by Mark Urban
Early in 2004 the Coalition helped put the new Iraqi National Intelligence Service on a formal footing. The development of the INIS had been a CIA project and by this time it had a couple of hundred members. Although the anti-Saddam exiled parties were invited to send people to the INIS, it was meant to be a non-political security service. One senior US intelligence officer explains that it was ‘intended to be an agency that wasn’t motivated by sectarian concerns… the INIS didn’t depend on the Shiite-led government of Iraq to fund it because the CIA completely funded its operations’.
Although the Coalition adopted a policy of de-Ba’athification with the army and ministries, the CIA played by quite different rules. Senior Coalition figures stated publicly that it would be quite unacceptable to use Saddam’s former secret police to fight the insurgency but the Agency had other ideas. They wanted people who knew their business, and they also wanted the CIA to be the channel through which any INIS intelligence was fed to other players. A Shia exile was placed in charge of the INIS but, according to a senior British intelligence officer, ‘others who were up there at the high level were all previous mukhabarat officers and they were much better than the CIA people sent to mentor them. We would much rather have dealt with the INIS people direct.’
As for the CIA, its establishment in Iraq soon swelled to around 450 personnel. In addition to its big Baghdad station, there were several outstations, including ones in the Kurdish north and in Basra Palace down south. Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, on the other hand, never exceeded fifty people in-country. Even so, claims one MI6 officer, ‘we had more Arabists than [the CIA] did’.
The US military, meanwhile, had spawned its own civilian humint organisation, and numerous service ones. The civilians, around a hundred belonging to the Defense Humint Service, had been sent to Iraq to search for Weapons of Mass Destruction but when this proved to be the ultimate ‘dry hole’ or fruitless mission, had rewritten their job specification to hunt for insurgents. Another agent-running organisation, the Special Counter Intelligence Division (SCID or ‘Scid’), brought about ninety operators into the picture. Most of SCID’s people were effectively detectives from the investigative services of the US armed forces. In addition to these specialists, rapidly trained Tactical Humint Teams tried to sign up Iraqi spies right across the country. These teams of five or six soldiers were attached to military units and often operated with uniformed US patrols. There were a few dozen THTs by early 2004 but the number would peak a few years later at about 140 cells. Britain had its military equivalents, Field Humint Teams.
Given that there were thousands of CIA, INIS, MI6, Defense Humint, SCID and tactical team officers or operators in action it might be supposed that a steady flow of agent reports would have been informing Coalition operations. But this was far from the case. The quantity certainly increased exponentially during 2004, but as one British officer who had to sift through this reporting in the south wearily records, ‘You had tons of agent reports predicting this or that but they were just complete rubbish. Iraqis give you answers they think you want to hear and with the Americans’ resources they were producing stacks of worthless humint.’ The nuggets of valuable information had to be picked from a slurry of tittle-tattle, embroidery and invention. In addition, to exploit the information required sharing, and in the Baghdad setup of early 2004 few players were any good at that.
The Coalition’s chief military intelligence officer, sitting in Camp Slayer (part of the American complex of bases at Baghdad airport) with hundreds of staff, ought to have been able to direct the spying effort. But the CIA jealously guarded its freedom and the Defense Humint Service reported to a boss outside Iraq: the head of a joint task force responsible for hunting down FREs – Former Regime Elements – across Iraq and the wider Middle East. Officers in Baghdad from MI6 or the British military found themselves acting as the go-betweens or facilitators between these battling US agencies. Many American officers resented the CIA’s attitude, resources and independence. Their British military colleagues often agreed, one noting, ‘The CIA were pretty arrogant. If they were at a meeting the body language and tone used suggested they were way above anybody else there.’ Another senior British figure describes the CIA’s behaviour towards other agencies as ‘catastrophic’.
