My Share of the Task (19 page)

Winter Strike showed this might be a long road, but we were moving.

| CHAPTER 8 |

The Enemy Emerges

December 2003–April 2004

A
bout midday on December 13, 2003, I received a phone call while back at Fort Bragg. “Sir, we have intelligence. We think we know where Saddam Hussein is and we're moving on him now.”

The voice on the other end of the secure phone was Rear Admiral Bill McRaven, one of TF 714's two assistant commanding generals. Bill, then TF 714's senior officer in Iraq, was a Navy SEAL I'd known off and on for many years. I had enjoyed the book he wrote,
Spec Ops
, and earlier that year I had attended his promotion ceremony at the White House, as he moved from working for Condoleezza Rice at the National Security Council to TF 714. Energetic and iconoclastic, he would be a passionate force in shaping the command.

Bill's call was welcome news. When I took over TF 714 in October 2003, Saddam Hussein was still the biggest target in Iraq. We were not the only unit responsible for his capture—everyone was on the hunt—but the administration and the military looked to us as the premier element. While his role in the growing violence in Iraq was unclear, we knew we had to remove him from the equation.

After Bill's call, I went immediately to TF 714's Joint Operations Center at Bragg. The room, with rows of workstations manned by staff and unit operators facing a wall of video screens, was a buzz of controlled excitement. One screen displayed an operational log of ongoing activities, and another showed a live Predator feed of the operation moving on Saddam's assessed location. As we watched, operators from Task Force 16 and soldiers from Ray Odierno's 4th Infantry Division moved down a road that cut through farmland in Ad Dawr, south of Tikrit.
*
We could see operators moving purposefully through empty courtyards. Bill, calling from the TF 16 operations center at the Baghdad airport, reported intermittently. Although I did not know it at the time, our force had brought along a detainee who had been flipped through the smart manipulation of the task force's interrogation team. After a period of silence, Bill spoke again.

“Okay, they went in there and . . .” He paused. “We've . . . got a guy.”

“Do you think it's Saddam Hussein?” I asked. For a few tense moments, the line was quiet.

Then we heard Bill get back on. “He claims he is, sir.”

“Well, that's
one
indicator,” I said, laughing.

Although less refined than many that would follow, the operations that led to the capture of Saddam gave a glimpse into how TF 714 operations would evolve in the coming years. Using a complex combination of intelligence collected from a variety of sources, including detainees, we slowly laid bare the network around Saddam. While the process was slower and less precise than it would ultimately become, our efforts with conventional-force partners, painstaking exploitation of information, and rapid reaction to emerging leads proved an effective combination.

But I cringed when, on December 14, Ambassador Bremer declared, “Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!” This was the kind of triumphalism that I knew would not play well with the Iraqi people. To me, the presentation evoked memories of the previous April. Soon after the capture of Baghdad, newspaper photographs showed U.S. generals sitting on couches and smoking cigars in one of Saddam's palaces. Annie observed that if she were an Iraqi, even an ardent opponent of Saddam, she would have resented what looked like foreign invaders humiliating Iraq. After Saddam's capture, my gut told me, the Iraqis should have made the announcement and celebrated it as a victory for the new Iraq. The country's government, although it did not technically exist, would need as much credibility as possible when it gained sovereignty the following summer, according to the American timetable.

The scene that followed increased my unease. After Bremer finished, Lieutenant General Sanchez moved to the podium and cued up a video. The monitors on stage first showed shaky nighttime footage of the hole in which our men had found the toppled dictator. The video then displayed an American medic sifting through his mangy hair with white latex gloves. Sanchez began to narrate, but when he said “Saddam”—clarifying that the raggedy man being prodded was indeed the tyrant—loud whistles and cheers from the audience interrupted him. “Death to Saddam! Death to Saddam!” the Iraqis in the audience, ostensibly reporters, shouted. Men in the front stood up from their seats to cheer. The video rolled on, showing Saddam with a cowlike expression, mouth open and tongue out. Sanchez tried to continue but was interrupted again by shouts and clapping.

