Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (51 page)

What followed typified the challenges that Task Force 17 faced. For a few hours, the task force interrogated the operative, as they had other Quds Force personnel. “We don't torture them,” said a TF 17 officer. “We don't beat them. We're going to take all their personal effects, strip them down, and then interrogate them and put them in jail.” Quds Force detainees' pocket litter and electronic devices such as laptops sometimes held useful intelligence, the officer said. The Iranian that Task Force 17 detained that night in April 2009 did not have a laptop, but was carrying several phones and important documents. As usual, however, the detainee's status as a Quds Force operative meant his detention was brief.
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Word of his capture was quickly reported up the chain of command and from there to Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. “He was handed over to the Iraqis and then he was released the next day,” the Task Force 17 officer said. Maliki then stood Task Force 17 down until it agreed to clear its target list through him daily.

*   *   *

As JSOC sought to fill the gaps in its knowledge of the Quds Force's reach into Iraq and the Levant, it was able to draw heavily on intelligence from another country that paid close attention to the militant Shi'ite threat in the Middle East: Israel. JSOC had access to Israeli intelligence because in the middle of the decade, Delta established a cell in Tel Aviv specifically to exchange intelligence with Israel. Doug Taylor, the Delta officer who'd led the 2005 mission in which Delta operators dressed up as farmhands to capture Ghassan Amin, ran the cell for a long time. “He, in particular, was able to work the information exchange and make relationships with the Israelis that allowed us to trade intelligence with them for intelligence they would trade to us,” said a senior special mission unit officer.

The cell swapped intelligence on Sunni Islamist networks active in southern Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq that JSOC had gained in Iraq for Israeli intelligence on Hezbollah and other Shi'ite groups in the Levant and Iraq. JSOC had the right to make the trade because, in the U.S. intelligence community, organizations retained release authority over intelligence that they had produced. While the Israelis got useful intelligence out of the deal, they may have had another goal in mind, according to the senior special mission unit officer. “I think their intent all along was to keep pushing us against the Iranians … in terms of trying to get us to interdict Hezbollah in other areas around the globe for them,” he said. Eventually Orange took over Taylor's cell, due to that unit's long-standing relationship with the Israelis.

But despite the Israelis' extensive penetration of the Shi'ite militant networks, the intelligence tip that led Task Force 17 to the Khazali brothers' safe house in Basra in March 2007 did not come from Tel Aviv, but from London, courtesy of Britain's MI6 intelligence agency. “It was an MI6 source in the Levant [who] knew exactly where it was in Basra,” said the senior special mission unit officer, adding that the tip's value could be judged from the fact that other than those detained at the site, presumably, the number of “bad guys” who knew the safe house's location could likely be counted on the fingers of one hand.
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There was a certain symmetry to the British role in Khazali's detention, in that the brothers were released—Laith in June 2009 and Qais in January 2010—in exchange for the release of Peter Moore, a British information technology consultant kidnapped (along with his four bodyguards, who were then murdered) on May 29, 2007, as he worked to install software to track the billions of dollars in foreign aid pouring into Iraq's treasury.
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“It got very diplomatic, to the point where it was out of JSOC's control and the British government was negotiating,” said a Task Force 17 officer. Equally frustrating for Task Force 17 veterans, in November 2012 the Iraqi government released the Hezbollah operative captured with the Khazali brothers, Ali Mussa Daqduq, whom the United States wanted charged with war crimes for his role in the execution-style killing of the four U.S. soldiers kidnapped in Karbala.
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The political restrictions that had hobbled Task Force 17 from its outset became even more onerous as the United States lowered its profile in Iraq and turned as much responsibility as possible over to the Maliki government. Between February and August 2009, by which time Army General Ray Odierno had replaced Petraeus as the Multi-National Force-Iraq commander, “they only did three missions because of restrictions placed on them by the four-star,” said the retired Special Forces officer.

