Task Force Black (18 page)
Authors: Mark Urban
After 118 days of captivity many had concluded that the 74-year-old hostage must be close to death. But the application of new intelligence techniques and a relentless special forces operation had thwarted what might have seemed grimly inevitable. Even today few people realise the scale of the secret search.
During the weeks of Operation LIGHTWATER, fifty buildings had been raided. British special forces of Task Force Knight conducted forty-four of these door-kicking operations, the remainder were done by other Coalition operators. During the course of these fifty operations, forty-seven people were detained. Only four of the operations were termed ‘dry holes’, places that were not productive of any useful information. All of this development of intelligence, Tactical Questioning of suspects, taking of risks and burning of money had been required to lead them to
Abu Laith
, the one man capable of telling them where the hostages had been hidden.
As they removed him from the scene of his incarceration the soldiers found it hard to get any response from Kember. One of them says, ‘[He] was the most frustrating individual I have ever met in my life. From the point of lifting him he didn’t address one word to us.’ Back in Britain the story that Kember had refused to thank his saviours quickly gained currency. The soldier involved notes, ‘The following day the Ambassador wheeled him over to our house and Kember finally said, if I remember his actual words, “Thanks for saving my life.”’
The ironies of an arch opponent of the war being rescued by the SAS were not lost on anyone. In the hours following Kember’s release, pent-up tensions about why the Christian group had been in Baghdad, the resources used to secure the three surviving hostages’ release and the apparent lack of thanks led to a minor onslaught against Kember in the press. Even General Sir Mike Jackson, Chief of the General Staff, was publicly critical. How much more pointed might the debate have been if the freed hostages had been aware of the use of ‘duress’ applied to prisoners in order to find them?
Abu Laith
’s rapid interrogation in the house where he was captured revealed a growing practice. One intelligence officer comments that JSOC’s prison was by this point ‘squeaky clean’, with CCTV surveillance and many other checks. Because of this, ‘most complaints that came from the Red Cross originated from what happened on site’ – that is, when a prisoner was captured. Among officers involved in special ops there seemed to be a recognition that the violent circumstances of many takedowns produced opportunities for their operators to question the prisoner before putting him on a helicopter to the MSS or Balad.
Upon his return to the UK on 25 March, Norman Kember made a statement at the airport in which he thanked the embassy staff and told reporters that they really ought to be interviewing ‘the ordinary people of Iraq’. He concluded, ‘I now need to reflect on my experience – was I foolhardy or rational?’ The blades watching the news channels back at MSS Fernandez had their own pithy answer to that one.
In responding to Task Force Knight’s coup the Coalition tried to exploit a rare positive story. Major-General Rick Lynch, the briefer at Multi-National Force Headquarters, wanted to use the success to hit back after so many months of stories about abuse of Iraqi prisoners, telling reporters, ‘The key point is it was intelligence-led. It was information provided by a detainee.’ Lynch, in line with standard procedures, did not specifically praise the SAS but referred to ‘Coalition forces’. In London they wanted a little more national credit. Jack Straw, then Foreign Secretary, told the press he was ‘absolutely delighted’ by the news and that ‘British forces were involved in this operation. It follows weeks and weeks of very careful work by our military and coalition personnel in Iraq and many civilians as well.’
On 7 November 2006, Iraqi police arrested men alleged to have carried out the kidnapping. Norman Kember, faithful to his principles, insisted that he would not give evidence against them.
Within Task Force Knight and the wider British special forces community, Operation LIGHTWATER was regarded as something of a watershed. B Squadron had achieved the kind of ‘op tempo’ or pace of action that Lieutenant-General McChrystal demanded of US units in JSOC. And with the Christian Peacemaker Team rescued, there were a wealth of urgent targets against which McChrystal’s anti-al-Qaeda task force was itching to use the SAS.
