The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies (6 page)

As our cooperation with local tribes increased, they learned that they had been lied to about our intentions in their country. They had been told that we were imperialists, and that we had come to colonize Iraq. As we worked together, they saw that we had no desire to live in that godforsaken place, and would go back home once we had fulfilled our mission. On the other hand, we were resolved to win, and were not about to suddenly turn tail and leave them to their own destiny. Both convictions were necessary for effective collaboration: we had to be seen as temporary occupiers, not colonialists, and they had to be convinced that we would fight alongside them until we had won—together.

We established close working relations with the Sunnis in Anbar. Not only the sheikhs who led the tribes, but their people began to believe that we were there to help and their interests and beliefs became our interests and beliefs. Never mind sending our guys to their relatively secure forward operating bases, as our top brass desired; we had to do the opposite. Indeed, we had to flip the way we waged war. We had to invert the relative weight of military operations and intelligence; that is, by treating Iraq (and later Afghanistan) as an intelligence war.

Before my eventual assignment to work for General McChrystal, I visited Iraq and Afghanistan in early 2004 to get acquainted with his command (Task Force 714), his team, and their current operating style. It was efficient but not effective, and General McChrystal knew it. After a couple of weeks, I came to recognize that this organization had a formidable capability, but they didn’t have the intelligence that they needed. They weren’t even considering it to the degree that they should have. They were focused on traditional targeting, above all, the top level of the terrorist groups (the so-called high-value targets). Capturing and killing top-tier terrorist leaders made us feel good, but it was a failed strategy.

We had an intense one-on-one discussion one night in Bagram, Afghanistan. Stan was deciding to transfer his HQ team and the task force’s main effort from Afghanistan to Iraq, which was not a small decision—it was April of 2004 and the First Battle of Fallujah was raging and we were losing. Osama bin Laden was still on the run somewhere in Pakistan, the situation in Afghanistan was relatively stable, but underneath this deceptively calm river of Afghanistan was a raging insurgency getting ready to reemerge. A decision had to be made and Stan’s instincts, as usual, were correct. That evening, I said to him, “Your intelligence operations are a small part of your organization and they need to be 8o percent of what you do as an organization. It needs to be the majority of what the task force does because, frankly, what we are facing we don’t know squat about.”

We had to put together a million-piece puzzle and had no box top to look at to help us. The puzzle was massive and it was in a region of the world and against an ideology that we did not properly understand. The more we tried to place the enemy in a typical conventional box, the more they changed. The more we tried to apply old, twentieth-century tactics, techniques, and procedures to this enemy, the more they adapted to them. We needed to act faster than they could and the only way to do that was to get inside their heads. And an intelligence officer who says he’s inside the head of the enemy is lying if he isn’t either dealing with a former enemy who’s come over to our side, or he’s talking directly to them and discovering what makes them tick.

This was so important that I couldn’t just delegate the task. I personally got involved in many interrogations and debriefings, especially early on. I wanted to know if the evil I could imagine was sufficient for full understanding, or if I was underestimating this enemy. For many years as an intelligence officer, I always believed that if I could think it, the enemy could think it. And I came to think about some pretty evil things—maybe it was the way I grew up or maybe it came from watching movies or maybe it was just instinctual on my part. But we were facing a despicable foe, one who would rape and pillage women and children, boys and girls, behead for fun, all while watching pornography on their laptops. In fact, at one point, we determined that 80 percent of the material on the laptops we were capturing was pornography. These sick, psychopathic foes were unbelievably vile, but they were also guileful and cunning. If we were to beat them, we needed to outwork and outwit them.

How did we do it?

Let’s say we captured somebody who knew something important. That information went at once to everyone in the task force: analysts, interrogators, SIGINT personnel, and the guys in the field. Everyone could then pursue new linkages in the terror network, leading to new captures, new discoveries of documents, computers, and the like. Faster and faster, those discoveries went back into our decision loop. Once we figured out how to do it, interrogators could receive real-time information about which they could query their captives, and if the answers pointed to new action, that would be relayed back to the tacticians and fighters.

It couldn’t have been done without improved communications technology. Paradoxically, al Qaeda and other terrorist groups understood this very well, and developed new skills using Internet sites to communicate with one another. We had to play catch-up. We’re a lot better today than we were then, thanks in no small measure to the work we did in Iraq first, and then in Afghanistan, but these skills are perishable if not routinely used.

That said, this was collaborative, transparent intelligence sharing in a more rapid fashion than warfare had ever seen. General Stan McChrystal was the principal driver of this revolutionary intelligence system, and thus turned Task Force 714 into an unprecedented instrument of modern intelligence warfare. He allowed me and my intelligence team complete autonomy when it came to crafting innovative techniques and procedures to rapidly transfer knowledge on one of the most complex and dangerous battlefields we had experienced in decades.

Our objective was to ensure that when one of our special operations teams captured someone, they received immediate feedback. When I arrived, guys we captured were just being dropped off, large bags of captured “stuff” were being thrown into a closet, never to be exploited for intelligence, and we were simply too slow. That was it! This would never allow us to understand all the dimensions of this field of fight we were on.

I wanted to amass information against the enemy we were capturing on the battlefield. The only way to defeat them was to get to know them better than they knew themselves, and we did. As we spoke to multiple detainees (many senior members of AQI and even those al Qaeda captured in Afghanistan or in friendly Arab countries like Jordan), we began to clarify the one-million-piece puzzle of this very effective enemy we were facing.

In Iraq, we got them to talk about each other. We would then go back and verify things on the battlefield. We would use unmanned surveillance to check on things we were learning in the interrogation booth, and we would direct human sources to go check out what we learned from these guys.

