Although JSOC’s secret history was discussed, in hushed tones, in the halls of the Pentagon, many of its most decorated veterans believed it had been underutilized or, worse, misused. After an auspicious start and a far-reaching mandate, JSOC was viewed as a bastard child within the Pentagon and White House. The Iran-Contra scandal had placed a pox on the house of covert action. Despite some successes, such as the rescue of Kurt Muse, an American citizen, from a Panamanian prison during Operation Just Cause in 1989, Special Operations Forces (SOFs) were used with trepidation for the decade preceding 9/11.
During the 1991 Gulf War, United States Central Command (CENTCOM) Commander General Norman Schwarzkopf was reluctant to include JSOC in the war plan, though he ultimately lost that battle. JSOC deployed and—among other missions—hunted down SCUD missile systems to sabotage them. This distrust began to thaw slightly during the Clinton administration. According to SOCOM’s official history, during this period, the operational tempo of Special Ops Forces increased more than 50 percent: “In 1996 alone, SOF were deployed in a total of 142 countries and engaged in 120 counterdrug missions, 12 demining training missions, and 204 Joint Combined Exchange Training exercises.” But, rather than targeted kinetic ops, JSOC had mostly been used in large-scale operations, which increasingly became peacekeeping missions involving international coalitions, such as the wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Haiti and Somalia. The kinetic, direct-action missions it was formed to conduct seldom seemed to go live. General Wayne Downing, who headed SOCOM from 1993 to 1996 and was a former JSOC commander, said that following the end of the Cold War, US Special Operations Forces’ “unconventional warfare” role “had received reduced emphasis,” adding that its “capabilities in this area had atrophied.” JSOC, he said, “maintained superb counterterrorism and counterproliferation capabilities, but operated from a reactive rather than a proactive posture.”
As the al Qaeda threat began to emerge in the 1990s, JSOC would propose missions aimed at targeting the network’s leadership. Its commanders believed that this was its central role, and early drafts of planned operations against bin Laden and al Qaeda in the late 1990s reportedly included JSOC. But JSOC’s commanders claimed that prior to 9/11 their forces “were never used once to hunt down terrorists who had taken American lives.” According to Downing, during his tenure at SOCOM he participated in the preparation of approximately twenty operations targeting terrorist groups accused of killing American citizens, but the command “couldn’t pull the trigger.” Downing asserted that although JSOC “had superb, direct assault, ‘finish’ capabilities,” it lacked “the ‘find’ and ‘fix’ and intelligence fusion capabilities essential to” fight a global war on terrorism.
“For many years, they were kind of a joke. They were the ‘Big, Bad, Weightlifting Guys,’ you know, down at Fort Bragg, inside their compound there,” recalled Lang. “But they went on a lot of reconnaissance, and did things like that, but they never got to fight anybody, until the Clinton thing in Somalia [the infamous 1993 Black Hawk Down incident]. You gotta admit, they were brave as hell—there’s no doubt about that—but in fact their real days of glory, as kind of worldwide scourers of the enemies of justice and truth, really only started after 9/11. They didn’t really do a lot of fighting before that, really.”
Rumsfeld came into office with an agenda to change that equation. He not only wanted the Pentagon to take over covert operations from the CIA but aimed to consolidate control over these operations himself, radically streamlining the established military chain of command. JSOC was created in secrecy to perform operations that were, by their very nature, meant to be kept hidden from virtually all other entities of military and government. After 9/11, Rumsfeld moved swiftly to create a structure to circumvent the Joint Chiefs and to begin directly coordinating with combatant commanders to conduct kinetic operations in their areas of responsibility. Under Title 10 of the US code, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was the senior military adviser to the president and was to serve as a conduit to the president. “[Rumsfeld] didn’t like that at all,” recalls Shelton. Rumsfeld “would try to diminish my authority or eliminate members of my staff,” Shelton alleged. Rumsfeld, Shelton said, “wanted to be the policy and the operations guy.” Shelton told me Rumsfeld sidelined “all that military expertise” and “he immediately wanted to figure out how he could start dealing directly with the combatant commanders and not dealing, as every other SECDEF [secretary of defense] had done, by presidential directive through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.” In his memoir, Shelton described Rumsfeld’s model of the secretary of defense as being “based on deception, deceit, working political agendas, and trying to get the Joint Chiefs to support an action that might not be the right thing to do for the country, but would work well for the President from a political standpoint.” He added, “It was the worst style of leadership I witnessed in 38 years of service or have witnessed at the highest levels of the corporate world since then.”
