The Secret Sentry

by Matthew M. Aid

  The Invasion of Afghanistan

  It did not take the Bush administration long to decide where to retaliate for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. At a meeting of the NSC held on the morning of September 13, 2001, President Bush ordered Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to begin preparing a plan to attack the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, including a range of options up to and including an actual invasion. The name eventually given to the operation was Enduring Freedom.31

  Bush’s decision to begin preparations for an invasion of Afghanistan put NSA director Hayden in a bind. As of September 2001, NSA’s SIGINT coverage of Afghanistan was not particularly good. The agency’s SIGINT collection resources had been so tightly stretched prior to 9/11 that it had dedicated only a relatively small amount of its resources to monitoring the communications of the regime in Kabul, since the Taliban was not a big user of radio or other inter-ceptable forms of communications. Other than a dozen or so Soviet-made shortwave radios, the Taliban’s military formations used nothing more sophisticated than walkie-talkies and satellite telephones. There was no cell phone ser-vice inside Afghanistan, the Internet had been banned by the Taliban regime as “unholy,” and the single microwave telephone link between Kabul and Pakistan was so unreliable that it frustrated the NSA intercept operators trying to monitor it as much as it did the Afghan officials who depended on it to communicate with the outside world.32

  NSA also faced a linguistic shortfall: It had only two or three individuals on staff who could speak the principal languages spoken in the country— Pashto, Dari, Uzbek, and Turkmen. The agency had to rely on decoding the diplomatic messages of countries that maintained embassies in Kabul (the United States had no embassy in Afghanistan), and on intelligence-sharing arrangements with a number of foreign intelligence services.33

  Completely in depen dent of NSA, the CIA was running a clandestine SIGINT collection effort inside Afghanistan that was slightly more successful than NSA’s. In late 1997, the CIA had delivered to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance forces some off-the-shelf SIGINT intercept equipment, which they used to monitor the radio and walkie-talkie traffic of the Taliban and al Qaeda forces arrayed against them in northern Afghanistan. More equipment was surreptitiously flown in by CIA teams in the summer of 1999. The problem was that prior to 9/11, there was no full-time CIA liaison officer assigned to the Northern Alliance, so the intercepts were picked up by the CIA only sporadically, usually months after the messages were intercepted.34

  The U.S. military’s SIGINT assets were also minimal. The army was slowly in the pro cess of revamping its tactical SIGINT capabilities with new equipment, but until such time as thesenew systems were fielded, the army’s field units were almost completely dependent on NSA’s “national systems” for most of the intelligence they got.35Linguists were in dreadfully short supply within the U.S. military’s SIGINT units because of a lack of recruitment and personnel retention. As of 9/11, the army was missing half of its Arabic linguists, a critical shortfall that obviously could not be rectified overnight and that would have unforeseen consequences in the months that followed.36

  Right after 9/11, NSA’s principal listening post covering the Middle East and Near East, the Gordon Regional Security Operations Center (GRSOC) at Fort Gordon, in Georgia, issued an urgent request for all available Arabic linguists to augment its collection operations. It was just one of many NSA and military SIGINT units making such a request, so as an emergency measure the U.S. Army decided to use Arabic linguists from tactical units based in the United States to augment GRSOC’s SIGINT operations. Within weeks, twelve Arabic linguists belonging to the SIGINT company of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment arrived at Fort Gordon on a 180-day temporary deployment. It turned out that none of the linguists could be used. They did not have the proper security clearances and weren’t highly proficient translators. It took almost three months to polygraph all these soldiers and upgrade their language training to the point where they could be used in an operational capacity at GRSOC.37

  The same problems handicapped the U.S. military’s tactical SIGINT units destined for use in Afghanistan. The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, did not even begin teaching courses in Pashto and Dari until October 15, 2001, a week after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan began. At the time of the invasion, only a tiny handful of specially trained Pashto-speaking Green Beret SIGINT collectors assigned to the Fifth Special Forces Group at Fort Campbell, in Kentucky, were up to speed, and they would perform brilliantly inside Afghanistan in the months that followed.38But that was all that was available.

