A New Campaign Against an Old Enemy
It was July 25, 2004. Violence was escalating in Iraq, the Taliban were reasserting themselves in Afghanistan, and JSOC was already deploying operators to the Horn of Africa and Yemen. But for the first day of the three-day JSOC commanders’ conference that Stan McChrystal was holding at Fort Bragg, the country under discussion was Iran, and the conversation was right out of the late 1990s: how to defeat hard and deeply buried targets, in this case the underground shelters that U.S. intelligence believed housed Iran’s nascent nuclear program. Intelligence also indicated that no air-delivered weapon could penetrate deep enough to reach those bunkers, thought to be a hundred feet or more beneath the surface. The National Command Authority had turned to JSOC for solutions.
By now, Team 6 was JSOC’s lead unit for counter-proliferation. But any raid on Iranian facilities would also involve Delta, in part because JSOC was considering simultaneous raids on two separate sites, and also because the assault force would need Delta’s heavy breachers to gain access to the bunkers. However, even a cursory examination of the challenges associated with such an operation gave the commanders pause. Unlike a lot of counter-proliferation operations for which they planned, this was not a mission to “render safe” a device held by a few terrorists, but a large-scale operation that would require JSOC to secure two major facilities. It would take a lot of troops, probably more than the special mission units and the Rangers could muster.
The commanders and their planners also considered from where such a mission might launch: Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, or a carrier in the Persian Gulf. All had disadvantages. The upshot was that when it came to a direct action mission against Iran’s nuclear sites, “no one really wanted to do it,” said a source familiar with the discussion. As the unit with primary responsibility for counter-proliferation missions, Team 6 had done its homework. This wasn’t the first time the unit had been directed to develop options for a raid into Iran. Shortly before the Iraq War Team 6’s Red Team conducted several rehearsals for a possible mission to seize a suspected weapons of mass destruction facility on the outskirts of Tehran and then hold it for up to twenty-four hours, while being resupplied by “speedball” low-altitude parachute drops. The mission’s purpose would be to locate indisputable proof that Iran was developing nuclear weapons. “We trained for weeks for it,” said a Team 6 source. But the proposed mission, which would have been an extraordinarily perilous undertaking, was not popular with the Team 6 operators. “I remember us all thinking, ‘This is stupid. Why are we going to go do this?’” the source said. “And then it all just kind of fizzled away.”
This time, Team 6 instead advocated a clandestine approach aimed at intercepting or disrupting material the Iranians needed for their nuclear program before it reached Iran from North Korea or elsewhere—a strategy based on the “pathway defeat” concept the SEALs had been refining since the late 1990s. The campaign to prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons would continue in the shadows.1
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As the July 2004 conference indicated, even as JSOC’s number one target remained Al Qaeda and its associated groups, in the background loomed Iran, the would-be regional superpower distinctly uncomfortable with U.S. forces occupying the countries on its eastern and western borders. In the immediate post–September 11 period, JSOC was running at least two undercover agents into Iran, but that was far from enough to gain any sort of holistic understanding of the massive target set that country represented.
This became clear when it emerged that about ten leading Al Qaeda figures, including bin Laden’s son Saad, had fled Afghanistan for Iran in fall 2001, as U.S.-backed Northern Alliance forces swept the Taliban from power. The Iranian government—no friend of the Taliban or Al Qaeda—placed them under house arrest in the city of Chalus, about 108 miles north of Tehran on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. The Pentagon tasked JSOC to plan a mission to seize the Al Qaeda personnel. Planners considered infiltrating Team 6 operators via submersible or helicopter. “The SEALs really definitely wanted to do it … because it would have proven a few of their new technologies,” said a Joint Staff source. But, as had been the case so often before, all attempts to plan a raid foundered on a lack of intelligence. JSOC simply did not know the Al Qaeda personnel’s exact locations. The command conducted several rehearsals in Texas before Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Richard Myers canceled the mission on the grounds that the risks—both tactical and political-military—exceeded the potential gains.2
The U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq gave JSOC more opportunities to penetrate Iran. After the invasion, Delta and Orange did quiet work along the Iranian border, particularly in Kurdistan, where Delta quickly made connections with the Asayish—the Kurdish intelligence organization that had one or more spies reporting on the Iranian nuclear program. Delta enlisted the help of other Iraqis as well in its twin campaigns against AQI and Iran’s covert operatives, but “the guys with the greatest access and placement were the Kurds,” said a task force officer. “They delivered some fucking huge targets to us.” Delta wasn’t the only unit working with the Asayish. “There’s a long history between Orange and the Kurds going back to at least the early 1990s,” said a special mission unit officer. JSOC personnel also worked with the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), a militant Iranian exile group that had based itself in Iraq after falling afoul of the ayatollahs’ regime in Tehran. The State Department had placed the MEK on its list of designated terrorist organizations, but that didn’t stop JSOC from taking an attitude of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” toward the group. “They were a group of folks that could transit the border, and they were willing to help us out on what we wanted to do with Iran,” said a special operations officer.
But JSOC was keen to get more of its own people into Iran.