Had these different espionage organisations operated under one person’s direction, their activities could have been properly tasked: the CIA perhaps looking after high-level political intelligence gathering, DH and SCID after certain Iraqi militias and so on. But the theory of unified direction was often honoured more in the breach than practice in Baghdad. In addition to their prickly attitude to cooperation, the agent runners found it harder and harder to get out into the ‘Red Zone’ – Iraq beyond the confines of the Green Zone – as it was deemed too dangerous. In this situation the CIA was often repackaging INIS reporting and the others scraping about for any credible Iraqi who volunteered his services at a Coalition base. When the humint organisations were so reliant on walk-ins, the scope for them to get scammed or for a single individual to take money from more than one Coalition agency increased considerably. Inevitably, valuable tips were not passed from one organisation to another and there was always the possibility, as the SAS would later discover, that one humint operation would accidentally target the assets of another.
The US troops had managed to develop a basic ground-level sense of life in many neighbourhoods, but then in February and March 2004 this was abruptly lost. The first major troop rotation of the occupation (American units mostly served on operations for one year) was under way. Some of the departing commanders painted a rosy picture of improving security, and it was true that violence had gone down since those shocking weeks of Ramadan in November 2003. February, with ‘only’ twenty US soldiers killed, was a relatively good month. But what little optimism this crude indicator might have produced was soon dispelled. The insurgency was mutating, taking on a more Islamic flavour, but penetration of the Islamic groups was essentially non-existent. As the veterans went home there was a poor handover to many of the incoming units, leaving them struggling to build a street-level picture.
Faced with this jumble of acronyms, dysfunction, and bureaucratic bloody-mindedness, Major-General McChrystal, a man who lived by the mantra ‘you need to build a network to defeat one’, decided to create his own. Vital months had been lost while the Pentagon leadership was in denial about the insurgency. By early 2004, it was mutating and McChrystal was one of the few who both understood this and the need to get on top of it. He shut down the special ops facility at Baghdad airport, Camp Nama, establishing a new base at Balad, to the north. Balad was a sprawling air base in which Saddam invested hundreds of millions of dollars, building concrete aircraft shelters and other infrastructure. It became a key logistic and air hub for the US forces. There, McChrystal created a state-of-the-art Joint Operations Centre, where JSOC’s war in Iraq would be run day to day by the commander of Delta Force. It was up and running by July 2004. Teams from each of the different intelligence agencies were established at Balad. Once he had started to milk them for information, McChrystal put it all into a JSOC intranet similar to the one he’d created in Afghanistan. It would allow those at the cutting edge of the US counterterrorism effort to share information worldwide. In order to bypass protocol-obsessed embassies or jealous CIA station chiefs in neighbouring countries, McChrystal also established a network of liaison offices run by his own people across the Middle East.
McChrystal’s counterterrorist Rome could not be built in a day. It would take much of 2004 to take shape. Many questions were unclear from the outset, not least whether Britain’s Task Force Black could be full partners in this secret network. Until they were resolved, the UK element had to carry on in ‘a semi-detached way’, according to one SAS officer. They could not prosecute the ‘full JSOC target set’, he adds, but were restricted more to ‘arresting old men, the FREs’. Another British officer, a senior figure who served in Baghdad,
describes the Former Regime Elements as ‘the pissed-off bourgeoisie – they’d lost their meal ticket’. Iraq being Iraq, their anger took violent form. Some – in MI6 in particular – tried to portray the arrest of old Ba’athists as a vital mission that fitted with their attempts to put out feelers to the nationalist insurgency, and a rejection of the Bush Administration’s emphasis on foreign fighters and its global onslaught against al-Qaeda. But this was an intellectually elegant way to justify the reality, which was that Task Force Black was kept away from the most violent or dangerous targets. This situation developed less because McChrystal wanted to shut UK special forces out of his operations and more because of the growing disquiet on the British side about the direction of events in Iraq.
