Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (57 page)

In the first half of the year, this combination subjected Al Qaeda in Iraq to an unrelenting campaign that targeted its foreign fighters, its financial and spiritual emirs, and its military leaders. The task force's operational tempo built to as many as eight missions a night. A strike force would hit a house based on signals intelligence that there was a cell phone linked to an insurgent leader inside. Once the strike force found the phone, analysts would load its contents into computers packed with advanced network mapping software, and combine what they found with what had been learned from questioning detainees. “The analysts would then push out a bunch of additional targets immediately, so we could then destroy that whole cell in one period of darkness,” said a Task Force North source. “That wasn't happening in 2004 and 2005.”

Abu Khalaf was Task Force North's highest priority target, but its analysts had never been able to link a cell phone to him. “That's why he'd been alive for six years,” the source said. “He didn't even have couriers that were allowed to use phones.”

The keys to finally running Abu Khalaf to ground were National Security Agency cyber sleuths and Task Force North's Mohawks, who in this case were Kurdish spies being run by the Delta troop. Suspecting that insurgent leaders were communicating by sharing an email account and writing draft emails that they never sent, but which their colleagues could read so long as they had the right username and password, the NSA had built a query that alerted it whenever the same username and password information were entered in different countries—like Pakistan, Syria, and Iraq—within the span of a few hours. From this, the NSA got username and password information for those accounts, allowing Task Force North's Mohawks to upload software onto computers in Mosul's Internet cafés that would alert them whenever someone typed in one of these username and password combinations. Analysts soon knew that they were tracking a senior Al Qaeda in Iraq leader from the contents of one of the accounts, but they didn't know his identity. Finally, someone with that username stayed logged on at a Mosul café long enough for the task force to get a Mohawk there and positively identify him as Abu Khalaf as he walked out of the café and strolled through an adjacent market.

Trailed by the Mohawk and a task force aircraft, the terrorist went back to his house, which became Objective Crescent Lake, simply because Crescent Lake was Khalaf's code name in the task force's targeting matrix. It was now mid-afternoon and Kurilla's instinct was to assault it immediately. But his operations officer persuaded him to keep the house under observation and map out Khalaf's network by having aircraft follow whoever left the house. There was a risk in this: one of those people could be Abu Khalaf, and Task Force North might lose him.

The task force quickly got two drones over the house. By 2008, this was routine for JSOC forces in Mosul, who were used to controlling as many as fourteen surveillance aircraft over the city at one time. In the task force headquarters at Forward Operating Base Marez, leaders and analysts watched as, sure enough, early that evening, Abu Khalaf left his home and returned to the market, where a black sedan picked him up. Kurilla was getting anxious. Even with the task force's exquisite surveillance assets, it was easy to lose a target as his car weaved in and out of traffic, or as he switched vehicles. But the highly trained imagery analysts kept their eyes on the car as it took Abu Khalaf back to his neighborhood, where he met with two men for thirty minutes in the courtyard of a house before getting back in the sedan and returning home.

It was getting dark. The task force put a plan together for two simultaneous assaults that night. One platoon would take down Abu Khalaf's home, the other would target the compound he had just left. After a quick series of briefings and planning sessions, the Rangers loaded onto the Strykers and rolled out of the gate.

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The squad leader made his decision. He pulled the trigger, shooting the man in the head. Realizing what his squad leader was going to do, the specialist did the same, firing a burst with his squad automatic weapon. Their reaction “was aggressive,” said another Ranger later, with studied understatement. If it turned out that the man was unarmed, there would be consequences.

The squad leader reported the room “clear and secure” and left the specialist to guard the woman. Above them, the sniper team leader shot and killed the second gunman on the roof. But as soon as the squad leader had left the room, the woman dove toward the body of her husband. Again the specialist had to make a split-second decision. Again his instinct told him to pull the trigger. He fired a short burst and the woman's head split apart. With the squad momentarily distracted by the firing, a figure darted from the last room left to be cleared and ran up the stairs clutching a pistol. He burst out of the cupola, only for the sniper team leader to put two bullets in his head. The gunman's lifeless body toppled back through the cupola and fell to the ground floor, crashing into a Ranger, the impact tearing the latter's night vision goggles from his face.

