The Secret Sentry (39 page)

At ten fifteen p.m. EST, President Bush announced on all the major TV networks that the war with Iraq had begun.

The Early Stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom

At six p.m. Baghdad time, March 20, a little more than twelve hours after the Dora Farms attack, the U.S. air campaign against
Iraq began. Over the next twenty-four hours, American and British warplanes flew a staggering seventeen hundred combat sorties
against hundreds of targets inside Iraq. At the same time, U.S. Navy warships and U.S. Air Force B-52 bombers launched 504
cruise missiles, which systematically took out dozens of Hussein’s presidential palaces, military command centers, and large
military garrisons in the most heavily defended parts of Iraq, particularly in and around Baghdad itself.
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American reporters covering the air assault and cruise missile attacks from their hotel balconies in downtown Baghdad repeatedly
used the phrase “shock and awe,” popularized by Donald Rumsfeld in 1999, to describe the pyrotechnics. Months later, journalists
referred to the initial air campaign attacks as “shucks and a www” when it became clear that the massive (and expensive) air
strikes had done only minimal damage to the Iraqi war machine.

NSA, however, was tasked with performing immediate assessments on the effectiveness of the air strikes and cruise missile
attacks in taking out the Iraqi air defense system. An air force Arabic linguist recalled that his job was to monitor the
known radio frequencies used by Iraqi air defense command posts in southern and central Iraq. One by one, during the predawn
hours of March 20, all of the radio frequencies he was monitoring went silent, some in mid-transmission, indicating that the
fighter-bombers and cruise missiles had done their job. By dawn, SIGINT, including intercepts translated by Arabic linguists
aboard U.S. Air Force RC-135 Rivet Joint and U.S. Navy EP-3E Aries reconnaissance aircraft, confirmed that virtually all of
the Iraqi air defense system’s sector operations centers were out of commission.
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In the days that followed, every time an Iraqi radar operator was brave (or foolish) enough to activate his radar system,
within minutes the site’s radar emissions were detected and located by one of the Rivet Joint or Aries reconnaissance aircraft
orbiting over Kuwait, which promptly directed fighter-bombers to destroy the site. By the time Operation Iraqi Freedom was
over three weeks later, SIGINT had directly contributed to the destruction of 95 percent of the Iraqi air defense system—
which was a remarkable accomplishment by any measure.
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SIGINT and the Ground War

At ten fifteen a.m. on March 20, hours after the air campaign began, the Iraqis began sporadically firing their homegrown
version of the Russian Scud ballistic missile and Chinese-made Seersucker cruise missiles at U.S. military positions inside
Kuwait. Some of these unwieldy and inaccurate missiles were aimed at Camp Commando in northern Kuwait, which was where the
marine First Radio Battalion had its main operations site. The missile detonations rocked the camp, but little damage was
done. Nonetheless, it shook up the American troops and served to remind them that there was a real war going on just a few
miles away.
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Shortly after six p.m., an Iraqi patrol boat crossed over from the Iraqi side of the Shatt al-Arab waterway and opened fire
on a marine radio intercept team deployed on the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border. At almost exactly the same time, Iraqi mortar fire
began falling on the marines position, and the marines spotted Iraqi infantrymen just across the border advancing toward them.
The marine SIGINT operators radioed their headquarters and urgently requested covering fire and immediate extraction. While
marine artillery units blasted the enemy with massive counter-battery fire, a helicopter flew in and successfully extracted
the marine SIGINT team without taking any casualties.
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That morning, satellite imagery had indicated that the Iraqis were ready to destroy the huge Rumailah oil field, in southern
Iraq. This new intelligence led General Franks to move up the start time of the ground offensive. At nine P.M., hundreds of
U.S. and British artillery pieces and missile launchers opened fire on the thin screen of Iraqi border guard posts strung
out along the border with Kuwait— and the posts’ radios went silent, some in midtransmission, as they were destroyed.
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After the barrage ended, thousands of American and British tanks, armored personnel carriers, and support vehicles crossed
over the border into Iraq. The invasion had begun.

