The helos never turned off their engines. In a minute they were off, six bags of IED evidence, six bags of hard-core forensics, six bags of pressure plates and fingerprints and distinctive wire snips and hairs, permanently sequestered from the conventional reporting channels and hand-delivered to the central depths of one of the fiercest black holes in Afghanistan.
WHEN SOLIMAN ARRIVED back at Bagram, she delivered the six bags to Zac Crush at SOCOM’s IED exploitation fusion cell. Though they worked for the main SOCOM (Special Operations Command) task force in Afghanistan—in the J2, the intelligence hub for activities as varied as hunter-killer takedowns and local police training—Soliman and Crush were not EOD technicians or spooks or Special Forces. They weren’t even in the military. They were contractors. Soliman is a biometrics engineer. Crush is an intel analyst in Identity Operations, SOCOM’s term for figuring out who people are.
Biometrics is the science of measuring and cataloguing unique human signatures, and it is not a new idea. In the late nineteenth century, French police began tabulating the lengths of forearms and feet and jawlines. At the same time, the US Army, in an effort to catch scam artists who enlisted in multiple recruiting stations to receive multiple bonus checks, began recording the distance from the top of the shoulder to the tip of the finger of each new soldier. Scotland Yard adopted fingerprinting in 1901, the New York City police department five years later.
As a system and theory, biometrics is unchanged. To be “enrolled,” a citizen simply has their unique characteristics measured. Then, when they want something (a job, to cross a border, access to a military base or classified information) or when the state wants something of them (evidence connected to a crime), those unique characteristics are measured again and checked against a database. Maybe the criminal had applied for a job; maybe the person applying for a job is an ex-con. In the twenty-first century we turn iris patterns into bar codes, use face recognition software, and flip through fingerprints digitally, but the process is fundamentally the same. Only the scope is different; millions of electronic records can be scoured in minutes versus thousands of paper records in days or weeks.
As a biometrics engineer, it was Sarah Soliman’s job to implement that scope. She helped develop the technology, tested it, taught it, and, in a pinch, used it herself. In 2011 and 2012, she traveled across Afghanistan in order to teach Special Forces units to gather the biometrics data—fingerprints, three photos, iris scans—of every Afghan they met. On the side, she was a courier, carrying forensic IED evidence back to the main SOCOM intel cell, but her prime job was that of the evangelist, selling and teaching a new way to fight the war.
Conducting a census of the population is a classic counterinsurgency strategy. It is also classic counterterrorism, a way to positively identify who needs killing.
Iraq was always a conventional war: large traditional Army divisions and brigades, firm AOs and lines of demarcation. In contrast, the war in Afghanistan was, from the beginning, a task force war. The Rangers went here, SOF went there, SEALs on this mission, 10th Mountain Division in a thrust to Tora Bora. That culture persisted as the years went on, and task forces were set up for everything: Paladin did the IEDs, ODIN did the aerial surveillance. Each NATO partner had their own designation. The task forces known only by a number often did the killing. SOCOM set up a tongue twister known as CJSOTF-A: Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force Afghanistan. CJSOTF (pronounced “See-Jah-SO-Tiff”) broke the country up into districts that did not match the larger Army regional command system and allowed each ODA team within this proprietary framework to act as a mini–task force itself.
No wonder, then, that biometrics, a system that functions properly only if built on a monolithic foundation, would find a foothold in Iraq long before Afghanistan. In 2007, two systems were fielded: the Biometric Automated Toolset and the Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment, known to soldiers in Iraq as BATs and HIIDEs. The BATs used a laptop and heavy scanner and sat at the front gate of every FOB to check any local who wanted access. The HIIDE looked like an old-fashioned bulky digital camera, and could be taken on patrol. This allowed two important developments. First, the entire country could be enrolled if soldiers would serve as door-to-door census takers. Second, when a unit detained someone suspicious, instead of just dousing them in Expray (which would make their hands turn black if they had touched explosives or fertilizer or both), one could immediately scan their eyeballs to find out if they were wanted men.
