Blood!
On the afternoon of April 2, as thousands of U.S. troops and hundreds of tanks belonging to General Blount’s Third Infantry Division surged through the Karbala Gap, a message from the commander of the Republican Guard Medina Division to his subordinate brigades was intercepted. It contained only three words: “Blood. Blood. Blood.” NSA interpreted the message to mean that “blood” was the Iraqi code word for use of chemical or biological weapons. General Jeff Kimmons, CENTCOM’s chief of intelligence, agreed with NSA’s analysis and so informed General Franks.51
The Top Secret SIGINT report from NSA was immediately passed to all se -nior army and marine commanders in Iraq, who placed their forces on alert. Lieutenant General James Conway, the commander of all Marine Corps forces in Iraq, later recalled, “Everybody that night slept with their [gas] mask in very close proximity, as well as sleeping in your [chemical protection] suit.”52
Shortly after the intercept was received, three Iraqi missiles impacted near the forward command post of the Fifth Corps in central Iraq, setting off the chemical detection alarms. Though it proved to be a false alarm, it is doubtful that anyone got any sleep that night.53
The intercepted message from the commander of the Medina Division caused more than a fair amount of concern in Washington, where Pentagon officials were honestly worried that the Iraqis were about to use their purported stockpile of chemical weapons against the Third Infantry Division. Blount’s troops had already crossed the “Red Line,” fifty miles outside Baghdad, where U.S. intelligence believed Saddam had authorized his commanders to use chemical weapons against U.S. forces. Senior White House and Pentagon officials quietly informed selected reporters in Washington that “U.S. forces in Iraq have recently intercepted increasing amounts of Iraqi communications that appear to allude to the use of weapons of mass destruction.” One unidentified official ominously told a reporter that the intercepts were worrisome because “there are allusions to using special weapons. There seem to be a lot more now.”54
The Battle for Objective Peach
Unfortunately, perishable SIGINT on Iraqi military activities was not making its way to field commanders. While CENTCOM and the Third Army intelligence staff in Kuwait continued getting the best intelligence available about the strength and capabilities of the Iraqi armed forces from NSA and other national intelligence agencies, it did not filter down to the army division, brigade, and battalion commanders slugging it out with the Iraqis. The Third Infantry’s Major Erik Berdy recalled that, despite the excellent intel available, “it still never felt like we had a true picture of who we were fighting, how they were fighting and what their intent was behind it all.”55
Only after the war did the U.S. military learn that its much-hyped “network centric warfare” electronic communications system, which was supposed to push intelligence down to the commanders on the battlefield in real time, did not work. During key battles, army frontline commanders literally did not know which Iraqi forces they were facing, despite the fact that their superiors in Kuwait did.56
A perfect example of this phenomenon was the role SIGINT played in the battle for the strategically important Al-Qa’id Bridge over the Euphrates River, thirty kilometers (about nineteen miles) southwest of Baghdad, on April 2–3. At four thirty p.m. on April 2, a reinforced armored battalion of the Third Infantry Division under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Ernest “Rock” Mar-cone seized the bridge, which opened Baghdad to attack by the hard-driving Third Infantry, coming up fast from the rear.
Marcone’s orders were to hold the bridge until the reinforcements from his brigade arrived. But the relief force had to take a less direct route to the bridge, leading Marcone’s force to stick it out overnight in its exposed defensive positions.