On 23 March, the day of the Kember rescue, a wave of four car bombs went off just after the SAS’s coup. The resulting death of twenty-three Iraqis and serious wounding of forty-eight others did not actually make it a particularly bad day by Baghdad standards. Across Iraq the trend of violence was still steadily upwards. The SIGACTS (significant acts of violence) charts compiled at General Casey’s headquarters showed, for example, that in the month of Kember’s rescue attacks against Iraqi infrastructure and government targets reached one thousand, and the total for IEDs 850.
Any notion that B Squadron might have earned a few days off after LIGHTWATER was swiftly scotched. The intelligence people were poring over their diagrams showing the networks of al-Qaeda cells that were sending so many bombs into Baghdad. In satellite towns around the capital, like Abu Ghraib, Taji or Yusufiyah, there was a picture of growing complexity of the bombers’ organisation. Team leaders began to prepare target packs for those whom analysis of mobile phone traffic could serve up.
As the SAS moved against the AQI target in earnest the scene was set for intense but highly professional competition with Delta Force, their neighbours at MSS Fernandez, which, by coincidence, also had its B Squadron in Baghdad at the time. Having set the broad parameters for their operations Colonel
Grist
, in the JOC at Balad, and his boss Lieutenant-General McChrystal allowed Team Leaders in both squadrons to develop their own plans, pitching for targets ‘from the bottom up’. If the SAS plan was more promising they would get the backing and resources of the JOC.
Two and a half weeks after the hostages were freed, the British played host to McChrystal and several other senior US officers at their base near Hereford. The visit was planned as an episode of military diplomacy and relationship-building. It also underlined the fact that McChrystal and his British host, the major-general who had succeeded
Peter Rogers
as Director of Special Forces, had to view events in Iraq as part of the wider special operations effort. Neither of these two officers could divorce what was going on in Baghdad from the regional, or indeed global, perspective. There were different pressures from the two sides of the Atlantic, and the meetings held over two days in Hereford were intended to help resolve those while sealing the understanding they had for Task Force Knight to operate against the full American target set in Iraq.
During the course of General McChrystal’s visit there were the inevitable formal briefings. There was also a long hike through the Herefordshire countryside, and then the two days of conversation were rounded off with a dinner at an early Georgian country house. The American visitors were treated to interiors worthy of a Jane Austen novel, views across the manicured deer park as well as a lavish feast: an archetypal English experience. McChrystal, often characterised as an austere soldier-monk who worked almost all the time, rose to the challenge of relaxing with his hosts.
McChrystal had for some time seen the Iraq problem in a regional context. JSOC had established liaison teams in several surrounding countries. ‘It was pretty well broadcast that the Saudis were cooperating,’ explains one senior American. ‘You would pick up a Saudi guy or a Moroccan [in Iraq], feed the information over to them. Then within days, sometimes hours, you got the answers back from them.’ The US approach was seen by some British intelligence officers both in terms of the attribution of much of Iraq’s bombing to foreign fighters and to the political ideology of the Bush Administration’s Global War on Terror or ‘G-wot’. Although many of the British believed that the US overestimated both the role of foreign fighters in Iraq and the global nature of al-Qaeda, they conceded there was some value in McChrystal’s approach. British intelligence had, after all, mounted Operation ASTON against suspected Pakistani jihadists travelling to Iraq two years earlier.
Any intelligence officer realised the value of being able to confront a suspected foreign fighter in the interrogation room with knowledge of his associates back home or en route for Iraq. The accumulated picture of who was getting into the country, and how, could help to frustrate that jihad trail. At the time of the Hereford meeting Britain agreed to a similar, but far smaller, deployment of regional teams that would follow the US lead in working in neighbouring states. The problem for both McChrystal and the British was that in the places where regional cooperation was needed most – Syria and Iran – it was, respectively, very limited and non-existent.
Still, the adoption of a regional approach was a British step worth toasting. It was just as well for Britain’s new Director of Special Forces that the Americans were taking Task Force Knight under their wing because UK concerns increasingly had to centre on Afghanistan.
