It was still dark when Master Sergeant Don Hollenbaugh heard the call to prayer echoing from a minaret 300 meters to the north. The haunting sound unsettled the Delta operator. “This is not going to be a good day,” he told Staff Sergeant Dan Briggs, a twenty-eight-year-old Delta medic kneeling beside him on a street corner in northwest Fallujah. “This could get ugly quick.”
At 4 A.M. that morning, six Delta soldiers and roughly forty Marines from E Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment had quietly advanced on foot about 300 meters in front of Coalition lines. The Delta contingent included Hollenbaugh and Sergeant Major Larry Boivin, Combat Support Troop’s operations sergeant and senior heavy breacher respectively; three A Squadron snipers; and Briggs. A fourth sniper occupied a building to the rear, from which he could overwatch the patrol’s route and warn of any movement ahead. Hollenbaugh and Boivin were there at the Marines’ request to provide added firepower of a specific type: thermobaric AT4 rockets. The AT4 was ubiquitous in U.S. Army and Marine Corps infantry formations, but Delta’s thermobaric rounds were not and were thus the envy of the Marines. Shoulder-fired from disposable launchers like all AT4s, they worked by rapidly driving up heat and pressure in any confined space into which they were fired. Used properly, they were enormously destructive. The Delta soldiers had already trained the Marines on the weapon and supplied them with rounds, but the Marines still didn’t feel comfortable employing the thermobarics, so had asked Hollenbaugh and Boivin to accompany the patrol into Fallujah to fire the rounds themselves. “They didn’t feel like the training was sufficient,” Hollenbaugh said. “And given the lethality of those weapons, I think that was a good call.”
After holding static positions on the city’s edge for several days, the U.S. troops were worried that the insurgents had figured out their “blind spots”—locations from which the militants could launch attacks unseen from Coalition lines. The early morning patrol was an effort to “mix up the battlefield … so that the snipers could change their lanes and if need be, we could put these thermobaric weapons to use,” Hollenbaugh recalled. As he knelt and whispered to Briggs, the Marines were clearing and occupying a pair of houses north and south of an intersection. The Delta soldiers entered the southern one and took positions on the flat rooftop, which measured about ten meters by fifteen meters. The Marines did the same on the northern rooftop and on the houses’ other floors. Low walls surrounded both rooftops. Using sledgehammers, the Americans spent the hour before dawn knocking holes in them to create fighting positions. The Marines were expecting a fight. They would not be disappointed.
At first light, a rocket-propelled grenade exploded against the southern house, followed a few minutes later by a burst of machine gun fire. As Hollenbaugh peered out of his fighting position another RPG hit a few feet below, close enough that he felt the heat and the spray of grit on his face. “Luckily, I had one earplug in and eye protection on,” he recalled. He quickly put the second earplug in. “Hey, keep watch over my sector, I’m going downstairs to see where this thing came from,” Hollenbaugh told Boivin.
Emerging outside, he crawled up on a wall to examine the “splash” mark the RPG had made on the house. The experienced operator could tell the rocket had been dipping by the time it impacted, meaning it had been fired from some distance away. Hollenbaugh mentally traced the angle of fire as far as he could see, then raced back upstairs to get a longer view. Spotting a small dark hole in some rubble about 300 meters away, he figured that was the RPG gunner’s position. He fired several M4 rounds into the hole and told the Marine forward observer to mark it as a potential mortar target.
For the next hour or so, insurgents probed the U.S. positions and traded occasional shots with the Americans. The Delta sniper team leader, J.N., decided to pull his men back to the other sniper’s position, from where they could better utilize their rifles’ range. After speaking with Hollenbaugh, E Company commander Captain Doug Zembiec sent two Marines to the roof to replace the snipers. Between himself, Boivin, Briggs, and the two Marines, Hollenbaugh calculated there were enough men on the roof to cover all sectors of fire, especially considering the presence of the Marines in the northern house and the Delta snipers to the rear.
