Contents
Chapter 1: The Tip of the Spear
Chapter 2: Doers, Not Teachers
Chapter 3: Interrogations and Intelligence
Chapter 4: Find, Fix, and Finish
Chapter 5: The Tools for the Job
Chapter 6: A Known Unknown
Chapter 7: When You See the Word National, You Know It Is Important
Chapter 8: The Activity
Chapter 9: Semper ad Meliora
Chapter 10: Widening the Playing Field
Chapter 11: Target: Africa
The Command
Deep Inside the President’s Secret Army
Marc Ambinder
and
D. B. Grady
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 by Marc Ambinder and D. B. Grady. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Congressman Bo Ginn: Mr. Secretary, the Defense Agencies Supplemental Request includes $15 million for additional funding under the Emergency Construction Fund. Has this fund been used yet for fiscal year 1981?
Secretary Perry Fliakas: Yes, sir, it has. In December of 1980, the Secretary approved a project at $3.2 million for what is a highly classified activity. It’s a joint special operations command at Fort Bragg, and we have another project in the pipeline, if you will, of $3.1 million for similar facilities at Dam Neck in Virginia.
—From House Appropriations Subcommittee Hearings, 19811
Secrecy, or at least the show of it, was central to their purpose. It allowed the dreamers and the politicians to have it both ways. They could stay on the high road while the dirty work happened offstage. If some Third World terrorist or Colombian drug lord needed to die, and then suddenly turned up dead, why, what a happy coincidence! The dark soldiers would melt back into shadow. If you asked them how they made it happen, they wouldn’t tell. They didn’t even exist, see?
—Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down2
Notes
1. Hearings before Subcommittees of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, 97th Cong., 1st sess. part 1, Supplemental Appropriation and Rescission Bill, 1981 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981), 681.
2. Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999), 33.
Chapter 1
The Tip of the Spear
For the SEALs of Red Squadron, putting two bullets in a primary target wasn’t asking much. The insertion aircraft were a little different, a little more crowded than standard Black Hawks, owing to some bolted-on stealth technology recently tested at Area 51. Destination X, a fair-weathered hill town only thirty miles from the capital of Pakistan and well within that country’s borders, would make for a daring incursion. One blip on a station’s radar would scramble Pakistani jets armed with 30mm cannons, air-to-air missiles, and very possibly free-fire orders. Still, it wasn’t anyone’s first time in Pakistan and wouldn’t be the last. When you’re fighting shadow wars everywhere from Iran to Paraguay, quiet infiltrations with no margin for error are simply the expected way to do business.
Those men of the Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU), better known as SEAL Team Six, had spent weeks (and, it later occurred to them, months) training for the mission. That night, the aircrews of the U.S. Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) piloted the one-of-a-kind stealth helicopters through Pakistan’s well-guarded and highly militarized border. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paramilitaries acted as spotters on the ground and monitored the situation from afar. A ratlike RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aerial vehicle operated by the U.S. Air Force 30th Reconnaissance Squadron hovered about fifty thousand feet above Abbottabad, equipped with a special camera designed to penetrate thin layers of cloud and down to a three-story compound below.
The RQ-170 Sentinel drone was designed to monitor nuclear weapons sites in Iran and North Korea. The National Security Council, however, had granted special permission for its use over Pakistan. To mitigate diplomatic fallout in the event the drone were to crash in Pakistan, the U.S. Defense Department disallowed nuclear-sensing devices from the aircraft, in opposition to wishes of the CIA.
Transmitters on this drone’s wing beamed encrypted footage to an orbiting National Reconnaissance Office satellite, which relayed the signal to a ground station in Germany. Another satellite hop brought the feed to the White House and elsewhere.
The Sentinel had spent months monitoring and mapping the Abbottabad compound. The area would fall into scrutiny after intelligence analysts learned that the high-value target in question communicated by courier. Captured enemy combatants—some subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques—fleshed out details. A name. A description. A satellite first spotted the courier’s van, and the drone circled. Ground crews in Afghanistan attached sophisticated laser devices and multispectral sensors to the drone’s underbelly, allowing the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency to create a three-dimensional rendering of that little piece of Pakistan. Details were so precise that analysts managed to compute the height of the tall man in question they nicknamed “the Pacer.” When it wasn’t gathering imagery intelligence (IMINT), the drone would sometimes fly from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to Abbottabad and back, on signals intelligence (SIGINT) operations, listening to the routine chatter of Pakistan’s air defense forces so that U.S. National Security Agency analysts could determine patterns and alert configurations.
