Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins

by Andrew Cockburn

  Even genuinely active Taliban leaders were at this point hard to find. One such was Saifur Rahman Mansoor, a youthful son of a famous anti-Soviet fighter who had risen to be a mid-level Taliban commander. Following the fall of the Taliban regime he had retreated with a few hundred followers, including assorted Uzbek and Arab jihadis, to his father’s old redoubt during the Russian war, a remote, narrow mountain valley close to the Pakistani border called the Shahikot. Finding his arrival unpopular with local tribes, he opened negotiations with the authorities in Kabul, using tribal elders as intermediaries, offerring “to end his armed defiance of the interim government.”

  Mansoor’s surrender offer was quickly brushed aside, for the U.S. military, eager to “flush out” such a conveniently consolidated collection of the enemy, was preparing a major assault. A surge in cell-phone traffic from the area and sightings of a number of SUVs had convinced the CIA and Task Force 11 that one or more of the highest-value targets of all—Osama bin Laden, his second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri, or Mullah Omar (quickly dubbed “the big three”)—might be wintering there, protected by a large force of bodyguards. According to the plan, conventional U.S. Army troops would drive down the valley from the north in expectation of pushing the enemy, or at least their leaders, into the arms of other units blocking escape routes through the mountain passes leading toward Pakistan. The special operations units, U.S. Navy Seals and others, would be waiting on observation points, ready to scoop up or kill fleeing high-value targets. In keeping with the exclusive and obsessive focus on these particular targets, the Task Force 11 teams were under an entirely separate chain of command from the conventional force, free to act as they chose. Code-named Operation Anaconda, it would be the largest U.S. military ground operation since the 1991 Gulf War.

  The ensuing battle featured almost all aspects of the remote-control high-technology approach to war, notably the abiding faith in remote sensing as a substitute for the human eye. The results were instructive, if tragic.

  Overlooking the southern end of the valley was a 10,000-foot mountain, Takur Ghar. Task Force 11 planners thought the summit would be an excellent spot for an observation post. “Unfortunately,” as Milani noted in his report, “the enemy thought so too.” Just to make sure, the task force dispatched one of their favorite tools, a four-engine AC-130 plane, to make a reconnaissance of the mountaintop and confirm that it was unoccupied. The plane carried a formidable amount of firepower, including heavy machine guns and a cannon. But Special Forces esteemed the aircraft even more for the array of surveillance devices it carried, including electro-optical and infrared cameras as well as radar. Relayed back to task force headquarters, the pictures showed no sign of any human presence, nor did any other intelligence report from the various surveillance aircraft and other systems blanketing the area. But they were wrong. In fact, as the elite Navy Seals were shortly to discover, several dozen of the enemy, highly trained Arab and Uzbek fighters, were well dug in, complete with a heavy machine gun in a fortified bunker, concealing themselves with the low-technology aid of snow, trees, and a tarpaulin.

  To the naked eye, on the other hand, the enemy force was by no means invisible. There was snow on the mountain, and trails of footprints showed up clearly, as did goatskins and other detritus left in plain view by untidy jihadis. These were exactly the kind of telltale signs that Marshall Harrison, the forward air controller prowling the skies over South Vietnam in his wide-observation little plane, had been ready and able to pick up: a trail of footprints left in the mud after early-morning rain, extra clothes on a washing line, and other indications visible to a well-trained human observer. Staring at the images from Takur Ghar on their (relatively) high-definition video screens, the task force mission planners saw no such signs. Believing these systems to be infallible, the commander ordered the SEALs to head for the mountaintop.

  So it was that on the night of March 2, 2002, a helicopter flew a SEAL team directly to the summit. They noticed the fresh tracks and goatskins the moment they touched down, but a discussion on whether to quit the scene was interrupted when a rocket-propelled grenade hit the helicopter, which was simultaneously ripped with machine-gun bullets. The pilot quickly took off again, flying the badly damaged craft to a landing several miles away on the valley floor. But in the sudden jolt of the takeoff, a SEAL, Petty Officer Neil Roberts, who had been standing on the rear exit ramp, fell off, stranding him alone amid the hornets’ nest of aroused jihadis.

