In the early days of the chase for al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) did most of the interrogating. JSOC intelligence gatherers watched but did not participate. By October 2002, an internal JSOC assessment of interrogations at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, found that the resistance techniques of enemy combatants “outmatched” the interrogation techniques of U.S. forces. Higher headquarters was not satisfied with the results, and JSOC picked up the rope. The Command established a task force to determine whether its operators should directly interrogate the “designated unlawful combatants” they captured. One month later, U.S. military Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) instructors taught certain members of JSOC the finer points of harsh interrogation. (These operators, like all members of the special operations forces community, had previously attended SERE school as prisoners so as to learn how to effectively resist torture.) Around this time, some JSOC operators were read into a classified program called MATCHBOX that included direct authorization to use certain aggressive interrogation techniques in the field. (For example, the best way to throw a detainee against a wall.)
Who chartered MATCHBOX (also known by the unclassified nickname COPPER GREEN, as revealed by journalist Seymour Hersh) remains a mystery. No one wants to take credit for it. Yet as a result of the program, JSOC adopted a standard operating procedure (SOP) for Afghanistan that included the use of stress positions, barking dogs, and sleep deprivation, among various other physical inducements.
When JSOC Task Force 6-26 set up operations in Iraq, it extended the practice, copying the SOP in its entirety, essentially only changing “Afghanistan” to “Iraq” on its letterhead. The primary mission of 6-26 was to hunt, kill, or capture high-value targets. At the top of the list: former senior members of the Baathist regime, followed by al-Qaeda and foreign fighters who flocked to the war zone en masse seeking a pound of Uncle Sam’s flesh.
Just after the fall of Saddam Hussein, U.S. Army Rangers claimed a small Iraqi military base near Baghdad International Airport for use by special operations forces. Camp Nama, as it is called, was purposed to hold enemy combatants thought to possess actionable intelligence about the locations of 6-26 targets. The limits of enemy interrogation as defined in a revised, more humane SOP soon fell by the wayside. Personnel from Task Force 6-26 (with the participation of members of the DIA) subjected prisoners to intense physical, psychological, and occasionally lethal interrogation.
The Senate Armed Services Committee investigation into detainee abuse in Iraq includes several harrowing accounts of the interactions between conventional military officers and JSOC commanders. Reportedly, special operations officers acted as though they were above the law, and the Senate review later concluded that JSOC interrogators regularly brutalized their detainees. At the time, members of both the Central Intelligence Agency and the DIA sent word up their respective chains of command that JSOC was possibly breaking the law. An effort by the Defense Department requiring JSOC to adhere to its own set of interrogation standards was ignored. One senior Joint Staff official testified that he would give 6-26 commanders a copy of the new SOP to sign every day. Every day, it would be “lost.” It was never signed.
During numerous visits by outside personnel, higher-ranking non-JSOC officers halted interrogations midway. JSOC personnel seemed to be flouting their harsh techniques with impunity. It got so bad that by late 2003, the DIA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and British interrogation teams stopped all cooperation with JSOC.
The lack of accountability was startling to long-term military interrogators such as Lieutenant Colonel Steven Kleinman, who had been dispatched to Iraq to review and modify JSOC detainee operations. One Iraqi was picked up for allegedly knowing a lot about bridges. The bridges in question would turn out to be of the calcium-and-enamel variety—he was a dentist. Kleinman later testified that he considered the JSOC facility to be “uncontrolled.”
McChrystal commanded JSOC for more than a year before the harsh interrogations finally stopped. People close to McChrystal say that when he toured Camp Nama facilities, the interrogators would be on their best behavior and seemed to be following the classified SOP he had approved. By the end of 2004, however, it became clear that the abuses were habitual and institutionalized. According to Urban, the British Special Air Service (SAS) informed McChrystal that it would no longer participate in operations where detainees were sent to “black” sites, which now included a kennel-like compound near Balad, Iraq, and another at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. Up until that point, SAS units had been instrumental in helping JSOC uncover the rudiments of an intelligence railway that allowed al-Qaeda to penetrate Iraq so easily.
McChrystal ordered deputy commanding general Eric Fiel to quietly review the practices at Camp Nama. The review, which remains classified and locked in a vault at Pope Army Airfield, resulted in disciplinary action against more than forty JSOC personnel. Several promising careers—including that of the colonel responsible for Nama at the time of the abuses—were ended. McChrystal has since told associates that he did not fully appreciate the degree to which interrogators at all levels lacked guidance and direction.
When the extent of the abuses at Camp Nama was made public, Undersecretary of Defense Cambone was furious with McChrystal, accusing the general of abusing the authority given to him. McChrystal, to put it mildly, did not appreciate being blamed for a program he did not create and by most accounts knew almost nothing about. A still-classified internal Pentagon investigation of McChrystal was initiated on Cambone’s insistence. Its conclusions are not publicly available, but it is known that they did not undermine confidence in the Pope. (Cambone did not respond to a request from us to discuss the subject.)
In some ways, the detainee abuse scandals gave McChrystal a platform to clean house at JSOC, and by most accounts he did. He flew to JSOC operating locations around the world and insisted that the era of harsh interrogations—except in the direst of circumstances—was over.
