All the Ways We Kill and Die

by Brian Castner

  The WIT mission was deceptively simple: investigate every IED attack in the entire country. At the height of the Iraq Surge, an average of 175 such incidents happened every day.

  Each team consisted of an Office of Special Investigations detective or photographer, a machine gunner “tactical” expert, two intel guys, and an EOD tech to lead them. Frost found the spin-up training to be a review of the basics, but there was a steep learning curve for the intelligence analysts on his team. The Air Force sent intel wonks of all types to WIT, and Frost ended up with a Russian linguist and satellite imagery specialist. The team learned to do battlefield forensics, de-encrypt the call data on cell phone SIM cards (a process known as ripping), download laptops, and conduct sensitive site exploitations. This last part, searching a bomb factory without ruining the good evidence or killing yourself, is no light matter; half-assembled IEDs with dangling homemade blasting caps can be more dangerous than completed and emplaced devices.

  “Battlefield forensics” sounds sophisticated, but the fundamentals of evidence collection are known to anyone who watches crime dramas on network television. The most dangerous part of the job was usually just getting to the blast site. Once safely on-scene, though, the work is almost pedestrian: Shoot photos from all cardinal directions, measure the size of the crater with an aluminum tape and record its precise grid location, interview witnesses, pick up smoking pieces of battery and shredded wire, gather bits of blood and bone for DNA analysis. The entire job can be done in five minutes by a competent team, faster if one is getting shot at.

  Frost did learn a few new techniques. He could now poke a cotton swab in the ground and put it in a sealed test tube and send it for explosives residue testing at the Combined Explosives Exploitations Cell (CEXC, pronounced “sexy,” of course) at Camp Victory. In a theoretical CSI: Baghdad, CEXC would serve as the central crime lab, and received an avalanche of reports and evidence every day from across the country.

  Frost and his team of intel analysts were assigned to the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division. The brigade made its headquarters in Tikrit, but Frost chose Samarra as his home base since it was centrally located, in the crotch of the Y between Baghdad and the cities of the north, Kirkuk and Mosul. It was a transit hub, and while his area of operations (AO) was geographically large, 120 miles by 90 miles, it felt like he could wrap his head around the whole thing. Baghdad had so many people and so many soldiers and so many fragmented AOs that no one could see the entire picture. Everyone saw a little slice, and if the same IED was used on the opposite side of a brigade’s boundary, even just a mile or two away, you would never hear about it. Not in Samarra. He could read the internal reports and trace the distribution network, watch the same type of device pop up first in the south, outside of Balad, and then work its way up the Tigris River Valley, along Highway 1, to Samarra and Bajji and then Tikrit and beyond.

  Frost believed that in this role, as the chief of the WIT in Samarra, he had an opportunity. Not necessarily to do anything differently but to think about the IED problem in a new way. EOD techs had been collecting IED evidence for years and had been making no progress, caused no substantial reduction in the number of bombs placed or caught the Engineer. Frost decided that this was because they were spending so much time and energy taking the IEDs apart and keeping themselves alive, they had no time to study the evidence they collected in any detailed or systematic way. They always trusted someone else to do it—JIEDDO, CEXC, the counter-IED HQ in Baghdad known as Task Force Troy, the FBI’s Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center (TEDAC) in the hills outside of DC—and assumed it would be done well, considering the billions of dollars spent and daily headlines at home.

  But Frost had now looked behind the curtain. He had attended the intel school, had seen the inside of the great machine, and he knew it might just be Asimov’s coin flip after all. The storage area at TEDAC looks like the warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and just as Bill Hailer had emailed TECHDIV for help on the rocket in 2004 and Matt Schwartz’s foot was nearly blown off in response, Frost knew there was no smart analysis coming from higher up. Frost had shipped bags of IED evidence to CEXC in Baghdad, priority evidence from attacks that killed and maimed soldiers, only to discover it laying forgotten in a corner when he visited in person months later. Every trip to HQ left him disillusioned, filled with the sense that “shrimp and gristle night” at the chow hall was the most important thing in the lives of the civilians and contractors who worked at CEXC and in the marble palaces of Camp Victory.

