The Command: Deep Inside the President's Secret Army

by Ambinder, Marc;Grady, D. B.

Today, drones are a ubiquitous presence in global airspace. Without them, it’s possible that Osama bin Laden would still be alive. Yet when General Stanley McChrystal assumed command of JSOC, the Command didn’t have one to its name. There were, in fact, no intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) resources whatsoever. General Michael Flynn had to beg for time on specialized collection platforms such as Medium Altitude Reconnaissance System airplanes, with which he could track insurgents on the ground, and RC-12 Guardrails, innocuous jets that contain highly sensitive signals intelligence collection equipment. With the NSC’s assent, Flynn expanded a unit called the Technical Development Activity, which flew secretly developed, manned reconnaissance and surveillance aircraft. He chained it to JSOC for use in Iraq, Pakistan, and, later, Yemen.

  Although the CIA was reluctant to provide institutional resources, the National Security Agency (NSA), under the directorship of General Keith Alexander, was quick to see the benefits of giving Flynn the best personnel and manpower. Several joint CIA/NSA Special Collection Service teams rotated through Balad. Alexander personally participated in a secure teleconference with General McChrystal at least once a week. He sent dozens of engineers directly to Flynn’s headquarters in Balad and to other forward deployed sites, where they implemented a TiVo-like system for signals intelligence that allowed analysts to rapidly process and analyze the take from the NSA’s near-total tapping of the telecom networks of several Iraqi cities. USSOCOM Technical Surveillance Elements set up cameras and RFID-chip (radio frequency identification chip) tracking sensors. A quiet Pentagon procurement office, the Rapid Response Technology Office, and a classified department called the Special Capabilities Office, provided more than three hundred technological assets to assist intelligence and special military operations in the CENTCOM (U.S. Central Command) theater.1 About 60 percent of them went operational.2 The army’s Technical Operations Support Activity figured out how to merge sensor data collected on the ground with experimental drones in the air, providing what commanders call “persistent” surveillance. Commanders could now track the bad guys and see their activities 24/7 and could analyze patterns with incredible efficiency. (One promising project involves sensors attached to balloons—the Persistent Threat Detection System.) Tactical satellites were fielded—by 2009, units could task them to view multiple targets and track as many as ten thousand objects per pass. (The unclassified Pentagon office that works on these projects is called the Operationally Responsive Space Office and is run directly out of the Office of the Secretary of Defense.)

  One operational technology that was first attached to drones and later to Artemis geostationary satellites helped JSOC (and then Task Force ODIN in Iraq) figure out where IEDs (improvised explosive devices) might be placed by analyzing how recently the soil had been disturbed. A joint National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)–U.S. Strategic Command project called NGA SKOPE allowed JSOC units to merge data collected from virtually any intelligence source and predict, based on patterns of movement, where insurgents were likely to be and what they were likely to do. (To understand how this works, imagine sensors surreptitiously placed on cars belonging to suspected IED planters. Based on the cars’ locations and orientations during an IED attack, the SKOPE cell could predict future attacks based on similar movements.)

  Three technologies developed by the NSA during this short burst of time proved pivotal. One, which the government has asked us not to describe in detail, involves the ability to pinpoint cell phone signals to within inches of their origin. (In their book Top Secret America, Dana Priest and Bill Arkin refer to an “electronic divining rod” that allowed operators to hone in on cell phone–using bad guys as though the operators were using metal detectors at a beach.)3 Another involves the use of RFID chips in what can only be described as an ingenious way. (Again, details are withheld because the technique is highly classified and still in use.) One technique that SOCOM has shared with researchers, originally code-named BLUE GRASS, involves attaching tiny RFID emitters to vehicles and tracking them through a variety of different platforms.4 In 2005, Project SONOMA helped analyze where cells of insurgents planning IED attacks were clustered. And JSOC was using dyes and perfluorocarbons to track insurgents before the rest of the military was aware that this capability existed.

