Chapter 6

A Known Unknown

For those not clued into JSOC operations, the June 2006 mission to capture or kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the first hint that something fairly magical was happening. Flynn would later recall that it took more than six hundred hours of surveillance time between the first tip and the kill. After Zarqawi, the White House began to rely on JSOC for just about everything. Congress was in love. Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana requested and received an unprecedented (and secret) billion-dollar earmark for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets on the basis of a battlefield conversation with Generals Stanley McChrystal and Michael Flynn.

“Chris C.” joined the army after reading about the heroics of Americans in Fallujah. A few months out of West Point, he was deployed on a fifteen-month tour of Iraq as a battalion-level intelligence officer. In order to find insurgents, his soldiers worked from scraps of human intelligence—a rumor here, an overheard conversation there. Based in the Salahuddin province north of Baghdad, they had shared access to a single drone for overhead surveillance. There was no National Security Agency presence and thus no real signals intelligence. Sometimes, a JSOC task force would inform Chris’s commander that they were about to raid a part of the city. “We were told: the Task Force is going into our area, and here is the grid they’re going to hit. I would look at the grid and say, ‘Oh, I know who they’re going to hit, because we’d just been there looking for the same person.’”

In Balad, General Flynn had come to appreciate the wealth of information that intelligence collectors with conventional forces could provide. He recognized that such intel could benefit the regular troops, as well as the JSOC task forces. While JSOC soldiers went home every three months, conventional forces were on twelve- to fifteen-month rotations.

McChrystal and Flynn knew that JSOC needed to better understand the populations their task forces worked among—an intelligence capability that only units such as Chris’s could provide. Knowing the sinews of a local community could help the U.S. military establish degrees of trust with tribal and authority figures. General David Petraeus, for example, would use early successes by conventional commanders such as General H. R. McMaster, the commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq, to develop his counterinsurgency doctrine. “JSOC, earlier than any other element in the U.S. government, understood the importance of messaging and how actions can influence populations,” said Mike Leiter, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center.1

Officers such as Chris C. had an institutional knowledge of tribes, geography, and environment that had eluded JSOC. Flynn was determined to merge the two systems. “Ninety percent of the intelligence we needed was not in JSOC,” he told one observer in 2010.2

Indeed, Chris’s unit provided the tip that led the JSOC task force to Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi, the spiritual adviser to al-Zarqawi. Chris’s officers had long watched an internecine tribal conflict north of the Tigris River. (One tribe was angry that the United States was targeting the other tribe, which increased the heat on everyone involved.) Just after a firefight, Chris got word that Haj al-Bazari, a high-ranking al-Qaeda in Iraq operative, had been injured and taken to a cousin’s home in the area. A database crosscheck revealed that one of al-Bazari’s cousins had a wife who was an OB/GYN. Chris’s team searched her house and found bloody gauze and a truculent doctor refusing to tell anyone what had happened. She was detained. When her husband arrived at the American detention center, he pleaded for her release. He had little money but was a member of a major facilitation network that included former Baathist elements funded by Syria. He offered the Americans information instead.

Chris’s commander contacted a JSOC task force. They flew in and grabbed the man and interrogated him. That was the last time Chris heard about the guy until, out of the blue, a JSOC shooter team came by to thank him. (This was another early McChrystal-Flynn innovation: let the “black” guys talk to the “white” guys, or allow units that operate in the shadows to work with units that operate in the sunlight.) “They told me that the guy was a high-level financier and that he had led them to Sheik Abdul Rahman,” he said.

By December 2007, when Chris’s second tour of duty in Iraq began, JSOC task forces were fully integrated with the rest of the effort. Chris’s battalion was assigned to the eastern half of Mosul and was constantly fighting to keep the province from collapsing under the weight of foreign fighters, many from Saudi Arabia. Communicating with the JSOC team in the area, Task Force 9-14 (also known as Task Force North), was much easier than before.

Chris had access to their interrogation reports and worked with a TF 9-14 intelligence officer to devise a strategy for his area of operation: they would target specific mid-level operatives who might lead to the bigger gets. His team produced a steady stream of intelligence reports about local politics and conditions on the ground. Not once was he denied access to JSOC products, and TF 9-14 was literally a phone call away. “Once this started happening, it was just awesome in terms of what we were able to do,” he said.