Abu Khalaf was dead.

The Rangers had been in the house for less than thirty seconds.

With the house finally cleared and all the adult males killed, the Rangers began the exploitation phase of the mission. An examination of the dead man in the first bedroom revealed a suicide vest. Had the two Rangers not fired when they did, they and perhaps several of their comrades would have died. Honed in nine combat deployments, the squad leader's instinct had saved numerous lives, as had the specialist's decision to open fire on the woman. She was the first woman that platoon had shot in about 200 missions. That there had been shooting at all was unusual. Only about 10 percent of the platoon's missions involved gunfights.

The Rangers also found about $120,000 in U.S. currency that Abu Khalaf had received from the man he met earlier that day—an Egyptian doctor who, the task force learned via signals intelligence, was in Iraq to work on some type of chemical attack. (Al Qaeda in Iraq had been trying to mount a chemical car bomb attack on a Coalition base for months.) The Rangers were elated. Kurilla, in particular, was “fired up,” said a soldier who was there. They had achieved a huge victory with a perfectly executed mission. The assault's impact could be gauged from message traffic the task force intercepted over the next few weeks. “I'm tired of running,” said one AQI fighter. “I have no place to sleep. They hunt me every day. I can't keep doing this.”
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In conjunction with operations by conventional U.S. and Iraqi forces, Task Force North kept hammering at Al Qaeda in Iraq. The result was a two-thirds drop in car bomb attacks from March to June of 2008, from 234 to seventy-eight. For suicide car bombs, the drop was 59 percent, from twenty-seven to eleven.
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Numbers such as these, combined with the successful assaults on Abu Khalaf and other senior figures, caused some outside JSOC to declare victory.
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With its own cell that fused intelligence of different types from diverse sources, Task Force North's operational tempo was far beyond what had been imagined in the early days of the revolution started by McChrystal and Flynn. From a total of eighteen JSOC missions across all Iraq in August 2004, in the spring of 2008 a single Task Force North Ranger platoon averaged more than sixty raids a month. But as the capability peaked in Iraq, things were starting to change.