  Both Roberts and the team leader with the damaged helicopter switched on their high-tech infrared strobe lights, visible to the AC-130 gunship circling overhead. This was a means of revealing location to friendly forces and was much valued by the special operators. It had, however, never been tested in actual combat. Thanks to the images, ascending levels of Special Operations command were aware of these distress signals, but none of them were clear as to whom each light belonged, thus generating a spiral of confusion.

  Down in the valley, the officer in immediate command of the unit that had tried to land on Takur Ghar quickly devised a plan to deal with the emergency. He did not have any sophisticated surveillance equipment, merely a radio and a satellite phone to talk to higher headquarters, but he had been in the area for some days and had a clear grasp of the local geography, what had happened, and what could and should be done. None of that mattered, however, because buzzing in the freezing darkness two thousand feet above the mountain summit was a Predator drone, its infrared camera streaming video up to a satellite high above and then across mountains, deserts, and oceans to Task Force 11 headquarters on Masirah, a desert island off the coast of Oman in the Arabian Gulf, a thousand miles from the battle on Takur Ghar. The hypnotic allure of close-up video gave commanders the illusion, not for the last time, that they were in close touch with the battlefield and had a better understanding of events than anyone actually on the scene. They felt they had “total situational awareness,” wrote one historian of the battle later, “making them like gods, omniscient and all-seeing,” and consequently better equipped to manage a complicated and fast-moving series of events far away. “We don’t need you getting all worked up on the radio,” the officer on the scene was curtly informed. “Get off the Net, we’ve got it.”

  The chair-bound staff on Masirah, not to mention the technicians and officers at assorted other headquarters in Bagram, Florida, and the Pentagon who were also watching the pictures (Special Operations Command was by now spending $1 million a day renting satellite bandwidth), were in fact glued to a strange depiction of reality. Dawn was hours away, and the silent stream of images generated by warm bodies against a cold background that was filtered through security encryption and satellite relays before ultimate translation into viewable pictures was indistinct at best. Just as Tom Christie’s testers had honestly reported two years earlier (to air force fury), the images gave only a “soda-straw” view of events, with a visual acuity of 20/200. As it so happens, this is the legal definition of blindness for drivers in the United States.

  To make matters worse, the people operating this drone were CIA employees sitting in the trailer park at CIA headquarters who felt free to shift the direction in which the drone camera was pointing without reference to the staff trying to coordinate troops and helicopters on and around the mountain. So each time this happened, the headquarters staff on the island off Oman had to contact the CIA trailer park and request a change of camera direction, a process that sometimes took twenty minutes.

  Apart from the quality of the pictures, the command post on Masirah should in theory have been able to communicate easily with troops on the scene thanks to the wonders of the radio communications net, which was designed to bypass mountains and other obstacles by relaying signals via satellites. But this system was notoriously unreliable, and true to its reputation, conversations were repeatedly interrupted or broken off completely, causing endless repetition and confusion during the operation. Nevertheless, so determined were the members of the task force ba
ttle staff to supervise the battle through the Predator drone, they settled for the deficient satellite radio with its unfulfilled promise of direct and instantaneous communications over long distances. The officer on the scene who had been rudely displaced from command did have direct and instant communication where it mattered, inside the valley and surrounding mountains, because his radios were comparatively simple and could easily reach anyone who was in line of sight, but this advantage was considered secondary to the omniscience conferred by the Predator.

  The helicopter carrying the first SEAL team had flown off the mountaintop when attacked and crash-landed in the valley, leaving Roberts behind. A second helicopter, having picked up the survivors from the first, landed on the same spot in hopes of rescuing Roberts. Under heavy fire and taking casualties, including Technical Sergeant John Chapman, an air force combat controller responsible for coordinating air support who was left for dead, the team retreated down the mountain and called for reinforcements, which were dispatched after some delay. But thanks to the confused communications among all concerned, the incoming rescue force of U.S. Army Rangers did not understand that the team had left the mountaintop. They therefore landed on the very same spot where the first two groups had already been attacked. Sure enough, they were met with a blizzard of rocket-propelled grenades and machine-gun bullets. Within a few minutes several men were dead and the survivors pinned down. Poor communications made it difficult for them to call in air support until late in the day.

