Authors: Mark Urban
Task Force Black (2 page)
As I began my research, two things soon struck me. The first was that many people were willing to talk, in part because they believed great things had been achieved secretly by Britain around Baghdad. The second was that Britain’s campaign in Iraq was already in its closing phase when my research was getting under way in earnest. This would allow certain final judgements to be reached and reduce the sensitivity of the contents to a level where many would be prepared to see it published, since continuing operations would not be endangered.
The story that emerged was a quite remarkable one of high risks and extreme violence. In this sense, Iraq presented a completely different arena from Northern Ireland where considerations such as the legality of the use of force ranked much higher. The truly disturbing (to those of a liberal mind, in any case) thing about the special operations campaign in Iraq is that it suggests a large terrorist organisation can be overwhelmed under certain circumstances by military force. The story of how far this was done is of course the main narrative of this book.
From the outset I decided to take certain steps to allow me to tell the story while protecting the lives of those – including insurgents as well as soldiers – who had been involved in these extraordinary events in Iraq. For those below a certain rank or status whose names had not come into the public domain, I would use pseudonyms denoted in the text by italics, such as Major
Smith
. I later added a few more senior officers who were still serving at the time of writing to this list, using pseudonyms in relation to the period of their special forces commands. Non-italicised names are of course real ones. I would also be very careful not to describe the limitations of intelligence or other capabilities used in this struggle, since many are still in use elsewhere.
When my research was already largely complete it became clear to me that there was also a body of opinion that was far less happy than those who had supported me in my work. In one sense this was a surprise, because I had come to assume that there was an official acceptance that it was not in the public interest to prevent my book’s publication. Quite a few sources indeed told me that they had checked before speaking to me and had been given the go-ahead. However, it is always a mistake to assume that in matters of special forces and intelligence Britain practises joined-up government. As the tone of official letters became harsher it became clear that one hand did not know what the other had done. I could see that the kind of objections from officialdom that had accompanied my earlier books about Northern Ireland and on the intelligence services (
UK Eyes Alpha
) was likely to be repeated with
Task Force Black
.
I never had a problem with the idea of the Ministry of Defence reading my manuscript before publication because while I had been careful not to give away what I considered sensitive, I did not want to make inadvertent mistakes that might endanger lives. This indeed was why I agreed to make many changes, despite the fact that I considered many of those requested to be essentially pointless. However the reaction to my text in certain quarters – essentially of making demands for hundreds of changes, backed by the threat of legal action – did surprise me because it soon prejudiced the kind of reasonable discussion that I had hoped to enjoy. Horns were locked, lawyers engaged and the whole thing became an unpleasant confrontation.
Of course, I realise that many people will not only sympathise with Whitehall for trying to make changes to sections of the book, but will argue that it is the type of work that should never be written. I don’t accept that, obviously. Whether the story of covert operations is essentially a critical or searching one, as my work about Northern Ireland was, or a somewhat more positive one, as this is, these histories must be told. They are about extraordinary deeds performed and lives taken or altered for ever by people who act in the country’s name. The truth will out. It is simply a case of how soon, and how full a telling the narrative will receive. Many of those who cooperated with me were not only keen that these facts come to light but that I, as an unofficial person, should tell the tale.
In the end, it became possible to tell the story (for the most part) after a difficult and expensive (to the taxpayer) process. I would like to thank those who were essential to this process and of course the wider one of preparing this book: Ursula Mackenzie, Tim Whiting, Zoe Gullen and Siobhan Hughes at Little, Brown; David Hooper and his legal team at RPC; my ever-supportive agent Jonathan Lloyd; and of course my wife Hilary and my children for seeing me through once more. My
Newsnight
editor Peter Rippon was endlessly understanding in allowing me time off to write the book. Publishers, lawyers, family and indeed the BBC all gave me magnificent support. I suppose thanks are also due to the team on Operation ABERRATE, whom I may have considered occasionally misguided but were motivated by honourable considerations.
