Chapter 9

Semper ad Meliora

On a fresh patch of land in the northwest corner of Ft. Bragg, specially cleared construction workers will soon erect a massive 110,000-square-foot building that will serve as the crown jewel in the Command’s empire. The building will headquarter the JSOC Intelligence Brigade (the JIB), which analyzes raw and finished intelligence for the Command’s special missions units. The JIB has quietly existed for more than three years, escaping the notice of congressional intelligence overseers, who have only just begun to scrutinize JSOC’s intelligence activities. Under a program started by Generals Stanley McChrystal and Michael Flynn, JSOC borrowed hundreds of intelligence analysts from the sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies, many of them rotating through quick front-line deployments. These augmentees greatly helped JSOC conduct its operations, but the Command was not able to develop a cadre of analysts who were JSOC’s own, with institutional muscle memory that would make the fusion of intelligence and operations more efficient in the future. The JIB, in essence, sets in stone JSOC’s new way of doing business.

In 2010, Admiral William McRaven attended the quiet ribbon cutting of his newest jewel: the Intelligence Crisis Action Center (ICAC) in Rosslyn, Virginia, funded through a classified line item in the Pentagon’s budget. Until just recently, it operated on two floors of a nondescript office building that also housed a language learning center and a dry cleaner. At the time when McRaven christened the center, its existence was a secret to many U.S intelligence officials, who learned about it by way of an Associated Press newsbreak in early 2011. According to a senior military official, it has about fifty employees and reports directly to the JSOC Directorate of Intelligence and Security.1 Its primary function is to serve as a command post for JSOC operations around the world. It is informally known as the Targeting Center, and because of operational security concerns it has changed its name twice. Presently, it’s the Joint Reconnaissance Task Force (JRTF), and it operates from a new location in the Beltway, a location that we have agreed not to divulge. (There are four other JRTFs, each responsible for JSOC operations within certain areas of operations.)

These entities are sensitive subjects at the highest levels of the U.S. counterterrorism community, because each represents the extraordinary achievements of the JSOC units and also reveals by its own existence the inadequacy of the other intelligence fusion centers set up by the government to do mostly the same thing. JSOC’s successes have brought with it blowback and envy and more than a bit of criticism from military officials who think that conventional forces and regular special operations forces units were just as important as the smaller, secretive standing task forces in degrading al-Qaeda’s infrastructure.

Though the addition of an intelligence brigade to JSOC is a natural consequence of its success and growth, when the Associated Press disclosed the existence of the ICAC to the general public, a spokesman for SOCOM made a point of telling reporters that its functions would not duplicate those of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). Mike Leiter, the director of the NCTC, worked closely with McRaven to make sure the two centers didn’t overlap. “I spent hours with Admiral McRaven on this,” he said. “We saw this as a natural evolution in what they were doing. We sent some of our guys over there, and they sent some of their guys over here.”

Managers at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) regarded JSOC’s growing footprint with alarm. Some whispered to journalists that JSOC was building a secret intelligence empire without oversight or scrutiny. More prosaically, they feared that the Command’s activities, in both the collection and the analysis of intelligence, would duplicate their own.

Sensing friction, Michael Morrell, the then acting director of the CIA; Michael Vickers, the civilian intelligence chief at the Pentagon; and General James Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tried to reduce tension and conflict arising from JSOC’s expansion. In the field, JSOC units and their counterparts at the CIA and the DIA work well together. In Yemen, after some early conflicts, the integration is almost seamless, with JSOC and the CIA alternating Predator missions and borrowing each other’s resources, such as satellite bandwidth. Often, JSOC element commanders will appear on videoconference calls alongside CIA station chiefs—all but unheard of until very recently. Yet some mid-level managers at the intelligence agencies remain resistant to the type of integration envisioned by the National Security Council (NSC).

McRaven, much like JSOC itself, is at cross-purposes. He knows that his intelligence assets will not survive budget purges unless they fit well within the rest of the community. Yet he also wants to preserve the razor-sharp edge of the special missions units at a time when, due to publicity and overtasking, it risks being dulled. A robust intelligence infrastructure multiplies the effect that JSOC has on the battlefield, he believes.

That JSOC no longer operates exclusively in the shadows is a meal uneasily digested by longtime JSOC team members. Once the curtains have been opened, it is hard to draw them shut. Since being promoted to commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, McRaven has spoken openly about the increased need for transparency regarding the nation’s counterterrorism forces. Operational security is still paramount in at least one way: the identities of those who belong to the Tier One units are state secrets, and McRaven, according to people who have spoken with him, would rather JSOC spend less time creating layers of myth around itself and more time thinking about how to protect its core assets at a time when, as one senior administration official who works with McRaven said, “every time there is an explosion in the world, everyone knows about it within minutes.”

