The Pentagon's Brain (39 page)

Years later, the maker of the phony device, ATSC president Jim McCormick, was arrested in England and convicted for fraud after a whistleblower revealed that McCormick knew he was selling bogus equipment. In 2011, Major General al-Jabiri was arrested for taking millions of dollars in bribes from McCormick. As of 2014 he had not been tried, and the bogus devices were still being used in Iraq.

The same month that terrorists in Iraq blew up Shia Islam’s revered shrine, attacks against coalition forces numbered more than two an hour, or fifty a day. By 2007 that figure had doubled to one hundred attacks a day, or three thousand a month. An estimated $15 billion had been spent by that point on counter-IED efforts—on jammers, robots, surveillance systems, and more. The situation was only getting worse. DARPA’s Combat Zones That See program was having little effect on the war effort, despite a classified number of dollars being spent on a program that collected video images of Iraqi citizens walking around cities and driving in cars and housed them in classified data storage facilities for access at a later date. America was rapidly losing control of the war, and in response, in January 2007, an additional thirty thousand troops were deployed to Iraq in what would become known as “the surge.”

To support the tens of thousands of new soldiers heading into
battle, Tony Tether appeared before the House Armed Services Committee to discuss several new technology programs DARPA was sending into the war zone. The Boomerang was DARPA’s response to sniper threats, Tether said. It was an acoustic sensor system made up of seven small microphones that attached to a military vehicle, listened for shooter information, and notified soldiers precisely where the fire was coming from, all in less than a second. The Boomerang system was able to detect shock waves from a sniper’s incoming bullets, as well as the muzzle blast, then relay that information to soldiers. For example, when a shot was detected, Boomerang might call out, “Shot. Two o’clock. 400 meters.” Tether told Congress that DARPA had fielded sixty Boomerang units to the Army, Marine Corps, and Special Forces, and was now working on a more advanced Boomerang-based technology called CROSSHAIRS (Counter Rocket-Propelled Grenade and Shooter System with Highly Accurate Immediate Responses).

CROSSHAIRS was a vehicle-mounted system that fused radar and signal-processing technologies to quickly detect much larger projectiles coming at coalition vehicles, including rocket-propelled grenades, antitank guided missiles, and even direct mortar fire. A sensor system inside the CROSSHAIRS would be able to identify where the shot came from and relay that information to all other vehicles in a convoy. The terrorists would be able to get one shot off, then Boomerang and CROSSHAIRS would allow coalition shooters to respond by targeting and killing the enemy shooter—in under one second.

To help snipers with accuracy, immediacy, and portability, DARPA was also fielding the smallest, lightest-weight sniper rifle in the history of warfare, the DARPA XM-3.

Tether also told Congress about DARPA’s new Radar Scope, a tiny, 1.5-pound handheld unit that allowed U.S. forces to “sense” through nonmetallic walls, including concrete, and determine if a human was hiding inside a building or behind a wall. In the winter
of 2007, DARPA fielded fifty Radar Scopes to the Army, Marines, and Special Forces for evaluation in the war theater. Tether hinted at bigger plans for this same technology, including ways to sense human activity underground, up to fifty feet deep.

Broad intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance efforts fused with massive data collection and data-mining operations would continue to be DARPA’s priority in urban area operations, Tether told Congress. “By 2025, nearly 60 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas,” Tether said, “so we should assume that U.S. forces will continue to be deployed to urban areas for combat and post-conflict stabilization.” Tether listed numerous unclassified programs, each with a suitable acronym. DARPA’s WATCH-IT (Wide Area All Terrain Change Indication Technologies) program analyzed data collected from foliage-penetrating radar. DARPA’s LADAR (Laser Detection and Ranging) program sensors obtained “exquisitely detailed, 3-D imagery through foliage to identify targets in response to these cues.” DARPA’s ASSIST (Advanced Soldier Sensor Information System and Technology) program allowed soldiers to collect details about specific Iraqi neighborhoods and then upload that information into a database for other soldiers to use.

DARPA’s HURT (Heterogeneous Urban Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Target Acquisition) program was flying more than fifty drones in support of coalition infantry brigades. HURT was able to reconnoiter over hundreds of miles of roadways, support convoys, and EOD tech teams. HURT provided persistent perimeter surveillance at forward operating bases and was playing a role in stopping an ever-increasing number of suicide bombers who were targeting U.S. military bases. In 2007 the HURT program would discreetly change its name to HART (Heterogeneous Airborne Reconnaissance Team) after unnamed sources suggested that the acronym was in poor taste.