The death shouts, likely most loudly voiced by Shia Iraqis, reflected an anger that was largely unimaginable to most Americans. Meanwhile, these images of Saddam and cheers likely amplified fearful questions that had been growing among Sunnis that fall. With Saddam gone, what revenge would these Shia seek? On that day, thermal emotions erupted in outbursts at the monitors. But the anger and fear they both represented and provoked would be cynically tapped and manipulated by both Zarqawi and his Shia opponents, and would lead to mind-numbing internecine cruelty.

Because I had always shared the fairly common army ethos that self-promotion was something quiet professionals eschewed, I was disappointed soon after Saddam's capture when I found out that members of my force had given President Bush the pistol found with Saddam in his spider hole. While I understood the desire of the team to thank a president they had followed in combat since 9/11, I felt such an act smacked too much of currying favor. My opinion changed somewhat in 2008 when I went with then–Brigadier General Scott Miller to the Oval Office to brief President Bush. He showed us the pistol, which he had kept in
a framed exhibition case. I realized the gesture had, in fact, meant much to a person in the loneliest of jobs, wartime commander-in-chief.

*   *   *

A
ny optimism Saddam's capture brought was short lived, and a growing Sunni insurgency was emerging as the principal threat in Iraq. The de-Baathification decision from the previous summer, which reduced Sunni presence in key positions, reinforced Sunnis' fears that the fall of Saddam would leave them disenfranchised in the face of Shia dominance. The dissolution of the Iraqi army stoked those fears and pushed thousands of trained potential fighters into an economy wracked by unemployment. Severe electricity shortages—which deprived Iraqis of fans or air-conditioning in the searing summer and convinced many that the high-tech American military withheld basic services out of spite—brought frustrations to a boil.

Particularly troubling was the assessment that one of Green's top intel analysts, then-Major Wayne Barefoot, brought when he came to my office in Iraq two weeks after Saddam's arrest, during the first week of January.

“Sir,” Wayne said, “we have good reason to believe Zarqawi is in Iraq.” Although we knew he had been in northern Iraq on the cusp of the American invasion, and attacks over the summer and fall had borne his hallmark, this was the first time we had felt certain he was setting up shop in the country. “And, sir,” Wayne continued, “we believe he's building up a network.” Most troubling, the Jordanian operative seemed to be angling to control the growing Iraqi uprising.

At the time, my focus was still primarily on the venues where we believed Al Qaeda's command structure lay, Afghanistan and Pakistan. I sensed but didn't fully appreciate at the time what Zarqawi's presence in Iraq augured. He was preparing to shift the group's center of gravity from the Hindu Kush to Anbar. But his growing impact also represented a broader post-9/11 change in the nature and networking of Al Qaeda, as our pressure had forced the group to move beyond its core-guided organizational model in the 1990s. We were seeing more, but Al Qaeda's command structure remained opaque.

On 9/11, Al Qaeda still largely organized its movement as it had at its inception thirteen years earlier. On an international scale, it mirrored the model of native insurgent movements I had studied throughout my career. This model included
three concentric circles: a core group, enclosed by support elements, with auxiliary components on the periphery.

The
core was a bureaucracy. Bin Laden led from the top as emir, consulted with an advisery council, and directed the group. Beneath him were committees in charge of religious authorization, military affairs, finance, the group's security, and propaganda. From here, bin Laden exerted command and control and distributed resources. Still building its brand, Al Qaeda needed its attacks to be spectacular and successful. Through what an Al Qaeda defector called “
centralization of decision and decentralization of execution,” the leadership selected targets and approved proposals that came from below. The bulk of the planning, equipping, and execution was delegated to the local parts of the network, which received guidance and funds as necessary from the professionals in the
top-level Military Affairs Committee.

As they planned and executed the attacks, local cells adopted a more traditional terrorist “blind” cell model, whereby the links among its members were limited. Single intermediaries—cutouts—connected different clusters, so arresting one or a number of members only made a limited dent in the organization. If a detainee could resist questioning long enough, the people he knew could scramble and reposition, maintaining the integrity of the cell. The night before the attack on the embassy in Nairobi in 1998, all members of Al Qaeda left East Africa except those preparing to kill themselves in the trucks and those
staying to clean their tracks.

