Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

8. Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape

WASHINGTON, DC, 2002–2003—The November 2002 drone strike in Yemen was the opening salvo in the Bush administration’s drive to expand US military action beyond the stated battlefield of Afghanistan. Although much of the media focus at the time was on the Bush administration’s campaign to justify the invasion of Iraq, in secret the CIA was building up a black-site archipelago to deal with the rest of the world. Prisoners who had been snatched from various countries across the globe were being held in the gulags of foreign intelligence services, where they were interrogated and often tortured under the direction of US intelligence agents. CIA black sites were being constructed and “high value” detainees were being interrogated.

But infighting between the FBI and the CIA was becoming untenable. Some FBI personnel were disgusted with what they believed were extreme tactics being employed by the Agency’s interrogators. Others, like Rumsfeld and Cheney, believed the CIA was not going far enough and was too restrained by its requirements to keep congressional committees abreast of its operations. By December 2002, CIA director George Tenet would boast that the United States and its allies had already detained more than 3,000 suspected al Qaeda operatives and associates, in more than one hundred countries. But despite such proclamations, the game was only just beginning. The post-9/11 fervor that had allowed Cheney’s “dark side” operations to flow largely unabated and unchallenged by Congress and the media was fading. Journalists and lawyers were poking around. A few members of Congress were starting to ask questions. There were rumblings about “secret prisons.”

Cheney and Rumsfeld were not content with the intelligence they were receiving from the CIA or the military’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) interrogators. “We have to start pushing on intel,” Rumsfeld had noted in an internal memo in March 2002. “It is not going right.” Rumsfeld asserted, “We are faced with the job of trying to find individual terrorists. That never used to be a DoD job. But terrorists today are well-organized and well-financed, they are trying to get weapons of mass destruction and can impose enormous damage on the United States. So finding them has become a Defense Department task.” Rumsfeld and his deputies began seeking assistance from a secretive military program. The Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) was responsible for coordinating the rescue of US military personnel trapped in enemy territory, including in “denied areas,” where their very presence—if exposed—could cause a major international crisis or scandal. But of particular relevance to Rumsfeld was JPRA’s other work: preparing US forces for resisting enemy attempts to extract information from captured US personnel. All US special operators went through JPRA’s horrid torture mill, a program known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape.

The SERE program was created to introduce US soldiers, sailors and airmen to the full spectrum of torture that “a totalitarian evil nation with a complete disregard for human rights and the Geneva Convention” could use on them if captured. At SERE training, soldiers would be subjected to a hellish regimen of torture tactics drawn from the techniques of vicious dictatorships and terrorists. During training, soldiers could be kidnapped from their quarters, beaten, hooded, shackled and stuffed into vans, flown in helicopters. They could be waterboarded, beaten with canes, have their heads slammed against walls. They would often be deprived of food and sleep and subjected to psychological torture. “At SERE school, ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ are enemy torture methods,” said Malcolm Nance, who worked on the SERE program from 1997 to 2001 and helped develop and modernize its curriculum. Nance and other SERE instructors studied the debriefings of US prisoners of war throughout history. They dissected the interrogation tactics of Communist China, North Korea, the Vietcong, Nazi Germany and scores of other regimes and terror groups. The institutional knowledge at SERE was “built in blood. They are written in blood. Everything we use at SERE, a US service member—or thousands of them in some instances—died from.” SERE, Nance said, “was a repository of every known [torture tactic] out there. We had debriefs that went back—literally, the original debriefs—that went back to the Civil War.” SERE’s intended purpose was to prepare US military personnel to face the tactics of lawless foes. But Rumsfeld and his allies saw a different value for the program.

In the early stages of the High Value Detainee program, the CIA and the DIA were running the interrogation show, but personnel from JSOC were watching closely. Internally, JSOC had concluded that the methods being used by the US interrogators in Afghanistan were not producing results—not because they were too harsh but because they were not harsh enough. “From the beginning, there was incredible pressure on interrogators to elicit actionable intelligence from practically every individual we took into custody. Some of these detainees were complicit, others innocent; some were knowledgeable, some truly clueless,” recalled Colonel Steven Kleinman, who spent twenty-seven years working in US intelligence and was one of the most experienced interrogators in modern US history. Among his positions was director of intelligence at JPRA’s Personnel Recovery Academy. “In far too many cases, we simply erred in pressing interrogation and interrogators beyond the edge of the envelope. As a result, interrogation was no longer an intelligence collection method; rather, it had morphed into a form of punishment for those who wouldn’t cooperate.” Kleinman added that when the torture tactics “proved ineffective in producing the type of actionable intelligence required by senior leaders,” veteran US interrogators, including some from the FBI and US military, suggested using alternative, noncoercive, nonviolent tactics. Top White House officials “ignored or rejected” those tactics as “irrelevant.” “We instead opted for more of the same, except the pressure would be ratcheted up…in some cases to an alarming degree,” Kleinman said. “When presented with the choice of getting smarter or getting tougher, we chose the latter.”

