Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

15. The Death Star

IRAQ, 2004—Balad was a massive air base that Saddam had built up with modern facilities and infrastructure. The kill/capture center JSOC established there was a microcosm of how Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted the whole national security apparatus in the United States to function: all US intelligence agencies and assets should be subordinate to the kill teams staffed by the Special Ops warrior class and directed by the White House and defense secretary. It would later be hailed by McChrystal and others as an unprecedented joint operation, but in reality it was a JSOC-run show where everyone else played their supporting parts. Journalist Mark Urban, who embedded with British commandos working with McChrystal’s task force, said that some JSOC operatives referred to the Joint Operations Center at Balad as “the Death Star because of the sense that ‘you could just reach out with a finger, as it were, and eliminate somebody.’ Others who watched live the white splash of five-hundred-pound bombs on image-intensifier cameras referred to the screens above them as ‘Kill TV.’” The JSOC command center was known as “the factory” or “the shop floor.” McChrystal was fond of calling the kill/capture apparatus “the machine.”

By mid-2004, the pace of the JSOC operations had accelerated dramatically. The CIA had liaisons assigned to the fusion center, along with satellite technicians from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, surveillance experts from the NSA and, for good measure, Iraq “experts” from the State Department. “An NSA-created linkup called the Real Time Regional Gateway allowed operatives who seized scraps of intelligence from raids—a terrorist’s cell phone contacts, receipts for bomb ingredients, even geolocated terrorist cell phones—to send their crucial data to different nodes across the network,” reported Spencer Ackerman of Wired magazine. “One analyst might not appreciate the significance of a given piece of intel. But once JSOC effectively became an experiment in intel crowdsourcing, it soon got a bigger, deeper picture of the enemy it was fighting—and essentially emulating.” In effect, JSOC was running the covert war buried within the larger war and controlling the intelligence.

In April 2004, Rumsfeld continued to hammer away on the theme that the Iraqi insurgency was being driven by remnants of the regime. After four private security contractors working for the mercenary firm Blackwater were killed in an ambush in Fallujah on March 31, 2004, Bush had ordered a massive revenge assault on the city, directing US commanders to “Kick ass!” and “Kill them!” With no apparent understanding that the uprising in Fallujah had been sparked by the US siege of the city, which disproportionately killed civilians, Rumsfeld thundered, “Thugs and assassins and former Saddam henchmen will not be allowed…to oppose peace and freedom.” The US occupation was creating a situation in which new militant cells were popping up weekly, and the task force was struggling to keep them all straight, much less track them. The emerging US strategy was to loosen the definition of who was an insurgent and to engage in a sweeping war against anyone suspected of being a “militant.” “The Americans were in total denial about the state of the insurgency,” said a British intelligence officer. “The arrogance and hubris… were breathtaking.”

In early April 2004, a young US businessman named Nicholas Berg went missing in Baghdad. Berg, like tens of thousands of other Americans, had come to Iraq to cash in on the post-invasion contracting boom. Under Saddam, Iraq had no real mobile phone networks and Berg saw dollar signs in the prospect of erecting mobile towers. He would never fulfill his dreams. On May 8, Berg’s decapitated body was discovered on a Baghdad bridge by a US military patrol unit. Three days later, a video appeared online with the title “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Slaughters an American.” In the video, Berg was dressed in an orange jumpsuit—similar to those worn by US prisoners at Guantánamo. The young Jewish American made a brief statement identifying himself before being grabbed by masked men wielding weapons. Two of the men held him down, while another severed his head with a knife. One of the men screamed “Allah u Akbar,” while another held the head in front of the camera. The narrator of the video declared, “We tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls. You will not receive anything from us but coffins after coffins,” warning that more Americans would be “slaughtered in this way. How can a free Muslim sleep well as he sees Islam slaughtered and its dignity bleeding, and the pictures of shame and the news of the devilish scorn of the people of Islam—men and women—in the prison of Abu Ghraib?” The voice of the narrator was later determined by US intelligence to be that of Zarqawi.

Although Zarqawi’s reference to the torture at Abu Ghraib was self-serving, it resonated with Iraqis who had lived to tell the tale of their ordeals there and other prisons or “filtration sites.” There was no doubt that such acts were fueling the insurgency. In fact, Malcolm Nance, the former SERE instructor who worked in Iraq during this period, told me he saw direct evidence that the way the United States treated prisoners and housed them helped extremist groups recruit new operatives. The prisons, he said, became “the Jihadi Advanced University for Suicide Bomber Studies,” explaining that “you put all the worst of the worst together with guys who would never consider being a jihadi, and suddenly you have guys who were released and now they’re suicide bomber fodder.”

