A number of secretive and advanced units have been op-conned (or, assigned) to JSOC since 2003. How they directly interact with the command is unclear, but they spend most of their time helping JSOC with its special missions. These units report directly to the Office of the Commander and his chief of staff. They include a unit known by the abbreviation BI, consisting solely of highly trained female intelligence collectors and interrogators operating undercover; the Army Compartmented Element, a semisecret U.S. Army unit; the new Naval Cyber Warfare Development Group, which works with the 25th Intelligence Squadron on cyber attacks; and the National Assessment Group (NAG), which evaluates technology and aircraft for SOCOM and JSOC use. An unclassified Department of Defense budget document credits the NAG with “providing low cost, responsive, evaluations of National Level programs belonging to Department of Defense.” (A bit of bureaucratese translation here: any time you see a reference to a “national” program, you’re dealing with one of three subjects: continuity of government, nuclear weapons, or JSOC.)
The Special Operations Program Activity, run by the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, has provided Technical Exploitation Units for assault team use. A large aircraft acquisition program known as the Technical Development Activity has been absorbed by the Command’s Center for Force Mobility.
JSOC’s plans and policy department (J-5) includes a fifty-person Strategic and Operational Plans Division, which is further subdivided into a strategic plans branch, a futures and concepts branch, an operational plans branch, and a special plans division (which formulates JSOC’s nuclear, biological, and chemical response procedures, along with its Hard and Deeply Buried Target breach planning team, which figures out how to penetrate underground nuclear bunkers). This division also runs a secret JSOC WMD (weapons of mass destruction) chemical lab and proving ground. It has a branch at the National Security Test Site in Nevada—Area 51. (That famous site has long been a testing site for cutting-edge technology, including flying vehicles, but none are otherworldly).
More operational planning for JSOC takes place at SOCOM headquarters in Tampa under the J-5 directorate of its Center for Special Operations, which develops plans for JSOC theater campaigns and coordinates JSOC activities with the rest of the military and intelligence community.
Notes
1. U.S. Army Technical Applications Program Office, http://www.sei.cmu.edu/productlines/casestudies/tapo/.
2. See Air Force Instruction 11-235, http://www.af.mil/shared/media/epubs/AFI11-235.pdf.
Chapter 8
The Activity
The most sensitive special missions unit listed on the base directory of Ft. Belvoir in Northern Virginia is the Mission Support Activity (MSA). It is JSOC’s clandestine intelligence-gathering organization and is considered a Tier Two special missions unit, performing Tier One functions. Until 2009, its code name was INTREPID SPEAR, and its cover changes every two years. In 2010, it was known as the U.S. Army Studies and Analysis Activity. Inside JSOC, it’s known as the Activity, or Task Force Orange. Doctrinally, it is responsible for “operational preparation of the environment.” The MSA has several fixed operating locations around the world, including at least five secret bases inside the United States.
Close readers of Bob Woodward’s books about the Bush administration may recognize the MSA’s code name during the first months of the war in Afghanistan: GREY FOX. GREY FOX operators were on the ground with Central Intelligence Agency paramilitaries and special forces shooters within days of September 11, 2001. They were instrumental in the capture of Saddam Hussein. (In the famous photograph of Saddam crawling out of his spider hole, you can see the boot of an MSA operator.) Included in the MSA’s numbers are elite signals intelligence collectors (their procurement history includes a lot of commercial radio scanners), pilots, and, to a lesser extent, case officers, interrogators, and shooters. They gather intelligence for counterterrorism operations, but some are cross-trained to kill.
