Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (62 page)

Those who suffered most from the events on the objective were Norgrove herself, of course, and her loved ones. But there were costs on the military side as well. The operator who threw the grenade, his shooting buddy, and the team leader who covered it up were moved out of the unit. For the latter two, this expulsion was temporary. Each returned to Team 6. For the operator who threw the grenade, the exclusion was permanent. “To this day, the guy that threw the grenade, he's a wreck,” said a senior Team 6 operator several years later. Team 6's reputation had also suffered. “This is a big failure for the command,” said the senior operator. Within seven months, however, the unit would have a chance to redeem itself.
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Hit and Miss in Pakistan

The helicopter carrying the Team 6 operators was gaining on the small convoy heading toward the Pakistan border. It was early March 2002, a few days after the bitter, bloody mountaintop battle of Takur Ghar during Operation Anaconda, and some of the same operators who'd fought in that snowy hell and lost their friends there were now being offered what seemed to be a chance at ultimate retribution. Overhead imagery had captured what appeared to be a tall man in a white robe and turban surrounded by other men getting into the vehicles, at least one of which was a late model sport-utility vehicle, at a compound that U.S. intelligence associated with Al Qaeda.

Now, a Predator was following the vehicles as they sped east. In the crowded operations center at the main U.S. military headquarters in Bagram, Major General Franklin “Buster” Hagenbeck, the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan, was getting impatient as he watched the Predator feed on a flat screen. “Where's the dad-gum air? Push the air!” he shouted. “Sir, we've got two F-16s and a B-1B [bomber] on station and we are getting them in,” his deputy chief of operations replied.

The vehicles pulled over and the passengers got out. Hagenbeck announced to the operations center that “all restrictions have been lifted.” They were free to hit the vehicles with an air strike. In the helicopter, the Team 6 operators pleaded with Bagram not to bomb the vehicles, but rather to let the SEALs land and get eyes on the targets first. But Hagenbeck and his staff were determined not to miss what might be a fleeting opportunity to kill the man they were fervently hoping was Osama bin Laden. (As a conventional Army general, Hagenbeck would not usually be in a position to order JSOC forces around on the battlefield, but after Takur Ghar, he had asked for and received that authority from General Tommy Franks, the head of Central Command, for the remainder of Operation Anaconda, which was still under way.) “Bombs away!” shouted someone in the operations center. “Go get 'em!” yelled Hagenbeck.

The first F-16 missed the target. Its 500-pound bomb exploded harmlessly near the vehicle. The second F-16 made no mistake. Then, the larger B-1B dropped a dozen 2,000-pound bombs to make sure nobody got away. The operators' mission then changed from a possible ambush to sensitive site exploitation—finding the body of the tall man in white robes and collecting DNA to see if it was bin Laden. The Air Force had used cluster munitions—small bomblets that the SEALs believed had a 50 percent dud rate—against the convoy, heightening the danger to the operators. “We were pissed,” said a SEAL.

The operators knew that they would be landing beside a scene of carnage, given the ordnance the Air Force had just dropped. But they were not prepared for what they encountered. Instead of more than a dozen hardened Al Qaeda fighters lying dead by the side of the road, “it was a family,” said the SEAL. “It was just, ‘Oh my God!'”

The height disparity between the man in white and the others had not been because the white-robed figure was very tall, it had been “because he's an adult and they're kids,” the SEAL said. “ISR is a very dangerous thing sometimes,” said another operator. “It really allows you to confirm your biases. I think it was seventeen women and children were killed on that target.” The SEALs did their best to bury the victims in accordance with Islamic law. “One kid survived,” said the first SEAL. “We patched him up and put him on a plane.”
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JSOC's post–Tora Bora hunt for bin Laden was off to what could charitably be called a bad start.

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A few weeks later Pete Blaber, on orders from Tommy Franks, and Spider from the CIA's Ground Branch, flew into Pakistan's capital city of Islamabad and met with Robert Grenier, the CIA's station chief. “There's no Al Qaeda here,” Grenier told them. Amused by Grenier's refusal to acknowledge what was obvious, the pair later met with Pakistan's senior military leaders, who “literally belly-laughed” at their contention that Al Qaeda was regrouping in the tribal areas, according to a source familiar with the conversation. “The trail of tears goes right back into Pakistan,” Blaber told the Pakistani flag officers. “We followed it. That's where they are.”

