Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (71 page)

Within hours of the attack, JSOC had determined the identities of the leaders, who were linked to the Ansar al-Sharia militia group. Delta dispatched a team to Libya to hunt them, and by Friday, September 14, three days after the attack, JSOC was briefing U.S. Special Operations Command that it was tracking the militia leaders responsible for the attack, had photographs of them (which were included in the briefing), and information that they had been calling an Islamist figure in jail in Iraq. “They knew who was in command and control of it, they knew it all,” said a SOCOM staffer. “I remember them specifically saying the guys on the ground were talking to a guy in prison in Iraq.”

From then on, JSOC kept a fix on the militia leaders, information that the command included as one of its handful of top priorities in its weekly Friday briefings to SOCOM. “They were giving the Friday update: ‘Hey, we've got a positive ID on X, we know his location is Y, last seen at so-and-so,'” the staffer said. But as to why JSOC didn't launch a mission against Abu Khattala or his associates earlier, the staffer said: “I don't think they ever got permission to.”
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That account was borne out by an October 29, 2013, CNN report that “U.S. special operations forces” were ready to grab Abu Khattala within a day or two of seizing Libi, but the White House never gave the okay, in part due to worries that another raid so soon after the Libi mission might destabilize Libya, leading to the downfall of the weak government in Tripoli, and in part to a desire to gather enough evidence to prosecute Abu Khattala in criminal court.

But the delays gave Delta the time to build a mock-up of Abu Khattala's compound at Fort Bragg, allowing them to rehearse the snatch repeatedly. Meanwhile, JSOC kept Abu Khattala under close watch, establishing his daily routine. When the two dozen Delta operators—supported by a couple of FBI agents—struck, they did so with guile, tricking their way into Abu Khattala's compound and seizing him without firing a shot. Delta quickly took him to the
New York,
a Navy ship waiting offshore, where he was interrogated before being brought to the United States to face trial.
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These sorts of missions placed a premium on exactly the capabilities that McChrystal initially sought to harness with the Joint Reconnaissance and Targeting Force: advance force operations, low-visibility urban reconnaissance, and undercover espionage missions. By 2014 JSOC had replaced the term “advance force operations” with “clandestine,” as the former implied the possibility of a follow-on force, which was not always politically acceptable. But the concept remained very much in vogue, so much so that the AFO-type squadrons in the special mission units (Black Squadron in Team 6, G Squadron in Delta) were now regarded as the most prestigious squadrons to command. No wonder that in 2014, there was talk of doing away with Team 6's newest assault squadron, Silver, which had been established at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but no rumors of anything but more growth for Black Squadron. Indeed, the story of Team 6's advanced reconnaissance organization exemplifies the trend toward ever more low-visibility and covert capabilities in JSOC. The squadron didn't even exist until the turn of the century, but by 2014 had become Team 6's largest squadron, with between 150 and 200 personnel. “It was a baby team but now it's a monster,” said a Team 6 officer. (During the same period Team 6 had grown from no more than 500 personnel to more than 1,500, of whom only about 300 were SEALs, with the rest consisting of roughly 800 other uniformed Navy personnel and about 400 civilians who together provided administration, intelligence, logistics, communications, and other support.)

As was the case for the assault squadrons, Black's commanding officer was a SEAL commander (the equivalent Navy rank to a lieutenant colonel in the other services), and the squadron had a SEAL operator command master chief. But in 2014 the commander's deputy was a retired Army Special Forces colonel with a great deal of experience in reconnaissance and advance force operations. The vast majority of the squadron's personnel were not SEALs, but other Navy personnel and civilians, including experts in merchant shipping. While the squadron did not have its own fleet, it was capable of using civilian ships to mount operations, and could take advantage of what a JSOC staffer described as Team 6's “natural connection” with the Maritime Branch of the CIA's Special Activities Division. A small number of Black Squadron operators lived abroad under long-term cover.
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“Their skill sets have exploded over time,” said the JSOC staffer, who said the increasingly significant role Black Squadron had assumed as a clandestine organization “absolutely” represented a threat to Orange. Delta's efforts to develop a signals intelligence capability compounded that threat, the staffer added. “If they're developing that capability, what's left for [Orange] to do?” he said. “You can't say.” Both Black Squadron and its Delta equivalent, G Squadron, began doing substantial covered work around 2009.
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But Team 6's maritime bent gave the unit certain advantages, argued a Team 6 source. “What maritime low-level or AFO capability gives you is dwell time,” he said. “You have a reason to go in there [to a target location] and stay there for days, weeks, or months. So if you have a maritime company, it comes in from the sea, then it offloads something that goes overland for miles and miles and you can turn a maritime shipping company into a logistics company that goes everywhere.”

