Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (21 page)

Something needed to be fixed. The fix was the
creation in 1980 of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC, pronounced “JAY-sock”), located at Ft. Bragg in North Carolina, so that the “Special Operators” of the various services could start to work together more seamlessly. The key components of JSOC are secret, “black,” Navy SEAL units, the army’s Delta Force and 75th Ranger Regiment, the helicopter pilots of the 160th Special Operations Air Regiment, and the air force’s Special Tactics Squadron. (The primary mission of “white” Special Forces units, which operate quite openly and are known as the Green Berets, is to train indigenous military forces.)

The top officers who ran the U.S. military were often
suspicious of the “snake eaters” in Special Operations, whom they tended to regard as cowboys. Then came
the debacle at Mogadishu, Somalia, in early October 1993. A daytime helicopter assault by pilots of the Special Operations Air Regiment and elements of Delta Force, SEAL Team 6, and the 75th Rangers with the goal of snatching Somali clan leaders who were attacking U.S. troops stationed in Somalia, turned into a fiasco in which two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down by rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), and eighteen American servicemen died.

Unknown to anyone in the U.S. government at the time, al-Qaeda had
sent some of its top trainers from its then base in Sudan into Somalia to train the Somali clansmen fighting the Americans in how best to bring down helicopters using RPGs. This is far from easy to do, as RPGs are designed to be antitank weapons; hitting a flying object with an RPG is difficult to pull off, given the powerful recoil of the RPG launcher.

Scarred by the Battle of Mogadishu, the Pentagon was resistant to using Special Operations Forces to take on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan once the terrorist group had rebased itself there in 1996. President Bill Clinton pushed the Pentagon to deploy the elite units of JSOC into Afghanistan to take out bin Laden, telling General Hugh Shelton, his top military advisor, “
You know it would scare the shit out of al-Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp. It would get us enormous deterrence and show the guys we are not afraid.” Michael Scheuer, the head of the bin Laden unit at the CIA at the time, says, “
I don’t carry a brief at all for President Clinton. But, numerous times, he asked the military to use commandos or Special Forces to try to kill bin Laden. And General Shelton, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs at that time, always brought him plans back for those operations that looked like the invasion of Normandy!” President Clinton was looking for a covert operation, not a large-scale military assault.

After the 9/11 attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was deeply frustrated that the first American boots on the ground in Afghanistan were from the CIA and not the highly trained counterterrorism units of JSOC. On October 17, 2001, ten days after the U.S. campaign against the Taliban had started, Rumsfeld wrote a secret memo to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Richard Myers,
expressing his irritation: “Does the fact that the Defense
Department can’t do anything on the ground in Afghanistan until CIA people go in first to prepare the way suggest that the Defense Department is lacking a capability we need? Specifically, given the nature of our world, isn’t it conceivable that the Department [of Defense] ought not to be in a position of near total dependence on CIA in situations such as this?”

Officials working for Rumsfeld commissioned Richard Shultz, a historian of Special Forces, to find out why JSOC units were not deployed to hit al-Qaeda before the attacks on New York and Washington. After all, fighting terrorists was why these units were founded in the first place. Shultz concluded that in the years before 9/11, the senior officers at the Pentagon had become “
Somalia-ized.” As a result, they tended to recommend “big-footprint” operations involving as many as several hundred soldiers, “
showstoppers” that made the missions politically impossible at a time when the American public was believed to have no tolerance for U.S. casualties. Another showstopper: before launching an operation, the Pentagon demanded high-quality “actionable intelligence,” which simply didn’t exist in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Special Operations boss General Peter Schoomaker recalled, “Special Operations were never given the mission. It was very, very frustrating. It was like having a
brand-new Ferrari in the garage and nobody wants to race it because you might dent the fender.”

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon allowed Rumsfeld to push Special Operations to the center of the “Global War on Terrorism.” In a sign of where Rumsfeld wanted to take the military, in the summer of 2003 he took the unprecedented step of
asking General Schoomaker to come out of retirement to become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And on September 6, 2003, Rumsfeld signed an
eighty-page order that empowered JSOC
to hunt al-Qaeda in as many as fifteen countries. It wasn’t a blanket permission, since in a number of those countries the president or State Department would still have to sign off on the missions, but it allowed JSOC considerable latitude to operate independently.