By March 2004 British officers knew that a raft of complaints about US detainee operations was percolating through the Pentagon. Back in the final weeks of 2003 Stuart Herrington, a retired US Army colonel, had gone on an inspection tour of the military intelligence setup in Iraq. Herrington was a quiet legend in US military intelligence – one of the last out of Saigon, and a veteran of the Phoenix Program, America’s black offensive against the Viet Cong. Few doors were closed to the Vietnam veteran as he took Humvees and helicopters to see what was going on or, more particularly, going wrong.
Herrington wanted to pay particular attention to Camp Nama, on the western side of Baghdad airport. This had been TF-121, JSOC’s main operations centre in Iraq prior to the move to Balad. There were also detention and interrogation facilities. It was to these that prisoners taken by Delta, the Rangers, or indeed the SAS had been brought. Concerns about the fate of prisoners taken by the British were voiced by Ben Griffin, an SAS man who went public after leaving the forces, even appearing at an anti-war rally. The Ministry of Defence denied his claims that British troops had been used to deliver suspects into a regime of abuse. However, those sent to investigate the detainee system – and Colonel Herrington was not the only one dispatched to do so – discovered that, bereft of high-quality agent or technical reporting and anxious to pursue the Ba’athists of the High-Value Target list and al-Qaeda suspects, JSOC had often fallen back on interrogation. In August 2003 the CIA had pulled its officers from Camp Nama. Herrington found his access to Camp Nama blocked, but still managed to find out what was going on.
He put it succinctly in his report to the chief army intelligence officer in Baghdad, noting that Iraqis ‘who had been captured by Task Force 121 showed signs of having been mistreated (beaten) by their captors’. The colonel, who regarded humane detainee operations as an important part of winning a counterinsurgency, was shocked by the fact that many of the JSOC officers he spoke to seemed to regard the abuse of prisoners – which ranged from hitting with rifle butts and slapping to shooting them with paint-ball guns – as normal.
In the following months there would be a series of investigations and a total of twenty-nine complaints investigated in relation to Camp Nama. Five were upheld, resulting in disciplinary action against thirty-four soldiers. A number of these incidents happened after McChrystal had taken over command of JSOC. The general’s defenders note that during the early months of running his classified operation his stays in Iraq had actually been intermittent: there were JSOC operations across Central Command’s area of operations, a broad swath of countries from North Africa, through the Middle East to South Asia. By the spring of 2004, however, McChrystal was making Iraq his top priority and evidently began to deal seriously with the level of abuse there. ‘What we did was establish a policy and atmosphere that said that is not what you do, that is not acceptable,’ he said later.
In fact, Camp Nama simply represented the tip of a looming public relations disaster for the US military. Herrington also investigated what was going on at Abu Ghraib prison where, by late 2003, some six thousand people swept up by regular units had been confined in poor conditions.
While the kicking in of so many doors and detention of thousands of people exacerbated the Sunni insurrection, many of the generals and brigade commanders directing America’s mailed fist apparently knew a little better. They had been schooled in doctrines of overwhelming force, a ‘warrior ethos’ that dictated they should seek out and destroy their enemy rather than use every operation as a chance to win someone over. But more could have been expected from the special operators, whose ranks included many of the small American military cadre who had operated in the Middle East, or indeed experienced the debacle of Somalia. Their understanding of the need to win hearts and minds made the lapses at Camp Nama all the less forgivable.