To develop new tactics, Rumsfeld and his team looked inward at the very program used to train US forces in how to resist enemy torture. As JSOC reviewed the “failures” of the interrogation program the CIA and DIA were running at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld and his team soon began reviewing the possibility of taking interrogation of enemy combatants captured on the battlefield to the next level. The SERE program, they believed, could be reverse-engineered. The medieval tactics they had studied from history’s greatest torturers would be their new interrogation manual. “We are at war with an enemy that has flagrantly violated the laws of war,” Rumsfeld had declared in late 2001. “They do not wear uniforms. They hide in caves abroad, and among us here at home.” While denouncing the “enemy’s” disregard for the laws of war, Rumsfeld and his team were preparing to follow suit. As early as December 2001, Rumsfeld’s office began asking JPRA for assistance in detainee “exploitation.”

Initially, the leadership at JPRA headquarters pushed back on Rumsfeld’s requests to export their training tactics into the interrogation chambers of the war on terror. In a two-page memo to the Pentagon’s general counsel, JPRA warned against using SERE’s “torture” tactics on enemy prisoners. “The requirement to obtain information from an uncooperative source as quickly as possible—in time to prevent, for example, an impending terrorist attack that could result in loss of life—has been forwarded as a compelling argument for the use of torture…. In essence, physical and/or psychological duress are viewed as an alternative to the more time-consuming conventional interrogation process,” JPRA’s command asserted. “The error inherent in this line of thinking is the assumption that, through torture, the interrogator can extract reliable and accurate intelligence. History and a consideration of human behavior would appear to refute this assumption.” JPRA noted that “upwards of 90 percent of interrogations have been successful” by developing a rapport with the detainee, and warned that after being subjected to harsh interrogation techniques, a prisoner’s resolve to resist cooperation is strengthened. JPRA’s memo noted that eventually, if tortured enough, prisoners “will provide answers that they feel the interrogator is seeking. In this instance, the information is neither reliable nor accurate.”

But Rumsfeld and his team forged ahead. Feith and other Defense officials instructed JPRA to begin providing detailed information on the SERE program to US interrogators. By early 2002, JPRA began briefing DIA personnel on “detainee resistance, techniques, and information on detainee exploitation.” Meanwhile, the senior SERE psychologist, Dr. Bruce Jessen, who was also a CIA contractor, began developing an “exploitation plan” for the Agency’s interrogators to receive instructions on how to use SERE tactics on detainees. In early July 2002, CIA interrogators began receiving training from SERE instructors and psychologists on extreme interrogation tactics. Later that month, Rumsfeld’s office requested documents from JPRA, “including excerpts from SERE instructor lesson plans, a list of physical and psychological pressures used in SERE resistance training, and a memo from a SERE psychologist assessing the long-term psychological effects of SERE resistance training on students and the effects of waterboarding,” according to a Senate Armed Services Committee investigation. “The list of SERE techniques included such methods as sensory deprivation, sleep disruption, stress positions, waterboarding, and slapping. It also made reference to a section of the JPRA instructor manual that discusses ‘coercive pressures,’ such as keeping the lights on at all times, and treating a person like an animal.” The Pentagon’s deputy general counsel for intelligence, Richard Shiffrin, acknowledged that the Pentagon wanted the documents in order to “reverse-engineer” SERE’s knowledge of enemy torture tactics for use against US detainees. He also described how JPRA provided interrogators with documents about “mind-control experiments” used on US prisoners by North Korean agents. “It was real ‘Manchurian Candidate’ stuff,” Shiffrin said. JPRA’s commander also sent the same information to the CIA.