Marcone, who had been told the bridge was undefended, recalled later that the “intel picture was terrible . . . I knew there would be Iraqis at the bridge, but I didn’t know how many or where.” As it turned out, he had no way of knowing that there were thousands of heavily armed Iraqi army soldiers all around him.57
At about nine p.m., Marcone was warned by a FLASH-precedence message that SIGINT indicated that the Iraqi Third Special Republican Guard Commando Brigade had just sortied from the Baghdad International Airport, to his north, with orders to attack his position and retake the bridge. Marcone immediately repositioned his forces as best he could in order to face the expected Iraqi infantry counterattack. But what SIGINT and all other intelligence sources missed was that two armored brigades belonging to the Republican Guard Medina and Nebuchadnezzar Divisions, totaling between five thousand and ten thousand men with T-72 tanks, were then converging on Marcone’s tightly stretched defensive positions from the south.58
Under attack by vastly superior forces during the period beginning at two a.m., Marcone’s unit held out against the Iraqi tanks and troops. Despite being repeatedly beaten back and suffering catastrophically heavy casualties, the Iraqi commander continued to press his attack, but Marcone’s M1A1 Abrams tanks, with better armor and night vision capability, beat off the Iraqi T-72 tanks. By five thirty a.m., the Tenth Brigade of the Medina Division had ceased to exist as a fighting unit, and radio intercepts revealed that the brigade commander had been killed by an air strike on his command post.
The Bridge over the Diyala Canal
SIGINT proved its value once again on April 7, when the lead elements of the Third Battalion of the Fourth Marine Regiment, First Marine Division, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Bryan McCoy, prepared to seize another vitally important bridge, over the Diyala Canal, over which the rest of the marine division would cross before driving on into Baghdad.59Just as McCoy began his attack, an Arab linguist at GRSOC intercepted messages indicating that Iraqi artillery was preparing to ambush McCoy’s force by raining down heavy fire on it.60
The reaction was immediate. According to a U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command account of the action, which deleted all of the salient details of who was involved in the action or where it was transpiring, “An Army strategic group [GRSOC] immediately notified a Marine battalion that it was advancing into the impact zone of an artillery ambush on a bridge. The battalion command [McCoy] immediately redeployed his forces to cross the river at another location.”61Unfortunately, the move did not take place fast enough. A barrage of Iraqi 155-millimeter artillery shells began falling on his position. Tragically, one of the Iraqi shells scored a direct hit on an armored assault vehicle, killing two marines and wounding four others. But it could have been far worse but for the warning provided by GRSOC.62
Los Endos
The capture of the bridges over the Euphrates River and Diyala Canal meant that Baghdad was doomed. Intercepted radio traffic revealed that the decimated Iraqi military was in its death throes, with the few remaining Republican Guard units deployed around Baghdad collapsing almost without a fight. The isolated Iraqi units that tried tostand up to the advancing American forces were quickly destroyed by artillery and air strikes within minutes of their radio operators going on the air. SIGINT revealed that what was left of Saddam Hussein’s regime refused to accept the fact that they had been defeated. As late as April 8, the day before Baghdad fell, intercepted Iraqi satellite phone messages showed that Hussein’s son Qusay, the Republican Guard commander, continued to believe that Iraq was winning the war, with Republican Guard commanders telling him of “high American casualties and defeats of the allied forces in various cities.”63
During the final skirmishes inside Baghdad between the U.S. Army and what was left of the Iraqi Army and Republican Guard, SIGINT was used to find former members of Hussein’s government. On April 7, a B-1B bomber dropped four bombs on the al-Saa restaurant in the tony Mansour district of west Baghdad, where intelligence sources indicated Saddam Hussein and two of his sons were meeting. Inspection of the ruins found eighteen dead bodies, all of them unfortunate customers of the restaurant. But Saddam and his sons were not among the casualties. One source suggests that air
strikes on Saddam’s reported locations were prompted by NSA intercepts of the Thuraya satellite phone used by Saddam Hussein and his key aides. NSA had long been able to locate people using Thuraya satellite telephones by triangulating on the signal emanating from the phone’s global positioning system chip. NSA had used this technology to track the movements of al Qaeda terrorists and other high-value targets around the world, even when these individuals were not using their telephones. 64
Conclusions
Declassified documents and interviews with former U.S. military commanders all generally agree that SIGINT performed well during the three weeks of Operation Iraqi Freedom, in some cases brilliantly, as in the case of the near-complete decapitation of the Iraqi air defense system during the first days of the invasion.
