Dirty Wars (23 page)

That month, McChrystal became JSOC commander, tasked with crushing the insurgency that had been sparked by his bosses' own policies, about which he had harbored doubts. Next to Saddam and his henchmen, the Jordanian terrorist Zarqawi, who had come to Iraq to fight against the US occupation, would become target number one of McChrystal's task force.

Zarqawi had
traveled to Afghanistan
to fight with the US-backed mujahedeen against the Soviet occupation. In early 2000, he had been
indicted in absentia
in a Jordanian court for plotting to attack American and Israeli tourists. The Bush administration had tried to use Zarqawi to prove an al Qaeda tie to Iraq, after Zarqawi allegedly received
medical treatment
in Baghdad in 2002. When Bush made his case in a nationally televised address on October 7, 2002, that Saddam's regime posed a “grave threat,” he cited “high-level contacts” between Saddam's government and al Qaeda, charging that “
some al-Qaeda leaders
who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al-Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks.” In his UN speech, Colin Powell called Zarqawi the leader of a “
deadly terrorist network
” that had been given safe haven by Saddam's government. But the charge that Zarqawi was in Baghdad with the consent of the Iraqi government
was a dubious one
. Saddam's regime and al Qaeda were rivals. Nonetheless, after the invasion, Zarqawi would eventually have a
$25 million bounty
on his head and JSOC hunting him in Iraq.

There is no doubt that Zarqawi was a savage character, but he was also a convenient villain for the United States. Washington was facing a mounting resistance in Iraq, and by inflating Zarqawi's importance, it could place the fight in Iraq within the context of the broader war on terror. Zarqawi played his role perfectly. A year after the UN bombing, Zarqawi and his group would
pledge allegiance
to Osama bin Laden and form al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, also known as al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Despite his declaration of loyalty, Zarqawi would ultimately prove problematic for al Qaeda. His ruthless attacks on Muslims—in both Iraq and Jordan—would eventually play into the hands of the US occupation and Washington's propaganda campaign against the Iraqi resistance.

IRAQ WOULD SERVE AS A
laboratory for creating a new kill/capture machine, centered on JSOC, run by McChrystal and accountable to no one but a small group of White House and Pentagon insiders. Within months, the targeted kill/capture program would begin to resemble the CIA's Phoenix Program from the Vietnam War, in which the Agency, supported by US Special Operations Forces and indigenous militias, carried out a vicious campaign to “neutralize” the Vietcong and its support networks. In plain terms, the Phoenix Program was effectively a well-organized death squad. “
They killed huge numbers
, thousands and thousands, of suspected Vietcong operatives,” said Gareth Porter, an independent historian who has written extensively about the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, as well as the history of JSOC. “Phoenix was in fact the grandfather of [the JSOC] approach to a war.”

Dealing with the Iraq insurgency would become an almost totally consuming task for the bulk of America's most elite forces, though Rumsfeld and Cheney had global aspirations for JSOC's expanded use. Rumsfeld signed an executive order on
September 16, 2003
—the same month that Holland retired as SOCOM commander, and General Bryan “Doug” Brown took over—establishing JSOC as the principal counterterrorism (CT) force of the United States. It contained preauthorized lists of fifteen countries where CT action might be taken and specified which actions could be carried out. Brown, a SOF vet and founding member of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, told the Senate that “
the nexus
of the Department of Defense's global war on terrorism is at USSOCOM.” SOCOM, a newly established, free-standing command, would be “the lead combatant commander for planning, synchronizing, and as directed, executing global operations against terrorist networks in coordination with other combatant commanders.” A month later, Rumsfeld was demanding answers from his senior advisers. “Are we
capturing, killing, or deterring
and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against them?” Rumsfeld wrote in a memo to Wolfowitz, Feith and Myers.

It was an interesting question and one many were debating in the counterterrorism community. But, as al Qaeda's leadership fled to countries throughout the Horn of Africa and Arabian Peninsula and into Pakistan, the premier US counterterrorism force would be given orders to focus entirely on a nation that had no al Qaeda presence before the US tanks rolled in a year earlier. The Pentagon had distributed decks of playing cards to troops in Iraq, assessing a value to various leaders of the former Baath regime. Saddam was the ace of spades. The tradition dated back to the US Civil War. But this time around, the cards were produced not just for the
military but as a
consumer product
sold to the public. The Bush administration seemed to believe its own propaganda about how easy victory would be in Iraq, reasoning that by destroying the Baath Party and killing or capturing its leaders, the war could be won swiftly.

When McChrystal hit the ground in Iraq in October 2003, his Task Force 20, renamed Task Force 121, would lead the hunt. Its members included JSOC forces, British SAS commandos and some local Iraqi teams. Their job was to plow through the deck of cards. “The mission of the direct action, special operations task force was really to focus on the old regime leadership,” recalled Andrew Exum, who led a platoon of Rangers in Iraq as part of McChrystal's task force. “The deck of cards—you know, the most wanted folks. I think that was based largely on the idea that the insurgency in Iraq, the fighting, kind of goes away if a lot of these guys go away.” That theory would prove to be fatally flawed.

Whatever the strategic value of the effort, however, it had some success in its immediate goals—taking out selected individual targets. At McChrystal's right hand as the
forward commander
of JSOC's High Value Targeting task force was William McRaven, a Navy SEAL renowned for his scholarly ambition. Although McChrystal would receive much of the credit for building up JSOC's capabilities and overseeing its greatest hits, people in the Special Ops community knew that many of the key achievements of the HVT Task Force were largely McRaven's doing.

Raised in San Antonio, Texas, McRaven grew up with an appreciation for the military—his father flew Spitfire fighter planes in World War II. The young Bill McRaven was a big fan of James Bond films—he was particularly enthralled by Sean Connery's underwater exploits in
Thunderball,
according to his sister. “That was his favorite!” Nan McRaven told
Time
magazine. “I said to him, ‘You can
grow up to be 007
.' I guess he did.”

