The next day, the world changed, but perhaps for no one more so than Red Squadron, SEAL Team Six, and its parent, the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the president’s secret army. At the end of a ten-year American crucible of terrorist attacks and two wars, and as the psychic burden of its citizenry was made all the heavier by a collapse in the financial markets and a near-total dysfunction in government, Operation Neptune’s Spear offered the tantalizing suggestion that something in government could work and did work. Here, government agencies worked together in secret, in pursuit of a single goal. No boundaries separated the intelligence community from the military or one military unit from another. In the parlance, it was the perfection of a process thirty years in the making—operations by joint military branches (“Purple”) conducted seamlessly with multiple agencies of the intelligence community (“Gold”).
It was the finest example of the apparatuses of state working in concert and probably the finest example of government secrecy approved of by the general public.
JSOC (pronounced “JAY-sock”) is a special military command established in 1980 by a classified charter. Its purpose is to quietly execute the most challenging tasks of the world’s most powerful nation with exacting precision and with little notice or regard. The Command is clandestine by design. When it makes mistakes, this often means that its singularly lethal techniques were applied to the wrong person, or that the sheer exuberance of being the elite of the elite dulled the razor-sharp moral calculus required of war fighters who have so much autonomy.
Before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, JSOC spent twenty years quietly operating on the periphery of the armed forces, inventing tactics to do the impossible and succeeding in execution. It recruited some of the best soldiers and sailors in the world and put them through the most intense training ever developed by a modern military. The last ten years have witnessed JSOC transform itself and, in so doing, change way the United States and her allies fight wars.
This is not an exaggeration or some attempt to burnish the Command’s mythos. Consider these two strategic objectives: suppressing the insurgency in Iraq so that conventional forces could regroup and mount a renewed counteroffensive, and degrading the capabilities of al-Qaeda. Without JSOC’s aggressive fusion of intelligence with operations in real time, and without its warp-speed tempo in tracking high-value targets, the United States would very likely still be slugging it out in the trenches of Iraq, and al-Qaeda would still be a credible threat to U.S. security. Whatever your view of the Iraq campaign or of war itself, and whatever your tolerance for the often nebulous morality of special operations missions, it behooves you to understand how this type of unconventional warfare evolved and what it means as the U.S. military faces significant spending cuts.
The bin Laden assassination bore all of the hallmarks of a modern JSOC operation. It was joint, involving military elements both white and black from different branches of the armed forces. It was interagency, coordinated with the CIA and leveraging the assets of much of the U.S. intelligence community, largely without conflict. It was legal enough; the razing force was temporarily placed under the control of Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, because JSOC isn’t strictly authorized to conduct operations in Pakistan. It was also resource-intensive, involving millions of dollars’ worth of secret equipment, significant satellite bandwidth, the attention of national policymakers, and a swath of military personnel belonging to various commands.
JSOC is the secret army of the president of the United States. But what does “secret” mean when it involves units virtually everyone has heard of? By the numbers, JSOC’s cover has not changed, and its subordinate units must “study special operations requirements and techniques, ensure interoperability and equipment standardization, plan and conduct special operations exercises and training, and develop joint special operations tactics.”1 Although that’s not a lie, it is to some degree obfuscation. JSOC does indeed plan and conduct special operations exercises, but it also conducts highly sensitive missions that require particularly specialized units. Many of those units have passed into American cultural legend.
In many ways, this mythologizing began with Colonel Charlie Beckwith, the father of Delta Force and its first commanding officer, who wrote a book about his unit. Journalist Mark Bowden later revealed in astonishing detail the operational effectiveness, bravery, and brutal efficiency of Delta operators in sustained combat against overwhelming numbers as exhibited in the Battle of Mogadishu. (Ridley Scott would later commit the operation to celluloid in the film Black Hawk Down.) Eric Haney, a former senior noncommissioned officer of Delta, produced a television show called The Unit, based on a book he’d previously written. Years earlier, Charlie Sheen and a camera crew were inexplicably granted access to the actual SEAL Team Six compound in Virginia to film a movie about DEVGRU. And of course, the beat reporters in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where Delta is headquartered, and Dam Neck, Virginia, where DEVGRU is headquartered, know the names of the colonels and the captains responsible for the military’s most daring forces.
So it’s not quite right to say that the two principal counterterrorism units of JSOC are secret, per se. A better description might be that they are officially unacknowledged. And though he can’t come out and say it, that’s what Ken McGraw, a spokesman for U.S. Special Operations Command, means when he tells reporters he won’t be talking about the “special missions units” with them.