The use of these new techniques was discussed at the National Security Council, including at meetings attended by Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice. By the summer of 2002, the War Council legal team, led by Cheney’s consigliere, David Addington, had developed a legal rationale for redefining torture so narrowly that virtually any tactic that did not result in death was fair game. “For an act to constitute torture as defined in [the federal torture statute], it must inflict pain that is difficult to endure. Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee asserted in what would become an infamous legal memo rationalizing the torture of US prisoners. “For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture under [the federal torture statute], it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.” A second memo signed by Bybee gave legal justification for using a specific series of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding. “There was not gonna be any deniability,” said the CIA’s Rodriguez, who was coordinating the interrogation of prisoners at the black sites. “In August of 2002, I felt I had all the authorities that I needed, all the approvals that I needed. The atmosphere in the country was different. Everybody wanted us to save American lives.” He added, “We went to the border of legality. We went to the border, but that was within legal bounds.”

In September 2002, the congressional leadership was briefed on these specific interrogation techniques. Some Democrats, including Representative Nancy Pelosi, would later say that they were never briefed on the use of waterboarding. The CIA briefers and her Republican colleagues claimed otherwise, adding that none of the House and Senate leaders briefed on the method raised any objections to it. Pelosi later clarified that, at the time, she had been briefed on the tactic of waterboarding, but not its active use in interrogations. Whatever the truth, the torture program was now operating at full speed and, as far as the White House was concerned, with the legal backing of the US government. “Instead of co-opting these [al Qaeda] operatives and bringing them to our side, we used SERE methodologies, which are purely enemy methodologies,” recalled Nance. “Taking those and inverting them and then taking them way past the safety margins…completely breaks the moral fiber of anyone who raises their hand in oath to support and defend the constitution of the United States.”

Years after the black sites had been established and scores of prisoners were shuttled through them, the International Committee of the Red Cross compiled testimonials of fourteen prisoners who had survived. Some were snatched in Thailand, others in Dubai or Djibouti. Most were taken in Pakistan. The ICRC report described what would happen once US forces took a prisoner:

According to the ICRC, some of the prisoners were bounced around to different black sites for more than three years, where they were kept in “continuous solitary confinement and incommunicado detention. They had no knowledge of where they were being held, no contact with persons other than their interrogators or guards.” The US personnel guarding them wore masks. None of the prisoners was ever permitted a phone call or to write to inform their families they had been taken. They simply vanished.

During the course of their imprisonment, some of the prisoners were confined in boxes and subjected to prolonged nudity—sometimes lasting for several months. Some of them were kept for days at a time, naked, in “stress standing positions,” with their “arms extended and chained above the head.” During this torture, they were not allowed to use a toilet and “had to defecate and urinate over themselves.” Beatings and kickings were common, as was a practice of placing a collar around a prisoner’s neck and using it to slam him against walls or yank him down hallways. Loud music was used for sleep deprivation, as was temperature manipulation. If prisoners were perceived to be cooperating, they were given clothes to wear. If they were deemed uncooperative, they’d be stripped naked. Dietary manipulation was used—at times the prisoners were put on liquid-only diets for weeks at a time. Three of the prisoners told the ICRC they had been waterboarded. Some of them were moved to as many as ten different sites during their imprisonment. “I was told during this period that I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques, so no rules applied,” one prisoner, taken early on in the war on terror, told the ICRC. “I felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.”

As the CIA began applying SERE tactics on more detainees at its black sites, Rumsfeld was not content with the Agency running interrogations. In late 2002, JSOC formed a task force to draw up plans for a potential role for its personnel in interrogating “designated unlawful combatants.” The CIA was reporting to the White House—specifically Cheney’s office—on its progress in using SERE tactics at its black sites, but JSOC could provide far greater flexibility and far less oversight. JSOC operators were tapped by the White House to participate in a parallel interrogation program known by its unclassified code name as Copper Green. Internally, the program was called Matchbox. Interrogation would be one of their key tactics, but Cheney and Rumsfeld had much broader plans for a new, unaccountable way of waging a global, secret war.

WITHIN THE US LAWS governing military and intelligence operations, there are gray areas. Title 50 of the US code, or federal law, sets out the rules and structures for intelligence operations, while Title 10 covers military actions. The code under which a particular operation is performed has serious implications for oversight and accountability. The terms “covert” action and “clandestine” operations are often thrown around as though they mean the same thing. They do not. “Covert action” is a doctrinal and legal term that, broadly speaking, refers to an activity whose sponsorship is meant to be a secret. It is meant to provide the United States with “plausible deniability.” Such operations are extremely risky—not just in terms of the operational danger, but because they often involve secret US agents conducting operations inside the borders of a sovereign country without alerting its government. If the operation is exposed or disrupted, the potential for scandal is very real. The legal definition of covert action, according to Title 50, is “An activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly.” A covert action requires a presidential finding and for the White House to brief the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on its contents. This briefing must occur before the covert action unless there are “extraordinary circumstances.” The requirements for congressional involvement were established to prevent scandals such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and Iran-Contra. Those operations were passionately supported by Cheney and Rumsfeld. Although they no doubt regretted the fact that Iran-Contra became public and stirred controversy, they did not regard the operation itself as a scandal but rather as a model for how the United States should conduct its dirty business.