“If you can conceive of doing it, we're likely doing it,” said a Team 6 operator. “It's the things you can't conceive of that we're also likely doing.”

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The challenge of conducting low-visibility operations in countries in which the United States was not at war was on Joe Votel's mind May 21, 2014, when the JSOC commander made a rare public appearance—and even rarer public remarks—at a special operations conference in Tampa. JSOC developed the “find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze” process in Iraq and Afghanistan, war zones in which the command enjoyed access to “large bases” and “solid infrastructure,” he noted. The organization's challenge, he said, is “how do we take that great methodology we refined over the last twelve or thirteen years and apply it to areas outside of declared theaters of armed conflict” in which operators must minimize their “footprint.”

When it came to the “find” and “fix” parts of the equation, “a key piece for us” would be figuring out how to maintain the same “level of situational awareness” in austere, remote locations that JSOC enjoyed in mature, built-up combat theaters, Votel said. In Iraq and Afghanistan, JSOC relied heavily on ISR aircraft to build a detailed picture of enemy activity. But that advantage may not be available in other theaters, and JSOC would need technological workarounds, he said. “In some cases we will not be able to operate aerial platforms because the host nation will not allow us to do that,” he said. “So we've got to continue to look at long-range, high-fidelity tactical sensors that allow us to see and understand what is happening.”

Minimizing civilian casualties when it was time to strike was particularly important in countries that were not declared combat zones, according to Votel. “We have to continue to improve our ‘finish' capability—whether it's a lethal finish, or whether it's a nonlethal finish, or whether it's enabling someone else—to be as precise as we possibly can,” he said.

Votel also highlighted the continuing priority JSOC placed on counter-proliferation, particularly on preventing “the nightmare scenario” of Islamist terrorists getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction. “We do see violent extremist organizations and others continue to exert a desire to acquire these types of weapons,” he said. “So our ability to detect and neutralize them effectively will be a key piece for our country,” he told the audience of defense contractors and special operations personnel. “We will only have very limited opportunities to get that right, when the situation is presented to us,” he said.

One country Votel highlighted as a place the United States had to be “very, very concerned” about weapons of mass destruction falling into the wrong hands was Syria, where what began as a peaceful uprising against Bashar Assad as part of the Arab Spring movement in 2011 had evolved by 2014 into a multiparty civil war that pitted Assad's military, reinforced by Quds Force and Hezbollah, against rebel forces that were divided between two Sunni Islamist factions and a more moderate group supported by the West. The JSOC commander went on to express his worry that terrorists could use Syria and other unstable countries as safe havens in which to train, but in the case of Syria he wanted to “avoid specific operational details.”
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While his reluctance to open up on the topic was to be expected, Votel had a particular reason to be circumspect: his force was at that moment rehearsing a life-or-death mission deep into rebel-held Syria.

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In the early hours of July 3, 2014, two Black Hawks full of Delta operators crossed the border from Jordan into Syria, flying fast across the desert. Their destination was a compound outside the town of Raqqa, on the north bank of the Euphrates in north-central Syria. It was there, U.S. intelligence analysts believed, that a group calling itself the Islamic State—one of the two Islamist factions waging war in Syria—was holding several Western hostages, including at least two Americans: journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. The intelligence came from several sources: FBI interviews with two European men that the Islamic State had held as hostages before releasing them, probably as a result of ransoms paid; satellite imagery of a building near Raqqa that matched the descriptions given by the Europeans; and information supplied by Israel.