Right now, with mostly successes visible to the public, we respect that this secrecy is for operational security. However, that respect may not last forever, because secrecy exists also to remove layers of accountability. JSOC doesn’t want most of our elected leaders to know what it is up to, especially in cases where things go wrong. And most of our elected leaders would rather not know, for the same reason. The secrecy apparatus of JSOC is prodigious in scope, and the Command camouflages itself with cover names, black budget mechanisms, and bureaucratic parlor tricks to keep it that way. It is heavily compartmentalized; the commanding officer of Delta knew about Neptune’s Spear only days before the operation. To get around Freedom of Information Act inquiries, JSOC security officers advise operators and analysts to “stick to paper and safes,” as one intelligence operative describes, meaning that for sensitive conversations, nonmilitary cell phones are preferable to classified military computer networks where every keystroke is recorded for use by counterintelligence investigators. JSOC currently participates in more than fifty special access programs, each one designating a particular operation or capability. The programs are given randomly selected and always-changing nicknames and are stamped with code words such as Meridian and Principal that are themselves classified.
JSOC perfectly represents the two sides of the secrecy coin. Most of their secrets—new technologies, new targets, new techniques—will not be a secret from our enemies once the operation is carried out. However, there will be things—there are almost surely already things—that they hope no one outside JSOC ever learns about.
The Command’s secrecy can intimidate outsiders, but such an operational culture is a necessity. Among its most sensitive tasks in recent years has been to establish contingency plans to secure the Pakistani nuclear arsenal in the event that the civilian government falls in a military coup d’état. Here, policymakers are given a welcome choice—a choice not to know, which allows senior administration officials to reliably and honestly explain to the public and to Pakistani officials that they are confident in Pakistan’s ability to keep its arsenal safe without having to lie. Only a few political appointees and members of Congress need to know the nature of such contingency plans. Incidentally, JSOC is also a key part of the classified contingency plans to preserve the U.S. civilian government in the event of a coup from the military or anyone else.
It’s clear, however, that the blankets of secrecy are fraying. “If you Google JSOC,” Admiral William McRaven, the commander of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), a former
DEVGRU operator and the previous commander of JSOC, has said, “you can find out pretty much everything you want to know.”
Yet JSOC has done a decent job of keeping to itself. The missions we hear about are but a fraction of those it completes. Likewise, JSOC has done a remarkable job of hiding from the public the incredible scope of the missions it is assigned and a fine job of preventing anyone outside the circle of trust from obtaining all but the slightest knowledge of its history, organization, function, and structure.
“Brian,” the decorated Naval Special Warfare Development Group deputy commander who planned Neptune’s Spear, had expected to read a lot about his unit—some of it even true—and had participated in conversations with colleagues about the future of the cover narrative given to JSOC. Maybe it was time to loosen things up a bit. A big mission such as this would inevitably degrade JSOC’s capacity to some nontrivial degree, as the efficacy of special operations forces is often inversely proportional to the publicity given to the mission. Brian is no longer a DEVGRU commander, but as with all JSOC colonels and captains, his identity is considered a state secret, protected by the Defense Cover Program. (Brian is also not his real name; because Nicholas Schmidle referred to him by that name in his excellent August 8, 2011, New Yorker article “Getting bin Laden,” we will too.)
As Brian worked with SEAL element planners and intelligence analysts in a warren of rooms at CIA headquarters in Langley during the first months of 2011, he was bemused to find that he was worried about success. He feared that in the operation’s aftermath, reporters might harass the Command for more information about how it worked and what it did. This was, admittedly, a mild concern. There has always been some level of curiosity, and there always would be. A more paramount concern was that someone might leak details of the mission before it happened. The closer to the witching hour, the higher the risk of a compromise. Simply put, JSOC commanders didn’t trust everyone at the White House who would have to be “read in” to the operation. Admiral McRaven did, however, trust Panetta and the director’s decision to brief certain lawmakers on the House and Senate select committees on intelligence. (Though no lawmakers received operational briefings about the mission until Osama bin Laden was introduced to the Arabian Sea, the chair and ranking committee members were given cryptic notifications by Panetta that the operation would happen about six hours before it did.)
Thankfully, Brian’s initial fears proved unfounded. Yet what he did not expect were the throngs of tourists flocking to Dam Neck, Virginia, hoping to spot members of the team at known SEAL bars and haunts. Or the two motion pictures put almost immediately into production, with filmmakers contacting members of the squadron. Or the History Channel and the Discovery Channel specials, with commentators either knowing nothing at all or revealing too much. Even President Barack Obama participated in one of them. If, as it seemed, JSOC was no longer secret, what would it be? How could it be effective when its existence was all but officially acknowledged and its activities openly reported? Brian, in fact, turned out to be the country’s best secret keeper for a while. Because Neptune’s Spear was his operation, he designed its security protocols. What that meant, in practice, was that almost nothing was committed to paper. There were no “read-aheads” distributed to aides in advance of meetings. No one took notes. “We did what the enemy did,” he said. “We went off the grid.” He kept a lot of the operational details inside his brain.
