The Command: Deep Inside the President's Secret Army
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McRaven, much like JSOC itself, is at cross-purposes. He knows that his intelligence assets will not survive budget purges unless they fit well within the rest of the community. Yet he also wants to preserve the razor-sharp edge of the special missions units at a time when, due to publicity and overtasking, it risks being dulled. A robust intelligence infrastructure multiplies the effect that JSOC has on the battlefield, he believes.
That JSOC no longer operates exclusively in the shadows is a meal uneasily digested by longtime JSOC team members. Once the curtains have been opened, it is hard to draw them shut. Since being promoted to commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, McRaven has spoken openly about the increased need for transparency regarding the nation’s counterterrorism forces. Operational security is still paramount in at least one way: the identities of those who belong to the Tier One units are state secrets, and McRaven, according to people who have spoken with him, would rather JSOC spend less time creating layers of myth around itself and more time thinking about how to protect its core assets at a time when, as one senior administration official who works with McRaven said, “every time there is an explosion in the world, everyone knows about it within minutes.”
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Some of the most vociferous objections to daylight came from legends of the special operations community. Shortly after the capture of Osama bin Laden and detailed information about the tactics, techniques, and procedures used by DEVGRU shooters showed up in the mainstream media, retired colonel Roland Guidry, one of JSOC’s founding members, took the rare step of contacting journalists to complain about the sunlight bathing the SEALs. “The pre-mission Operational Security was superb, but the postmission OPSEC stinks,” he said. “When all the hullabaloo settles down, JSOC and [the SEALs] will have to get back to business as usual, keeping the troops operationally ready and getting set for the next mission; the visibility the administration has allowed to be focused on JSOC and [the SEALs] will make their job now more difficult.”
Guidry said that the “administration’s bragging” about details such as the existence of the bin Laden courier network and efforts to eavesdrop on cell phones would encourage the enemy to adapt by changing their cell phones, e-mail addresses, websites, safe houses, and couriers. He also thinks the administration should not have disclosed precisely what types of equipment it found in bin Laden’s compound, such as the terrorist’s use of thumb drives to communicate. “Why did the administration not respond like we were trained to do thirty years ago in early JSOC by uttering two simple words: ‘no comment’?” he asked.
To be sure, the administration—construed broadly—did not intend for too many specifics to get out. The NSC wrestled with the dilemma early on, knowing as soon as bin Laden was captured that the demand for information would be intense. Though no strategic communications expert had been read into the op before it was executed, the White House and the Pentagon hastily prepared a strategy. Mike Vickers and deputy CIA director Mike Morrell would brief reporters on a conference call the night of the capture, after President Barack Obama finished speaking. The White House would issue some details about the time line by having John Brennan, the respected deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism, brief the press corps. And then everyone would shut up.
Because the SEALs themselves were not debriefed until after the White House had released its initial time line, bad information got out. Bin Laden had pointed a gun at the SEALs, reporters were told, and used his wife as a human shield. Neither was true—but both were conveyed in good faith. Reporters, sensitive to the way the administration would try to use the bin Laden capture to boost the president’s image, were relentless in their efforts to pinpoint precise details. Intelligence agencies, seeking their share of credit, offered unsolicited interviews with analysts who had participated in the hunt. Maybe it was simply the pent-up tension caused by keeping the secret so long, but in the days after the raid, “the national security establishment barfed,” is how Denis McDonough, another deputy national security adviser, put it to a colleague.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, had four secrets he did not want published at all. One was the stealth technology used on the Black Hawk, but there was nothing he could do once it crashed. Another was the presence on the ground of CIA operatives—it took less than a week for a detailed story to be published in the Washington Post about the CIA renting a house near Osama bin Laden’s compound. (It later emerged that the CIA had had a station in Abbottabad for quite a while and had enlisted an unwitting local doctor to run a vaccination campaign to try to get blood samples from the bin Laden compound. The doctor and others suspected of helping the CIA were taken into custody by the Pakistani intelligence service and would later be released only after much begging on the CIA’s behalf.
Secret three was the type of drones that hovered above the raid—RQ-170 Sentinels, operated out of Tenopah Test Range, near Area 51 in Nevada, capable of jamming Pakistani radar with one pod and transmitting real-time video to commanders with another. A message posted to Twitter by one of us on the night of the raid and a subsequent comprehensive Washington Post story broke that secret. (In early December 2011, an RQ-170 gathering intelligence on possible insurgent training camps inside of Iran lost contact with ground controllers and subsequently floated down deep inside the country. Briefly, a JSOC recovery operation was considered, but that was before the Iranians discovered it. At that point, a mission would be tantamount to war. The United States had to adapt to the possible compromise of Top Secret cryptographic devices and stealth material.)
Secret four was the identity of the SEAL unit that had taken the mission, and, in particular, the identities of the operatives. The unit name was revealed the night of the raid, but the intelligence community and Special Operations Command were horrified a month later when several reporters asked them to verify a list of names and ranks that had been distributed to them by sources unknown. Someone had leaked the names of some of the SEALs on the helicopters.
