Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (10 page)

The enemy’s goal was not just to kill and maim American soldiers but also to imperil all traffic on Highway 1, known by the troops as MSR Tampa (Major Supply Route Tampa), which carried ammunition, food, fuel, and personnel through Flanders’s patrol area. The IED campaign was also meant to knock back the American military presence along the terror network’s own critical supply lines, coming from Syria and crossing the deserts of Anbar and Nineveh provinces, then pushing all the way through to Diyala Province and other terror and insurgent havens surrounding Baghdad, their ultimate prize.

A sunset-to-dawn curfew had done little to prevent the terrorists from planting IEDs. For two nights straight, Flanders and his soldiers of 1st Platoon, Delta Troop, had seen no traffic at all from their checkpoint, but the IEDs kept detonating—and kept killing. He bet he could get straight to the root of the problem. The enemy’s informal intelligence network was relaying the exact location as the Army set up its static traffic control roadblocks. “We have to ‘out-G’ the ‘G,’” Flanders decided and told his soldiers so. “We have to ‘out-guerrilla’ the guerrilla. The best way to do that is being unpredictable and not falling into a pattern set.” So Flanders ordered his roadblock force to hit the road, to operate as an all-night mobile checkpoint that might surprise anybody out past curfew but clever enough to try and skirt the stationary patrol posts.

Over the course of any tour of duty, missions blur together into a jumble of fragmentary memories, since a soldier’s life most days is the numbing routine of patrol, eat, patrol, exercise, patrol, sleep, shower, eat, patrol. Some missions end in victory, large or small; some end in great tragedy. And some, like Flanders’s operation of December 19, 2006, change the very course of a war, in this case the war against Al Qaeda in Iraq.

The convoy was moving west out of Taji on a narrow paved road just wider than a single Humvee. Flanders scanned the open terrain, the occasional clump of trees among thick reeds growing along canals separated from the roadway by a low berm. “We almost ran head-on into them,” Flanders said. “We caught them by surprise. And they caught us by surprise.” It was a dark Mercedes 300-series sedan, the vehicle of choice of Baathist diehards and the transportation adopted by the insurgent and terrorist network’s top officers. The Mercedes tried to pull a quick U-turn but was boxed in by the quartet of Humvees in front and the parallel berms that defined the narrow strip of pavement on both sides.

Flanders and the troops in his platoon jumped out of their Humvees, except for the soldiers operating the heavy machine guns poking out of the turrets on top. An Iraqi interpreter told the driver to step out of the Mercedes. The driver was in his midthirties, with a beard and black hair, wearing a jacket, an open-collared shirt, and dress pants. Flanders noted right away that the driver wouldn’t look him in the eye and was shuffling—nervous tics he had been taught to notice during his training for deployment to Iraq. “He was acting like we weren’t there,” Flanders said. The soldiers noticed two more things at once. That the driver had a large bulge under his shirt, and that there was a passenger in the backseat. They ordered the passenger to step out of the car. And that was when the driver made a run down the road and made ready to leap into the reeds. The soldiers on the ground raised their weapons and shouted; the machine gunners spun in their turrets.

Then came the red mist. “There was this explosion. A cloud. Red mist,” Flanders recalled. “He self-detonated. A suicide vest.” The soldiers could see individual body parts thrown in the air. As sometimes happens with suicide vests, shoes and shins still stood on the roadway, disconnected for eternity from their owner.

The soldiers pounced on the passenger, a man in his late thirties to forties, wearing a shirt and pants but no jacket, curly hair, and no beard. He said through the interpreter that he had been taken hostage by the local terrorist cell and was being held for ransom to subsidize the bombing network. He said the terrorists were going to kill him. He begged for help. Flanders noticed, however, that he wasn’t tied or gagged, but for the moment, his identity was not the big question. The soldiers knew terrorist standard operating procedures and feared the entire car was rigged with explosives. The passenger was moved a safe distance from the car and held at gunpoint. An explosive-ordnance disposal team was called, and it sent a small robot on wheels to check the car, which was clean.

