by Mark Urban
In many neighbourhoods masked men appeared, manning roadblocks formed by felling palm trees or collecting burnt-out cars. It was a spontaneous move by citizens trying to stop sectarian abductions.
As this terrifying juggernaut of violence careered into action, Iraq’s fledgling security forces appeared to be part of the problem. Sunni complaints against the Interior Ministry and its paramilitary forces portrayed them as Shia death squads. With sectarian factions trading charges, the country stood without a government. Elections in mid-December 2005, praised by many because of widespread Sunni participation, had resulted in a long, painful negotiation to form a coalition. During the early months of 2006, therefore, the violence exploited a political vacuum. Indeed, some of the Coalition diplomats and spooks even thought that groups such as Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army escalated their killing as a means of trying to influence the political negotiations for a national-unity government. It seemed as if the whole project of Iraqi elections, democracy and security operations was imploding.
It might be imagined that Task Force Knight’s first priority would have been the apprehension of sectarian death squads who were killing hundreds of people each week. But Whitehall stressed that the main concern was to find Norman Kember and the other Christian missionaries. One person who sat in the ops room at the MSS, watching daily Video Tele-Conferences remembers ‘constant pressure from London and PJHQ on the Kember issue. I recall in particular the Chief of Defence Staff [at that time General Sir Michael Walker] emphasising the importance of this on more than one occasion.’
From a short time before the Samarra bombing these efforts were moved into a higher gear. A team involving intelligence agencies, the embassy and the SAS began to work the case so intensively that, in the words of one SAS officer, ‘Our whole squadron was focused on trying to find Kember.’ This search was codenamed Operation LIGHTWATER. In addition to the blades from B Squadron, a small detachment of Canadian special forces and intelligence experts joined the team, since two of the hostages were Canadian. There was apparently little resentment in JSOC at the priority given to this hunt because, of course, in soldier turned Quaker activist Tom Fox there was an American angle to the kidnapping too. Indeed, the Operation LIGHTWATER team benefited from a great deal of American technical intelligence in their hunt.
Life for the four hostages soon assumed a pattern that alternated between fear at what might come (for example after Fox and Kember were filmed in orange jumpsuits), the tedium of spending up to twelve hours a day chained up in their room and gratitude for some small acts of kindness on the part of their guards. They had given the captives a cake on Christmas Day and an Arabic DVD about Jesus. They had also allowed the hostages to have pencils and paper, although Kember, bereft of his reading glasses, could not write. Instead he sketched snakes and ladders as a sort of map of his ordeal – one day up, another down.
Early on it became clear that the guards had taken against Fox in particular. He was American, of course, but had been carrying papers showing he was a former soldier too. He had probably hoped these might help him at the city’s numerous security checkpoints but the kidnappers found them, and their antipathy towards the American increased as a result.
For the kidnap gang, holding the foreigners for a long time carried its own risks. Perhaps by late February they had begun to feel the first effects of Operation LIGHTWATER, since doors were being kicked and arrests among their associates made. At times it seemed like a war of videos: one showing Kember appeared on 7 December, followed two days later by an influential appeal on the hostages’ behalf by Moazzem Beg. With each new communication, the gang were taking risks, as a video, call or e-mail could be traced back to them or their friends.
The hostage-takers had demanded that the Iraqi and US authorities release all prisoners, but this was never likely to be agreed to. At times it was speculated that appeals to the Gulf States to help solve the crisis were thinly veiled demands for ransom. Like many kidnappers they seemed uncertain how to use their human capital to best effect, but throughout endeavoured to get the best possible propaganda value from them. On the 7 December tape, for example, Kember told the camera:
I’m a Christian peacemaker. I’m a friend of Iraq. I have been opposed to this war, Mr Blair’s war, since the very beginning. I ask of him now, and the British government, to do all that they can to work for my release and the release of the Iraqi people from oppression.
When a fifth video was released on 7 March, the Foreign Office expressed concern that it showed the two Canadians and Kember but not Tom Fox. Three days later their fears were confirmed.
8
THE KEMBER OUTCOME
In the dim early light of a Friday morning, 10 March 2006, people in Dawoudi could make out something by the railway line. On the rubbish-strewn ground, where feral dogs rooted around, a body had been dumped. Sectarian killing had not yet arrived on a grand scale in this mixed suburb of Baghdad, so the discovery was a shocking thing. Although the man was dressed in an Arab dishdasha, he was a westerner. His hands were tied, cuts and bruises were visible on his head and body. The police later speculated that he had been tortured before he was shot.
Surveying the scene, one local commented that whoever had carried out the murder would ‘distort the reputation of Iraq’. The body was that of Tom Fox.
Hearing the news, Norman Kember’s friend, fellow peace activist Bruce Kent, concluded that the Christian Peacemaker Team hostages were going to be killed one by one. Those in Task Force Knight who hunted the kidnappers drew exactly the same conclusion. The pressure to find Fox’s three surviving comrades could not have been more intense.
It cannot be said that the odds of success were high. By this time around two hundred foreigners had been kidnapped in Iraq. They ranged from Italian security guards to Egyptian telecoms engineers and Turkish drivers. In some cases the nationality of the victim coincided with a military member of the Coalition, so the kidnappers appealed for that country’s withdrawal. Many other victims came from countries without troops in Iraq.