In 2003, tantalizing information reached the command that caused Dailey and then McChrystal to direct the advance force operations cell to examine ways to infiltrate Iran. JSOC heard that Iran had moved Saad bin Laden and the other Al Qaeda exiles from Afghanistan to a comfortable “country club”-like facility in downtown Tehran, according to a JSOC staff officer. The two JSOC commanders wanted the AFO cell to determine the feasibility of entering Iran, going to the prison in Tehran, and confirming that Saad was being held there. Inside JSOC, it was considered a very high-risk mission. But the AFO personnel were surprised to discover that someone could drive to the Iranian border, show an American passport, get a ten-day tourist visa, and enter the country immediately, whereas if the same person applied for a visa through an Iranian embassy or consulate, “then they’re going to pull your Social Security number, then they’re going to do the background diligence on you,” said a source familiar with the operation. Nonetheless, the AFO cell’s assessment was that it would take at least a year to be able to work up a “legend” (a spy’s claimed biography—his cover story) and a cover that would allow a special mission unit operator to enter Iran, get to the prison, gather information, and then leave without attracting suspicion.
McChrystal wasn’t happy. “I need it sooner than that,” he said that fall. When the AFO cell came back to him a month later with the same assessment, this time backed up by the new Orange commander, Colonel Konrad “KT” Trautman, McChrystal told Trautman he wanted Orange to take a closer look at how the mission might be conducted sooner.
But while Orange planned, the growing concern over Iran’s suspected nuclear program changed the mission from reconnoitering the prison to determining whether fissile material was being produced at certain sites. By spring 2004, Orange had selected a two-person male-female team for a proof-of-concept mission and figured out an effective cover for them. McChrystal approved the plan and sent it up the chain of command. But because it involved undercover operatives on a clandestine mission into a country with which the United States was not at war, Orange also needed the CIA’s approval, which proved harder to obtain. “We had a really difficult time getting it approved by the Agency,” said an officer. “They had their own equities to protect.” After the CIA agreed, President Bush gave his okay. The mission finally launched in fall 2004, a delay that appeared to prove the AFO cell correct in its assessment of how long it would take to prepare for such an operation. The operatives’ cover was strong enough to get visas through an Iranian consulate, so they dispensed with the idea of driving up to the border and instead flew commercial into a major Iranian city and checked into a hotel. They spent several days taking taxis around and outside the city, and determined that it would not be difficult to get close enough to the suspected nuclear sites to take a soil sample. But on this occasion, they chose not to. “That wasn’t the mission,” said the source familiar with the operation. “[The mission] at the time was just to get in and get out.” Upon their return to the United States, the operatives briefed President Bush on their mission, who was duly impressed.3
The United States’ occupation of Afghanistan gave U.S. forces access to that country’s border with Iran from late 2001 onward. But for several years, risk aversion restricted almost any effort to take advantage of that for human intelligence purposes. It wasn’t until 2007 that JSOC started a program to penetrate Iran using trained Afghan surrogates. “It was kind of one of those things … that the rest of the world assumes that we’re [already] doing,” said a special operations officer. Nonetheless, the Defense Department considered the program so hush-hush that the officer recalled being ushered into “the room within the room within the room” in the Pentagon to receive a briefing on the topic. The officer’s reaction to the briefing was, “You mean we’re not doing this already?”
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Striding out of the Baghdad International Airport arrivals terminal, dressed in a suit and fresh off the flight from Tehran, the fifty-something Iranian was looking for a taxi on a warm April night in 2009. As he scanned the street, a small plane high above the airport filmed him, transmitting video in real time to a strike force of Rangers and SEALs, who had parked four Stryker wheeled armored vehicles and two nondescript Toyota HiLux trucks in a covered area used by taxis waiting to pick up fares at the airport. The Iranian dialed a number on his cell phone. Using data from that call, the Rangers confirmed his identity within moments. Loading into the HiLuxes, about half a dozen Rangers moved a short distance forward before dismounting quickly and encircling the Iranian. Surrounded by heavily armed soldiers from one of the world’s premier light infantry regiments, the Iranian did not appear in the least flustered. He just laughed, before coming up with perhaps the worst insult he could think of. “Are you guys Jews?” he asked (probably equating “Jews” with “Israelis”). “What?” the Ranger platoon leader asked. The Iranian said he asked “because surely the Americans aren’t stupid enough to detain me.”
His self-confidence was no false bravado. The situation typified a Gordian knot of a problem the United States faced in Iraq. The Rangers’ target was a senior figure in Iran’s powerful covert operations organization: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force. Carrying a diplomatic passport, he had come to Iraq as part of Iran’s campaign to destabilize its neighbor by distributing training, bombs, and money among not only Shi’ite militias—the natural allies of the Shi’ite theocracy that governed Iran—but even Sunni insurgent groups. However, the Quds Force’s vast web of alliances throughout Iraq’s Shi’ite political structure meant any American moves against its operatives were matters of extraordinary sensitivity. The Quds Force operative had laughed at his would-be captors, said a U.S. officer, “because he knew he was protected.”4
Established during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, the Quds Force combined the roles of intelligence collection and covert action for Iran, taking the lead in the Islamic Republic’s special operations and proxy wars in the Middle East and beyond. It was the power behind Lebanon’s Hezbollah organization and now sought to weaken Iraq and kill U.S. troops in the country. The Quds Force was divided into departments or corps, with each corps having a geographic area of responsibility. Department 1000, or the Ramazan Corps, was in charge of operations in Iraq. It was the Quds Force commander, Qassem Suleimani, rather than the foreign minister, who set Iran’s Iraq policy.