In the spring of 2006 the British military were deploying more than four thousand troops to southern Afghanistan. Under
Peter Rogers
’s rebalancing of special forces, the Special Boat Service was taking the lead in supporting this new deployment. But, as he had anticipated, the attempt to conduct these two operations at once was going to stretch both his own command and the wider armed forces. UK special forces were only provided with the ‘enablers’ (for example special secure communications equipment, helicopters and Hercules transports) to support one squadron on operations at a time. Since the Americans at that time still regarded Iraq as very much their first priority, support to the SBS in southern Afghanistan would be limited.
Task Force Knight’s growing integration into the JSOC Iraq campaign was thus coming at just the right time for the British commanders who wondered how on earth they were going to cope in Afghanistan. And, as if on cue, just days after McChrystal and Britain’s Director of Special Forces charted their way forward in Hereford, the SAS squadron in Iraq demonstrated its usefulness to the Americans in a most dramatic way.
The scene about the MSS Fernandez landing site that April night in 2006 was one that had already become thoroughly familiar. RAF Pumas had come in from BIAP and their crews were making final checks. ‘The guys on standby knew they could be quite relaxed during the daylight,’ recalls one crewman assigned to the Task Force Knight helicopter flight. ‘They would have an hour or two’s warning. But then that might go down to a thirty-minute standby, then a cockpit standby and finally a rotors turning standby.’
In the murk beside the choppers, men formed up nearby, fresh from their quick battle orders. These were usually given in the briefing room of the SAS house, where the marble floors and gilded white sofas reminded the blades of its previous inhabitants. Sergeant-Major
Mulberry
was there, a couple of the troop commanders, two guys with snipers’ rifles. It was after 1 a.m. as each man checked his kit: night-vision equipment, radio, magazines for their primary weapon, usually an assault rifle, and a pistol. The blades had formerly worn their handgun or secondary weapon low-slung in leg holsters, but by this time the fashion was for fixing a quick-release holster to the front of the body armour, just beneath the neck. In addition to the standard kit, there would be small personal add-ons. Some men, usually the sergeant-major among them, carried cyalumes, chemical lights that could be used to mark a landing zone or an entry point. One or two men carried shotguns or explosive charges for blowing in doors. Many sported knives too, although the SAS never quite adopted Delta’s taste for fearsome fighting daggers.
That night’s serial, as the name Operation LARCHWOOD 4 suggests, was a development based upon raids over the previous days. The two B squadrons – SAS and Delta – had been hitting AQI targets in the ‘Baghdad belts’ – a term used by the Coalition for communities surrounding the capital. There had already been several firefights. On 8 April a raid near the same town they were heading for on this night had killed five insurgents, who the intelligence people claimed were foreign fighters. On 13 April, another two. With each raid, JSOC’s intelligence picture of a group of al-Qaeda cells around the capital had evolved.
Yusufiyah, twenty-five kilometres to the south-west of Baghdad, was seething with tension at the time. Fallujah is about twenty kilometres off to the west, Abu Ghraib between the two places. To the east of Yusufiyah is Mahmudiyah and south-east is Latifiyah – the three ‘iyahs’ marking the points of an area of intense insurgent activity known since late 2003 as the Triangle of Death. By 2006 the violence was going in several different directions. It was an extremely dangerous area for Coalition forces but the presence of many Shia villages had also led to numerous sectarian murders.
During the spring of 2006, there was a series of sweeps by US troops through the area. They had rounded up the usual trophies of Kalashnikovs, mortar rounds and IED materials but had also suffered many casualties at the hands of Sunni insurgents. The vicious war in this part of Iraq had also produced one of the Coalition’s most serious lapses, or rather collapses, in military discipline.
Just one month before B Squadron’s planned raid, several US soldiers had got drunk on local bootleg whisky at their checkpoint not far from Yusufiyah and deserted their post. They had broken into an Iraqi home and raped and murdered a fourteen-year-old girl named Abeer Qasim Hamza. They killed her parents and five-year-old sister for good measure. At the time of the planned B Squadron mission the implications of these crimes were just beginning to percolate up the US military system, with the first conviction seven months later and several more to follow. Evidently, though, word of what had happened spread very quickly through the community. If the local people or the AQI groups in Yusufiyah needed any further reason to fight the Coalition, revenge for this act could be added.