One night in February 2004, soldiers from B Squadron readied themselves for an assault. Their targets were the product of an extraordinary intelligence operation that showed the high value of building an international network. Operation ASTON took place alongside a bigger MI6 effort to target ‘transnational terrorism’, or the jihadist network. Using the SAS on a mission spun up by British intelligence sat well with those who wished to give greater independence to Task Force Black – or to keep a greater distance from the Americans. For their part, McChrystal’s people and the US agencies tried to lend a helping hand to the Brits, since they still regarded them as acting for the common good. In the case of Operation ASTON, there was a particular desire to help because the British seemed to be on to something very good. Following the invasion, British intelligence had seen an opportunity. It had been trying for some time to operate against the pipelines feeding volunteers towards al-Qaeda’s new front, hoping that if they could follow someone down a rat line into the country it could produce numerous intelligence spinoffs. Now, operatives outside Iraq had picked up some suspects who they believed were intending to travel to the country to join the jihad. As the suspects moved across Iran and into Iraq, they were tracked by British and American agencies. It was vital not to lose track of them, but the British directing ASTON were delighted when their targets turned up in Baghdad. The targets then fell in with a jihadist group. Intelligence about this group was then built up by careful surveillance work. Having refined their operation through watching a specific house in southern Baghdad, the assault was ordered.
As several teams from B Squadron approached the ‘Alpha’ – target – building they were spotted by locals. Whistles, torchlight and gunshots soon disturbed the night air. The assaulters pressed on, breaking their way into the house. Inside the jihadists opened fire from a distance of a few feet. One of the SAS Team Leaders, Sergeant-Major Mulberry, was hit in the face by an AK-47 round but had a lucky escape because it was deflected by his equipment, leaving him with only light injuries. In a short-range firefight as the building was cleared, two men were killed. Both were later assessed to be foreign fighters. Some of the insurgents were captured. One of these proved to be Pakistani and another a Qatari national of Pakistani origin. Coalition intelligence assessed the Pakistanis to be members of Lashkar-e-Taiba or the LeT, a Kashmiri militant group. Operation ASTON was therefore judged a great success: it had shown how the British could develop transnational counterterrorist work. In fact, it was precisely the kind of synergy that Major-General McChrystal was hoping to develop within the wider JSOC network, exposing the rat lines from Syria or Saudi Arabia, but, for reasons that did not become apparent for a few weeks, Operation ASTON was to have a negative effect on UK–US cooperation in Iraq at a time when wider developments in the country put great strain on the Coalition. It would also embroil the UK in legal difficulties over the identity of the two men who had been taken to Bagram. Critically, the difficulties about the UK handing over detainees would build during 2004 as rising levels of violence were causing the Americans to lash out, in turn damaging public support back in Britain.
On 31 March 2004 two SUVs drove around one of the US Marine checkpoints outside Fallujah and into the town. Inside the vehicle were four members of Blackwater, a private security firm that liked to project a badass reputation. They were there to liaise with the local police about the contractor convoy coming into Fallujah the follo
wing day, but Blackwater appeared completely ignorant of some important changes that had occurred in the preceding week, and would come to pay for their mistakes.
Four days earlier a JSOC surveillance team had been compromised in the town, shooting its way out of trouble. The US Marines, who had taken control of the area from the 82nd Airborne on 24 March, were drawn into running gun battles with insurgents in the hours that followed. Rather sooner than they’d expected, the Marines found themselves using these firefights to test the strength of the resistance in various neighbourhoods. Then the Blackwater men appeared.
Insurgents, apparently tipped off about the contractors, hit them with RPGs and gunfire. The two vehicles were soon ablaze and the men killed. Two charred bodies were dragged through the streets, spat upon, hacked, trampled and finally hoisted up onto a girder of the old Euphrates bridge. These scenes were recorded and soon playing around the world. Fearing a ‘Mogadishu moment’ in which national confidence faltered as it had during the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia in 1993, senior US officers promised immediate action. The guilty would be found and punished.
The best laid plans of the Marine commanders, a blueprint for how they intended to eat away at the resistance, were junked. Instead, on 5 April, 2500 Marines and the full panoply of destructive power at their disposal were unleashed on Fallujah: tanks, helicopter gunships and air strikes. TV pictures showed automatic grenade launchers sputtering 40mm rounds into the sides of houses, which burst in showers of shrapnel, but the American troops encountered heavy resistance and in little more than forty-eight hours it became clear that their advance into the town was stalling.