Within a couple of minutes of the two Marines arriving on the roof, the volume of insurgent fire suddenly increased as word of the Americans’ location spread. More than 300 militants arrived by the truckload to join the fight. Thousands of bullets and scores of RPGs tore into the walls of both houses. The insurgents “really believed this was the full-on invasion of Fallujah,” recalled Hollenbaugh. “They were just throwing everything they had at us.” Using alleyways and positions in neighboring houses, insurgents got close enough to hurl grenades onto the northern rooftop, wounding several Marines. Hearing their screams, Briggs left his position and, together with the forward observer, sprinted across the no-man’s-land between the two buildings to help treat and evacuate the wounded, exposing himself to enemy fire at least six times.
The situation was now perilous for the Americans, outnumbered ten to one by insurgents who were moving along the walls of the two buildings in an effort to surround them. Shouting to be heard above the din, the U.S. troops rained fire and threw grenades down on their attackers. On the southern roof Hollenbaugh, Boivin, and the two Marines were fighting hard to hold off the insurgents—a tough job for only four men. Then a grenade landed on the roof and exploded, grievously wounding both Marines, one of whom stood up. “He’s got his hands on his face and blood’s coming through his fingers, it’s just ugly,” Hollenbaugh recalled. Concerned that the Marine was exposing himself to insurgent fire, the Delta master sergeant hustled him into the crowded stairwell, before returning to the other wounded Marine, an NCO whose name he never learned. Lying facedown, the Marine pointed with his right hand in the direction of where he thought the more junior Marine was still lying. “Take him first, take him first,” he told Hollenbaugh, who was impressed with the Marine’s selfless bravery. “This guy’s crawling backwards and he’s just leaving a streak of blood, so you know he’s hurt really bad,” he said later. “I already got him,” the operator told the Marine, as he grabbed his belt, yanked him to his feet, and moved him to the stairwell.
With Boivin still covering his sector, Hollenbaugh moved between his own fighting position and those left vacant by the Marines’ departure, firing his M4 and tossing grenades. Another incoming grenade exploded on the roof, with shrapnel catching Boivin behind the ear and in the back of his arm. “Don, I’m hit,” he yelled. Sitting by the stairwell opening, which was surrounded on three sides by walls, Hollenbaugh worked to patch Boivin up quickly. Reaching into a “go bag” that the Delta guys had brought, which contained grenades, spare magazines, a signal kit, and medical supplies, he grabbed Kerlix gauze bandages and green do-rags. He packed the Kerlix into the head wound, tied it off with do-rags, and told Boivin to turn and face him. “You look really cool,” he teased the heavy breacher. Despite the nasty wound, Boivin—later described by Hollenbaugh as “a tough, tough individual”—was about to return to the fight when both men noticed what looked like a mouse moving under a clumped-up blanket the Marines had been using to shield themselves from the sun. Realization came to each soldier simultaneously. Staring at each other in wide-eyed alarm, they yelled the same word: “Grenade!”1
* * *
With Saddam captured and Winter Strike concluded, in January John Abizaid held a conference at his Tampa headquarters to which he invited representatives of the key organizations fighting the war against Al Qaeda, which was largely playing out across Central Command’s patch of the globe. Attendees included McChrystal; SOCOM commander Doug Brown and his deputy, Vice Admiral Eric Olson; CIA director George Tenet; as well as NSA and Joint Staff representatives. Abizaid expressed his belief that the United States had taken its eye off the ball in the campaign against Al Qaeda, and, in particular, the hunt for the terror organization’s leaders. The officials seated around the table committed themselves to work together more closely and with greater imagination.
