The Secret Sentry (41 page)

Officers lower down on the chain of command, according to a Marine Corps after-action report, “found the enemy by running
into them, much as forces have done since the beginning of warfare.”
⁷⁰

Moreover, according to a U.S. Navy document, once the invasion was under way, NSA’s strategic SIGINT collection units in the
United States archived 60 percent of the material they collected and never processed (i.e., translated or analyzed) it. The
military’s tactical SIGINT units taking part in the invasion pro cessed less than 2 percent of the Iraqi messages they intercepted.
These are hardly the sorts of numbers one can be proud of if one is an intelligence professional.
⁷¹

Just as in Afghanistan two years earlier, much of the SIGINT collection equipment used by American military intelligence units
during the invasion was found to be outdated and unsuited for supporting fast-moving offensive operations.
⁷²
Some of the newly developed collection equipment did not work as advertised. For example, the army’s highly touted Prophet
tactical SIGINT collection system proved to be fine for short-range target location, but did not perform particularly well
when it was tasked with locating Iraqi radio emitters deep behind enemy lines. As a result, many brigade and division commanders
reported after the war that they had found themselves completely dependent on NSA’s national SIGINT collection assets for
locating Iraqi forces, as in the case of the Republican Guard units during the early stages of the invasion.
⁷³

Severe and per sistent shortages of Arabic linguists dogged NSA and the U.S. military’s SIGINT collection effort. For example,
only half of the linguists assigned to the SIGINT collection unit supporting the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion
spoke Arabic. The other half spoke Korean. Since very few of the intelligence community’s Arabic linguists could understand
the Iraqi dialect, the United States had to turn to a private contractor to hire as quickly and as many translators as possible
who could speak the Iraqi dialect. Many of the linguists Titan Corporation recruited on short notice (and at considerable
cost to the U.S. government) were Iraqi political refugees living in the United States, Canada, Eu rope, and Australia or
first-generation Americans of Iraqi descent. Olympic speed records were set hiring these individuals, vetting them, and then
flying them to Kuwait in time to participate in the invasion.
⁷⁴

CHAPTER 15

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly SIGINT and Combating the Insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan

I don’t do quagmires.

—DONALD RUMSFELD, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE TRANSCRIPT

The Repeat Per formance

U.S. troops entered Baghdad on April 9, 2003, leading to the immediate collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Looting on a massive
scale broke out, but U.S. forces did not attempt to stop it. When reporters asked about the escalating level of violence and
chaos in Baghdad, Secretary of Defense Donald Rums-feld made his now-famous comment: “Freedom is untidy.”
¹

A flood of books and studies later demonstrated that Rumsfeld viewed the security situation in Iraq through rose-colored glasses.
Equally in a state of denial was CENTCOM’s General Franks. In what is now widely viewed as one of the most significant blunders
in American military history, Rumsfeld and Franks had given little if any thought to how post-Hussein Iraq would be governed.
CENTCOM did not even begin reconstruction planning until five months after the fall of Baghdad. But by that time, the Iraqi
insurgency was in full swing, and the reconstruction plan was quickly junked in favor of a counterinsurgency plan, which also
had not been worked on prior to the fall of Baghdad.
²

On April 16, Franks cheerfully announced that most U.S. combat forces in Iraq would be withdrawn within sixty days so that
they would not “wear out their welcome.” Franks’s plan called for keeping some thirty thousand U.S. troops there as a peacetime
occupation force. As a result, two army divisions that were supposed to be sent to Iraq after the fall of Baghdad were never
sent, and on April 21 the Pentagon canceled plans to deploy a third division there. By summer, there were too few U.S. combat
troops to secure Baghdad, a teeming city of 4.8 million, or the rest of Iraq. Franks’s prescription for disaster had been
endorsed by the White House and the Pentagon, and it was a repetition of the same mistake that he and Rumsfeld had made a
year earlier in Afghanistan. He declared victory and left the battlefield before the job was finished.
³

As part of the drawdown of forces, the military began rapidly and drastically reducing its intelligence presence in Iraq,
just as it had done a year earlier in Af-ghanistan. Major General James “Spider” Marks, who had commanded the U.S. military’s
intelligence effort during Operation Iraqi Freedom, left Iraq in June to return to his former position as commandant of the
U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, in Arizona. Virtually all of the army’s best intelligence units in Iraq left
with him, including the entire 513th Military Intelligence Brigade, which had performed so admirably during Operation Iraqi
Freedom.
⁴

Back in the United States, all of the intelligence staffs and special operations units created to provide intelligence support
for the invasion of Iraq, including those at NSA, were disbanded and their personnel returned to their former posts. For example,
the Iraq reporting cell within NSA’s National Security Operations Center (NSOC) was disbanded on May 2, the day after President
Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS
Abraham
Lincoln.
⁵

