Yet JSOC has done a decent job of keeping to itself. The missions we hear about are but a fraction of the missions it completes. Likewise, JSOC has done a remarkable job of hiding from the public the incredible scope of the missions it is assigned and a fine job of preventing anyone outside the circle of trust from obtaining all but the slightest knowledge of its history, organization, function, and structure.
•••
“Brian,” the decorated Naval Special Warfare Development Group deputy commander who planned Neptune’s Spear, had expected to read a lot about his unit—some of it even true—and had participated in conversations with colleagues about the future of the cover narrative given to JSOC. Maybe it was time to loosen things up a bit. A big mission such as this would inevitably degrade JSOC’s capacity to some nontrivial degree, as the efficacy of special operations forces is often inversely proportional to the publicity given to the mission. Brian is no longer a DEVGRU commander, but as with all JSOC colonels and captains, his identity is considered a state secret, protected by the Defense Cover Program. (Brian is also not his real name; because Nicholas Schmidle referred to him as Brian in his excellent August 8, 2011, New Yorker article “Getting Bin Laden,” we will, too.)
As Brian worked with SEAL element planners and intelligence analysts in a warren of rooms at CIA headquarters in Langley during the first months of 2011, he was bemused to find that he was worried about success. He feared that in the operation’s aftermath, reporters might harass the Command for more information about how it worked and what it did. This was, admittedly, a mild concern. There has always been some level of curiosity, and there always would be. A more paramount concern was that someone might leak details of the mission before it happened. The closer to the witching hour, the higher the risk of a compromise. Simply put, JSOC commanders didn’t trust everyone at the White House who would have to be “read in” to the operation. Admiral McRaven did, however, trust Panetta and the director’s decision to brief certain lawmakers on the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence. (Though no lawmakers were given operational briefings about the mission until Osama bin Laden was introduced to the Arabian Sea, the chair and ranking committee members were given cryptic notifications by Panetta that the operation would happen about six hours before it did.)
Thankfully, Brian’s initial fears proved unfounded. Yet what he did not expect were the throngs of tourists flocking to Dam Neck, Virginia, hoping to spot members of the team at known SEAL bars and haunts. Or the two motion pictures put almost immediately into production, with filmmakers contacting members of the squadron. Or the History Channel and Discovery Channel specials, with commentators either knowing nothing at all or revealing too much. (Even President Barack Obama participated in one of them.) Or the book by a former SEAL element commander that directly named the serving captain in charge of DEVGRU. If, as it seemed, JSOC were no longer secret, what would it be? How could it be effective when its existence was all but officially acknowledged and its activities openly reported?
When he assumed command of SOCOM, Admiral McRaven sent word to the Command: The story of U.S. special operations forces (SOF) is a good one, and he wanted to talk forthrightly with the American people about it. Americans could, and should, be proud of their SOF. There would by necessity be exceptions: he would protect the identities of those involved in missions, and he would never talk about missions themselves. In keeping with this promise, he declined to talk about Neptune’s Spear or any other mission for this book.
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By some estimates, 80 percent of JSOC missions launched before 2000 remain classified. Operators from Delta Force and SEAL Team Six infiltrated China with the CIA and mapped the locations of Chinese satellite transmission facilities in the event that the United States ever needed to disable them. On more than one occasion, they’ve engaged Iranian troops on Iranian soil. They’ve fought in Lebanon, in Peru, in the Palestinian territories, and in Syria. They also spent a lot of time shooting up abandoned buildings in U.S. cities, rehearsing hostage rescue situations of every kind. The Command hoards contingency planners. When the president travels overseas, a JSOC team usually shadows him. Its members are trained to take charge should the mammoth security structure of the U.S. Secret Service break down.
Although the bin Laden mission may have been less complicated than other, less well-known operations, it was in many ways the culmination of decades of work. Since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, no single entity—not even the CIA—has done more to degrade and isolate al-Qaeda, to prevent Hezbollah from funneling drug money to terrorists, or to check Iranian influence. Pick a threat, and there’s a good chance the Command is there “mowing the lawn.” (This metaphor is a favorite of JSOC flag and general officers.) The cost of doing so much—indeed, the necessary cost of success—is that the secret force is no longer impenetrably black. Its operators are tired. The casualty rate has been high. And a perennial, hush-hush debate inside the Pentagon has grown vociferous.
During the last decade, the United States has created the most impressive killing machine in the history of the world. What, exactly, will we do with it?
Notes
1. Joint Special Operations Command, United States Special Operations Command, http://www.socom.mil/Pages/JointSpecialOperationsCommand.aspx.