Suleimani wielded power in Iraq via a complex and shifting web of proxy forces. These included: the Badr Organization, which began as the Iranian-funded and -led armed wing of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI; firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia, Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM, or the Mahdi Army), and in particular, its even more extremist and violent offshoots referred to by the Coalition as “special groups”; Asaib Ahl al-Haq (the League of the Righteous); the al-Gharawai Network in southeastern Iraq’s Maysan province; and Khatab Hezbollah. Suleimani found the Badr Organization (previously called the Badr Brigades or the Badr Corps) particularly useful. Badr and its parent organization, SCIRI, had a historic relationship with the Quds Force dating back to their years spent exiled in Iran during Saddam Hussein’s rule. They also had close ties to many Iraqi members of parliament. The Quds Force used the Badr Organization for intelligence collection as well as militia activities, with its proxies in the organization passing information directly to Quds Force handlers.
Iran’s strategic goal of destabilizing Iraq created some strange bedfellows, with the Quds Force—the covert arm of Iran’s Shi’ite theocracy—even cozying up to Sunni insurgent networks. “It was 100 percent ‘Are you willing to kill Americans and are you willing to coordinate attacks?’” said an officer who studied the Quds Force’s approach closely. “‘If the answer is “yes,” here’s arms, here’s money.’” The officer compared this approach to that employed by the CIA in the 1980s, when the Agency armed and funded the Afghan mujahideen in their war against Soviet occupiers and their Afghan communist allies. The Quds Force also conducted information operations in Iraq, working via the Internet and the news media, with the goals of: influencing any status of forces agreement between the U.S. and Iraqi governments governing the future role of U.S. forces in Iraq; effecting a reconciliation between warring Shi’ite factions; and focusing those Shi’ite groups on attacking only Coalition forces.5
In early 2005, the Quds Force introduced a new weapon onto the Iraqi battlefield: the explosively formed projectile (EFP), a sort of roadside bomb that sent a jet of molten copper slicing through Coalition armored vehicles. EFP use increased 150 percent in 2006, inflicting 30 percent of U.S. casualties from October through December.6 By early 2007 some U.S. intelligence estimates held that as many as 150 Iranian operatives were in Iraq.7 For several years large sections of the U.S. government had seemed in denial8 about the extent of the Quds Force’s activities, but after years of reluctance to confront the Iranians, the U.S. chain of command could no longer ignore the toll in blood extracted by the Quds Force. In summer 2006 Rumsfeld directed McChrystal to use special operations forces to target Shi’ite death squads.9 George Casey, the MNF-I commander, who had no authority to give orders to JSOC forces, followed up with his own request for McChrystal to go after the Shi’ite groups, especially those supported by Iran.10 “It came down from the top once we … started recovering EFPs in Sadr City that were stamped from Iranian manufacturing facilities,” said a Ranger officer, referring to the teeming Shi’ite neighborhood in east Baghdad.
JSOC began targeting Iranian proxies in Iraq in October 2006.11 The new missions were collectively described within the command as “countering malign Iranian influence.” Between November 2006 and January 2007, McChrystal’s task force conducted two such missions.12 In the first, on December 21, operators descended on Objective Clarke, the Baghdad compound of SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz Hakim. Inside the compound they found and detained Iranian Brigadier General Mohsen Chirazi, who directed all Quds Force operations in Iraq, and the colonel who served as the Quds Force’s chief of operations. After strong protests from Iranian and Iraqi political leaders, JSOC released the pair nine days later.13
In the second mission, the task force launched a combined air and ground assault on Objective Twins, an Iranian diplomatic compound in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil, in the early hours of January 11. The Delta operators were hoping to snare Mohammed Jafari, the deputy head of Iran’s Security Council who was playing a key role in the Iraq campaign, and General Minjahar Frouzanda, the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence chief. Neither target was present in the walled compound, however. Instead, the operators detained five lower-ranking Revolutionary Guard personnel who became known as “the Irbil five,” and who provided valuable intelligence under interrogation.14
The Quds Force struck back January 20, with a carefully planned attack on the Karbala Provisional Joint Coordination Center, a compound manned by U.S. and Iraqi troops in central Iraq. The League of the Righteous, one of the Iranians’ most dangerous proxy forces, carried out the attack, driving eight black SUVs and wearing U.S. uniforms to gain access to the compound. They killed one U.S. soldier on the spot and kidnapped four, only to execute them shortly thereafter while making their escape.15
By the time General David Petraeus replaced George Casey as commander of Multi-National Force-Iraq on February 10, 2007, what had been a one-sided campaign on the part of the Quds Force and its Iraqi agents had become a war. “It was clear [from] theater-level and above intelligence that these guys were active proxies for Iran—they were doing Iran’s bidding in Iraq,” said an Army civilian who spent time in Iraq. “When Dave Petraeus was commander in Iraq, he was determined to stop that.” As usual, when the problem seemed beyond others’ ability to solve, the force to which the Pentagon turned was JSOC.