In 2001, the MSA, then known, confusingly enough, as the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), was the bastard child of the U.S. Army. It had survived years of controversy and scrutiny, including several congressional attempts to shut it down, scandals involving extra-legal activities, and financial improprieties. It was underutilized and poorly integrated with the rest of the force’s intelligence services. In 2003, over the strenuous objection of army leadership, Marshall Billingslea transferred the ISA to JSOC. Its new command quickly changed the ISA’s cover name and code name and put it to work. (The unit’s last known cover name was changed after a reporter used the phrase in an e-mail to a Pentagon official. This constituted an operational breach sufficient to warrant the termination of a dozen security contractors.) Billingslea did not intend for the MSA to engage in direct action missions. Rather, he believed that the Tier One teams could benefit from the battlefield intelligence-gathering skills that the MSA could bring to bear.
After Billingslea left the Pentagon, however, the incessant demands on JSOC would turn the MSA into something resembling a Tier One unit, with members tasked with missions that involved the direct collection of intelligence for the sake of intelligence—something that American law has a problem with or, at least, the laws that civilians are allowed to see. The MSA was never designed to be a tactical unit, per se, but intelligence and military officials confirm that after 9/11, they executed direct action missions in Somalia, Pakistan, and several other countries. Congress was largely kept in the dark, and, to some extent, it still is. In 1982, after the ISA/MSA’s creation, Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, not shy about flexing the Pentagon’s muscles, worried that “we seem to have created our own CIA, but like Topsy, uncoordinated and uncontrolled.” An organization with such a secret mandate had to have accountability as its essence, Carlucci wrote in a memo, but “we have created an organization that is uncontrolled.”1
As the Mission Support Activity expanded under JSOC’s purview, it began to execute missions independently and outside of declared war zones. In countries such as Yemen, Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia, Task Force Orange gathered intelligence directly, technically reporting to the CIA, whose operations were ostensibly based on covert action findings but in reality adhered to the Al Qaeda Network Exord, an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Members of the MSA staffed new Military Liaison Elements (MLEs) installed by SOCOM in U.S. embassies around the world, much to the consternation of the State Department. (The use of MLEs was significantly curtailed when Robert Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary, although a 2010 SOCOM budget document includes a line item for their funding in Africa.)
The MSA, with a budget of $80 million, trains its personnel to be essentially dropped into denied areas and to operate more or less on their own. Some MSA elements operate highly specialized surveillance and reconnaissance planes, such as the RC-12 Guardrail, used for years to track al-Qaeda operatives as they meander through the deserts of North Africa. Others zip around terrorist training camps in MH-6 Little Birds, small helicopters used extensively by the U.S. Army.
In two countries with which the United States is not at war, according to three former U.S. officials with knowledge of its operations, MSA elements were tasked with tracking and killing specific terrorist targets. Technically, only the CIA can do that—which was why SEAL Team Six was very publicly placed under the titular authority of CIA director Leon Panetta when it conducted the bin Laden raid, even though Admiral William McRaven and a navy captain managed the operation. Under U.S. law, the military’s intelligence activities outside war zones are restricted to Title 10 of the U.S. code. The CIA, meanwhile, operates under Title 50, which permits covert action, including targeted assassinations of terrorists, so long as a covert action finding has been transmitted to Congress. Given the secrecy associated with the MSA missions, it is not clear whether the CIA had full cognizance of what the Defense Department was doing, particularly in the early years of the global campai
gn against transnational terrorism. In places such as Africa, “the authorities were fucked up and no one knew who was in charge,” a still-serving JSOC officer said in an interview. This would change around 2004, as JSOC and CIA objectives diverged. Seizing the initiative, General Stanley McChrystal increased the Command’s footprint in Nairobi, Kenya; Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti; and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. JSOC focused its efforts on “intelligence collection and target development.”2 In 2006, JSOC went kinetic in Somalia, actively hunting for al-Qaeda leader Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan. He was killed and bagged in 2009.