Shelton said that during his time as chairman, under both Clinton and Bush, he personally intervened to stop operations he believed would have resulted in innocents being killed if they had gone ahead based on initial intel. But Rumsfeld wanted to streamline the process for green-lighting targeted killing operations and did not want to be bogged down by the military brass. “You’ve got to be careful when you start killing people, and make sure the ones you kill are the right people. And that requires using all the assets we got, to make sure we don’t make a mistake. And it can be done fast, but it needs to be done as a cross-check,” said Shelton. “Even though you don’t want to miss an opportunity to grab a terrorist, you don’t want to end up having an international incident that turns out to make us look like the terrorist.” Far from Shelton’s view of how these “surgical” forces should be deployed, Rumsfeld believed that JSOC had been underutilized, and he intended to transform it from the tip of the spear of a new global killing campaign to the spear itself. Rumsfeld—and many in the Special Ops community—believed that President Clinton and the military brass of the 1990s had lawyered forces like JSOC into a state of near irrelevance in the fight against terrorism. During the Clinton administration, “the possibility of hunting down the terrorists did receive ample attention at the top echelons of government,” concluded a report commissioned by Rumsfeld three months after 9/11. “But somewhere between inception and execution, the SOF options were always scuttled as too problematic.”
The author of the report was Richard Shultz, an academic who specialized in Special Operations warfare, and its purpose was to dissect Clinton’s counterterrorism strategy. Rumsfeld wanted to ensure that any legal or bureaucratic barriers to unleashing JSOC would be smashed. Shultz was given a security clearance and free rein to conduct interviews with senior military officials and to review intelligence. The ultimate conclusion of the Shultz report was that the United States needed to take JSOC off the national security shelf and put it front and center in the war on terror.
The Shultz report, parts of which were later adapted into an unclassified article for the neoconservative Weekly Standard, also postulated that the Black Hawk Down incident in 1993 in Somalia had scared the White House into paralyzing Special Operations Forces. In late 1992, the United States was leading a UN peacekeeping mission aimed at delivering aid and, later, ridding Somalia of the warlords who had overthrown the country’s government. But the warlords openly defied the US and UN forces and continued to pillage Somalia. In the summer of 1993, after a series of attacks on UN forces, Clinton gave the green light to JSOC to conduct a daring operation to take down the inner circle of the notorious warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, whose forces were rapidly consolidating their control of Mogadishu. But the mission descended into disaster when two of JSOC’s Black Hawk helicopters were shot down over Mogadishu, sparking a massive battle between Special Ops Forces and Somali militia members. In all, eighteen US soldiers were killed. Images of some of the Americans being dragged through the
streets were broadcast around the globe and ultimately spurred a US withdrawal. “The Mogadishu disaster spooked the Clinton administration as well as the brass, and confirmed the Joint Chiefs in the view that SOF should never be entrusted with independent operations,” the Shultz report asserted. “After Mogadishu, one Pentagon officer explained, there was ‘reluctance to even discuss pro-active measures associated with countering the terrorist threat through SOF operations. The Joint Staff was very happy for the administration to take a law enforcement view. They didn’t want to put special ops troops on the ground.’” General Peter Schoomaker, who commanded JSOC from 1994 to 1996, said that the presidential directives under Clinton, “and the subsequent findings and authorities, in my view, were done to check off boxes. The president signed things that everybody involved knew full well were never going to happen,” adding: “The military, by the way, didn’t want to touch it. There was great reluctance in the Pentagon.”
