Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (15 page)

Planning the 2003 invasion ran into an acute, last-minute complication when two fighting divisions—the U.S. 4th Infantry and British 1st Armoured—were blocked out of Kurdish northern Iraq by Turkey’s veto. At short notice a substitute force had to be found to enter and hold enemy territory without crossing Turkey. No less than thirteen Iraqi divisions held their positions in the north, convinced by an elaborate American deception plan that this was the region which the U.S. Army would strike first and hardest. The key player in this spoof was a U.S. officer known as April Fool who, for almost two months ahead of the event, had been selling the Iraqis genuine but outdated invasion plans, crown jewels that were really mere paste. The spoof was given its final cutting edge by a decision to commit the 173rd Airborne Brigade, which should have been attached to the 4th Infantry Division, to a classic coup de main parachute drop onto a strategically valuable airfield at Bashur in the far north of Iraq, near the Iranian border.

The 173rd was now officially under Combined Forces Special Operations and part of the northern command titled Task Force Viking. As an official U.S. Army history concedes: “Without the 4th Infantry Division, Special Operations Forces troops would be wholly responsible for northern Iraq until the conventional forces could fight their way north from Kuwait.”
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It is unlikely that the parachute soldiers knew of April Fool, whose success focused Iraqi eyes on the area into which they jumped. The main invasion was mounted from Kuwait, to the southeast. For anyone within the magic circle that did know of this deception, and with a memory of doomed enterprises, a parachute operation in Northern Iraq in these circumstances must have been haunted by specters of Arnhem, 1944 (where clear intelligence that a Panzer division lurked near the drop zone was ignored) or Dien Bien Phu, 1954 (where French and Foreign Legion men jumped, some without parachute training, into an area already surrounded by a superior enemy force).

As it turned out, this latest operation—Operation Northern Delay, the 44th combat jump in U.S. history—got lucky. A mixed team of Special Forces, CIA Special Operations Group agents, Kurdish Peshmerga guerrillas, and drop zone pathfinders was in place at the undefended airfield on the evening of 26 March, three days after the main ground offensive began in the south, when a fleet of five C-17 Globemasters approached Iraqi air space at 30,000 feet, then dived to 600 feet so fast, to elude enemy ground fire, that the paratroopers experienced negative gravity. The Globemaster is a big bird with a wingspan of 170 feet, not designed for dive bombing or dogfights. Nevertheless, in one pass, the C-17s dropped ten heavy drop platforms of vehicles and equipment. The first man to jump after this was 173rd’s commander, Colonel William Mayville. During the next 57 seconds, another 962 paras followed him. It was probably a record. The total might have been close to 1,000, had not thirty-two men been prevented from jumping as the Globemasters “powered up to make their violent escape back up to altitude.” The DZ was now 10,000 feet long.
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This journey to war had been no picnic: a five-hour flight from Aviano, Italy to a drop zone that was glutinous mud, in total darkness on a moonless night. Thirty minutes from the drop zone, internal lights in the aircraft were switched off to be replaced by red lights over the doors, a signal that the time to jump was not far off. Tension inside the aircraft rose further as Air Force jumpmasters took the men the men through the exit drills. One of the paras recalled: “By the time we stood up to wait for the green [jump] light, my stomach was doing somersaults. I thought for a second I might throw up and had to put my head on the parachute of the guy in front of me to get my bearings. We stood up and our rucksacks [carried in front of the body for the jump] were as heavy as hell, so we were leaning on everything and trying not to stand up straight because it was horrendous.”
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Bodies crushed together, the paras hooked up their static lines to a wire cable above them and checked the parachute container of the man in front. Then the jumpmasters opened the doors on each side of the fuselage. A cold blast of air hit them and so did swirling desert dust. One of the soldiers recalled: “We were already standing and hooked up when they went into this crazy dive. When they started to pull out of it I couldn’t stand up with all the weight I had on. All I wanted to do was to get out of the bird.” As the aircraft leveled off, the sensation was as if an elevator had descended at speed from a skyscraper to hit the basement without pausing. At the same moment, the green light came on and voices shouted “Go! Go! Go!” Adrenaline time. “That’s when all the fear left me and I just wanted to get out of the plane. Everybody is screaming to get out of the door because nobody wants to be left behind.”