McRaven graduated from the University of Texas in 1977 with a degree in journalism. He enrolled in Navy ROTC on campus, and right after graduating with an ensign's commission, he entered SEAL training. After finishing his training he was deployed to the Philippines. When Richard Marcinko created the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, SEAL Team 6, in 1982, he asked McRaven to lead one of the
constituent SEAL teams
. Marcinko's freewheeling leadership soon put him at loggerheads with his young lieutenant. Marcinko bought his SEALS expensive cars and financed
debauched parties
on navy property that included prostitutes. “
The SEALS were happy
, I was happy, and nobody was getting in trouble except Bill McRaven,” Marcinko told
Time
magazine, remembering McRaven as a killjoy. “He was a bright guy, but he didn't like my rude and crude way. If I was a loose cannon, he was too rigid. He took the special
out of special warfare.” McRaven saw it differently. “I was not some white knight on a horse going with my lance against the windmill,” McRaven countered. Marcinko “was the boss, I was a very young lieutenant. There were some things I didn't think were exactly right...and he relieved me” of duty. According to a former Special Forces commander, Marcinko asked McRaven to carry out “
some questionable activities
,” adding that McRaven refused and “would not back down.” Other officers in SEAL Team 6 reportedly found McRaven's integrity heroic, but after his run-in with Marcinko, “thought it was the
end of his career
.”

Actually, it was Marcinko whose career in black ops was coming to an abrupt end—while McRaven's was just getting started. In March 1990, Marcinko was sentenced to
twenty-one months
in prison on charges he defrauded the US government in a weapons sale. McRaven was soon given command of a platoon in SEAL Team 4, focusing on South and Central America. Very few details are publicly available about McRaven's combat history, though he was a “
task unit
” leader in the Persian Gulf War, according to his official biography. In 1991, he headed to the Naval Postgraduate School, and graduated in 1993. He helped to establish the Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict program and was its
first graduate
. He received a dual degree, in SO/LIC and national security affairs. His graduate thesis, “The Theory of Special Operations,” was published in book form and would become widely read and taught. The book analyzed several key Special Ops battles from World War II to Vietnam, presenting lessons that could be learned for future conflicts and wars. It is considered a seminal text in the study of Special Operations warfare. “Bill is reputed to be
the smartest SEAL that ever lived
,” a former commander said in 2004. McRaven went on to serve as a “task group commander” in the Middle East, and he also commanded SEAL Team 3, which operates in Southwest Asia. By 2001, he was a naval captain, commodore of the SEALS Special Naval Warfare Group 1.

Shortly after 9/11, McRaven's SEAL team deployed to Afghanistan, but its commander could not join them. Two months before 9/11, McRaven had
fractured his pelvis
and part of his back during a parachute jump near his base in Coronado, California. Some predicted he might never fight again, let alone walk normally. McRaven resigned his command, but his career was not over. If anything, the parachute accident was fortuitous. Although McRaven was not on the battlefield initially, he would become a major player in the strategy that was to shape US counterterrorism operations for many years to come. Wayne Downing, newly appointed the deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism, asked McRaven to join his staff at the White House. McRaven ended up working for Downing
for two years while he recovered from his injuries and is credited with having been the
principal author
of Bush's “National Strategy for Combating Terrorism.” It was not a cushy job for a sidelined warrior. Captain McRaven would become the primary JSOC figure inside the National Security Council and coordinated the Office of Combating Terrorism. Among his jobs would be
vetting and assembling
lists of High Value Targets for JSOC to hunt down. He was one of the key players in militarizing US counterterror policy and building up the infrastructure for the creation of kill lists. McRaven's time at the NSC would put him on a path to becoming one of the most powerful figures in US military history and a transformative figure in the institutionalization of assassination as a central component of US national security policy.

After 9/11, no more than two dozen men were on the US kill list. Once McRaven got to work, the list grew every year. After helping build the structure for JSOC to engage in a global manhunt, McRaven would finally forward deploy to implement it. There are “three people who really improved Special Operations Forces and who can claim a great amount of credit for the way they have developed since 2001,” Exum told me. “You can look at Bill McRaven, you look at Stan McChrystal and you look at Mike Flynn.”

SOMALIA,
1993-2004—In early January 2003, Mohamed Afrah Qanyare stood on the tarmac of the
secluded airstrip
he controlled just a few clicks north of Mogadishu. The tiny airport was a small fortress in a dangerous, lawless nation. Qanyare's private security force guarded its perimeter and land mines were strategically scattered “in the bush,” making a sneak attack—or, for that matter, a casual visit—very risky. In the years following the fall of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre—who headed Somalia's last stable government—Qanyare had emerged as one of the most
powerful warlords
who ravaged Mogadishu and laid claim to their own plots of territory. The Daynile airstrip was Qayare's fiefdom. And it brought in money. A lot of money. For a decade, the airport's profits overwhelmingly came from
smuggling
mira
, or khat, the addictive, narcotic-like leaf that is chewed by millions throughout the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. It was the drug of choice among the thousands of militiamen who fought for Qanyare and his fellow warlords and a major factor in the insanity that had long gripped Somalia. But on this particular day—January 5, 2003—the aircraft that Qanyare awaited on the tarmac was not a
Bluebird Aviation
flight bringing in the foliage of chaos, but rather a small Gulfstream that carried a different kind of volatile cargo.

Qanyare said he couldn't recall which government agency the white men who stepped off the plane that day worked for, but they were definitely Americans. “I believe they were special military intelligence and CIA,” Qanyare remembered. “But I really don't know. That's internal business for them. They were intelligence,
American intelligence
.”