Task Force Black (6 page)
Authors: Mark Urban
The SAS’s attempt to raise its game was, as the year closed, just a small part of what was going on in Iraq special ops. Britain’s presence was dwarfed by the American laydown. The players in that world of classified units, barely acknowledged by the Pentagon, were trying to get a slice of the action in Iraq. There was a marked lack of coherence or purpose in their early operations. However, an officer had been sent to take charge and he would soon make his presence felt at every level of the secret war.
‘The first thing that struck me about him was how absurdly young he looked for a general.’ Honed by his early morning eight-mile run and a single proper meal each day, Major-General Stanley McChrystal was physically greyhound-like, and his manner projected intellectual intensity. He had been appointed in September to take over the Tier 1 classified force – Joint Special Operations Command. One of McChrystal’s JSOC colleagues describes him as ‘Jesuit-like, ruthless, brilliant’. Often referred to by his SAS colleagues as ‘a soldier-monk’, he would prove the single most important figure in the cast of characters who defined the secret war in Iraq.
McChrystal’s upbringing was typical of the army brat who follows his father around the world, from one military post to another. That officer fought in Korea and Vietnam. Young Stanley graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point in 1976, a member of a class full of later generals. Those who know him say McChrystal disliked intensely the bullshit and limited intellectual horizons of that institution. His ability to think outside the box was evident as he climbed the promotion ladder. ‘I first worked for him in the Gulf War,’ Graeme Lamb recalled, ‘and General McChrystal was the fastest, sharpest staff officer I had ever come across.’
After that first Iraq war, McChrystal returned from the staff to a prestige field role commanding a paratroop battalion in the 82nd Airborne Division in the early nineties. He tried to find the right outlet for his fierce intellect while dealing day to day with those who could not match it. ‘He doesn’t suffer fools gladly,’ says a fellow officer from his battalion, adding – apparently without irony – ‘which must have made it really hard for him to stay in the army.’
McChrystal’s turning point came in the mid-nineties, first as a battalion commander and later as overall head of the 75th Ranger Regiment. On the spectrum of military otherness, the Rangers stand about halfway between the paratrooper battalion he had left and the covert non-conformists of Delta Force. Rangers are used for assault missions, often backing up the Tier 1 special operators. McChrystal thrived in the Rangers, and this produced the glowing reports and testimonials required to take him to higher command.
As a one-star or brigadier-general, the rising talent was given another staff job where he encountered more British officers. One, who worked for McChrystal in Afghanistan in 2002, described with wonder the change wrought in corps headquarters by the soldier-monk. McChrystal did not like the hierarchy of information going up the chain of command from battalion to brigade to division and so on. He preferred ‘agile groupings’ of people to share it, a McKinsey management science approach of de-layered authority over data. His two hundred staff in Afghanistan used an intranet that permitted all, regardless of rank, to have access to the same information. They worked from a common homepage on their screens and communicated via headsets. It was not a free-for-all, since McChrystal still expected to be in charge, but he wanted to bypass the structures, hierarchies and procedures that he felt stopped the efficient flow of information as well as his people giving their best. The mantra heard repeatedly by a British officer from his American brigadier in Afghanistan would prove central to everything McChrystal did in Iraq: ‘you’ve got to build a network to defeat a network’.
Before arriving in Iraq, the up-and-coming general served briefly at the Pentagon. The byzantine office politics and turf wars there appalled him, and his role in briefing the press on the progress of the Iraq campaign could hardly have sat easily with someone more used to the shadows. People who know McChrystal suggest he disliked the Pentagon almost as much as West Point, but in September 2003 he was able to leave. He returned to the fight leading one of the most prestigious but secret commands open to him.
Heading up Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), he would face an unenviable challenge. Given the difficulties of operating in places like Ramadi or Baghdad, the task of gathering intelligence about who exactly was behind the rising tide of violence and quelling it in a targeted way – by mounting precision special forces raids – was going to be extremely difficult. For troops such as the SAS or US Tier 1 special ops, results required timely and accurate intelligence, but the methods for gathering secret information were rudimentary to say the least. This shortcoming was to prove critical in the matter of how the elite forces might pick out the foreign fighters swimming in the sea of popular Sunni resentment of the invasion.