But after Rumsfeld (in one of his last decisions before resigning effective December 18, 2006) ordered him to go after the Iranians, McChrystal struggled to figure out how to accommodate what was essentially a doubling of his mission. His Iraq task force, at the time called Task Force 16, was fine-tuned to go after Sunni insurgent networks, with a particular focus on Al Qaeda in Iraq. All its intelligence analysts, interrogators, and even operators had become experts on that target set, which was keeping them fully occupied. By early 2007, JSOC estimated its forces had killed about 2,000 Sunni insurgents. But that hard-earned expertise was of limited utility against the Iranians and their proxies, at least according to some in JSOC. A Task Force 16 interrogator “wouldn’t know the first question to ask one of these guys,” said a senior special mission unit officer. John Christian, the Task Force 16 commander at the time, asked not to be given the additional mission of targeting the Quds Force and its allies, for fear TF 16 would lose its laserlike focus on Al Qaeda in Iraq. McChrystal shared his concern. The general did not want to add the Shi’ite groups to Task Force 16’s target set, nor to split off some of that task force to focus solely on those militias.16 “We were getting bled out in Baghdad by the EFPs that were being brought over by Iran … but McChrystal wasn’t willing to pull assault forces from what he perceived to be the real fight strategically,” said a Ranger officer. “So he asked for additional assets.”
Those “assets” came largely from the “white” or “theater” special operations task force working in Iraq, which was known as Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force (CJSOTF, pronounced “see-juh-so-tiff”)-Arabian Peninsula and included Special Forces A-teams and SEAL units. Colonel Kevin McDonnell, commander of 5th Special Forces Group, led the task force, which also included SEAL Team 4, led by Commander John Burnham. McDonnell reported to Major General Frank Kearney, the former JSOC operations director who now commanded all non-JSOC special operations forces in Central Command’s area of responsibility.
Realizing that he needed far more resources to handle both target sets, McChrystal’s solution was to request personnel assigned to the CJSOTF, which had already been targeting Sadr’s Mahdi Army. But when McChrystal made his move, “the threat was it would subsume the entire CJSOTF,” said a retired special forces officer. Concerned that the JSOC boss wanted to bring the entire CJSOTF under his command, Kearney and McDonnell resisted McChrystal’s efforts to strip away theater special operations units from the task force for his own purposes. “Kevin [McDonnell] saw that [JSOC’s] appetite was such that once it got its teeth into you, it could quickly eat you up,” the retired officer said. In a tense arrangement, the mission to counter the Iranians was handed to McDonnell from January to March 2007, reporting to McChrystal. But intense friction between the two officers meant that didn’t work, so in April command of the counter-Iranian task force was moved to Balad and given to a former Delta squadron commander on the JSOC staff.17 McDonnell gave up some headquarters personnel, “a SEAL platoon or two,” and “some technical things” to the new task force, the retired officer said.
The new task force was named Task Force 17. Its mission statement was simple: “TF 17 defeats IRGC-QF [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force], their proxies and surrogate networks in Iraq IOT [in order to] disrupt malign Iranian influence.” In layman’s terms, Task Force 17’s mandate was to go after “anything that Iran is doing to aid in the destabilization of Iraq,” said a Task Force 17 officer. The task force was to work along three “lines of operation”: disrupting the Quds Force’s networks in Iraq “through kinetic targeting” (i.e., via kill-or-capture missions); using captured intelligence materials to enable nonkinetic pressure to be brought to bear on key Shi’ite leaders; and isolating the Quds Force from its Iraqi proxies. Task Force 17’s assault forces at first were a couple of Burnham’s SEAL platoons and a Special Forces CIF company. Its campaign against the Quds Force was called Operation Canine.18
In addition to the challenges inherent in trying to find, fix, and finish enemies who did not want to be found, fixed, and finished, Task Force 17 faced political obstacles that TF 16 did not. While Iraq’s Shi’ite political leadership was only too happy to have McChrystal’s ruthless machine grind away at the Sunni insurgency, there was enormous sensitivity over the targeting of Shi’ite groups, even those who were clearly murdering other Iraqis. The political connections of some of the most savage Shi’ite militia leaders meant there was “an unofficial list of Shiites whom we could not knowingly target,” McChrystal wrote. This dynamic would act as a brake on Task Force 17 throughout its existence. But nonetheless the new task force quickly made an impact.
For months Task Force 17 had been hunting Laith and Qais Khazali, brothers who ran the League of the Righteous. Qais, at thirty-three the older of the two, had worked for Moqtada Sadr’s father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr, before the latter’s 1999 assassination by Saddam Hussein’s regime. After throwing his support behind Moqtada following the U.S. invasion, Qais had split off in June 2006 to found the League of the Righteous. His political connections meant Task Force 17 was not supposed to launch a raid to grab him. The same did not apply to his brother, however, and in mid-March an intelligence tip fixed Laith Khazali in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. Task Force 17 named the location Objective Setanta and on March 20, 2007, a combination of the SAS’s G Squadron and SEALs led by Burnham flew down to Basra and, supported by conventional British troops, detained Laith and seven other men without a fight. One of those seven, they almost immediately realized, was Qais. When Burnham called McChrystal with the news, the latter decided Qais was too big a fish to release.