There was a scare just three weeks before the Abbottabad raid. While the drone was in transit over a Pakistani airbase, tran
slators listening to the feed picked up Pakistani air controllers alerting crews to an orbiting American reconnaissance plane. Had the Sentinel—designed to evade detection and crucial to the operation—been outed? Moments later, when a Pakistani air controller ordered its fighter pilots to ascend to the altitude of “the EP-3,” Americans could exhale. The Pakistanis were merely practicing for the possible straying of an EP-3E Aries surveillance plane from its permitted flight path from the Indian Ocean into Pakistan.
To the list of units that participated in the Abbottabad mission—otherwise known as Operation Neptune’s Spear—there are others still unknown but whose value was inestimable. Some entity of the U.S. government, for example, figured out how to completely spoof Pakistani air defenses for a while, because at least some of the U.S. aircraft in use that night were not stealthy. Yet at the core of it all were the shooters and the door-kickers of Red Squadron, SEAL Team Six, and a dog named Cairo. It took just forty minutes from boots-on-dirt to exfiltration, and although they lost one helicopter to the region’s thin air (notoriously inhospitable to rotary-wing aircraft), they expended fewer rounds than would fill a single magazine, snatched bags of evidence, and collected a single dead body.
They detonated the lost Back Hawk and slipped like phantoms back to Jalalabad, where DNA samples were taken from the body. They loaded into MH-47 Chinooks and again passed over now-cleared parts of Pakistan, then landed on the flight deck of the waiting USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier. In accordance with Muslim rites, a short ceremony was held above deck (all crewmembers were confined below), and the body of Osama bin Laden was tossed overboard. The after action report doesn’t go into too much more detail than that, but the story of Abbottabad, of seamless integration between elite special forces and the intelligence community, includes many more layers. Lost in the sparkling details of the raid is the immense logistical challenge of providing reliable communications. There was a contingency plan; military interrogators were in place in the Vinson, along with CIA officers, just in case bin Laden was captured alive. The 75th Ranger Regiment played an unknown role in the proceedings. And someone had to later exfiltrate the CIA officers who were on the ground.
The next day, the world changed, but perhaps for no one more so than Red Squadron, SEAL Team Six, and its parent, the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the president’s secret army. At the end of a ten-year American crucible of terrorist attacks and two wars, and as the psychic burden of its citizenry was made all the heavier by a collapse in the financial markets and a near-total dysfunction in government, Operation Neptune’s Spear offered the tantalizing suggestion that something in government could work and did work. Here, government agencies worked together in secret, in pursuit of a single goal. No boundaries separated the intelligence community from the military or one military unit from another. In parlance, it was the perfection of a process thirty years in the making—operations by joint military branches (“Purple”) conducted seamlessly with multiple agencies of the intelligence community (“Gold”). It was the finest example of the apparatuses of state working in concert.
•••
JSOC (JAY-sock) is a special military command established in 1980 by a classified charter. Its purpose is to quietly execute the most challenging tasks of the world’s most powerful nation with exacting precision and with little notice or regard. The Command is clandestine by design. When it makes mistakes, this often means that its singularly lethal techniques were applied to the wrong person, or that the sheer exuberance of being the elite of the elite dulled the razor-sharp moral calculus required of war fighters who have so much autonomy.
Before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, JSOC spent twenty years quietly operating on the periphery of the armed forces, inventing tactics to do the impossible and succeeding in execution. It recruited some of the best soldiers and sailors in the world and put them through the most intense training ever developed by a modern military. The last ten years have witnessed JSOC transform itself and, in so doing, change way the United States and her allies fight wars. This is not an exaggeration or some attempt to burnish the Command’s mythos. Consider these two strategic objectives: suppressing the insurgency in Iraq so that conventional forces could regroup and mount a renewed counteroffensive; and degrading the capabilities of al-Qaeda. Without JSOC’s aggressive fusion of intelligence with operations in real time, and without its warp-speed tempo in tracking high-value targets, the United States would very likely still be slugging it out in the trenches of Iraq, and al-Qaeda would still be a credible threat to U.S. security. Whatever your view of the Iraq campaign or of war itself, and whatever your tolerance for the often nebulous morality of special operations missions, it behooves you to understand how this type of unconventional warfare evolved and what it means as the U.S. military faces significant spending cuts.