Chapter 2
Doers, Not Teachers
Delta Force, the secret U.S. Army counterterrorist unit, was the brainchild of Colonel Charles Beckwith, a U.S. Army Special Forces officer in Vietnam and a liaison there to the Special Air Service, Britain’s premier special operations force. He immediately recognized the U.S. tactical disadvantage in not having such a direct-action force of its own and pushed hard to make up for lost time. In 1977, the army finally acquiesced to the determined colonel and gave him the funds and the latitude to create the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, better known as Delta Force. As its name would indicate and as Colonel Beckwith later wrote, these men were not teachers (as is the formal mission of special forces—to act as force multipliers by training indigent forces in hostile areas), but doers.1
A little more than two years later, Delta’s first major hostage rescue, in Iran, ended in disaster. Operation Eagle Claw was a joint mission of U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force operators transported by U.S. Air Force MC-130 cargo planes to a secret staging area designated as Desert One, in Iran. Central Intelligence Agency paramilitaries and U.S. Air Force combat air controllers had scouted the area. U.S. Marine helicopters from a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier were set to rendezvous at the base, but when harsh weather and mechanical failures beset the incoming helos, the mission was delayed and ultimately aborted.
The delay, however, created another problem: the idling aircraft at Desert One now required refueling. A miscommunication between an air force combat controller and a marine pilot caused a helicopter to collide with a transport plane. A total of eight airmen and marines died in the explosion. The survivors departed by MC-130 in an emergency evacuation. In addition to the loss of life, the United States suffered a crushing humiliation on the world stage, U.S. special operations forces (already generally held in poor regard by conventional military leadership) appeared second-rate at best, and Iranians gained abandoned helicopters and the intelligence within.
Following the disaster, Colonel Beckwith would immediately press for the formation of a new kind of “joint” command that he’d long proposed, which could train for and execute special operations requiring the best of each branch of the U.S. military. The muddled chains of command, branch rivalries, varied operating procedures, and ad-hoc arrangement that doomed Eagle Claw would be cleared away and reorganized into a unified force—a military within the military.2 By the end of 1980, the organization would essentially absorb the U.S. Army Delta Force and a new U.S. Navy unit called SEAL Team Six (a number inflated by its founder, SEAL Team Two commander Dick Marcinko, to alarm foreign intelligence services) and train alongside the newly minted 16
0th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), or SOAR, an elite collection of the most highly trained rotary wing aircraft pilots in the U.S. Army.
In 1987, the organization was subordinated to a new U.S. Special Operations Command, though JSOC reported directly to the National Command Authority, meaning that its units could be tasked directly by the president and the secretary of defense. The Command existed on the fringes of military operations. If it worked in the shadows before, secretly deploying hunter-killer teams around the world to do the necessary dirty work of the White House, it would now largely vanish completely, but for occasional glimpses in such places as Bosnia, where it hunted war criminals, or in Panama, where it allegedly pursued Pablo Escobar.
The crucial role of JSOC units in the early phase of the campaign against terrorism (when al-Qaeda was largely concentrated in the Punjab) has been chronicled. Sean Naylor’s Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda tells it best—so rich in detail, in fact, that Naylor was declared persona non grata by some JSOC commanders for revealing too much about their operations. In brief: Delta sent half of its force to Afghanistan. Major General Dell Dailey, then commander of JSOC, ordered a second task force of the less experienced DEVGRU SEALs to the region, setting off some territorial friction. Delta operated autonomously, while the SEALs operated with experienced and chagrined U.S. Army Rangers. Despite any simmering tensions, the various teams set about pursuing high-value targets without the benefit of solid intelligence and almost no technical intelligence surveillance assets. Yet many operators on the ground had spent the 1990s on the hunt in Bosnia and Kosovo and leveraged their capabilities to the fullest. In March 2002, the men killed as many as five hundred Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in the Shahi Kot valley in Afghanistan’s Paktia Province, working alongside Green Berets and U.S. Army infantrymen from the 101st Airborne Division. Early failures (such as losing Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora) were matched with successes (for example, the Delta Force capturing Saddam Hussein).
Details of later successes, such as the direct action mission that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, are still coming to light. In this baptism by fire, is easy to imagine the remnants of problems that beset Somalia falling away—no more reliance on nonmilitary operators, no more weak intelligence, no more rivalries. JSOC’s missions in the global war on terror were taxing, but they were normal JSOC missions—reactive, shrouded in secrecy, and peripheral to the larger war effort. In Iraq, several small JSOC teams covertly infiltrated the country before the war officially began. Their goal: find and, if needed, secure chemical and biological weapons Saddam was sure to use against the allied forces. General Stanley McChrystal, the incoming commander of JSOC, would change all of that. He would set the Command on the decisive course that put a controlled pair in Osama bin Laden.
