Task Force Black (14 page)

An Iraqi police lieutenant… confirmed to me the widespread rumors that a few police officers are perpetrating many of the hundreds of assassinations… that take place in Basra each month… meanwhile, the British stand above the growing turmoil, refusing to challenge the Islamists’ claim on the hearts and minds of police officers. This detachment angers many Basrans. ‘The British know what’s happening but they are asleep, pretending they can simply establish security and leave behind democracy,’ said the police lieutenant who had told me of the assassinations.

Vincent was particularly angered by the fact that, in training and arming the police while doing little to challenge the growth of militia power within its ranks, ‘the British are in effect strengthening the hand of Shiite organisations’.

The power of these truths was such that somebody decided to act. A couple of days after the
New York Times
piece appeared, Vincent and his female interpreter Nouriya Itais were stopped on one of the city’s main streets in full view of the early evening crowd. The armed men who took them were dressed as policemen, and bundled the pair into a police car. After cruising around, beating them and calling Itais ‘a whore and a pig’ for being with an American, their hands were tied. They were then thrown out onto the street and shot. Itais survived, but Steve Vincent became the first American journalist to be killed covering the insurgency in Iraq. For the
New York Times
, it was naturally a big story. The paper’s stringer in Basra, a 38-year-old father of three named Fakher Haider, filed several reports on what had happened, capturing local feeling that Vincent had been murdered because he had exposed the ugly nexus of Shia extremism, criminality and infiltration of the police. On the day that the HATHOR detachment began its ill-fated mission against Captain Jafar, Fakher Haider was murdered.

It had taken Staff Sergeant
Campbell
and his team just a few hours to complete their task. One colleague comments that ‘the incident happened when the serial was finished and the guys felt they couldn’t get any more of value’. But as they drove towards one of the main thoroughfares to the east of Basra, everything unravelled.

Iraqi police had spotted the surveillance. Tension was running high because a few days earlier a leading member of Jaish al-Mehdi had been arrested during a large British army strike operation. Whether or not the militia’s supporters in police uniform realised there was a connection between the surveillance cars out that morning and the earlier arrest, HATHOR had in fact helped prepare it. A Squadron had only returned to Baghdad a couple of days earlier, following that raid. But on the morning of 19 September, the special forces soldiers on the ground were bereft of their SAS colleagues’ support.

The IPS set up a checkpoint and stopped the car containing
Campbell
and Lance Corporal
Griffiths
. Moving in to pull them out, there was a brief firefight. The SAS shot at least one policeman and drove off. With Iraqi police vehicles in pursuit, they radioed Basra Palace, informing the signaller that there had been a contact. But their car was no souped-up wolf in sheep’s clothing – it was a cheaply bought Iraqi banger. ‘There was a point where they felt they couldn’t outpace the pursuers,’ notes one SAS soldier. ‘They wanted to try and talk their way out of it.’ They laid down their weapons and got out of the car and the Iraqi police bundled the British soldiers into their own vehicles. Two SAS men were in the bag.

At the Joint Operations Centre in Balad, it was breakfast time. Key people worked nights, when the raids went in. During the early part of daytime those players were usually asleep and lesser mortals manned the shop floor in the quieter hours. Then the call from Basra came. Someone was sent to wake Colonel
James Grist
who, as CO of Delta Force, ran the JSOC operation in Iraq. People began to filter in and the place began to crackle with the tension of an unexpected operational situation. The British liaison team, intelligence people, psychological operations (psyops) staff, all began to move about the JOC with focus and purpose.

Grist
was soon on the scene and briefed by the specialists represented in the JOC. Decisions were taken swiftly. A Predator was scrambled from its base at Baghdad, but the propeller-driven drone was built for endurance not speed: it would take two and a half hours to reach Basra. It was clear that
Campbell
and
Griffiths
might have to be rescued. Colonel
Grist
offered British commanders the services of a squadron of Delta. This was a gesture of American solidarity that would be remembered within the SAS long afterwards, but Task Force Black wanted to get its own people on site as soon as it could.

