Task Force Black

by Mark Urban

  5

  TARGET AQI

  On 20 February 2005 US special operations forces had their chance to kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Acting on intelligence, they had landed by helicopter on a desert road in Anbar Province. The jihadist leader was travelling from Ramadi towards Fallujah. As is usual when throwing up a checkpoint of this kind, a machine-gunner had been placed in position to engage any vehicle that attempted to go straight through.

  There are different versions of exactly what happened. According to one, a car thought to contain Zarqawi and a couple of bodyguards saw the unexpected American roadblock, stepped on the gas and ran right through it. The machine-gunner, however, did not feel within his rights under the rules of engagement to open fire.

  Another account comes from someone in the world of black special operations. The JSOC team had the support of a Predator UAV, and officers in Balad were watching the suspect car speeding along the desert road on the live feed. The fact that the car was under ‘eyes on’ surveillance from the Predator should have given the soldiers another chance, even if the gunner on the ground had faltered at the key moment. But as the JSOC personnel looked on, the image on the screen suddenly started to spin madly. The aircraft had developed a technical fault and the camera mounted beneath it was gyrating out of control. The opportunity had been lost.

  This incident was one of several in which the intelligence experts working for McChrystal believed that they had been close but had missed their man. Iraqi forces were even reckoned to have had Zarqawi in their custody near Fallujah at one point before the town was stormed, but had not realised who he was and released him. The SAS had its own brush with Zarqawi early in 2004 when it assaulted a house in Baghdad. After forcing an entry, the blades had swiftly reversed, piling out when an artillery shell attached to detonating cord came bouncing down the stairs. The device did not go off, and the occupants of the building were later overwhelmed and captured. Intelligence subsequently revealed that Zarqawi had left a short time before.

  By early 2005 JSOC had a clear focus deriving from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s apparent obsession with taking down high-value targets. Major-General McChrystal’s command had built a regional laydown, which was designed to allow rapid response to intelligence anywhere that the AQI leader or key associates might be found. At Al Asad airbase in Anbar Province were the Seal Team 6 crew, Task Force Blue, or West. In Tikrit a select team of Rangers was deployed as Task Force Red, or North. The Delta squadron – Task Force Green (Central) – operated out of MSS Fernandez in the Green Zone. Their next-door neighbours, the British Task Force Black, were able to operate in and around Baghdad but with the specific target set or mission of hunting Former Regime Elements.

  A series of steps initiated by SAS Commanding Officer Charles Beaufort back in the UK had increased Task Force Black’s ability to operate as a semi-independent unit. Early in 2005 the SAS supplemented their lightly protected Snatch and unarmoured Land Rovers with M1114s – armour-plated US Humvees. The helicopter fleet was changing too, losing its pair of Chinooks and gaining more Pumas. Intelligence back-up had been boosted by establishing both humint and sigint specialist teams in the task force. Cut off from the intelligence flow about JSOC’s ‘Black List’ of targets – that is, Zarqawi and the AQI leadership – the British humint team had provided most of the initial leads for Task Force Black’s raids in the latter part of 2004.

  Britain’s caveats about delivering prisoners to the JSOC jail in Balad meant that those taken in Task Force Black raids were instead handed over to regular US army units. They usually ended up at the Divisional Internment Facility at Baghdad airport where, by this time, the inter-agency task force hunting old Ba’athists had its main station and could interrogate those whom the British had scooped up. This seemed like a joined-up system; the only problem was that many of the SAS and British intelligence people were beginning to lose faith in the value of their man hunt. The former Ba’athists frogmarched from their homes in the middle of the night were often described as ‘old men’ by their captors.

  Increasingly, the great game in Iraq was the hunt for Zarqawi. The JSOC leaders devoted the best intelligence-gathering people and the lion’s share of resources to this aim. But Britain had effectively opted out owing to its concerns about American actions. Members of Task Force Black knew all about what their Delta colleagues were doing through the unofficial grapevine but also through the British liaison teams that still went to Balad, to sit in the Joint Operations Centre, but the resumption of full cooperation was dependent upon work to improve the condition of the prison cells and British inspections of the regime there.

  It was against the background of this bureaucratic standoff that an RAF Hercules on its way up to Balad disappeared off the radar on 13 January 2005. An Iraqi group swiftly claimed responsibility for shooting down the aircraft, in which nine British servicemen were killed. The Board of Inquiry would eventually rule that the aircraft’s low-level flight profile was too dangerous given the capabilities of the resistance and that the Hercules, once hit, might have been lost because its fuel tanks were not fitted with explosion-suppressant foam (as similar American planes were, and RAF ones eventually would be).

  The loss of the aircraft was a blow for G Squadron, then starting its tour of duty in Baghdad, and the rest of Task Force Black. Its members responded by devoting particular energy to tracking down the killers. A long intelligence operation led to raids later that year, which captured some of those responsible, and it demonstrated the growing technological sophistication of the Coalition effort.

  At the time of the Hercules crash, an American surveillance aircraft equipped with a highly sophisticated radar called JSTARS ( Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System) had been orbiting north of Baghdad. Designed during the Cold War to pick up impending Soviet Army tank thrusts, JSTARS maps moving objects on the ground. It could thus be used to detect cars. Information from the aircraft gave analysts an initial lead in pinpointing who might have shot down the C-130.

