Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (11 page)

“It gave us their whole game plan for Baghdad,” said one intelligence officer who worked on the Taji trove. As tens of thousands of additional American forces were surging into Iraq in early 2007, Al Qaeda and its allies were planning their own offensive to take over the Iraqi capital. The intelligence seized at Taji contained the location of Al Qaeda safe houses and arms caches, detailed information on IED cells, and guides for planting roadside bombs. It showed the adversary’s lines of attack as originating in the volatile belt of villages circling Baghdad along routes into the capital and the order for isolating the capital, neighborhood by neighborhood. The enemy military planners proved they had no lack of diabolical imagination for their tactical campaign of terror. There were orders for the mass murder of any sanitation workers spotted on the street, “so garbage would pile up and outrage the population against the central and local governments,” recalled the intelligence officer. “When the trash piles up, it gets unbearable.” There also were battle plans to kill all the bakers, since buying fresh bread daily is a sign of stable urban life and anger, frustration, and unease work in favor of the opposition. “This gave us the Al Qaeda order of battle, lines for their course of action, and operations for isolating neighborhoods and then the capital,” said the officer.

The plan was sophisticated, too. “They had two or three different courses of action, branches, and sequels”—just like a concept of operations or mission plan drawn up by the American military, the officer said. The Taji material also told the military more than they had known about a shadowy terrorist group that claimed allegiance to Osama bin Laden. “There were names, faces, correspondence, notes between units; it’s where we got to thinking that they did have some structure, did have some organization, did have an organization for battle, and chain of command,” said the intelligence officer.

The influence of Saddam Hussein’s loyalists was also seen in the battle plans for terrorists in Iraq who claimed allegiance to Al Qaeda. Military intelligence analysts realized that the terrorists’ plan for squeezing Baghdad from the belts outside the capital used established communications, structures, housing, and lines of attack that Saddam Hussein’s forces had planned to use to counter the American invasion.

“Once that stuff started coming back from exploitation and we grasped what we had, we set up countering operations to thwart what [Al Qaeda in Iraq] was trying to do at the time,” recalled General Campbell of the 1st Cavalry. “We had not really understood how serious Al Qaeda was about Baghdad being their center of gravity, too,” he said. “This gave us all of that and their routes into the city.”

Using the hand-drawn maps and other battle campaign documents, the American military in central Iraq mounted raids northwest and west of Taji that uncovered huge arms caches and seized underground bunkers that were serving as terror cell headquarters. And illustrating the new and more cordial relations between the conventional and Special Operations forces, historic rivals within the American military, the intelligence was also passed to the elite counterterrorism force, which targeted high-value terror leaders whose locations were indicated by material in the Taji trove. As with any intelligence find, analysts and commanders had some disagreements over exactly how to interpret portions of the translated documents and how they should shape the deployment of American and allied combat forces. Some officers involved with the effort said some units were misdirected south of Baghdad as a result of the Taji haul, but General Campbell and others in command of the surge said they had no doubt about the value of the intelligence coup.

The American military, of course, did not make public the intelligence bonanza at the time, any more than the Allies bragged publicly about Enigma until many years after V-E Day. But the Iraq surge was a success, and General Odierno, who ran the day-to-day fight, was rewarded with a fourth star—and the job of turning security over to the Iraqis and trimming back the American force in Iraq that he had commanded as it grew again to invasion numbers.

Later, during one of his trips home to confer with President Obama and Defense Secretary Gates, General Odierno reflected on the secret elements that had made the surge a success: “What we found in those documents was the fact that they felt that if they could control very specific areas around Baghdad—north, west, and south of Baghdad—as long as they could control that, they would be able then to conduct operations,” General Odierno said. “So we had to take away their sanctuaries. It’s fundamental to see how a young lieutenant who stopped a vehicle and got this material gave us an extremely important piece of information that all of a sudden changed my thought processes on how to allocate my forces during the surge. I said, ‘Hey. We’ve missed it here. We have to make sure we control these areas.’ So I adjusted our plan.”

