Task Force Black (7 page)
Authors: Mark Urban
Arabists in the British embassy and MI6 station kept up a caustic running commentary as political, security and presentational mistakes multiplied. ‘Have you ever met an Arab who said he wanted democracy?’ a senior MI6 officer asked – rhetorically – at the time. ‘The Americans were in total denial about the state of the insurgency,’ says another British intelligence officer. ‘The arrogance and hubris of some of them were breathtaking.’
The aggregate effect of American folly, detainee abuse, poor intelligence and the cautionary influence of those overseeing operations in the UK was, for many months, to have a deadening impact on special forces activities in Iraq. In the south meanwhile, some flattered themselves that the British operation was a model of how things ought to be done.
Down in Basra, the Shia majority still remained broadly welcoming towards the Coalition that had liberated them from Saddam’s oppression. The area had been tightly gripped by the
mukharabat
, particularly after the Shia rising following the Gulf War in 1991. Thousands had been tortured and murdered and the southern port, once a hub of regional commerce, deliberately starved of investment. The city British troops had entered was friendly. Soft-skin Land Rovers and rented civilian ‘white fleet’ vehicles remained a common sight, and troops tried to patrol built-up areas in soft hats rather than helmets. There was plenty of time for sport and officers at the air station could enjoy a beer or bottle of wine at the end of their day’s work (and indeed continued to do so until late 2005). The MI6 Chief of Station referred to Basra as ‘the sleepy shire by the Shatt al-Arab’.
As time wore on, however, the surge of expectations that greeted the fall of Saddam had gone unmet. There had been some signs of trouble: the killing of the six military police in Majar al-Kabir had been the most shocking, but there had been other incidents too. In the slums on the city’s eastern edge, such as at the bazaar christened the Five Mile Market by the soldiers or the Shia Flats (the huge housing development known to locals as the Hayyaniyah), aggro had already become routine. Stones flew, causing the soldiers to attach wire mesh to their Land Rovers, and bullets sometimes came in too.
The Shia political parties with their own armed militias promised to look after the streets. After the assassination of Ayatollah Hakim by car bomb that August, the British made the fateful decision to allow Shia militias to run their own checkpoints, claiming that they needed to do so to prevent car bomb attacks on their offices in the city. Large numbers of these armed party members, particularly from the late Ayatollah’s party, were also co-opted straight into the police force. The militia had begun to spread their tentacles through the city – with British agreement.
Major-General Graeme Lamb was by October 2003 back in Iraq commanding Multi-National Division South East. When, during a BBC interview that November, I asked him whether his predecessor’s decision to allow the militia to bear arms in the city would buy short-term quiet at the expense of long-term stability, he candidly accepted that only time could answer that question.
SAS and MI6 personnel who visited Basra during those months, and through the following year, talk with despair about the general half-heartedness of the operation, even while Lamb, a man after their own heart, was in charge. One describes a ‘critical mass’ of complacency in an officer corps formed in Northern Ireland and the Balkans. Others highlight the lack of energy with which intelligence gathering or training the Iraqi police was conducted. ‘It was not impressive,’ notes one frequent SAS visitor to Basra during the early months. ‘The Brits were looking over their shoulder and asking “when can we pack up and go home?”’ Another SAS man comments in a similar but more caustic vein, ‘They were just doing what we’d done in Kosovo, which was to fuck about and count the days until they went home.’
Given the generally quiet nature of the British patch in southern Iraq at this early stage, officers at MND South East HQ were not too keen on the special forces stirring things up. In any case, the challenge for the SAS squadron and its growing contingent of ‘enablers’ was how they could make an impact on an increasingly violent situation in the capital. They would struggle throughout 2004 to answer that question. The new British mission and deployment was codenamed Operation CRICHTON, a title that remained in use until 2009 when their stay in Iraq ended. Not long after CRICHTON was agreed in Whitehall, a new codename was agreed for the SF squadron and its supporting team in Baghdad: Task Force Black.
