The Secret Sentry

by Matthew M. Aid

  Through the end of January, no movements by Iraqi Republican Guard units deployed south of Baghdad were detected in SIGINT. It was not until late February that SIGINT began to note the Iraqi army and the Republican Guard hastily redeploying some of their forces. In mid-February, two weak Regular Army infantry brigades were moved to guard Umm Qasr and the massive petroleum production center of Rumailah. Then in late February, SIGINT and satellite reconnaissance detected two Republican Guard divisions—the Adnan Division and the Nebuchadnezzar Division— being hastily moved from their home bases in Mosul and Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, southward toward Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit.19

  Then an eerie stillness took over the airwaves as the Iraqi military went to near-complete radio silence, which in military parlance is called emission control (EMCON).20Even the Iraqi observation posts situated along the border with Kuwait reduced their radio traffic to almost nil. On Tuesday, March 18, only hours before the U.S. invasion was to begin, the Iraqi government switched off all telephone service across the country.21

  The War Begins with a Bust

  At about three p.m. EST on Wednesday, March 19, 2003, the CIA received a FLASH-precedence intelligence message from an agent asset inside Iraq known as Rockstar containing the reported location of Saddam Hussein. CIA director George Tenet immediately informed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, as well as the White House. An hour later, when Rumsfeld and Tenet arrived at the White House for an emergency meeting with President Bush and his senior national security advisers, Tenet stated that Hussein was meeting with his senior commanders at an isolated house in southern Baghdad called the Dora Farms and would remain there for at least several hours. At seven twelve p.m., Bush signed the order to bomb the house and kill Hussein.22

  A little more than two hours later, at five thirty-three a.m. Baghdad time, March 20, two U.S. Air Force F-117 stealth fighters dropped four two-thousand-pound JDAM “bunker buster” bombs on the Dora Farms complex.

  Jubilation broke out throughout the U.S. intelligence community when a few sketchy intercepts of Iraqi civil defense radio traffic indicated that some high-ranking Iraqi government official had been killed. But it turned out that there was no bunker at the Dora Farms, and Saddam Hussein had not been anywhere near the place when the bombs were dropped.23

  At the exact same moment that the F-117s released their bombs on the Dora Farms, the first of forty-five Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from six U.S. Navy warships in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea began hitting high-priority Iraqi government buildings and military command posts in and around Baghdad, such as the Ministry of Defense building, the headquarters of the Iraqi Republican Guard, and the compound in east Baghdad that housed the Iraqi intelligence service.

  At ten fifteen p.m. EST, President Bush announced on all the major TV networks that the war with Iraq had begun.

  The Early Stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom

  At six p.m. Baghdad time, March 20, a little more than twelve hours after the Dora Farms attack, the U.S. air campaign against Iraq began. Over the next twenty-four hours, American and British warplanes flew a staggering seventeen hundred combat sorties against hundreds of targets inside Iraq. At the same time, U.S. Navy warships and U.S. Air Force B-52 bombers launched 504 cruise missiles, which systematically took out dozens of Hussein’s presidential palaces, military command centers, and large military garrisons in the most heavily defended parts of Iraq, particularly in and around Baghdad itself.24

  American reporters covering the air assault and cruise missile attacks from their hotel balconies in downtown Baghdad repeatedly used the phrase “shock and awe,” popularized by Donald Rumsfeld in 1999, to describe the pyrotechnics. Months later, journalists referred to the initial air campaign attacks as “shucks and a www” when it became clear that the massive (and expensive) air strikes had done only minimal damage to the Iraqi war machine.

  NSA, however, was tasked with performing immediate assessments on the effectiveness of the air strikes and cruise missile attacks in taking out the Iraqi air defense system. An air force Arabic linguist recalled that his job was to monitor the known radio frequencies used by Iraqi air defense command posts in southern and central Iraq. One by one, during the predawn hours of March 20, all of the radio frequencies he was monitoring went silent, some in mid-transmission, indicating that the fighter-bombers and cruise missiles had done their job. By dawn, SIGINT, including intercepts translated by Arabic linguists aboard U.S. Air Force RC-135 Rivet Joint and U.S. Navy EP-3E Aries reconnaissance aircraft, confirmed that virtually all of the Iraqi air defense system’s sector operations centers were out of commission.25