Military doctrine defines another class of activities, “clandestine operations,” in which the point of secrecy is to protect the integrity of the mission, not to conceal its sponsor, the US government. The military may conduct operations that are both covert and clandestine, but these are rare. Unlike covert actions, clandestine operations do not require a presidential finding if “future hostilities” are “anticipated” in the country where they are taking place. Nor is the administration required to report the operation to Congress. Such operations are defined as “Traditional Military Activities” and offer the intelligence committees no real-time oversight rights. Under US law, the military is not required to disclose the specific actions of an operation, but the US role in the “overall operation” should be “apparent” or eventually “acknowledged.”

From where Rumsfeld and Cheney were sitting, the United States was at war, and the world was a battlefield. Therefore, hostilities were “anticipated” in every country on earth, necessitating dozens if not hundreds of potential “Traditional Military Activities” across the globe. Cheney and Rumsfeld realized that by using JSOC—a black-ops force whose activities arguably straddled both Title 10 and Title 50—they could operate in the crevice separating US military and intelligence law. Much of JSOC’s operations could be classified under military doctrine as “Preparing the Battlespace,” which is defined by the US Special Operations Command as “the umbrella term for all activities conducted prior to D-Day, H-Hour to plan and prepare for potential follow-on military operations…in likely or potential areas of employment, to train and prepare for follow-on military operations.” Such activities could be conducted as Advance Force Operations (AFOs), which are “military operations conducted by forces which precede the main elements into the area of operations to prepare for follow-on operations.” Unlike CIA operations, AFOs can be carried out with minimal external oversight—for a significant period of time—prior to an “overt” hostility, or for a “contingency” that may or may not occur.

The congressional intelligence committees viewed this logic as a work-around to oversight and reporting laws, charging that the Defense Department wanted to liberally deploy its increasingly formidable intelligence capabilities abroad under the pretense of operational planning for future military hostilities, without granting the intelligence committees their due oversight.

Adding another layer of bureaucratic complexity to this already murky area of US law was the fact that the armed services committees authorized the funding for operations, and the intelligence committees held the power to determine what constituted a covert action. Those committees often clashed on this very issue and fiercely guarded their turf, leaving a huge opening for potential abuses and the exploitation of gaps or gray areas.

Although the CIA was supposed to be the main agency conducting covert actions, the National Command Authority—which consisted of the president and Rumsfeld—could choose to use Title 50 authorities for organizations other than the CIA, by delegating military assets to CIA operations. JSOC, for example, had been used for covert actions in order to operate in politically volatile areas without repercussions under international law or to supersede Congress’s authority to declare war. Title 10 operations conducted in “Preparing the Battlespace” had even fewer congressional reporting requirements, and with the congressional resolution authorizing a global war, the National Command Authority could use its power to direct military operations without having to classify them as covert actions. This had always been a gray area open for exploitation. And that was attractive to Cheney and Rumsfeld and their teams as they plotted their “Next Steps.”

Rumsfeld had major plans for Special Ops—and they didn’t include any CIA control or meddling. Cofer Black’s departure opened a door for Rumsfeld to assert more control over the dark wars. But it wasn’t just the Agency or Congress that Rumsfeld wanted to cut out of the equation. It was also the conventional military bureaucracy and military brass, which he believed had grown soft and gun-shy. “The worst way to organize for a manhunt…is to have it planned in the Pentagon,” Rumsfeld wrote in an internal memo laying out a vision for SOF units to begin striking globally. “We must be willing to accept the risks associated with a smaller footprint.” On July 22, 2002, Rumsfeld sent a secret directive to General Charles Holland, the SOCOM commander, envisioning a decentralized “manhunt” that would circumvent the traditional military command structure and operate more like a private hit team. He instructed Holland to “develop a plan” to deal with al Qaeda and associated groups. Rumsfeld explained that going forward, they would need to find a way to “cut through” the Pentagon bureaucracy and process deployment orders “in minutes and hours, not days and weeks.” He added: “The objective is to capture terrorists for interrogation or, if necessary, to kill them, not simply to arrest them in a law-enforcement exercise.” But Holland “did not respond as swiftly and dramatically as people in Washington thought he should,” recalled Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired colonel who served thirty years in the army. “People in Washington, in this case, being Rumsfeld and Cheney.” The general came back with a five-year plan when Rumsfeld wanted immediate action.