“My sense is that we just didn’t know much about how to work or handle the detainees,” said a senior military official whose service at JSOC spanned the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. “The mistakes that were made during our initial forays into detainee exploitation were more about ignorance and just trying to figure out this art, rather than any malicious attempt to violate any policies or regulations. We also suffered from a lack of trained personnel who didn’t understand what was effective interrogation.” He added, “Then General McChrystal’s leadership drove the need for a fix and professionalizing the force, and then General [Michael] Flynn drove the execution.”
Notes
1. Donald Rumsfeld, memorandum to Steve Cambone, September 12, 2003, http://library.rumsfeld.com/doclib/sp/1922/2003–09–12%20to%20Steve%20Cambone%20re%20(no%20subject).pdf, accessed January 20, 2012.
2. McChrsytal’s views on Iraq, from a senior official who discussed it with him contemporaneously.
3. Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 216, iPad edition.
4. Tony Shaffer, promotional letter for Operation Dark Heart (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, June 2010), http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2010/09/dark-promo.pdf.
Chapter 4
Find, Fix, and Finish
General Michael Flynn is the sixth eldest of nine children and grew up in a poorer section of gilded Newport, Rhode Island. He is slender, with fierce, dark eyes. According to his brother Charles, a fellow army general, “You don’t get out of a family like that without learning how to scrap.”
Flynn first worked with Stanley McChrystal in the Afghanistan campaign, when the former was the intelligence officer for the army’s XVIII Airborne Corps and the latter assumed command of Task Force 180. At the start of the Iraq campaign, Flynn became a senior special forces intelligence officer, and McChrystal was called to Washington
for Joint Staff duty. Secretary Donald Rumsfeld soon appointed McChrystal to head JSOC, and a year later, McChrystal asked Flynn to be his top intelligence officer.
To the extent that a man such as Flynn has martial fantasies, one has always been to integrate intelligence and fight a war in real time. In Afghanistan, early efforts at fusion teams (called Cross Functional Teams) were modestly successful but “depended on voluntary participation and their authorities were limited,” according to an influential study by National Defense University academics Christopher Lamb and Evan Munsing.1 At Bagram Airfield, the first formal Joint Interagency Counter-Terrorism Task Force helped several task forces in the early phase of the al-Qaeda conflict. Yet intelligence analysts did not sit in the same meetings as operators. Real-time access to databases was limited. Everyone understood the concept—battlefield forces needed intel—but no one really knew how to execute it. And everyone was obsessed with keeping JSOC’s secrets a secret, even at the cost of collecting and sharing actionable intelligence.
As his intelligence officer (or J-2, or “two”), Flynn operated with General McChrystal’s full authority. He leveraged his friendships with senior members of U.S. intelligence to send more analysts into the field. By force of personality, and during the course of several years, Flynn convinced officials everywhere from the State Department to the Internal Revenue Service to staff the experimental new interagency fusion teams he was developing. He crossed Iraq, trying to better integrate JSOC’s mission (which mostly involved hunting high-value targets) with other special operation forces and conventional units. (Before Flynn’s efforts began, when JSOC conducted a combat mission, the battle space would be cleared of conventional forces lest anyone disturb the secrecy of a black operation.) Flynn discovered that most intelligence and interrogation reports collected by JSOC units were stamped ORCON, meaning, “originator controlled,” which effectively precluded anyone else—even the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—from seeing them. He wondered how often conventional forces missed an opportunity to capture or kill a bad guy because they couldn’t gain access to JSOC task force intelligence. Flynn issued an order that JSOC information should be classified only at the Secret level, bringing tens of thousands of intelligence analysts around the world into the fold.
McChrystal and Flynn slowly coaxed the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Defense Intelligence Agency back into JSOC interrogations and insisted to the agencies that he would deal with abuse complaints directly. McChrystal even charmed the CIA, bringing its main special operations liaison into his secure video conference calls (but he instructed the man to never, ever tell his superiors at Langley untruths about what JSOC was up to). McChrystal was famously enthusiastic for video conferencing and used the technology to “gather” officers, operators, ambassadors, politicians, and members of the intelligence community around the world in the same room to resolve issues and design strategy. In fact, his unit spent more than $100,000 on video teleconferencing bandwidth during the early stages of the counterinsurgency operation in Iraq. As his counterterrorism efforts in the Horn of Africa increased, he likewise coordinated regular videoconferences between CIA station chiefs, U.S. ambassadors, and policymakers in Washington.2
If it surprises you that it took years for the CIA—which is tasked with gathering intelligence on terrorists—to establish a regular, senior-level presence in daily conference calls with the military units tasked with killing terrorists, you can begin to sense the frustration that fed Flynn’s and McChrystal’s determination to set things right.
Changing the culture of a mysterious organization such as JSOC is hard, and it took more than three years before Flynn and McChrystal could create the real-time, flattened battlefield that allowed coalition troops to significantly reduce violence in Iraq. General Doug Brown of Special Operations Command eventually pulled in more than a hundred liaison officers from agencies and entities across the government, telling them that they were expected to be part of the team, not just note takers at briefings.