At such low level, with so many men under canopy in the same place at the same time, there was a risk of mid-air entanglement, though that does not seem to have happened. Instead, on the ground, there was mud that swallowed up some men to their waists. Some were extracted at the price of losing a boot, with the prospect of a long march ahead. It was dark, dead silent, and cold. One man recalled, “My weapon was a big chunk of mud. The barrel was clogged and I couldn’t get to the trigger. It was all over my uniform, my skin and my hair. I spent the rest of the night pulling people out of it. It was crazy.”

As the official U.S. Army history notes, the sun rose on “‘LGOPPs—little groups of pissed off paratroopers’”—linking up with anyone they could find to form ad hoc fighting teams.
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But fifteen hours after the jump, 173rd was once again a coherent brigade, preparing the runway for an airborne bridge that brought in twelve Globemasters each day. The U.S. Air Force delivered 2,160 soldiers and 381 pieces of heavy equipment including tanks and artillery in ninety-six hours. With the airhead secured, the 173rd moved forward to link up with a Special Operations task force and their Kurdish allies to confront the Iraqis near Kirkuk and its vulnerable oilfields.

On 5 April, a forward reconnaissance team—twenty-six Green Berets, three Air Force controllers, and two intelligence officers driving southeast from the territory now held by their Kurdish allies—approached an enemy-held crossroads on the main road linking Kirkuk and Mosul. The approach was blocked by minefields and Debecka Ridge, a feature that defined the Green Line separating the semi-autonomous Kurdish region from the Iraqi Arab heartland to the south. Iraqi soldiers stood on bunkers on the ridge, apparently unconcerned by the appearance of such a tiny enemy force in thin-skinned Humvee’s and Range Rovers. The Iraqis had confidence in the knowledge that their armory included Russian T-55 main battle tanks, equipped with 100mm guns. That night, the Americans called down B-52 strikes on the ridge. It shattered the morale of many of the Iraqi defenders, who deserted.

The recce team was now joined by only eighty Kurdish Peshmerga fighters rather than the 200 they expected. Faced with a defensive earthen berm and a minefield, the Kurds drove a Jeep armed with a recoilless rifle, clearing mines as they went, to the top of the ridge. Led by some of the team on foot, the Green Berets, with their heavier vehicles, followed through to a secondary ridge that they called, with good reason, the Alamo. Iraqi infantry opened fire on them. Under heavy enemy fire, Staff Sgt Jason D. Brown lowered his profile by squatting down, a Javelin anti-tank missile on his shoulder. He had fired only one practice round before this moment. Hoping that the missile’s fire-and-forget infrared guidance system would do what the Army promised, he lined up an enemy truck full of troops at a range of 3,000 meters. The vehicle exploded in a fireball. In the battle that was to follow, the Javelin was “worth its weight in gold” according to Sergeant 1st Class Frank Antenori.
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The team now drove forward at 70 mph to occupy the crossroads. Then, out of the morning haze, three Iraqi utility vehicles—SUVs—came toward them, headlights flashing. For a moment it seemed that they wished to surrender, but then they released smoke grenades to cover the rest of the convoy: three armored personnel carriers on each side of the SUVs. They were followed by a column of tanks. As Staff Sergeant Bobby Farmer said: “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
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As bullets and shells exploded around them, it was time to retreat to the nominal sanctuary of the Alamo ridgeline. Once there, Brown jumped from his Humvee, carrying a loaded Javelin, sat down, and sighted the weapon on the leading armored personnel carrier. For a brief, heart-stopping moment the missile appeared to hesitate as it left the tube, moving a safe distance from the firing point before its main motor fired up and hurtled like an avenging angel toward the target. When flame and smoke cleared, little remained of the vehicle but a charred chassis.

Brown was joined by two of his comrades who also carried Javelins. They were Staff Sergeant Jeffrey M. Adamec and Master Sergeant Kenneth Thompson. By the end of a five-hour battle, the team had unleashed nineteen missiles. According to Sergeant Antenori, “sixteen hit enemy vehicles; two hit other structures (mud hut, monument) as a result of gunner error (accidentally locking on the wrong target), and one missile actually missed.” Discovering their vulnerability, Iraqi infantry left the cover of their APCs only to be cut down by the Green Berets’ machine guns.