The bin Laden assassination bore all of the hallmarks of a modern JSOC operation. It was joint, involving military elements both white and black from different branches of the armed forces. It was interagency, coordinated with the CIA and leveraging the assets of much of the U.S. intelligence community, largely without conflict. It was legal enough; the razing force was temporarily placed under the control of Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, because JSOC isn’t strictly authorized to conduct operations in Pakistan. It was also resource-intensive, involving millions of dollars’ worth of secret equipment, significant satellite bandwidth, the attention of national policymakers, and a swath of military personnel belonging to various commands.
The JSOC is the secret army of the president of the United States. But what does “secret” mean when it involves units virtually everyone has heard of? By the numbers, JSOC’s cover has not changed, and its subordinate units must “study special operations requirements and techniques, ensure interoperability and equipment standardization, plan and conduct special operations exercises and training, and develop joint special operations tactics.”1 Although that’s not a lie, it is to some degree obfuscation. JSOC does indeed plan and conduct special operations exercises, but it also conducts highly sensitive missions that require particularly specialized units. Many of those units have passed into American cultural legend. In many ways, this mythologizing began with Colonel Charlie Beckwith, the father of Delta Force and its first commanding officer, who wrote a book about his unit. Journalist Mark Bowden later revealed in astonishing detail the operational effectiveness, bravery, and brutal efficiency of Delta operators in sustained combat against overwhelming numbers as exhibited in the Battle of Mogadishu. (Ridley Scott would later commit the operation to celluloid in the film Black Hawk Down.) Eric Haney, a former senior noncommissioned officer of Delta, produced a television show called The Unit, based on a book he’d previously written. Years earlier, Charlie Sheen and a camera crew were inexplicably granted access to the actual SEAL Team Six compound in Virginia to film a movie about DEVGRU. And, of course, the beat reporters in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where Delta is headquartered, and Dam Neck, Virginia, where DEVGRU is headquartered, know the names of the colonels and the captains responsible for the military’s most daring forces.
So it’s not quite right to say that the two principal counterterrorism units of JSOC are secret, per se. A better description might be that they are officially unacknowledged. And though he can’t come out and say it, that’s what Ken McGraw, a spokesman for U.S. Special Operations Command, means when he tells reporters he won’t be talking about the “special missions units” with them.
This secrecy is for operational security, but it’s also to remove layers of accountability. JSOC doesn’t want most of our elected leaders to know what it is up to, especially in cases where things go wrong. And most of our elected leaders would rather not know, for the same reason. The secrecy apparatus of JSOC is prodigious in scope, and the Command camouflages itself with cover names, black budget mechanisms, and bureaucratic parlor tricks to keep it that way. It is heavily compartmentalized; the commanding officer o
f Delta knew about Neptune’s Spear only days before the operation. To get around Freedom of Information Act inquiries, JSOC security officers advise operators and analysts to “stick to paper and safes,” as one intelligence operative describes, meaning that for sensitive conversations, nonmilitary cell phones are preferable to classified military computer networks where every keystroke is recorded for use by counterintelligence investigators. JSOC currently participates in more than fifty Special Access Programs, each one designating a particular operation or capability. The programs are given randomly selected and always-changing nicknames and are stamped with code words such as Meridian and Principal that are themselves classified.
The Command’s secrecy can intimidate outsiders, but such an operational culture is a necessity. Among its most sensitive tasks in recent years has been to establish contingency plans to secure the Pakistani nuclear arsenal in the event that the civilian government falls in a military coup d’état. Here, policymakers are given a welcome choice—a choice not to know, which allows senior administration officials to reliably and honestly explain to the public and to Pakistani officials that they are confident in Pakistan’s ability to keep its arsenal safe without having to lie. Only a few political appointees and members of Congress need to know the nature of such contingency plans. Incidentally, JSOC is also a key part of the classified contingency plans to preserve the U.S. civilian government in the event of a coup from the military or anyone else.
It’s clear, however, that the blankets of secrecy are fraying. “If you Google JSOC,” Admiral William McRaven, the commander of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), a former DEVGRU operator and the previous commander of JSOC, has said, “you can find out pretty much everything you want to know.”
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