  In other areas, too, technology and intelligence relationships were coalescing. That March, a caller to one of the Coalition telephone tips lines had offered information on the whereabouts of one of Saddam’s former apparatchiks. The existence of the phone lines, which were also being used in Basra and other cities, was a British innovation in Iraq, based on long experience in Northern Ireland. In the Baghdad call centre police officers from Britain and Northern Ireland acted as mentors for the entire operation. Those who rang in might give a one-off tip, and they might also prove suitable for cultivation as informers. The phone offered an important way for the humint teams to overcome some of the dangers of working in the Red Zone, but also for the callers to make themselves known without publicly giving themselves away. On such an occasion, a suitable case presented itself and a British policeman monitoring the call wondered where to take it, having found that the main US intelligence agencies were not much interested in the raw material produced by the call centre.

  His answer lay with the Special Counter Intelligence Directorate, the American joint service organisation that ran humint operations but was considered by some to rank below the CIA, MI6 or the Defense Humint Service in the Baghdad spooks pecking order. But the SCID people were happy to be opportunistic about their cases, and so picked up the caller’s details and got to work.

  The Iraqi caller gave information pinpointing the whereabouts of Fadhil Ibrahim al-Mashadani, formerly a senior regional official in the Ba’ath party. He was not one of the top Ba’athists in the deck of cards, but even so there was a $200,000 price on Mashadani’s head because of the role he was believed to play in the resistance. Having ascertained that the information was true, SCID took it to Task Force Black. Surveillance experts from G Squadron, joined by a member of the SCID team using helicopter and other technical surveillance, fixed Mashadani’s location as a farm to the north-east of the capital.

  On 11 April 2005 the SAS went in and lifted their man with a se
t-piece house assault. The raid was conducted without opposition. Mashadani was flown back to the MSS, where British intelligence officers conducted an initial interview prior to him being processed into the American detention system. Despite the manner in which he had been swept from his home in the middle of the night, the atmosphere in the interrogation was relaxed and Mashadani, an educated and once privileged man, chatted freely with his British captors. He couldn’t fathom why the Coalition was still going after people like him. Didn’t they understand that the real threat came from the jihadists who had flooded into Iraq? People at MSS Fernandez had heard similar things from quite a few of those whom they had picked up. But there was something about Mashadani’s simple eloquence that caused his message to ripple outwards from that interview room. His words became a topic of discussion for many of those involved with the intelligence effort in Baghdad. ‘It’s over,’ he reportedly told his questioners. The Ba’ath party had lost power and, Mashadani added, they all knew it had no chance of getting it back. There was something about having your own targets rubbish the importance of the mission that pricked the pride of many in Task Force Black. Their rivalry with Delta Force and knowledge of what was going on up at Balad told them that Britain had relegated itself from the counterterrorist premier league. Little by little, Task Force Black tried to address the situation, for example by trying to thrash out the detention issue at Balad, but in truth matters could not come to a head until someone of sufficient stature in the world of special forces chose to argue the issue out with the DSF and others in the UK.

  The origins of the Mashadani operation, using a humint source found through the phone tip line and developed by SCID, showed how a sort of free market in intelligence had evolved amid the organisational rivalry of Iraq’s intelligence agencies. Since the gathering of humint was not being properly centrally directed, nor its product fully shared, those running Task Force Black started going wherever their instincts took them in order to find a starting point for each new operation. Having begun in Iraq with close ties to MI6 and the CIA, they became more professionally promiscuous, searching for the right informers with the SCID, INIS, Defense Humint Service or agent teams run by US ground-holding units. Instead of the neat organi-gram of intelligence process mapped out by the staff officers, the Baghdad scene represented more of a secret information bazaar on the free-wheeling Middle Eastern model. ‘There was a free market in intelligence and therefore you could afford to be entrepreneurial,’ comments one member of Task Force Black. On quiet days the Team Leaders, usually staff sergeants or captains, would saunter around the Green Zone dropping in on the different intelligence gatherers, sharing a brew, seeing whether anyone was developing any promising informers and catching up on insurgency gossip. For the most part this approach worked in teeing up missions such as the Mashadani takedown, but it could go spectacularly wrong.

  At around the time Task Force Black lifted Mashadani, its people went out on another late-night arrest operation. This time they were hoping for a bigger, more meaningful result. The planned raid came as a result of a long-running operation to find the kidnappers of a foreigner in Baghdad. Tracking some men who had offered their services as intermediaries, the SAS moved in. They lifted Abu Jamal, formerly a senior Ba’athist official, and another man. The soldiers’ disappointment at not finding the hostage in the same house was tempered by the knowledge that these men were definitely connected to the kidnap gang.