At the MSS in Baghdad, there was a buzz of activity. Some twenty members of A Squadron, a platoon of British paratroopers from the recently deployed Special Forces Support Group, four signallers and a medic – more than fifty men in all – packed their kit, readied their weapons and headed out to the airport. There, an RAF Hercules was prepared for action. Within a few hours of the incident in Basra both the Hercules and the Predator were in the air and heading south.

At the headquarters of Multi-National Division South East at Basra airport, the scene was quite different. There, officious notices were stuck to the coffee tables telling soldiers to clear up their mess, and in the airy hallway forces public relations posters proclaimed Anglo-Iraqi friendship. These realities, of a mission bound by rules and politics, were to define the staff ’s response to the apprehension of the two British soldiers.

Off the hallway, behind doors with combination locks, were the offices of both the divisional and the brigade commanders. The more senior of the two officers, a major-general, was meant to handle the big picture, liaising with the Iraqis or Americans as well as up the national chain of command to Permanent Joint Headquarters back at Northwood. On this day, though, the general was out of the country. The commander of 12 Brigade, Brigadier John Lorimer, an able officer formerly of the Parachute Regiment, was there and in charge of formulating a response.

After
Campbell
and
Griffiths
had been taken away by the Iraqi police, their movements had been followed. The car carrying the other members of HATHOR detachment had remained briefly on the scene without being spotted by the Iraqis. They tracked their colleagues to the Jamiat, then raced off to get more soldiers from a Quick Reaction Force at Basra Palace.

As this information was fed back, two communications systems were in operation. The HATHOR detachment signaller was constantly in touch with Balad, and was also relaying situation reports to the green army. This single soldier stood at the centre of the information as the first phase of the crisis developed. And while troops and MI6 people at the Palace all began making preparations, they needed definite guidance about what to do.

It was not long before the Predator tasked by the JOC appeared over Basra, relaying live pictures back to Balad. The British division did not at that time have the necessary equipment to downlink these pictures. They relied instead on a Sea King helicopter equipped with a television surveillance system known as Broadsword. Since the pictures from Broadsword could not be watched in Balad or most British locations in Basra city, the system’s operator on board the Sea King, a member of the army’s Brigade Reconnaissance Force, became, like the special forces signaller at the Palace, another key figure, a thread by which the two captured men’s lives dangled. For if the SAS prisoners’ whereabouts was lost, their lives might soon be forfeited too.

Inside the Jamiat, things were going badly for
Campbell
and
Griffiths
. They had been beaten up during capture and stripped of their equipment. The men were filmed and the pictures released to the world media. They were described as spies apprehended on their way to carrying out a terrorist attack. Across the Hayyaniyah and the other baking bastions of the Shia militias, word spread of the sensational capture.

Not long after the Predator had arrived on station, different images grabbed the attention of everyone watching. The bloodied captives in the Jamiat were shown, as were the weapons, radio and other equipment taken from their car. The political sensitivity of the incident had just increased exponentially.

At the airport, Major
Chappell
, the OC of A Squadron, arrived in Lorimer’s office. He had not returned to Baghdad with the rest of his squadron following the arrest operation a few days before and, hearing of the Jamiat crisis, he had gone to urge swiftness upon the brigade commander. The SAS wanted its men out as quickly as possible, but they were also worried that the TV images and charges of spying or terrorism levelled against them meant a show trial or some even more summary form of Iraqi justice was on the cards.

Lorimer’s hands had been tied by PJHQ, which advised him not to take any step that might inflame the situation. He did, however, send a negotiating team to the Jamiat and put a cordon of British infantry around it, aiming to block the main routes to and from the compound.

On that same September day, dozens of SAS soldiers, their families and friends had gathered near the regiment’s base at Hereford for the consecration of a new special forces graveyard. The regiment had long buried its fallen at St Martin’s, a nearby church. The churchyard was running out of space so the regiment had decided to create its own burial place.