•••

Some of the most vociferous objections to daylight came from legends of the special operations community. Shortly after the capture of Osama bin Laden and detailed information about the tactics, techniques, and procedures used by DEVGRU shooters showed up in the mainstream media, retired colonel Roland Guidry, one of JSOC’s founding members, took the rare step of contacting journalists to complain about the sunlight bathing the SEALs. “The pre-mission Operational Security was superb, but the postmission OPSEC stinks,” he said. “When all the hullabaloo settles down, JSOC and [the SEALs] will have to get back to business as usual, keeping the troops operationally ready and getting set for the next mission; the visibility the administration has allowed to be focused on JSOC and [the SEALs] will make their job now more difficult.”

Guidry said that the “administration’s bragging” about details such as the existence of the bin Laden courier network and efforts to eavesdrop on cell phones would encourage the enemy to adapt by changing their cell phones, e-mail addresses, websites, safe houses, and couriers. He also thinks the administration should not have disclosed precisely what types of equipment it found in bin Laden’s compound, such as the terrorist’s use of thumb drives to communicate. “Why did the administration not respond like we were trained to do thirty years ago in early JSOC by uttering two simple words: ‘no comment’?” he asked.

To be sure, the administration—construed broadly—did not intend for too many specifics to get out. The NSC wrestled with the dilemma early on, knowing as soon as bin Laden was captured that the demand for information would be intense. Though no strategic communications expert had been read into the op before it was executed, the White House and the Pentagon hastily prepared a strategy. Mike Vickers and deputy CIA director Mike Morrell would brief reporters on a conference call the night of the capture, after President Barack Obama finished speaking. The White House would issue some details about the time line by having John Brennan, the respected deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism, brief the press corps. And then everyone would shut up.

Because the SEALs themselves were not debriefed until after the White House had released its initial time line, bad information got out. Bin Laden had pointed a gun at the SEALs, reporters were told, and used his wife as a human shield. Neither was true—but both were conveyed in good faith. Reporters, sensitive to the way the administration would try to use the bin Laden capture to boost the president’s image, were relentless in their efforts to pinpoint precise details. Intelligence agencies, seeking their share of credit, offered unsolicited interviews with analysts who had participated in the hunt. Maybe it was simply the pent-up tension caused by keeping the secret so long, but in the days after the raid, “the national security establishment barfed,” is how Denis McDonough, another deputy national security adviser, put it to a colleague.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, had four secrets he did not want published at all. One was the stealth technology used on the Black Hawk, but there was nothing he could do once it crashed. Another was the presence on the ground of CIA operatives—it took less than a week for a detailed story to be published in the Washington Post about the CIA renting a house near Osama bin Laden’s compound. (It later emerged that the CIA had had a station in Abbottabad for quite a while and had enlisted an unwitting local doctor to run a vaccination campaign to try to get blood samples from the bin Laden compound. The doctor and others suspected of helping the CIA were taken into custody by the Pakistani intelligence service and would later be released only after much begging on the CIA’s behalf.

Secret three was the type of drones that hovered above the raid—RQ-170 Sentinels, operated out of Tenopah Test Range, near Area 51 in Nevada, capable of jamming Pakistani radar with one pod and transmitting real-time video to commanders with another. A message posted to Twitter by one of us on the night of the raid and a subsequent comprehensive Washington Post story broke that secret. (In early December 2011, an RQ-170 gathering intelligence on possible insurgent training camps inside of Iran lost contact with ground controllers and subsequently floated down deep inside the country. Briefly, a JSOC recovery operation was considered, but that was before the Iranians discovered it. At that point, a mission would be tantamount to war. The United States had to adapt to the possible compromise of Top Secret cryptographic devices and stealth material.)

Secret four was the identity of the SEAL unit that had taken the mission, and, in particular, the identities of the operatives. The unit name was revealed the night of the raid, but the intelligence community and Special Operations Command were horrified a month later when several reporters asked them to verify a list of names and ranks that had been distributed to them by sources unknown. Someone had leaked the names of some of the SEALs on the helicopters.

Military officials begged the reporters not to publish the names or even reveal that the list existed. The reporters acquiesced. A Department of Defense agency—most likely, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations—began to work quietly with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to see who might have possibly leaked such protected information. Inside SOCOM, suspicions were directed at the White House, which, some believed, was availing itself of every opportunity to highlight Obama’s decision to launch the raid. (White House officials insist that no one there would be so stupid as to leak the names of Tier One operatives to reporters, and SOCOM’s Ken McGraw said he was not aware of the incident.)

Inside JSOC, the Delta guys blamed the larger SEAL community for inviting the attention. Whoever leaked the names might have taken a lesson from the SEALs themselves: when Obama met with them several days after the raid, he was told not to ask the men who actually killed bin Laden because they wouldn’t tell even the commander in chief. Bill Daley, Obama’s chief of staff, asked anyway and was told by the squadron leader, “Sir, we all did.”

Notes

1. Based on interviews with firsthand participants.