Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

13. “You Don’t Have to Prove to Anyone That You Did Right”

IRAQ, 2003–2005—Once the Iraq War was in full swing, Rumsfeld directed General John Abizaid, the CENTCOM commander, to disband the separate High Value Task Forces JSOC was running in Afghanistan and Iraq, TF-5 and TF-20. Instead, JSOC would run one unified task force, TF-121, that would have jurisdiction to operate and hit in both countries. The logic was that “tracking and then capturing or killing Qaeda and Taliban leaders or fleeing members of the former Iraqi government required planning and missions not restricted by the lines on the map of a region where borders are porous.” It was a further blurring of the lines between “covert” and “clandestine” missions, but Rumsfeld had determined JSOC should forge ahead. In keeping with Rumsfeld’s drive to make Special Operations Forces the lead agency in the “global manhunt,” the task force would be run by McRaven and overseen by McChrystal, and they would have at their disposal the full range of US intelligence assets, including what was needed from the CIA. In addition to McRaven’s Navy SEALs and McChrystal’s Rangers, as well as members of Delta Force, the team would also have command over paramilitaries from the CIA’s Special Activities Division and support from the Activity, JSOC’s signals intelligence wing.

The days of JSOC operatives being regularly put on loan to the CIA were over. Cambone’s Strategic Support Branch and the Activity were coordinating the feeding of all-access intel to the task force. “This is tightening the sensor-to-shooter loop,” a senior defense official told the Washington Times. “You have your own intelligence right with the guys who do the shooting and grabbing. All the information under one roof.”

While TF-121 was given a mission to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein by the spring of 2004, Washington was increasingly focused on Iraq. Veteran intelligence officials identify this period as a turning point in the hunt for bin Laden. At a time when JSOC was asking for more resources and permissions to pursue targets inside of Pakistan and other countries, there was a tectonic shift toward making Iraq the numberone priority.

The heavy costs of that strategic redirection to the larger counterterrorism mission were of deep concern to Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer, a senior military intelligence officer who was CIA trained and had worked for the DIA and JSOC. Shaffer ran a task force, Stratus Ivy, that was part of a program started in the late 1990s code-named Able Danger. Utilizing what was then cutting-edge “data mining” technology, the program was operated by military intelligence and the Special Operations Command and aimed at identifying al Qaeda cells globally. Shaffer and some of his Able Danger colleagues claimed that they had uncovered several of the 9/11 hijackers a year before the attacks but that no action was taken against them. He told the 9/11 Commission he felt frustrated when the program was shut down and believed it was one of the few effective tools the United States had in the fight against al Qaeda pre-9/11. After the attacks, Shaffer volunteered for active duty and became the commander of the DIA’s Operating Base Alpha, which Shaffer said “conducted clandestine antiterrorist operations” in Africa. Shaffer was running the secret program, targeting al Qaeda figures who might flee Afghanistan and seek shelter in Somalia, Liberia and other African nations. It “was the first DIA covert action of the post–Cold War era, where my officers used an African national military proxy to hunt down and kill al Qaeda terrorists,” Shaffer recalled.

Like many other experienced intelligence officers who had been tracking al Qaeda prior to 9/11, Shaffer believed that the focus was finally placed correctly on destroying the terror network and killing or capturing its leaders. But then all resources were repurposed for the Iraq invasion. “I saw the Bush administration lunacy up close and personal,” Shaffer said. After a year and a half of running the African ops, “I was forced to shut down Operating Base Alpha so that its resources could be used for the Iraq invasion.”

Shaffer was reassigned as an intelligence planner on the DIA team that helped feed information on possible Iraqi WMD sites to the advance JSOC teams that covertly entered Iraq ahead of the invasion. “It yielded nothing,” he alleged. “As we now know, no WMD were ever found.” He believed that shifting the focus and resources to Iraq was a grave error that allowed bin Laden to continue operating for nearly another decade. Shaffer was eventually sent to Afghanistan, where he would clash with US military leaders over his proposals to run operations into Pakistan to target the al Qaeda leaders who were hiding there.

Beginning in 2002 and into 2003, Special Ops and CIA units in Afghanistan began shifting their resources to Iraq. By the time it was disbanded in 2003, TF-5 in Afghanistan had already lost “more than two-thirds of its fighting strength,” from about 150 commandos to as few as thirty. By the winter of 2003, it was reported that “nearly half the US intelligence and commando agents who had been in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan were reassigned to Iraq.” Saddam was code-named Black List One, and McRaven’s force intensified the hunt, scouring Iraq for him. They yanked family members, former bodyguards and aides of Saddam from their homes or hiding places and pressed them for information on his whereabouts. By late 2003, the US military’s conventional commanders were growing concerned about the techniques they heard were being used by TF-121 to interrogate prisoners. It sounded a lot like the descriptions they had heard in whispers about what the CIA was doing at its black sites. “Detainees captured by TF 121 have shown injuries that caused examining medical personnel to note that ‘detainee shows signs of having been beaten,’” according to a classified military report prepared for top US generals in Iraq at the time. One officer was quoted in the report as saying, “Everyone knows about it.” The report alleged that some of the treatment of detainees by TF-121 could “technically” be illegal and gravely warned that the mass detention of Iraqis could fan the flames of a brewing insurgency, adding that Iraqis could perceive the United States and its allies as “gratuitous enemies.”