NSA’s SIGINT collection assets that had formerly been committed to Iraq were shifted to intercepting the military and diplomatic
communications of Iran and Syria. SIGINT coverage of those countries’ military and internal security radio traffic turned
up nothing to suggest that either Iran or Syria intended anything nefarious. SIGINT also monitored Turkish traffic because
of the U.S. concern that Turkey might intervene militarily in northern Iraq to prevent the formation of an independent Kurdish
state, anathema to the Turkish government.
⁶

Debilitating turf wars broke out between NSA, CENTCOM, and the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq over “who was going to do
what to whom,” which created all sorts of unnecessary chaos on the ground there.
⁷

Coming Prepared for the Wrong War

The first Iraqi insurgent attacks on U.S. forces began within days of the fall of Baghdad, but they were infrequent. However,
after President Bush proclaimed “Mission Accomplished,” the number of attacks stepped up dramatically, to six a day by the
end of the month. American soldiers began dying, and the press began to question whether Bush’s victory declaration might
have been a wee bit premature. White House and Pentagon officials dismissed the attacks as the last gasp of “dead-ender” remnants
of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the work of foreign terrorists aligned with al Qaeda, or the activities of criminal gangs taking
advantage of Hussein’s downfall.
⁸

The leading proponent of this sunny vision of the situation in Iraq, which a retired army general characterized as the “Morning
in Iraq Syndrome,” was Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who breezily told reporters, “In short, the co ali-tion is making good
progress.”
⁹
In Baghdad, echoing Rumsfeld, the newly appointed commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, told
reporters that the Iraqi insurgency was “strategically and operationally insignificant.”
¹⁰
The chief of army intelligence in Iraq, Colonel Steven Boltz, went so far as to tell a reporter that the insurgent attacks
were “random and it isn’t organized and that’s a good thing.”
¹¹

But this Panglossian view of things became untenable after suicide bombings in Baghdad and roadside attacks on U.S. forces
throughout Iraq jumped 500 percent, to more than thirty a day. By October 2003, 203 American soldiers had died at the hands
of Iraqi insurgents, more than all casualties suffered during the invasion of Iraq. After the Baghdad suicide bombings of
the Jordanian embassy on August 7 and the U.N. headquarters compound on August 19, the CIA station chief in Baghdad warned
Washington that these bombings were symptomatic of the growing strength and deadliness of the Sunni insurgency, but his warning
was ignored.
¹²

But the equipment that the U.S. military’s SIGINT units had brought with them to Iraq during the 2003 invasion proved to be
next to useless in an urban counterinsurgency environment. Major Steven Bower, who commanded a company of the 311th Military
Intelligence Battalion in northern Iraq, recalled, “As far as SIGINT is concerned, most of our stuff was designed to operate
on the military wave band lengths . . . but it doesn’t pick up cell phones or a lot of the technology out there. We still
picked up some radio traffic and we still got some stuff out of it, but it wasn’t as much as we wanted.”
¹³
In 2004, new SIGINT equipment, including the latest version of the army’s Prophet tactical SIGINT collection system, called
Prophet Hammer, was delivered to every U.S. Army combat division in Iraq. The new version of the Prophet was the army’s latest
high-tech intelligence collection toy, built specifically for cell phone interception, which everyone in Washington thought
was a marvelous improvement. Designed for use in Europe, the Prophet and Prophet Hammer systems did not work well in the crowded
and densely populated cities of Iraq. They were also not designed to cope with the primitive Iraqi signals environment because,
as a brigade operations officer with the 101st Airborne Division stationed in northern Iraq pointed out, “at that time there
wasn’t a lot of mobile phones in use” in Iraq.
¹⁴

So the U.S. Army and Marine Corps were forced to junk much of their expensive SIGINT equipment and spend still more millions
replacing it with consumer products—low-tech off-the-shelf radio scanners and other equipment— not really knowing if they
would work in Iraq.
¹⁵

And even if SIGINT units could intercept the phone calls of the Iraqi insurgents, the people needed to translate them were
not available. Within months of the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, all army division commanders in Iraq began disbanding their
SIGINT units and transferring their personnel to fill out Tactical HUMINT Teams that were being formed throughout the country.
For example, the Third Infantry Division’s commander, Major General Buford Blount, whose division was responsible for garrisoning
Baghdad, stripped all of the Arabic linguists out of his division’s SIGINT company and transferred them to HUMINT-gathering
duties—which of course they were not trained or equipped for. The Arab linguists available were trained only to listen to
Arabic communications traffic and transcribe it; they had not been trained to speak the language with any degree of fluency.
Moreover, they had no command of the Iraqi dialect, which put them at a severe disadvantage when trying to talk to Iraqis.
¹⁶
At the same time, the company’s SIGINT equipment, notably Prophet, was parked in the division’s motor pool and allowed to
gather dust.
¹⁷
Much the same thing happened in northern Iraq, which was the operational area of the 101st Airborne Division, commanded by
Major General David Petraeus. Many of the Arabic cryptologic linguists assigned to the division’s 311th MI Battalion were
transferred to HUMINT collection duties, with the division intel officer G-2, Lieutenant Colo-nel D.J. Reyes, concluding,
“The low technology, HUMINT-rich nature of stability operations and support operations mitigated (and at times negated) the
effectiveness of our technical intelligence platforms.”
¹⁸