Berg’s killing by Zarqawi provided the Bush administration with a convenient opportunity to pivot from its claims that “regime dead-enders” were driving the violence in Iraq and shift the emphasis to al Qaeda terrorists. The US focus on Zarqawi, in turn, brought him notoriety and recognition, and he began raising new funds for his previously obscure network. Much of his money poured in from wealthy Saudis, Syrians and Jordanians. Although the Jordanian terrorist had already been on JSOC’s radar for some time, Zarqawi became a propaganda bonanza for the Bush administration because it could now characterize the resistance in Iraq as being led by al Qaeda. “The execution of Nicholas Berg instantly catapulted Zarqawi into the media spotlight,” recalled Richard Rowley, an independent journalist who spent extensive time in Iraq during that period, including in Zarqawi strongholds. He said:

That operation would come in November 2004 with the second US siege of Fallujah, which had become a potent symbol of resistance to the US occupation. After that, a bloody civil war would break out in Iraq. Zarqawi would announce a war against Shiites, while the United States, in turn, would build up its own Shiite death squads.

At the center of the US contribution to Iraq’s civil war were two Americans. One was General David Petraeus, who had close ties to the White House, particularly to Dick Cheney, and had been tapped by Rumsfeld in June 2004 to head the Multi-National Security Transition Command–Iraq. The other was retired US colonel James Steele, a former Enron executive who had been selected for a senior Iraq job by Wolfowitz.

Although Enron had been a major backer of the Bush campaign, Steele wasn’t in Iraq because of his Enron days. He had a deep history with US “dirty wars” in Central America. As a colonel in the marines in the mid-1980s, Steele had been a key “counterinsurgency” official in the bloody US-fueled war in El Salvador, where he coordinated the US Military Advisory Group, supervising Washington’s military assistance and training of Salvadoran Army units battling the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front guerrillas. In the late 1980s, Steele was called to testify during the Iran-Contra investigation about his role in Oliver North’s covert weapons pipeline, which ran through the Salvadoran air force base at Ilopango, to the Nicaraguan Contra death squads.

Steele and Petraeus were central to a program known as the “Salvadorization of Iraq,” or simply the “Salvador Option.” The two men built up local Iraqi Special Ops units to be used in a counterinsurgency campaign, but they would soon turn into unaccountable death squads. “We will hit these people and teach them a good lesson they won’t forget,” Iraqi defense minister Hazim Shaalan said the day the first six-hundred-man battalion of Iraqi Special Operations forces was to put into action in June 2004. “Americans and allied forces have certain restrictions we won’t have. It’s our country, it’s our culture, and we have different laws than you do.” Enraged by another suicide bombing days later, Hazim declared, “We will cut off their hands and behead them.”

On his own, Steele helped hatch a Special Police Commando Unit (also known as the Wolf Brigade), made up of former Republican Guard and Saddam-era SOFs recruited by the Ministry of Interior. According to a New York Times Magazine piece by Peter Maass from 2005, Petraeus didn’t know about the unit right away; he found out about it, visited its base in the Green Zone, challenged the commandos to one of his famous push-up contests, and that was that. “He was not just embracing a new military formation; he was embracing a new strategy,” Maass reported. “The hard men of the past would help shape the country’s future. Petraeus decided that the commandos would receive whatever arms, ammunition and supplies they required,” and he gave Steele his full support. After Ayad Allawi, the Sunni interim prime minister, lost the election in January 2005, the Wolf Brigade was taken over by Shiite militia members who then became the beneficiaries of Petraeus’s support. It was the moment Iraq descended into unspeakable violence.

MCCHRYSTAL’S COMMAND CENTER at Balad was now up and running at a decent speed. “Vital months had been lost while the Pentagon leadership was in denial about the insurgency. By early 2004, it was mutating and McChrystal was one of the few who both understood this and the need to get on top of it,” reported Mark Urban, the journalist who embedded with British commandos working with McChrystal. “Teams from each of the different intelligence agencies were established at Balad. Once he had started to milk them for information, McChrystal put it all into a JSOC intranet similar to the one he’d created in Afghanistan. It would allow those at the cutting edge of the US counterterrorism effort to share information worldwide.” Urban added: “McChrystal’s counterterrorist Rome could not be built in a day. It would take much of 2004 to take shape.”

With Saddam Hussein in prison and the High Value Task Force killing its way through Iraq, McChrystal and McRaven began refocusing the HVT efforts on Afghanistan and the hunt for Osama bin Laden. “If anyone is smart and cunning enough to get [bin Laden], McRaven and the Delta and SEAL Team Six guys he now commands will do it,” General Downing said in 2004. Downing’s remark about McRaven and Team 6 hitting bin Laden was prophetic, but he would not live to see it fulfilled—Downing passed away in 2007. Iraq was becoming engulfed in the flames of multiple insurgencies that were largely fueled by the US invasion and occupation, the abuse and torture of prisoners and the widely held perception among large swaths of the Iraqi population that the United States was a “gratuitous enemy.” Zarqawi and his network grew stronger and made what was once a lie about an al Qaeda presence in Iraq a bloody reality. McChrystal would spend a great deal of time trying to find, fix and ultimately finish Zarqawi. But Afghanistan and Pakistan were also calling.