This was not JSOC's first raid into Syria. But unlike the October 2008 mission to kill Abu Ghadiya, which involved a few minutes' flight across the Iraqi border, this operation involved penetrating 200 miles into Syrian airspace. For that reason, JSOC had chosen to use the latest version of the stealth Black Hawks that flew the bin Laden raid. That mission famously left one of the two such aircraft then in existence burned to a crisp in bin Laden's backyard. But since May 2011 more of the airframes had been constructed, and the program had expanded so that the 160th now kept a unit of about forty personnel under a lieutenant colonel at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, where the stealth helicopters were housed.

As the use of the specialized airframes suggested, JSOC had spared little expense to prepare for the operation. The task force had been training for weeks on a replica of the compound they were going to assault. There had been “eyes on the target” for at least a week prior to D-day, reporting what they saw in short, encrypted messages. When the helicopters neared the compound, they were filmed by at least one armed drone overhead.

The Black Hawks touched down and the operators swarmed off, as they had so many times over the previous thirteen years. Moving with their trademark efficiency they swept through the compound, killing about as many as a dozen militants in a firefight that ignited a blaze that would eventually consume the facility. (A helicopter pilot shot in the leg was the mission's only U.S. casualty.) There was little doubt that they were at the location where the Europeans had been held—the internal layout matched the former hostages' descriptions. But to the operators' dismay, they found no sign of the hostages. The militants had moved them to a new location. After spending thirty to forty minutes on the ground, the operators reboarded the helicopters and flew away empty-handed. They were back in Jordan by dawn.
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The full cost of the failure to free the hostages in Raqqa would be revealed in horrific fashion in August and early September, when the Islamic State released videos two weeks apart depicting an English-accented militant beheading Foley and Sotloff. The media storm that erupted alerted much of the American public to a menace that had been building for several months, as the Islamic State metastasized from a force focused mostly on fighting the Syrian regime to one that overran much of Sunni Iraq in the first half of 2014. By August, the Islamic State controlled a swath of territory that encompassed eastern Syria and huge chunks of western and northern Iraq. The group, which changed names several times, was the organizational descendant of Al Qaeda in Iraq, but its growth can be traced back to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi ascending to the leadership of the group in May 2010, and the withdrawal of U.S. forces—including JSOC—from Iraq by the end of the following year. Baghdadi proved himself a charismatic and effective leader who revitalized the organization and expanded its ambitions. In 2012 and 2013 the group emerged as the dominant resistance outfit in Syria, in the process breaking with Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri because of the latter's support for the al-Nusra Front over the Islamic State.

Then, in 2014, having established a secure rear area in eastern Syria, Baghdadi's forces stormed back into Iraq, stunning many Western observers as they swept across the country, whose armed forces put up little effective resistance. On June 29, Baghdadi declared himself head of an Islamic caliphate, a clear challenge to Zawahiri for leadership of the global Islamist movement. For JSOC, it was a bitter experience. The list of Iraqi cities the Islamic State had taken by the end of the summer was a roll call of places where the JSOC task force had engaged in hard, vicious fights to dislodge Saddam Hussein's forces and then to eviscerate Al Qaeda in Iraq: Haditha, where the Rangers withstood a fearsome artillery barrage to take a vital dam during the 2003 invasion; Tikrit, where Task Force Wolverine and Team Tank fought it out with the Fedayeen; Fallujah, where Don Hollenbaugh had earned his Distinguished Service Cross by holding off an insurgent assault single-handedly in April 2004; Rawa, where Doug Taylor's Delta troop had impersonated farmhands to snare Ghassan Amin in April 2005; Al Qaim, where Delta operators Steven Langmack, Bob Horrigan, and Michael McNulty had died in the bloody spring of 2005; and Mosul, where the Rangers killed Abu Khalaf in a perfectly executed assault in 2008.