High over southern Baghdad an aerial dance was taking place. Flying at the top of the stack, a lumbering Hercules command aircraft banking in a figure-of-eight pattern was coordinating the planes with the assault force on the ground. Then, circling a couple of kilometres off to the west, was a group of Puma helicopters that had just dropped off the SAS and their supporting Paras. Closest to the ground, Lynxes were orbiting the target, each with a sniper peering out through an open side door.
If everything went to plan, their target would be picked off, cuffed and on his way to the interrogation facility within hours. If it turned into a drama, the air commander could call in anything from helicopters to F-16s. The outcome could vary from a swift night-time stroke that even the target’s neighbours would be unaware of to the total obliteration of his farm.
The whole scene, at two o’clock on a summer’s morning in 2007, was viewed through the green and black contrasts of night-vision goggles by pilots straining every sinew, scanning the horizon of this unmanaged airspace, desperate to avoid a mid-air collision. Suddenly, a banking Lynx flashed in front but just below them, causing the pilots to tense momentarily. It was the ultimate flying challenge for these aviators, one of whom described it as ‘a fucking awesome adrenaline frenzy – ten to fifteen air assets all stacked up on each other in the same air space, all doing a job. You would not believe the amount of time, energy and love that went into lifting one man.’
Down below, in the dusty farm compound that was his home on the edge of the Iraqi capital, that target was still unaware of what was about to happen. He was asleep, and so used to the sound of Coalition helicopters wheeling over the city by night that he did not stir. On the table next to his bed his mobile phone was still switched on. One of the brothers might call.
Across a plantation of date palms a few hundred yards from the farm, assault teams of British special forces soldiers stepped off their Pumas into the darkness. All of the men had state-of-the-art night-vision goggles and an assault rig carrying body armour, grenades and magazines, as well as plastic ties for their prisoner. Written on each man’s forearm were the grid references of their target, as well as details of call-signs and timings.
Walking towards the objective was the Team Leader. He had been studying the target for weeks, learning who he was, where he operated and his place in the al-Qaeda setup. He had also gathered information on the community around the farm – if things went wrong, they did not want to get caught in a hornets’ nest. ‘You have to be driving ops with timely and accurate intelligence,’ says one Team Leader. ‘If it’s flawed, people die on both sides.’
The target that night had been identified by intelligence as the administrator for a car-bombing cell. He put the vehicles, explosives and martyrs together to execute the attack. His people had already mounted several attacks on American troops and the market in the suburb of Doura a few miles to the north. Dozens of people had been blown apart in these bombings.
As the soldiers reached the farm they moved into position. The entry team had approached the chosen entrance. Up above the airborne commander was receiving reports from a surveillance aircraft. ‘You are thinking about the individual you are after,’ recalls the Team Leader. ‘You are listening to the intelligence coming through from the aircraft above you. At a certain point you say “OK we’re ready”.’ The door was blown and within seconds the SAS were in.
The mission that night was part of a secret war in which the SAS were effectively placed under the control of a classified American command working for General Stanley McChrystal. The gaunt American general would later emerge as a central figure in the Afghanistan conflict but at this time he was regarded with awe by a select band – the brotherhood of special operators he led in Iraq. McChrystal’s people waged a campaign in which the old rules of counterterrorism were torn up and a devastating new style of operations emerged.
It was not easy for the British to adopt this new thinking. Many of them thought they knew better. But the sprawling suburbs of Baghdad or the alleyways of old Basra had little in common with Belfast or the Balkans, where the SAS had perfected its techniques. This was not a European battlefield, but something altogether more alien; a crazy jumble of baking heat, strange smells, and extreme violence. America’s invasion of Iraq had drawn in thousands of jihadists, people who expressed their zeal for the cause in the willingness to cut off heads or drive cars full of explosives into crowded markets. Faced with a mounting disaster, the Americans were ready to kill these extremists by the thousand, harnessing all of their formidable technology and knowhow to the task. For the British, at times, the argument between those who wanted to follow McChrystal’s plan and those who opposed it threatened to tear the UK special forces community apart. In the end, the British task force found its way through the political minefield. Although it never numbered more than 150 people, it managed to play a key role in the battle for Baghdad and the suppression of al-Qaeda in Iraq. What follows is the story of how that happened.