The task force’s analysts immediately went to work on the large amount of captured material, while interrogators puzzled over one of the detainees—a middle-aged Arab man who acted deaf and mute. The analysts quickly found a document that named Azhar al-Dulaimi as the leader of the Karbala attack, tied the brothers to the attack, and proved that the Quds Force had provided significant support for it. The document helped persuade Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to keep the brothers behind bars. Within two months, the task force had killed Dulaimi in northern Baghdad and the supposedly deaf and mute man had begun to talk, revealing himself to be Ali Mussa Daqduq, a senior Lebanese Hezbollah operative brought in by the Quds Force to help the League of the Righteous.19
Daqduq’s role was typical of the Quds Force’s efforts to use cutouts to do its dirty work in Iraq. In order to preserve a fig leaf of plausible deniability for the Iranian regime, the Quds Force used a “train the trainer” concept, bringing members of its Iraqi proxy forces to Iran and Lebanon to receive training, often from Hezbollah instructors, before sending them back to Iraq to train others.20 “We were confused there about the actual delineation between the Quds Force and the splinter networks, and that’s intentional,” a Task Force 17 officer said.
The task force followed that success up with an April 20 raid that netted Abu Yaser al-Sheibani, second in command of the Sheibani Network run by his elder brother Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani, who was a former member of the Badr Brigades. The network had been smuggling EFPs to militias like the League of the Righteous from Iran for the Quds Force for more than two years. But Task Force 17 had to wait five months for its next high-profile capture, when it detained Mahmud Farhadi, a Quds Force lieutenant colonel who commanded one of the three camps along the Iran-Iraq border from which the Ramazan Corps ran its Iraq campaign. The task force captured Farhadi, who was posing as an Iranian trade representative, in a September 20 raid on a hotel in the northern Iraqi province of Suleymaniyah. (The Iranian government protested Farhadi’s seizure vehemently, closing the northern border for a period.)21
The captures—particularly those of the Iranian operatives—caused the Quds Force to reassess how it conducted its Iraq campaign. Rather than scale down or end its destabilization efforts, Suleimani increasingly sought to put an Iraqi face on the campaign. As a result, the Sheibani Network and other Iranian proxies grew in size.
In October 2007, Ranger Regiment commander Colonel Richard Clarke took command of Task Force 17. This was significant because it was the first time the Rangers had been given command of a JSOC task force at the O-6 level (the pay grade that equates to captain in the Navy and colonel in the other services). Underneath Clarke, a SEAL commander (an O-5) ran the operations, with two Ranger platoons (about ninety soldiers) and two SEAL platoons (about thirty-two personnel) under him (plus a Ranger company headquarters and a SEAL troop headquarters), all based at the massive Victory Base complex beside Baghdad airport. Task Force 17 also included a SEAL reconnaissance team in Baghdad, and a Ranger reconnaissance team in Al Kut, about 160 kilometers southeast of the capital. McChrystal blended the assault forces, so that each company-level assault force included a SEAL platoon and a Ranger platoon working for either the SEAL troop or the Ranger company commander. This was double the size of Task Force 16 assault forces, in which a single Ranger platoon would be a strike force. Some of those forced to work under this paradigm resented it on the grounds that it unnecessarily limited the number of assault forces.22 There was no need to have seventy-five personnel on a single raid, according to a Ranger officer. “It was four assault forces that were forced into two,” he said.
One reason Task Force 17’s forces were organized this way was that the SEALs lacked vehicle crews, limiting their mobility. In other locations, they’d use helicopters to air-assault to an offset location a short distance from the target. But in Baghdad’s dense—often hostile—environs, that wasn’t always possible. “You can’t offset in Sadr City,” the Ranger officer said. The imperfect solution, he said, was “to get Rangers to drive them.”
Almost immediately, the Rangers were embroiled in a controversy stemming from an October 20 mission that exposed the thin political ice on which Task Force 17 was skating. That night Rangers from B Company, 2nd Ranger Battalion, launched a ground raid into Sadr City to get a Shi’ite special groups leader. The Rangers missed their target, and then found themselves virtually surrounded by Shi’ite militants in the dense urban jungle. With the support of helicopter gunships, the task force fought its way out block by block, killing an estimated forty-nine militiamen without suffering a single fatality. “It was like the Mogadishu Mile [in] and then the Mogadishu Mile out,” a Ranger officer said. “There was a substantial amount of collateral damage.”