  In the days that followed, every time an Iraqi radar operator was brave (or foolish) enough to activate his radar system, within minutes the site’s radar emissions were detected and located by one of the Rivet Joint or Aries reconnaissance aircraft orbiting over Kuwait, which promptly directed fighter-bombers to destroy the site. By the time Operation Iraqi Freedom was over three weeks later, SIGINT had directly contributed to the destruction of 95 percent of the Iraqi air defense system— which was a remarkable accomplishment by any measure.26

  SIGINT and the Ground War

  At ten fifteen a.m. on March 20, hours after the air campaign began, the Iraqis began sporadically firing their homegrown version of the Russian Scud ballistic missile and Chinese-made Seersucker cruise missiles at U.S. military positions inside Kuwait. Some of these unwieldy and inaccurate missiles were aimed at Camp Commando in northern Kuwait, which was where the marine First Radio Battalion had its main operations site. The missile detonations rocked the camp, but little damage was done. Nonetheless, it shook up the American troops and served to remind them that there was a real war going on just a few miles away.27

  Shortly after six p.m., an Iraqi patrol boat crossed over from the Iraqi side of the Shatt al-Arab waterway and opened fire on a marine radio intercept team deployed on the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border. At almost exactly the same time, Iraqi mortar fire began falling on the marines position, and the marines spotted Iraqi infantrymen just across the border advancing toward them. The marine SIGINT operators radioed their headquarters and urgently requested covering fire and immediate extraction. While marine artillery units blasted the enemy with massive counter-battery fire, a helicopter flew in and successfully extracted the marine SIGINT team without taking any casualties.28

  That morning, satellite imagery had indicated that the Iraqis were ready to destroy the huge Rumailah oil field, in southern Iraq. This new intelligence led General Franks to move up the start time of the ground offensive. At nine P.M., hundreds of U.S. and British artillery pieces and missile launchers opened fire on the thin screen of Iraqi border guard posts strung out along the border with Kuwait— and the posts’ radios went silent, some in midtransmission, as they were destroyed.29After the barrage ended, thousands of American and British tanks, armored personnel carriers, and support vehicles crossed over the border into Iraq. The invasion had begun.

  American and British ground troops advanced steadily into the country without any appreciable opposition. In the first twenty-four hours, elements of the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division advanced one hundred miles, arriving on the outskirts of the city of Nasiriyah by the end of March 21. To the east, the First Marine Division seized the Rumailah oil fields on March 21 and destroyed the Iraqi Fifty-first Mechanized Division by the end of the following day.

  Across the border in Kuwait, American and British SIGINT operators were flummoxed by the near total absence of the Iraqi military radio traffic that should have been part of a forceful Iraqi response. Moreover, Iraqi divisions did not move from their peacetime bases, and there was no evidence that Hus-sein’s army had any intention of meeting coalition forces head-on.30

  The Iraqi army and the Fedayeen Saddam paramilitary forces did not use their radios much to communicate during the initial phases of the invasion. This not only prevented Iraqi forces from coordin
ating attacks on and mounting resistance to coalition forces— but also degraded the value of SIGINT as a source for intelligence during the first couple of days of the invasion.31

  In the British sector on the extreme right flank, SIGINT played a relatively small role in the successful taking of the key city of Basra by the British First Armored Division—by giving the British a very accurate picture of the formidable Iraqi forces facing them.32

  According to British military officials, high-level strategic intelligence derived from SIGINT on Iraqi military strength and capabilities was hard to come by, but intercepted Iraqi tactical radio traffic proved to be an important source for British field commanders.33During the course of the First Armored Division’s advance, SIGINT provided some warnings of impending ambushes by Fedayeen Saddam guerrillas as well as information concerning the movements and activities of key Iraqi regime leaders inside Basra itself.34But no radio intercepts detected signs that the Shi’ite inhabitants of the city had risen up against Hussein’s troops.35

