But this Panglossian view of things became untenable after suicide bombings in Baghdad and roadside attacks on U.S. forces throughout Iraq jumped 500 percent, to more than thirty a day. By October 2003, 203 American soldiers had died at the hands of Iraqi insurgents, more than all casualties suffered during the invasion of Iraq. After the Baghdad suicide bombings of the Jordanian embassy on August 7 and the U.N. headquarters compound on August 19, the CIA station chief in Baghdad warned Washington that these bombings were symptomatic of the growing strength and deadliness of the Sunni insurgency, but his warning was ignored.12
But the equipment that the U.S. military’s SIGINT units had brought with them to Iraq during the 2003 invasion proved to be next to useless in an urban counterinsurgency environment. Major Steven Bower, who commanded a company of the 311th Military Intelligence Battalion in northern Iraq, recalled, “As far as SIGINT is concerned, most of our stuff was designed to operate on the military wave band lengths . . . but it doesn’t pick up cell phones or a lot of the technology out there. We still picked up some radio traffic and we still got some stuff out of it, but it wasn’t as much as we wanted.”13In 2004, new SIGINT equipment, including the latest version of the army’s Prophet tactical SIGINT collection system, called Prophet Hammer, was delivered to every U.S. Army combat division in Iraq. The new version of the Prophet was the army’s latest high-tech intelligence collection toy, built specifically for cell phone interception, which everyone in Washington thought was a marvelous improvement. Designed for use in Europe, the Prophet and Prophet Hammer systems did not work well in the crowded and densely populated cities of Iraq. They were also not designed to cope with the primitive Iraqi signals environment because, as a brigade operations officer with the 101st Airborne Division stationed in northern Iraq pointed out, “at that time there wasn’t a lot of mobile phones in use” in Iraq.14
So the U.S. Army and Marine Corps were forced to junk much of their expensive SIGINT equipment and spend still more millions replacing it with consumer products—low-tech off-the-shelf radio scanners and other equipment— not really knowing if they would work in Iraq.15
And even if SIGINT units could intercept the phone calls of the Iraqi insurgents, the people needed to translate them were not available. Within months of the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, all army division commanders in Iraq began disbanding their SIGINT units and transferring their personnel to fill out Tactical HUMINT Teams that were being formed throughout the country. For example, the Third Infantry Division’s commander, Major General Buford Blount, whose division was responsible for garrisoning Baghdad, stripped all of the Arabic linguists out of his division’s SIGINT company and transferred them to HUMINT-gathering duties—which of course they were not trained or equipped for. The Arab linguists available were trained only to listen to Arabic communications traffic and transcribe it; they had not been trained to speak the language with any degree of fluency. Moreover, they had no command of the Iraqi dialect, which put them at a severe disadvantage when trying to talk to Iraqis.16At the same time, the company’s SIGINT equipment, notably Prophet, was parked in the division’s motor pool and allowed to gather dust.17Much the same thing happened in northern Iraq, which was the operational area of the 101st Airborne Division, commanded by Major General David Petraeus. Many of the Arabic cryptologic linguists assigned to the division’s 311th MI Battalion were transferred to HUMINT collection duties, with the division intel officer G-2, Lieutenant Colo-nel D.J. Reyes, concluding, “The low technology, HUMINT-rich nature of stability operations and support operations mitigated (and at times negated) the effectiveness of our technical intelligence platforms.”18
Then, in a typical U.S. Army “comedy of errors,” its intelligence officers were shocked to discover that many of the cryptologic linguists they had in Iraq could speak Korean, French, Spanish, and other languages—but not Arabic. How they ended up in Iraq in the first place remains a question that army intelligence officials do not seem to want to answer. As of September 2003, many of these “misplaced persons” were still in Iraq doing jobs that had nothing to do with intelligence, such as pulling guard duty, manning traffic checkpoints at base gates, or working as administrative clerks.19