McChrystal had already decided that for JSOC to reach its full potential, it would need to leverage the strengths of other government organizations, particularly those in the intelligence business. Before the conference ended, McChrystal announced his intention to create a joint interagency task force (JIATF) that would incorporate representatives of as many intelligence agencies as he could persuade to send personnel downrange to fill it. The JIATF had been McRaven’s idea, but McChrystal instantly saw its potential. He correctly perceived that taking analysts out of their cubicles in suburban Washington, D.C., and putting them in the same tent in a combat zone on the other side of the world would enable them to turn raw data into actionable intelligence that much faster, and loosen the bonds of parochialism that often hindered true collaboration between government entities in the United States. Within weeks, McChrystal established JIATF-East on the JSOC compound at Bagram, under the leadership of former Delta A Squadron commander Lieutenant Colonel John Alexander.2
The JIATF’s purpose was to look beyond Afghanistan’s borders in an effort to draw an accurate picture of the enemy networks and the movement of targeted individuals within those networks, with particular attention paid to bin Laden and Zawahiri. It wasn’t all plain sailing at first, particularly when it came to persuading the CIA personnel to open up. In the early days at Bagram, police tape separated Agency analysts from their military counterparts. Military folks were not allowed past the tape.3
* * *
As JIATF-East began to map the jihadist networks that spread across Central Asia and the Middle East, Team 6 was involved in a mission on the other side of the world to peacefully remove the leader of a nation with which the unit had some history: Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. It was shortly after a military junta had deposed Aristide in 1991 that Team 6 had rescued some mysterious individuals from a Haitian beach—the mission that saved the unit from being dissolved. The U.S. military had ousted the coup leaders and reinstalled Aristide as president in 1994. But ten years later, in February 2004, the SEALs were back, this time enforcing U.S. policy by helping to persuade Aristide to leave again after a heavily armed rebellion that appeared to have U.S. support had taken over much of the country.
“TF Blue went down,” said a senior JSOC officer. “We were in communications with the team leader constantly. They were coached to try and go in and almost negotiate his removal. They weren’t directed to forcibly pull him out. He [the team leader] was more or less going there with the Department of State—I think the ambassador was involved, there may have been others too—and it was designed basically to provide security and protect [Aristide] and escort him out and ensure that he got out.”
But a Team 6 officer said that although the small SEAL element, which included a master chief named Pete Kent, did not use physical force, their discussions with Aristide left little doubt as to what his options were. Kent told the Haitian politician, “Get on the plane now!” the Team 6 officer said. “I was told that to avoid bloodshed I’d better leave,” Aristide told CNN. White House press secretary Scott McClellan strongly denied this at the time. But several officers familiar with the mission said the Team 6 personnel were influential in getting Aristide on the plane, which ultimately took him to exile in the Central African Republic. “That’s when McChrystal told me, ‘We need more guys like that master chief, because he could sell a fucking bad bucket of stones to somebody,’” said an officer.4
(Two years earlier Kent had achieved a certain level of notoriety as one of then interim president of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai’s bodyguards during a September 5, 2002, assassination attempt on the president. Karzai’s SEAL Team 6 bodyguards shot the would-be assassin, as well as two Afghans who were wrestling with him. In the course of the fight, a round ricocheted and hit Kent in the head, lightly wounding him, but forced him to take his shirt off and wrap it round his head as a bandage. The photo of him naked from the waist up, brandishing an assault rifle, with a shirt around his head was picked up by many news outlets.)5
* * *
Meanwhile in Iraq it was becoming clear that the campaign against the “former regime elements” had run its course. A new enemy more capable and far more dangerous than any of Saddam Hussein’s henchmen had emerged: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In January, “Zarqawi became our primary focus,” McChrystal wrote.
Zarqawi’s group had embedded itself in Fallujah, a religiously conservative city of 285,000 in the Sunni heartland of Anbar province about thirty miles west of Baghdad. The city was part of the 82nd Airborne Division’s area of operations until March 2004, when the 1st Marine Division relieved the 82nd as the “landowning” conventional force responsible for the city. But neither unit had the manpower to keep the lid on insurgent activity in Fallujah, which had become a no-go area for U.S. forces.6 Residents threw rocks at low-flying Little Birds on daylight missions in mid-January. By February, they were aiming more dangerous projectiles. A shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile narrowly missed a Little Bird flight just south of Fallujah on February 26. A few days later in the same area, a similar missile—later determined to be an SA-14—brought down an AH-6, destroying the helicopter and injuring the pilots.7 It was on this cauldron of anti-Coalition sentiment that the task force focused its attention in spring 2004.
