Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the "Butcher of Fallujah"-and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091) (4 page)

This had the effect of driving the weapons of the Sunni resistance underground. The result was the formation of a tribal hotbed, a kind of Sunni Citadel, determined to fight to the last man. There were wild crowd-control confrontations and endless murders and bombings. The most violent area in all of Iraq was suddenly the blasted side streets of Fallujah, where the demented Sunni killer Al-Isawi had assumed a loose and terrifying control.

But no one, anywhere, had ever reported seeing the man. If they had mentioned such a sighting, their life would not have been worth four Iraqi dinars, and because at the time it took about four thousand of these to buy one US dollar, that would have been a tragically inexpensive life. Al-Isawi habitually took no prisoners. He fixed his own exchange rate down the sixteen-inch barrel of his Kalashnikov rifle.

He was wanted for murder all over the country. But chasing him was to chase the shadows of the desert. In the summer of 2004 the US military was already seeking a ghost. After each new uproar in the city of Fallujah, the SEAL briefings were edged with frustration.

This is a summary of a midsummer briefing by the commander of SEAL Team 4:

Gentlemen, for us there's nothing so difficult as searching for the unknown. But right now, the way it's been for God knows how long, we have only a name for this bastard Isawi. There's no more doubt that he strung up the bodies on the bridge, matter of fact he seems proud of that. But we've never been able to grab him, never been able even to see the sonofabitch. Right now we don't even have a friggin' photograph.

By July 2004 Fallujah was once more in chaos. The insurgents had refused to hand over both their heavy weapons or Al-Isawi in return for a US ceasefire in the city. And despite close US air support, the city fell back under Sunni terrorist control.

But by November the Americans had had enough. They unleashed a full-blooded attack on Fallujah, and this resulted in the fiercest urban combat of the entire war. The US Marines overran the city, darn near flattening it in the process. They got everything and everyone except Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi.

And then the new year came, 2005, and again there was this uneasy standoff. Attacks continued all through the spring and summer, and on August
I
a car-bomb ambush killed six US Marine snipers in the city of Haditha, a Sunni farming town on the Euphrates. In Langley Al-Isawi was suspected of moving his headquarters temporarily some 140 miles upriver. Suspicions grew even more so when a massive roadside bomb two days later detonated in Haditha, killing fourteen Marines plus their interpreter.

Another blast occurred in the same area on November 19, when a huge IED constructed of artillery shells and explosive-packed propane tanks blew up from under the asphalt, hurling a Marine Humvee into the air, splitting it clean in half, and killing the driver instantly. The rest
of the Marines then reported they came under fire from civilian houses, and they immediately responded.

In the end, after a volley of machine gunfire and an exploding grenade, twenty-four apparently unarmed civilians lay dead. And it was six long years before the several Marines charged with assault and murder were ultimately cleared. None of them went to jail. Their defense attorney was Haytham Faraj, a former US Marine officer.

And once again investigators were faced with a situation that bore the marks of Al-Isawi—the particular construction of the bomb as well as the gunfire aimed at Marines that had come from civilian homes, according to the testimony of a Marine lieutenant. This was classic Al-Isawi, who thought nothing of firing at and murdering Americans from schools, hospitals, and mosques.

Winter 2006—Commander SEAL Team 7:

We now know more about this maniac than any other target, except where the hell he is, and what he looks like. ... The one thing we really know is, he's smart, he's an expert in bomb making, and he has excellent INTEL. ... He also has an unusual grasp of military ops, and this suggests he may have served somewhere. His men show up in unexpected places, all over the goddamned desert, and that means he knows a lot about map-reading in difficult terrain, as well as communications, weapons and high explosive. This is no goat-herding Bedouin tribesman. This is a serious operator. And ... the suits in Washington want results.

We got two more missions tonight. Both based on new Intelligence. One in the city, one somewhere out in the desert. I don't like the sound of either of 'em much. So be darned careful. ... Even if Isawi doesn't show up, there's a couple of other al-Qaeda guys we really want to locate. That's all.

