Task Force Black (10 page)
Authors: Mark Urban
The onslaught against Fallujah was finally launched on 8 November, just after the re-election of President Bush. Operation PHANTOM FURY threw approximately twenty thousand US and Iraqi troops into action. By that time, the Coalition estimated more than 95 per cent of the population had fled, and the number of mujahedeen in the city was thought to be 1200 to 1500.
British political nervousness about the possible scale of the slaughter stopped any direct UK involvement, though the Black Watch was moved up to northern Babil Province in order to relieve a US unit so that it could take part in the operation. They were swiftly targeted by Sunni insurgents, losing five men in their first fortnight on the mission – a sobering taste of what the Americans were up against. Such was the nervousness in Downing Street that serious consideration was given to withdrawing the Black Watch after these incidents. British field commanders preferred to plough on. As for Task Force Black, D Squadron of 22 SAS had initially prepared to take part in the operation.
The blades set off for the short drive west, finding themselves a leaguering-up point in the desert near Fallujah. One of Delta’s squadrons had already got stuck into the fight, and D, sometimes described as the most intense of all the squadrons, was itching to join in. Their spirit arose from ‘airborne aggression’ – the traditional domination of the squadron by members of the Parachute Regiment. At Fallujah many of them might have liked to adopt the traditional Para approach, which went by the acronym FIDO: Fuck It and Drive On. But orders came down the chain of command that they were not to do so. Britain had played another red card in a national caveat. Neither the visible army nor UK special forces were to take part in the assault on Fallujah.
In street-to-street fighting, the US Marines stormed the city. It was a bloody, grim and determined business done with hand grenades, small arms and all the support the Americans could muster. One week later the operation was declared complete. Four thousand artillery rounds, ten thousand mortars and ten tons of bombs had been used on the city. The Americans had lost fifty-one soldiers. The tally of bodies recovered in the city was around two thousand. The military said they were all insurgents, but one British officer who was in Fallujah shortly after PHANTOM FURY speculates that the difference between the intelligence estimate of fighters before the attack and the number of bodies recovered suggests several hundred civilian fatalities. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was not among the dead. Indeed, Islamist sources suggested he had moved to an area south of Baghdad before the assault commenced.
In the months before the assault the balance of power between him and the al-Qaeda leadership hiding in Pakistan had changed decisively. A letter seized early in the year, which was believed to have been addressed to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the movement’s number two, showed the reason why ‘head office’ was nervous about Zarqawi. In it he had preached hatred of the Shia, describing them as the American’s puppets in evicting the Sunnis from power. In June 2004 Zarqawi wrote to Osama bin Laden that ‘they [the Shia] have been a sect of treachery and betrayal through all history and all ages’, arguing that he would not formally join al-Qaeda unless he was allowed to step up his onslaught on the Shia. Zawahiri and bin Laden apparently feared this nakedly sectarian approach, but events had begun to define their response. ‘Zarqawi generated so much success and publicity,’ says an intelligence officer, ‘that al-Qaeda simply had to anoint him.’ In October an Islamist website carried a communiqué stating that Zarqawi had sworn an abaya, or oath of allegiance, to bin Laden. His movement changed its name to ‘Organisation for the Holy War’s Base in the land of the Two Rivers’ (in Arabic,
Tanzim Qa’idat Al Jihad bil Balad al Rafidayn
), leading to the simplified Coalition designation of the movement as ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ or AQI.
As the Americans became increasingly preoccupied with hunting down the Jordanian leader and his network, British special forces found themselves on the sidelines.
Shortly before the attack on Fallujah, MI6 visited Balad to question a suspected insurgent. The Iraqi was being held in a secret jail called the Temporary Screening Facility (TSF). In keeping with Major-General McChrystal’s approach, this place provided the JSOC team of interrogators with their own opportunity to question the people they had captured using the full range of intelligence information coming into Balad. It was not visited by the Red Cross or other humanitarian organisations, and its exceptional sensitivity made it, says one British officer, ‘a black prison within a black programme’.