  When the Humvees roared back into the MSS and the two detainees were taken inside, things started to go wrong. Abu Jamal asked if he could use a secure telephone. His request was granted and before long various SUVs arrived bearing US civilians. The American visitors, like intelligence professionals the world over, wanted to reveal as little as possible about their connection to the two forlorn Iraqis sitting in the British interrogation room. But since the SAS were not inclined to release them without a proper explanation, it was eventually wrung out of the night-time visitors. Abu Jamal and his friend were CIA assets. The incident raised many disturbing questions: why were people in the kidnap business under CIA pay? If they were agents taking part in the conspiracy at their handlers’ direction, why hadn’t they yet produced a tip-off that would allow the hostage to be freed? And, given that the CIA was party to hostage working groups with MI6 and other agencies, why hadn’t the Americans done something to prevent the SAS carrying out their raid?

  This arrest showed how spectacularly dysfunctional intelligence relationships were, even two years after the Americans got to Baghdad. Little wonder that McChrystal wanted to build a separate network under his own tight grasp, fusing intelligence and special operations. The business also underlined that the Ba’athist or nationalist resistance was easier to penetrate than the Islamist network, and that in many cases of kidnapping was operating more like a criminal conspiracy than anything else.

  Episodes like Mashadani and Abu Jamal’s arrest did however bring to a head the debates about whether British special forces were really after the right people. There had been dozens of similar episodes in which the ‘right’ man had been lifted, but with no noticeable effect on the carnage going on around them. Many US ground-holding unit commanders had through 2004 shared the British view that the main threat to future stability came from a widespread Sunni revolt – an authentic Iraqi phenomenon quite different from the mad nihilism of Zarqawi and his ilk. But the currents of the violence were shifting and, belatedly, changing minds in the Green Zone.

  When I asked one senior British figure at what point the UK military had decided that al-Qaeda presented a more significant threat than the FREs he replied, ‘You imply a clarity that did not exist… most of our tools for intelligence analysis were overwhelmed at that time… I don’t think we ever made a clear choice.’ Perhaps, then, it is unwise to use hindsight to talk about tipping points, but it is clear that around the same time that Task Force Black was bringing in Mashadani, events on the ground were causing senior American commanders to rethink.

  That same month, April 2005, had started with a complex assault on Abu Ghraib prison involving machine guns, mortars and two car bombs. The Americans reckoned that dozens of insurgents had been involved in a well-coordinated operation, which wounded forty-four of their soldiers as well as twelve prisoners. Eleven days later, insurgents had mounted a sustained attack on a marine base near the Syrian border at al-Husaybah. Up to a hundred men had attacked the marines, launching three vehicle suicide attacks including ones using a fire engine and dump truck rigged with huge amounts of explosive. Calling in air strikes and helicopters to beat off the attack, the Americans had killed around three dozen insurgents. The operation was also attributed to al-Qaeda. On 29 April the movement had staged fourteen car bomb attacks in a single day, most of them in Baghdad. Force Commander General Casey was so disturbed by the capabilities shown in these attacks that he formally upgraded Zarqawi’s organisation to be the Coalition’s principal enemy in Iraq.

  At this point, an underlying tension between Casey and McChrystal came to the surface. McChrystal, says one senior Baghdad figure from that time, was ‘resented by the rest of the army because they were gobbling up a very large slice of the available overhead reconnaissance assets’. The JSOC task force, operating from Balad, had successfully cornered a large proportion of the Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance platforms in its hunt for Zarqawi. This meant not only control of Predator UAVs, which every commander wanted desperately, but other technical means such as satellites and aircraft used to intercept and locate mobile telephones. By May 2005 the number of Iraqis using cellular phones had grown to around 1.75 million. Mobiles were becoming a vital intelligence source. Just the details of a call between two numbers could be the start of an operation. What the spooks called nodal analysis could be used to map the relationship between different people and their phones. Once the pattern was better understood, the handset itself could work as a locator beacon. However, JSOC almost monopolised the means of harnessing this i
nformation.

  The tension between JSOC and the rest of the US military would doubtless have been more easily managed if al-Qaeda had been rolled up with the speed that the Ba’athist deck of cards was lifted. But although there was some progress – for example the arrest in January 2005 of the master bomber believed to be behind the UN and other spectacular vehicle bombings of 2003 – attacks against police stations, recruiting offices or markets just seemed to carry on increasing in number and lethality. One at the end of February, in the largely Shia town of Hilla, south of Baghdad, had claimed 114 lives. To some watchers, the JSOC response of striking, often with bombing, wherever they found a trace of the AQI leadership seemed to smack of desperation. For the American ground-holding commanders – running brigades or battalions in relentlessly violent places like Ramadi or Baquba – the steady toll of young men or women blown apart by the insurgents provoked its own questions about why JSOC, with such a big slice of vital intelligence-gathering assets, was not doing more to help them.

  Casey had instituted a morning meeting that united all senior commanders, staff and intelligence people in Iraq via a Video Tele-Conference or VTC. The meeting, the Battlefield Update Assessment, had its own acronym, BUA – or ‘Boo-ah’ in headquarters speak. Once the main news of the day was processed, a smaller, highly classified meeting known as the Huddle took place to discuss sensitive matters. One attendee recalls the atmosphere: ‘The hunt for Zarqawi was paramount. It was mentioned every morning in the BUA and in the Huddle in the mistaken belief that if you got him the insurgency would collapse.’