Crucially, JSOC—unlike the CIA—would not have to brief Congress about its actions in those fifteen countries. That was because JSOC operated under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which outlined the rules under which the U.S. military operated, unlike the CIA, which operated under Title 50, and was required to brief Congress whenever it conducted covert operations overseas. This might seem like no more than a typical bureaucratic loophole, but it would have a significant result: JSOC was now empowered to mount covert actions in many countries around the world with less accountability than the CIA. JSOC’s overseas operations were all classified, so it also received very little scrutiny from the media or public. For many years the Pentagon
didn’t even acknowledge that JSOC existed.

In the decade after 9/11, JSOC mushroomed
from a force of eighteen hundred to four thousand, becoming a small army within the military. It had its own drones, its own air force (known as the
Confederate Air Force), and its own intelligence operations. The rise of JSOC was inextricably linked to the vision of Major General Stanley McChrystal, a brilliant workaholic from a military family who was beloved by his men and who during the Iraq War would go out with them on missions to capture/kill insurgents. Depending on your perspective, this was either foolhardy or brilliant leadership—or maybe a little of both—given that killing a two-star American general would have been a significant propaganda coup for Iraq’s insurgents.

It was McChrystal who took the Special Operations Ferrari out of the garage and drove it to become a killing machine of unprecedented
agility and ferocity. The Iraq War provided the opportunity to make that change because, to prevail against the insurgency, Special Operations would need to be geared for not only one-off missions but also an entire campaign. McChrystal said that Special Operations had to go from being just “a bookseller to being Amazon.com.”

McChrystal realized that the most lethal of the Iraqi insurgent groups, in particular “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” were not fighting like Saddam Hussein’s tank-based army—which fought as every other hierarchical military had done before it—but comprised, rather, loose networks of fighters who operated in largely independent bands.

Unlike satellite imagery of Saddam’s tank formations, intelligence about the insurgents was both fleeting and highly perishable. JSOC would have to become more like al-Qaeda
if it was going to defeat al-Qaeda; it would take “a network to defeat a network,” in McChrystal’s formulation. A major part of McChrystal’s strategy was to go after not just the leaders of the insurgency but also the midlevel insurgents who were keeping the trains running. (It is one of history’s little ironies that al-Qaeda itself was set up as a JSOC-like group. The main trainer of al-Qaeda in the years before 9/11 was Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian American army sergeant who had served at Ft. Bragg, the headquarters of JSOC. In the 1980s,
Mohamed taught courses on the Middle East and Islam at the Special Warfare Center at the army base.
During his leave from the army, he trained al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan using Special Forces
manuals he had pilfered from Ft. Bragg. His life as an al-Qaeda double agent was not discovered until 1998.)

To make JSOC more like al-Qaeda meant making it “
flat and fast,” two qualities rarely mentioned in the same sentence as “the U.S. military.” To get JSOC as flat and fast as the insurgents, McChrystal made a number of key decisions.
In the summer of
2004 he set up his base of operations in a group of aircraft hangars at Balad Air Base in central Iraq. This was a long way from the stultifying embrace of Washington and the Pentagon, and even a ways from Baghdad, and it would allow JSOC to get outside all the typical bureaucratic restraints that made quick decisions impossible. Then, to break down the “stovepipes” that existed between JSOC and the intelligence community, McChrystal started recruiting CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) analysts to work at Balad, and he also sent Colonel Michael T. Flynn, his top intelligence officer,
to work at the CIA station in Baghdad for eight months in 2004. Gradually, other potential bureaucratic rivals were co-opted into McChrystal’s enterprise, so he could quickly and easily draw on the resources of key intelligence agencies such as the CIA and the NSA.

McChrystal also harnessed technology to transform JSOC’s operations. Through the aggressive and early adoption of video teleconferences (VTCs), McChrystal tied together JSOC’s far-flung operations, which stretched from Balad to Ft. Bragg to Tampa (the headquarters of Special Operations Command), to other key bases, such as at Bagram in Afghanistan, which managed JSOC’s Afghan and Pakistan missions. Gradually, these daily ninety-minute VTCs became worldwide briefings about the fight against al-Qaeda and its allies that also drew in the CIA and State Department officers. The discussions ranged across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, and McChrystal wanted to hear from anyone with real expertise, regardless of rank.
One of the senior leaders in the Pentagon who began to listen in on these videoconferences was the chief of naval operations, Admiral Michael Mullen.