NSA did a superb job of getting its SIGINT product to senior U.S. military commanders as soon as it became available. The Iraq Operational Cell within NSOC at Fort Meade did a remarkable job of packaging and reporting the latest SIGINT coming in from NSA’s worldwide network of listening posts designed specifically for the use of field commanders in Iraq through its secure intranet system, known as NSANet. The flood of timely and valuable information in Top Secret/COMINT e-mails from NSA “was almost too much,” one se -nior CENTCOM intelligence officer recalled. “Nobody else in the community gave that kind of service.”65Virtually all senior American military commanders also praised the quantity, quality, and timeliness of NSA’s intelligence production before and during the invasion.66
But little has been made public about the fact that Iraqi communications security procedures prior to the invasion were highly effective and denied NSA and the U.S. military SIGINT units access to Iraqi military communications traffic.67
Army and marine division commanders in the field and their subordinate brigade and battalion commanders were less than satisfied with SIGINT from NSA and the military intelligence organizations under their command during the invasion. As the desperate and heroicstand of Colonel Marcone’s unit at Al-Qa’id Bridge demonstrated, the perennial problem of getting really useful intel to units at the sharp end had yet to be solved.68Some of these officers wondered if some sort of “digital divide” accounted for most SIGINT intel going to army and corps commanders and little if any going to division commanders and their subordinates.69
Officers lower down on the chain of command, according to a Marine Corps after-action report, “found the enemy by running into them, much as forces have done since the beginning of warfare.”70
Moreover, according to a U.S. Navy document, once the invasion was under way, NSA’s strategic SIGINT collection units in the United States archived 60 percent of the material they collected and never processed (i.e., translated or analyzed) it. The military’s tactical SIGINT units taking part in the invasion pro cessed less than 2 percent of the Iraqi messages they intercepted. These are hardly the sorts of numbers one can be proud of if one is an intelligence professional. 71
Just as in Afghanistan two years earlier, much of the SIGINT collection equipment used by American military intelligence units during the invasion was found to be outdated and unsuited for supporting fast-moving offensive operations.72 Some of the newly developed collection equipment did not work as advertised. For example, the army’s highly touted Prophet tactical SIGINT collection system proved to be fine for short-range target location, but did not perform particularly well when it was tasked with locating Iraqi radio emitters deep behind enemy lines. As a result, many brigade and division commanders reported after the war that they had found themselves completely dependent on NSA’s national SIGINT collection assets for locating Iraqi forces, as in the case of the Republican Guard units during the early stages of the invasion.73
Severe and per sistent shortages of Arabic linguists dogged NSA and the U.S. military’s SIGINT collection effort. For example, only half of the linguists assigned to the SIGINT collection unit supporting the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion spoke Arabic. The other half spoke Korean. Since very few of the intelligence community’s Arabic linguists could understand the Iraqi dialect, the United States had to turn to a private contractor to hire as quickly and as many translators as possible who could speak the Iraqi dialect. Many of the linguists Titan Corporation recruited on short notice (and at considerable cost to the U.S. government) were Iraqi political refugees living in the United States, Canada, Eu rope, and Australia or first-generation Americans of Iraqi descent. Olympic speed records were set hiring these individuals, vetting them, and then flying them to Kuwait in time to participate in the invasion.74
CHAPTER 15
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly SIGINT and Combating the Insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan
I don’t do quagmires.
