Task Force Black (11 page)

His answer lay with the Special Counter Intelligence Directorate, the American joint service organisation that ran humint operations but was considered by some to rank below the CIA, MI6 or the Defense Humint Service in the Baghdad spooks pecking order. But the SCID people were happy to be opportunistic about their cases, and so picked up the caller’s details and got to work.

The Iraqi caller gave information pinpointing the whereabouts of Fadhil Ibrahim al-Mashadani, formerly a senior regional official in the Ba’ath party. He was not one of the top Ba’athists in the deck of cards, but even so there was a $200,000 price on Mashadani’s head because of the role he was believed to play in the resistance. Having ascertained that the information was true, SCID took it to Task Force Black. Surveillance experts from G Squadron, joined by a member of the SCID team using helicopter and other technical surveillance, fixed Mashadani’s location as a farm to the north-east of the capital.

On 11 April 2005 the SAS went in and lifted their man with a set-piece house assault. The raid was conducted without opposition. Mashadani was flown back to the MSS, where British intelligence officers conducted an initial interview prior to him being processed into the American detention system. Despite the manner in which he had been swept from his home in the middle of the night, the atmosphere in the interrogation was relaxed and Mashadani, an educated and once privileged man, chatted freely with his British captors. He couldn’t fathom why the Coalition was still going after people like him. Didn’t they understand that the real threat came from the jihadists who had flooded into Iraq? People at MSS Fernandez had heard similar things from quite a few of those whom they had picked up. But there was something about Mashadani’s simple eloquence that caused his message to ripple outwards from that interview room. His words became a topic of discussion for many of those involved with the intelligence effort in Baghdad. ‘It’s over,’ he reportedly told his questioners. The Ba’ath party had lost power and, Mashadani added, they all knew it had no chance of getting it back. There was something about having your own targets rubbish the importance of the mission that pricked the pride of many in Task Force Black. Their rivalry with Delta Force and knowledge of what was going on up at Balad told them that Britain had relegated itself from the counterterrorist premier league. Little by little, Task Force Black tried to address the situation, for example by trying to thrash out the detention issue at Balad, but in truth matters could not come to a head until someone of sufficient stature in the world of special forces chose to argue the issue out with the DSF and others in the UK.

The origins of the Mashadani operation, using a humint source found through the phone tip line and developed by SCID, showed how a sort of free market in intelligence had evolved amid the organisational rivalry of Iraq’s intelligence agencies. Since the gathering of humint was not being properly centrally directed, nor its product fully shared, those running Task Force Black started going wherever their instincts took them in order to find a starting point for each new operation. Having begun in Iraq with close ties to MI6 and the CIA, they became more professionally promiscuous, searching for the right informers with the SCID, INIS, Defense Humint Service or agent teams run by US ground-holding units. Instead of the neat organi-gram of intelligence process mapped out by the staff officers, the Baghdad scene represented more of a secret information bazaar on the free-wheeling Middle Eastern model. ‘There was a free market in intelligence and therefore you could afford to be entrepreneurial,’ comments one member of Task Force Black. On quiet days the Team Leaders, usually staff sergeants or captains, would saunter around the Green Zone dropping in on the different intelligence gatherers, sharing a brew, seeing whether anyone was developing any promising informers and catching up on insurgency gossip. For the most part this approach worked in teeing up missions such as the Mashadani takedown, but it could go spectacularly wrong.

At around the time Task Force Black lifted Mashadani, its people went out on another late-night arrest operation. This time they were hoping for a bigger, more meaningful result. The planned raid came as a result of a long-running operation to find the kidnappers of a foreigner in Baghdad. Tracking some men who had offered their services as intermediaries, the SAS moved in. They lifted
Abu Jamal
, formerly a senior Ba’athist official, and another man. The soldiers’ disappointment at not finding the hostage in the same house was tempered by the knowledge that these men were definitely connected to the kidnap gang.

