Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (18 page)

General David Petraeus, installed as military supremo in Iraq during the last year of the Bush presidency, adopted a classic Special Forces technique, refined by the British during their war in Oman, 1970–1976, to turn the tide. He bought out the Sunni opposition. He did so by inventing local groups of “concerned local citizens,” paying them and giving them authority to protect their neighborhoods. It is likely that much of the strategy was inspired by Petraeus’s SAS deputy, the Scottish General Graeme Lamb. (As Colonel Kurt Pinkerton, commanding 2/5 Cavalry Regiment, said of his experience in Baghdad: “When I first got here, a sheikh told me that anyone wearing my uniform deserves to be shot. Then after General Lamb approached community leaders who said they were prepared to do something, this same guy is thanking me for my persistence.”)

Two other factors were vital if this hearts-and-minds strategy was to work. First, there was the brutality of the self-styled local al Qaeda against their hosts, alienating local people. Equally important was a surge in military force, agreed to by President Bush on 10 January 2007, of up to 30,000 more troops. Terrorist car bombs, averaging forty-two a month in Baghdad in the summer of 2006, dropped to twenty-three by September 2007. In Oman, the British had armed their recent enemy with the latest self-loading rifle. In Iraq, no weapons were handed out, but the men signing up to join the new militias, sometimes called “Awakening Councils,” had plenty of those. In the disordered economy of Iraq, they needed dollars. At first, the U.S. taxpayer provided each man with $130 to $300 per month. Later, when the Iraq government took over, the pay evaporated, leaving the door open to a return by the dissidents.

Nevertheless, by the summer of 2009, the situation in much of Iraq had stabilized sufficiently for the U.S. Army to withdraw street patrols and for President Obama to propose an entire withdrawal from the country by December 2011. While the Iraq government presented this as a victory over America, many local people feared that once the foreign soldiers disappeared, the nightmare of a
de facto
civil war, accompanied by ethnic cleansing, would return. It would be surprising, however, if agents from the CIA’s Special Activities Division and the U.K.’s MI6 did not maintain their street knowledge by one means or another. The U.S.-Iraqi agreement permitted the Pentagon to continue unspecified military operations, if necessary.

In 2007, well before the end of operations in Iraq, General Barry McCaffrey, an adjunct professor at West Point, reported that the SF elite there was “simply magic…. Deadly in getting their target—with normally zero collateral damage—and with minimal friendly losses or injuries. Some of these assault elements have done 200 to 300 ‘takedown’ operations at platoon level. The comprehensive intelligence system is phenomenal. We need to rethink how we view these forces. They are a national strategic system akin to a B1 [Stealth] bomber.”

This was not the whole picture. The Special Forces culture also included an American (and possibly even Israeli) trained Iraqi Counterterrorism Bureau, a stand-alone entity distinct from Baghdad’s armed forces and the police. By April 2008 the Iraq Special Operations Force, ISOF, had 3,709 trained warriors. According to Shane Bauer, an Arabic-speaking freelance journalist based in the Middle East, an eight-man team from ISOF raided a house in Sadr City, Baghdad’s rundown Shiite district, during a drive against the Mahdi Army. They smashed their way into the home of Hassan Mahsan, a police officer, accusing him of terrorist links.

“The men didn’t move like any Iraqi forces he’d ever seen. They looked and spoke like his fellow countrymen but they were wearing American-style uniforms and carrying American weapons with night-vision scopes. They accused him of being a commander in the local militia, the Mahdi Army, before they dragged him off, telling his wife he was ‘finished.’ But before they left, they identified themselves. ‘We are the Special Forces. The dirty brigade,’ Hassan recalls them saying.”
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There was one other deeply clandestine Special Forces priority during the allied occupation of Iraq. This was the movement of enemy guerrillas and terrorists across Iraq’s borders with Iran and Syria. By their very nature, such operations are, or should be, invisible. But the motivation and political architecture were present to make such cross-border operations at least credible. For a start, many of the Improvised Explosive Devices used to kill and maim American and British soldiers on Iraqi roads were anything but improvised. They were factory-made anti-tank missiles, probably in Iran, and supplied to their co-religionists in the Mahdi Army. Interdicting those supplies would be a natural function of Special Forces assisted by the CIA’s Special Activities Division.

U.S. and U.K. Special Forces could rely on knowledgeable allies in the Kurdish north of Iraq, to cross back and forth across Iran’s exposed border in that area. On their own account, Kurdish guerrillas belonging to the PJAK (Party of Free Life in Pakistan) clashed repeatedly with Iranian security forces from 2004 onward. Links with U.S. or U.K. Special Forces, however, would need to be more than usually “black.” The Obama administration declared the group a terrorist organization in 2009, forbidding contact between PJAK and U.S. citizens. This was in line with Obama’s “extended hand” policy toward Iran at the time.