By March 2006 most of those two hundred had been released, often upon payment of ransoms. The sense that kidnapping was essentially a business activity was reinforced by the even larger numbers of Iraqis who had been ransomed since the fall of Saddam. But while many took their captives for money, there was an ideological angle too; if your prize was American or British the greatest return could come from selling them on to extremists.
For British hostages, with their government’s refusal to pay ransoms, the chances of survival were bleak. Ken Bigley had been beheaded on videotape the previous year. Margaret Hassan, a British aid worker struggling for years to alleviate poverty in the country and who had married an Iraqi, was killed by her kidnappers with a couple of shots to the head. Norman Kember’s fate appeared to have been sealed. But what few people outside the world of special operations understood was the degree to which the balance of advantage between them and the insurgents was changing.
The Operation LIGHTWATER team had, by the time of Tom Fox’s death, already mounted many raids in pursuit of intelligence. They had homed in on their targets through a variety of methods. There were suspicions about who might be holding the hostages, and possible intermediaries presented themselves. Some clues emerged through scrutiny of the hostage videos and the surveillance of websites. The latter method, for example, suggested that the Swords of Righteousness Brigade that posted the videos might be an offshoot of the Army of Islam, or a cover name for it. The group was not part of the Zarqawi-sponsored Mujahedeen Shura Council of jihadist parties, nor did it line up with the mainstream Ba’athists, but sat somewhere between in the spectrum of extremism. The website discovery led intelligence specialists to focus on Army of Islam players.
Once pursuing subjects of interest, the special operators could make use of advances in the exploitation of mobile phone traffic. According to those involved in intelligence work, the NSA had been recording the details of all calls ma
de in Iraq for many months. This did not mean that they had the content of these millions of conversations, but could refer to dialling details of all calls made and received.
This brought dramatic changes to the intelligence business. If, for example, a cell phone was seized in a raid on a bomb maker’s house, this new tool allowed analysts to map all of the calls made on it during previous months. Using these same techniques, the Operation LIGHTWATER team could generate a computer picture of suspects and their contacts that looked, on the classified video screens, like a spider’s web.
Raids could then be mounted, often having pinpointed the suspect’s whereabouts by mobile phone. In former times, the special operators would have liked to have known much more before conducting their raids, but pressure from London to find Kember combined with the sense that time was running out made Task Force Knight operate during the early months of 2006 at the speed, and without the time spent on deliberate preparation, that Lieutenant-Colonel Williams had long wanted. Whereas squadrons in 2004 had mounted a couple of raids each week, by March 2006, under the pressure of Operation LIGHTWATER, B Squadron was doing them almost every night. ‘In Northern Ireland you spent loads of time doing intelligence development,’ says one SAS officer, commenting that by 2006 ‘in Iraq everything became a fighting patrol. The purpose of our strikes was to produce intelligence.’
Within the squadron a handful of young officers and senior NCOs (usually a total of four captains, sergeants or staff sergeants) were designated Team Leaders. It was their responsibility to plan these operations. ‘We were out every night, but every day you were preparing to go out,’ recalls a one-time Team Leader. ‘You were in a constant state of preparation and anticipation.’ This involved working up a ‘target pack’ on someone who appeared in the intelligence analysts’ web of contacts. The Team Leader and intelligence people would discuss the most promising possible targets for a raid, with the SAS man then going away to look at where that person might be apprehended as well as the tactics this might require. These questions might include, for example, whether the person should better be stopped in their car or arrested at home; whether a ground assault force carried in by vehicles or a helicopter assault force would be more suitable, and so on.
During the raid, suspects would be questioned, phones or computers seized. It had also become clear, as TF Knight’s operations intensified, that what they termed Tactical Questioning – interrogating the man who had just been arrested quickly on the spot or nearby – often yielded results. ‘The shock of capture makes it very important to exploit that moment, and to do it on the spot,’ says one veteran of such raids. Another, when I asked about operations to find Norman Kember, told me, ‘Individuals were exploited to get to him – both by putting them under duress and not.’ And it was by putting somebody ‘under duress’ that the key break came, those sources agree. Those who have run special forces operations are anxious to deny that ‘duress’ consisted of something that went beyond exploiting the detainee’s initial disorientation once in custody.
It was during the early hours of 23 March, nearly a fortnight after the discovery of Tom Fox’s body, that a team from B Squadron mounted yet another LIGHTWATER raid. Even the codename for that night’s assault, Operation NEY 3, indicated the relentless and repetitive nature of this search. Their target was a house in Mishahda, an area around twenty miles northwest of central Baghdad. One of the leaders of the raid was Sergeant-Major Mulberry, the veteran NCO who had had a lucky escape when hit by a bullet in Baghdad two years earlier.
Having burst into the building, the SAS men found two men they were looking for. One of them, Abu Laith, clearly knew something about the kidnappers. Under pressure – people who know about the operation reject the use of such words as ‘beating’ and ‘torture’ – Abu Laith began to talk. He knew where Norman Kember and the two Canadians were being held.