It was then that Flanders and his soldiers were able to inspect the Mercedes, where they found a black satchel briefcase, a laptop computer, a half-dozen hard drives, smaller thumb drives, and sheaves of documents. Flanders had been trained not to boot up the computer; a favorite terrorist trick was to booby-trap their laptops with explosives in case they were seized and someone tried to turn them on without putting in a pass code. Even so, he was beginning to suspect that this was a major intelligence find. It was almost 2:00 a.m. as Flanders and his soldiers finished inspecting the car, photographing the seizure, turning the confiscated material over to the battalion intelligence officer, and passing the detainee to a medical team who would examine him before turning him over to Army interrogators.

The day after the sunset encounter with the dark Mercedes, Flanders told his soldiers it was time to get back out there and “out-G the G.” Another patrol, another mobile checkpoint. But over the next few months, they heard the rumors. Their detainee was a major Al Qaeda courier. He proved too well trained at countering interrogation techniques to be cracked even at the central “high-value detainee” facility in Iraq at Camp Cropper and eventually was separated from the run-of-the-mill detainees and sent for higher-level interrogation by the CIA. Their cache—the computer and drives—was a treasure trove of valuable data. Four-star generals were briefed on their find. Even the president knew about it. Or so the soldiers of 1st Platoon told themselves over a steady diet of PowerBars and Red Bull.

At the headquarters of the 1st Cavalry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, Colonel Paul E. Funk II, in command of Flanders’s unit, sat looking at the map of the huge area of responsibility he had inherited a month before. He had to exercise control over more than 350 square miles of Iraq, from Tarmiyah through Taji, around to the western deserts and down to Abu Ghraib. Every commander knew this was to be one of the lines of attack into Baghdad by the antigovernment forces. The IEDs told him that. But he had more to worry about. An Air Force F-16 had just gone down, and his troops were securing the area to ensure that its high technology was not scavenged. The intelligence bonanza secured by Flanders’s platoon was being examined; the brigade’s intelligence-exploitation teams had been poring over the maps, translating the documents, and cracking open the computer for about ten days. Their ace in the hole was an analytical team on loan from the National Security Agency, the nation’s premier electronic intelligence-espionage organization, but one that had never before assigned its experts down to the brigade level, where they get a fingertip sense of the threat in a combat zone. The analysis is painstakingly detailed work, carried out in the midst of a war.

Funk had already alerted his boss, the 1st Cavalry’s assistant division commander, Brigadier General John Campbell, who had come to the division by way of Army Special Forces and then a stint as executive officer to the Army’s chief of staff. Campbell was eager to move on the platoon’s find. He pushed the trove up to his commander, Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, in charge of the day-to-day fight as the top officer of Multinational Corps–Iraq. From there, it went to the intelligence community in Washington and back to Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. (The troops assigned there call the headquarters Tampa-stan.)

It took weeks to crack the computer and thumb drives and translate all the documents. It would have taken even longer, but the military headquarters in Baghdad was able to send digital files of all the data and images over a secure forty-megabyte transmission line that had been installed to connect a number of bases across Iraq and Afghanistan earlier that year. This was a major change in operations. “They did an initial triage and sensitive-site exploitation downrange—phones, e-mails, signatures for guys they knew to be emirs,” said a military intelligence officer who worked the trove. “There are automated systems for analyzing and exploiting cell phone numbers. Same with GPS and mini flash drives. We can get data off of anything.”

Another important change was in personnel. As the war in Iraq became more intelligence driven, the number of analysts assigned to the sensitive-site exploitation mission grew from a mere fifty in 2003 to four hundred by the time of the Taji coup at the end of 2006.

While senior military officers and intelligence officials say the working relationship between the troops and analysts is a good and productive one today, the pressure to find new and better ways for analysts to support the war-fighters produced an unanticipated clash of cultures in the early years of the Iraq War. When the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison was breaking in the spring of 2004, tensions were rising between the Special Operations troops and civilian interrogators and case officers from the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) Defense Human Intelligence Service at another secret detention facility in Iraq, Camp Nama. The dispute centered on the harsh treatment of detainees as well as restrictions the Special Operations troops placed on their civilian colleagues, which included monitoring their e-mail messages and phone calls. Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, the DIA’s director, wrote a two-page memo to Stephen Cambone, a close adviser to Secretary Rumsfeld, in which he described a series of complaints from DIA personnel. The most disturbing was a May 2004 incident in which a DIA interrogator said he witnessed soldiers punch a detainee hard enough to require medical attention. The DIA officer took photos of the injuries, but a supervisor confiscated them, Jacoby wrote.

