Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (13 page)

It is from this base that the Rivet Joint and JSTAR surveillance aircraft are launched, and it is home to the tanker jets that refuel them and the tactical fighters and long-range bombers sent over Iraq and Afghanistan for extended missions. It also is at the CAOC that a three-star Air Force general manages the precious number of Predator, Reaper, and Global Hawk surveillance drones available for orbits gathering vital intelligence in the skies over targets each day, such as those that found and figured out what the terrorist network was doing at Sinjar.

Lieutenant General Gary North, the CAOC commander from 2006 to 2009, during the run-up and execution of the Sinjar operation, said that the improvement in airborne surveillance in recent years, in particular the ability to capture and transmit full-motion video images in real time to help plan and guide combat missions, is like the transition “from the bow and arrow to the rifle.”

“It changed the focus of battle,” he said. “It is that entity which makes us, the coalition forces, able to have ‘persistent stare.’ And then tied to the platforms that now have full-motion video capability are weapons. We have deadly persistence.”

As he spoke in his command suite overlooking the giant digital maps and video monitors of the sprawling CAOC floor, at least a half-dozen Predators were feeding live video surveillance on locations where insurgents were believed to be preparing to plant roadside bombs across Iraq and Afghanistan. Other images were boring, showing nothing but mud huts surrounded by parked trucks, a few male figures moving about. Yet, sometimes it is the least interesting sequence of images watched for days on end that tells the most about the way forward in the counterterrorism effort. And it was exactly such usually boring images that led the military to Sinjar and helped guide the Special Operations mission that scooped up the “Al Qaeda Rolodex.”

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The Sinjar records, according to analysts charged with creating a public summary of the captured material, “offer an unrivaled insight into foreign fighters entering Iraq.” For the twelve months ending in August 2007, Saudi Arabia and Libya were the starting points for almost two-thirds of all foreigners who came to Iraq to take up arms against the Baghdad government and its American supporters, especially those who dreamed of serving as suicide bombers. Saudi Arabia, a vital partner in the post-9/11 global counterterrorism effort, was home to 41 percent of the would-be terrorists, and Libya was home to 19 percent. Syria and Yemen were each the birthplace of about 8 percent of the Al Qaeda recruits, followed by Algeria with 7 percent, Morocco with 6 percent, and Jordan with just under 2 percent. The average age of all the jihadists was between twenty-two and twenty-three, with the oldest being fifty-four and the youngest having just turned fifteen. About 40 percent of those who listed occupations said they were students, and there were handfuls of teachers, doctors, and engineers. Intelligence officers snickered when the translation came through that one jihadist said he had previously worked as a massage therapist.

“The fighters’ overall youth suggests that most of these individuals are first-time volunteers rather than veterans of previous Jihadi struggles,” stated an analysis of the documents prepared by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, a research organization that draws on the U.S. Military Academy’s scholarly and military resources. “The incitement of a new generation of Jihadis to join the fight in Iraq, or plan operations elsewhere, is one of the most worrisome aspects of the ongoing fight.” And the analysis warned the American leadership not to confuse gains against the franchise Al Qaeda units inside Iraq “as fundamental blows against the organization outside of Iraq. So long as al Qaida is able to attract hundreds of young men to join its ranks, it will remain a serious threat to global security.”

In a chilling list of career goals of the recruits, 56 percent said they had volunteered to be suicide bombers, far above the 42 percent who had expressed the goal of taking up combat arms as insurgent foot soldiers and had at least some prospects of living to fight another day. But countering this worrisome large percentage of those who chose martyrdom as their future was information in the documents that revealed holes in the terrorist recruiting network.