Military officials begged the reporters not to publish the names or even reveal that the list existed. The reporters acquiesced. A Department of Defense agency—most likely, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations—began to work quietly with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to see who might have possibly leaked such protected information. Inside SOCOM, suspicions were directed at the White House, which, some believed, was availing itself of every opportunity to highlight Obama’s decision to launch the raid. (White House officials insist that no one there would be so stupid as to leak the names of Tier One operatives to reporters, and SOCOM’s Ken McGraw said he was not aware of the incident.)
Inside JSOC, the Delta guys blamed the larger SEAL community for inviting the attention. Whoever leaked the names might have taken a lesson from the SEALs themselves: when Obama met with them several days after the raid, he was told not to ask the men who actually killed bin Laden because they wouldn’t tell even the commander in chief. Bill Daley, Obama’s chief of staff, asked anyway and was told by the squadron leader, “Sir, we all did.”
Notes
1. Based on interviews with firsthand participants.
Chapter 10
Widening the Playing Field
With bin Laden dead, al-Qaeda’s capabilities severely diminished, and the United States pulling back in Afghanistan and Iraq, what will President Barack Obama and his successors do with JSOC? A look at what they’ve already been doing outside of war zones gives us some hints.
In 2005, for example, a 7.6-magnitude earthquake killed seventy-five thousand people in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. After four solid years of war in the region, the United States poured relief services into Pakistan as a show of solidarity with the nominal ally in the war on terror.
The U.S. intelligence community took advantage of the chaos to spread resources of its own into the country. Using valid U.S. passports and posing as construction and aid workers, dozens of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
operatives and contractors flooded in without the requisite background checks from the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Al-Qaeda had reconstituted itself in the country’s tribal areas, largely because of the ISI’s benign neglect. In Afghanistan, the ISI was actively undermining the U.S.-backed government of Hamid Karzai, training and recruiting for the Taliban, which it viewed as the more reliable partner. The political system was in chaos. The Pakistani army was focused on the threat from India and had redeployed away from the Afghanistan border region, the Durand line, making it porous once again. To some extent, the Bush administration had been focused on Iraq for the previous two years, content with the ISI’s cooperation in capturing senior al-Qaeda leaders, while ignoring its support of other groups that would later become recruiting grounds for al-Qaeda.1
A JSOC intelligence team slipped in alongside the CIA. The team had several goals. One was prosaic: team members were to develop rings of informants to gather targeting information about al-Qaeda terrorists. Other goals were extremely sensitive: JSOC needed better intelligence about how Pakistan transported its nuclear weapons and wanted to penetrate the ISI. Under a secret program code-named SCREEN HUNTER, JSOC, augmented by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and contract personnel, was authorized to shadow and identify members of the ISI suspected of being sympathetic to al-Qaeda. It is not clear whether JSOC units used lethal force against these ISI officers; one official said that the goal of the program was to track terrorists through the ISI by using disinformation and psychological warfare. (The program, by then known under a different name, was curtailed by the Obama administration when Pakistan’s anxiety about a covert U.S. presence inside the country was most intense.)
Meanwhile, rotating teams of SEALs from DEVGRU Black squadron, aided by Rangers and other special operations forces, established a parallel terrorist-hunting capability called VIGILANT HARVEST. They operated in the border areas of Pakistan deemed off limits to Americans, and they targeted courier networks, trainers, and facilitators. (Legally, these units would operate under the authority of the CIA any time they crossed the border.) Some of their missions were coordinated with Pakistan; others were not. As of 2006, teams of Green Berets were regularly crossing the border. Missions involved as few as three or four operators quietly trekking across the line, their movements monitored by U.S. satellites and drones locked onto the cell phones of these soldiers. (The cell phones were encrypted in such a way that made them undetectable to Pakistani intelligence.) Twice in 2008, Pakistani officials caught wind of these missions, and in one instance, Pakistani soldiers operating in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas fired guns into the air to prevent the approach of drones.2
Forward intelligence cells in Pakistan are staffed by JSOC-contracted security personnel from obscure firms with insider names such as Triple Canopy and various offshoots of Blackwater, but it is not clear whether, as Jeremy Scahill of the Nation has argued, the scale of these operations was operationally significant or that the contractors acted as hired guns for the U.S. government.3 Sources say that only U.S. soldiers performed “kinetic” operations; Scahill’s sources suggest otherwise. The security compartments were so small for these operations (one was known as QUIET STORM, a particularly specialized mission targeting the Pakistani Taliban in 2008) that the Command will probably be insulated from retrospective oversight about its activities. A senior Obama administration official said that by the middle of 2011, after tensions between the United States and the Pakistani government had reached an unhealthy degree of danger, all JSOC personnel except for its declared military trainers were ferreted out of the country. (They were easy to find using that same secret cell phone pinging technology.) Those who remained were called Omegas, a term denoting their temporary designation as members of the reserve force. They then joined any one of a dozen small contracting companies set up by the CIA, which turned these JSOC soldiers into civilians, for the purposes of deniability.