  The Art of Improvisation

  So as in virtually every other world crisis that had preceded this one, NSA was forced to rapidly improvise. Recruiters from NSA, the military, and every other branch of the U.S. intelligence community scoured Fremont, California, which had the largest population of Afghan expatriates in the United States. Weeks after 9/11, several dozen Afghan Americans from the Fremont area had signed contracts for substantial sums of money and had quickly been put on planes to the new front lines in the war on terrorism.39Less than two weeks after 9/11, a special Afghanistan Cell was created within the agency’s SIGINT Directorate, headed by army lieutenant colonel Ronald Stephens, who was given the thankless job of trying to resurrect overnight NSA’s dormant SIGINT collection effort against Afghanistan. Richard Berardino, the head of NSOC, set up a special Afghan Desk on his operations floor to correlate and report to the agency’s consumers any intercepts concerning Afghanistan. Teams of NSA and U.S. military linguists and SIGINT collectors and analysts hastily boarded flights at Dulles International Airport and Baltimore-Washington International Airport bound for Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kuwait, Turkey, Bahrain, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia to beef up NSA’s thin presence in the region. The agency’s SIGINT satellites and listening posts were ordered to drop less important targets and instead train their antennae on Afghanistan. NSA, in conjunction with its En glish, Canadian, and Australian SIGINT partners, was scanning virtually every satellite telephone call coming in and out of Afghanistan, hoping against hope that it might catch Osama bin Laden or one of his lieutenants talking on the phone. The Army’s 513th Military Intelligence Brigade hastily sent 200 SIGINT and HUMINT collectors to Kuwait in late September 2001 to augment the 120 SIGINT collectors already there.40A navy task force was hurriedly dispatched to the waters off the coast of Pakistan, including a complete marine expeditionary unit, which was essentially a reinforced marine battalion with air support. Aboard one of the ships in that force was a large contingent of U.S. Navy SIGINT collectors, who trained their ship’s sophisticated radio intercept antennae on Afghanistan once they came within range.41

  No matter how many resources, human and technical, the NSA could muster in a few weeks, it could not produce meaningful intelligence about Afghanistan before the beginning of U.S. military operations on October 7, 2001. The CIA worked out a way to fill the intelligence gap by striking a deal with the Northern Alliance officials for SIGINT collection in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of new and improved SIGINT collection equipment, a deal that would pay huge dividends for the CIA in the weeks that followed. 42

  On Sunday night, October 7, offensive military operations against Afghanistan began with air strikes against thirty-one targets, including major Taliban military units, command posts, communications sites, and early-warning radar and air defense units.43Not surprisingly, the Taliban regime’s scanty communications system collapsed under the weight of the relentless bombing. In a matter of a couple of hours virtually every communications site and telephone relay facility inside Afghanistan was destroyed, including the telephone switching center at Lataband, twenty-two miles east of Kabul, which connected the capital city with the outside world. A former NSA analyst recalled that from October 7 onward, Mullah Omar and his fellow Taliban leaders could communicate with their military commanders only by satellite telephone, which, of course, NSA could easily intercept.44

  Even though
SIGINT was not much help in finding bin Laden, the quantity and quality of NSA’s SIGINT coverage of the Taliban rapidly improved in early October, thanks largely to the commanders’ incessant chattering about the most sensitive information over satellite phones and walkie-talkies.45

  From the time the U.S. air campaign began, one of the top SIGINT targets assigned to NSA was the radio traffic of the Taliban’s elite Fifty-fifth Brigade, which was based in a former Afghan army camp at Rishikor, southwest of Kabul. A detachment of the brigade was stationed in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif. Widely considered to be the best combat unit in the Taliban military, the Fifty-fifth Brigade was comprised entirely of foreign fighters, including a large number of Arabs who were members of al Qaeda and had volunteered to fight with the Taliban. The Fifty-fifth Brigade was also an easy target for NSA because unlike other Taliban units it was well equipped with modern radios, walkie-talkies, and satellite phones, many of which were personally paid for by bin Laden. All of the brigade’s officers were Arabs, which made monitoring its radio traffic much easier since NSA had plenty of Arabic linguists.46This was an instance of SIGINT (employing resources like air force AC-130H Spectre gunships, each of which carried a contingent of Arabic linguists on board) contributing directly to the destruction of a key enemy unit.