During the early weeks of 2004 a band of construction workers plied their trade across central Iraq. They ran big risks, not least because they were installing generators at each of the sites they completed, and generators were extremely valuable in that power-starved country. The work they were doing involved hundreds of sites in Baghdad and would eventually extend to 1300 across the country. In some places they made use of existing structures – such as masts or tall buildings – in others the bright red and white painted towers that they needed were brought in through Kuwait. The workers in question were putting up a mobile phone network.
Several months after the invasion of Iraq, bids had been invited for those who wanted to install the new communications system. At the time of the invasion, the fixed phone system provided around 800,000 lines to the country’s 26 million people. Naturally the prevalence of telephones was higher among government officials and their cronies, and naturally also the main government phone nodes had been targeted during the invasion. Mobile phone operators therefore saw a huge opportunity – an open market. Three contractors were eventually chosen, operating in the south, centre and north of the country. In the centre, which included Baghdad, the mobile phone company calling itself Iraqna was ready to begin operations in February 2004.
During the early years of the network it would grow nationally at a rate of more than 100,000 new subscribers per month. The birth of mobile telephony might therefore have been seen as one of the rare success stories of the Coalition Provisional Authority phase of government. Inevitably, though, there were some who saw ways in which mobile phones might be deployed to kill people. Their use as triggering devices for roadside bombs or improvised explosive devices (IEDs) soon became a standard tactic. The phenomenal growth of Iraqna would, in time, provide opportunities for the Coalition to turn the tables on the insurgency, but early in 2004 few had the vision to see this.
For one young American, the new mobile network was to exert a lethal attraction. Nick Berg came to Iraq hoping to make big money erecting phone masts. He was a lone figure in the tide of corporate gold-diggers flooding the country in pursuit of fat construction or security contracts. Moving between cheap Iraqi hotels at a time when executives from the big firms were already shielded by convoys of armed security guards, Berg stood out as a naïve, even suicidal, figure. Both American soldiers and ordinary Iraqis warned him of the dangers. Having left the country in February, he returned in March and was arrested in Mosul by the Iraqi police. He was sprung by American officials in April and told to leave. But Berg did not get out, returning instead to a Baghdad hotel, and soon became the victim of one of the kidnap gangs that flourished in the growing mayhem.
During his captivity predictable charges of spying were levelled against Berg. Anguished pleas from his father, an anti-Bush, anti-war activist, were ignored. His captors probably hardly believed the espionage allegations themselves, instead employing the young American as a prop in their jihadist communications strategy. By May, having outlived his usefulness, Berg was beheaded by black-clad masked figures while a video camera recorded the spectacle. The resulting film, complete with screams as a man with a long knife saws away at the tendon and bone of the hostage’s neck, appeared on the internet.
The video started with a caption, ‘Abu Musab al-Zarqawi slaughters an American’. A few days later US experts studying the masked figure who wielded the knife confirmed that they thought it was indeed the Jordanian jihadist known by that name. Having reached the age of 37 at this time, Zarqawi had already notched up a formidable pedigree in the Islamist underground. The name itself, literally ‘father of Musab the one from Zarqa’, was typical of those who preferred to hide their identity – in his case the real name was Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayilah. The product of a tough neighbourhood in the Jordanian town of Zarqa, rumours abounded that he had a reputation as a street criminal, indulging in a life of vice until he found religion. Zarqawi had gone to Afghanistan in 1989 and like many on the ‘jihad trail’ arrived too late to fight the Soviet Army, struggling instead against the Afghan regime it left behind. Returning to Jordan, Zarqawi spent the nineties in and out of jail on a succession of charges that ranged from possessing weapons to plotting terrorist attacks on tourist attractions.
In 1999 the newly crowned King Abdullah freed terrorist detainees, and having served less than one year of his sentence, Zarqawi soon found his way back to Afghanistan where he trained with al-Qaeda but maintained a semi-detached relationship with it, not formally joining. When the Americans toppled the Taleban, Zarqawi made his way via Iran back to northern Iraq, where he fell in with Ansar al-Islam.