Here is how a colleague of General Flynn’s described the change in procedures on the ground: “What would normally happen is: the shooters would kick down a door and snatch everyone and drag them to the front room, and then take everything with them, and put it in a trash bag. The bad guys would be taken to a detention facility and the pocket litter would come back to [the intelligence analysts]. Flynn thought this was stupid. Instead, he gave the shooters—think of this—the Delta guys, mini cameras, and schooled them in some basic detective techniques. When you capture someone, take a picture of them exactly where you captured them. Take detailed notes of who was doing what with what. Don’t merge all the pocket litter.”

He continued, “Then, the shooters were supposed to e-mail back an image of the person they captured to Balad [JSOC’s intelligence headquarters], where analysts would run it through every facial recognition database we have, or fingerprints or names, or what have you. We’d get hits immediately. And so our intel guys would radio back to the team in the field, ‘Hey, you’ve got Abu-so-and-so, or someone who looks like them. See if he knows where Abu–other-person is.’”

And that’s what the shooters would do. They’d tell their captured insurgents that for a price, they could help them. A senior JSOC intelligence commander said, “They’d say, ‘I know you, you’re so-and-so. And if you want us to help you, you need to tell us where this other person is.’ And it would work. And then, when we got a new address, sometimes within twenty minutes of the first boot on the door, we’d have another team of shooters going to another location.” Follow-up interrogations were plotted out like dense crime dramas, with dozens of participants, including some by video teleconference.

Instead of three operations every two weeks, JSOC was able to increase its operations tempo (or “optempo”) significantly, sometimes raiding five or six places a night. This completely bewildered insurgents and al-Qaeda sympathizers, who had no idea what was going on. In April 2004, according to classified unit histories, JSOC participated in fewer than a dozen operations in Iraq. By July 2006, its teams were exceeding 250 a month. McChrystal’s operations center was open for fifteen hours a day, regardless of where he was. There is a strong correlation between the pace of JSOC operations, the death rate of Iraqi insurgents and terrorists, and the overall decline in violence that lasted long enough for U.S. troops to surge into the country and “hold” areas that used to be incredibly dangerous.

In Lamb and Munsing’s thesis-length assessment of intelligence in Iraq, Flynn’s “pivotal” efforts at fusing intelligence and operations, developing real-time reach back to analysts, and the flattening of authority are lauded as “the secret weapon” behind the surge—not some special weapon, as Bob Woodward has hinted. Notably, Flynn is rendered in the piece as “General Brown,” and the authors were not permitted to mention that his team was actually JSOC. Such is the nature of the Defense Cover Program—Flynn himself was (and is) a target for terrorists and many nation-states.

•••

The Bush administration showered attention and resources on JSOC, and as the mission in Iraq wound down and the United States elected a new president who, it seemed, would take counterterrorism in a different direction, the Command prepared itself for an uncertain future. There were whispers of a Justice Department investigation into JSOC’s financial and operational practices. This appears untrue, although the Senate Armed Services Committee did conduct some type of JSOC investigation beginning in 2008—with results no one will discuss.

Barack Obama was a complete unknown—a Democrat with no military experience and little understanding of its dynamics. A wave of JSOC operators quietly retired as President George Bush’s second term drew to a close. Some migrated to become contractors or to the CIA or lower-profile military units.

Admiral William McRaven assumed command of JSOC on June 13, 2008. The problem with being a secret organization is that when a harsh light is cast on questionable activities—even activities performed with patriotic intent or, at least, performed when no better options seemed available at the time—there’s no opportunity for a rebuttal. “We are in a difficult position, in that there’s not much we can do to make the case for ourselves,” McRaven said in 2010. “There are some things we can try and do to respond to things like Seymour Hersh articles,” referring to the journalist’s allegations that JSOC fostered a culture that resulted in torture and later served as Dick Cheney’s personal assassination force, “but we are constrained.”

For all of McChrystal’s advances and achievements, McRaven still inherited a work in progress. Even with all of the attention paid to ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) assets, JSOC had only thirty-three planes to its name, and its drones were making only five orbits per day over Iraq. Fusion cells that worked well in some areas didn’t necessarily work in others. With a new U.S. president, the rules of engagement in Iraq were about to change, and attention would soon shift back to Afghanistan and more decisively toward Africa. The spigots were still open, but JSOC’s bureaucracy was growing overburdened.