The task force almost got lucky with one of its earliest missions into Fallujah. In February, McChrystal accompanied a Delta strike force on a night raid on a suspected Zarqawi safe house in the middle-class Askari neighborhood in the city’s northeast. (The JSOC commander made a habit of going along on such raids, believing they gave him a better feel for the war and allowed him “to build relationships and mutual trust” with his troops.) But Zarqawi eluded them, probably jumping into a dark alleyway from a second-floor window as the operators closed in. Just as with the decision not to proceed with Delta’s 1999 bin Laden mission, JSOC’s history and that of the unit might look very different had the task force captured Zarqawi that night in Fallujah, before the Jordanian’s goal of inspiring a Sunni-Shi’a civil war in Iraq had gained traction.8 As it was, the operators continued to make frequent forays into Fallujah and Ramadi throughout March, hunting Zarqawi and his lieutenants. They ran into trouble on the night of March 24 when insurgents ambushed a mounted Delta patrol outside the city. With operators forced to shelter behind their vehicles, a firefight ensued, the ferocity of which can be judged by the fact that somehow a detainee managed to escape. Two troops were wounded before the operators could withdraw.9
Less than a week later came the event that would sear the word “Fallujah” into the American consciousness, when insurgents ambushed four employees of the security firm Blackwater as they were driving through the city, killing all four and stringing two of their corpses up over the bridge across the Euphrates. The incident recalled 1993’s battle of Mogadishu, when Somalis had dragged fallen task force soldiers’ bodies through the streets. The episode’s fallout prevented Delta commander Colonel Bennet Sacolick from attending a commanders’ conference that McChrystal hosted the first week of April at Bagram. The commanders, deputy commanders, and senior enlisted advisers of JSOC’s units, as well as McChrystal’s senior staff officers, attended the conference. With his force dispersed across the globe, McChrystal held such gatherings regularly to ensure his immediate subordinates understood his intent. The JSOC commander left no doubt that he was dissatisfied with the task force’s level of knowledge of their enemies. “We fundamentally do not understand what is going on outside the wire,” he told his men.
McChrystal, who was bouncing between Pope, Bagram, and Baghdad during this period, flew to the Iraqi capital with his staff on April 5, arriving as the Marines launched an attack to rid Fallujah of insurgents.10 (Major General Jim Mattis, commander of 1st Marine Division, had counseled a patient approach after the Blackwater incident, but with anger and a desire for revenge coursing through the American body politic, Army Lieutenant General Ric Sanchez, the senior U.S. military leader in Iraq, ordered him to attack.)11 At the urging of Delta’s Fallujah team leader, one or two of the unit’s operators linked up with Marine platoons entering the city. The aim was to add a little more lethality and combat savvy to the Marine elements, but because the operators enjoyed superior communications links with each other and the task force JOC, they were able to give their higher headquarters superb situational awareness of events on the battlefield. By his own admission, McChrystal “became addicted to this ground-level reporting for the rest of the war.”12
Four Marine battalions began to sweep through Fallujah. But the same political forces that had forced Mattis to attack before he was ready abruptly changed tack after Arab media outlets reported that the initial stages of the assault had killed hundreds of civilians. On the advice of Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, President Bush decided the attack had to stop, an order Abizaid delivered to Mattis April 9.13 Surprised by the halt, McChrystal realized he had not established close enough links to Mattis’s headquarters. He sought to rectify that oversight by placing liaison officers not just with Mattis’s Marines, but in as many conventional unit headquarters as possible. Many regular units were reluctant to accept the JSOC representatives, however, so the process took almost a year. McChrystal’s approach mirrored his strategy with other government agencies. He placed more than seventy-five liaison officers in Washington and 100 elsewhere, including on the staffs of Joint Chiefs chairman Myers, CIA director Tenet, CENTCOM boss Abizaid, and the U.S. ambassadors to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The liaisons were limited to four-month tours, to prevent them losing touch with the battlefield. McChrystal had come to two conclusions. The first was that not just in Iraq but across the globe, JSOC was confronting a networked enemy—one that went by many names, but shared values, goals, personal connections, and, in many cases, people. McChrystal’s second realization was that to have any chance against Al Qaeda’s global brand of Sunni Islamist militancy, JSOC would have to create its own network by availing itself of the knowledge, the manpower, and, sometimes, the legal authorities that resided in other parts of the military and the U.S. government. “It takes a network to defeat a network” became McChrystal’s mantra.14
* * *
The Marines’ pause in Fallujah became a withdrawal to the city’s outskirts at the end of April. Although a hastily cobbled together local security force called the Fallujah Brigade replaced them, the reality was that Zarqawi’s men controlled the city. It was on April 26, a few days before the withdrawal, that Hollenbaugh, Briggs, Boivin, and the Marines of Echo Company found themselves in a desperate fight to avoid being overrun.