American and British ground troops advanced steadily into the country without any appreciable opposition. In the first twenty-four
hours, elements of the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division advanced one hundred miles, arriving on the outskirts of the city
of Nasiriyah by the end of March 21. To the east, the First Marine Division seized the Rumailah oil fields on March 21 and
destroyed the Iraqi Fifty-first Mechanized Division by the end of the following day.

Across the border in Kuwait, American and British SIGINT operators were flummoxed by the near total absence of the Iraqi military
radio traffic that should have been part of a forceful Iraqi response. Moreover, Iraqi divisions did not move from their peacetime
bases, and there was no evidence that Hus-sein’s army had any intention of meeting coalition forces head-on.
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The Iraqi army and the Fedayeen Saddam paramilitary forces did not use their radios much to communicate during the initial
phases of the invasion. This not only prevented Iraqi forces from coordinating attacks on and mounting resistance to coalition
forces— but also degraded the value of SIGINT as a source for intelligence during the first couple of days of the invasion.
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In the British sector on the extreme right flank, SIGINT played a relatively small role in the successful taking of the key
city of Basra by the British First Armored Division—by giving the British a very accurate picture of the formidable Iraqi
forces facing them.
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According to British military officials, high-level strategic intelligence derived from SIGINT on Iraqi military strength
and capabilities was hard to come by, but intercepted Iraqi tactical radio traffic proved to be an important source for British
field commanders.
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During the course of the First Armored Division’s advance, SIGINT provided some warnings of impending ambushes by Fedayeen
Saddam guerrillas as well as information concerning the movements and activities of key Iraqi regime leaders inside Basra
itself.
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But no radio intercepts detected signs that the Shi’ite inhabitants of the city had risen up against Hussein’s troops.
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The same situation existed in the American sector to the west. One of the more interesting battles where SIGINT played a meaningful
role was for Nasiriyah, in southeastern Iraq. With a population of 250,000 people, most of whom were Shi’ites, the city was
the linchpin of the Iraqi army’s defense of southern Iraq. Garrisoning Nasiriyah was the Iraqi Eleventh Infantry Division,
and the city had been reinforced by Ba’ath Party Al Quds militiamen and Fedayeen Saddam guerrillas. Just outside the city
was the vitally important Tallil Air Base, which was the headquarters of all air defense forces in southern Iraq. The CIA
and U.S. military intelligence believed that the Eleventh Infantry Division would put up minimal resistance since it was comprised
primarily of Shi’ite troops who had no love for Saddam Hussein’s regime.
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But the Iraqis defended the city fiercely. For the next fifteen days, the Iraqi army’s Forty-fifth Brigade, bolstered by Al
Quds Party militiamen and Fedayeen Saddam guerrillas, fought the numerically superior U.S. Marines to astandstill before finally
being overcome. Radio intercepts from the marine Second Radio Battalion on March 26 indicated a buildup of two thousand Iraqi
soldiers and Fedayeen Saddam guerrillas who were preparing to launch a counterattack on U.S. Marines trying to clear the city.
Marine artillery units immediately hit the Iraqi troops with a barrage of high-explosive antipersonnel shells, killing two
hundred and breaking up the planned counterattack before it even began.
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The same thing was taking place further to the north in front of the city of Na-jaf, where Fedayeen Saddam paramilitaries
and Al Quds militiamen continued to hold the city against Major General David Petraeus’s 101st Airborne Division. SIGINT provided
Petraeus with some valuable intelligence about the strength and fighting condition of the Iraqi forces inside the embattled
city. This reportedly included intercepted messages from the Iraqi commander of the Najaf civilian militia to Baghdad requesting
reinforcements because he and more than one thousand civilian militiamen were surrounded by U.S. troops.
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Taking On the Medina Division