When the Humvees roared back into the MSS and the two detainees were taken inside, things started to go wrong.
Abu Jamal
asked if he could use a secure telephone. His request was granted and before long various SUVs arrived bearing US civilians. The American visitors, like intelligence professionals the world over, wanted to reveal as little as possible about their connection to the two forlorn Iraqis sitting in the British interrogation room. But since the SAS were not inclined to release them without a proper explanation, it was eventually wrung out of the night-time visitors.
Abu Jamal
and his friend were CIA assets. The incident raised many disturbing questions: why were people in the kidnap business under CIA pay? If they were agents taking part in the conspiracy at their handlers’ direction, why hadn’t they yet produced a tip-off that would allow the hostage to be freed? And, given that the CIA was party to hostage working groups with MI6 and other agencies, why hadn’t the Americans done something to prevent the SAS carrying out their raid?

This arrest showed how spectacularly dysfunctional intelligence relationships were, even two years after the Americans got to Baghdad. Little wonder that McChrystal wanted to build a separate network under his own tight grasp, fusing intelligence and special operations. The business also underlined that the Ba’athist or nationalist resistance was easier to penetrate than the Islamist network, and that in many cases of kidnapping was operating more like a criminal conspiracy than anything else.

Episodes like Mashadani and
Abu Jamal
’s arrest did however bring to a head the debates about whether British special forces were really after the right people. There had been dozens of similar episodes in which the ‘right’ man had been lifted, but with no noticeable effect on the carnage going on around them. Many US ground-holding unit commanders had through 2004 shared the British view that the main threat to future stability came from a widespread Sunni revolt – an authentic Iraqi phenomenon quite different from the mad nihilism of Zarqawi and his ilk. But the currents of the violence were shifting and, belatedly, changing minds in the Green Zone.

When I asked one senior British figure at what point the UK military had decided that al-Qaeda presented a more significant threat than the FREs he replied, ‘You imply a clarity that did not exist… most of our tools for intelligence analysis were overwhelmed at that time… I don’t think we ever made a clear choice.’ Perhaps, then, it is unwise to use hindsight to talk about tipping points, but it is clear that around the same time that Task Force Black was bringing in Mashadani, events on the ground were causing senior American commanders to rethink.

That same month, April 2005, had started with a complex assault on Abu Ghraib prison involving machine guns, mortars and two car bombs. The Americans reckoned that dozens of insurgents had been involved in a well-coordinated operation, which wounded forty-four of their soldiers as well as twelve prisoners. Eleven days later, insurgents had mounted a sustained attack on a marine base near the Syrian border at al-Husaybah. Up to a hundred men had attacked the marines, launching three vehicle suicide attacks including ones using a fire engine and dump truck rigged with huge amounts of explosive. Calling in air strikes and helicopters to beat off the attack, the Americans had killed around three dozen insurgents. The operation was also attributed to al-Qaeda. On 29 April the movement had staged fourteen car bomb attacks in a single day, most of them in Baghdad. Force Commander General Casey was so disturbed by the capabilities shown in these attacks that he formally upgraded Zarqawi’s organisation to be the Coalition’s principal enemy in Iraq.

At this point, an underlying tension between Casey and McChrystal came to the surface. McChrystal, says one senior Baghdad figure from that time, was ‘resented by the rest of the army because they were gobbling up a very large slice of the available overhead reconnaissance assets’. The JSOC task force, operating from Balad, had successfully cornered a large proportion of the Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance platforms in its hunt for Zarqawi. This meant not only control of Predator UAVs, which every commander wanted desperately, but other technical means such as satellites and aircraft used to intercept and locate mobile telephones. By May 2005 the number of Iraqis using cellular phones had grown to around 1.75 million. Mobiles were becoming a vital intelligence source. Just the details of a call between two numbers could be the start of an operation. What the spooks called nodal analysis could be used to map the relationship between different people and their phones. Once the pattern was better understood, the handset itself could work as a locator beacon. However, JSOC almost monopolised the means of harnessing this information.