  The same situation existed in the American sector to the west. One of the more interesting battles where SIGINT played a meaningful role was for Nasiriyah, in southeastern Iraq. With a population of 250,000 people, most of whom were Shi’ites, the city was the linchpin of the Iraqi army’s defense of southern Iraq. Garrisoning Nasiriyah was the Iraqi Eleventh Infantry Division, and the city had been reinforced by Ba’ath Party Al Quds militiamen and Fedayeen Saddam guerrillas. Just outside the city was the vitally important Tallil Air Base, which was the headquarters of all air defense forces in southern Iraq. The CIA and U.S. military intelligence believed that the Eleventh Infantry Division would put up minimal resistance since it was comprised primarily of Shi’ite troops who had no love for Saddam Hussein’s regime.36

  But the Iraqis defended the city fiercely. For the next fifteen days, the Iraqi army’s Forty-fifth Brigade, bolstered by Al Quds Party militiamen and Fedayeen Saddam guerrillas, fought the numerically superior U.S. Marines to astandstill before finally being overcome. Radio intercepts from the marine Second Radio Battalion on March 26 indicated a buildup of two thousand Iraqi soldiers and Fedayeen Saddam guerrillas who were preparing to launch a counterattack on U.S. Marines trying to clear the city. Marine artillery units immediately hit the Iraqi troops with a barrage of high-explosive antipersonnel shells, killing two hundred and breaking up the planned counterattack before it even began.37

  The same thing was taking place further to the north in front of the city of Na-jaf, where Fedayeen Saddam paramilitaries and Al Quds militiamen continued to hold the city against Major General David Petraeus’s 101st Airborne Division. SIGINT provided Petraeus with some valuable intelligence about the strength and fighting condition of the Iraqi forces inside the embattled city. This reportedly included intercepted messages from the Iraqi commander of the Najaf civilian militia to Baghdad requesting reinforcements because he and more than one thousand civilian militiamen were surrounded by U.S. troops.38

  Taking On the Medina Division

  The battles between the U.S. Army Third Infantry Division and the Republican Guard Medina Division south of Baghdad in late March and early April 2003 proved to be the decisive events in the war. The importance of defeating the Medina Division was immense. British prime minister Tony Blair had predicted that the impending battle the division would be a “crucial moment” in the war.39Even before the invasion began, U.S. military planners had determined that the inevitable battle with the Medina Division would be critical to the successful outcome of the war because it was by far the best Iraqi combat unit guarding the southern approaches to Baghdad. A senior U.S. intelligence officer, who at the time was working in the CENTCOM intelligence shop in Qatar, said, “All roads to Baghdad led through the Medina Division. We had to destroy it to take Baghdad and win the war.”40

  Once the invasion began, every radio transmission and electronic emission coming from the units of the Medina Division was closely monitored by NSA. The SIGINT operators at GRSOC monitored the radio traffic coming in and out of the division’s headquarters because of apprehensions created by SIGINT and foreign intelligence reports that the division had already been issued artillery shells filled with either mustard gas or nerve agents.41We now know, of course, that Iraq did not have any chemical weapons in its arsenal, so one of the enduring mysteries of Operation Iraqi Freedom is what the source of these wildly inaccurate intelligence reports was.

  While NSA kept the intelligence staffs in Kuwait well supplied with the latest intelligence about the Medina Division, the responsibility for providing intelligence support to the U.S. Army’s main combat unit on the battlefield, the Third Infantry Division, fell to its own integral intelligence unit, the 103rd Military Intelligence Battalion, which had its own SIGINT collection company. It used a SIGINT collection system called Prophet, which was basically an unarmored Humvee vehicle with two radio intercept personnel sitting in the back, who got their intercepts from a twenty-three-foot-high telescoping antenna mounted on the roof of the vehicle. Prophet intercepts were beamed directly to the 103rd MI Battalion’s command center, then sent via satellite to GRSOC, where Arabic linguists translated them and beamed the results back to the Third Infantry Division’s analysts in Iraq. But the Third Infantry Division received its complement of Prophet systems only a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq began, meaning that the division’s radio intercept operators were still learning how to use the system when the war began.42