“The Sinjar records reinforce anecdotal accounts suggesting that Al Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliates rely on smugglers and criminals—rather than their own personnel—to funnel recruits into Iraq,” according to the West Point analysis. “Al Qaeda’s reliance on criminal and smuggling networks exposes it to the greed of mercenaries. In many cases, the United States should target work to destroy these networks, but the U.S. must remain flexible enough to recognize opportunities to co-opt, rather than simply annihilate, such systems.” It is a clear recognition that the corrosive effects of smuggling and organized crime are far less heinous than the effects of terrorism—and the trade-off to intelligence planners was obvious. The report suggests that “the U.S. may be able to use financial incentives and creative security guarantees to secure cooperation from some smugglers.”

Another data point pounced on by the intelligence community was the demographics of the recruits: Most of the jihadists entering Iraq from the Middle East and North Africa crossed from Syria as part of a group from their hometown, suggesting that Al Qaeda’s recruiting efforts operated, at varying degrees of effectiveness, in only a few cities. “For example in Libya, about fifty of the names came from a city on the eastern border,” said one counterterrorism expert who worked on the Sinjar project, referring to Darnah, Libya. “And we said, ‘What’s the deal here?’ And that’s the first time the Libyan government had seen that, and they said, ‘You know, I tell you what, we had problems there, too. We’ve brought troops in there twice before, for other reasons not necessarily tied to terrorism but it’s not necessarily an area that’s easy for us to control ourselves.’”

From the Libyan example, General McChrystal immediately realized the value of the documents, and he decided to break down a couple of walls. He believed that effective pressure could be mounted by sharing the information with the countries of origin for the jihadists—even those countries with which the United States had little or no alliance in the struggle. And, even more, he thought pages of the highly classified intelligence findings should be thrust into the very public marketplace of ideas to shape the international debate on terrorism. Across the military and intelligence community, General McChrystal was credited with commanding missions that captured and killed more of America’s adversaries than any other living officer. But his legacy in shifting the culture of handling intelligence is just as important. “Whoever finds the intel, owns the intel,” said one Special Operations commander who acknowledged that in past years there had been reluctance on the part of the military’s elite units to share its most valuable finds with conventional military units, let alone the civilian intelligence community. General McChrystal put an end to that.

“McChrystal said this is not something that should stay in the intelligence world,” said one senior official involved in the Sinjar effort. “This is too valuable. And if we wait for eight hundred leads to get run around the world, the full effect of this can’t necessarily be felt. So McChrystal did something that was very audacious and not very well received on the intelligence side. He said, ‘I’m going to declassify all of this, put it in “open source,” and we’re going to get this thing cooking.’ Rather than wait for the law enforcement community or the intelligence community to exploit this stuff, McChrystal ‘operationalized’ it immediately: He just put it out there in a blanket release.”

There was no precedent for declassifying such a large trove of classified intelligence materials seized by the most classified counterterrorism unit in the American military. Not only no precedent but no unit, function, or team for doing it. The task fell to the military’s Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base, specifically to one young and energetic noncommissioned officer and a naturalized Egyptian émigré—“a 9/11 patriot,” his friends called him—who sat side by side in two cubicles inside the command’s intelligence section. The project was officially referred to, by those with the requisite “need to know,” as Red Beard. (The team has since grown to add another linguist and a civilian analyst.)

But the new unit’s mission did not sit well at first with the troops in the field who had risked their lives to scoop up the intelligence in firefights and raids. “To do it, it involved dragging the shooters kicking and screaming,” said the military member of the Red Beard team who believed that the quiet spread of information about terrorist networks was a necessary tool in the special operator’s arsenal. “We need to educate our planners.”

The two men in those cubicles were given access to the DIA’s database of two million captured documents, files, passports, pocket litter, hard drives, and electronic files. But they focused specifically on eight hundred files from the Sinjar raid; translating, cross-referencing, and collating them took about two weeks. Overwhelmed by the volume of the material, the Red Beard team came up with the unusual plan to enlist West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center to analyze and publicize the find. “We did not have the bandwidth to do the study, so we used West Point for the academic side,” said the Red Beard analyst. “Within thirty days of giving it to West Point, we had a rough draft. Academics read better, tell a better story, and this was apparent in the report. We have had a shift in how we do intel reports since then. Captured material resonates in their community.”