Few outfits in the British army devote less energy to spit and polish than the SAS, but this was one of those occasions when padres, ladies in hats and soldiers in spotless uniform were mingling. When the time came for the ceremonial unveiling, the serenity of the occasion was disrupted by mobile phone calls and text messages.

Such is the nature of the special forces grapevine that communications from Iraq started coming through to officers and senior NCOs in their service dress. The place was soon alive with rumours. What were the army going to do to get
Campbell
and
Griffiths
out? Not much, many members of the regiment concluded.

At PJHQ, consternation at the early TV pictures of the two captured men was followed by shock as shots appeared of the soldiers forming the cordon around the Jamiat coming under attack from angry crowds. Rumour had spread around the Hayyaniyah with dizzying speed, leading thousands of militant inhabitants onto the streets. Rioting broke out, with petrol bombs and bullets – both real and rubber – traded. As Molotov cocktails hit a Warrior armoured vehicle, Sergeant George Long of the Staffordshire Regiment tumbled out of his turret, ablaze with burning petrol. The images of him rolling off the vehicle were for many viewers in Britain the clearest possible indication that they should not accept government assurances that everything was going to plan in southern Iraq.

The British embassy’s response to this emergency was to use its official channels to request the men’s release. An order to this effect was issued by the Iraqi Interior Ministry, but duly ignored by the officers at the Jamiat. Remarkably, according to a number of people involved in the day’s drama, neither the British embassy nor the divisional HQ at Basra nor PJHQ in Britain saw fit to inform the Coalition – that is, the American – command about what was going on. Despite the appearance of alarming TV images throughout the day, the British division in Basra had not asked General Casey, the top commander in Baghdad, what it should do or even informed him as to how they might rescue the men. One senior British officer reflects, ‘The whole command relationship broke down because nobody, officially, told the Americans what was going on, although of course they knew through JSOC.’

By mid-afternoon the SAS, through Major
Chappell
at the Basra end and Lieutenant-Colonel Williams in the UK, were pressing hard for a rescue operation. It was at this point that they paid dearly for the command arrangements put in place two years earlier, under which SAS operations in Iraq were run through the Chief of Joint Operations at Northwood. Nobody, however, could be found in authority to approve the mission. Major
Chappell
could not get through to the CJO’s mobile phone. It later went around the SAS that the senior officer had switched it off because he was playing golf.

The special ops people in Iraq knew that the police inside the Jamiat were preparing to withstand an attack. Men were being brought in with rocket-propelled grenades, and warned about a possible British helicopter assault. Given the mayhem in the streets outside, those holding
Campbell
and
Griffiths
might well have been wondering whether their prisoners were too hot to handle. They had withstood the pressure from a British negotiator and their own interior ministry to release the captives, but at length, with difficulties multiplying for them, the police decided that it would be better if the men were not in their custody.

At the airport, after hours of consideration, and with little meaningful guidance from the UK, Brigadier Lorimer authorised an attack on the Jamiat. It would be spearheaded by Challenger tanks and Warriors. In his initial orders he gave no authority for the troops to enter any other building or compound.

At this time, the Iraqis decided to move
Campbell
and
Griffiths
. Knowing that there were ‘eyes in the sky’ above the compound, they put dishdashas (long Arab shirts that come down to the ankle) on the prisoners, and threw blankets over their heads as they moved them to vehicles in the yard outside. It was a forlorn hope for the SAS men to think that they might be seen by one of the orbiting aircraft. But as they were forced into the waiting vehicles a struggle broke out.

With the amount of trouble going on in the streets around the Jamiat, the solitary Broadsword operator in the helicopter up above the city might easily have been looking elsewhere, trying to help some of the soldiers who were engaged in running gun battles with the Shia militia. But he saw the scuffle in the courtyard and zoomed in. As the vehicles moved off, the American Predator was not on station and so everything depended upon the man hunched over his screen in the Sea King, relaying verbally what he could see to those who listened below.