Afghanistan did not fully adopt biometrics until the next generation of mobile device was fielded. It was called the SEEK, proof that nerds have a sense of humor. It took iris scans and photos and, unlike the HIIDE, FBI standard nail-to-nail rolled fingerprints. “Ten rolled is gold,” Soliman would say in her classes. SEEKs were fielded to both Special Forces teams and average Army patrols during the Afghanistan Surge; the surge in manpower was also a surge in data, to move Left of Boom.
The biometrics database was one of the few that was truly DoD-wide, and if searched correctly, it could reveal a map of the IED supply chain. The same fingerprints were always found on blasting caps or on the tape inside pressure plates; repeat offenders were the norm. Who applies for a job after emplacing IEDs? Soliman met them all the time. The unemployed, the desperate, the poor, the cuckolded, the cajoled, the ignorant. Computers are magic here, she thought. How can the average Afghan even conceive of a searchable database system of fingerprints and iris scans?
But biometrics could only take you so far. Zac Crush tried to fuse various streams of forensic data and saw the limits every day. He was an analyst in an IED deconstruction office, an intel cell somewhat analogous to Chris Frost’s Weapons Intelligence Team. Frost didn’t trust his headquarters in Baghdad and so did his own analysis in Samarra. CJSOTF found the national system set up by Task Force Paladin, the main counter-IED organization in Afghanistan, too slow and cumbersome, and so it hired contractors like Crush to do IED exploitation locally. Special Forces needed forensic answers faster than the conventional military could give them, and so it created its own feedback loop in its own black hole, fed by IEDs recovered by their teams. Compared to the experts working in the big evidence labs in Bagram, analysts like Crush sometimes had less specific training and had to do multiple jobs, but he produced reports quickly that could be used immediately. This is what he found:
So you have a fingerprint. So what? A fingerprint by itself is useless unless you have records to check it against, and the biometrics database for Afghanistan was always incomplete. And even if you found a match and discovered that a print on a battery in Kandahar in 2012 matched one collected from an individual who applied for a job in Mazer-e-Sharif in 2009, there is very little that can be done at that moment. You know that guy’s name, but you don’t know where he is now. So you flag his profile in case he randomly pops again. And anyway, all you really know is that he touched a battery. You don’t know exactly how he fits into the process. The complete IED network map does not instantly spring into focus once a match is made; it was always fragmented, a concentration of data here, large holes there.
Tracking individual data points is not enough. Soliman’s databases sorted through millions of head/tail penny combinations and set priority lists for the analysts. Crush tied that biometrics info to actual devices. But to move beyond grabbing trigger pullers and tape touchers, to break into an IED network Gallieni oil spot’s second and third rings, an additional level of analysis and ingenuity is required.
In the J2 black hole, such profile-building was the job of contractors like Hayes.
Hayes goes by his first name. He is physically forgettable, and his Southern accent is often well concealed. Part psychologist, part anthropologist, part straight-from-a-police-procedural detective, Hayes was trained in multiple types of intelligence collection. He did biometrics and sensors and detainees as well as traditional targeting and analysis, and like an MBA who speaks multiple languages fluently, international business oppo
rtunities opened to him.
When he deployed to Afghanistan, Hayes found himself reading as many histories as current reports, and it was the academic texts concerning Genghis Khan and the empire building of the Ghilzais that made the most sense to him. The Ghilzais were the predecessors of the modern Pashtuns that form the bulk of the Taliban, and they had not changed greatly in centuries. Insular, tribal, stubborn. They outlast empires and don’t tolerate foreigners in their valleys. Eventually Hayes realized his whole intelligence process was built on so many false assumptions, he thought it was amazing they found anyone at all.
Take, for example, the simple idea of names.