But, just as the military was uncovering a potentially illegal and counterproductive detention program being run by TF-121, the task force achieved a major victory that would grab international headlines and win much internal praise in the Pentagon. A former bodyguard captured and interrogated by the task force had given up the location of a farm outside of Saddam’s hometown, Tikrit, which he claimed the deposed Iraqi leader used as a hiding place. McRaven’s men, backed by scores of troops from the 4th Infantry Division and local Iraqi militiamen, descended on the farm after cutting off all of its electricity, causing it to go completely dark. After searching the buildings on the property, they were just about to give up when a soldier spotted a crack in the floor, partially covered by a rug. Underneath, they found a styrofoam plate concealing a hole.

ON DECEMBER 14, 2003, it seemed to the Bush administration that the Iraq War had an end—and victory—in sight. That morning, Paul Bremer, flanked by General Ricardo Sanchez, walked up to a podium at a press conference in Baghdad. “Ladies and gentlemen, we got him,” Bremer said, barely able to contain his smile. The “him” in this case was none other than Saddam Hussein. The deposed Iraqi leader had been found hiding in a “spider hole” inside a mud brick hovel at the farm in Adwar, near Tikrit, with a pistol. They also recovered some AKs and $750,000 in hundred-dollar bills on the farm. When a member of Delta Force spotted Saddam hiding in the hole, the Iraqi leader told him: “I am Saddam Hussein. I am the president of Iraq. I want to negotiate.” The soldier reportedly shot back, “President Bush sends his regards.” Moments later, McRaven’s men were whisking him to a JSOC filtration site, a temporary holding facility, near the Baghdad Airport. It was called Camp NAMA. Ironically, the facility that would become Saddam’s temporary home had once served as one of his torture chambers. The media was shown images of Saddam being given a medical exam at the facility, but JSOC had already been putting it to much darker uses that would never make it onto TV.

“Now it is time to look to the future, to your future of hope, to a future of reconciliation. Iraq’s future, your future, has never been more full of hope. The tyrant is a prisoner,” Bremer confidently declared. “The economy is moving forward. You have before you the prospect of a sovereign government in a few months.” General Sanchez said the operation was a team effort, involving “coalition special operations forces,” but JSOC and its commanders were not given any direct credit. Neither McChrystal nor McRaven were at the podium that day, but people in the Special Ops community say that McRaven coordinated “Operation Red Dawn.” McRaven and Assistant Secretary of Defense Thomas O’Connell, a veteran of the Activity, shared a cigar outside of Saddam’s cell soon after the Iraqi leader’s capture. Rumsfeld announced that he believed “the eight-month-long insurgency might begin to run out of gas.” In reality, the war was just beginning, particularly for McChrystal and McRaven. And the CIA knew it.

“We are seeing the establishment of an insurgency in Iraq,” Robert Richer, the head of the CIA Near East Division, had told Bush during an intelligence briefing in late 2003. “That’s a strong word,” Rumsfeld interjected. “What do you mean? How do you define insurgency?” When Richer explained what he meant, Rumsfeld quipped, “I might disagree with you.” Finally, Bush weighed in. “I don’t want to read in the New York Times that we are facing an insurgency,” he declared. “I don’t want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don’t think we are there yet.” Despite the state of denial that Rumsfeld appeared to embrace, Richer was right. Iraq, which had no ties to al Qaeda or 9/11, was becoming a magnet for jihadist groups wanting to fight—and kill—Americans.