  One of the Arabic linguists who flew on the Spectre missions recalled, “Every time one of the brigade’s commanders went on the air, we quickly triangulated the location of his radio transmission and blasted the shit out of his location with our Gatling gun . . . Once our bird was finished chewing up the enemy positions, there usually were no more radio transmissions heard coming from that location.”47

  The War Ends

  By late October 2001, it was clear to U.S. officials that U.S. combat troops were urgently needed on the ground in order to defeat the Taliban and destroy the remnants of al Qaeda in Afghanistan. It was not until October 30, however, that a U.S. Marine Corps MEU operating from ships in the Indian Ocean was ordered by CENTCOM to prepare for deployment to Afghanistan. It would require more than three weeks to assemble and prepare the necessary combat units to execute this order.48

  Much of the early SIGINT effort was focused on helping the Northern Alliance forces capture the key city of Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan. Finally, after two weeks of intense fighting, Mazar-i-Sharif fell to the Northern Alliance on November 10. With the fall of this city, the badly battered Taliban and al Qaeda military forces in northern Afghanistan quickly began to crumble as the Northern Alliance forces drove rapidly southward. Four days later, the Afghan capital of Kabul fell to the Northern Alliance without a fight. Soon after, the remnants of the Taliban military collapsed.

  The day that Kabul fell, a radio intercept caught the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar, broadcasting a message from Kandahar exhorting what was left of his troops to stand and fight, telling them, “I order you to obey your commanders completely and not to go hither and thither. Any person who goes hither and thither is like a slaughtered chicken which falls and dies. Regroup yourselves. Resist and fight . . . This fight is for Islam.”49

  Such exhortations were in vain. Mullah Omar’s plea fell on deaf ears as American fighter-bombers decimated what was left of the Taliban and al Qaeda forces fleeing Kabul. But mistakes occurred. On November 13, U.S. warplanes bombed a building in Kabul thought to be a Taliban or al Qaeda headquarters. After the bombs completely leveled the building, a senior military official recalled, “Some cell phone intercepts [contained] some excited or angry exchanges between Taliban and al Qaeda members” indicating that one or more al Qaeda leaders had been killed in the building. U.S. officials later learned that the building housed the Kabul offices of the al-Jazeera television network.50

  By early December, SIGINT showed that there were few remaining organized Taliban and al Qaeda combat units still operating inside Afghanistan. On the night of December 6–7, Mullah Omar disappeared from Kandahar and was not heard from again for some time. U.S. intelligence later learned that he and his men managed to flee southward across the border into Pakistan, where he remains to this day. The failure of the U.S. military to capture or kill Mullah Omar was to prove to be a major mistake, one that we are still paying for with the lives of our soldiers in Afghanistan.51

  For the SIGINT personnel in Afghanistan, the fall of Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, meant that the Taliban’s ill-conceived attempt at waging a conventional war was over. Despite the failure to capture or kill Mullah Omar, the Bush administration loudly and publicly declared victory. This proved to be a very premature statement. The Taliban not only survived, but has actually thrived in the six years since the invasion of Afghanistan.

  The Battle of Tora Bora

  This didn’t mean that the war was over for the American SIGINTers in Afghanistan. Far from it.