To merge its growing number of surveillance and data-collection technologies, DARPA engineered a multimedia reporting system
called TIGR (Tactical Ground Reporting) to be used by soldiers on the ground in Iraq. Congress was told that TIGR’s web-based multimedia platform “allows small units, like patrols, to easily collect and quickly share ‘cop-on-the-beat’ information about operations, neighborhoods, people and civil affairs.” It was like a three-dimensional Wikipedia for soldiers in combat zones. U.S. soldiers told
MIT Technology Review
that TIGR allowed them to “see locations of key buildings, like mosques,” and to access data on “past attacks, geo-tagged photos of houses… and photos of suspected insurgents and neighborhood leaders.” In testimony the following year, the Armed Services Committee was told that TIGR was “so successful in Operation Iraqi Freedom, it was [being] requested by brigades going to Afghanistan.” Which, in the fall of 2008, was where tens of thousands of additional coalition forces would soon be headed.

After five years of relative stability in Afghanistan, the country was again spiraling into violence and chaos. Critics cried foul, declaring that the Bush administration had lost control of an insurgency force it had already defeated and pacified in 2002. That in diverting the great majority of American military resources, as well as intelligence and reconstruction resources, from Afghanistan into Iraq, the White House and the Pentagon had created a dual insurgency nightmare. Afghanistan and Iraq were being called quagmires in the press. These wars were unwinnable, critics said. This was Vietnam all over again. And, as had been the case for fifty years, DARPA was heading straight into the war zone.

A
t 9:20 p.m. on the night of June 13, 2008, two truck bombs, or vehicle-borne IEDs (VBIEDs), pulled up to the gates of the Sarposa prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and exploded in massive fireballs, knocking down large sections of the mud brick walls. Taliban militants on motorcycles quickly swarmed into the area in a coordinated attack, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles at prison guards, killing fifteen of them. It was a scene of carnage and mayhem. By the time coalition forces arrived, roughly an hour later, not one of the 1,200 incarcerated prisoners remained. In the morning, Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of President Hamid Karzai and the head of the provincial council in Kandahar, declared that “all” of the Sarposa prisoners had escaped, including as many as four hundred hard-core Taliban.

The prison break was dangerous for the citizens of Kandahar and embarrassing for NATO-led coalition forces, officially called the International Security Assistance Force. The Taliban issued a press release claiming responsibility and stating that the freed prisoners were happy to be back living in their Kandahar homes.
Coalition force soldiers conducted door-to-door searches looking for Taliban escapees, but there was almost no way to determine who had been in the prison. Fifteen prison guards were dead, and those still alive were not cooperating.

As a result of the security failure, the Pentagon redoubled efforts regarding its biometrics program in Afghanistan. Thousands of Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE) units were shipped to coalition forces with instructions on how to collect eye scans, fingerprints, facial images, and DNA swabs from every Afghan male between the ages of fifteen and sixty-four that coalition soldiers and Afghan security forces came into contact with. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had given birth to a new form of U.S. intelligence exploitation called bio-intelligence, or BIOINT. This concept found its genesis in DARPA’s Information Awareness Office. The mission of BIOINT, bulleted out in a DARPA program memo from 2002, was to “produce a proto-type system to [gather] biometric signatures of humans.” The biometrics system had been fielded to the Army, with the first hardware units appearing in Fallujah, Iraq, in December 2004.

The U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, was an advocate of collecting biometrics in counterinsurgency operations. “This data is virtually irrefutable and generally is very helpful in identifying who was responsible for a particular device [i.e., an IED] in a particular attack, enabling subsequent targeting,” Petraeus said. “Based on our experience in Iraq, I pushed this hard here in Afghanistan, too, and the Afghan authorities have recognized the value and embraced the systems.” Over the next three years, coalition forces would collect biometrics on more than 1.5 million Afghan men, roughly one out of every six males in the country. In Iraq the figure was even higher—reportedly 2.2 million male Iraqis, or one in four, had biometric scans performed on them.

The month after the Sarposa prison break, in July 2008, Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama took his first
official trip to the region, spending two days in Iraq and two days in Afghanistan. Senator Obama called the situation in Afghanistan “precarious and urgent,” and said that if elected president, he would make Afghanistan the new “central front in the war against terrorism.” Two days later the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, appeared on
PBS NewsHour
to discuss the growing violence in Afghanistan and the need for a ten-thousand-to twenty-thousand-troop surge there.