Early in April 2003 an RAF Chinook flew through the darkness towards Baghdad. It had set out from a remote airstrip in western Iraq and was heading for the city’s airport. The pilots, highly trained special forces aircrew, scanned the land below through night-vision goggles, trying hard to keep low while racing over a desert so featureless that those who misjudged their height could easily fly into the ground.
BIAP (Baghdad International Airport) was the objective for one of the US armoured brigades that had sped up from Kuwait. But although the armour had reached it, the place was far from secure. Mortar rounds dropped in as the capital of Iraq tottered between decades of authoritarian rule and its uncertain future. The US 3rd Division’s race to the capital had been part of the overt military campaign. It came up from the south, accompanied by dozens of embedded reporters. The RAF Chinook, on the other hand, was arriving from a different point of the compass and had been part of an effort that was rarely talked about publicly.
A few minutes out from their destination, the passengers in the British helicopter started to glimpse the sprawl below. Tracer fire from heavy machine guns snaked into the sky, fires were visible across the city and the desert too. Disbanded Republican Guards, Fedayeen Ba’athist irregulars, and the criminals let flooding out of the jails were vying for the streets, turning the city into a cauldron of violence.
The Chinook came thumping over the apron, its twin rotors producing a huge cloud of dust as it came close to the ground. Taxiing to a halt, the passengers glimpsed more signs of America’s eviction of Saddam Hussein. A couple of shot-up Iraqi Airways aircraft, one a Boeing 727 with its tail jutting awkwardly into the air could be seen in the darkness. As one of the early British arrivals recalls, ‘The airport was a defensive perimeter under blackout conditions, with people in shellscrapes and Bradleys in defensive positions.’
The Americans were taking Baghdad. It wasn’t a matter of marching straight in but a process of probing attacks. The airport had already served as the launching point for several thunder runs. These were strong armoured reconnaissance missions to test the mettle of those who had vowed to turn the city into a new Stalingrad. Although many Iraqis emerged to take pot shots at the passing tanks, the level of resistance was far less than the Americans, who had planned for 120 days of fighting, had feared. But as the Iraqi capacity for organised violence ebbed away, disorder was breaking out. Well-to-do businessmen were hauled from their cars and dispatched with a shot to the head by those who wanted their wheels. Looters carried off the contents of museums, Ba’ath party offices and even hospitals. The settling of scores was beginning too: between those who had been oppressed and the overlords who had trodden them down without mercy. The Sunni minority, and in particular members of Saddam’s tribe, the Tikritis, braced themselves for payback from the Shia majority and the Kurds too. Too many had been tortured, bombed or killed for the thing to pass without bloodletting.
Out of the British Chinook stepped a group of officers with a handful of civilians and some well-armed SAS troops. One of the civilians on board, a young MI6 officer who had not been to war before, questioned whether the machine-gun fire they had seen had been evidence of celebrations. ‘That’s one celebration you don’t want to be on the end of,’ quipped a special forces veteran.
Among the party was Brigadier Graeme Lamb, Director of Special Forces (DSF). Lean and obsessively fit for a man of forty-nine, Lamb had started his military career in the Queen’s Own Highlanders. The product of a Spartan Scottish boarding school, he had been reared to shun the rat race and crave adrenalin. He had commanded a squadron in the SAS and later, his regiment of Highlanders. Having experienced command at these levels, Lamb’s ambition was almost spent. Friends say he never thought of himself as a general, and had assumed that he would leave the army as a colonel. But Lamb’s superiors had other ideas. They had detected that, with his reputation for toughness, easy way with soldiers and special-forces mystique, he was a man whose services needed to be retained. He was one of the few people in the army with the self-confidence, as well as the respect of the old sweats of the SAS, to carry off the job of Director of Special Forces. The brigadier was given to blasphemous plain speaking, and his dismissal of overcomplicated ideas as ‘bollocks’ made some think of him as anti-intellectual. But as those who knew Lamb would attest, what he always sought was clarity, robustness and the avoidance of bullshit.