Following the MI6 visit, concerns were raised about the detention conditions there. Another visitor to the TSF told me that ‘the cells there were like dog kennels – tiny’. In the first place the wooden cells constructed to hold the prisoners were smaller than stipulated by British standards. There were also worries about the condition of some of the detainees. People in JSOC sometimes refer to the injuries a prisoner can take at the moment of capture, when being overpowered by those he was trying to kill moments before. But were the violent practices Colonel Herrington uncovered at Camp Nama being continued?
As a result of MI6’s visit and the concerns raised, Britain communicated another national caveat to JSOC in Iraq: from now on Britain’s special forces would only turn its prisoners over to the Americans if there was an undertaking not to send them to Balad.
It can be imagined how this news was received by the CO of Delta Force, and McChrystal himself. The American general was carefully building his network and the British had just tugged out an element of it. ‘Inevitably [the decision] caused a degree of tension with McChrystal and his crew at Balad,’ says one figure in this drama, with remarkable understatement.
JSOC’s people knew that Task Force Black, through Operations ABALONE the previous autumn in Ramadi or 2004’s ASTON, the capture of the alleged Pakistani jihadists in Baghdad, had delivered some of the only evidence of how the global al-Qaeda network might be operating in Iraq, but this UK–US cooperation was effectively at an end. One senior American figure told me that they had never consciously shut the British out. But the new British caveat had left JSOC with a stark choice. Given the importance of rapidly exploiting intelligence, they did not want to rely upon the British to capture someone who might know where Zarqawi or some other key figure was hiding, because that precious source of intelligence would be delivered into the neverland of the ‘white’ detainee system rather than to JSOC’s own people.
By the autumn of 2004, roughly one year after Major-General McChrystal had taken over JSOC, British special forces were operating in an increasingly ‘semi-detached’ way. A consensus had emerged between Brigadier
Peter Rogers
as DSF Lieutenant-Colonel
Beaufort
in command of the SAS, the MI6 station and several senior officers, such as those back at PJHQ in Northwood, that Task Force Black needed to put some distance between itself and the Americans. By building up its humint team, analysts, support from intelligence agencies and means of transport, those who had lost faith in the American approach intended to give Task Force Black the ability to find-fix-finish its own targets. The only problem with this approach was that as SAS operators chatted to their Delta neighbours in the MSS, or the spooks shared a coffee after one of their endless liaison meetings in Camp Slayer, Britain’s team in Baghdad started to develop a nagging feeling that it might be fighting the wrong war. Up in Balad, McChrystal and his people were coming up with ideas, technologies and tactics that amounted to nothing less than a revolution in counterterrorism. The first target for this new machine would be al-Qaeda.
On 20 February 2005 US special operations forces had their chance to kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Acting on intelligence, they had landed by helicopter on a desert road in Anbar Province. The jihadist leader was travelling from Ramadi towards Fallujah. As is usual when throwing up a checkpoint of this kind, a machine-gunner had been placed in position to engage any vehicle that attempted to go straight through.
There are different versions of exactly what happened. According to one, a car thought to contain Zarqawi and a couple of bodyguards saw the unexpected American roadblock, stepped on the gas and ran right through it. The machine-gunner, however, did not feel within his rights under the rules of engagement to open fire.
Another account comes from someone in the world of black special operations. The JSOC team had the support of a Predator UAV, and officers in Balad were watching the suspect car speeding along the desert road on the live feed. The fact that the car was under ‘eyes on’ surveillance from the Predator should have given the soldiers another chance, even if the gunner on the ground had faltered at the key moment. But as the JSOC personnel looked on, the image on the screen suddenly started to spin madly. The aircraft had developed a technical fault and the camera mounted beneath it was gyrating out of control. The opportunity had been lost.
This incident was one of several in which the intelligence experts working for McChrystal believed that they had been close but had missed their man. Iraqi forces were even reckoned to have had Zarqawi in their custody near Fallujah at one point before the town was stormed, but had not realised who he was and released him. The SAS had its own brush with Zarqawi early in 2004 when it assaulted a house in Baghdad. After forcing an entry, the blades had swiftly reversed, piling out when an artillery shell attached to detonating cord came bouncing down the stairs. The device did not go off, and the occupants of the building were later overwhelmed and captured. Intelligence subsequently revealed that Zarqawi had left a short time before.