Although much lip service was paid during the ensuing period to the presence of al Qaeda in Iraq, it was seldom pointed out that the foreign fighters came because of the US invasion. If anything, Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda were enemies. And though there was undoubtedly an al Qaeda presence after the March 2003 invasion, Zarqawi and AQI, or al Qaeda in Iraq, represented a tiny portion of those attacking US occupation forces. There were disparate militias, unemployed Iraqi Army units, Shiite guerrillas and various political factions vying for local power, all of which were rising against the United States. American attacks, such as the siege of Fallujah in April 2004 and a shootout in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, combined with the broader war against the popular cleric Moqtada al Sadr, were swelling the ranks of the insurgency. Despite all the talk of sharp sectarian divides in Iraq, the US occupation was actually uniting Iraqis, Shiite and Sunni, in a common cause against their occupiers. The United States should have realized early on that its own disastrous policies were driving the chaos in Iraq. But the US war planners were intent on planting the flag of victory in Iraq by force, and that meant the insurgency had to be crushed and its leaders killed or captured. “We had this assumption that, okay, you’ve got this group of dead-enders, so to speak, and that if you capture Saddam Hussein, if you are able to capture or kill his sons, then you can more or less deflate the insurgency,” recalled Exum, the Army Ranger. “We were so focused on getting these high value targets, quite independent of any larger or any broader strategy for how we were going to pacify Iraq. I think we ended up exacerbating a lot of the drivers of conflict and exacerbating the insurgency.”

There were two wars in Iraq. One being waged by the conventional army, which was largely an occupation; the other was a war of attrition being fought by JSOC. McChrystal’s men did not believe in taking orders from conventional commanders. General Sanchez, who from 2003 to 2004 was the top commander in Iraq, told me that JSOC forces would barely give his command the courtesy of informing his office of when they were going to conduct operations, even in areas where the conventional US forces were holding territory. When they did, he said, it was just to alert the conventional forces that they’d be doing a hit and to have his men stand clear. Exum recalled of the JSOC relationship with the conventional military: “Lord knows we were depending on those guys for Medivac and for Quick Reaction Force if things got really bad, but we weren’t really talking to them, at the command level.” The task force’s operations, Exum said, were “very compartmentalized, very stove-piped.” JSOC was creating a system where its intelligence operations were feeding its action and often that intelligence would not be vetted by anyone outside of the JSOC structure. The priority was to keep hitting targets. “The most serious thing is the abuse of power that that allows you to do,” said Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Powell. He continued:

Exum recalled hunting Izzat Ibrahim al Douri, one of Saddam’s senior military commanders, who had received the designation as the King of Clubs in the High Value Target deck of cards. They got a tip that Douri was in a particular house and conducted a night raid. As they began the raid, Exum’s Ranger team came under fire from two men. His team returned fire and gunned the men down. “We found out later that we were on two weeks old intelligence,” he remembered. “We killed them and, you know, we kind of realized later that these guys were just out guarding the neighborhood generator.” The men, Exum speculated, likely thought the Rangers were thieves. “Now, I didn’t lose any sleep over it, because these guys were shooting at me, but nonetheless, you start thinking about it from a strategic perspective, that’s a loss.”

McChrystal’s forces realized quickly that the Iraqi resistance was growing, not shrinking, even as various key members of the fallen Baath regime were taken out. McChrystal and his deputy, Mike Flynn, began assessing the state of the insurgency. At the time, JSOC had been “tailored down to a relatively small size in the months following the initial invasion,” McChrystal recalled. “We found a growing threat from multiple sources—but particularly from al Qaeda in Iraq. We began a review of our enemy, and of ourselves. Neither was easy to understand.” From JSOC’s small base outside of Baghdad, McChrystal and his team began mapping out the intel they had on AQI, using white dry-erase boards. “Like all too many military forces in history, we initially saw our enemy as we viewed ourselves,” McChrystal later wrote in an article for Foreign Policy:

The insurgency was far more complex than those in Washington or at the Pentagon were letting on. But the decision to move ahead with targeting any and all insurgents went unchanged. Instead of stepping back, they doubled down. “If you see a fledgling insurgency start to develop, then it doesn’t take a genius to realize that by dragging people out of their homes in the middle of the night, by doing so in such a way that you are not communicating to the neighbors…why this person is being dragged out of their home in the middle of the night, it’s not hard to see how this could inflame tensions, how this could actually exacerbate drivers of conflict,” said Exum. “I think that that’s probably what happened in 2003.”

That’s not how Rumsfeld saw it. He wanted the insurgency obliterated and its leadership decapitated. McChrystal was left to figure out a system for achieving those goals. He began building up a structure to obtain and share information that could be used to facilitate a major expansion of house raids and targeted killing operations. “It became increasingly clear—often from intercepted communications or the accounts of insurgents we had captured—that our enemy was a constellation of fighters organized not by rank but on the basis of relationships and acquaintances, reputation and fame,” McChrystal remembered. “We realized we had to have the rapid ability to detect nuanced changes, whether the emergence of new personalities and alliances or sudden changes in tactics.” JSOC “had to process that new information in real time—so we could act on it,” he asserted. “A stream of hot cinders was falling everywhere around us, and we had to see them, catch those we could, and react instantly to those we had missed that were starting to set the ground on fire.”