When 132,000 U.S. soldiers were withdrawn from the crowded, jostling streets of the country’s urban areas on 30 June 2009, the Baghdad government declared a national holiday to celebrate a great victory, but feelings about the transfer of security were mixed on both sides. A total of 4,321 American soldiers, 179 Brits, and many thousands of Iraqis were dead. The fault lines of Iraq’s disordered social architecture splintered into four separate, polarized entities subdivided into clan loyalties and criminal fraternities, all driven by anger and fear. More blood flowed. During the last ten days of Coalition presence on the streets, more than 250 people, most of them civilians, were murdered by terrorists. By October 2009, the insurgency was still killing 300 people each month, a reduction of 90 per cent on the previous year. But on the countdown to Iraq’s election in 2010, the bombers were back. A truck and a car carrying bombs were driven undetected through a series of checkpoints manned by Iraqi security forces to kill 155 people, injure another 500, and destroy three government buildings in the capital.

The U.S. withdrawal from the streets of Iraq was far from being as ignominious as the last helicopter out of Saigon, or the British surrender to the militias at Basra, or the British retreat from Palestine. Indeed, after the double bomb attack in Baghdad on 25 October, the question in many Iraqi minds was whether it was a good idea to say farewell to American protection. A majority of Iraqis were more than satisfied with Pax Americana. They now wanted it to work. As one close observer in Baghdad noted, the more violent Iraq became, the harder it would be to justify a full U.S. withdrawal in 2011.

If regular, conventional U.S. soldiers were not to return to restore order and hold the line for an indefinite period, then the obvious Special Operations remedy would be Iraq’s own, U.S.-trained Special Forces supported by American intelligence to arrange—who knows?—a return to the Phoenix Program? After extraordinary rendition, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo, it would probably be a step too far for most Americans, and their friends, to accept. It would assuredly need to be more scientific, more accurate, and more plausibly deniable than America’s earlier assassination agendas. The name of Fidel Castro comes to mind. History looms like Nemesis over such notions. During the Algerian War of the 1950s, the French Foreign Legion achieved a military victory over terrorism in Algiers by torturing terrorists. The French Army lost their war politically and morally, back home in Paris, when the news got out, as it usually does.

CHAPTER 4

CLOAK-AND-DAGGER DONS THE GREEN BERET

T
he story of America’s thirty-year military campaign in Afghanistan, led by Special Forces and the CIA, has been one of expediency camouflaged as strategy, from the destabilization of a Soviet client ruler and arming mujahideen guerrillas in the 1970s so as to draw the Russians into “their own Vietnam” (Zbigniew Brzezinksi) to the mutating strategies—none convincing as yet—addressing the Islamist threat; from the moral certainties of Charlie Wilson’s war against the Soviets to the carefully limited commitment of President Obama; from eight wasted years of military inconsistency after 2001, to the search for political legitimacy in Kabul thereafter; from the canonization of Hamid Karzai (“a future national leader who could unite the disparate ethnic factions,” according to General Tommy Franks) to Karzai’s diminished status as just another mediocre politician; from the spread of drug dependency as a weapon against Russian soldiers to the demonization of poppy barons now placed on a U.S. death list…the meandering policies continued as American casualties mounted.

By 2014, according to one expert analysis by Deloitte, the figure could reach 5,400 including 927 killed, but not including 300,000 military victims of post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans of this conflict if—and it was a big if—American boots were still on Afghan soil by 2014. By way of comparison, the Red Army during its nine-year occupation lost 14,427 men killed augmented by 576 KGB dead. The financial cost of the war to the U.S., by the fall of 2009, was running at $3.6 billion per month.

It did not have to be like this. In 2001, following the 9/11 assault on America, an initiative led by a handful of Green Beret Special Forces and CIA operators gave the West effective control of Afghanistan. But then, in an exercise of monumental hubris immortalized by the phrase “Mission Accomplished!” America and Britain turned their attention away from nation-building in Afghanistan and their guns on Iraq. When Obama took office in January 2009, as he points out, “We had just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan, compared to 160,000 in Iraq at the peak of the war.” Along the way, much of Pakistan was also radicalized in the madrassas of Quetta. Benazir Bhutto was assassinated and her country plunged into its own dark night of the soul. Secret contingency plans were made in the Pentagon to deal with Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, should that be compromised.

In “Af-Pak,” a shorthand name for this now-complex geopolitical problem, the war could not be won by military means alone. Nor could it be won without military muscle. Militarily, Obama switched budget priorities and military command toward Special Forces. Politically, he banged together two heads of state: Afghanistan’s fleet-footed, sinuous Hamid Karzai and Pakistan’s money-grubbing Asif Ali (“Mr Ten Per Cent”) Zardari, in an effort to plug the gap through which Taliban and al Qaeda warriors were able to attack Western forces and then back off, with impunity, to fight another day. A medallion of generals on both sides of the Atlantic lined up to declare that the war was not being won and, possibly, might never be. It could be that the West might have to think the unthinkable and settle for what a British minister (Reginald Maudling) proposed during the thirty-year Irish insurgency: “A tolerable level of violence.” In that case, it might succeed in keeping Islamist terror on the back foot until, like the Provisional IRA, this enemy also tired of an unwinnable war of attrition and settled for the best deal it could get.