Shultz had interviewed several officials who served on the Joint Staff and in the special operations world under Clinton and who asserted that officials such as Richard Clarke, who advocated using Special Ops troops on the ground to engage in targeted kill or capture operations against bin Laden and other al Qaeda figures, were denounced by the brass as madmen who were “out of control, power hungry, wanted to be a hero, all that kind of stuff.” One former official told Shultz, “when we would carry back from the counterterrorism group one of those SOF counterterrorism proposals, our job was” not to figure out “how to execute it, but how we were going to say no.” Shultz denounced such “showstoppers,” his label for the lawyering and bureaucratic restrictions imposed under Clinton that “formed an impenetrable phalanx ensuring that all high level policy discussions, tough new presidential directives, revised contingency plans, and actual dress rehearsals for missions would come to nothing.” As Shultz saw it, these “mutually reinforcing, self-imposed constraints...kept the special mission units sidelined,” under Clinton, “even as al Qaeda struck at...targets around the globe and trumpeted its intention to do more of the same.”
The Shultz report painted a picture of Special Ops Forces being handcuffed by the military brass and civilian officials who preferred to launch cruise missiles and to approach bin Laden and his terrorist troops through a law-enforcement lens. The fear of failed missions or humiliation combined with concern over violating bans on assassination or killing innocents in the pursuit of the guilty paved the path to 9/11, in Rumsfeld’s opinion. His strategy boiled down to this: he wanted America’s best killers to kill America’s enemies wherever they resided.
As the United States began its global war, Shultz began briefing senior Pentagon officials on his findings and recommendations. The report, which was classified as “SECRET,” was scathing in its denunciation of Clinton’s counterterrorism policies and advocated an aggressive promotion of JSOC within the US national security apparatus. Instead of being a force that could be called in to support the conventional US commanders in their areas of responsibility, those conventional commanders would be supporting JSOC. It was an unprecedented promotion of America’s premier black ops force to a position of supreme authority. Rumsfeld, who only had to deal with General Shelton “for fifteen minutes,” as Rumsfeld put it, forged ahead full speed after Shelton was replaced in October 2001 by a far more malleable chair of the Joint Chiefs, Richard Myers. If Rumsfeld was to “employ” JSOC to “conduct a global war on al Qaeda it must learn the right lessons of Mogadishu,” the Shultz report concluded. “Those lessons reveal how good SOF units are, even when policymakers misuse them. Imagine if they were employed properly in the war on terrorism.”
Whether it was proper or not, Rumsfeld was about to yank JSOC from obscurity and build its force to an unprecedented prominence and strength within the US war machine. To do it, he would need to invade the CIA’s realm and create parallel structures that would answer to him—not to Congress or the State Department. They would also need a freestanding intelligence operation that would support their covert agenda.
FROM THE START of the Bush administration, Rumsfeld and Cheney frequently clashed with Secretary of State Colin Powell and were determined to make sure the highly decorated former chair of the Joint Chiefs didn’t stand in the way of their wars. Powell was hardly a dove, but from the first moments after 9/11, he was advocating that the United States develop a tightly focused military response against al Qaeda. Powell and his deputies asserted that “our allies and friends abroad would be more comfortable with retributive U.S. strikes against the perpetrators of 9/11 than with a global war against Islamist terrorists and their state supporters,” recalled Douglas Feith. Powell, he asserted, believed a “narrowly scoped campaign of punishment would keep U.S. policy more in line with the traditional law enforcement approach to fighting terrorism.” But the neoconservatives were intent on waging preemptive wars against nation-states and sought to unleash the CIA from the legal and oversight bureaucracy. “Forget about ‘exit strategies,’” Rumsfeld said two weeks after 9/11. “We’re looking at a sustained engagement that carries no deadlines.” As secretary of state, Powell was responsible for building up international relationships and alliances. His diplomatic agenda almost immediately came into direct conflict with that of the neocons. Powell and his ambassadors also had a hand in monitoring CIA activities around the globe. They were to be informed of all operations in countries around the world—a stricture Rumsfeld and Cheney bitterly resented.