But for a small number of Shi'ite targets, JSOC found a way around the political restrictions by killing its enemies without leaving any U.S. fingerprints. The command did this using a device called the “Xbox.” Developed jointly by Delta and Team 6, the Xbox was a bomb designed to look and behave exactly like one made by Iraqi insurgents, using materials typically found in locally made improvised explosive devices. Its genesis was the training that Delta and Team 6 explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) personnel went through to learn how to disarm the homemade bombs. After capturing some intact on the Afghan and Iraqi battlefields, the EOD troops set about taking them apart. It wasn't long before they realized they could build them as well. “So they're reverse-engineering the whole thing,” said the senior special mission unit officer. A collective light went on in some corners of JSOC when leaders realized the possibilities inherent in this capability.

At first, the officer said, JSOC's bomb makers used components typically found in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater: “Chinese circuits and Pakistani parts … and explosives from old Soviet munitions, et cetera.” The intent was to create a device that if it were sent to the FBI's Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center in Quantico, Virginia, the Bureau's experts would mistakenly trace the bomb back to a particular terrorist bomb maker because of certain supposedly telltale signature elements of the design that JSOC's explosive ordnance disposal gurus had managed to re-create.

But the Xbox was different from regular IEDs in several ways, in order to reduce risks to operators and civilians. First, unlike many IEDs, such as those detonated by vehicles running over pressure plates, it had to be command detonated, meaning an operator somewhere was watching the target and then pressing a button. Another design requirement was that the Xbox device had to be extremely stable, to avoid the sort of premature explosions that often kill terrorists. JSOC wanted to use the device to kill individuals, rather than crowds. “You're just going to get the one guy in the car, you're not looking to blow up forty people in a marketplace,” said the senior special mission unit officer. “You've got authority for military force against one by-name guy. You've got to get positive ID and positive detonation in a place where you're not going to get collateral damage. [For instance,] smoke the guy while driving his HiLux pickup in an area that there's no U.S. or Coalition presence.”

Most insurgents JSOC killed this way were Task Force 17 targets in southern Iraq—“a variety of folks that were running [the] Quds Force EFP pipeline and stuff in through the south,” the senior special mission unit operator said. But the missions were conducted by operators from the squadron Delta had created in 2005 to replace and take the mission of Operational Support Troop. (Confusingly, the new reconnaissance squadron was initially called D Squadron, until Delta created a fourth line squadron about a year later and named it D Squadron, with the reconnaissance squadron renamed G Squadron.)
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JSOC used reconnaissance operators, who are typically some of Delta's most experienced, because getting the device into position, by placing it in the target's vehicle, for example, was “a lot of work,” he said. It usually involved surveillance of the target for days on end, understanding his pattern of life—his daily routines—so that the operators could predict when they would be able to gain access to his vehicle unobserved. When that time window opened, “then, like out of the movies, you're picking the locks and going over walls and alleyways, very shortly placing that stuff in there,” he said.

The special mission unit officer acknowledged the possibility that JSOC might choose to use the Xbox on other battlefields—and might already have done so. “We have successfully used this in places where you're not flying a Predator, you don't want to launch a missile, you don't necessarily want to do a raid,” he said. “So if you get authorization for the use of military force then you want something very precise against a target.” But although the Xbox began with EOD personnel re-creating devices from the Afghan theater, it was not used there, where Team 6 was the lead special mission unit. “We co-developed it with Delta, but it was only being used in Iraq,” said a senior Team 6 source, who questioned the morality of using the device: “[It's] a great tool, but as many of us have said—hey, we're no different than the enemy if we're just blowing people up with booby traps.”

*   *   *

Task Force 17 continued to operate for several years, but was closed down long before U.S. troops left Iraq at the end of 2011. Despite all the challenges the task force faced, it achieved some success, albeit fleeting. “Previously they [i.e., Quds Force] were running in EFPs and U.S. currency by the truckload,” said a Ranger officer. “Post–TF 17 they were using ratlines and having to do what al Qaeda was having to do up north, so there was some level of success there. We saved a lot of Coalition lives by reducing the EFP footprint all around Sadr City, but it was never going to be [the equivalent of] TF 16.”