McChrystal knew only too well that the campaign against the insurgency had so far produced precious few moments when the intelligence picture was of a really high quality. When the Americans had hit the Ansar al-Islam jihadists in the spring of 2003 they had been directed to their target by allied Kurdish groups, who provided information through their longstanding CIA liaison. This had given the Americans the confidence to know that they were striking a major concentration of foreign fighters. Travelling in the north of Iraq shortly after these events, Arab journalist Zaki Chehab found plenty of evidence of the international militant brotherhood. Sheikh Ali, the leader of a Kurdish Islamist party opposed to the jihadists, told Chehab, ‘We know for a fact that they have Arab foreigners with them from Jordan, Palestine and al-Ahwaz [the Arab majority area of Iran].’ Finding a jail run by one of the Kurdish
peshmerga
, or militia groups, Chehab, himself a Palestinian, met Mohammed, a countryman from Gaza who had been captured after the US onslaught against Ansar al-Islam in April. Chehab asked the prisoner why he had travelled to Iraq when there were plenty of opportunities for jihad back home. The Palestinian fighter replied, ‘They are one and the same enemy, and if we succeed in defeating the US here, it will be the end of the Jewish state.’
What could be found in the Kurdish north, which for years had been outside the control of Saddam’s
mukhabarat
(secret police), was to prove elusive elsewhere. Even late in 2003, when Operation ABALONE turned up evidence of foreign fighters, finding actual proof of an internationalist jihadist movement channelling people into Iraq was proving elusive. The CIA and military intelligence had no mature networks of agents outside the Kurdish north. There was no mobile phone network to speak of either. This left the questioning of prisoners as one of the only viable means of intelligence-gathering.
When it came to interrogation, however, basic language barriers and the absence of any proper system for collating the information hamstrung operations. Just entering information from Iraqis, translated into English, onto computers caused difficulties. ‘Transliteration was a huge problem,’ explains one MI6 veteran of those early days. ‘We didn’t even have a common way of writing “Mohammed”. We literally had no idea who we had in prison.’ During those first months, interrogation had provided plenty of leads in chasing down the old Ba’athists, but the jihadists were to prove a far tougher target. Being bundled into prison was a novel and highly unpleasant experience for many of the displaced Iraqi elite who had enjoyed a comfortable life prior to the invasion. Many of the religious militants, on the other hand, had already had experience of detention and torture at the hands of secret police across the Arab world, so they were hardly intimidated by the Americans.
Given the paucity of solid information about who was orchestrating the violence – particularly the car bombings – there were heated debates among the intelligence people. Under the American special operations hierarchy, the best targets were to be prosecuted by units variously referred to as ‘Tier 1’, ‘classified’, ‘special mission’ or ‘black’ SOF (special operations forces). This differentiated them from the so-called ‘white SOF’, publicly acknowledged Tier 2 units, such as the US Army special forces groups – or Green Berets – which also operated in the region. The SAS were the British equivalent to the American Tier 1 units. The Pentagon’s elite within an elite were grouped together as the Joint Special Operations Command or JSOC. Being at the top of the secret pyramid, JSOC was most interested in the links between foreign fighters in Iraq and the al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan. Their command, codenamed at that time Task Force 121, was set up in such a way that Delta and other elements of JSOC could be switched between Afghanistan and Iraq as required. They saw it as a joined-up struggle, part of the Bush Administration’s War on Terror. British experts – from both MI6 and military intelligence – preferred to stress the home-grown nature of most of the Iraqi resistance. In this barely coded way, those who had been convinced by the White House’s justifications for invading Iraq, and those who had not, continued to argue it out.