  It also helped when NSA scientists figured out a way to “un-wipe” supposedly cleared cell phones and extract every number ever called by that phone. When a cell phone is captured at a site, the NSA techs download its data using the new technique and feed it to other analysts who are monitoring the data pulled from cell towers across Iraq. If two numbers match, a team is sent to the area to investigate. The NSA, with help from British intelligence, has created a massive database of computer hard drive and thumb drive identification numbers, allowing analysts to trace connections among militants through the technological litter left at sites.

  JSOC fusion teams and their augments also benefit from the completion of a comprehensive biometrics database that allows for quick identification of insurgents, as well as a quiet revolution in DOCEX (or document exploitation) techniques. Using technology relying on sophisticated algorithms that assign values to data based on the probability that a faint “I” might indeed have been an “I,” DOCEX specialists can reconstruct documents that have been burned. Meanwhile, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) consolidated its media exploitation center and figured out a way to speed up its analysis.5 As late as 2003, lumbering military transport planes had to fly into Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland to drop off unsorted pocket litter by the crate, leaving the DIA’s teams with reams of paper and little context.

  To the credit of the Department of Defense and SOCOM, most of these technologies were classified only until they were fielded and then were quickly downgraded to allow the people fighting the wars to gain access to them and push their limits. If the intelligence agencies had been stingy—if they’d been unwilling to relax security controls or had set up shielding for special access programs—the fusion cells that beat back the insurgency in Iraq and have been used by U.S. forces ever since would simply not have existed. NGA’s SKOPE cell, for example, was highly classified for about two months. Now it is ubiquitous, and its main architect is permitted to acknowledge its existence in the press.6 “A lot of organizations like this—the Rapid Equipping Force, the Robotics Systems Joint Program Office, the Joint IED Defeat Organization, the Biometrics task force, and probably down at JSOC—were essentially start-ups deploying technologies that were unique to the threats of counterinsurgency,” said Brian Smith, an air force captain who worked on energy projects for the Rapid Equipping Force during the early years of the Iraq war.

  •••

  In October 2011, Michael Flynn, the former JSOC J-2, was promoted to lieutenant general and appointed a deputy director of national intelligence. He has been outspoken about the need for reform within the military intelligence community. Many of his fellow flag and general officers in the intelligence community consider him to be too outspoken. His nomination took more than eight months to gestate, as forces within the Pentagon—inside the army, in particular—pushed back, whispering into the ears of senators that Flynn’s tactics did not work when he followed McChrystal to Afghanistan in 2009. Some Democratic senators on the Armed Services Committee believe that Flynn’s championing of bulk data analysis provided a brutally efficient way to kill too many innocent Afghans and may not have been as effective as the military suggests. By this, they mean that instead of targeting people, infantry and special forces units targeted telephone numbers—they would target gatherings of people who had been surreptitiously tagged with chemicals or RFID chips, even if they didn’t precisely know who these targets were.

  Officially, the DIA’s Joint Interagency Task Force–Counter Terrorism vetted the targets, with input from the NSC. In reality, the Joint Prioritized Effects List—the target board—had a lot of phone numbers that a computer had associated with the broad periphery of the insurge
ncy, rather than names of specific terrorists.7 Flynn’s response to this is simple: for one thing, raids weren’t ordered because some Afghan villager happened to call a Taliban commander; commanders had to have a better reason to send Americans into harm’s way than that. One of the hardest tasks that Flynn’s intelligence team faced was figuring out whether contacts between innocent Afghans and those associated with the Taliban were innocent or nefarious. Doing that required a significant amount of collection and analytical time. It required a granular level of knowledge about each village. Plenty of people were collecting all sorts of information—Provisional Reconstruction Teams, Human Terrain Teams, Civil Affairs officers and intelligence gatherers—but it wasn’t being fused or analyzed or appropriately disseminated.