Summer became fall, and now it was November 2008. It had been four years since DARPA had sponsored its first social science and counterinsurgency conference since the Vietnam War, the Adversary Cultural Knowledge and National Security Conference organized by Montgomery McFate. The results of the conference had borne fruit in what was now the Army’s Human Terrain System program, and at least twenty-six teams of social scientists and anthropologists had been sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. On November 4, one of those Human Terrain Teams was a three-person unit stationed at Combat Outpost Hutal, Afghanistan, fifty miles west of Kandahar. On this day back home, Americans were voting for a new president, and here in the war theater, anthropologist Paula Loyd, security contractor Don Ayala, and former combat Marine Clint Cooper were heading out on regular patrol.

The area around Kandahar was particularly dangerous and hostile to coalition forces. Kandahar had long been the spiritual center of the Taliban, and now, after the prison break five months earlier, an unusual number of hard-core Taliban were living among the people, making the situation even more precarious. On patrol that November morning, Paula Loyd, Don Ayala, and Clint Cooper were accompanied by three local interpreters and one platoon of U.S. Army infantry soldiers with C Company, 2-2 Infantry Battalion. Paula Loyd was a dedicated anthropologist, a Wellesley College graduate, thirty-six years old and engaged to be married. Petite and striking, with long blond hair hanging out the back of
her combat helmet, Loyd had served in the U.S. Army for four years after college, including a post as a vehicle mechanic in the DMZ in South Korea. She was hardworking, curious, and respected by her peers; one former colleague said, “An indefinable spirit defined her.” Nearing the central market in the village of Chehel Gazi, the Human Terrain Team spread out. Paula Loyd stopped in a dirt alleyway and started handing out candy and pens to local children walking to school. The alleyway was about twenty-five feet wide and lined on either side by tall mud brick walls. Running down the center of the alleyway was a shallow creek, its sloping banks lined with tall leafy trees. As adults passed by, through an interpreter Loyd asked questions about the local price of cooking fuel, a key indicator as to whether or not the Taliban had hijacked supply lines. As Loyd interviewed people, she took notes in her notebook, information that was to be uploaded into a military database at the end of each day.

A young bearded man walked up to Loyd, shooing the local children away. The man carried a container, like a jug. Loyd asked her interpreter to translate.

“What’s in your jug?” Loyd asked the man.

He told her it was fuel. Gasoline for his water pump at home.

“How much does petrol cost in Maiwand?” Loyd asked.

He told her it was very expensive. She asked about his job. He said he worked for a school.

“Would you like some candy?” she asked.

“I don’t like candy,” the man said. His name was Abdul Salam. He wore blue sweatpants, a long-sleeved shirt, and a blue-striped vest. Abdul Salam asked Loyd’s interpreter if she smoked. The conversation continued for a while, then tapered off. Then Abdul Salam wandered away. After a while he came back. The interpreter noticed he was playing with a plastic lighter, turning it over in one hand. In the other hand he held the jug of fuel.

In a flash, Abdul Salam raised the jug and poured gasoline over
Paula Loyd. He struck the lighter and set her on fire. Some witnesses described hearing a
whoosh
sound. Others described seeing Paula Loyd being consumed by an inferno of flames. The heat was so intense and powerful that no one near her could immediately help without catching fire as well. Loyd’s interpreter later recalled seeing her burning as his mind raced for a way to put the fire out. She called out his name. Nearby, a twenty-six-year-old platoon leader named Matthew Pathak shouted out that soldiers should get her into the creek. He filled his helmet with water and threw it on Loyd. People tossed dirt and sand on her, trying to get the fire out. Finally, soldiers dragged her across the alleyway and into the creek. The flames were not out. Loyd had third-degree burns on 60 percent of her body. She was still conscious.

“I’m cold,” she said. “I’m cold.” It was one of the last things she said.

When Abdul Salam set Paula Loyd on fire, people started screaming. Human Terrain Team member Don Ayala was standing roughly 150 feet down the alleyway. He drew his pistol and raced toward the commotion. As Ayala ran toward Loyd, Abdul Salam was running away from the crime scene, toward Ayala. Soldiers pursuing Salam screamed, “Stop that man! Shoot him!” Ayala tackled Salam and, with the help of two soldiers, put him in flex cuffs.

Don Ayala was not a social scientist or an anthropologist; he was a security contractor, or bodyguard. Ayala had previously guarded Afghan president Hamid Karzai and Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. His job was to keep Paula Loyd from getting killed. Witnesses watched him work to immobilize Abdul Salam, who resisted detention, while soldiers and interpreters about 150 feet away tried to help the critically injured Loyd, whose clothes had melted into her skin and who was in terrible pain. Specialist Justin Skotnicki, one of the U.S. Army infantry soldiers who had witnessed the attack, went over to Ayala and told him what had
happened to Paula Loyd, that Abdul Salam had thrown gasoline on her and set her on fire. Ayala called out for an interpreter.