All of these operations were and still are strictly classified by the US Navy. They are as significant today in Iraq and Afghanistan as they were in 2005. For that reason they are incomplete so that no material confidential to US military intelligence should be made public, not
even to an American audience, because to do so achieves nothing but to alert the enemies of US armed forces.

Iraq has always been an extremely “leaky” spot in which to conduct any form of warfare. For instance, even the fighter pilots flying off US aircraft carriers in the Gulf and headed for the forbidden air space above the US-imposed No-Fly Zone were often astounded at how regularly Saddam Hussein's rocket men, hidden in the desert, were absolutely aware of US flight-wing arrival times in Iraqi airspace.

It's a country where no one could be trusted. No one living there understood who was al-Qaeda and who was a mere tribesman. Some Iraqis used every subversive trick in the book, with their hot cell phones, utter lack of loyalty, and propensity to sell information to the Americans for money and to the terrorists out of fear—Al-Isawi's speciality.

Confronted by advancing US troops, insurgents knew how to get rid of their weapons faster than any stage magician. Men who had, moments before, been blazing away with the AK-47s were suddenly unarmed, hands held high, appearing utterly bewildered as to why they had come under suspicion.

They knew the US Rules of Engagement (ROEs) better than the American themselves. And they really knew the one about not firing on the enemy until fired upon. They knew exactly when to stop, often stranding advancing American troops in some kind of no man's land in which Americans might get shot but were not permitted to open fire. As the months went by, Al-Isawi became a global authority on the US section of urban guerrilla warfare.

To the American soldiers it often seemed they must wait for someone to take a bullet in the head before they were legally permitted to fire.

The year 2006 wore on, and the insurgent attacks on US forces continued. Wave after wave of Navy SEALs crossed the ocean from Coronado and Virginia Beach, joining vast legions of US Marines in the fight to bring Iraq under control.

And night after night small groups of these Special Forces ventured out into the dark of the desert in search of the “bad guys,” the SEALs' all-compassing term for the furtive al-Qaeda killers whose mission remained unaltered: to drive the forces of the West out of the Middle East forever.

The road was hard, but the Americans were winning. Slowly they hunted down the al-Qaeda leaders, grabbing, manhandling, and terrifying Osama bin Laden's field commanders. But they were pursuing an elusive tribe, military intelligence was often sketchy, and sometimes days went by without a significant success.

Early in June 2006, however, Jordanian intelligence made a breakthrough. They alerted the Iraqi authorities that they had some kind of a fix on al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq. And the scene swiftly shifted to the city of Baqouda, capital of the Diyala Governate, situated thirty-one miles northeast of Baghdad and home to almost a half-million people.

In truth the Jordanians were only a couple of gunshots in front of US Navy intelligence, who were simultaneously on the trail of one of al-Zarqawi's main lieutenants as well as his principal spiritual adviser, Sheik Abdul Rahman. They had him in the area of the old Silk Road way station of Baqouda but were still finalizing the finer details.

Heavy-handed US interrogation of al-Qaeda prisoners actually cracked the case wide open for the intelligence agents. Someone finally betrayed al-Zarqawi, and as early as late April, US Joint Task Force 145 was stealthily headed toward a terrorist safe house in a remote area five miles north of Baqouda.

They kept it under tight surveillance alongside Iraqi security forces, which were the first ground troops to arrive. Finally al-Zarqawi showed up for an obvious high-level meeting of the local mass murderers. And US intelligence finally had a bead on one of the worst killers in Iraq since Saddam Hussein was dethroned—Al-Isawi's boss, no less.

The United States wanted no mistakes, and in the late afternoon of June 8 they whistled up a couple of USAF F-16C Fighting Falcons, which identified the house and came screaming in from the north. The
lead jet unleashed two five hundred–pound bombs—one of them a laser-guided GBU-12—Lockheed Martin's deadly accurate, finned hunter-killer, PAVEWAY II, made in Pennsylvania and unstoppable once launched. The other was a GBU-38—Boeing's Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) pinpoint targeted, satellite-guided destroyer, utilized here to avoid extensive outer damage.