The battles between the U.S. Army Third Infantry Division and the Republican Guard Medina Division south of Baghdad in late
March and early April 2003 proved to be the decisive events in the war. The importance of defeating the Medina Division was
immense. British prime minister Tony Blair had predicted that the impending battle the division would be a “crucial moment”
in the war.
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Even before the invasion began, U.S. military planners had determined that the inevitable battle with the Medina Division
would be critical to the successful outcome of the war because it was by far the best Iraqi combat unit guarding the southern
approaches to Baghdad. A senior U.S. intelligence officer, who at the time was working in the CENTCOM intelligence shop in
Qatar, said, “All roads to Baghdad led through the Medina Division. We had to destroy it to take Baghdad and win the war.”
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Once the invasion began, every radio transmission and electronic emission coming from the units of the Medina Division was
closely monitored by NSA. The SIGINT operators at GRSOC monitored the radio traffic coming in and out of the division’s headquarters
because of apprehensions created by SIGINT and foreign intelligence reports that the division had already been issued artillery
shells filled with either mustard gas or nerve agents.
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We now know, of course, that Iraq did not have any chemical weapons in its arsenal, so one of the enduring mysteries of Operation
Iraqi Freedom is what the source of these wildly inaccurate intelligence reports was.

While NSA kept the intelligence staffs in Kuwait well supplied with the latest intelligence about the Medina Division, the
responsibility for providing intelligence support to the U.S. Army’s main combat unit on the battlefield, the Third Infantry
Division, fell to its own integral intelligence unit, the 103rd Military Intelligence Battalion, which had its own SIGINT
collection company. It used a SIGINT collection system called Prophet, which was basically an unarmored Humvee vehicle with
two radio intercept personnel sitting in the back, who got their intercepts from a twenty-three-foot-high telescoping antenna
mounted on the roof of the vehicle. Prophet intercepts were beamed directly to the 103rd MI Battalion’s command center, then
sent via satellite to GRSOC, where Arabic linguists translated them and beamed the results back to the Third Infantry Division’s
analysts in Iraq. But the Third Infantry Division received its complement of Prophet systems only a few weeks before the invasion
of Iraq began, meaning that the division’s radio intercept operators were still learning how to use the system when the war
began.
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SIGINT played an important role in the first, abortive attack on the Medina Division in the Karbala Gap by a force of attack
helicopters on the night of March 23–24. That night, the Eleventh Attack Helicopter Regiment, equipped with thirty-two AH-64D
Apache attack helicopters, launched a deep airborne strike that was designed to destroy the Second Armored Brigade of the
Medina Division, which SIGINT had pinpointed as deployed in defensive positions north of the town of Al Hillal in the Karbala
Gap. However, the Iraqis were waiting, and they destroyed one Apache and captured the two pilots. They also damaged the thirty-one
other helicopters. Making matters worse, the attack failed to engage, much less destroy, the Medina Division. The U.S. Army’s
official history of the war describes the abortive attack as “the darkest day” of the war.
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On the evening of March 23, SIGINT intercepted ominous messages indicating that the Medina Division had been warned that an
attack on its positions was imminent. But once the attack was under way on the morning of March 24, SIGINT operators intercepted
dozens of Iraqi radio messages indicating that the Eleventh Attack He licop ter Regiment had indeed flown right into a carefully
orchestrated “flak trap.”
^44.
The commander of the U.S. Army’s Fifth Corps, Lieutenant General William Wallace, admitted after the war, “We found out, subsequent
to the attack, based on some intelligence reports, that apparently both the location of our attack aviation assembly areas
and the fact that we were moving out of those assembly areas in the attack was announced to the enemy’s air defense personnel
by an Iraqi observer, thought to be a major general, who was located someplace in the town of An-Najaf using a cellular telephone.
In fact, he used it to speed-dial a number of Iraqi air defenders. As our attack aviation approached the attack positions,
they came under intense enemy fire.”
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Hours after the abortive attack by the Apache helicopters, a trio of army RC-12 Guardrail SIGINT aircraft belonging to the
Fifteenth Military Intelligence Battalion, based in Kuwait, flew a special reconnaissance mission over the Karbala Gap looking
for the Medina Division and found it positioned around the towns of Karbala, Al Hillal, and Al Haswah. Using the coordinates
provided by the Guardrail aircraft, U.S. Army artillery units immediately launched a barrage of lethal multiple-launch rocket
system (MLRS) missiles at the Iraqi positions, with COMINT intercepts indicating that the missiles had caused widespread damage.
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