Meanwhile, in 2007 Task Force 16's main effort shifted to Mosul, where McChrystal had placed a Ranger battalion in command of Task Force North, the first time the Rangers had been given command of a battalion or squadron-level task force.

In the wider war, there was a sense by late 2007 that the tide was turning in favor of the Coalition. Petraeus had asked for and received a “surge” of five additional combat brigades—more than 20,000 troops. As those forces flowed in and were committed mostly in the Baghdad area, the Coalition was also making headway splitting Anbar's Sunni tribes and associated insurgent groups away from AQI in what became known as the “Sunni Awakening.”

In June 2007, Mike Flynn left JSOC to become Central Command's intelligence director. A year later McChrystal changed command after almost five years on the job, far longer than the tenure of any previous commander.
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The JSOC he left behind bore little resemblance to the organization he had taken command of in October 2003. Its budget, authorities, and the size of its headquarters staff had all expanded exponentially. (In 2002 the size of the JSOC staff was about 800. By the end of 2008, that had ballooned to about 2,300.)
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The command's battlefield role had similarly evolved. Accustomed to fighting on the periphery of major conflict, JSOC had taken a central role in Iraq, albeit one that the U.S. military did its best to obscure, never acknowledging the command or its special mission units by name when discussing their operations. Several factors had combined to enable JSOC's rise to prominence: the fact that Zarqawi allied his group with Al Qaeda at a time when the U.S. military considered the destruction of Al Qaeda its most pressing mission meant JSOC—often called “the national mission force”—was likely to have a starring role; the rapid growth of cell phone networks in Iraq, and the insurgents' concomitant use of the same, were invaluable in helping McChrystal's task force find and fix the enemy; the same was true of the Internet café phenomenon in Iraq, and the fielding of the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle in growing numbers.

McChrystal was, of course, also fortunate to have at his disposal units composed of men and women who brought an unparalleled combination of professionalism, skill, imagination, courage, and drive to their work. But this is something to which all previous JSOC commanders could lay claim. And there was no guarantee that the various technological advantages JSOC brought to the fight would ever amount to a winning combination. Like the German architects of blitzkrieg in the 1930s, who took tools—the tank, radio communications, fighters, and bombers—and combined them in ways that others had not imagined, what set McChrystal apart was, first, a vision for how to meld all the tools at his disposal together, while flattening his organization and breaking apart the “stovepipes” that kept information from being fully exploited, and, second, the force of personality required to make that vision a reality.

What that meant was that during the U.S. military's darkest days in Iraq, in 2005, 2006, and 2007, when the country seemed on the way to becoming a charnel-house, JSOC was virtually the only American force achieving success (leading President Bush to declare to author Bob Woodward, “JSOC is awesome”).
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The crucial role that McChrystal and his JSOC task force played in rocking Al Qaeda in Iraq back on its heels when the terrorist group had seemed on the brink, if not of victory in the traditional sense, then certainly of pushing Iraq into an indefinite period of bloody sectarian conflict, would remain largely unrecognized for years. But its growing size and increasingly important role were robbing JSOC of its ability to hide in the shadows. In less than three years, the man to whom McChrystal passed command, Vice Admiral Bill McRaven, would preside over JSOC's highest profile success. But first, he had matters to address on Iraq's borders.

 

PART IV

A GLOBAL CAMPAIGN

 

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Close Target Reconnaissance in Syria
1

The four helicopters scythed through the air, two Black Hawks full of Delta operators covered by a pair of AH-6 Little Birds, all headed for the Syrian border near Al Qaim. The aircraft were flown by Night Stalkers, but it was broad daylight—4:45
P.M.
on October 26, 2008. They were on their way to kill a man.