  He needed to do the analysis on his own. If he didn’t, no one would, no one was looking. And now, unlike his EOD brothers still dismantling IEDs every day, he had no response team to run, no robot to fix, no bomb suit to clean, no explosives to inventory. He had space and room to step back, breathe, and just think about the IED problem from scratch. And this is what he came up with.

  FROST WAS SICK of playing defense. EOD teams always reacted, waited to get a call to go disarm a device. The challenge in going on offense lay in predicting where that device would be placed.

  As the Engineer undoubtedly taught his students, it is a truism among IED emplacers that it is only worth putting a bomb where someone is likely to travel. This may be obvious, but it also grants insight. Digging in a device is dangerous and exhausting work. A Predator can spot you. A soldier can shoot you. Your accomplice can rat on you. The safety mechanism on the bomb can fail. The cell leader can blame you if it fails to function. So much risk, so much can go wrong, why place a device where no one will ever tread?

  On the micro level, there is a delicate balance to be struck in this question of where to place the bomb. American patrols long ago learned to avoid the most obvious funnels and routes. Never step in the entranceway of a house. Never walk in the center of the road. Never take the most well-worn donkey path unless you watch the locals take it first. But it is also dangerous to take the most difficult path. Once insurgents saw soldiers leap through a window instead of knocking down the door, landmines appeared in dirt floors beneath sashes and sills. The sheer cliff face was as likely to be booby-trapped as the labeled trail. What then is left?

  The pendulum swung from one extreme to the other, until the war settled into a tenuous middle ambiguity. The direct route was both off-limits and probably free of hazards. The soldier shuns it, so the bomb placer does too. The most indirect route is likewise avoided by both under the same logic. The most obvious and least obvious are deadly. Safety lies in the random. The soldier walks anywhere between the extremes. The bomb is placed anywhere between the extremes. Round and round the mulberry bush it goes.

  But now Frost wanted to answer the bomb-placement question more strategically. To do this, for years EOD units and brigade intel cells and Special Forces teams had been using a technique called Trend Analysis. It is a fancy term for pushing pins into a map, multicolored to discriminate the data most important to each community. EOD techs might use red for radio-controlled IEDs, blue for car bombs, yellow for suicides, black for command wire. This sorted by type but little else. The Army infantry brigades mapped for effectiveness, using different colors for the number of soldiers hurt and killed, trucks destroyed, attacks deemed “effective” or not. They would create a “heat map” to correlate the frequency of a certain type in a certain place at a certain time. When pins bunched up, they gave the place a name. Tactical Area of Interest (TAI) Tennessee. TAI Detroit. Named Area of Interest (NAI) Vicksburg. NAI Celtics. But the names were nothing more than another way of saying, “Here is where we die.”

  In his mind, Frost likened this whole process to pouring a giant jar of pennies all over a basketball court and then walking around and noting heads and tails. You could search the scattered pennies and mark every time three heads or three tails lay next to each other. Then the battalion intelligence officer could say, “Hey look, there might be something here, because there are three! There’s a cluster, and there’s a cluster, and there’s a clu
ster.” And Task Force Troy in Baghdad and JIEDDO in DC could write reports that said, “Hey, look, we see a cluster here.” As late as the spring of 2008, Frost was still receiving such vapid reports for Samarra, as if his pushpin map didn’t already say the same thing.

  There is a cluster of pennies. So what?

  Frost decided that pushpin-based Trend Analysis survived as a legitimate tracking method for as long as it did because it worked just well enough to get a unit to the end of its tour. It worked well enough to tell the brigade commander what street to patrol, where to put an observation post, which route to stop traveling at which times. It worked well enough to catch a guy and make everyone feel better. But they never caught the guy, and the Engineer labored on.