  Flynn wanted to create a middle level of what he termed “information brokers,” who could analyze everything and determine patterns that would allow all parts of the Afghanistan effort—especially the mission to rebuild civil society—to succeed. As he described it, “This vast and underappreciated body of information, almost all of which is unclassified, admittedly offers few clues about where to find insurgents, but it does provide elements of even greater importance—a map for leveraging support and for marginalizing the insurgency itself.” He attempted to divine, in villages and provinces, who was good and who was bad and attempted to flesh out (as much as possible) which members of the Taliban were secretly cooperating with the State Department or the CIA and which members were susceptible to U.S. influence. But Washington saw American body counts and ordered that General McChrystal, as the commanding general of the International Security Assistance Force, force Flynn to reprioritize his resources. He had to stop the flow of money and trainers from Iran who were arming insurgents. He had to counter growing Pakistani influence in the region and deal with the nettle of cross-border political complexities. And he had promised to provide conventional forces in Afghanistan with the same high-grade, high-velocity intelligence that special operations forces received.8

  Notes

  1. National Research Council Committee on Experimentation and Rapid Prototyping in Support of Counterterrorism, Experimentation and Rapid Prototyping in Support of Counterterrorism (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2009), p. 72.

  2. Ibid., 24.

  3. Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 222.

  4. National Research Council Committee on Experimentation and Rapid Prototyping in Support of Counterterrorism, Experimentation and Rapid Prototyping in Support of Counterterrorism, 20.

  5. Interview with a former Defense Intelligence Agency official.

  6. Henry Kenyon, A Mandate to Innovate in Intelligence Analysis, Federal Computer Week, March 28, 2011, http://fcw.com/Articles/2011/03/28/FEATURE-Di-Leonardo-Al-Special-Operations.aspx?Page=2.

  7. Gareth Porter, “How McChrystal and Petraeus Built an Indiscriminate ‘Killing Machine,’” http://www.truth-out.org/how-mcchrystal-and-petraeus-built-indiscriminate-killing-machine/1317052524.

  8. An oblique outline of this dispute can be found in Flynn’s unauthorized essay for the Center for New American Security in January 2010, http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/AfghanIntel_Flynn_Jan2010_code507_voices.pdf.

  Chapter 6

  A Known Unknown

  For those not clued into JSOC operations, the June 2006 mission to capture or kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the first hint that something fairly magical was happening. Flynn would later recall that it took more than six hundred hours of surveillance time between the first tip and the kill. After Zarqawi, the White House began to rely on JSOC for just about everything. Congress was in love. Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana requested and received an unprecedented (and secret) billion-dollar earmark for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets on the basis of a battlefield conversation with Generals Stanley McChrystal and Michael Flynn.

  “Chris C.” joined the army after reading about the heroics of Americans in Fallujah. A few months out of West Point, he was deployed on a fifteen-month tour of Iraq as a battalion-level intelligence officer. In order to find insurgents, his soldiers worked from scraps of human intelligence—a rumor here, an overheard conversation there. Based in the Salahuddin province north of Baghdad, they had shared access to a single drone for overhead surveillance. There was no National Security Agency presence and thus no real signals intelligence. Sometimes, a JSOC task force would inform Chris’s commander that they were about to raid a part of the city. “We were told: the Task Force is going into our area, and here is the grid they’re going to hit. I would look at the grid and say, ‘Oh, I know who they’re going to hit, because we’d just been there looking for the same person.’”

  In Balad, General Flynn had come to appreciate the wealth of information that intelligence collectors with conventional forces could provide. He recognized that such intel could benefit the regular troops, as well as the JSOC task forces. While JSOC soldiers went home every three months, conventional forces were on twelve- to fifteen-month rotations.