With Pakistan's permission, Blaber and Spider stayed. Together with a few U.S. communications and intelligence personnel, they established two advance force operations cells: one in Miram Shah, the all-but-lawless capital of the North Waziristan tribal agency a few miles from the Afghan border; and the other in Wana, about fifty-five miles to the southwest, in South Waziristan. JSOC chose the locations for a reason. The command thought that bin Laden might be hiding out in Waziristan.

By mid-2003, the AFO team in the tribal areas had grown to two Delta operators, a 24th Special Tactics Squadron combat controller, a Team 6 officer, two Orange operatives (one of whom was an Urdu-speaking signals intelligence guy), plus Spider. The intent was to work closely with Pakistan's most elite special operations unit, the Special Services Group, hunting Al Qaeda's leadership throughout the tribal areas.

The Pakistani unit appeared supportive of at least some of the Americans' efforts, according to one AFO operator. Typical missions would begin with JSOC elements in Afghanistan generating intelligence on targets in the tribal areas, which they would transmit via secure satellite communications to the AFO team. The team members and their Pakistani counterparts would jump in their trucks, the Americans would use Global Positioning System devices to locate the targets, and then point and tell the Pakistani troops to search a particular compound. The team operated in Razmak, Miram Shah, Wana, and Parachinar—all towns in the tribal areas—and visited every border crossing. The AFO operators were always in Pakistani uniforms—sometimes dressed as members of the Special Services Group, at other times as border guards.

But the Pakistanis imposed such tight constraints on the team that it was sometimes like being “in jail,” the AFO operator acknowledged. The Pakistanis never let the operators go anywhere without their Special Services Group and Inter-Services Intelligence minders. The AFO personnel referred to their Miram Shah outpost as “Miram Shawshank,” in reference to the movie
The Shawshank Redemption,
which is set in a state prison. If an American tried to leave the base alone, a Pakistani guard would stop him at gunpoint. The U.S. operators thus became little more than “hostages,” said a retired special operations officer, who blamed the Pakistanis. “They talked a good story, but they never would allow us to do anything,” he said. “But that was an investment in the future. We knew if we left, we'd never get back in.” The arrangement lasted at least several years.

Like others in the U.S. government, JSOC had entertained high hopes of routing Al Qaeda from the tribal areas with the help of their Pakistani “allies.” Eventually, however, reality sank in. “It became very apparent that the Pakistanis weren't going to do anything,” the retired officer said. But it wasn't just the Pakistani security services blocking JSOC's hunt for bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders in the tribal areas. The command also faced opposition from the CIA. “Pakistan was completely an Agency area, and they weren't going to let anybody [from JSOC] come in and do anything,” the retired officer said. “It was the Agency's turf.… The Agency hired a whole bunch of former [special operations] and Marine guys to go out and do humint collection for them.”
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Meanwhile, having become the lead special mission unit in Afghanistan almost by default, given Delta's commitment to Iraq, Team 6 set about preparing for any cross-border mission that the National Command Authority might order it to conduct. The first thing the SEALs had to figure out was what mode of transport they might use to cross the border, beyond the obvious helicopter solution. One option was to ride in undercover on specially outfitted “jingle trucks,” the ubiquitous brightly painted vehicles that ply the roads of South and Central Asia, so-called because of the little chains that jangle as they move. To a casual observer, the SEALs' trucks looked full of lumber. But each had a hidden passenger compartment that could hold “a couple of assault teams”—between eight and ten operators—according to a special operations source familiar with the vehicle. “This was a Trojan horse kind of deal,” he said. In early 2004, Team 6's Afghan agents drove the trucks across the border successfully, but without any operators in the back. “If you're going to blow somebody's cover, you don't want it to be yours,” he said.