Undeterred, in tactics reminiscent of their sacrificial war with Iran, the Iraqis “just kept coming and coming” according to the team leader, Captain Eric Wright. A later estimate by Antenori is that the allied team was indeed outnumbered. As well as five tanks, the Iraqi force totaled up to 200 men. The tanks, concealed behind a berm, were out of the reach of the Javelins, but their 100mm guns were able to maintain a dangerous barrage on the Green Berets’ exposed Alamo position. The SF team summoned an air strike. The result was disastrous. A Navy F-14 bombed the wrong position, killing sixteen Peshmerga and wounding at least forty. Two Green Berets were also wounded, as was the BBC war correspondent John Simpson, who was traveling with the Kurds. Simpson’s translator, Kamaran Abdurazaq Muhammed, lost both legs and bled to death. Simpson said he witnessed a scene from hell as bodies littered the dusty road amid burning wrecks. “I saw the bomb coming out of one of the planes and then, extraordinarily, I saw it as it came down beside me…. I saw people burning to death in front of me.”
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Had Simpson not worn his flak jacket, which was riddled with shrapnel, he also would have died.

Led by Captain Wright, six of the recce force including the team medic raced to the scene. Their first, macabre job was to sort the dead and dying from potential survivors, whose wounds they treated. On the ridge, the battle continued. An Iraqi tank moved from cover toward the handful of Special Forces soldiers facing them across the Kirkuk road. Staff Sergeant Eric Strigotte hit it from a range of 3,700 meters, substantially more than the Javelin’s theoretical effective range of 2,500 meters. More air attacks, on target this time, broke the Iraqi advance. They fled on foot, leaving eight tanks and sixteen APCs behind them.

Next day, recalled Antenori, “we were counterattacked by a larger force of six T-55 and sixteen armored personnel carriers. We took out the lead tank with a Javelin and dropped some bombs on the rest. The counterattack stalled when the enemy turned around…later abandoning their vehicles about three kilometers away.”

The road to Kirkuk was now open. The city was taken in a virtual walkover by the Kurdish Peshmerga and their Green Beret friends, supported by U.S. air power, followed up by the Paras of the 173rd. No one was spoiling for a fight at Kirkuk, a city with a large and long-established Kurdish population, living alongside Arabs, Turkmen, Assyrians, Christians, and Muslims. An Iraqi army officer, Amir Sahib Aziz, who had sworn to die to defend the city, admitted: “The Peshmerga came and they called out to us and said, ‘We are your brothers and your countrymen. If you give up, we will not hurt you.’”
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The next strategic target, Mosul, was another matter. This city of two million people included thousands who were fiercely loyal to Saddam. In due time, Saddam’s two sons would seek sanctuary in Mosul and die there under the guns of American Special Forces. In April 2003 the senior U.S. officer in the region, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Waltemeyer, had only 380 Green Berets from 2nd Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group, to take over the city. Suddenly, his Kurdish allies were a political embarrassment. Had they led the occupation, Turkey might have fulfilled its threat to invade northern Iraq. Invasion Lite was unraveling. The 2,000 men of the 173rd Airborne were now committed to one of Washington’s top priorities, seizure and protection of oil refineries at Kirkuk. The result was general mayhem in Mosul and within a year, much of Iraq descended into a chaotic, unstructured conflict that mocked President Bush’s boast “Mission accomplished!”

The campaign in northern Iraq in March and April 2003 bears closer scrutiny by believers in the refashioned doctrine of Unconventional Warfare. UW is defined in that document as “a broad spectrum of military and paramilitary operations, predominantly conducted through, with, or by indigenous or surrogate forces organized, trained, equipped, supported and directed in varying degrees by an external source.”
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If Special Forces and ethnic surrogates are used as a means of reducing the number of regular American or Allied soldiers, then there are manifold risks in employing the surrogates as an army of occupation rather than a useful extra tool on the battlefield.

There is another sort of surrogate, used to the same effect but not discussed in FM 3-05.20. This is the private military contractor, whose employment in Iraq provoked controversy. On 31 March 2004, the Blackwater company sent two two-man teams (including former SEALs) into Fallujah as guards for a catering company. They were ambushed at a position later renamed Blackwater Bridge, dragged from their vehicles, lynched in scenes reminiscent of Mogadishu, murdered, their bodies mutilated and set on fire. The incident detonated a bloody siege lasting a month during which twenty-seven U.S. soldiers and an unknown number of civilians and insurgents were killed. The verdict on Special Operations Forces in northern Iraq in 2003, nevertheless, must be that yet again a tiny, elite force—thanks to its versatility and intelligence as well as courage—had a strategic impact on the course of events. If, at times, too much was expected of Task Force Viking, that was no novelty either.