As Rumsfeld and Cheney pushed for Special Ops to start hitting globally, top military commanders expressed concern that those plans outpaced the military’s abilities to collect and exploit intelligence. Some JSOC teams in Afghanistan had found themselves in turf battles with other JSOC teams and, though they did kill a tremendous number of Afghans and foreign fighters, whom exactly it was they were killing was not always clear. A big problem was a lack of solid intelligence. While the CIA was taking the lead in hunting down High Value Targets (HVTs), Rumsfeld was simultaneously pushing JSOC’s men to yield results. But without good intel, they were chasing ghosts.

When Rumsfeld proposed beefing up JSOC and taking it global, General Holland pushed back. He told Rumsfeld he was concerned about the lack of “actionable intelligence” in the emerging proposed target regions. One senior military commander said bluntly that “the intelligence wasn’t good enough to allow us to have a campaign like that.” Rumsfeld and his deputies reportedly ridiculed the commanders, particularly General Holland, for what they saw as excessive caution. A Pentagon adviser who worked closely with Rumsfeld at the time told the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that Rumsfeld and his team were convinced that “there [were] few four-stars leaning forward in the Special Operations Command,” and that more “fighting generals” were needed, and further, the high-ranking military officers who came up during the Clinton years would need to be “reassessed.”

More to Rumsfeld’s liking was General Wayne Downing, who had been called out of retirement after 9/11 to serve as deputy national security adviser and coordinate the US campaign targeting terrorist networks and “those who support them.” Although he technically reported to National Security Adviser Rice, he would be JSOC’s advocate within the White House. Downing pushed for JSOC to return to its roots as a “blacker/lower visibility force,” employing “a preemptive posture, with improved find and fix capabilities for sustained operations.” He began pushing for Special Operations Forces to prepare for “the future indirect and clandestine GWOT fight in countries with which we are not at war” and to conduct operations “in multiple, sensitive, non-permissive and denied areas.” He recommended that JSOC should report directly to the secretary of defense and not run its operations through the conventional chain of command.

In reality JSOC was already being freed. While Downing went through official channels, Wilkerson said Rumsfeld and Cheney had already “bypassed Special Operations Command and went straight into Fort Bragg and began giving directions for Special Operating Force activities, direct action in most cases, directly from the Vice President’s office to the Joint Special Operations Command.” Within months, Holland would be relieved of his SOCOM post.

It was the beginning of what would be a multiyear project by Rumsfeld and Cheney to separate this small, elite, surgical unit from the broader chain of command and transform it into a global killing machine. Before 9/11, they had big plans for JSOC, but the terrorist attacks gave them all the ammunition they would need to win their own war against oversight of these elite and highly lethal forces.

“What I was seeing was the development of what I would later see in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Special Operations Forces would operate in both theaters without the conventional commander even knowing what they were doing,” said Wilkerson. “That’s dangerous, that’s very dangerous. You have all kinds of mess when you don’t tell the theater commander what you’re doing.” Wilkerson told me that when he worked in the Bush administration, “You had JSOC operating as an extension of the [administration] doing things the executive branch—read: Cheney and Rumsfeld—wanted it to do. This would be more or less carte blanche. ‘You need to do it, do it.’ It was very alarming for me as a conventional soldier.”

There was no love lost between the CIA and Rumsfeld and Cheney over the emerging Iraq War intelligence game. And, as they planned other wars, they didn’t trust the CIA’s analysts to provide them with intelligence required to hit, early and often, globally. Rumsfeld believed that Special Operations needed its own intelligence operation specifically aimed at fueling the global kill/capture campaign. JSOC already worked closely with the famed signals intelligence operation, the Intelligence Support Activity, or simply the Activity. Also known as Gray Fox, the unit specialized in operational electronic surveillance and intercepts. But Rumsfeld also wanted an entity that mirrored the capabilities of the CIA—one that was built on human intelligence, known in the community as HUMINT. In the spring of 2002, a commission chaired by former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft recommended that the NSA, the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency be removed from Pentagon control and handed over to the CIA. Rumsfeld pushed back violently and moved US intelligence in the exact opposite direction.