Spying the grenade as it rolled under the blanket, the already wounded Boivin dived down the stairwell, crashing into Zembiec and his radio operator. Hollenbaugh had just enough time to duck behind the stairwell wall before the grenade exploded harmlessly. But he noticed it had been thrown from roughly the same area as the previous two. Grabbing a grenade of his own from a pouch on his body armor, he pulled the pin while walking toward that side of the roof. “About three quarters of the way there I let the spoon fly, counted one, two, three and threw it down hoping to get the guy,” he recalled. “Never saw any grenades come up over that [wall] again, but you just don’t know.” He then did a quick tour of the roof, moving from hole to hole, firing multiple single shots from his M4 when he saw a target or a suspected insurgent position. He turned to check on Boivin, who was sitting in the stairwell with his head in his hands. “Larry, are you okay?” Hollenbaugh yelled. “Yeah, Don, I’m okay,” Boivin replied shakily. But he was very pale. The original dressing had come loose and he was bleeding heavily. Hollenbaugh redressed the wound with new Kerlix, taking even more care this time and tying it off so tightly that Boivin worried it might crush his skull.
Boivin descended to an open-air patio on the second floor and continued to fight from there with the Marines. Hollenbaugh remained on the roof and fought on alone, shifting from position to position, staying in one place only long enough to squeeze off a few rounds or toss one of the sixteen grenades he’d brought. Twelve were regular M67 fragmentation grenades, but four were thermobarics. Essentially a smaller, hand-thrown version of the “thermo” AT4 round, a thermobaric grenade needed to land in an enclosed space for optimal effect. With insurgents in neighboring houses, Hollenbaugh hurled his thermobaric grenades at their windows. “A couple” hit the target, he said. Dodging grenades, RPGs, and bullets, the experienced operator needed all his tricks to keep the insurgents at bay. When a Humvee arrived to evacuate the wounded, insurgents fired a well-hidden machine gun at the medics from an upper-floor window of a building to the south. Unable to see the machine gun itself from his position on the south wall, Hollenbaugh identified its location from the visible gases emanating from its barrel. He fired against the alley wall at an angle that he calculated would send the ricochets into the window. The gun went quiet. Hollenbaugh turned his attention to an insurgent-occupied house to the northeast. “I started putting rounds into the building,” he said. “Skipping bullets in off the floors and the walls.”