For the SAS Team Leader on the ground and his commander, the OC of Task Force Knight, this stunning disclosure posed an immediate question: what should they do next?
The answer to that question was defined by the need for speed, the desire to avoid being drawn into an ambush and the need to protect the life of the hostages. As members of B Squadron looked on, the hostage-takers were telephoned and put in the picture. The SAS were on the way to the house. Their warning: ‘How about you disappear and we won’t come after you.’
Just before 8 a.m. a ground assault force from B Squadron hit a house in western Baghdad, hardly more than a mile from the Green Zone. They cleared it room by room, finding no insurgents. Video shot by the troops shows the moments after they burst in on the hostages. Kember is in a checked jacket, the same one that he was wearing in one of his captors’ videos. Perhaps unsurprisingly given his age, he looks quite bewildered. Harmeet Singh Sooden, the youngest of the captives, is wearing a beanie hat and a smile of intense relief.
The hostages were ushered out of the house, down its front path to the gate where a Bradley armoured vehicle was waiting with its rear passenger ramp down. The blades of B Squadron mounted up in their Humvees in euphoric mood. One SAS man at the wheel of his truck turns to the camera and jokes that this must be worth an MBE at the very least. Across Coalition HQs from Baghdad to Balad there was enormous relief that they had beaten the kidnappers. The three freed men were driven the short distance to the Green Zone, where they received medical checks and were able to call their families.
After 118 days of captivity many had concluded that the 74-year-old hostage must be close to death. But the application of new intelligence techniques and a relentless special forces operation had thwarted what might have seemed grimly inevitable. Even today few people realise the scale of the secret search.
During the weeks of Operation LIGHTWATER, fifty buildings had been raided. British special forces of Task Force Knight conducted forty-four of these door-kicking operations, the remainder were done by other Coalition operators. During the course of these fifty operations, forty-seven people were detained. Only four of the operations were termed ‘dry holes’, places that were not productive of any useful information. All of this development of intelligence, Tactical Questioning of suspects, taking of risks and burning of money had been required to lead them to Abu Laith, the one man capable of telling them where the hostages had been hidden.
As they removed him from the scene of his incarceration the soldiers found it hard to get any response from Kember. One of them says, ‘[He] was the most frustrating individual I have ever met in my life. From the point of lifting him he didn’t address one word to us.’ Back in Britain the story that Kember had refused to thank his saviours quickly gained currency. The soldier involved notes, ‘The following day the Ambassador wheeled him over to our house and Kember finally said, if I remember his actual words, “Thanks for saving my life.”’
The ironies of an arch opponent of the war being rescued by the SAS were not lost on anyone. In the hours following Kember’s release, pent-up tensions about why the Christian group had been in Baghdad, the resources used to secure the three surviving hostages’ release and the apparent lack of thanks led to a minor onslaught against Kember in the press. Even General Sir Mike Jackson, Chief of the General Staff, was publicly critical. How much more pointed might the debate have been if the freed hostages had been aware of the use of ‘duress’ applied to prisoners in order to find them?
Abu Laith’s rapid interrogation in the house where he was captured revealed a growing practice. One intelligence officer comments that JSOC’s prison was by this point ‘squeaky clean’, with CCTV surveillance and many other checks. Because of this, ‘most complaints that came from the Red Cross originated from what happened on site’ – that is, when a prisoner was captured. Among officers involved in special ops there seemed to be a recognition that the violent circumstances of many takedowns produced opportunities for their operators to question the prisoner before putting him on a helicopter to the MSS or Balad.
Upon his return to the UK on 25
March, Norman Kember made a statement at the airport in which he thanked the embassy staff and told reporters that they really ought to be interviewing ‘the ordinary people of Iraq’. He concluded, ‘I now need to reflect on my experience – was I foolhardy or rational?’ The blades watching the news channels back at MSS Fernandez had their own pithy answer to that one.
In responding to Task Force Knight’s coup the Coalition tried to exploit a rare positive story. Major-General Rick Lynch, the briefer at Multi-National Force Headquarters, wanted to use the success to hit back after so many months of stories about abuse of Iraqi prisoners, telling reporters, ‘The key point is it was intelligence-led. It was information provided by a detainee.’ Lynch, in line with standard procedures, did not specifically praise the SAS but referred to ‘Coalition forces’. In London they wanted a little more national credit. Jack Straw, then Foreign Secretary, told the press he was ‘absolutely delighted’ by the news and that ‘British forces were involved in this operation. It follows weeks and weeks of very careful work by our military and coalition personnel in Iraq and many civilians as well.’
On 7 November 2006, Iraqi police arrested men alleged to have carried out the kidnapping. Norman Kember, faithful to his principles, insisted that he would not give evidence against them.
Within Task Force Knight and the wider British special forces community, Operation LIGHTWATER was regarded as something of a watershed. B Squadron had achieved the kind of ‘op tempo’ or pace of action that Lieutenant-General McChrystal demanded of US units in JSOC. And with the Christian Peacemaker Team rescued, there were a wealth of urgent targets against which McChrystal’s anti-al-Qaeda task force was itching to use the SAS.