The political backlash from conducting a large, violent operation in the heart of Shi’ite Baghdad was immediate. U.S. forces could virtually level entire neighborhoods in a Sunni city like Fallujah without upsetting Iraq’s Shi’ite leaders, but kinetic action, even on a much smaller scale, in Sadr City crossed a line. Petraeus was worried. Maliki, a Shi’ite whose government had a distinctly anti-Sunni bent, was enraged. His government accused U.S. forces of killing fifteen civilians in the raid. From January 2008 on, Task Force 17 was no longer authorized to enter Sadr City. To the deep frustration of its personnel, it had to wait for targets to leave the rectangular Shi’ite neighborhood before striking.23 “The concept that we would allow a safe haven blew my mind,” said the Ranger officer.
To some observers, the Sadr City operation exemplified Task Force 17’s overreliance on firepower at the expense of precision. “Whenever they did anything, they tended to shoot the shit out of everything,” the retired Special Forces officer said. “Either they shot everything up, killed the wrong person, captured the wrong person who was related to someone, or didn’t coordinate with the locals.” But despite the Rangers’ aggressive posture, which was on full display in Task Force 16 and in particular in Task Force North when it was under Ranger battalion command, Task Force 17 never came close to matching Task Force 16’s operational tempo.
Politics was partly responsible. “My teams needed immense freedom to operate in order to achieve the desired operational tempo,” McChrystal wrote. But Petraeus had to balance his desire to counter the Iranians with Maliki’s need to keep the Shi’ite militias from turning on his government. As a result there were standing restrictions on Task Force 17 operations in the provinces that had been turned over to Iraqi control (there were nine by the end of 2007), as well as the province of Qadisiyah and the cities Hindiyah, Najaf, and Karbala, in addition to Sadr City—“all their safe havens,” as the Ranger officer put it. Before striking a target Task Force 17 needed to get it approved on the day of the raid all the way up the chain of command to Petraeus.24
“TF 17 was very political,” said a Ranger officer who served in it. “There were a lot of times when we detained a senior-level Quds operative who had a diplomatic passport.… We’d get called and Maliki would shut down JSOC for a day, and say ‘Until he’s in my compound, all JSOC operations are closed.’ Not just [TF] 17. All. And so obviously, McChrystal would get pissed and then I would have to drive some dickhead to the Green Zone and he’d get released the next day.” However, he said, complaints that political concerns kept the task force from hitting Shi’ite targets were misplaced. “Don’t let anyone fool you that the weak optempo was politically driven,” he said. “It was incompetence.” In particular, he blamed the “white” (i.e., non–Team 6) SEAL officers’ inexperience with real-time signals intelligence. “The targeting was a joke.”
This inexperience only exacerbated another problem: the fact that when it came to signals intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets, Task Forces 16 and 17 were “in competition over the same resources,” as McChrystal put it.25 JSOC never gave Task Force 17 the priority it allotted to the task force going after Al Qaeda in Iraq. “At 17 you’re at the bottom of the totem pole,” said the Ranger officer.
By 2008, Task Forces North and West, in Mosul and Al Asad respectively, were Task Force 16’s priority, but Task Force Central, in Baghdad, still conducted more missions than Task Force 17, much to the amusement of TF Central’s Rangers, who missed no opportunity to mock their TF 17 colleagues. Clarke, the Task Force 17 commander, followed the JSOC model of allowing his subordinate commanders to run day-to-day operations. But he repeatedly expressed his frustration with his assault forces’ inability “to get out the door.” Despite these hurdles, Task Force 17 prosecuted about sixty raids in a ninety-day cycle in early 2008, probably the high point of its short history.
In spring 2009, interrogations of Quds Force and Shi’ite militia detainees revealed that the senior Quds Force operatives were not sneaking across the border into Iraq like their AQI counterparts in Syria, but instead were arriving on commercial flights from Tehran. It was a eureka moment for Task Force 17. U.S. intelligence persuaded the airlines to supply the passenger manifests for each flight from Tehran, which were quickly passed to the Task Force 17 operations center. TF 17 assumed Quds Force operatives would be flying undercover, but within three days the real name of one of its highest priority Quds Force targets showed up on the manifest. It was that man that the Rangers detained as he got into his taxi, flex-cuffing him, and putting him in the back of a Stryker for the short drive to Victory Base, adjacent to the airport.
What followed typified the challenges that Task Force 17 faced. For a few hours, the task force interrogated the operative, as they had other Quds Force personnel. “We don’t torture them,” said a TF 17 officer. “We don’t beat them. We’re going to take all their personal effects, strip them down, and then interrogate them and put them in jail.” Quds Force detainees’ pocket litter and electronic devices such as laptops sometimes held useful intelligence, the officer said. The Iranian that Task Force 17 detained that night in April 2009 did not have a laptop, but was carrying several phones and important documents. As usual, however, the detainee’s status as a Quds Force operative meant his detention was brief.26 Word of his capture was quickly reported up the chain of command and from there to Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. “He was handed over to the Iraqis and then he was released the next day,” the Task Force 17 officer said. Maliki then stood Task Force 17 down until it agreed to clear its target list through him daily.