After an hour, Hollenbaugh was down to his last magazine and his final thermobaric AT4. His ears were ringing from the multiple explosions around him; his throat and nostrils were filled with the smell of gunpowder smoke, RPG accelerant, and the sweet tartness of C4 explosive; and his boots were tracking his colleagues’ blood across the dusty rooftop. The machine gun opened up again. He had just grabbed his last AT4 when Zembiec appeared on the roof. “Hey Don, it’s time to go,” the Marine captain said. “Let me shoot this,” the Delta operator replied, shouldering the AT4. Zembiec knelt down behind him, too close to the launcher’s back blast area for Hollenbaugh, who motioned for him to move forward, then fired. The rocket flew just inside the edge of the machine gun nest window and exploded. “It shut the gun up,” Hollenbaugh said later. Satisfied, he followed Zembiec down the stairs. It was then he realized that everyone else had long since pulled out (eleven Marines having departed on stretchers). Only his one-man impersonation of an infantry squad had prevented the insurgents from storming the southern building. “It never came into my mind that I was alone,” he said later, telling The Fayetteville Observer. “I am glad someone did a head count.”
A single Marine, nineteen-year-old Lance Corporal Aaron Austin, died in the firefight. For their roles, Hollenbaugh and Briggs received the Distinguished Service Cross and Boivin the Silver Star.15
The Marines’ withdrawal and the predictable collapse of the Fallujah Brigade shortly thereafter gave Zarqawi the run of the city. In a late May meeting at the Coalition’s Camp Fallujah on the edge of the city, a frustrated Abizaid let McChrystal know he expected his task force to take the lead in striking back. “We need to hit some targets,” he told the JSOC commander, slamming his fist on the table. But with no Coalition troops in Fallujah, the task force relied on Predators to track insurgent movements. By now, JSOC was rotating forces through Iraq about every ninety days. From April through June 2004 Mark Erwin’s A Squadron was on point as Task Force Green. Wanting more from the Predator coverage, the squadron’s team leaders put their heads together and came up with a new system. They placed an experienced operator alongside the intel analysts monitoring the Predators’ real-time video feed around the clock. Once a drone caught sight of a suspect, the operator would have the pilots back in the United States follow the target relentlessly, keeping careful notes of his movements. “We would follow these guys all over—went in this house with two guys, got in this car, changed cars here—and plot all this on a map,” said a Delta source. At shift’s end, the operator passed the logbook to his relief, so the task force was able to build a detailed picture of the suspect’s “pattern of life.” According to McChrystal, this new way of operating meant both analysts and operators felt as if they “owned” the mission, “which in turn increased activity on the ground by moving targeting decisions down the ranks.” The system wasn’t perfect yet—there weren’t enough Predators to track every target, for one thing—but it was the beginning of what JSOC came to call the “Unblinking Eye.”16
The new technique paid off almost immediately. In mid-June, a Delta intelligence analyst studying recorded Predator footage noticed a truck blocking a Fallujah street. Directing the drone back to that spot, he saw men moving weapons from a house to a pair of trucks. One drove off heading east. The Predator tracked it. When Green operators intercepted the truck near Baghdad without a fight, they found in it enough AKs, belted ammunition, fragmentation grenades, rockets, ammo vests, and medical supplies to equip a hundred fighters. The operators detained two men and a thirteen-year-old boy who were in the truck, brought them back to Mission Support Site Fernandez, and interrogated them.17 The boy said they had drunk tea with Zarqawi very recently and told the operators where.18 Meanwhile, the Predator returned to the original blocked-off street, from where it followed cars and trucks to a southwest Fallujah house exactly where the truck drivers had told Task Force Green the rest of the arms cache was being moved. Some operators were sure Zarqawi was there or in one of two other buildings they were watching. The task force dubbed the house Objective Big Ben and planned to bomb it the night of June 18, then raid it to exploit any intelligence in the rubble.