Malcolm Nance, a career navy counterterrorist specialist who trained elite US Special Operations Forces, watched as experienced military figures within the administration were sidelined by Cheney, Rumsfeld and their militia of ideologues. “No one amongst those people had served in combat, but Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson and his staff were all the combat personnel,” Nance told me. “And it’s funny, they were shuffled over at the State Department and the civilian ideologues were put over into the Pentagon and they were the people who came up with what we call TCCC, ‘Tom Clancy Combat Concepts.’ They came out and just started reading these books and magazines and start thinking, ‘We’re going to be hard, we’re going to do these things, we’re going to go out and start popping people on the streets and we’re going to start renditioning people.’ The decision makers were almost childlike in wanting to do high, Dungeons and Dragons, you know, dagger and intrigue all the time.”
On 9/11, the CIA did not have a large in-house paramilitary capability—just six hundred to seven hundred covert operatives at most. So, many of its hits relied heavily on Special Forces and Special Operations Forces—which numbered more than 10,000—loaned to the Agency for specific missions. “All of the paramilitary expertise really came from the military, from Special Forces,” recalled Vincent Cannistraro, a career CIA counterterrorism officer, who also did stints at the Pentagon and the National Security Agency (NSA). “It didn’t really exist, except in a skeletal way, in the CIA,” he told me. “The Special Forces had the expertise. The resources were Department of Defense resources, and the transfer of those under CIA direction was a policy decision made at the national level.”
Initially, on orders from President Bush, the CIA was the lead agency in the global war. But Cheney and Rumsfeld realized early on that it certainly didn’t need to be the only dark-side force and that there was another capability available to the White House that could provide far greater flexibility and almost no congressional or State Department meddling. Although some operations necessitated working through the CIA—particularly when it came to establishing “black sites” with the cooperation of foreign intelligence services—Cheney’s crew did not trust the Agency’s bureaucrats. “I think Rumsfeld, Cheney thought that the CIA was a bunch of pansies, much the way they thought about the State Department,” recalled Wilkerson, Powell’s former chief of staff. Wilkerson said that, during this period, he began to see a pattern of “what I consider assumption of presidential power, commander in chief powers, by the vice president of the Uni
ted States.” Cheney, in particular, he said, longed for the covert wars of the 1980s, “the Ronald Reagan period of helping the Contras to fight the Sandinistas” and the “almost symbiotic relationship between some of the Special Operations Forces and the clandestine operators in the CIA. That, I think comes to a real art form in the War on Terror, as one would suspect it would, because this is what Cheney wanted to do. Cheney wanted to operate on the clandestine side.”
Rumsfeld saw the lending of US Special Ops Forces to the CIA as creating a problematic, obstructionist middle man whose operations could be lawyered to death. He wanted America’s premier direct-action forces to be unrestrained and unaccountable to anyone except him, Cheney and the president. “The CIA can’t do anything without the intelligence oversight committees knowing about it, or being informed almost immediately thereafter,” said Cannistraro, who helped start the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. “When you had CIA carrying out a paramilitary operation, prior to 9/11, that meant that there were Special Forces elements that were attached to CIA, and therefore they were under civilian control [and] what they were doing for CIA was reported to the Intelligence Oversight Committee. But, if the military carries it out, it doesn’t follow the same guidance, because it doesn’t get reported to the intelligence oversight committees. They’re military operations. And therefore they’re part of a war, or ‘military preparing.’” Cannistraro told me that some of the most controversial and secretive activities conducted globally would be done through “the military under the ‘Cheney Program,’ because it didn’t have to be briefed to the Congress.”
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