In April 2002, Project Icon was launched. The funding for the program came from “reprogrammed” Pentagon funds and was not briefed to congressional intelligence committees. The “new clandestine teams” made up of “case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists” were deployed alongside Special Ops Forces with renewed focus on gathering human intelligence—from the field interrogations, surveillance and the running of local sources and assets. After initially operating under classified code names, the secret program would later become known as the Strategic Support Branch, or SSB. In July 2002, President Bush transferred Gray Fox to the Special Operations Command by executive order, giving Rumsfeld control over a huge portion of US intelligence assets and systems. This new shop, consisting of Gray Fox working together with SSB, would provide real-time intelligence to Special Ops Forces to target suspected militants, prevent future attacks and “prepare the battlefield” for potential military operations. In short, it would fuel a global manhunt. If Doug Feith’s intelligence shop was meant to threaten the supremacy of the CIA’s analysts, the SSB was meant to supersede the authorities of the Agency’s human intelligence structures.

Any country, friend or foe of the United States, would be fair game for operations. The CIA, the US ambassadors and the home government would not be looped in. Early planning memos by Rumsfeld indicated that he wanted the SSB to focus intelligence-gathering operations on “emerging target countries such as Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, Philippines and Georgia.” SSB was designed to “operate without detection and under the defense secretary’s direct control.” The Washington Post obtained internal Pentagon documents that called for a HUMINT branch that would be “directly responsive to tasking from SecDef.” These SSB units would operate under “nonofficial cover,” at times using false names and nationalities with the goal of covering the “full spectrum of humint operations.” It was a direct challenge to the CIA, whose Directorate of Operations was the traditional agency tasked with covert missions, particularly when conducted in “friendly” nations or countries where “conventional war is a distant or unlikely prospect.” There was pro forma language in the internal guidelines on the SSB defining “coordination” as giving the Agency seventy-two hours’ notice before launching an intelligence-gathering mission, but the SSB was intended to radically streamline the pace and scope of lethal covert military operations against terrorist suspects, regardless of where they resided.

“Definitely Cheney, and also Rumsfeld to a lesser extent, viewed the CIA as a weak sister, and that basically they were not politically reliable,” recalled Philip Giraldi, the career CIA case officer. “And, essentially, it was decided that we would go the JSOC route. But of course, the JSOC route has problems. When you use the military as your cutting edge on some of these activities where you’re not at war with somebody, where you’re getting involved with sending people into someone else’s sovereign territory, then you’re opening up all kinds of cans of worms that intelligence agencies were created to avoid.” Covert actions permit US operatives to ignore international conventions and to violate other nations’ domestic laws. US military operations, however, are required by US law to observe international laws, the laws of war and the Geneva Conventions, though the Bush administration clearly did not see it that way when it came to the status of certain military detainees. Using US Special Ops Forces for covert actions could mean they lose their Geneva Convention status, be accused of spying and ultimately be labeled “unlawful combatants.” Critics worried that this would place US armed service members at risk should they be captured, with their captors enabled to ignore the Geneva Conventions’ prohibitions on torture and inhumane treatment, citing the US precedent.

Although the SSB was officially run by Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, its real taskmaster was Stephen Cambone, a political ideologue recruited by Rumsfeld. A leading neocon, Cambone had first appeared on the Pentagon radar when he ran the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1990. Later, he worked on special projects for Rumsfeld on DoD commissions dealing with missile defense and spacebased weapons. Bringing Cambone on board to help shape the hunter-killer Special Ops program that had been on Rumsfeld’s mind since 9/11 opened the floodgates. Officially, Cambone was Rumsfeld’s special assistant. In reality, he was Rumsfeld’s point man on developing the DoD’s version of the “dark side.”

When, after 9/11, Rumsfeld sought to wrest control of the Global War on Terror from the CIA, he went to Cambone. In one of his famous “snowflake” memos, on September 23, 2001, Rumsfeld told his staff: “We want to think through designating Special Ops as the global terrorism CINC [commander in chief]. They’ve got a joint intelligence center. The effort has to be global.” That day, Rumsfeld sent Cambone a note, subject: “Capabilities,” asking him to look into “how we can develop additional unconventional capabilities in the Pentagon and troops, like Special Ops, only of a different type. We need greater flexibility and versatility.” Three days later, on the morning of September 26, 2001, Rumsfeld sent Cambone another memo with the subject: “Opportunity.” “Now is the time to fix intel,” Rumsfeld wrote, saying that he wanted to remap the command structure of US forces across the globe, “to reorganize our forces in Europe and Asia, to accelerate Army transformation, to reduce headquarters and to get homeland defense humming. There may be other things we could do as well.”