Delta’s operators were on the verge of launching when Lieutenant General Jim Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, told McChrystal the potential for civilian casualties meant that he didn’t want JSOC to bomb the house, nor did he want Delta driving Pandurs into the city. After talking with McChrystal, Erwin canceled the mission, unwilling to risk insurgents swarming the convoy without the armored vehicles’ protection and firepower. McChrystal then gained permission—presumably from Sanchez or Abizaid—to hit Big Ben with a precision air strike after all. At 9:30 the next morning, the strike destroyed the building. To the relief of McChrystal, whose task force’s credibility was on the line, after a few tense seconds the arms cache began exploding, validating the target. The bombing killed an estimated twenty people, mostly Tunisian jihadists. Zarqawi, however, was not among them.19
Another upshot of Big Ben did not reflect well on the task force. A couple of days after the operation, one of the truck drivers that Task Force Green had captured arrived at the Camp Nama detention center. A routine medical screening found suspicious burns on him. A quick investigation determined that in their zeal to get the drivers to talk, four operators had been involved in shocking at least one driver with a Taser.20 The task force chain of command quickly punished the four: two were expelled from Delta for a year (which later became a permanent expulsion for one of them); the others received letters of reprimand from Sacolick, but were still in the unit as of 2013.21
In his autobiography, McChrystal described the episode as an isolated incident and said neither he nor his subordinate commanders ever ordered troops to mistreat detainees, or tolerated those who did.22 But others in and around the task force at the time said that explanation strained credulity, that the problem was far more prevalent than McChrystal suggested, and that the operators punished were “scapegoats.”23
Several news stories and documents released under the Freedom of Information Act lend credence to this view. A March 2006 New York Times article reported that the task force’s treatment of detainees was bad enough that in August 2003 the CIA barred its personnel from Nama.24 In December 2003, retired Army Colonel Stu Herrington had highlighted the excesses of the JSOC task force (then called Task Force 121) in a report for Major General Barbara Fast, the senior U.S. military intelligence officer in Iraq. To research the report, Herrington and two other intelligence officials toured U.S. detention facilities in Iraq for a week in early December. “Detainees captured by TF 121 have shown injuries that caused examining medical personnel to note that ‘detainee shows signs of having been beaten,’” Herrington wrote, before concluding that “It seems clear that TF 121 needs to be reined in with respect to its treatment of detainees.” (When Herrington asked an officer in charge of interrogations at a high-value target detention facility whether he had alerted his bosses to his concerns that Task Force 121’s prisoners appeared to have been beaten, the officer replied, “Everyone knows about it.”)25
Part of the problem was that prior to September 11, 2001, JSOC typically trained for operations of such short duration that its personnel were not used to having their own prisoners, let alone being responsible for squeezing actionable intelligence from them.26 This was compounded by the fact that, like the rest of the U.S. government, JSOC had very few trained interrogators, and almost none fluent in Arabic.27
JSOC used its cocoon of secrecy to shield itself from a series of investigations into overall U.S. military conduct with regard to detainees, repeatedly rebuffing investigators seeking access to Nama and other task force facilities.28 But at McChrystal’s behest, JSOC deputy commander Air Force Brigadier General David Scott conducted a classified review of procedures at Nama, resulting in administrative punishment for more than forty task force personnel and ending the career of the colonel in charge of Nama at the time.29
Media attention focused on Nama, but detainee abuse also occurred at smaller facilities where task force elements would hold detainees for as long as a few days before sending them to Nama. As the Taser incident indicated, this was particularly the case with Mission Support Site Fernandez in the Green Zone.
Fernandez functioned as the operations center and main living quarters for whichever Delta squadron was deployed to Iraq. It had two floors. The upper floor held the operations center and sleeping quarters, with each assault team of six to eight operators taking one bedroom.30 The lower floor—which operators sometimes called the basement—was divided into interrogation rooms and a room converted into a holding facility. These were built during one of A Squadron’s first Baghdad tours, said a Delta source who estimated the holding room measured twelve feet by twelve feet. Along its walls, engineers built what he described as about twenty “stand-up closets” that prevented a prisoner from physical relaxation—“so a guy can’t squat, he can’t sleep, all you can do is stand.” Another Delta source seconded this description.