Then, in a typical U.S. Army “comedy of errors,” its intelligence officers were shocked to discover that many of the cryptologic
linguists they had in Iraq could speak Korean, French, Spanish, and other languages—but not Arabic. How they ended up in Iraq
in the first place remains a question that army intelligence officials do not seem to want to answer. As of September 2003,
many of these “misplaced persons” were still in Iraq doing jobs that had nothing to do with intelligence, such as pulling
guard duty, manning traffic checkpoints at base gates, or working as administrative clerks.
¹⁹

The sad result was that by the end of 2003, the U.S. military’s SIGINT collection capabilities in Iraq had fallen to such
calamitously low levels of accomplishment that some thoroughly pissed-off army division commanders came close to ordering
the disbandment of what was left of their SIGINT units completely. The dearth of intelligence being produced by NSA not surprisingly
angered many of the senior military commanders in Iraq. A former NSA liaison officer recalled, “There were some very, very
unhappy people down in those division headquarters” who were angry about NSA’s inability to get them the intelligence they
needed.
²⁰

As if things were not bad enough, when cell phone service was introduced throughout Iraq in the spring and summer of 2004,
military SIGINT units discovered that their intercept equipment brought in from the United States was useless against the
cell phones that were now being used by the Iraqi insurgents.
²¹
It was not until the summer of 2004 that the first U.S. Air Force cargo aircraft began landing in Kuwait carrying emergency
shipments of hastily purchased replacement cell phone intercept equipment. The equipment was so new that the U.S. Army intelligence
personnel accompanying it were literally still reading the operating manuals trying to learn how to use the stuff when the
planes touched down.
²²

And even then, the new cell phone intercept equipment being brought into Iraq left much to be desired because it was available
only at the brigade level, which meant that little of the SIGINT product from this source made its way down to the battalions
slugging it out on the streets of Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq. The equipment itself was of marginal utility because of technical
limitations on what it could hear and its restricted range. A U.S. Army officer who served with the First Cavalry Division
in the Shi’ite slum of Sadr City in eastern Baghdad recalled, “I wasn’t impressed, though, with how good the cell phone listening
capability really was because you could get only one side of the conversation and you had to be within a certain range.”
²³

Once cell phone service began to expand, NSA and the military SIGINT units scrambled to find security-cleared linguists who
had at least some comprehension of Iraqi dialects, but two resources—the nascent Iraqi army and the national police— were
believed to be infiltrated by insurgents. So the recruitment of linguists was handed over to American private sector defense
contractors— CACI and Titan Corporation (now part of L-3 Corporation). The candidate linguists who could pass the security
clearance requirements were sent not to Iraq but to NSA’s Gordon Regional Security Operations Center (GRSOC), where they were
immediately put to work in a newly formed operations unit called Cobra Focus, whose sole mission was to translate the cell
phone intercepts that were being beamed directly to GRSOC from the Iraqi front lines via satellite.
²⁴

Monitoring Insurgent Finances and Infiltration

All available evidence indicates that it took NSA a significant amount of time to adapt to the rapidly changing battlefield
environment in Iraq. But in the summer of 2003, according to Sergeant Major Kevin Gainey, the head of the Third Infantry Division’s
all-source intelligence fusion center, “eventually we got signals intelligence (SIGINT) working.”
²⁵

One of NSA’s early successes was determining who was providing the Iraqi insurgents with financial and logistical support.
In 2003, SIGINT helped the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment destroy an insurgent cell in the town of Rawa in al-Anbar Province
that was helping foreign fighters infiltrate into Iraq from neighboring Jordan.
²⁶
Intercepts of telephone calls between insurgent leaders in Iraq and their cohorts in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East
in the summer and fall of 2003 revealed that certain Iraqi insurgent groups were being financed by former members of Saddam
Hussein’s regime based in Syria and by sympathizers elsewhere in the Arab world. By mid-2004, SIGINT was also providing detailed
intelligence concerning the flow of money from Syria that was being used to finance Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s foreign fighters
operating in al-Anbar Province. A former NSA intelligence analyst said, “SIGINT showed that Ramadi was the destination for
most of the money flowing into Iraq from Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia.” President Bush was informed that the flow
of money amounted to $1.2 million a month.
²⁷