The auxiliary support for the group included the networks that funneled donations from sympathetic patrons in the Gulf,
in Europe, and elsewhere. Al Qaeda had unofficial partnerships with at least
twenty other groups, some of which
bin Laden attempted to bring under his control.

Attraction to the brand during the late 1990s was most noticeable in the robust training camps Al Qaeda established, primarily in Afghanistan. These camps trained and indoctrinated between
ten thousand and twenty thousand (estimates ranged
as high as seventy thousand) young Muslim men in the way of modern jihad. Some of those trainees came from
hard, poor lives. Many were well-to-do men who had
science and engineering degrees but had never fired a gun. Al Qaeda adopted the pedagogy of bin Laden's influential high-school gym teacher, who had mixed Koranic study with soccer—running violent, macho
physical training alongside indoctrination classes that fed a narrow but potent ideology.

To spur innovation, the leadership
invited attendees to brainstorm and share their own macabre ideas about how to kill a lot of Americans and Jews. At the same time, the organization enforced some strict tenets of its own. For example, it ensured that suicide bombing became
an Al Qaeda trademark by belaboring the
prestige of such “martyrdom operations.”

Like a spinneret, these camps spit out the threads that would compose the web of the growing network. While a small portion of these trainees remained in the core—staying to fight the Northern Alliance or
graduating to advanced training—the camps ensured that the organization had supporters and agents of varying commitment worldwide. As the men returned to their corners of the world, including western Europe, they did so with strong links to fellow jihadists. At times, those global relationships crossed social strata or cultural divides they wouldn't have crossed before the camps. Even as these men dispersed, they did so bonded by a shared consciousness. They saw the same “problem” and
endorsed the same strategy for redress: to restore Muslim pride and dignity by demonstrating moral and political strength, largely through violence. By 1999, their increasingly thick network stretched
across sixty countries.

Those durable relationships made the movement difficult to target, as its dynamics were often known only to the people who shared those bonds. We tried to think of it less as an organization easily defined by a hierarchical chart and talked instead of associations and a network of relationships: Who communicated with whom? Who was married to whose sister or daughter? Who, ultimately, influenced whom?

September 11 represented the high-water mark of Al Qaeda's triumph. Even a dedicated enemy of Osama bin Laden could acknowledge the impressive operational feat of simultaneously hijacking four airliners and crashing three into different buildings. The attacks also established Al Qaeda as a brand. Thenceforth, no group was more recognizable as the credible, effective Islamic resistance to America. Its appeal swelled beyond the confines of the jihadist community. But the swift response by the United States quickly forced the organization to adapt.

By 2004, a number of trends were making the group more effective but also more vulnerable. Bin Laden and his core group were increasingly isolated and on the run, and he was less able to maintain meaningful
control over the disparate network. For the survival of the brand, the group needed to remain active. As a result, power and authority devolved from the center to the outer parts of the network, which would thenceforth make decisions that central committees had previously made.

Beginning in 2003, this decentralization forced Al Qaeda to rely on what became known as its “franchises”—in Algeria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq. The first of these had appeared the previous spring in Saudi Arabia, when in May 2003 a new group operating under the name Al Qaeda in the Land of Two Holy Places set off car bombs in three Western housing compounds in Riyadh. Their cells comprised core Al Qaeda members operating
under orders from bin Laden, though most of the country-based franchises would not be created through large transplants from central Al Qaeda. Veteran Al Qaeda cadres would offer guidance, but the franchises were increasingly jihadist groups that had existed or started somewhat independently. As they grew in prominence and ambition, they joined Al Qaeda by taking its name and benefited from its image as
the
global resistance to the United States. What had been a weakness of the Al Qaeda brand—its narrowly extreme but global ambitions—now reinforced it. We would soon learn much more about how these groups functioned through our close-quarters battle with what became the most violent and most powerful of the franchises—that which was led by Zarqawi in Iraq.