In America and the West, everyone has a unique name. It is generally permanent, and we organize and search for people based on their names. The Western tradition assumes that strangers will interact, and so it privileges the easy building of a large social network, using fixed names as reference. The biometrics intelligence databases are built on this system. The fingerprints and iris scans and photos must be attached to a record, and that record is identified by the individual’s name. Iraq’s naming system was generally stable, secular, and Western. Iraqis occasionally used a kunya, deriving a nickname from one’s child, but it was saved for the notable or infamous. Biometrics fit fairly well.
Afghanistan’s naming convention, on the other hand, privileges tribal integrity, isolationism, and long-term relationships with a few close family members in one’s clan. Why do you need a system to meet a stranger? Strangers stay in their valley, and you stay in yours. Given that, Hayes found that names were fluid and repeated often. The same individual might have multiple public names, depending on his relationship to the person asking. The name might change throughout a life as the person changes. These weren’t criminal or hadith-directed aliases, but rather natural shades on a theme. The same name could be spelled many ways, often by the same individual. Afghans know the personal history of those in their village—sometimes also assigning traditional Arabic and Islamic titles of hafiz, qari, and mullah if the person memorized the Koran as a child, speaks it well, or works at the local mosque—and everyone’s current name is easily and intuitively understood. Even if the infantry grunt entering the name in the SEEK spelled it right, it was a temporary name alone.
Hayes saw that he was checking fingerprints against a database as impermanent as last winter’s snow. But there were so few other means to collect intelligence. No individual American military unit stayed in place long enough to truly earn the kind of trust required to get people to talk willingly. No one watched state-run television, and most villagers got their news at their local marketplace and mosque. It was very difficult for Americans to listen in on that conversation, to even know what the average Afghan was hearing about current events. Analysts used to be able to rely on signals intelligence, intercepted radio communications. They called it SIGINT crack, because it was so addicting and easy to use and exploit, but it was a crutch, covering up for a lot of bad methodology and lesser analysis. The enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan had learned to guard their communications, and the good old crack days were now long gone.
Often, Hayes knew, the biometrics was the best they had, the only objective link between individual and bomb.
ON ONE TOUR, while Hayes was an analyst in the J2, Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan exploded like a pressure cooker heated on the stove too long. Every measurable toll spiked: deaths, injuries, gunfights, IEDs. The lethality of each IED suddenly leapt as well, and new designs were seen throughout the district.
There’s a new guy here, Hayes thought. There’s a new trainer in town.
Hayes didn’t call him the Engineer. He wasn’t the Smart Guy either. In the J2, the analysts called him the So-Called Expert. But despite the name, an expert he was, and respected. Hayes knew that bad bomb makers didn’t live long enough to have the kind of impact he was seeing.
In his databases, Hayes’s profile for the Engineer was thin. He didn’t have fingerprints or an iris scan or a photo or even a name. Of course, the Engineer’s Afghan name might be evolving as well.
Hayes only had one firm hit. A series of fingerprints in the hot glue used to attach carbon rods to wooden pressure plate boards. Mohammed from Kunduz. Not Mohamed or Muhammad. Three M’s and an E. Good luck finding just one Mohammed in Kunduz, Hayes thought, here’s the phone book. But this one had previously applied for a job down south, so they had a name and a face to match to the glue on fifteen IEDs. Thank God for the photos. Without those it was almost impossible to pick up the right guy.
Hayes took the reports to his commander. This was a place to start, Hayes said. We start with Mohammed, and we work our way up. They should do a targeted data collection, Hayes said. Verify or enroll everyone living within a few klicks of every IED bearing Mohammed’s hot glue.
In a case like this, it would be Soliman’s job to get on a helicopter and link up with the local ODA team. She would deliver new SEEKs and software and repair equipment and train them to cast the wide net, enroll every villager and dirt farmer throughout the valley.
That’s the funny thing about using biometrics. The only way to find one person is to find everyone.
WE’VE ALREADY ESTABLISHED that all these stories seem to begin on September 11, and Sarah Soliman’s trip to that helicopter is no exception.