  Elsewhere in the Shahikot valley, the U.S. offensive was not going any better. By the afternoon of the second day of the operation, senior officers were seriously discussing a complete retreat from the valley to regroup. The best intelligence that satellites, reconnaissance planes, signals intercepts, and CIA agents could supply had reported that there were some 250 enemy fighters overall in the valley. In fact there may have been as many as 1,000. It had also been reported that there were about 800 civilians living in villages on the valley floor, but there were none. It was believed that the enemy would also be sheltering on the valley floor, but they were dug in on the high ground and far better armed than predicted. The army commander had been confident that the operation would be over quickly because the enemy would cut and run. But the foreign fighters had determinedly stood and fought, despite a rain of bombs from dozens of planes crowding the air over the valley, including B-52 bombers cruising 7 miles above the fray.

  Anaconda’s overall commander, Major General H. L. “Buster” Hagenback, was not helping this disordered state of affairs by devoting a lot of attention to the individual manhunt. A vivid dispatch by an embedded reporter at his headquarters described the pursuit, via Predator drone feed, of a “late-model SUV” as it drove toward Pakistan. Among those inside was a man wearing a white robe and turban, a sure sign, according to the senior intelligence officer at headquarters, of a “liaison” between al-Qaeda forces in the field and the terrorist organization’s senior leadership. As described in the dispatch, the entire staff at headquarters was engrossed in the video of the car as they all waited impatiently for strike aircraft to appear on scene. “Go get ’em,” yelled Hagenback. Eventually, a B-1 bomber unleashed 16 tons of bombs, obliterating the car and surrounding landscape. As the smoke cleared, the deputy commander addressed the headquarters staff: “If you haven’t done it recently, reach around and pat yourselves on the back. This is hard stuff. Hell, I’ve been trying to shoot a truck on that damned road for two days!” he said to appreciative chuckles.

  In theory, the relentless air attacks were being coordinated by two huge aircraft designed specifically for “battle management” and orbiting ceaselessly above the battlefield. One was a $244 million JSTARS (Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System). Readers may recall that this system was originally developed to track Soviet armored divisions racing across the plains of northern Europe by collecting radar images of moving objects and processing them with on-board computers in order to target the advancing formations. Conceptually descended from Task Force Alpha and the electronic fence of Vietnam days, it had never worked properly (being unable, for example, to distinguish a moving tank from a tree waving in the wind). Tom Christie had caught the air force pretending that it could see through mountains in the Balkans in 1995. But as always, the dream that sensors could make centralized battle management possible had never been allowed to die, so now JSTARS was supposed to be tracking sandal-clad guerrillas hiding behind rocks. Joining it in orbit over the battlefield was a $270 million AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System), an airborne air traffic control system designed to manage aerial battles.

  Despite this costly deployment of advanced technology, when Scott “Soup” Campbell arrived on the scene, he found chaos. An air force captain, Campbell flew an A-10 “Warthog,” which could maneuver at low level with relative impunity, allowing the pilot to survey the ground with the naked eye, unlike the sensor-rich AC-130 that led the SEALS to disaster on Takur Ghar.

  Campbell and his wingman had been dispatched to Afghanistan on a few hours’ notice late in the morning of the third day of Operation Anaconda. The long journey down the Gulf, necessarily skirting Iran, and across the Arabian Sea and then Pakistan, took 5 hours, with repeated hookups to an accompanying tanker aircraft. As ordered, he flew straight to the battle without landing. At the time he arrived, the sun was sinking behind the mountains, so the valley below, as he told me later, was in deep shadow, and everything was in a state of utter confusion. On the ground, 39 separate Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (whose job is to call for air support) in the 5-by-9-kilometer “killbox” were radioing urgently for air support: “we’re getting mortared, Dshk [machine-gun] fire … we’re getting hammered.” In the gathering darkness, fighters, gunships, and helicopters thronged the airspace, moving at hundreds of miles an hour, all ignorant of each other’s position and missing each other often by mere yards. A navy fighter shot between Campbell and his wingman: a Predator “practically bounced off my canopy.” In his vivid recollection, “weapons coming off the jet(s) fall through that sky.… All of a sudden a 2,000-pounder blows up just as I’m sitting there looking down at the ground. That means it probably just dropped right through my formation off a bomber at 39,000 feet. So it quickly dawned on us that this is a mess and the threat is not from the ground really, from guys shooting at us, it’s from each other.”