The sad result was that by the end of 2003, the U.S. military’s SIGINT collection capabilities in Iraq had fallen to such calamitously low levels of accomplishment that some thoroughly pissed-off army division commanders came close to ordering the disbandment of what was left of their SIGINT units completely. The dearth of intelligence being produced by NSA not surprisingly angered many of the senior military commanders in Iraq. A former NSA liaison officer recalled, “There were some very, very unhappy people down in those division headquarters” who were angry about NSA’s inability to get them the intelligence they needed.20
As if things were not bad enough, when cell phone service was introduced throughout Iraq in the spring and summer of 2004, military SIGINT units discovered that their intercept equipment brought in from the United States was useless against the cell phones that were now being used by the Iraqi insurgents. 21 It was not until the summer of 2004 that the first U.S. Air Force cargo aircraft began landing in Kuwait carrying emergency shipments of hastily purchased replacement cell phone intercept equipment. The equipment was so new that the U.S. Army intelligence personnel accompanying it were literally still reading the operating manuals trying to learn how to use the stuff when the planes touched down.22
And even then, the new cell phone intercept equipment being brought into Iraq left much to be desired because it was available only at the brigade level, which meant that little of the SIGINT product from this source made its way down to the battalions slugging it out on the streets of Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq. The equipment itself was of marginal utility because of technical limitations on what it could hear and its restricted range. A U.S. Army officer who served with the First Cavalry Division in the Shi’ite slum of Sadr City in eastern Baghdad recalled, “I wasn’t impressed, though, with how good the cell phone listening capability really was because you could get only one side of the conversation and you had to be within a certain range.”23
Once cell phone service began to expand, NSA and the military SIGINT units scrambled to find security-cleared linguists who had at least some comprehension of Iraqi dialects, but two resources—the nascent Iraqi army and the national police— were believed to be infiltrated by insurgents. So the recruitment of linguists was handed over to American private sector defense contractors— CACI and Titan Corporation (now part of L-3 Corporation). The candidate linguists who could pass the security clearance requirements were sent not to Iraq but to NSA’s Gordon Regional Security Operations Center (GRSOC), where they were immediately put to work in a newly formed operations unit called Cobra Focus, whose sole mission was to translate the cell phone intercepts that were being beamed directly to GRSOC from the Iraqi front lines via satellite.24
Monitoring Insurgent Finances and Infiltration
All available evidence indicates that it took NSA a significant amount of time to adapt to the rapidly changing battlefield environment in Iraq. But in the summer of 2003, according to Sergeant Major Kevin Gainey, the head of the Third Infantry Division’s all-source intelligence fusion center, “eventually we got signals intelligence (SIGINT) working.”25
One of NSA’s early successes was determining who was providing the Iraqi insurgents with financial and logistical support. In 2003, SIGINT helped the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment destroy an insurgent cell in the town of Rawa in al-Anbar Province that was helping foreign fighters infiltrate into Iraq from neighboring Jordan.26Intercepts of telephone calls between insurgent leaders in Iraq and their cohorts in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East in the summer and fall of 2003 revealed that certain Iraqi insurgent groups were being financed by former members of Saddam Hussein’s regime based in Syria and by sympathizers elsewhere in the Arab world. By mid-2004, SIGINT was also providing detailed intelligence concerning the flow o
f money from Syria that was being used to finance Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s foreign fighters operating in al-Anbar Province. A former NSA intelligence analyst said, “SIGINT showed that Ramadi was the destination for most of the money flowing into Iraq from Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia.” President Bush was informed that the flow of money amounted to $1.2 million a month.27