Shortly after 9/11, one MSA case officer was nearly killed while following a target (much as a CIA case officer might) in Beirut, when he was kidnapped outside his hotel. He escaped, shot his attackers, and wound up receiving—secretly—a medal for his valor. The number of case officer–types hired by the MSA ramped up after 9/11 and is slowly spinning back down. Yet JSOC’s human intelligence–gathering activities continue to expand—and this is not a secret. A recent official job solicitation reports that the Command is recruiting: “[a] Human Intelligence Operations Officer, responsible for planning and executing highly specialized, mission critical HUMINT requirements for JCS Directed Operations and contingency plans. Coordinates the de-confliction, registration and management of Title 10 and Title 50 recruited HUMINT sources.”
The hiring unit is JSOC’s Directorate of Operation, Security, and Intelligence Support Division at Fort Bragg, which includes all of JSOC’s intelligence assets, with the exception of the MSA. The effectiveness of the MSA operations is difficult to determine, but their legality is an easier question to answer. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the Defense Department ran the show, using traditional authorities granted to them under Title 10 of the U.S. code. Outside the war zones, the CIA had primacy. United States law is fairly explicit about this: covert action to collect intelligence cannot be led by the military, in part because the oversight mechanisms aren’t set up to monitor them.
•••
Under the large umbrella of “preparing the battlefield,” which later became “preparing the environment” (an environment being a bigger thing than a battlefield), and based on their successes elsewhere, there was reluctance in the Bush administration to de-conflict cases where the CIA and JSOC had different ideas about what they wanted to do in a country where the president had signed a finding. For example, the CIA objected to a JSOC Somalia mission at the last moment in 2003; the National Security Council (NSC) sided with SOCOM. The CIA had legal authority, but SOCOM had, by presidential fiat, the lead in terms of counterterrorism. When the twain diverged in thinking, significant interagency conflicts resulted.
When it came to unleashing JSOC in countries with which the United States was not at war, the NSC was cautious. Terrorists on the target lists were fair game pretty much anywhere in the world, and the sovereignty of several countries was quietly disregarded as tiny hunter-killer teams invaded. Large-scale military involvement, however, was iffier, and although the White House had embraced the kinetic success of JSOC in Iraq, it would not endorse the same type of resource surge into places such as East Africa, where terrorists were fleeing. This was maddening for JSOC commanders: they were “lawnmowers,” cutting al-Qaeda off at its roots. They had successfully disrupted Iranian attempts to use Hezbollah to destabilize any number of operations—and now Washington was suddenly very cautious? There was a resource crunch, too. General Doug Brown of SOCOM didn’t have the resources he needed for foreign internal defense operations in Africa, “and that vacuum could be, and was, in some cases, filled by Al Qaeda,” he told a historian.3
JSOC’s role in some of the more legally marginal elements of the war on terrorism had brought unwanted attention and significant friction with the State Department. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice encouraged ambassadors in countries where JSOC operated with impunity to speak up. One was Peru, where a DEVGRU operator with red hair (his nickname was “Flamer”) got into a physical dispute with some locals. JSOC wanted the CIA to help exfiltrate him from the country. The CIA refused, and JSOC had to scramble its own assets to collect its sailor. Why was JSOC in Peru? It’s not clear. The NSC, not wanting to unleash JSOC’s capacity in areas outside the war zone and cognizant of the publicity that the units were getting, began to pull back on the reins.
The United States believes that in the summer of 2007, as many as three hundred al-Qaeda-trained fighters fled to the Horn of Africa. Though JSOC was on the ground, missions were highly restricted by an overly cautious Washington. “Flynn watched, literally, because they had these guys tracked, as hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters went to Somalia and into Yemen and elsewhere in the Horn and got better trained,” a senior military official said. It would take a new president and a new classified presidential order to unleash JSOC’s global strike capability again.
Notes
1. Memorandum for the deputy undersecretary of policy, from Frank Carlucci, secretary of defense, May 26, 1982, accessed from the National Security Archive website, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB46/document7.pdf.
2. Sean D. Naylor, “Years of Detective Work Led to Al-Qaeda Target,” Army Times, November 21, 2011.
3. John Gresham, “The Year in Special Operations,” interview with General Doug Brown (ret.); Defense Media Network, 2010.