  In theory, everybody would have been coordinated by an Air Support Operations Center relaying requests from the ground in an orderly fashion. But the colonel in charge of the air operation had elected to direct matters from many miles and several high mountains away at Bagram, the main American base in Afghanistan. This system depended on line-of-sight radios so, thanks to those mountains, it was effectively out of action, and without it, the beleaguered soldiers on the ground had no way of communicating directly with the planes overhead … until Campbell showed up. His A-10 had radios that could talk to both ground units and other aircraft. So he and his wingman became a two-man air traffic control center, relaying the frantic calls for help from the ground to the circling planes while warning bombers off strikes that might hit friendly positions. He could achieve this because his plane was designed, and he was trained, to enable a “fingertip feel” of the immediate surroundings.

  Campbell was able to form a three-dimensional mental picture of who was where in and above the valley, coordinating and directing air strikes accordingly, an impressive feat considering that when he finally landed at a base in Pakistan he had been in the air for a total of twelve hours. Over the next few days he returned to the valley, where conditions were slowly stabilizing, until he was urgently dispatched, along with a multitude of other fighters, gunships, and SEAL teams, to pursue a white van on an Afghan back road rumored to contain Osama bin Laden himself, which of course it did not.

  Operation Anaconda, which officially ended on March 18, was declared an unqualified success, with over seven hundred enemy casualties in exchange for eight U.S. dead (seven
on Takur Ghar) and seventy-two wounded. Others, including friendly Afghan commanders, reported that the number of enemy casualties had been far, far lower. It turned out that none of the “big three” had been anywhere near the battle. For some time it was claimed that Saifur Rahman Mansour, whose foiled attempts to surrender had preceded the operation, had indeed been killed. But he lived to fight on many more days, his reputation reportedly bolstered to hero status by his stand against the Americans in the Shahikot. He finally died in a battle with the Pakistani military in South Waziristan in 2008.

  Even as silence descended over the valley, the hunt for targets went on. Joining the effort in June was a new force grandly titled Combined Joint Task Force 180 whose mission was “to conduct operations to destroy remaining Al Qaeda/hostile Taliban command control and other hostile anti-Islamic Transitional Government of Afghanistan elements.” It was also tasked to help establish a “stable and secure Afghanistan able to deter/defeat the re-emergence of terrorism.” But it was the “kinetic” part of the mission that occupied the energies of the force, especially its chief of staff, a tough, aggressive two-star general named Stanley McChrystal. “I always thought Stan was responsible for the Afghan war we ended up with,” a former army general who served in Afghanistan at that time told me. “All we had to do was leave the Afghans alone; they weren’t any threat to us. But Stan insisted on doing all these raids, busting into villages, arresting people, killing people. Pretty soon they were all riled up at us and the whole thing went south from there on in.”

  In the weeks following Anaconda, Special Operations Command undertook an intense postmortem into the debacle on the mountain, paying particular attention to the ultimate fate of Neil Roberts, the SEAL who fell from the first helicopter. Fortunately, or so it seemed, the Predator video was available as a firsthand record of what had actually happened. Careful scrutiny of the footage satisfied commanders that he had died a noble death, taking the fight to the enemy despite several bullet wounds and even storming a machine-gun nest. At his crowded memorial service his deputy commanding officer spoke movingly of how the video “shows the mortal wound and Neil falls to the ground … he had expended all of his ammo, both primary and secondary, as well as all his grenades.”