“Don had the interpreter inform [Abdul Salam] that Don thought the man was the devil,” Skotnicki later recalled. Then Don Ayala pulled his 9mm pistol from his belt, pressed it against Abdul Salam’s temple, and shot him in the head, killing him.

Paula Loyd was transported to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. She was in the burn unit there for two months until she died of her injuries on January 7, 2009. The Taliban claimed credit for her death.

Earlier that spring, in May, Don Ayala was tried for murder in a Louisiana courtroom. He pled guilty to manslaughter. U.S. District Senior Judge Claude Hilton showed leniency and gave Ayala probation and a $12,500 fine instead of jail time. “The acts that were done in front of this defendant would provide provocation for anyone” who was present, Judge Hilton said. “This occurred in a hostile area, maybe not in the middle of a battlefield, but certainly in the middle of a war.”

The entire situation was grotesque. An anthropologist handing out candy to children was set on fire by an emissary of the Taliban and died a horrible death. The security contractor hired to protect the anthropologist was unable to do so and instead took justice into his own hands. But none of this was exactly as it seemed. Why was Ayala on the Human Terrain Team in the first place? He had no qualifications in anthropology or social science. Why weren’t the U.S. Army infantry soldiers considered capable of protecting her? According to Montgomery McFate, all Human Terrain Team members “advise brigades on economic development, political systems, tribal structures, etc.; provide training to brigades as requested; and conduct research on topics of interest to the brigade staff,” but Ayala was not qualified in any of those areas, except for the “etc.” part.

Court documents revealed that Don Ayala was paid $425 a day, each day he worked in Afghanistan, and that in Iraq he had been
paid $800 a day, which meant he earned more in two days than any of the soldiers in C Company made in a month. What service could Don Ayala perform that the C Company soldiers were unable to do? Over the next five years the Human Terrain System would cost taxpayers $600 million. What actual purpose did it serve? The answer would ultimately lead back to DARPA.

But first there was subterfuge and misinformation, starting with the wide gap between how McFate and other social scientists presented the program to the public—knowingly or not—and how the program was actually positioned in the Defense Department hierarchy.

To the public, the Human Terrain System was sold as a culture-centric program, a hearts and minds campaign. But in U.S. Army literature, the Human Terrain System was in place “to help mitigate IEDs,” and the program was funded by the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), with members like Paula Loyd working alongside EOD technicians, DARPA jammers, and Talon robots. In press releases, the Army was oblique. “Combat commanders [do] not have a good understanding of the cultural and social implications of military operations in urban environments,” said one. Anthropologists and social scientists were going into the battle zone “to provide social science support to military commanders.” The important word was “support.” It would take until this book for a fuller picture to emerge of what was being supported.

The Human Terrain System program was controversial from the start. The American Anthropological Association, which was founded in 1902, and whose credo for anthropologists was “first do no harm,” denounced the program as “a disaster waiting to unfold.” Its executive board condemned the Human Terrain System as “a problematic application of anthropological expertise, most specifically on ethical grounds,” and in a letter to Congress called the program “dangerous and reckless” and “a waste of the taxpayers’
money.” In an article for
Anthropology Today,
Roberto González, associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University, called the program “mercenary anthropology.” Catherine Lutz, chair of the anthropology department at Brown University, charged that the Defense Department was promoting a dangerous and false idea “that anthropologists’ ‘help’ will create a more humane approach on the part of the U.S. military towards the Iraqi people.” Lutz believed the notion of helping people to be “a very seductive idea,” but she encouraged anthropologists to step back and ask, “Help what? Help whom, to do what?”

Hugh Gusterson, professor of anthropology at George Mason University, accused the Army of trying to convince anthropologists that “Americans have a mission to spread democracy” and that “Americans have only the well-being of other people in mind.” Gusterson saw that as manipulative and believed that once a person convinced himself or herself of that, “you start to think of it [war] as some kind of cultural miscommunication. And you start to ask naive, misshapen questions [like],‘If we only understood their culture, how could we make them like us? Why do they hate us so much?’” Gusterson believed the answer was simple. “They hate us because we are occupying their country, not because they don’t understand our hand signals and because occasionally we mistreat their women,” Gusterson said. “So if you ask the wrong questions you get the wrong answers and more people on both sides will die.”