By the end of 2011, SEALs and the CIA Special Activities Division ground branch were crossing the border to target militants whom Pakistan would not. Presently, Task Force Green (also known as TF 3-10) is the active counterterrorist task force in Afghanistan. A veteran infantry officer nicknamed “K-Bar” commands it. Colonel K-Bar is unique among such task force leaders, in that he has never served as a subordinate in a special missions unit. He first attracted the attention of JSOC brass while serving in Iraq, when he was shot in the chest and ordered his medic to stay away so that he could continue shooting until the rest of his attackers were dead.
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Though the bulk of JSOC’s missions took place in CENTCOM’s area of operations, some of its more colorful endeavors were conducted elsewhere since 9/11.
A Delta Force detachment helped rescue Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and fourteen other hostages, including four Americans, in 2008, even though full credit was given to the Colombians.
An operation, code-named NOISEMAKER, tracks Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps agents and narcotraffickers on the Venezuelan border and works with the Colombian military.
A JSOC team slipped into Madagascar and killed Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, after INTERPOL got a tip about his whereabouts in 2007.
In 2009, a team from DEVGRU killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, who led a successful attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, in 2002.4
A secret presidential finding on Iran influenced JSOC’s activities to a degree that irritated its commanders. The idea was to co-opt militaries and nonstate actors who could be trained to cause trouble in Iran. That, in turn, would draw members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps into Iraq to retaliate, so that JSOC could pick them off, one by one. The finding was allowed to quietly expire in 2006. The next year, Generals Stanley McChrystal and Michael Flynn established a task force to counter Iranian influence in the world (its reach would come to include Hezbollah-linked drug lords in South America).
Outside the war zone, in Africa, Mexico, and South America, the CIA and special operations forces have been teaming together efficiently without significant institutional friction on a growing number of missions. In the field, JSOC units and their counterparts at the CIA and the DIA work well together. Yet mid-level managers at the intelligence agencies remain resistant to the type of integration envisioned by the National Security Council.
At the beginning of 2011, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence notified the Special Operations Command that they wanted more briefings about these commingled Title 10 and Title 50 activities. Such increased oversight could prove to be a bane and a blessing. Many of JSOC’s more questionable incursions might well be curtailed. On the other hand, a well-informed Congress is an insurance policy of sorts. When things go wrong, JSOC will be able to very honestly say that it had the full support of the government at the time.
Notes
1. Bruce Riedel, Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of Global Jihad (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2011), 70–80.
2. Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 202.
3. Jeremy Scahill, “The Secret U.S. War In Pakistan,” Nation, December 7, 2009.
4. Alex Perry, “Striking al-Qaeda in a Terrorist Breeding Ground,” Time, September 15, 2009, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1923169,00.html; and Yochi Dreazen, “Rolling Out Global Hit Teams,” National Journal, September 3, 2011.
Chapter 11
Target: Africa
The U.S. military, and primarily SOCOM and JSOC, have actively hunted al-Qaeda in Africa since at least 2003. In the Army Times, Sean Naylor has charted the remarkable growth of America’s presence in the region and has provided the best look at how U.S. special operations forces enter an area with little, establish a beachhead, and eventually stand up with a frightening, lethal presence.1
President George W. Bush first gave the go-ahead for operations on the continent after captured Libyan
terrorist Ali Abdul Aziz al-Fakhri revealed under interrogation that al-Qaeda, disrupted in Afghanistan, planned to regroup in Somalia and Yemen. In November 2003, an underwater “SEAL delivery vehicle” deployed from the submarine USS Dallas (SSN-700) and entered Somali waters. The clandestine SEAL mission was the first of a dozen to install specialized cameras called Cardinals, which would monitor the coastline. Both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) station chief and the U.S. ambassador to Kenya objected to the mission as overkill, which threatened to derail the entire operation. Just before the launch of the operation (known as Cobalt Blue), Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and CIA director George Tenet debated the issue before the president, who sided with Rumsfeld. The SEALs didn’t operate on the periphery and weren’t micromanaged. The devices were installed in heavily trafficked areas determined on the fly.
A cross-section of U.S. special operations forces participated in the operation. The Joint Special Operations Task Force–Horn of Africa (part of the Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa [CJTF-HOA]), which conducted the operation, pulled double-duty as CENTCOM’s crisis response element (CRE) and was tasked with everything from recon to combat search and rescue. The CRE was composed of a U.S. Army Special Forces commander’s in-extremis force, a team of on-alert, highly mobile trigger-pullers; a SEAL platoon; and air force special operations fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft.
Because the cameras snapped shots only every twelve hours—a battery-saving measure—Cobalt Blue turned up nothing of value. Still, it was an improvement over the day- and weeks-long gaps that occurred in the past, and it was still in the early days of the sweeping movement at JSOC to eliminate such “blinks” in intelligence. The best intelligence is constant surveillance.