On June 13, Bill McRaven replaced Stan McChrystal as JSOC commander. McRaven was a SEAL officer with a reputation as a deep thinker, based in part on his time at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where he designed—and was the first graduate from—the special operations/low-intensity conflict curriculum. He turned his thesis into a book,
Spec Ops—Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: Theory and Practice,
in which he presented his own definition of special operations, one that paid homage to the direct action missions that were the forte of JSOC and the SEALs, but which ignored the unconventional warfare approach that was the specialty of Special Forces: “A special operation is conducted by forces specially trained, equipped, and supported for a specific target whose destruction, elimination, or rescue (in the case of hostages), is a political or military imperative.” With the exception of a brief spell at Team 6 as a junior officer, McRaven's career before he became an admiral had been entirely in non-JSOC jobs. But his stint after September 11 as director of strategic planning in the Office of Combating Terrorism on the National Security Council staff (working for retired general and former JSOC commander Wayne Downing) gave him invaluable insight into how national security decisions were made at the highest levels of government.
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McRaven was by no means an unknown quantity at JSOC, however, having served as the organization's deputy commander for operations during the middle of the decade. And while there were subtle differences between his command style and that of McChrystal—some observers thought McChrystal drove his subordinates slightly harder
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—by and large McRaven continued where McChrystal had left off in terms of continuing to flatten and broaden the organization.
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After taking command, McRaven initially positioned himself in Balad. But JSOC's—and the U.S. military's—priority was shifting to Afghanistan.
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In Iraq, JSOC kept up the pressure, but with fewer forces and more political constraints. The task force was now working closely with Iraqi commandos, a recognition that even the “black” special operations war was taking on more of a local flavor. But there were missteps. In a mission aimed at a Shi'ite “special group” in central Iraq's Babil province on June 27, JSOC forces killed an innocent security guard who was a cousin of Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister. In early July, in an apparent effort to mollify Maliki, Petraeus brought him to McRaven's Balad headquarters, where operators and leaders gave him an overview of the task force's capabilities—a highly unusual display for a foreign leader.
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For the final three years of the United States' war in Iraq, JSOC, like all U.S. military forces, was subject to the status of forces agreement (or SOFA)
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between the U.S. and Iraqi governments. The agreement's requirement that JSOC obtain warrants for most targeted individuals before launching raids, and the Iraqi government's habit of releasing most terrorist suspects detained by JSOC, created intense frustration at all levels of the command's forces in Iraq. The situation regarding JSOC's targeting of Shi'ite militias and their Quds Force benefactors remained even more tenuous. Quds Force operatives were on an Iraqi government “restricted target list,” meaning JSOC could not detain them without a warrant from Maliki's government, which rarely, if ever, provided one.
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By early 2010, most of the task force had shifted to Afghanistan. But the units that remained had one more major success to come, when on April 18 a combined JSOC-Iraqi special operations raid killed Masri and three other insurgents in a safe house on the border between Anbar and Salahuddin provinces.
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That raid aside, for JSOC no less than the rest of the U.S. forces, the 2011 withdrawal marked an anticlimactic end to its war in Iraq. McChrystal and other senior U.S. military leaders had always argued that JSOC's campaign was designed to hold the terrorists and insurgents at arm's length, to keep them on the back foot, to allow time for a political solution. There can be no doubt that the JSOC task force in Iraq achieved extraordinary successes against Al Qaeda in Iraq and its allies. But absent a holistic political solution in Iraq, and given the reality that the U.S. military presence was destined to end, those gains were always likely to be temporary. By the first week of January 2014, the organizational descendants of Al Qaeda in Iraq were back in control of Fallujah.
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For many in the task force, the frustrations that accompanied the status of forces agreement prompted jealous glances toward their colleagues in what had long been the secondary theater in the “war on terror.” “The SOFA agreement,” said a Ranger officer. “This is when everyone was like, ‘Pack it up, boys. Let's go to Afghanistan.'”

 

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Rangers Step Up in Afghanistan

After Operation Anaconda, in spring 2002, a debate took place at the highest levels of JSOC over whether—and how—it should proceed in Afghanistan. “The debate really was: what is our role here in Afghanistan?” said a senior JSOC officer. “Are we going to position troops forward here always, to be on the prowl and look for Al Qaeda senior leaders?” That approach didn't make much sense to some at JSOC. “The trail had run cold by 2002, after Tora Bora,” said the officer. “There wasn't, in many ways … a very clearly defined mission. So do we want to now, with the cold trail, leave the nation's premier mission forces in these shit holes in Bagram or up in Kabul? And the answer in many cases, [was] no.”

Concerned that its troops' highly perishable skills would atrophy if they were left with little to do in Afghanistan, JSOC drastically downsized its force there. A small task force headquarters remained in Bagram. As Delta became consumed by the Iraq War, the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater became Team 6's domain, with a small Ranger element in support. But although the September 11 attacks had been planned there, and the Al Qaeda leaders that had survived the operation to oust the Taliban from power were thought to be hiding just across the border in Pakistan, Afghanistan became a strategic backwater from the point of view of Washington and, therefore, of JSOC. Team 6 kept a squadron headquarters and a troop of operators there. The other operational parts of the JSOC task force consisted of little more than a Ranger platoon, three Task Force Brown Chinook helicopters and two Predator drones. Beyond hunting Al Qaeda, Team 6 operators had one other mission in Afghanistan: providing a personal security detail for Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's new president.
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“Karzai owes his life to their skills,” said the senior JSOC officer.