It was the United Way Day of Caring in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, and Soliman was with her high school senior class in a local park, picking up trash when the towers fell. She had already planned to attend her local West Virginia University on scholarship, but after 9/11 she decided to apply her interest in math and science to WVU’s biometrics engineering program, the only one of its kind in the nation. In her major, she fell in love with data. On a semester abroad in Morocco, she fell in love with travel and exotic cultures. During internships at the White House and the DoD’s Biometrics Management Office in DC, she secured her future in government. She spent a year getting her master’s degree in the UK, and then she traded idyllic green Cambridge for the Green Zone in Baghdad. It was 2008, and her first job out of college was working as a biometrics contractor.
That was her first tour, and she would come to think of them as tours. It wasn’t exactly the same as being in the military, she knew. She didn’t take the same risks certainly. But she went back and forth, deployed and home, for the next several years.
In the Green Zone, she worked in a glorified DMV, checking locals who wanted to work on base. She read Imperial Life in the Emerald City as preparation, and it was everything she expected: a college campus in the middle of a war she barely saw. She learned all of the cultural norms, kept her arms covered and her hair long. She learned to say, “Welcome,” and “Happy to meet you,” and “Please open your eyes,” in halting Arabic. She wore blouses and skirts and heels and earrings to “glam it up a bit” but avoided black because it showed the dust, swearing to herself that if she ever felt tempted to convert to the standard contractor uniform of polo shirts and 5.11 khakis, then it was time to get a new job. She met a handsome man in her office one day and fell in love with him during Tuesday night country line-dancing lessons under the crystal chandeliers and engraved ceilings of Saddam’s marble palace. She married that man when they returned to the United States, and then she did what we all did; she left him at home to go on another deployment.
She spent half of the next year on the flight line at Kandahar, helping to launch sorties for Task Force ODIN. Most military acronyms don’t make much sense when their component terms are written out, but the Norse god–inspired ODIN gets pretty close: Observe, Detect, Identify, Neutralize. ODIN was ostensibly an Army unit but really consisted of a mishmash of contractors. The only members in uniform were quality assurance representatives serving as “systems integrators,” making sure all of the companies worked together. It was a Go-Co program: the government owned the planes, the pilots and technicians were contractors. They flew a variety of platforms, from the Army’s version of the Pr
edator to modified King Airs measled with antennas. The first commander of ODIN was Army Colonel A. T. Ball, and he said their mission was “sensor-to-shooter” fusion, “persistent stare capability,” and “dynamic re-tasking.” The policy wonks call this Network-Centric Warfare, using our network to take out theirs. More oil spots.
Soliman’s role in this process was minuscule. She ensured one small device on one aircraft was functioning. Meanwhile, the other airframes bubbled with sensor pods that listened to radio communications and smelled fertilizer-based homemade explosives and did a million other things she knew nothing about. Most of her tour she was isolated, on one far side of the flight line, killing time in her little parts shed. General McChrystal had recently determined that everyone was having too much fun in the war, and so had made life more Spartan, closing restaurants and coffee shops on base. She was lonely, but she was introduced to a world she barely knew existed. In Baghdad, she had only seen the tiniest sliver of these secret missions. Who flies these planes? She knew that, when she came back, she wanted the best of both worlds, the social and the surveillance, and to transition from building Gallieni oil spots to dismembering them.
And now here she was, assigned to CJSOTF and the J2, working with operators and analysts, on a helicopter flying to train a special operations team to use a technology that continued to fascinate her.
So much had changed since her first tour. Then, she had only one week at Fort Benning as preparation: marching and guns and shots and scary sucking-chest-wound PowerPoints and two green seabags for her gas mask and vest and helmet. The first time she flew on a helicopter out of Baghdad, she was so nervous. Her future husband calmed her fears then, but she didn’t know what to wear, what to do. She wore a ridiculous winter coat on that first flight and was somehow still cold. But the flight was a liberation from the Green Zone, and a beautiful ballet in the air, she thought.
All the Ways We Kill and Die Page 19