Afghanistan, and JSOC was already deploying operators to the Horn of Africa and Yemen. But for the first day of the three-day JSOC commanders' conference that Stan McChrystal was holding at Fort Bragg, the country under discussion was Iran, and the conversation was right out of the late 1990s: how to defeat hard and deeply buried targets, in this case the underground shelters that U.S. intelligence believed housed Iran's nascent nuclear program. Intelligence also indicated that no air-delivered weapon could penetrate deep enough to reach those bunkers, thought to be a hundred feet or more beneath the surface. The National Command Authority had turned to JSOC for solutions.

By now, Team 6 was JSOC's lead unit for counter-proliferation. But any raid on Iranian facilities would also involve Delta, in part because JSOC was considering simultaneous raids on two separate sites, and also because the assault force would need Delta's heavy breachers to gain access to the bunkers. However, even a cursory examination of the challenges associated with such an operation gave the commanders pause. Unlike a lot of counter-proliferation operations for which they planned, this was not a mission to “render safe” a device held by a few terrorists, but a large-scale operation that would require JSOC to secure two major facilities. It would take a lot of troops, probably more than the special mission units and the Rangers could muster.

The commanders and their planners also considered from where such a mission might launch: Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, or a carrier in the Persian Gulf. All had disadvantages. The upshot was that when it came to a direct action mission against Iran's nuclear sites, “no one really wanted to do it,” said a source familiar with the discussion. As the unit with primary responsibility for counter-proliferation missions, Team 6 had done its homework. This wasn't the first time the unit had been directed to develop options for a raid into Iran. Shortly before the Iraq War Team 6's Red Team conducted several rehearsals for a possible mission to seize a suspected weapons of mass destruction facility on the outskirts of Tehran and then hold it for up to twenty-four hours, while being resupplied by “speedball” low-altitude parachute drops. The mission's purpose would be to locate indisputable proof that Iran was developing nuclear weapons. “We trained for weeks for it,” said a Team 6 source. But the proposed mission, which would have been an extraordinarily perilous undertaking, was not popular with the Team 6 operators. “I remember us all thinking, ‘This is stupid. Why are we going to go do this?'” the source said. “And then it all just kind of fizzled away.”

This time, Team 6 instead advocated a clandestine approach aimed at intercepting or disrupting material the Iranians needed for their nuclear program before it reached Iran from North Korea or elsewhere—a strategy based on the “pathway defeat” concept the SEALs had been refining since the late 1990s. The campaign to prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons would continue in the shadows.
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As the July 2004 conference indicated, even as JSOC's number one target remained Al Qaeda and its associated groups, in the background loomed Iran, the would-be regional superpower distinctly uncomfortable with U.S. forces occupying the countries on its eastern and western borders. In the immediate post–September 11 period, JSOC was running at least two undercover agents into Iran, but that was far from enough to gain any sort of holistic understanding of the massive target set that country represented.

This became clear when it emerged that about ten leading Al Qaeda figures, including bin Laden's son Saad, had fled Afghanistan for Iran in fall 2001, as U.S.-backed Northern Alliance forces swept the Taliban from power. The Iranian government—no friend of the Taliban or Al Qaeda—placed them under house arrest in the city of Chalus, about 108 miles north of Tehran on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. The Pentagon tasked JSOC to plan a mission to seize the Al Qaeda personnel. Planners considered infiltrating Team 6 operators via submersible or helicopter. “The SEALs really definitely wanted to do it … because it would have proven a few of their new technologies,” said a Joint Staff source. But, as had been the case so often before, all attempts to plan a raid foundered on a lack of intelligence. JSOC simply did not know the Al Qaeda personnel's exact locations. The command conducted several rehearsals in Texas before Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Richard Myers canceled the mission on the grounds that the risks—both tactical and political-military—exceeded the potential gains.
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