  SIGINT played an important role in the first, abortive attack on the Medina Division in the Karbala Gap by a force of attack helicopters on the night of March 23–24. That night, the Eleventh Attack Helicopter Regiment, equipped with thirty-two AH-64D Apache attack helicopters, launched a deep airborne strike that was designed to destroy the Second Armored Brigade of the Medina Division, which SIGINT had pinpointed as deployed in defensive positions north of the town of Al Hillal in the Karbala Gap. However, the Iraqis were waiting, and they destroyed one Apache and captured the two pilots. They also damaged the thirty-one other helicopters. Making matters worse, the attack failed to engage, much less destroy, the Medina Division. The U.S. Army’s official history of the war describes the abortive attack as “the darkest day” of the war.43

  On the evening of March 23, SIGINT intercepted ominous messages indicating that the Medina Division had been warned that an attack on its positions was imminent. But once the attack was under way on the morning of March 24, SIGINT operators intercepted dozens of Iraqi radio messages indicating that the Eleventh Attack He licop ter Regiment had indeed flown right into a carefully orchestrated “flak trap.”44.The commander of the U.S. Army’s Fifth Corps, Lieutenant General William Wallace, admitted after the war, “We found out, subsequent to the attack, based on some intelligence reports, that apparently both the location of our attack aviation assembly areas and the fact that we were moving out of those assembly areas in the attack was announced to the enemy’s air defense personnel by an Iraqi observer, thought to be a major general, who was located someplace in the town of An-Najaf using a cellular telephone. In fact, he used it to speed-dial a number of Iraqi air defenders. As our attack aviation approached the attack positions, they came under intense enemy fire.”45

  Hours after the abortive attack by the Apache helicopters, a trio of army RC-12 Guardrail SIGINT aircraft belonging to the Fifteenth Military Intelligence Battalion, based in Kuwait, flew a special reconnaissance mission over the Karbala Gap looking for the Medina Division and found it positioned around the towns of Karbala, Al Hillal, and Al Haswah. Using the coordinates provided by the Guardrail aircraft, U.S. Army artillery units immediately launched a barrage of lethal multiple-launch rocket system (MLRS) missiles at the Iraqi positions, with COMINT intercepts indicating that the missiles had caused widespread damage.46

  For the next three days, a ferocious sandstorm brought all operations to a halt. During it, on the night of March 25–26, the Iraqis attempted to move up elements of five Republican Gua
rd divisions to positions south of Baghdad. These moves were quickly detected by SIGINT and other technical sensors, which led to a seemingly never-ending series of air attacks on the Republican Guards desperately trying to make their way to the front. With the Iraqi air defense system almost completely flattened, American and British fighter-bombers were able to clobber Iraqi military targets with impunity within minutes after SIGINT fingered them. By the end of the war, more than four hundred air strikes on Iraqi military targets had been flown based solely on SIGINT intercepts coming out of NSA.47

  By March 28, Major General Buford Blount III’s Third Infantry Division was ready to take on the Medina Division. The upcoming battle had taken on new importance because on the previous day, SIGINT had picked up the first indications that the Iraqis had moved what were believed to be chemical weapons from a central stockpile site outside Baghdad to the Medina Division. American intelligence analysts at the time strongly believed that the weapons in question were 155-millimeter artillery shells filled with either mustard gas or the nerve agents VX or Sarin.48That afternoon, the CENTCOM deputy director of operations in Qatar, Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, confirmed the story, telling reporters, “We have seen indications through a variety of sources . . . [that] orders have been given that at a certain point chemical weapons may be used.”49

  Despite this grave threat, the offensive against the Medina Division in the Karbala Gap proceeded on April 1. By the end of the day, the lead elements of Blount’s division had advanced to within fifty kilometers (about thirty miles) of Baghdad. The Iraqis detected the move around their flank almost immediately and reacted as best they could, throwing elements of the Medina Division into the breach to try to slow down the American attack. These Iraqi countermoves were quickly noted by SIGINT and other American intelligence sensors. Fifth Corps commander Lieutenant General William Wallace recalled that his intelligence assets almost immediately detected the Iraqi reaction. “Simultaneous with those reports and that movement, we had UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] flying and identifying those formations. That operational maneuver, in my judgment, enabled the operational fires of the coalition to really do some major damage on portions of the Republican Guards. And from that point, over the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours, the number of reports we were getting on destruction of Iraqi armor and artillery formations was dramatically larger than what we had received earlier in the fight.”50