The GBU-12 blasted the safe house to high heaven, killing everyone in it, al-Zarqawi, Abdul Rahman, and five others, two male and three female, including one of al-Zarqawi's wives and their child.

There was a huge sense of relief in Iraqi government circles, particularly as there had been a marked increase in violent atrocities in the city of Baqouba in recent days. One of them, which culminated in seventeen severed heads being found in fruit boxes, brought forward in intelligence circles the name of the fiendish Al-Isawi once more.

But then there was another mass murder, when masked Sunni gunmen suddenly killed twenty-one Shi'ites, including twelve students pulled from a minibus and shot. That was pure al-Zarqawi, again demonstrating the precise sectarian tendencies bin Laden detested. No one thought the killing would stop after al-Zarqawi's lair was vaporized; Islamist fanatics would swiftly move forward to replace their brethren. But some thought the quality of terrorist commander might decline. The Americans had killed or captured so many of al-Qaeda's top men; surely it would have some effect.

For now, however, the clinical brilliance involved in the total demise of the top al-Qaeda commander in Iraq inspired a grim sense of relief in all the clandestine SEAL bases both east and west of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

Like al-Qaeda, the SEAL Teams constantly required new, young American blood—tough, dedicated men whose sense of idealism and duty matched or surpassed their Islamic counterparts.

That very summer two such recruits were making their separate ways toward the training cauldron of Coronado, home of the fabled BUD/S course, that baptism of ruthless indoctrination designed to answer
just one singular question: Are you tough enough for us even to consider making you a Navy SEAL?

Every applicant with ambitions to wear the Trident must tolerate that six-month endurance test on the shores of the cold Pacific in order to even try. And the ancient proverb “Many are called, but few are chosen” understates the rigor of this test. On average, fewer than 12 out of 160-plus men finally make it through. In comparison, Harvard Law School has a higher acceptance rate than the US Navy SEALs.

Matthew Vernon McCabe, a small-town boy with modest high school grades, coming from the outer suburbs of Toledo, Ohio, was the first of the two. The second was Jonathan Keefe, Virginia State swim champion from an even smaller town, near Yorktown. Neither had achieved anything close to their academic potential as students, but both of them had been bound and determined to become Navy SEALs since an unusually young age.

Matt understood perhaps best the iron-clad boundaries of the “Many are called...” proverb, as it was first written in his namesake's gospel. For him, a career in the Navy SEALs was beyond all realms of possibility.

He came from a broken home in Perrysburg, Ohio. His parents' divorce when he was thirteen had the effect of loosening his parental guidelines, first living with his mother and sister, then moving to stay with his father, Martin McCabe, a second-generation proprietor of a prosperous auto body shop who was sometimes inclined to indulge his son.

“Guess that's what kids do,” Matt says now. “Head for the area where life will be easiest. Looking back I understand better that my mom was a wonderful lady and laid down standards for me and my sister which could not be changed. She was absolutely certain of her own moral guidelines. And to this day she's always been there for both of us. Hell, my mom worked three jobs to hold the family together after Dad left.”

Matt was a gifted, athletic midfielder on his high school soccer team, well on his way to his full five-foot, eleven-inch, 180-pound fighting weight. But the truth was that he was bored sideways by soccer
before his sixteenth birthday and wholeheartedly entered another kind of world when his father, from out of the blue, presented him with a second-hand Ford Mustang GT convertible to mark his opening step into manhood.

Generally speaking Matt was happier driving around rural Ohio in his Mustang, accompanied by a veritable platoon of the best-looking girls Perrysburg had to offer, than being kicked and barged into by various schoolboy meatheads whose principal ambitions lay in the pursuit of a round ball.

In any event, his older sister, Megan, a student at Ohio State and a future New York fashion model, had already introduced him to a more sophisticated way of life. So he announced his retirement from the game in order to concentrate his energies on a form of Buckeye
dolce vita
.