The new strategy, placing imaginative, lateral thinking at the heart of military policy, was most dramatically expressed with the removal from office of America’s military commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, in May 2009. McKiernan, a distinguished soldier with a background in conventional warfare, was replaced by Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, a Special Forces veteran with a proven track record in Iraq. The new administration introduced a political rottweiler into the diplomatic arena in the form of Richard Holbrooke. During the Balkan wars in 1995, Holbrooke revealed how the Serb army was defeated by the Croats, with American help. He said: “We hired these guys [the Croats] to be our junkyard dogs because we were desperate. We need to ‘control’ them. But this is no time to get squeamish…. That is essential for us to get stability, sowe can get out.”
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The reconstruction of all U.S. Special Forces including those controlled by the Pentagon following 9/11 rolled through the defense budget before and after Obama’s inauguration. As Obama pointed out in his West Point speech of 2 December 2009: “By the time I took office the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan approached a trillion dollars. Our new approach in Afghanistan is likely to cost us roughly $30 billion for the military this year.” Special Operations Forces, once the little brother of U.S. defense, had already emerged as the main actor in a new, asymmetric style of conflict demanding a realignment of planning priorities and budgets. In November 2007, Michael G. Vickers, a former Green Beret NCO and CIA paramilitary officer who rose to become Special Forces supremo under President Bush, revealed that funds allocated to Special Operations Command had doubled to $6 billion for 2008, while its strength was to increase from 54,000 to 67,000 by 2011.
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Todd Harrison, an expert on military budgets, confirmed in May 2009 that the winners in President Obama’s $534 billion core defense budget for FY 2010 “are Special Forces and programs that are designed to help fight irregular wars.” Marching in step, the U.K.’s Defence Minister announced that “the next decade must see a major rebalancing of our armed forces toward Special Forces in response to the new threats.” Britain and America, he said, were conducting an urgent joint analysis to identify how their armed forces could best work together.
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Even before Obama took office, in spite of anxieties about constitutional niceties, the clear separation of duties, roles, and powers between the CIA’s front line Special Activities Division and the Special Forces of the U.S. Navy, Marines, Army, and Air Force was largely eradicated by the brutal realities of GWOT, the Global War On Terror. Which element within the USA—CIA or military Special Operations Command (SOCOM), an entity independent of other services—would ultimately dominate the irregular warfare empire was unclear. The rivalry continues. In 2004, the main arm of the Army’s Special Force team, the Green Berets, claimed that it could do better than the CIA in running agents in contested areas. At Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, it opened an advanced intelligence course resembling the CIA’s Camp Peary (“The Farm”) near Williamsburg, VA. The thinking blades of the Agency, an organization which recruits, almost exclusively, university graduates, were also looking at the options when, in 2005, following the intelligence failures preceding the Iraq War, a shiny new organism emerged to coordinate clandestine activities and, in effect, swallow up the Agency’s entire Directorate of Operations. This included the agent-running and covert warfare Special Activities Division and its sub-unit, the paramilitary Special Operations Group, a child of the Vietnam conflict. The new organism was called the National Clandestine Service.

In a press release, Intelligence supremo John D. Negroponte and the CIA Director, Porter J. Goss, said that the takeover “reflects the thinking of some the most seasoned veterans in human intelligence collection, men and women with decades of experience in the field.” It also “represents a grant of trust and an expression of confidence in CIA from the President, the Director of National Intelligence (Negroponte) and our partners throughout government.”
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The statement made much of coordinated Humint operations. It said nothing about the covert war-fighting activities of the Agency’s Special Activities Division.

The de facto coalition of Army/Agency guerrillas had not gone unnoticed elsewhere. In 2002 a U.S. Army lawyer, Colonel Kathryn Stone, was working on an analysis of the implications of “employing CIA operatives in a warfighting role alongside Special Operations Forces.”
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Taking 9/11/2001 as her starting point, she noted that President Bush, backed by Congress, ordered the CIA to “use all necessary means” to destroy Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. The focus of U.S. paramilitary operations at this time was Afghanistan, identified as al Qaeda’s training ground. The distraction of Iraq did not occur until two years later.