By early 2005 JSOC had a clear focus deriving from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s apparent obsession with taking down high-value targets. Major-General McChrystal’s command had built a regional laydown, which was designed to allow rapid response to intelligence anywhere that the AQI leader or key associates might be found. At Al Asad airbase in Anbar Province were the Seal Team 6 crew, Task Force Blue, or West. In Tikrit a select team of Rangers was deployed as Task Force Red, or North. The Delta squadron – Task Force Green (Central) – operated out of MSS Fernandez in the Green Zone. Their next-door neighbours, the British Task Force Black, were able to operate in and around Baghdad but with the specific target set or mission of hunting Former Regime Elements.
A series of steps initiated by SAS Commanding Officer
Charles Beaufort
back in the UK had increased Task Force Black’s ability to operate as a semi-independent unit. Early in 2005 the SAS supplemented their lightly protected Snatch and unarmoured Land Rovers with M1114s – armour-plated US Humvees. The helicopter fleet was changing too, losing its pair of Chinooks and gaining more Pumas. Intelligence back-up had been boosted by establishing both humint and sigint specialist teams in the task force. Cut off from the intelligence flow about JSOC’s ‘Black List’ of targets – that is, Zarqawi and the AQI leadership – the British humint team had provided most of the initial leads for Task Force Black’s raids in the latter part of 2004.
Britain’s caveats about delivering prisoners to the JSOC jail in Balad meant that those taken in Task Force Black raids were instead handed over to regular US army units. They usually ended up at the Divisional Internment Facility at Baghdad airport where, by this time, the inter-agency task force hunting old Ba’athists had its main station and could interrogate those whom the British had scooped up. This seemed like a joined-up system; the only problem was that many of the SAS and British intelligence people were beginning to lose faith in the value of their man hunt. The former Ba’athists frogmarched from their homes in the middle of the night were often described as ‘old men’ by their captors.
Increasingly, the great game in Iraq was the hunt for Zarqawi. The JSOC leaders devoted the best intelligence-gathering people and the lion’s share of resources to this aim. But Britain had effectively opted out owing to its concerns about American actions. Members of Task Force Black knew all about what their Delta colleagues were doing through the unofficial grapevine but also through the British liaison teams that still went to Balad, to sit in the Joint Operations Centre, but the resumption of full cooperation was dependent upon work to improve the condition of the prison cells and British inspections of the regime there.
It was against the background of this bureaucratic standoff that an RAF Hercules on its way up to Balad disappeared off the radar on 13 January 2005. An Iraqi group swiftly claimed responsibility for shooting down the aircraft, in which nine British servicemen were killed. The Board of Inquiry would eventually rule that the aircraft’s low-level flight profile was too dangerous given the capabilities of the resistance and that the Hercules, once hit, might have been lost because its fuel tanks were not fitted with explosion-suppressant foam (as similar American planes were, and RAF ones eventually would be).
The loss of the aircraft was a blow for G Squadron, then starting its tour of duty in Baghdad, and the rest of Task Force Black. Its members responded by devoting particular energy to tracking down the killers. A long intelligence operation led to raids later that year, which captured some of those responsible, and it demonstrated the growing technological sophistication of the Coalition effort.
At the time of the Hercules crash, an American surveillance aircraft equipped with a highly sophisticated radar called JSTARS ( Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System) had been orbiting north of Baghdad. Designed during the Cold War to pick up impending Soviet Army tank thrusts, JSTARS maps moving objects on the ground. It could thus be used to detect cars. Information from the aircraft gave analysts an initial lead in pinpointing who might have shot down the C-130.
In other areas, too, technology and intelligence relationships were coalescing. That March, a caller to one of the Coalition telephone tips lines had offered information on the whereabouts of one of Saddam’s former apparatchiks. The existence of the phone lines, which were also being used in Basra and other cities, was a British innovation in Iraq, based on long experience in Northern Ireland. In the Baghdad call centre police officers from Britain and Northern Ireland acted as mentors for the entire operation. Those who rang in might give a one-off tip, and they might also prove suitable for cultivation as informers. The phone offered an important way for the humint teams to overcome some of the dangers of working in the Red Zone, but also for the callers to make themselves known without publicly giving themselves away. On such an occasion, a suitable case presented itself and a British policeman monitoring the call wondered where to take it, having found that the main US intelligence agencies were not much interested in the raw material produced by the call centre.