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As JSOC sought to fill the gaps in its knowledge of the Quds Force’s reach into Iraq and the Levant, it was able to draw heavily on intelligence from another country that paid close attention to the militant Shi’ite threat in the Middle East: Israel. JSOC had access to Israeli intelligence because in the middle of the decade, Delta established a cell in Tel Aviv specifically to exchange intelligence with Israel. Doug Taylor, the Delta officer who’d led the 2005 mission in which Delta operators dressed up as farmhands to capture Ghassan Amin, ran the cell for a long time. “He, in particular, was able to work the information exchange and make relationships with the Israelis that allowed us to trade intelligence with them for intelligence they would trade to us,” said a senior special mission unit officer.
The cell swapped intelligence on Sunni Islamist networks active in southern Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq that JSOC had gained in Iraq for Israeli intelligence on Hezbollah and other Shi’ite groups in the Levant and Iraq. JSOC had the right to make the trade because, in the U.S. intelligence community, organizations retained release authority over intelligence that they had produced. While the Israelis got useful intelligence out of the deal, they may have had another goal in mind, according to the senior special mission unit officer. “I think their intent all along was to keep pushing us against the Iranians … in terms of trying to get us to interdict Hezbollah in other areas around the globe for them,” he said. Eventually Orange took over Taylor’s cell, due to that unit’s long-standing relationship with the Israelis.
But despite the Israelis’ extensive penetration of the Shi’ite militant networks, the intelligence tip that led Task Force 17 to the Khazali brothers’ safe house in Basra in March 2007 did not come from Tel Aviv, but from London, courtesy of Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency. “It was an MI6 source in the Levant [who] knew exactly where it was in Basra,” said the senior special mission unit officer, adding that the tip’s value could be judged from the fact that other than those detained at the site, presumably, the number of “bad guys” who knew the safe house’s location could likely be counted on the fingers of one hand.27 There was a certain symmetry to the British role in Khazali’s detention, in that the brothers were released—Laith in June 2009 and Qais in January 2010—in exchange for the release of Peter Moore, a British information technology consultant kidnapped (along with his four bodyguards, who were then murdered) on May 29, 2007, as he worked to install software to track the billions of dollars in foreign aid pouring into Iraq’s treasury.28 “It got very diplomatic, to the point where it was out of JSOC’s control and the British government was negotiating,” said a Task Force 17 officer. Equally frustrating for Task Force 17 veterans, in November 2012 the Iraqi government released the Hezbollah operative captured with the Khazali brothers, Ali Mussa Daqduq, whom the United States wanted charged with war crimes for his role in the execution-style killing of the four U.S. soldiers kidnapped in Karbala.29
The political restrictions that had hobbled Task Force 17 from its outset became even more onerous as the United States lowered its profile in Iraq and turned as much responsibility as possible over to the Maliki government. Between February and August 2009, by which time Army General Ray Odierno had replaced Petraeus as the Multi-National Force-Iraq commander, “they only did three missions because of restrictions placed on them by the four-star,” said the retired Special Forces officer.
But for a small number of Shi’ite targets, JSOC found a way around the political restrictions by killing its enemies without leaving any U.S. fingerprints. The command did this using a device called the “Xbox.” Developed jointly by Delta and Team 6, the Xbox was a bomb designed to look and behave exactly like one made by Iraqi insurgents, using materials typically found in locally made improvised explosive devices. Its genesis was the training that Delta and Team 6 explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) personnel went through to learn how to disarm the homemade bombs. After capturing some intact on the Afghan and Iraqi battlefields, the EOD troops set about taking them apart. It wasn’t long before they realized they could build them as well. “So they’re reverse-engineering the whole thing,” said the senior special mission unit officer. A collective light went on in some corners of JSOC when leaders realized the possibilities inherent in this capability.
At first, the officer said, JSOC’s bomb makers used components typically found in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater: “Chinese circuits and Pakistani parts … and explosives from old Soviet munitions, et cetera.” The intent was to create a device that if it were sent to the FBI’s Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center in Quantico, Virginia, the Bureau’s experts would mistakenly trace the bomb back to a particular terrorist bomb maker because of certain supposedly telltale signature elements of the design that JSOC’s explosive ordnance disposal gurus had managed to re-create.
But the Xbox was different from regular IEDs in several ways, in order to reduce risks to operators and civilians. First, unlike many IEDs, such as those detonated by vehicles running over pressure plates, it had to be command detonated, meaning an operator somewhere was watching the target and then pressing a button. Another design requirement was that the Xbox device had to be extremely stable, to avoid the sort of premature explosions that often kill terrorists. JSOC wanted to use the device to kill individuals, rather than crowds. “You’re just going to get the one guy in the car, you’re not looking to blow up forty people in a marketplace,” said the senior special mission unit officer. “You’ve got authority for military force against one by-name guy. You’ve got to get positive ID and positive detonation in a place where you’re not going to get collateral damage. [For instance,] smoke the guy while driving his HiLux pickup in an area that there’s no U.S. or Coalition presence.”