At first JSOC had only one Predator drone in Iraq. So it improvised and
leased a couple of small aircraft to which cameras were affixed. As the command grew, JSOC acquired its own dedicated
drones so that it could maintain an “unblinking eye” 24/7 over targets.

The natural tendency of the intelligence community is to hoard information. McChrystal made his teams share intelligence, creating a JSOC intranet that everyone in the command could access, and he teamed with an obscure military intelligence unit in Washington, the National Media Exploitation Center, to turn the large volume of papers, CDs, thumb drives, computers, and other “pocket litter” that his operators were picking up on the battlefield into “
actionable intelligence.” JSOC built computer infrastructure so that when units on the battlefield captured anything of interest, they would get it to Balad and the material would then be quickly uploaded to the States, where the staff at the National Media Exploitation Center worked around the clock to turn it into usable intelligence. “We got to a point where they were able to turn things that were large quantities in about twenty-four hours, whereas before it would get lost in the ether,” says one of McChrystal’s deputies. All this required massively increased bandwidth, which JSOC acquired on commercial satellites, building up over the years a significant “farm” of satellite dishes at its headquarters in Balad.

For JSOC, every mission now became what McChrystal termed a “
fight for intelligence.” The intelligence was used to get inside the “decision cycle” of the insurgents so that information picked up on one raid could be used to launch still other raids. Sometimes intelligence recovered from one location led to an assault on another insurgent hideout in the same night.

JSOC techs were creative. They designed an “electronic
divining rod” that would ping only when it was near a cell phone linked to a particular insurgent. The base at Balad was awash in cell phones used by insurgents that had been picked up on raids. But because the base
was shielded from electronic eavesdropping, the cell phones were no longer receiving incoming calls, calls that could have provided important clues to other insurgents. So JSOC techs rigged a cell phone base station inside the Balad headquarters so that the phones could start receiving calls again. Once the station was turned on, dozens of the captured phones started ringing and buzzing,
netting more leads for JSOC.

All these measures were taken to create a sequence known as “F3EA,” in which JSOC would “find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze” its insurgent targets. Hiding behind ever-shifting anodyne code names such as Task Force 121, which captured Saddam Hussein, JSOC got results. In 2006 it killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the psychopathic leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. After Zarqawi was killed, President Bush took the unusual step of referring by name to the hitherto shadowy General McChrystal and gushed that
JSOC was “awesome.”

JSOC’s record was not unblemished. In the first year of the Iraq War, at Camp Nama, near Baghdad, a Special Operations task force maintained a prison facility where prisoners were sometimes beaten;
thirty-four task force members were disciplined for mistreating prisoners, and the facility was closed in 2004. The same year,
McChrystal himself was one of a number of officers who did not disclose that Pat Tillman, the football star turned Army Ranger, was killed in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan, rather than by the Taliban, as the army had initially portrayed it. The army declined to discipline McChrystal because he did try to warn senior officers that Tillman might have been killed by his comrades.

JSOC went from
half a dozen operations a month in Iraq in the spring of 2004 to three hundred a month by the summer of 2006. The work ethic was brutal. At JSOC, the day was “
17-5-2”—seventeen hours for work, five hours for sleep, and two hours for everything
else. In 2006,
McChrystal wrote to all his men: “It will not be about what’s easy, or even what we normally associate with conventional military standards. It will not even be about what is effective. It will be about what is the MOST effective way to operate—and we will do everything to increase effectiveness even in small ways. If anyone finds this inconvenient or onerous, there’s no place in the force for you. This is about winning—and making as few trips to Arlington Cemetery en route to that objective.” McChrystal, who ran JSOC until 2008, saw his wife only one month a year for the five years he was in command. The “battle rhythm” was so brutal that one JSOC officer used to joke, “We lived in Balad and vacationed in Kabul or Bagram.”