Under pressure from their chain of command to get information immediately from the detainees in the basement, Delta operators routinely resorted to abusing them, the first Delta source said. Trained interrogators or intelligence personnel were rarely if ever present. “We might go talk to the intel guy and he gives us the twenty questions he has and then we go down there and fucking get [the answers] from [the detainee],” he said. The second Delta source said the failure to push trained interrogators down to the lowest echelons was a major factor behind the abuse. “A lesson learned from this is we should have … had the right guys doing it and not the operators,” he said. “Instead we let the operators do it, and you’ve got a commando sergeant major saying, ‘Get this fucking shit now.’ There was a lot of consternation in A Squadron about that.… [They] could have said, ‘It’s an illegal order, I’m not going to do it.’ However, that’s easier said than done.”
The first Delta source defended Delta’s harsh methods, which he said were “a necessary evil” that were not only an inevitable by-product of the emotions produced in close quarters combat, but also effective. “You can’t go out and catch these guys who shot your buddies and expect we’re going to fucking hand them tea and crumpets,” he said. “Saddam wasn’t caught on tea and crumpets. Saddam was caught on ass whuppings.” Trained interrogators such as Herrington were critical of the notion that detainee abuse produces better intelligence than a more patient approach of building a relationship with a prisoner. But the pressure to produce immediate results meant there was no time for such niceties, the operator said. “When you got a year to crack someone’s brain, your technique is best,” he said. “When you’ve got minutes to save American lives, that shit don’t fucking work.”
The operator was particularly aghast at what he viewed as his chain of command’s efforts to blame the detainee abuse on a few “rogue” personnel. “You know how much scrutiny you’re under as a Delta Force operator? You think you can just go rogue? You think you can do something without orders?” he said. “The detainee abuse happened in the fucking basement of the house we all lived in, at the bottom of the stairs, under the commander’s bedroom.… Everybody who lived in the house knew what was going on.” Indeed, sometimes residents on the upper floors heard screams coming from the basement, he said. “There’s times I’d go down there and tell people, ‘Hey, keep it the fuck down, I’m trying to relax up here,’” the operator said.
Other Delta operators took strong issue with the suggestion that this behavior was par for the course in the unit. “You never thought of beating somebody up or applying physical torture to anybody,” said an experienced operator who was in Delta during the Iraq War’s opening stages. “The culture of the unit wasn’t anything like that.” He cited the case of an operator forced out of Delta for kicking a Balkan war crimes suspect struggling in a net that operators threw over him after pulling him from his car. Another operator who made multiple deployments to Iraq in 2003 and 2004 said only a very few individuals in the unit abused detainees and that they did so without any authorization, tacit or otherwise, from above. “None of the leaders that I know there, not a one, do I think would allow that,” he said. “It’s a small few who did that and those who got punished deserved it.”
But documents, press reports, and interviews with special operations troops leave little doubt that JSOC personnel engaged in widespread detainee abuse during the first thirteen months of the American occupation of Iraq.31 Already under scrutiny because of the warnings from Herrington, the CIA, the FBI, and others, this practice may have been in its final days by spring 2004, anyway. But in late April news of conventional soldiers’ abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison hit the headlines, resulting in a much closer examination of all U.S. forces’ treatment of prisoners. As described by Delta operators, their chain of command’s attitude changed immediately. One special operations officer likened what happened to “a game of musical chairs.” The operators punished for the Taser incident happened to be those left standing when the music stopped.
In midsummer 2004, McChrystal made a change that went some way toward solving his Camp Nama problem. He simply moved his entire headquarters to the sprawling Balad air base, almost fifty miles north of Baghdad. There, he built a new “clean and sterile” detainee facility that he described as “clearly the most important building constructed during” the move. This facility remained off-limits to the International Committee of the Red Cross, but McChrystal made it “internally transparent” within his growing “network” by allowing carefully controlled visits by partner agencies and, on occasion, allied representatives.32 Whether it was the move to Balad that made the difference, or a heightened sensitivity to the potential political fallout from incidents of detainee abuse, reports of such transgressions declined sharply once the task force moved north.33
There were practical reasons for moving the JOC to Balad—the Iraqi government was taking control of Baghdad airport—but also psychological ones. After ten months in command, McChrystal’s concept for how JSOC should operate had crystallized, and he wanted to start from a clean slate as he turned that vision into reality.34