  After the fall of Kandahar, teams of Green Beret, Delta Force and Navy SEAL commandos, together with allied Afghan militiamen on the U.S. payroll, began systematically combing the mountainous and sparsely populated southeastern part of the Afghan countryside looking for Osama bin Laden and his fighters. Accompanying them were a half-dozen SIGINT collection teams, who systematically searched the airwaves looking for any sign of bin Laden and his al Qaeda forces.52

  These SIGINT teams belonged to some of the most secretive units in the U.S. military. There were teams of U.S. Navy Tactical Cryptologic Support operators belonging to Naval Security Group Activity Bahrain, who were assigned to provide SIGINT support to the elite commandos of SEAL Team Six. Working with the operators from the U.S. Army’s Delta Force was a squadron of highly skilled SIGINT specialists from the five-hundred-man U.S. Army Security Coordination Detachment (formerly known as the Intelligence Support Activity), based at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., whose unclassified nickname was Grey Fox.53

  Bin Laden’s whereabouts were not a secret to the Pashtun tribesmen of southeastern Afghanistan. On November 13, he and his forces left the city of Jalalabad in a convoy of Toyota pickup trucks just ahead of advancing American and Northern Alliance forces and moved into prepared defensive positions in the Tora Bora mountains, thirty miles southeast of Jalalabad.54

  The day after Jalalabad fell, a small CIA Jawbreaker intelligence team called Team Juliet, which was commanded by a Green Beret officer seconded to the CIA, was sent to the city to enlist the help of the Northern Alliance militia commander who had taken control of it, Hazrat Ali. A member of the Pashay tribe from northern Afghanistan, Ali willingly signed on and was instantly put on the CIA payroll to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars in return for his promise to help find and capture or kill bin Laden and his al Qaeda fighters.55

  It did not take the CIA long to find bin Laden in his new stronghold along the border with Pakistan.56The new intelligence prompted the United States to begin a series of major air strikes on Tora Bora on November 30. It also prompted the U.S. Army to immediately begin planning a search-and-destroy operation to root out bin Laden and his fighters. But rather than assigning the mission of destroying the al Qaeda force at Tora Bora to American combat units, General Tommy Franks and Major General Franklin “Buster” Hagenbeck, commander of the Tenth Mountain Division and the senior army field commander in Afghanistan, decided to give the job to the motley collection of Northern Alliance militiamen in Jalalabad commanded by Ali. This would prove to be a grave military mistake. Ali, as one of his former Green Beret advisers put it, was “a disaster waiting to happen.” His troops possessed very little in the way of demonstrable fighting ability. One thing that the CIA and the Green Beret advisers clearly agreed upon was that Ali’s ragtag militiamen were going to need substantial American military help if they were to be successful in clearing the Tora Bora mountains of bin Laden’s al Qaeda forces. On December 2, a twelve-man Green Beret A-team, designated ODA 572, arrived in Jalalabad to support Ali’s attack on Tora Bora. The unit was ordered not to engage in combat operations. Rather, its principal mission was to c
all in air strikes on al Qaeda positions in the mountains. On board the MH-53 Pace Low helicopters that ferried ODA 571 to Jalal-abad was a four-man Green Beret SIGINT team, whose mission was to collect intelligence and locate the source of the al Qaeda radio transmissions, then call in air strikes on the coordinates.57

  It should come as no surprise that when it came time for Ali’s troops to attack the al Qaeda positions, the militia commanders suddenly discovered a large number of different reasons why they could not advance despite repeated entreaties from their Green Beret advisers. Ali’s locally recruited Pashtun militiamen were more willing to fight the Northern Alliance troops ferried in by the United States than they were to clear the Tora Bora caves of al Qaeda fighters.58

  On December 3, a CIA Jawbreaker intelligence team operating near the town of Gardez, in eastern Afghanistan, picked up the first “hard” intelligence that bin Laden was in fact at Tora Bora. A U.S. Army Grey Fox SIGINT team near Gardez intercepted some al Qaeda walkie-talkie radio traffic that confirmed he was personally leading the al Qaeda forces.59

  Despite the accumulation of evidence from SIGINT, which was confirmed by interrogations of captured al Qaeda personnel after the battle was over, senior Bush administration officials and CENTCOM officers adamantly refused to accept, probably as a matter of political expediency, that bin Laden was ever at Tora Bora. The official view of CENTCOM, as voiced by the command’s spokesman, was this: “We have never seen anything that was convincing to us at all that Osama bin Laden was present at any stage of Tora Bora—before, during or after.”60