  Frost started to run through the Big Data differently, and while he was far from the only one doing so in the spring of 2008—many of the twenty other WIT team leads assigned to other brigades in other parts of the country were starting a similar process—he knew he was the only one doing it for his area. As the leader of an intel cell, he was now plugged in to the massive intelligence apparatus in a new way and could use the network to pull reports. The main database, known as CIDNE (Combined Information Data Network Exchange, pronounced “Sydney”), provided great statistics but no analysis. In Frost’s view, the military had long confused one for the other; CIDNE counted widgets, told him there were seven hundred car bombs, but data do not become intelligence until they are analyzed and filtered.

  When he tackled the data, Frost did not sort IEDs by effectiveness or general category. Instead, he taxonomized them by how they were employed or by the very specific material of their construction. Sorting by employment allowed him to get into the tactical mind of the local leader. Sorting by material allowed him to track makes and models across wide geographic areas. Then, by combining the two data sets, he could identify IED cells and draw circles on the map that meant something. He named each cell by its leader: Directional Frag Asshole, Northside Dirtbag, Southside Dirtbag. Each time, he felt he could say, “This is really a cell,” and not random penny clusters, because of the accumulation of data points. He knew that they used old military ordnance and thin-gauge command wire and a particular red switch as a safety and a particular white outlet box to contain the electronics and they always worked along Highway 1 on Saturdays after prayers.

  Once the cell was identified with this specific signature, he could begin to analyze the pattern, ask smarter questions, draw conclusions. Where is the cell based? Where are they moving? Where do they build the devices? Have the devices changed, signaling that the Engineer had been near recently, teaching new skills to local thugs? Where do their materials come from? The answers to these rarely asked questions had always lain in the data, but hidden.

  Frost wasn’t doing rocket science, and his method wasn’t novel, but he and the best of his fellow WIT leaders could apply a thoroughness and persistence to the analysis that had not been possible on previous tours on a brigade-wide scale. Frost was drawing circles on the map that actually meant something. He was drawing each cell’s Gallieni oil spot.

  Draw it, then dismantle it.

  It was at this point that reality intruded upon theory.

  THE BRITISH CALL their EOD operators ammunition technicians, or ATs, and in the Troubles in Northern Ireland they became famous for truly understanding their IRA opponent. Nervous citizens would call the local police about a suspicious package left at their door, and the AT would walk up and cut it open with a knife and toss the mail aside. How did they know? Because the ATs were fighting trustworthy professionals. They knew where the IRA would put a real bomb, and therefore a package anywhere else was a hoax or trash.

  After months of trying to track the various cells in Samarra, Frost envied the AT’s situation. The British techs had worked in a nearly homogenous population that they intuitively understood. The IRA built consistently identical bombs, so often repeated that the ATs would give them nomenclature, Type 4 and Type 19 and so on. Frost had neither advantage. Iraqi IED construction was varied, similar but not identical, occasionally sloppy and haphazard, and the population he worked in was foreign, mixed, sectarian, aggressive, and to him, unpredictable.

  And he had so much to learn. Frost was trying to track very specific information, but there was little foundation for him to start with, very little institutional knowledge because no one in the US military consistently specialized in the habits of IED cells in Samarra. The Army did not send the same brigade back to Tikrit every other year. Same for EOD techs. Special Forces only began to send the same units back to the same Afghan villages in 2010, after the Iraq War was over. JIEDDO eventually tried to set up a “desk” system, similar to how the CIA and DIA organize their specialists, but by then the hour had grown late.

  Frost wanted to do more than just gather information, though. He wanted to convince his brigade to do missions to catch the cells making the IEDs. The normal cycle for all intel-driven mission planning is roughly the same: collect, process, target, execute. It was WIT’s job to collect and process, but absent regular support from Troy or JIEDDO, he took on the targeting role too, to get the Army to move.