Cambone would become a powerful shadow player with access to Rumsfeld and his team. One of his primary jobs would be organizing Special Operations activities aimed at killing and capturing people designated as terrorists or enemies by Rumsfeld and the White House. “They are all cast in the same mode, which is ‘let’s get the most high-tech gadgets for communications and weapons, let’s run these operations at the highest possible level of efficiency, let’s get some really good intelligence, so we can pick out individuals, and we’ll go kill them,’” said Colonel Lang. Rumsfeld had told Cambone, “We need to increase the total number of Special Forces.” In 2002, Cambone began reviewing ways to free up as many shooters as possible. This began with transferring some of the traditional tasks performed by SOFs to the conventional military, such as: training foreign forces, conducting airlift missions and serving as a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) for VIPs in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld and Cambone wanted all SOF hands on deck for kill/capture. Leave the rest to big army.

In mid-2002, Rumsfeld issued a classified planning order to General Richard Myers, the chair of the Joint Chiefs, advocating a sweeping change in the way JSOC and other Special Ops would operate. Rumsfeld wanted “preliminary pre-clearance” for operations and maximum authority for commanders on the ground to execute missions.

Rumsfeld’s goal was to reorganize the structure of US Special Operations Forces, blowing up barriers to allow for fast, lethal, global operations with no bureaucratic meddling from anyone who did not have a need to know. The Special Mission Units (SMUs) of JSOC, Delta Force, which was officially known as CAG, or Combat Applications Group, and SEAL Team 6, were attractive to Rumsfeld because they were accustomed to operating autonomously, even in the old days of regional commands being responsible for all troops operating in their Area of Responsibility. These SMUs formed the National Missions Force and were permitted to operate discreetly and globally without coordinating with the conventional command authorities. Rumsfeld wanted to make this model apply to all Special Ops Forces.

“Today we’re taking a number of steps to strengthen the U.S. Special Operations Command so it can make even greater contributions to the global war on terrorism,” Rumsfeld declared. “Since 1987 the Special Operations Command has been organized as a supporting command, meaning it provides warriors and materiel to the various regional combatant commanders, who then plan and direct missions.” No more. From now on, Rumsfeld asserted, SOCOM would be its own boss—with a headquarters in Tampa, Florida, and regional “Theater Special Operations Commands” that could organize hits and other direct actions on a rolling basis. Rumsfeld said this was necessary because of “the nature of the enemy and the need for fast, efficient operations in hunting down and rooting out terrorist networks around the world.”

In 2003, Rumsfeld created a new portfolio for Cambone, one that had never existed in the Pentagon’s civilian bureaucracy before, undersecretary of defense for intelligence. The new position was referred to internally as “defense intelligence czar”—and it came with unprecedented authority, as it forced all of the previously independent intelligence entities of the Pentagon to report directly to Cambone. This included the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists charged that the position was part of a drive “to shift the intelligence community’s center of gravity further into the Pentagon.” What this meant in real terms was that 85 percent of the nation’s total intelligence budget would be under Cambone’s control, with the CIA director controlling just 12 percent. “Rumsfeld wasn’t an evil man” a former aide to a Special Operations commander told me. “Rumsfeld had vision. He allowed people like Cambone to manipulate shit.” Conventional uniformed military leaders reportedly despised Cambone, with one senior army officer quipping early in Cambone’s tenure, “If I had one round left in my revolver, I’d take out Stephen Cambone.”

Cambone’s right-hand man was a legend in the dark world of covert military operations, Major General William “Jerry” Boykin, an original member of Delta Force who went on to serve in both JSOC and the CIA. He’d spent his entire career in the shadows of US foreign policy, engaged in unattributable operations across the globe. As Boykin saw it, “Through the 1980s and 90s, SOFs saw great opportunities to get boots on the ground, to prepare the battleground, to shape the environment, and to collect intelligence” but only received “approval for less than 10 percent of the opportunities that existed.” These opportunities, he asserted, “were missed because of an unwillingness to take risks and a lack of vision and understanding of the benefits for preparing the battle space ahead of time. There was also a fear of consequences.” Boykin believed that US counterterrorism operations had become subservient to intelligence standards that required nearly 100 percent certainty of the target and that civilians would not be killed. He said he rejected the term “actionable intelligence.” “Give me action,” Boykin declared. “I will give you intelligence.”