One of the earliest problems McRaven had to deal with was the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), signed with Iraq and which forbade the United States from conducting most counterterrorism raids without warrants. Warrants? JSOC doesn’t do warrants—that’s a law enforcement thing. Many in the Command wanted to ignore the SOFA entirely. McRaven, however, insisted that his team figure out a way to fulfill the agreement. To do this, he directed JSOC funds to build mini-courthouses, first in Baghdad and then elsewhere in the country. JSOC flew in JAG (Judge Advocate General) officers from the United States, and McRaven personally briefed the Iraqi leadership, describing the constraints under which JSOC often operated. He asked for their help.

As a result, Iraqi judges were empowered by the U.S. military and began issuing warrants based on the testimony of JSOC intelligence analysts, SEALs, or Delta guys themselves. McRaven at first faced internal resistance for bringing in the Iraqis—JSOC was supposed to be a secret organization. Yet as operators saw how well the courthouse system worked, they soon dropped their objections and quickly adapted.

Likewise, they adapted to McRaven’s establishment of an Afghan partner unit within JSOC. It consisted mostly of civilians, many without a shred of military experience, and began to accompany JSOC units on raids. This was a particularly important outreach following a JSOC disaster in April 2010, when a Ranger unit killed five Afghan civilians in Khataba, the result of a bad tip from an unreliable source. McRaven took the extraordinary step of personally apologizing to the family and admitting that the men under his command had made a “terrible terrible mistake.” As reported, McRaven, near tears, told an elder, “You are a family man with many children and many friends. I am a soldier. I have spent most of my career overseas, away from my family. But I have children as well. And my heart grieves for you.” McRaven figured that the Afghan partner units could prevent these kinds of mistakes—the kind that made the job harder for every soldier, conventional or special operations, who was fighting in Afghanistan. McRaven further reached out to conventional units, asking commanders how his units could better assist their missions.

As of yet, JSOC does not seem to have found the kind of successes in Afghanistan that it did in Iraq. The enemy is different, more embedded in the population. The geography makes intelligence gathering more difficult. And the strategy from the White House is different. Yet as a force multiplier and as a hub of best practices, the Command may have prevented a decisively unwinnable situation from descending into disaster.

•••

In the early morning of April 12, 2009, Somali pirates held an American merchant marine captain captive, and President Obama had his first encounter with his secret army. On the other end of the telephone was McRaven, who, in turn, had a deputy directly plugged in to a DEVGRU platoon positioned on the deck of the USS Bainbridge off the coast of Somalia. Four Red Squadron SEALs had sighted three of the pirates with their long-barreled M-110 rifles. Obama and McRaven agreed on the rules of engagement. If the pirates seemed to endanger the life of the captain, the SEALs could shoot.

A few hours after the call, the SEAL snipers squeezed their triggers, and the hostage situation was over. Obama was not required to make that particular call to McRaven. A secure teletype sent through the Defense Message Service had already given the element commander authority to use force if necessary. In fact, those present could recall only two other times in recent memory when a president directly discussed firing options with a commander. But Obama was curious about the authority associated with the presidency. The military was curious, too. Did Obama have the mettle?

It would seem he did. The new commander in chief, a young one-term senator who did not strike voters as the type who was predisposed to authorizing force, had endorsed a decisive application of lethal action. From this kill, a relationship flourished. Months later, the White House authorized a large expansion of clandestine military and intelligence operations worldwide, sanctioning activities in more than a dozen countries, rewriting, in effect, the Al Qaeda Network Exord. Obama’s national security adviser, retired marine general James Jones, and his chief lieutenant for Afghanistan and Pakistan, General Douglas Lute, were well aware of JSOC’s capabilities. Obama gave JSOC unprecedented authority to track and kill terrorists. In turn, JSOC would keep al-Qaeda from regrowing the networks and the branches needed to mount large-scale attacks against the United States. That was the implicit understanding Obama and the National Security Council had reached with McRaven. Keep us safe, and you can do what you need to do.

Notes

1. Author’s interview with Michael Leiter.

2. Based on interviews with firsthand participants.