First Lieutenant Garry Owen Flanders and the soldiers of 1st Platoon never got an official briefing on what they had found or on what it had meant to the war against Al Qaeda in Iraq. However, more than a year later, as their unit transitioned from combat to advising Iraqi security forces to take over the mission, they received a visitor. General Odierno helicoptered into their forward operating base and presented his official “coin”—a highly prized keepsake that carries a commander’s official seal—to Flanders, his platoon sergeant, and two squad leaders, the soldiers who had landed one of the biggest intelligence catches in the war.

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It was another September 11, this time in 2007, when members of an elite Special Operations team code-named Task Force 121 flew in darkness aboard helicopters, the pilots’ eyes glowing green from the crystals of their night-vision scopes, as they dashed across the northwestern desert of Iraq toward Sinjar, a dusty village at the bottom of a low range of dry hills less than ten miles from the Syrian border that was a critical field station for the Islamic Republic of Iraq, the name for an Al Qaeda–affiliated group that chose an indigenous-sounding name to hide its foreign roots.

For weeks, a tent camp just outside Sinjar had been under constant watch. Unmanned Predator surveillance drones silently logged hundreds of hours overhead. Their pilots sat at a safe distance, many time zones away in the deserts of Nevada. In the “Pred” flight-control trailers, the consoles may look like video games with joysticks, but the weapons and targets are real. Those controlling the drones fly eight-hour shifts and then go home to their families in the suburbs of Las Vegas. The Predators captured full-motion video and infrared images of the Sinjar site around the clock, establishing what the military calls “a pattern of life”: who comes, who goes, how often, how regularly.

At the same time, Rivet Joint aircraft manned by real pilots in planes the size of a Boeing passenger jet flew unseen overhead. These aircraft suck up cell phone and walkie-talkie signals from 30,000 feet. Joining the effort was the Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS), carried aboard another converted Boeing passenger airframe, which can track personnel and vehicles traveling on the ground across a large swath of desert, from Sinjar to the Syrian border. This capability was critical to the surveillance mission, because operatives at Sinjar were believed to be responsible for smuggling jihadists on routes that ran like veins along the Syria-Iraq border all the way from Turkey to the town of Qaim in Iraq’s western Anbar province, a hotbed of the Sunni insurgency.

Together, this massive effort at intelligence gathering had established beyond a doubt that Sinjar was the hub for a key Al Qaeda smuggling route, or “ratline,” that brought fighters—especially suicide bombers—into Iraq. The Iraqis themselves, even the most virulently anti-American, did not volunteer in large numbers for suicide missions; that was the emotional commitment of foreigners who came into the country to make holy war. The network smuggling these would-be suicide bombers was operated by a terrorist commander named Muthanna, whose self-chosen title was Emir of the Iraq and Syrian Border. Military intelligence profiles identified him as a “close associate of key Syrian-based Al Qaeda in Iraq facilitators.” He was king of a cross-border region of Iraq and Syria that stretched more than 450 miles, a length impossible to patrol, even if the checkpoints and official border crossings were not riddled with corruption. “If you don’t lock your door, you can’t complain about burglars,” said one Marine officer stationed in the desolate desert of western Iraq along the border with Syria. By the time the Sinjar mission was mounted in the fall of 2007, an estimated 25,000 people had been killed in that year alone by suicide bombings in Iraq. The range of improvised explosives—dug into roads, carried aboard vehicles, or worn by jihadists—was becoming the gravest threat to American and allied forces, killing and maiming more personnel than did bullets and mortars. While technology and intelligence offered ways to discover and detonate at least some of the roadside and car bombs, “We were getting our asses kicked by suicide bombers,” said one three-star American commander.

Muthanna was known to be an efficient and capable commander, but that was about all anybody knew. There were photographs of other terror leaders in Iraq: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who ran Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia; Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the Egyptian-born military strategist; Haythem Sabah Shaker Mahmud al-Badri, the emir of Greater Samarra; and Khalid al Mashadani, the senior Iraqi in the Al Qaeda network. Their mug shots were on wanted posters inside the coalition headquarters and on the baseball cards carried by troops in the field. But not Muthanna. His image was a black silhouette representing a terror leader for whom no photographs had been taken, bought, captured, or acquired. The military didn’t know what he looked like, but it knew what he did. And so the order was issued to go after him. “It was the kind of thing done a thousand times before, and a thousand times after,” said a senior operations officer. “It was a standard mission set.”