The HVT Task Force was broken down into four subunits: Task Force West, whose main unit was a SEAL Team 6 squadron, with support from Rangers; Task Force Central, made up of a Delta squadron with support from Rangers; Task Force North, a Ranger battalion with a group of Deltas; and Task Force Black, a British SAS saber squadron, with British paratroopers. Each of these subunits could be supplemented by a Special Forces company specializing in “direct action” missions. The pace of the raids increased with intelligence gained from one raid leading to two or three others. “General McChrystal and Mike Flynn, his intelligence deputy, really invigorated that Task Force and did some pretty innovative things,” recalled Exum. “In the past, in large part because of the experience in Mogadishu in 1993, the iron rule was, you don’t go anywhere unless you’ve got company of Army Rangers in reserve. Well, under McChrystal, nobody was in reserve. I mean, people were hitting targets every single night, in a very dispersed way. You had Ranger platoons [conducting operations] that previously only Tier One Special Mission Units would be doing.”

McChrystal and Flynn’s fusion approach to gathering intelligence relied on an infrastructure for targeting known by the acronym F₃EA: Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, and Analyze. “The idea was to combine analysts who found the enemy (through intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance); drone operators who fixed the target; combat teams who finished the target by capturing or killing him; specialists who exploited the intelligence the raid yielded, such as cell phones, maps, and detainees; and the intelligence analysts who turned this raw information into usable knowledge,” wrote McChrystal. “By doing this, we speeded up the cycle for a counterterrorism operation, gleaning valuable insights in hours, not days.”

Part of McChrystal and Flynn’s strategy for targeting the insurgency revolved around technology, while the other depended on taking prisoners and extracting information from them as quickly as possible.

Strategically, Flynn and McChrystal were hailed as geniuses. But the whole system was ultimately dependent on human intelligence, not technology. And with an incredibly diverse spectrum of insurgents attacking the occupation forces, that was a major challenge. It was this urgent need for HUMINT and the pressure from the White House and Pentagon to produce results to crush the insurgency (which they had declared did not exist) that would lead to a brutal regime of abuse and torture of detainees held by JSOC. Unsatisfied with the pace of interrogations being conducted by the CIA and other US agencies in the early stages of the Global War on Terror, Rumsfeld and Cambone developed a parallel rendition and detention program to the CIA black sites authorized under Greystone. The new Special Access Program went by various code names, including Copper Green, Matchbox and Footprint. With only some two hundred people read into the Special Access Program (SAP), the highly classified program put Stephen Cambone’s private intel shop in the Pentagon on steroids. “They weren’t getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq” early on in the invasion, a former senior intelligence official told Seymour Hersh. “No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, ‘I’ve got to crack this thing and I’m tired of working through the normal chain of command. I’ve got this apparatus set up—the black special-access program—and I’m going in hot.’ So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing.”

Although it got its major kick-start in Iraq, Copper Green predated the 2003 invasion and the intent was for it to go global. The program was “Rumsfeld’s answer to the CIA death squads envisioned by Cofer Black,” reported investigative journalist Jane Mayer. “Members of the squads were given aliases, dead mail drops, and unmarked clothing. They worked in a loose structure outside the Pentagon’s usually rigid chain of command.” Hersh, who first reported the existence of Copper Green in the New Yorker, interviewed several former high-ranking intelligence and military officials about the program. “We’re not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness,” a former high-level intelligence official told Hersh. “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’”

When Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer was in Afghanistan, he saw the early stages of Copper Green. It was “authorized,” he said, “but a lot of us felt it wasn’t appropriate and just wasn’t right.” When he visited the task force’s facility in Afghanistan, Shaffer said he was “blown away—and not in a good way—by what I saw.” He described how the building had been “completely gutted. Rooms had been converted into holding cells or open areas, framed in wood and steel.” It was “nothing like the interrogation areas I was familiar with.” The task force’s Copper Green interrogation rooms in Afghanistan, he said, “had holding points for a prisoner’s arms and legs. They were designed for prisoners to be shackled and held in stress positions to maximize discomfort and pain.” “I’d been led into a top-secret interrogation ‘system’ authorized by my boss at the time, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, as well as Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, permitting highly coercive interrogation techniques on detained personnel in Afghanistan.” As he stood in “the giant facility,” Shaffer recalled, “I could feel a sense of tension in the air—palpable and raw—like walking on a beach before a hurricane is about to hit.” The world knew about Guantánamo and would soon come to know the name Abu Ghraib. Shocking photos would leak into the media that portrayed barking dogs menacing cowering prisoners, pyramids of naked detainees positioned behind smiling guards, the eerie image of a hooded man, standing arms outstretched in a crucifix pose, on a box. The wires attached to his fingers, he was told, would electrocute him if he lost balance and fell. Abu Ghraib would be infamous the world over, but almost no one ever talked about Camp NAMA.