—DONALD RUMSFELD, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE TRANSCRIPT
The Repeat Per formance
U.S. troops entered Baghdad on April 9, 2003, leading to the immediate collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Looting on a massive scale broke out, but U.S. forces did not attempt to stop it. When reporters asked about the escalating level of violence and chaos in Baghdad, Secretary of Defense Donald Rums-feld made his now-famous comment: “Freedom is untidy.”1
A flood of books and studies later demonstrated that Rumsfeld viewed the security situation in Iraq through rose-colored glasses. Equally in a state of denial was CENTCOM’s General Franks. In what is now widely viewed as one of the most significant blunders in American military history, Rumsfeld and Franks had given little if any thought to how post-Hussein Iraq would be governed. CENTCOM did not even begin reconstruction planning until five months after the fall of Baghdad. But by that time, the Iraqi insurgency was in full swing, and the reconstruction plan was quickly junked in favor of a counterinsurgency plan, which also had not been worked on prior to the fall of Baghdad.2
On April 16, Franks cheerfully announced that most U.S. combat forces in Iraq would be withdrawn within sixty days so that they would not “wear out their welcome.” Franks’s plan called for keeping some thirty thousand U.S. troops there as a peacetime occupation force. As a result, two army divisions that were supposed to be sent to Iraq after the fall of Baghdad were never sent, and on April 21 the Pentagon canceled plans to deploy a third division there. By summer, there were too few U.S. combat troops to secure Baghdad, a teeming city of 4.8 million, or the rest of Iraq. Franks’s prescription for disaster had been endorsed by the White House and the Pentagon, and it was a repetition of the same mistake that he and Rumsfeld had made a year earlier in Afghanistan. He declared victory and left the battlefield before the job was finished.3
As part of the drawdown of forces, the military began rapidly and drastically reducing its intelligence presence in Iraq, just as it had done a year earlier in Af-ghanistan. Major General James “Spider” Marks, who had commanded the U.S. military’s intelligence effort during Operation Iraqi Freedom, left Iraq in June to return to his former position as commandant of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, in Arizona. Virtually all of the army’s best intelligence units in Iraq left with him, including the entire 513th Military Intelligence Brigade, which had performed so admirably during Operation Iraqi Freedom.4
Back in the United States, all of the intelligence staffs and special operations units created to provide intelligence support for the invasion of Iraq, including those at NSA, were disbanded and their personnel returned to their former posts. For example, the Iraq reporting cell within NSA’s National Security Operations Center (NSOC) was disbanded on May 2, the day after President Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.5
NSA’s SIGINT collection assets that had formerly been committed to Iraq were shifted to intercepting the military and diplomatic communications of Iran and Syria. SIGINT coverage of those countries’ military and internal security radio traffic turned up nothing to suggest that either Iran or Syria intended anything nefarious. SIGINT also monitored Turkish traffic because of the
U.S. concern that Turkey might intervene militarily in northern Iraq to prevent the formation of an independent Kurdish state, anathema to the Turkish government. 6
Debilitating turf wars broke out between NSA, CENTCOM, and the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq over “who was going to do what to whom,” which created all sorts of unnecessary chaos on the ground there.7
Coming Prepared for the Wrong War
The first Iraqi insurgent attacks on U.S. forces began within days of the fall of Baghdad, but they were infrequent. However, after President Bush proclaimed “Mission Accomplished,” the number of attacks stepped up dramatically, to six a day by the end of the month. American soldiers began dying, and the press began to question whether Bush’s victory declaration might have been a wee bit premature. White House and Pentagon officials dismissed the attacks as the last gasp of “dead-ender” remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the work of foreign terrorists aligned with al Qaeda, or the activities of criminal gangs taking advantage of Hussein’s downfall.8
The leading proponent of this sunny vision of the situation in Iraq, which a retired army general characterized as the “Morning in Iraq Syndrome,” was Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who breezily told reporters, “In short, the co ali-tion is making good progress.”9In Baghdad, echoing Rumsfeld, the newly appointed commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, told reporters that the Iraqi insurgency was “strategically and operationally insignificant.”10The chief of army intelligence in Iraq, Colonel Steven Boltz, went so far as to tell a reporter that the insurgent attacks were “random and it isn’t organized and that’s a good thing.”11
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