Signals intelligence operators picked up a solid lead on exactly when Muthanna was crossing from Syria into Iraq on his way to a conference of senior terrorist leaders in Mosul, in north-central Iraq, which had effectively become Al Qaeda’s capital in the country after having been pushed out of its safe haven in Anbar Province. The American military learned that Muthanna would stop at a tent camp outside Sinjar, just inside the border. Once the “go” order was given, dozens of Army Rangers, the elite light infantry of the American military, landed by helicopter at the four corners of what would be an imaginary square in the sand whose edges outlined what the military calls “a kill box” several hundred yards around the camp within which anybody moving is fair game. The commandos established this firm perimeter to keep innocents out and to capture or kill any “squirters” who might try and escape once the attack began.

Just before dawn, the Special Operations team hit, and hit hard, dropping from helicopters right onto the camp. In rapid spasms of violence, six terrorist fighters were killed by gunfire. Two other terrorist operatives died when they ran at the American commandos entering their tent and set off their suicide vests. Forensic identification identified one of them as Muthanna, who self-detonated inside his tent rather than be taken alive for interrogation. Muthanna’s death was officially announced at a Baghdad news conference a month after the mission.

Even more important than having eliminated the mastermind of a significant smuggling route for foreign fighters and suicide bombers into Iraq, the Special Operations forces scooped up a treasure trove of documents and five terabytes of data on computer hard drives. Much of it had been erased in the minutes after the attack began, but computer wizards working for the National Security Agency were able to recover the zeros and ones. Word quickly spread throughout the American intelligence community and the military that the commandos had come up with what one senior spy boss in Washington called “an Al Qaeda Rolodex”—and not just for Iraq but for all of Southwest Asia and North Africa.

The identities of between six hundred and eight hundred foreigners who had entered Iraq at the behest of Al Qaeda were in the file. The documents and hard drives contained biographical material on one hundred others. Each file contained precious details of their personal lives: their misfortunes, their inspirations, their goals.

“These Al Qaeda were as—what’s the right word?—as anal about taking notes and keeping records as the Nazis were in concentration camps,” said one senior administration counterterrorism official who reviewed the Sinjar file. “They had the name of the guy. They had his alias, place of birth, phone number, facilitator when he got into Syria, what his profession was—all types of very magnificently helpful intelligence specifics. So this trove bought us a thousand names—or maybe eight hundred because of aliases.” The terrorist network operating through Sinjar also had videotaped their training of bombers and their farewell tapes pledging a suicide in the name of jihad. “They videotape everything,” said one young military analyst, “like Pamela and Tommy Lee.”

The captured information also allowed the constellation of American intelligence agencies to dramatically refine its assessment of what animates a terrorist and who is susceptible to terrorist propaganda, inducements, manipulation, and indoctrination. According to a dossier completed by the military after the raid, the intelligence included “hand-written memos discussing personnel, weapons and ammunition procurement, the creation of passports and collection of money.” The military gleaned details of how the would-be suicide bombers were crossing the border illegally and who was taking bribes. More gruesome was the task of matching the heads of suicide bombers—often recovered severed from their bodies after a self-detonation—with photographs found in the Sinjar computers.

According to senior American intelligence officers and military personnel who worked the mission, the captured files and computer information offered new clues for how to counter Al Qaeda’s efforts in the marketplace of ideas. Experts learned how to mount supersecret counterattacks in the virtual world of online Al Qaeda Internet locations, since the hard drives included Web addresses of secret chat rooms, passwords to enter them, and coded “backdoors” for taking control of the sites. The hard drives from this raid, and from others across Iraq, Afghanistan, and in Pakistan, have become central to the “fight for intelligence.”