But the cross-border infiltration method to which Team 6 devoted the most time and money was the use of high-altitude, high-opening (HAHO) freefall parachute techniques. The unit considered HAHO parachuting its forte, so much so that it trained extensively to use the method to get the biggest prize of all: Osama bin Laden. Each Team 6 squadron that deployed to Afghanistan assigned one of its two assault troops the mission to be ready on short notice to conduct a HAHO jump into Pakistan to kill the Al Qaeda leader, if the United States got actionable intelligence on his location. The basic idea would be to load the troop (about fifteen to twenty operators) onto a Combat Talon at Bagram, where the operators would put on oxygen masks at least two hours before jumping, to clear all the carbon dioxide from their systems; fly along—but not over—the Pakistan border, have the SEALs jump at high altitude (probably about 25,000 feet), open their specialized chutes quickly, and then steer themselves on the wind into Pakistan, using handheld Global Positioning System devices. An operator from the squadron's 3 Troop, which at the time was the reconnaissance troop, would usually be the lead jumper, guiding the rest in and then getting them to the target. When done perfectly, a HAHO jump resulted in twenty operators landing close to each other, ready to fight, up to thirty miles from where they'd jumped, with the enemy being none the wiser. But such perfection was difficult to attain. It required hundreds of practice jumps and the use of unreliable computer programs to help a unit determine its “release point”—the exact right time and place at which to jump. While all freefall missions were challenging and dangerous, the operators considered HAHO a much tougher skill to master than HALO. “It's just a difficult process,” said a Team 6 SEAL. “There's so many little things that can just go wrong with it.”

Training for the HAHO mission consumed three to four weeks of the pre-deployment workup for the troop that had the mission. Much of this training was done in Arizona, home of U.S. Special Operations Command's Parachute Testing and Training Facility at Pinal Airpark northwest of Tucson, but at least one Gold Squadron troop spent part of winter 2003–2004 in Colorado, training for HAHO jumps in the mountains. Upon arriving at Bagram at the start of a rotation, the designated HAHO troop would immediately link up with the Combat Talon crews also on alert for the bin Laden mission and go over what was expected if they got the call. The troop would conduct “fly-away” rehearsals, in which the operators would load onto the plane and fly off, but in order to preserve the secrecy surrounding the HAHO capability, they never jumped.
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“We did not want to really tip our hand,” said a Team 6 source.

In early 2004, intelligence suggested that the SEALs might have an opportunity to put the training to use. A JSOC spy had reported a possibility that bin Laden was in a compound in Miram Shah. “There's a house where we thought bin Laden was at,” said a special operations source. “We had a spy that was going in there and saying [it].” The evidence was mostly circumstantial—“movement patterns and vehicles,” the source said. There was a tall man living in the compound who always traveled in convoys of multiple vehicles surrounded by numerous people who seemed to act deferentially toward him. “That's what we were looking at: somebody important is in this compound and it appeared to be bin Laden—tall fellow, and it looked like he had four or five security guys with him. That's what this Mohawk was telling us, and so we had planned on this target, got a little overhead stuff, and it was around a thirty-kilometer infiltration, so we were putting together the intel to be able to hit this target, but we were never able to confirm that it was him.”

Nonetheless, the Joint Interagency Task Force at Bagram, part of whose mission it was to track Al Qaeda's network in Pakistan, briefed McChrystal on the possibility that bin Laden had been found. McChrystal asked the briefer to put a percentage on the likelihood that it was bin Laden. “I don't know,” the briefer replied. “He's either there or he's not.” “No, I need at least an 80 percent surety that he's there,” the general said. The briefer told him that he couldn't give McChrystal 80 percent surety. “Well then, I'm not going to ask the SecDef for approval to hit this target,” McChrystal said. “The threshold for being able to get execution to launch an operation [across the border] was kind of high,” said a special operations source familiar with the episode.

A year later, a similar sequence of events took place when a Pakistani source for the CIA reported that Al Qaeda's second- and third-ranking leaders, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Faraj al-Libi, were due to attend a meeting of Al Qaeda's senior leaders in the Bajaur tribal agency. JSOC hastily put together a plan for a Team 6 parachute assault onto the meeting, where they were to capture as many people as possible and take them to a pickup zone from which helicopters would take them back to Afghanistan. McChrystal and CIA director Porter Goss (who had succeeded George Tenet in 2004) were in favor of the plan, but Rumsfeld and his undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Stephen Cambone, thought it too risky. Rumsfeld ordered that more Rangers be added to the plan. The CIA's Islamabad station chief also opposed the plan. The Team 6 operators sat on a Combat Talon for hours before Rumsfeld canceled the mission.
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“In the end we still believe that who we thought was in that target was there,” said a senior Team 6 officer.