Most insurgents JSOC killed this way were Task Force 17 targets in southern Iraq—“a variety of folks that were running [the] Quds Force EFP pipeline and stuff in through the south,” the senior special mission unit operator said. But the missions were conducted by operators from the squadron Delta had created in 2005 to replace and take the mission of Operational Support Troop. (Confusingly, the new reconnaissance squadron was initially called D Squadron, until Delta created a fourth line squadron about a year later and named it D Squadron, with the reconnaissance squadron renamed G Squadron.)30 JSOC used reconnaissance operators, who are typically some of Delta’s most experienced, because getting the device into position, by placing it in the target’s vehicle, for example, was “a lot of work,” he said. It usually involved surveillance of the target for days on end, understanding his pattern of life—his daily routines—so that the operators could predict when they would be able to gain access to his vehicle unobserved. When that time window opened, “then, like out of the movies, you’re picking the locks and going over walls and alleyways, very shortly placing that stuff in there,” he said.
The special mission unit officer acknowledged the possibility that JSOC might choose to use the Xbox on other battlefields—and might already have done so. “We have successfully used this in places where you’re not flying a Predator, you don’t want to launch a missile, you don’t necessarily want to do a raid,” he said. “So if you get authorization for the use of military force then you want something very precise against a target.” But although the Xbox began with EOD personnel re-creating devices from the Afghan theater, it was not used there, where Team 6 was the lead special mission unit. “We co-developed it with Delta, but it was only being used in Iraq,” said a senior Team 6 source, who questioned the morality of using the device: “[It’s] a great tool, but as many of us have said—hey, we’re no different than the enemy if we’re just blowing people up with booby traps.”
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Task Force 17 continued to operate for several years, but was closed down long before U.S. troops left Iraq at the end of 2011. Despite all the challenges the task force faced, it achieved some success, albeit fleeting. “Previously they [i.e., Quds Force] were running in EFPs and U.S. currency by the truckload,” said a Ranger officer. “Post–TF 17 they were using ratlines and having to do what al Qaeda was having to do up north, so there was some level of success there. We saved a lot of Coalition lives by reducing the EFP footprint all around Sadr City, but it was never going to be [the equivalent of] TF 16.”
Meanwhile, in 2007 Task Force 16’s main effort shifted to Mosul, where McChrystal had placed a Ranger battalion in command of Task Force North, the first time the Rangers had been given command of a battalion or squadron-level task force.
In the wider war, there was a sense by late 2007 that the tide was turning in favor of the Coalition. Petraeus had asked for and received a “surge” of five additional combat brigades—more than 20,000 troops. As those forces flowed in and were committed mostly in the Baghdad area, the Coalition was also making headway splitting Anbar’s Sunni tribes and associated insurgent groups away from AQI in what became known as the “Sunni Awakening.”
In June 2007, Mike Flynn left JSOC to become Central Command’s intelligence director. A year later McChrystal changed command after almost five years on the job, far longer than the tenure of any previous commander.31 The JSOC he left behind bore little resemblance to the organization he had taken command of in October 2003. Its budget, authorities, and the size of its headquarters staff had all expanded exponentially. (In 2002 the size of the JSOC staff was about 800. By the end of 2008, that had ballooned to about 2,300.)32 The command’s battlefield role had similarly evolved. Accustomed to fighting on the periphery of major conflict, JSOC had taken a central role in Iraq, albeit one that the U.S. military did its best to obscure, never acknowledging the command or its special mission units by name when discussing their operations. Several factors had combined to enable JSOC’s rise to prominence: the fact that Zarqawi allied his group with Al Qaeda at a time when the U.S. military considered the destruction of Al Qaeda its most pressing mission meant JSOC—often called “the national mission force”—was likely to have a starring role; the rapid growth of cell phone networks in Iraq, and the insurgents’ concomitant use of the same, were invaluable in helping McChrystal’s task force find and fix the enemy; the same was true of the Internet café phenomenon in Iraq, and the fielding of the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle in growing numbers.
McChrystal was, of course, also fortunate to have at his disposal units composed of men and women who brought an unparalleled combination of professionalism, skill, imagination, courage, and drive to their work. But this is something to which all previous JSOC commanders could lay claim. And there was no guarantee that the various technological advantages JSOC brought to the fight would ever amount to a winning combination. Like the German architects of blitzkrieg in the 1930s, who took tools—the tank, radio communications, fighters, and bombers—and combined them in ways that others had not imagined, what set McChrystal apart was, first, a vision for how to meld all the tools at his disposal together, while flattening his organization and breaking apart the “stovepipes” that kept information from being fully exploited, and, second, the force of personality required to make that vision a reality.
What that meant was that during the U.S. military’s darkest days in Iraq, in 2005, 2006, and 2007, when the country seemed on the way to becoming a charnel-house, JSOC was virtually the only American force achieving success (leading President Bush to declare to author Bob Woodward, “JSOC is awesome”).33 The crucial role that McChrystal and his JSOC task force played in rocking Al Qaeda in Iraq back on its heels when the terrorist group had seemed on the brink, if not of victory in the traditional sense, then certainly of pushing Iraq into an indefinite period of bloody sectarian conflict, would remain largely unrecognized for years. But its growing size and increasingly important role were robbing JSOC of its ability to hide in the shadows. In less than three years, the man to whom McChrystal passed command, Vice Admiral Bill McRaven, would preside over JSOC’s highest profile success. But first, he had matters to address on Iraq’s borders.