Notes
1. Charlie A. Beckwith and Donald Knox, Delta Force: The Army’s Elite Counterterrorist Unit (New York: Avon, 2000), 39.
2. Ibid., 331.
Chapter 3
Interrogations and Intelligence
The insurgency in Iraq caused panic at the Pentagon. The lack of tactical intelligence was a nontrivial problem. In early June 2003, U.S. commanders in Iraq launched Operation Peninsula Strike, the first of the efforts to sweep away the underbrush that allowed the Fedayeen Saddam to survive. The operation was not a success. On September 12, as violence against coalition forces spiked, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sent a memo to Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. “I keep reading [intelligence community] intel,” he wrote. “It leaves one with the impression that we know a lot—who the people are, what they are doing, where they are going, when they are meeting, and the like. However, when one pushes on that information it is pretty clear that we don’t have actionable intelligence.” Furthermore, Rumsfeld didn’t “have good data on the people we have been capturing and interrogating” in either Iraq or Afghanistan. “I don’t feel I am getting information from the interrogations that should be enabling us as to answer the questions I’ve posed.”1
It is not hard to see how, from this urgent need, a policy of enhanced interrogation techniques might develop, which in the frenzy of war could turn into torture. In 2004, according to a recently declassified memorandum written for Rumsfeld, three years after the start of the war, JSOC now “operated from a reactive rather than a proactive posture and was not structured for the complex, extended-duration operations they currently conduct.” JSOC, he said, “lacked the ‘find and fix’ intelligence fusion capabilities essential” to the war on terrorism. Its intelligence capabilities, “particularly in human intelligence, were very limited.” Rumsfeld, in an interview with one of the authors, would say, “We elevated them and put them on the spear point.”
Such was the situation when Rumsfeld named then Major General Stanley McChrystal as commanding general of JSOC. General McChrystal, the former commander of the 75th Ranger Regiment and a task force commander in Afghanistan, had just completed a Pentagon tour as vice director of operations on the Joint Staff. He had impressed Rumsfeld, who admired him for defending the Iraq war in public, despite harboring private reservations.2
McChrystal had, with the help of Marshall Billingslea, the Pentagon civilian in charge of special operations, painstakingly drafted the execute order that allowed JSOC to pursue terrorists in a dozen countries outside Afghanistan and Iraq, subject to various rules imposed by the National Security Council. (JSOC could not set foot in Iran; it had to jump through hoops to chase terrorists in Pakistan; Somalia was an open zone.) McChrystal, compact, intense, and stone-faced, was known for his Ranger high-and-tight, his minimal tolerance for bureaucracy, and his talent as a constant innovator. (To wit: Before he put on his first star, he had rewritten the U.S. Army hand-to-hand combat curriculum.) He is at once disarming and intimidating in person. He struck some subordinates as a monk, largely because he was an introvert, and the nickname JSOC personnel give to their boss—the Pope—became synonymous with McChrystal, more so than with any JSOC commander, before or since. (The Pope moniker traces its lineage to Janet Reno, the attorney general under President Bill Clinton, who once complained that getting information out of JSOC was like trying to pry loose the Vatican’s secrets.)
McChrystal slept in tents with his men. Once, General Doug Brown, the commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command and McChrystal’s boss, visited a JSOC team forward deployed in a war zone, expecting that his office would befit his three-star billet. It turned out to be an austere eight-foot by ten-foot prisonlike cell. It wasn’t for show that McChrystal accepted the designation of commander, Joint Special Operations Command Forward—he was always with his men. Indeed, under his command, JSOC’s headquarters back in Fayetteville often had little to do. McChrystal brought everything with him. But, as a decorated Ranger colleague of McChrystal’s recalls of the period, “We were cowboys in 2003 and 2004 . . . we were accountable to no one.”
McChrystal inherited a command that included the military’s brightest and boldest but also most overburdened. Indeed, his predecessor, Major General Dell Dailey, wanted to scale back JSOC’s missions after Afghanistan in order to give the teams time to regroup.3 The Rangers, in particular, had just finished Operation Winter Strike, clearing large swaths of territory in Afghanistan at the end of 2003. Task Force 1-21, JSOC’s regional task force, followed.4 The demands on JSOC were prodigious, and they lacked a strategy or central focus for success. Even though the spigot of money for counterterrorism operations was open, the Command often had to beg to get a fixed-wing aircraft in the air. Simply put, JSOC lacked the resources, the structure, and the strategy to carry out its mission. McChrystal’s first instinct was true to his infantry roots: he wanted more combined arms training for the units, but he quickly realized he had a much larger problem. As the war in Iraq turned ugly, no one really knew how to solve what in military terms was known as the “OODA problem.”
An OODA loop is a te
rm coined by the late military strategist John Boyd to refer to the way fighting organizations adapt: observe, orient, decide, and act. The challenge of fighting insurgencies is that smaller groups tend to outlast their larger adversaries because small groups have OODA loops measured in nanoseconds when compared with the lumbering decision chains of major world armies. The enemy is thus always a step ahead of even armies with the best technology and hardened soldiers.
Complicating matters was the existence of excess “blinks” between the development of a piece of intelligence and its use on the battlefield. Most of the actionable intelligence the United States received came from foreign sources (the Brits were particularly good in Iraq, as were the Kurds). The National Security Agency had yet to get a full read on Iraq’s rudimentary but highly distributed cell phone network. The U.S. intelligence community bickered over high-tech surveillance resources, and agencies refused to talk to one another. British journalist Mark Urban, writing in Task Force Black, a narrative history about U.S.-UK cooperation in Iraq, quotes a senior British officer as saying that the CIA’s refusal to share information with even its own countrymen was “catastrophic.”
Such confusion and desperation are two reasons harsh interrogations seemed morally permissible at the time. At the very least, enemy combatants would say something, which would set in motion kinetic operations. This, at least, gave the appearance of movement toward a goal.
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The Command: Deep Inside the President's Secret Army Page 2