Stone correctly asserts that a small number of CIA operators had been on the ground in Afghanistan since September 1999, supporting anti-Taliban warlords in the Northern Alliance such as the Afghan-Uzbek Abdul Rashid Dostum, in a non-combat role. The pioneers included a former Marine captain and CIA operator named Johnny (Mike) Spann. A handsome, boyish all-American hero, he was destined to be the first American to die after the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan in 2001. Before 9/11, the assistance Spann and his colleague Dave Tyson could offer to their local allies usually amounted to intelligence derived from America’s satellite and electronic spy systems, tactical advice, better communications, and money.

In practice, the Agency had been covertly fishing in the troubled waters of the region for much longer, certainly for months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. The CIA’s most experienced field operator in Afghanistan, Gary C. Schroen, had been involved in that country’s affairs since 1978.
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By 30 March 1979 Under Secretary of Defense Walter Slocombe, thinking aloud at a meeting of the National Security Council, wondered whether “there is value in keeping the Afghan insurgency going, ‘sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire.’”
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On 3 July that year, President Jimmy Carter ordered the CIA to start secret operations to undermine Russia’s puppet regime in Kabul. Zbigniew Brzezinksi, Carter’s National Security Adviser, in an interview with a French journal, later revealed that Carter’s strategic objective was “to draw the Soviets into the Afghan trap…. Their own Vietnam War.”
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The chief strategist for this indirect war on Russia was probably Michael G. Vickers.

On behalf of America, British SF teams, including members of the Special Boat Squadron (Royal Marine Commandos, the U.K.’s SEALs) and deniable ex-SAS men working for a military company known as KMS were covertly training friendly mujahideen from 1979. In 1982, twenty potential leaders among these guerrillas, members of Ahmed Shah Masood’s Northern Alliance, were trained by the SAS at privately owned estates in Britain and Oman. One of the most successful British operators in this deniable campaign was Richard Adamson, an SBS instructor at the U.K.’s Commando Training Centre, posted to Iran in the early 1970s to set up a commando school for the Shah’s government. For this assignment he learned Farsi, then Pashto. When the Shah was overthrown 1979, Adamson escaped from Iran and was chosen by Prime Minister Thatcher to join an undercover team in Afghanistan training mujahideen to fire U.S. Stinger missiles. Working subsequently for a private military company, he was a hostage in Somalia, survived that, and returned to Kabul after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. He was murdered by gangsters in Kabul in 2007.

Limited by the doctrine of plausible deniability in the early eighties, the CIA increasingly turned to British Special Forces veterans. In London in 1982, two SAS veterans were invited to meet a team from the Agency, which wanted unattributable advice: a battle plan for an attack on a Soviet air base in Afghanistan. The Brits, one of whom was a long-serving sergeant-major named Ken Connor, studied reconnaissance photographs of 24 MiG-21 aircraft, parked in a line. They wrote a detailed plan of action itemizing untraceable plastic explosive, weight to carry, time to target, entry and exit methods, and force requirements. A month later, the CIA team contacted Connor again and showed him photographs of the same air strip. The MiGs were still there, but their backs had been broken as if a scimitar had sliced through them.
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In July 1983, working on behalf of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a five-man British team infiltrated Afghanistan from Peshawar. Their controller was the British Secret Intelligence Service head of station on the Pakistan border. Unwisely, they carried electronic eavesdropping equipment supplied by the U.S. National Security Agency, NSA. They had been operating for three months when they were detected and hunted down. Radio Kabul identified them by their
noms-de-guerre
as Stuart Bodman, who was shot dead during the pursuit, Roderick Macginnis, Stephen Elwick, and three others known only as “Tim,” “Chris,” and “Phil.” Their fate remains unknown. The U.K. government denied all knowledge of the team, who carried false passports.

From the mid-eighties, U.S. Green Beret soldiers were cleared to enter Afghanistan. They spent seven months there on a CIA-led mission. Following 9/11 and Bush’s declaration to use all necessary means, CIA paramilitary operators entered Afghanistan on 26 September 2001 ahead of the Army’s Special Operations Forces teams. They included Gary C. Schroen, the CIA’s most experienced Afghanistan hand. During the anti-Soviet campaign, he had gone alone into the country, carrying bags full of dollars to encourage resistance leaders and warlords to participate in the West’s version of jihad. They included Ahmed Shah Masood. Two days before 9/11, Masood was assassinated by agents of Osama bin Laden. Schroen had known Masood well. The CIA veteran was now expected to establish working relations, neglected after the Soviet withdrawal in February 1989, with Masood’s successors.

Aged 59, deferring his retirement, Schroen was accompanied by seven other CIA veterans including, according to some sources, the redoubtable Billy Waugh, a soldier from 1948 until 1972 and member of the Agency’s Special Activities Division from 1962. In September 2001, Waugh was aged 71 and still battle-fit. The team’s orders included the instruction: “Your job is to capture bin Laden, kill him and bring his head back in a box full of dry ice.”
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For some of them, it was their most dangerous assignment. They updated their wills before they set off.