Beginning in the summer of 2003, special NSA intercept teams and small U.S. Army SIGINT units at Mount Sinjar, in northern Iraq, and Al Qaim, in western Iraq, kept a quiet vigil on the Syrian border, trying to monitor the flow of foreign fighters seeking to cross over and join al-Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq.28
Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the SIGINT collectors, the vast majority of the foreign fighters managed to successfully evade the U.S. Army units deployed along the border. An army battalion commander stationed on the border in 2003 recalled that they “weren’t sneaking across; they were just driving across, because in Arab countries it’s easy to get false passports and stuff.” Once inside Iraq, most of them made their way to Ramadi, in rebellious al-Anbar Province, which became the key way station for foreign fighters on their way into the heart of Iraq. In Ramadi, they were trained, equipped, given false identification papers, and sent on their first missions. The few foreign fighters who were captured were dedicated— but not very bright. One day during the summer of 2003, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Arnold, a battalion commander stationed on the Syrian border, was shown the passport of a person seeking to enter Iraq. “I think he was from the Sudan or something like that— and under ‘Reason for Traveling,’ it said, ‘Jihad.’ That’s how dumb these guys were.”29
Iran was a particularly important target for NSA after the fall of Baghdad. According to a former NSA official, the agency was able to read much of the sensitive communications traffic of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), which gave U.S. intelligence analysts some vivid insights into Irani an policy on Iraq, as well as details of Irani an clandestine intelligence operations inside Iraq. But according to news reports, this extremely sensitive NSA program was badly damaged in the spring of 2004 by none other than America’s longtime “expert ally” against Saddam Hussein, Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC). These reports stated that Chalabi and other senior members of the INC had secretly provided Iranian intelligence officials with details of U.S. political and military plans in Iraq, and NSA intercepts reportedly showed that the head of the INC intelligence organization, Aras Habib, was on the payroll of the Iranian intelligence service. Based on this intelligence information, on May 20, 2004, U.S. troops raided Chalabi’s home and the offices of the INC in Baghdad.30
Then in early June, news reports in the New York Times based on leaks from U.S. intelligence sources indicated that in mid-April, Chalabi himself had told the Baghdad station chief of MOIS that NSA had broken the codes of the Iranian intelligence service. Perhaps not believing Chalabi, the Iranian official reportedly radioed a message to Tehran with the substance of Chalabi’s information using the code that NSA had broken. According to the news reports, the Ira ni ans immediately changed their codes, and in a stroke eliminated NSA’s best source of information about what was going on inside Iran.31
NSA’s overall performance during the first year of the war in Iraq has been described by a number of senior military commanders as “disappointing.” Among the most serious of the complaints was that NSA overemphasized SIGINT collection directed at Iraq’s neighbors Iran and Syria, as well as the internal machinations of the U.S.-backed Iraqi government, at the expense of coverage of the Iraqi insurgency movement.32
Fight for Allah! SIGINT and the Battle of Fallujah
SIGINT’s first important test in Iraq came in 2004 during the Battle of Fallu-jah, which pitted thousands of U.S. Marine infantrymen backed by tanks and fighter-bombers against an equally large number of Iraqi insurgents and foreign fighters in a bloody street-by-street battle to decide who controlled the city, which was in the heart of al-Anbar Province, a stronghold of the Sunni insurgency ever since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Between May 2003 and March 2004, an overextended brigade of the Eighty-second Airborne Division gradually lost control of the city to the Iraqi insurgents and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s foreign fighters. By November 2003, the security situation in Fallujah had become so precarious that the last remaining units of the Eighty-second had to withdraw, which allowed the insurgents and foreign fighters to control the city, to the consternation of Washington and U.S. military commanders in Baghdad.