The tension between JSOC and the rest of the US military would doubtless have been more easily managed if al-Qaeda had been rolled up with the speed that the Ba’athist deck of cards was lifted. But although there was some progress – for example the arrest in January 2005 of the master bomber believed to be behind the UN and other spectacular vehicle bombings of 2003 – attacks against police stations, recruiting offices or markets just seemed to carry on increasing in number and lethality. One at the end of February, in the largely Shia town of Hilla, south of Baghdad, had claimed 114 lives. To some watchers, the JSOC response of striking, often with bombing, wherever they found a trace of the AQI leadership seemed to smack of desperation. For the American ground-holding commanders – running brigades or battalions in relentlessly violent places like Ramadi or Baquba – the steady toll of young men or women blown apart by the insurgents provoked its own questions about why JSOC, with such a big slice of vital intelligence-gathering assets, was not doing more to help them.

Casey had instituted a morning meeting that united all senior commanders, staff and intelligence people in Iraq via a Video Tele-Conference or VTC. The meeting, the Battlefield Update Assessment, had its own acronym, BUA – or ‘Boo-ah’ in headquarters speak. Once the main news of the day was processed, a smaller, highly classified meeting known as the Huddle took place to discuss sensitive matters. One attendee recalls the atmosphere: ‘The hunt for Zarqawi was paramount. It was mentioned every morning in the BUA and in the Huddle in the mistaken belief that if you got him the insurgency would collapse.’

As pressure increased on JSOC from Casey and others wanting results, McChrystal began to shift the emphasis of his operation in Iraq. Since his target had become that of the entire Coalition force, he needed to do more to take on the local militant networks that were killing and maiming so many US troops. Many hard-pressed commanders had formed the idea that JSOC was there to take down Zarqawi and a handful of his associates – in short, that they were playing a game of high Pentagon politics that consumed huge resources but was failing to deliver. McChrystal responded by exploiting the growing information flow from drones and cell phones to target the entire al-Qaeda network from top to bottom, but with particular focus on those in between. ‘The aim was to go after the middle of their network,’ McChrystal would later reveal, ‘in a regular army, their senior non-commissioned officers. We tried to cause the network to collapse.’ The changes were of vital importance, not just because they would bring about dramatic shifts in the secret war but also because they brought to a head various UK special forces issues. McChrystal’s new approach required the British to rethink why they were mounting covert operations in Iraq, triggering bitter battles between those responsible.

McChrystal sought to mollify Casey that summer with special operations in support of a broad military effort to interdict the Sunni militant rat lines from the western borders of Iraq to Baghdad. The JSOC commander codenamed this effort Operation SNAKE EYES. It involved synchronising raids by Seal Team 6 or Delta Force to those of the ground-holding army and marine units up the Euphrates valley. From May to October regular US ground forces fought a series of at least fourteen major operations, each involving more than a thousand troops, along the course of this key watercourse from places such as al-Qaim, close to the Syrian frontier, down through Haditha and Hit, through Ramadi and Fallujah to Abu Ghraib on the outskirts of Baghdad. The battlefield ranged from remote farms fringed with date palms to the suburbs of major cities. The Americans characterised these places as stopovers on the infiltration route of foreign fighters from the Jordanian or Syrian frontiers to the capital. What the ordinary grunts found in many of these communities were well-organised paramilitary groups armed with everything from small arms to mortars or surface-to-air missiles, who manoeuvred against them.

During one of the early operations, a single platoon of US Marines had suffered 60 per cent casualties in five days. Attacking a house in Ubaydi, a small town in western Anbar Province, two men were killed and five wounded. In the words of an embedded reporter, ‘It took twelve hours and five assaults by the squad – plus grenades, bombing by an F/A-18 attack plane, tank rounds and rockets at twenty yards – to kill the insurgents and permit recovery of the dead Marines’ bodies.’ A couple of days later, survivors of that fight were in their vehicle when it was hit by an IED, killing another four and wounding ten. Their parent battalion suffered forty-eight fatalities and more than 120 wounded during a seven-month tour.