While McChrystal tried to understand his enemy in order to perfect the means to be used against it, the attempts by Britain’s special ops community to get the rising tide of violence in Iraq taken seriously in Whitehall had at last begun to bear fruit. Not long after the Halloween fight in Ramadi, a small detachment of RAF Chinook helicopters arrived at Baghdad International, earmarked to support A Squadron’s operations. This was a tangible sign of change in the British setup. Late that November, A Squadron used the choppers in an assault on a remote farm in al-Anbar Province. After A Squadron’s men came under fire from insurgents inside, air support was called in to hit the compound. When it was finally cleared, seven dead men, whom the Americans believed to be foreign fighters, were found inside.
In the Green Zone, meanwhile, an operation able to gather and fuse intelligence of different kinds was coming together, often under the aegis of SIS. ‘We got serious UK buy-in,’ notes one SAS officer. ‘The Americans were going to support us but they didn’t want us to become a draw on resources.’
During the dying days of A Squadron’s four-month deployment, the character of the SAS operation in Iraq was changing once again. It had gone from the invasion and Operation ROW, through the G Squadron tour when it was expected to pursue the bewildering range of missions of Operation PARADOXICAL, to finding a new focus as a counterterrorist force operating from the country’s capital. Its masters in the UK,
Charles Beaufort
and the Director of Special Forces had, as part of the price of convincing other Whitehall players who did not believe in their mission, been forced to place the operation under the control of the Chief of Joint Operations in Northwood – the command centre that runs Britain’s worldwide operations – instead of running it on their own.
Some argue that this new arrangement would not have happened had Graeme Lamb still been DSF. In July 2003 he had been promoted to major-general and given command of an armoured division. In his place came Brigadier
Peter Rogers
– who, perhaps, was not inclined to take on the fight so early in his tenure. The change might seem like a dry, bureaucratic distinction, but it was important in defining what happened subsequently. It meant abandoning an element of the independence the SAS enjoyed during the invasion and Operation PARADOXICAL. The free-wheeling days of that summer and autumn, in which G and A squadrons had been joined at the hip to Delta and JSOC, were over. And, as the soldier-monk refined his ideas, it would become more difficult for the SAS to cooperate fruitfully with McChrystal. UK special forces lost their distinct chain of command in accepting the ‘interference’ of officers in Northwood, some of whom were deeply sceptical about the Iraq mission. A few of these figures, even if they understood why the main deployment of British forces in southern Iraq was politically necessary, couldn’t see why the SAS had to be in Baghdad at all. One officer who fought this battle of office politics back home recalls that some were asking, ‘Is this the SF out on the flank doing their own fucking thing again?’ The new DSF,
Peter Rogers
, ‘wanted to tread more lightly in Whitehall than Graeme Lamb had. [He] had to put the whole thing on a more sustainable footing, and a joint operation was a sort of loss leader.’
So the SAS got its helicopters and expanded military intelligence capability. In return, it gave up some operational independence to the Chief of Joint Operations (CJO) at Northwood and planted the seeds for possible conflict with the classified American operation of JSOC. There were various things that the SAS had not or could not be given as A Squadron was replaced late in 2003. Britain did not at that time have its own Predator drones for live video coverage of targets. It had to rely on limited coverage from Nimrod manned surveillance aircraft, but even that was often unavailable. It did not have its own detainee facilities in Baghdad either. And it was in this area that trouble was brewing for both the British and the new JSOC commander.
This establishment of a ‘semi-detached British operation’ in Baghdad, under closer supervision from UK-based officers, ran counter to the network that McChrystal wanted to develop. But at that moment the finer points of command structures or UK–US cooperation were hardly at the forefront of most people’s minds. For at the time the new JSOC commander arrived and A Squadron mounted its Ramadi operation almost every aspect of the US project in Iraq was going wrong. Lives, and American prestige, were haemorrhaging away.
The Coalition Provisional Authority, set up to run the country until an Iraqi government could be established, had proven inefficient, misplacing billions of dollars while living conditions for ordinary Iraqis collapsed. By late 2003 grandiose plans to fashion a model Middle Eastern democracy were already giving way to an accelerated effort to turn over power to local leaders.