In March 2004, the Eighty-second was replaced by the First Marine Division, which was tasked with reasserting control over Fallujah and the rest of al-Anbar Province. The insurgents in Fallujah were well aware of the marines’ preparations for a massive conventional assault backed by tanks, artillery, and air strikes. The only question was when.33
On March 31, less than two weeks after the marines arrived, a mob in Fallu-jah killed four American security contractors, mutilated the bodies, and hung them from a bridge for all to see. In response, on April 4 the marines sent in two thousand troops, backed by heavy artillery and air strikes, but the ferocious battle that ensued ended on April 9 when the newly elected Iraqi government; Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, the chief of the Co alition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad; and Washington became concerned about unacceptable numbers of civilian casualties caused by the air strikes.34After the marines withdrew from Fallujah, the insurgents were once again in control of one of the largest cities in Iraq. The few agents that the marines managed to recruit and infiltrate into Fallujah were never heard from again.35
Given the failure of HUMINT, SIGINT and unmanned reconnaissance drones became the principal providers of intelligence about what was going on inside the besieged city. The U.S. Marine SIGINT unit, the Third Radio Battalion, had just arrived in-country and was still trying to learn the terrain and its targets on the fly. By the time it arrived, there were eight thousand marines crammed into a massive tent city, Camp Fallujah. The Marine SIGINTers were confined inside the defensive perimeter of the base, enduring hundred-degree temperatures (except when working in their air-conditioned ops center) as well as frequent rocket and mortar attacks on the base, until they rotated out in October 2004.36
During this period, they set about gathering intelligence about the insurgents and quickly discovered that al-Zarqawi’s foreign fighters, unlike their more security-conscious Iraqi counterparts, consistently chatted away on their ICOM walkie-talkies and cell phones. Al-Zarqawi’s inexperienced fighters were later to pay a terrible price for their lack of communications security.37
The marines occasionally used a small armored patrol as bait to get the insurgents chattering on their walkie-talkies and cell phones. A marine infantry commander recalled that “these ‘bait and hook’ methods worked like a charm” because the SIGINT operators could determine the exact locations where al-Zarqawi’s fighters were concentrated in Fallujah. “This is all bad guys,” said Captain Kirk Mayfield. “Every sigint [electronic intercept], every humint [infor mant report] tells us this is where all the foreign fighters hang out.”38
On September 26, intercepted cell phone calls identified the location of a meeting of senior al-Zarqawi operatives inside the city. An unmanned Predator reconnaissance drone surveyed the target and passed on the coordinates to three fighter-bombers from the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy. The air strike destroyed the building and killed everyone inside, including a Saudi named Abu Ahmed Tabouki, one of al-Zarqawi’s most senior commanders in Fallujah.39Two weeks later, after a Predator identified the house inside Fallujah from which the cell phone calls of another gathering of senior insurgent leaders were originating, two F-16 fighter-bombers were ordered to destroy the house with GBU-38 bombs.40
On the night of November 7, ten thousand American troops from the First Marine Division and the army’s First Cavalry Division launched the offensive, designated Operation Phantom Fury (Al Fajr), to retake Fallujah.41The a
rmy and marine troops, supported by tanks, artillery, and air strikes, smashed into the insurgent defenses on the northern outskirts of Fallujah and began inexorably pressing the insurgents back toward the center of the city. Intercepted cell phone calls indicated that the insurgents could not hold back the onslaught. Lieutenant Colonel James Rainey, who commanded one of the army mechanized battalions leading the attack, told an interviewer, “If you’ve heard any of the enemy radio intercepts, they clearly show that the enemy was panicking and reeling from this attack.”42
U.S. forces thought they had won the bitter struggle, and intercepted messages from the insurgents such as “It’s useless. Fallujah is lost” seemed to confirm that.43But the insurgents and foreign fighters inside Fallujah did not quit, falling back before the steadily advancing U.S. forces. The punishment that they took while desperately trying to stem the American advance was horrific. They fought on for eleven more days, until they were finally overwhelmed by the numerically superior marine forces. Hundreds of Iraqi insurgents and foreign fighters had been killed, but the cost in American lives was steep. More than seventy marines died in the fighting for Fallujah, and hundreds more were wounded. The battle may have been won for the moment, but radio intercepts and interrogations of captured fighters revealed that two thousand insurgents, including almost all of al-Zarqawi’s senior commanders, had managed to escape from the city before the battle. It was the midlevel leadership and their troops who had stayed behind and fought.44
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