Chapter 9
Semper ad Meliora
On a fresh patch of land in the northwest corner of Ft. Bragg, specially cleared construction workers will soon erect a massive 110,000-square-foot building that will serve as the crown jewel in the Command’s empire. The building will headquarter the JSOC Intelligence Brigade (the JIB), which analyzes raw and finished intelligence for the Command’s special missions units. The JIB has quietly existed for more than three years, escaping the notice of congressional intelligence overseers, who have only just begun to scrutinize JSOC’s intelligence activities. Under a program started by Generals Stanley McChrystal and Michael Flynn, JSOC borrowed hundreds of intelligence analysts from the sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies, many of them rotating through quick front-line deployments. These augmentees greatly helped JSOC conduct its operations, but the Command was not able to develop a cadre of analysts who were JSOC’s own, with institutional muscle memory that would make the fusion of intelligence and operations more efficient in the future. The JIB, in essence, sets in stone JSOC’s new way of doing business.
In 2010, Admiral William McRaven attended the quiet ribbon cutting of his newest jewel: the Intelligence Crisis Action Center (ICAC) in Rosslyn, Virginia, funded through a classified line item in the Pentagon’s budget. Until just recently, it operated on two floors of a nondescript office building that also housed a language learning center and a dry cleaner. At the time when McRaven christened the center, its existence was a secret to many U.S intelligence officials, who learned about it by way of an Associated Press newsbreak in early 2011. According to a senior military official, it has about fifty employees and reports directly to the JSOC Directorate of Intelligence and Security.1 Its primary function is to serve as a command post for JSOC operations around the world. It is informally known as the Targeting Center, and because of operational security concerns it has changed its name twice. Presently, it’s the Joint Reconnaissance Task Force (JRTF), and it operates from a new location in the Beltway, a location that we have agreed not to divulge. (There are four other JRTFs, each responsible for JSOC operations within certain areas of operations.)
These entities are sensitive subjects at the highest levels of the U.S. counterterrorism community, because each represents the extraordinary achievements of the JSOC units and also reveals by its own existence the inadequacy of the other intelligence fusion centers set up by the government to do mostly the same thing. JSOC’s successes have brought with it blowback and envy and more than a bit of criticism from military officials who think that conventional forces and regular special operations forces units were just as important as the smaller, secretive standing task forces in degradin
g al-Qaeda’s infrastructure.
Though the addition of an intelligence brigade to JSOC is a natural consequence of its success and growth, when the Associated Press disclosed the existence of the ICAC to the general public, a spokesman for SOCOM made a point of telling reporters that its functions would not duplicate those of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). Mike Leiter, the director of the NCTC, worked closely with McRaven to make sure the two centers didn’t overlap. “I spent hours with Admiral McRaven on this,” he said. “We saw this as a natural evolution in what they were doing. We sent some of our guys over there, and they sent some of their guys over here.”
Managers at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) regarded JSOC’s growing footprint with alarm. Some whispered to journalists that JSOC was building a secret intelligence empire without oversight or scrutiny. More prosaically, they feared that the Command’s activities, in both the collection and the analysis of intelligence, would duplicate their own.
Sensing friction, Michael Morrell, the then acting director of the CIA; Michael Vickers, the civilian intelligence chief at the Pentagon; and General James Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tried to reduce tension and conflict arising from JSOC’s expansion. In the field, JSOC units and their counterparts at the CIA and the DIA work well together. In Yemen, after some early conflicts, the integration is almost seamless, with JSOC and the CIA alternating Predator missions and borrowing each other’s resources, such as satellite bandwidth. Often, JSOC element commanders will appear on videoconference calls alongside CIA station chiefs—all but unheard of until very recently. Yet some mid-level managers at the intelligence agencies remain resistant to the type of integration envisioned by the National Security Council (NSC).
The Command: Deep Inside the President's Secret Army Page 6