Some, though, warned of the risks of this approach. Running US Special Operations Forces in CIA-type operations and “expanding their role in the way Rumsfeld intends could be very dangerous for U.S. foreign policy,” argued Jennifer Kibbe of the Brookings Institution, adding that using Special Ops Forces was “much easier than using the CIA. And this facility seems to appeal to Rumsfeld.” It meant that Special Operations “can conduct covert operations abroad without local governments’ permission and with little or no congressional oversight or recourse. If Rumsfeld gets his way, administration hawks may soon start using special forces to attack or undermine other regimes on Washington’s hit list.”

Over at the State Department, Powell and Wilkerson began seeing the effects of this new, parallel operation being run out of the Pentagon. “Early in the so-called ‘Global War on Terror,’ we were encountering things like ambassadors calling or e-mailing, or messaging or cabling, that they had people walking around their capital cities, who were white people, six foot five, males, nineteen-inch biceps, and it didn’t take too long for the ambassador to figure out who these people were, and why were they there,” recalled Wilkerson. “We began to have to press Rumsfeld as to what he was doing, sending these Special Operating Forces around the world, without alerting the country team, without alerting our ambassador, the chief of mission in the country. It got to the point where we actually had a death down in South America where one of these people got a little bit inebriated one night and pulled his weapon and he killed a taxi driver in that country, and we had to whip him out of the country real quickly.” Wilkerson added: “I am not even sure Rumsfeld knew some of the [operations] that the vice president’s office was” running.

“It grew and went out of control under the vice president. It kinda went wild,” Cannistraro, the former senior CIA officer, told me. “There were people at the Pentagon given the responsibility to run ‘special Special Operations,’ that didn’t go through the regular chain of command, and that were kept separate from coordination with CIA, or the State Department, or other elements of the US government. And that was all justified on the basis that 9/11 meant that we were in a war, and this war would require special measures to deal with. And it got out of control. There were a couple of places where, because they weren’t coordinated, they weren’t informed, they killed people that were not real targets. They were wrong.” He added, “It happened, frequently.”

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence would eventually conclude that the Pentagon had “shown a propensity to apply the [Preparing the Battlespace] label where the slightest nexus of a theoretical, distant military operation might one day exist.” For some career army officers who had served in the conventional military, the developments they were witnessing inside the Pentagon felt ominous. “We know that the Geneva Convention was thrown under the bus, so to say, pretty early,” Colonel Douglas Macgregor told me. Macgregor was a decorated army officer who led the most famous tank battle of the 1991 Gulf War. He was on the Pentagon team that was charting out the early stages of Iraq War planning in 2001 and 2002. He said he was disturbed by what he was witnessing inside the DoD as Cheney and Rumsfeld began building up the SSB and JSOC. “To be perfectly blunt with you, I stayed away from it. I didn’t want to be involved in it, and I wasn’t interested in participating in it, because I had this fear that we were ultimately breaking laws,” he said. “Whether those laws were our own, or they turned out to be the Geneva Convention, or the ‘Law of War’ as we in uniform call it. One would have expected someone to stand up and say, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Secretary, Mr. Cambone, General Boykin, you don’t have the authority to suspend the Geneva Convention. That has been ratified by the United States Senate.’ But, we have another problem. We have no interest in the Senate, in holding anyone accountable and enforcing the laws,” he asserted. “So if you have no one in any branch—whether it’s judicial, legislative or executive—who’s interested in upholding the law, then you can do pretty much what you want. And I think that’s ultimately what’s happened.”

Elsewhere in the military, there was great consternation at the possibilities for disaster presented by this newly forming power being asserted by Rumsfeld and Cheney and the global adventure they were plotting for US Special Operations Forces. “By entering the friendly country with military forces in execution of a military mission, the U.S. has committed an act of war even though our interest lies not with them but in the terrorist headquarters,” noted Colonel Kathryn Stone in a July 2003 report for the US Army War College:

Colonel Stone’s analysis would later prove prophetic, but such concerns were buried away. “I think a lot of ‘back-dooring’ went on and as a result they got a lot of running room. The President was kind of passive, in his first term he let them get away with a lot of stuff, and they had their own idea how to do things, which is much like the way the Israelis do things,” recalled Colonel Lang. “You know, the famous ‘Cheney one percent’ thing—if there’s any doubt, you kill ’em. That’s basically it, either capture them, or kill them. And that’s what they did for a long time.”

Rumsfeld and Cheney were beginning to build up the infrastructure for waging an unaccountable, global war—and JSOC would be their prized weapon. They needed a forward-leaning general to run their secret war. They would find their man in the form of General Stanley McChrystal, US Army Ranger.