McChrystal and Flynn came to realize around the same time that JSOC’s operational tempo could be rapidly stepped up by introducing radical decentralization and radical transparency into an organization that had always been centralized and extraordinarily discrete. Flynn once told one of McChrystal’s deputies that his “ah-ha” moment came when he saw that the key to actually doing tactical military intelligence right was as simple as making sure that everyone had access to everything.3
At another moment in history, with any other unit, these insights might not have produced even a ripple of change, much less a wave. Yet JSOC was special and feared, and the bureaucracy paid extra attention to it. McChrystal was uniquely suited for the challenge—humble and exacting, capable of incorporating into his inner circle personalities (such as Flynn’s) that were the opposite of his own.
And there was urgency. Nothing but JSOC’s networked warfare was working. Not the CIA’s operations, not whatever the National Counterterrorism Center thought it was, not outsourcing intelligence to liaison organizations. JSOC’s success begat success. Iraq was a horrible place to be as JSOC’s operational strategy gelled. Sometimes, Iraqi police would have to cart fifty dead bodies a day to the morgue in Baghdad alone. Lieutenant General David Petraeus, the commanding general of the Multi-National Force in Iraq at the beginning of the McChrystal era and then, in his second tour, as the usher of President George W. Bush’s surge, had a slightly more measured view of JSOC’s success; he knew how much his conventional forces were contributing to missions that JSOC was supplementing, and he was not above pulling rank to refuse to authorize a JSOC mission when he felt it would compromise another strategic goal. Yet he deeply respected McChrystal for his strategic vision. Likewise, McChrystal saw in Petraeus the model of a warrior-intellectual that he aspired to be. The two men got along well; had their relationship not developed, it would have been disastrous to the mission.4 Petraeus, now the director of the CIA, is on better terms with special missions unit commanders than any of his predecessors ever were, because they served under him just prior to his appointment.
•••
A newly minted real admiral named William McRaven was equally instrumental in their endeavors. The former SEAL Team Six member and SEAL Team Four commander had just spent eighteen months as a director on the National Security Council (NSC). He’d been itching to get back to the combat zone during his tenure at the NSC, but his time at the top of the chain proved useful. He now knew the bureaucracy in ways that McChrystal and Flynn did not, and he knew its trigger points. McRaven was given command of the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force–Arabian Peninsula, which oversaw all JSOC operations in Iraq. He had a direct line to the White House through his former boss, Michele Malvesti, the senior National Security Council director for combating terrorism. (They shared adjoining desks in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.)
After mending old wounds and reorganizing the bureaucracy, the three men turned their guns to the doctrine itself. Flynn and McChrystal wanted to operationalize what Flynn calls “network-centered warfare,” a PowerPoint term that conceals as much as it reveals. With Malvesti’s help, they developed a new model of using intelligence to aid combat against terrorists and insurgents. Technology now allowed (at least, in theory) for the reduction of blinks between collecting and exploiting a piece of intelligence. The model went by the initials FFFEAD, or F3EAD—find, fix, finish (that is, the getting of the bad guys), exploit, analyze, and disseminate (that is, using the first get to get other bad guys). The “finish” of F3EAD—the kill—is certainly the most dangerous part of any operation. “But exploitation is where you truly made your money and enabled you to go after a network, vice a single target, once we all embraced F3EAD, which was relatively quickly,” said a U.S. Army Ranger who served in Iraq. “This was the strength of McChrystal and Flynn. They believed in the process and then set out to resource it.”
As simple and intuitive as it sounds, F3EAD was terrifi
cally difficult to actually do. Most soldiers—even the elite special operations forces—were trained on a much less elegant model that privileged firepower and hardware over thinking and strategizing. For Flynn, the key word in the model is “disseminate.” Information, he told one colleague, “was fucking less than worthless” if it couldn’t be widely distributed. This meant that JSOC’s culture had to change. No longer could it be some secret task force. It had to open the tent. Meanwhile, high-level commanders in Iraq had to learn to be patient.
Notes
1. Christopher J. Lamb and Evan Munsing, Secret Weapon: High-Value Target Teams as an Organizational Innovation (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University, 2011), 11.
2. Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 223, iPad edition; Sean D. Naylor, “Years of Detective Work Led to Al-Qaeda Target,” Army Times, November 21, 2011.
3. Based on interviews with firsthand participants.
4. From the author’s brief interview with Richard Holbrooke, the special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, shortly before his death.
Chapter 5
The Tools for the Job
At the National Security Council (NSC), Admiral William McRaven chaired an informal task force that took inventory of the secret aircraft and surveillance platforms of the United States—what the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had, what the air force had, what JSOC had, and so on. They also evaluated the specialized and highly classified Pentagon units that designed and fielded such technology. The traditional Pentagon acquisition process is lethargic, but shortly afterward, and in a rare show of intellectual synergy, Congress authorized an enormous buying spree in 2003 and 2004.
The Command: Deep Inside the President's Secret Army Page 3