The military-versus-civilians conflict could not be ignored. “These guys wanted results, and our debriefers were used to a civil environment,” said one Defense Department official who was briefed on the task-force operations, speaking of the soldiers. Within days after Admiral Jacoby sent his memo, the DIA took the extraordinary step of temporarily withdrawing its personnel from Camp Nama. Admiral Jacoby’s memo also provoked an angry reaction from Cambone. “Get to the bottom of this immediately. This is not acceptable,” Cambone said in a handwritten note on June 26, 2004, to his top deputy, Lieutenant General William G. Boykin. “In particular, I want to know if this is part of a pattern of behavior.”

John Tyson, the DIA’s top Al Qaeda tracker, recalls the painful birth of this new, intensive relationship between the intelligence community and the soldiers on the ground. “That was a situation where we were building the airplane as we were flying it,” he said. “It was anything but smooth sailing. After 9/11, we had our troops pouring into Afghanistan. These are guys we have worked with for several years. And, they need a lot of intel support. We had to create a mechanism, a process, product lines that supported them, that got to the finite level of detail they needed and that was timely enough for their requirements. That was one of the biggest changes immediately after 9/11.”

There had been spikes in tempo before, of course: The East Africa embassy bombings. The
Cole
. But as the military moved into the Afghanistan offensive, with bin Laden as their target, there were daily, hourly, even minute-by-minute demands for analysis and targets. “Literally you were talking to the guys who were going to be knocking down doors that night on whatever objective it was going to be,” Tyson recalls. “There was this learning process to the level of detail they needed, when they needed it, how we could get that level of detail in a product that was usable to them. So, there was this huge learning process going on as we were trying to support these operations. That was one of the biggest turning points for us.”

That was the intellectual part of DIA’s evolution. The other part, physical, was the physics of the process. “The other thing, which goes along with that, was then figuring out how to get your national-level analysts here, out to the field from here to support those operations,” Tyson said. “It is just critical to be actually tied to that operational unit. You just can’t do it from DC, and that is one of the lessons we took away: You just can’t do it from here.” Issue number one, he said, was getting traditionally desk-bound analysts into a mind-set that prepared them for going forward into these dangerous places. “We just hadn’t been asked to do it, and it wasn’t necessarily an expectation of someone coming into the agency at that time—like it is now,” said Tyson, who has deployed to the combat zone as often as many military personnel. “So, there was a lot of learning on all our parts, absolutely.” Issue number two was just exactly how do you do it? “How do you even equip an analyst to get out there? How do you get them out there? If they are on a military bird, do they need a visa for anyplace? All these little pieces that you had to get together,” Tyson said. “When they get out there, what are you going to do, when are they going to contribute, what is their connectivity going to be? So, immediately after 9/11, that was sort of one piece that was swirling.”

By the time of the Taji breakthrough in December 2006, those pieces were not swirling but were in place, and helped account for a big score.

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What was pulled out of the Taji trove was so valuable that one military officer compared it to the Allies’ success in breaking the Nazis’ Enigma codes during World War II. In that conflict, the operation at Bletchley Park in England enabled British and American commanders to read the Nazis’ operational orders for their land, sea, and air forces and to dispatch their own aircraft and ships to attack German troops and submarines. Intelligence helped win the day then, and was winning it again in Iraq. In advance of the Battle of Baghdad in 2007, the American commanders who were managing the successful deployment of the surge forces sent by President Bush would have the Taji cache to thank: They were given hand-drawn maps, one identified by intelligence officers as having been the work of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Some showed exactly what the terrorists knew about the location of American checkpoints. There was Google Earth imagery with Xs marking American forward operating bases and their perimeter defenses. And so much more.