By the time Berg was kidnapped, Zarqawi was already well known to the CIA, MI6 and military intelligence, but nobody quite understood where he belonged in the scheme of things. Westerners referred to the ‘Zarqawi group’ or ‘Zarqawi network’. Arabs who watched the jihadist underground knew that Zarqawi’s people often referred to themselves as Al Tawhid Wa Al Jihad – ‘Monotheism and Holy War’ – but the group’s relationship with other militant organisations was unclear. Did Zarqawi run Ansar al-Islam or was his group a subordinate part of it? Nobody was sure. Even among the jihadists, lines delineating these groups defeated almost everyone. Some put the differences down to different theological affiliations, others to disputes about the tactics to be employed in the holy war against the West.
What Zarqawi understood well was that reputation and sensation counted for a great deal on the Arab street. Those wishing to give money to the jihad against Bush were more likely to send it to a militant commander with some public profile. Similarly, the young volunteers arriving from Saudi or Syria would gravitate towards somebody they had heard of. The release of the Berg video and other chilling communiqués at this time were therefore an important part of Zarqawi’s strategy of establishing himself and his network. By the strangest of coincidences Berg’s short and terrible stay in Iraq was a consequence of one emerging network – a mobile phone one – and he became the victim of another, Zarqawi’s. There ought to have been a third network in this picture, that of the Coalition forces and their Iraqi allies, but at this time such an organisation, implying a synergy between different elements able to support each other, was hardly working at all.
*
The early months of 2004 were a busy time for those trying to build intelligence empires in Iraq. Good intelligence was critical to everything that the Coalition was trying to do, but without it special operations forces in particular were impotent. McChrystal’s people in JSOC had exploited the best information available to them to round up fugitive Ba’athists, including in mid-December Saddam Hussein himself. While Britain’s Task Force Black took part in some of these operations, national pride determined that some targets, like Saddam, were reserved for the Americans, and by early 2004 many of the leading ‘deck of cards’ figures had been accounted for. The violence was worsening by the week, but hard information on the insurgent networks was still lacking.
With such thin pickings, one SAS officer notes, ‘You could wait for ever for the ideal intelligence to come along, but what were you going to do in the meantime? We had to sort of make missions up.’ Increasingly, this involved using the regiment’s capabilities for surveillance reconnaissance to watch suspects, developing the intelligence picture. This could be done with ‘eyes on’ – observing from vehicles or buildings – but this was dangerous, as one SAS operator noted: ‘In Iraq you’re compromised the moment you go on the ground. People had to get their minds away from Ireland.’ One solution was to use special cameras and other technology developed by the regiment’s Research and Development wing and fielded by its specialist Surveillance Reconnaissance Cell. As techniques developed in Baghdad, the SAS learnt to keep time on the ground to the minimum and to let technology do the rest. An American intelligence officer who watched Task Force Black at work explains:
It was pretty apparent that the lessons they’d learnt in Northern Ireland were being put to good use. They were particularly good at using surveillance cameras. They’d find a place to put them – say on a roof overlooking the target’s house – that was imaginative and productive. Our technical guys had a look over some of their gear and were pretty impressed.
The SAS summarised their operational process during the early days in Baghdad as find-fix-finish. Working backwards, the ‘finish’ part of the equation was the actual raid to take down suspects. The ‘fix’ involved pinpointing a time and place at which the target could be taken. It was in fixing people that the regiment’s surveillance skills proved particularly useful. But the problem for them was that in order to target the right individuals – the ‘find’ part of the process – its starting point had, in fact, to be spot on. The key to this was obtaining intelligence from spies within insurgent groups, but in Iraq at that time this type of information proved surprisingly hard to gather, let alone share.
Early in 2004 the Coalition helped put the new Iraqi National Intelligence Service on a formal footing. The development of the INIS had been a CIA project and by this time it had a couple of hundred members. Although the anti-Saddam exiled parties were invited to send people to the INIS, it was meant to be a non-political security service. One senior US intelligence officer explains that it was ‘intended to be an agency that wasn’t motivated by sectarian concerns… the INIS didn’t depend on the Shiite-led government of Iraq to fund it because the CIA completely funded its operations’.