  McChrystal and Flynn knew that JSOC needed to better understand the populations their task forces worked among—an intelligence capability that only units such as Chris’s could provide. Knowing the sinews of a local community could help the U.S. military establish degrees of trust with tribal and authority figures. General David Petraeus, for example, would use early successes by conventional commanders such as General H. R. McMaster, the commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq, to develop his counterinsurgency doctrine. “JSOC, earlier than any other element in the U.S. government, understood the importance of messaging and how actions can influence populations,” said Mike Leiter, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center.1

  Officers such as Chris C. had an institutional knowledge of tribes, geography, and environment that had eluded JSOC. Flynn was determined to merge the two systems. “Ninety percent of the intelligence we needed was not in JSOC,” he told one observer in 2010.2

  Indeed, Chris’s unit provided the tip that led the JSOC task force to Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi, the spiritual adviser to al-Zarqawi. Chris’s officers had long watched an internecine tribal conflict north of the Tigris River. (One tribe was angry that the United States was targeting the other tribe, which increased the heat on everyone involved.) Just after a firefight, Chris got word that Haj al-Bazari, a high-ranking al-Qaeda in Iraq operative, had been injured and taken to a cousin’s home in the area. A database crosscheck revealed that one of al-Bazari’s cousins had a wife who was an OB/GYN. Chris’s team searched her house and found bloody gauze and a truculent doctor refusing to tell anyone what had happened. She was detained. When her husband arrived at the American detention center, he pleaded for her release. He had little money but was a member of a major facilitation network that included former Baathist elements funded by Syria. He offered the Americans information instead.

  Chris’s commander contacted a JSOC task force. They flew in and grabbed the man and interrogated him. That was the last time Chris heard about the guy until, out of the blue, a JSOC shooter team came by to thank him. (This was another early McChrystal-Flynn innovation: let the “black” guys talk to the “white” guys, or allow units that operate in the shadows to work with units that operate in the sunlight.) “They told me that the guy was a high-level financier and that he had led them to Sheik Abdul Rahman,” he said.

  By December 2007, when Chris’s second tour of duty in Iraq began, JSOC task forces were fully integrated with the rest of the effort. Chris’s battalion was assigned to the eastern half of Mosul and was constantly fighting to keep the province from collapsing under the weight of foreign fighters, many from Saudi Arabia. Communicating with the JSOC team in the area, Task Force 9-14 (also known as Task Force North), was much easier than before.

  Chris had access to their interrogation reports and worked with a TF 9-14 intelligence officer to devise a strateg
y for his area of operation: they would target specific mid-level operatives who might lead to the bigger gets. His team produced a steady stream of intelligence reports about local politics and conditions on the ground. Not once was he denied access to JSOC products, and TF 9-14 was literally a phone call away. “Once this started happening, it was just awesome in terms of what we were able to do,” he said.

  Here is how a colleague of General Flynn’s described the change in procedures on the ground: “What would normally happen is: the shooters would kick down a door and snatch everyone and drag them to the front room, and then take everything with them, and put it in a trash bag. The bad guys would be taken to a detention facility and the pocket litter would come back to [the intelligence analysts]. Flynn thought this was stupid. Instead, he gave the shooters—think of this—the Delta guys, mini cameras, and schooled them in some basic detective techniques. When you capture someone, take a picture of them exactly where you captured them. Take detailed notes of who was doing what with what. Don’t merge all the pocket litter.”

  He continued, “Then, the shooters were supposed to e-mail back an image of the person they captured to Balad [JSOC’s intelligence headquarters], where analysts would run it through every facial recognition database we have, or fingerprints or names, or what have you. We’d get hits immediately. And so our intel guys would radio back to the team in the field, ‘Hey, you’ve got Abu-so-and-so, or someone who looks like them. See if he knows where Abu–other-person is.’”

  And that’s what the shooters would do. They’d tell their captured insurgents that for a price, they could help them. A senior JSOC intelligence commander said, “They’d say, ‘I know you, you’re so-and-so. And if you want us to help you, you need to tell us where this other person is.’ And it would work. And then, when we got a new address, sometimes within twenty minutes of the first boot on the door, we’d have another team of shooters going to another location.” Follow-up interrogations were plotted out like dense crime dramas, with dozens of participants, including some by video teleconference.