“It increasingly became a concern for us that it was going to leak,” he said. “We had a few operational constraints, one of which was that we needed to go in on an illumination cycle in Pakistan. That was at the beginning of the month, when the moon was bright. I was concerned that if we waited for June, four long weeks—the chances would have risen exponentially that something would leak.”
When Brian says “leak,” he doesn’t mean a front-page story in the Washington Post. “Even if there had been some chatter about it, if any of that had gotten back to the Pakistani government, it would have been over.”
When he assumed command of SOCOM, Admiral McRaven sent word to JSOC: the story of U.S. special operations forces is a good one, and he wanted to talk forthrightly with the American people about it. Americans could, and should, be proud of their special operations forces. There would by necessity be exceptions: he would protect the identities of those involved in missions, and he would never talk about missions themselves. In keeping with this promise, he declined to talk about Neptune’s Spear or any other mission for this book.
By some estimates, 80 percent of JSOC missions launched before 2000 remain classified. Some of these are likely secrets they hope will never get out. Operators from Delta Force and SEAL Team Six infiltrated China with the CIA and mapped the locations of Chinese satellite transmission facilities in the event that the United States ever needed to disable them. On more than one occasion, they’ve engaged Iranian troops on Iranian soil. They’ve fought in Lebanon, in Peru, in the Palestinian territories, and in Syria. They also spent a lot of time shooting up abandoned buildings in U.S. cities, rehearsing hostage rescue situations of every kind. The Command hoards contingency planners. When the president travels overseas, a JSOC team usually shadows him. Its members are trained to take charge should the mammoth security structure of the U.S. Secret Service break down.
Although the bin Laden mission may have been less complicated than other, less well-known operations, it was in many ways the culmination of decades of work. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, no single entity—not even the CIA—has done more to degrade and isolate al-Qaeda, to prevent Hezbollah from funneling drug money to terrorists, or to check Iranian influence. Pick a threat, and there’s a good chance the Command is there “mowing the lawn.” (This metaphor is a favorite of JSOC flag and general officers.) The cost of doing so much—indeed, the necessary cost of success—is that the secret force is no longer impenetrably black. Its operators are tired. The casualty rate has been high. And a perennial, hush-hush debate inside the Pentagon has grown vociferous.
During the last decade, the United States has created the most impressive rapid military response machine in the history of the world. Simply stated, JSOC can kill more efficiently and effectively than any other force on earth. How then can we safely, legally, and responsibly employ it?
The law is murky. The CIA is permitted to engage in something called “covert action,” and can use JSOC to do so. By law, a covert action is “an activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it’s intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly.”2 As we have discussed, the president must formally “find” that such an activity is warranted and must inform select members of Congress in advance.
The legal definition of “covert action” does not cover intelligence collection; it does not cover “traditional diplomatic or military activities, or their routine support” or support to law enforcement or other government agencies. In practice, if another agency is engaged in something approximating a covert action, the CIA can stand in support of that agency and not be subject to the statutory requirements imposed by Congress. In theory, it is tempting for a president who wants to do something secret to charter it under something like “traditional military activities,” which is a phrase that is sufficiently balloonlike to purchase just about everything that JSOC does.
Since its founding, the CIA has been a bit of a free body in the orbit of secret activities. Its regulation by Congress has a lot to do with the tendency of its leaders to push the boundaries of policy and not be held accountable for it. The Department of Defense, however, is a very hierarchical organization, and accountability is not left to a separate branch of government. It is embedded within the organizational structure and culture of the American defense establishment, more so after the Goldwater-Nichols reforms of the 1980s. JSOC reports to the civilian secretary of defense, who reports to the civilia
n National Security Council and then directly to the president. Internally, JSOC components are constrained by the services (the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy) that fund them, and their leaders are held to account by the oaths they’ve sworn, the combatant commands they work under, the umbrella command they work for, and by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to say nothing of the civilian under secretary who oversees special operations. Many more people know about JSOC operations than might be read in to a CIA “compartmented” for a covert action. Congress, however, isn’t necessarily in that number, which is one reason many observers of secret wars tend to worry about JSOC and accountability. But it is accountable—just not to Congress.
Practically speaking, Congress cannot by its nature and expertise or the Constitution tell the commander in chief how to conduct a war. And if Congress has deemed the inchoate battle against terrorism to be such a war, there is very little it can do, in retrospect, to regather or reclassify certain types of operations as distinct from that war. The big battles of tomorrow—countercyber, counternarcotics, and counterterrorism, are American defense priorities. The Defense Department has all the authority it needs to resource and execute its mission. Special operations forces will fight many of these “small wars,” and they are legally permitted to operate without oversight in ways that the CIA legally cannot. If Congress finds this untenable, it can change the law. That it has not suggests that it is comfortable with the arrangement; its silence provides the consent that the president seeks for the employment of his secret army.
Deep State Page 15