  Convincing the 101st Airborne he had enough information to justify a raid was a challenge, and Frost seemed to face a constant headwind. The backlog for fingerprint identification could be a year. Circuit and radio frequency spectrum analysis from CEXC was quicker but still too slow to plan a timely mission. He even seemed to be at odds with the Army brigade he was working for. Too many soldiers wanted their own “petting zoo,” as he called them, a collection of bomb trophies kept under the bed. That was IED evidence he never saw and thus could not analyze. Out on patrol, or on the scene of a detonation, he felt like he was hiking in the wilderness and tying to enforce a Leave No Trace ethic: take only pictures, leave only footprints … but not in the middle of the crime scene, and not in that sandal print, I’m going to need a photo of that.

  So Frost started working outside the system. When he couldn’t get a report from a particular intelligence agency, he pulled the information from their classified online databases himself. He hung out with the infantry guys. In the Surge, it was now their job to stand on the same street corners every day. They knew who the good and bad guys were, but that information rarely worked itself into official intel channels because they simply weren’t asked.

  At one point in Frost’s tour, IEDs in his AO suddenly started using military ordnance, long after most cells had converted to easier-to-hide homemade explosives. Frost had a hunch and organized a patrol to check on a massive ammunition supply point, ASP 3, in the desert west of Samarra. In 2003 and 2004, the Army Corps of Engineers had hired four private companies to destroy several Iraqi ASPs. In the case of ASP 3, it appeared to Frost that the contractors (many retired military EOD techs) simply got sick of piling up ordnance and disposing of it. So they just poured concrete over the bunkers and left it to dry. It looked as if no one had checked the bunkers in years, and when Frost arrived he found fresh digging and broken chunks of concrete. Within the cement chunks were cylindrical impressions that matched the diameter of the artillery rounds that were appearing in the IEDs. When Frost reported this to Task Force Troy, they assured him that ASP 3 was properly disposed of and could not possibly be the source of his munitions. Frost felt more like a quality assurance inspector than a spook, managing the fallout of a bad contract from years before.

  Frost made headway, but never as much as he would have liked. He investigated a series of bombings against Iraqi Police checkpoints, IEDs that were unusual in construction and only detonated when no one was around. The culprit turned out to be the police captain, laying devices to ensure he and his men were seen as valuable and stayed employed. Another failed bomb maker turned out to be a sixteen-year-old kid who just liked the technical challenge. These two cases represented a tiny (but “non-zero,” in Frost’s words) fraction of the IEDs he saw, but they took valuable time to track down and were hugely disapp
ointing finds.

  Frost can point to a few successes. They found two “mother lode” weapons caches, and they caught nine definite leaders, second layer oil-spot guys, facilitators and planners. But in both cases, they found the mother lode because of an informant. It was rare to get a good source; anyone reliable got snatched up by Special Forces, and the leftover dregs usually just said enough to get paid or save their own skins. And in the case of the nine, two popped from DNA and seven from fingerprints, information kept in the big biometrics database that Frost was not allowed to access. One got caught when he applied for a job. Who applies for a job with the US when they’ve just been planning ambushes and IED attacks?

  Despite his increased understanding of the IED cells, his tracking of their materials, and his drawing of Gallieni oil spots that far outpaced the old pushpin maps, Frost still found it hard to proactively move Left of Boom. His work mostly confirmed intel that had been gathered elsewhere. When a leader was caught, Frost could tie his fingerprints to a certain device. When an informant claimed a weapons cache was hidden in a certain district of Samarra, Frost could prove that was feasible, based on the types of IEDs seen nearby. But he couldn’t put together all the pieces to identify the Engineer or, most importantly for convincing the Army to do a cordon and search, know precisely where he was.

  So, like police forces all over the United States, he was stuck chasing lowlifes. He would rather have spent his time on the kingpins, but who has time for kingpins? That was the point of the Surge, but Frost worked across a wide AO for the conventional Army, not on a Special Forces task force or at a three-letter government agency, and so success was tenuous and incremental. No victory was definitive. Frost never got the Engineer.