All of that led us to get smarter and then move faster than they could cope with. This was fusion of intelligence in the interrogation process with advanced communications technology and effective operations on the battlefield. In the end, we operationalized intelligence to increase knowledge for our tactical to strategic decision makers. This type of intelligence warfare was and remains a critical component of how to destroy Radical Islamism today and those enemies we will face in the future.

As you can see, interrogations were enormously important, and as the new system evolved, we increased the number and quality of our interrogators. All our hard work led to a new kind of intelligence system that constantly meshed with our actions. Intelligence had to drive operations, if possible within a single day, because the terrorists were very fast. For us to dominate the battlefield, our fighting teams must have the most significant and up-to-date intelligence so they can pinpoint their next logical attack. For that to happen, we couldn’t do intelligence the old way; there simply wasn’t time for the information to move through the various bureaucratic levels, nor could our fighters wait for guidance. We had to do something quite different: the intelligence people had to be linked together with our operators, and they had to get the results of their fighting almost immediately.

There was still more to do. We needed to get rid of the bureaucratic bottlenecks, within our task force and more broadly within the various military services, and perhaps most difficult, between the three-letter intelligence agencies that were working, analyzing, and fighting, but doing so in their own stovepiped systems: National Security Agency (NSA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and so forth. This meant undoing the traditional chain of command, because our men in the field had to be able to act on the intelligence they were getting. The terrorists were fast, and we had to be faster.

Two examples bring this need for speed to light. The first is the use of a national jewel called the National Media Exploitation Center (NMEC) located in Washington, D.C. This organization was doing some amazing work. They were taking captured material and turning it around to us as fast as they could (in days and weeks at that time—and this was fast—but it had to be faster). Between myself, and then-director of NMEC Roy Apselof, we figured out a way to build an “electronic bridge” directly between NMEC in Washington and our task force HQ in Balad, Iraq. Once we got this “bridge” in place, we exponentially sped up our exploitation process and turned information around, now in minutes and hours instead of days and weeks. This adaptation broke through so many layers of bureaucracy, was done without orders and long bureaucratic processes or permission, and helped us accomplish our mission. It was accomplished only through personal relationships; sadly, the entire war had to be fought like this. Left to its own traditional devices, the bureaucracy, at all levels and, maddeningly, at every opportunity, would crush adaptation and ingenuity.

The second example was more tactical but just as effective. In the early days during interrogations we would bring paper maps into the interrogation booth. The maps would be used with the detainees to get them to point out locations of certain places we were interested in finding out about. One day, we were sitting around talking about the use of Google Maps by some of our operators and tactical units because the larger imagery system wasn’t working fast enough to respond to our requirements. Google Maps was a relatively new technology and a software that was available on the open market. One of our great interrogators asked, “Why can’t we use this technology during interrogations?” Instead of asking why, we turned the question into “Why not?” So we did. And at first, we did Google 101: we literally taught detainees how to use a mouse with a laptop. Then we went Hollywood and put up large, flat-panel screens in the interrogation booths. Overnight, we got exponentially more fidelity of the locations we were interested in and much more accuracy for our targeting. Better still, the detainees actually liked using it. It seemed fun to them, it reinforced their fears and suspicions that the Americans knew everything and could see everything, and it made the interrogations faster. The resulting information could be electronically tracked from the interrogation booth, right out to the analytic floor, and in a digital flash right down to the operators on the battlefield.

It was an amazing application of technology, and shows you that real innovation can be conjured up by smart, highly motivated American soldiers on a battlefield. We were trying to save our operators’ lives, destroy our enemies, and win the damn war. To do this, our network had to be faster, more agile, and more relentless than the enemy network we were facing. We were, and that is why we eventually won.

In sum, Task Force 714 was drastically transformed. To be an effective action arm, the operational units had to be coordinated with a robust intelligence capability comprising several of the three-letter agencies of the intelligence community. Actionable intelligence had to lead the way in the fight against AQI—that was then and remains the case now.

Interestingly, pushing our decision making down into the midlevel officer and NCO ranks mirrored our overall strategy of moving out of our secure bases and immersing ourselves in the society. While we never stopped our hunt for the terrorists’ top leaders—Zarqawi headed the Most Wanted List until we finally killed him—we worked harder and harder to dismantle the terror network. This meant that our midlevel leaders tracked down their action officers at the core of the AQI network. Once we learned how to do it, it was really no contest. Good as the terrorists were, our guys were better trained, better equipped, and were part of a better, faster, and more devastating network.

Sometimes we got super-lucky and captured men who came over to our side. Or pretended to. I generally preferred to capture the terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, hoping to recruit some of them to our side. My youthful sortie into violent misbehavior had taught me that some criminals can be brought over from the dark side, but many of the terrorists that we did capture wouldn’t convert. Members of the Islamic State, the bad guys in the Taliban, and al Qaeda in Iraq, the vicious killers who reported to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, often proved unreformable. To make our task even more difficult, lots of them were gifted fakers, and jumped back and forth from our side to the terrorists. They fooled a lot of us, me included.

There are many examples of terrorists who pretended to cooperate, while they were actually betraying us. One, we’ll call George, due to Department of Defense censorship, was one of the earliest examples. He was in Zarqawi’s inner circle and in early fall 2004 we discovered he was one of the runners for AQI. This meant he had direct access to Zarqawi and his henchmen, all of whom were prime targets for us. If we could grab him, and convince him to work with us, the payoff might be enormous. So we mounted a major operation to accomplish this, and after several failures we captured him one night in a bar.