As fate and the bureaucracy would have it, the government official given the task of leading the next phase of the larger Sinjar effort was a man who was fluent in the secret language of Special Operations and who had just moved on to lead the Bush administration’s diplomatic efforts to marshal other nations to the cause of striking back at terrorists. They still call him general, although he traded his camouflage combat uniform for the pinstripes of diplomacy, laying his three stars and sidearm on the table for a Blackberry and leather binder. Not exactly in from the cold, retired Lieutenant General Dell L. Dailey had come in from the “black” world of the military’s most top-secret Special Operations missions to be a key strategist in the growing effort to use American “soft power” of economic might, cultural influence, and democratic values to counter terrorism around the world. American movies, music, and lifestyle may remain popular throughout the Muslim world, the general knew from his decades of travel across the Middle East, but he also knew that American policies are decidedly not.

Born into a military family, General Dailey graduated from West Point in 1971 and served during the opening of the war in Afghanistan as the commander of the Joint Special Operations forces, including Delta and Navy SEAL Team Six, the nation’s most secret counterterrorism units. After earning his third star, Dailey was given the choice job of directing day-to-day operations for the military’s Special Operations Command before being named by the Bush administration as civilian point man for coordinating U.S. counterterrorism policies and programs with America’s allies on behalf of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

He brought military discipline to a State Department staff more comfortable with a work routine less structured than the armed forces, and a similar rigor to his diplomatic missions that routinely had him meeting senior counterterrorism officials around the globe at all hours of the night. Imposing in uniform and daunting in a suit—although you could miss him in civvies in a sports bar, since he looks like your favorite uncle—Dailey nonetheless could roll up his sleeves and lecture the Beltway leadership on the need to deal with complex terrorist threats using every instrument of national power—the economy, educational institutions, charitable organizations—not just the military. And he had learned through multiple deployments even before becoming a diplomat that it is important to pause and sip tea until dawn with Middle Eastern leaders. He may have preferred the company of defense ministry and intelligence types, but he also courted prime ministers and presidents.

General Dailey conducted exhaustive rounds of shuttle diplomacy as he circulated from December 2007 through the spring of 2008 among almost two dozen Middle Eastern and North African capitals to disclose—and exploit—the Sinjar findings. Many details of his marathon, closed-door negotiations remain secret, but members of the team that planned the effort and others who joined the delegation on the road described their work on condition that they never be identified publicly.

One member of the team recalled General Dailey’s opening pep talk for the mission. “I can’t walk into a country and say, ‘Stop foreign fighters,’” the general said. “I’ve got to have intelligence. And it can be sophisticated, open-source intelligence, or it can be raw classified intelligence, but for these folks to listen to me I’ve got to lay something on the table.” The Sinjar bonanza, which Dailey described to his aides as “super intelligence,” was tailor-made for his diplomatic offensive, which initially focused on the countries that had supplied most of the foreign fighters and suicide bombers to Iraq: Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and, in a startling destination for a former Special Operations commander, Libya. (He had hoped to visit Syria, but diplomatic tensions made this impossible. Even so, the Syrian government was given details of the Sinjar file through other channels.)

At each stop along the way, Dailey was going to break china and not care about turf or traditional arrangements for country-to-country talks, ordering that appointments be made not just with the usual local foreign-ministry types in each country, which were the protocol destinations on State Department visits, but also with ministries of defense and of interior—the military and state police—and with the local spymaster as well. Members of the team credited embassy personnel in each stop on the itinerary for understanding the importance of the mission and identifying key leaders in the local government for meetings. The composition of Dailey’s delegation was specifically designed to reflect the similar all-of-government nature of the American effort: His delegation included representatives from the State Department, the National Security Council, and the intelligence agencies as well as the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security. But it was the general-turned-ambassador who led the way. “This guy named Dailey would come in from the State Department bona fides in countries that recognize the horsepower of the State Department,” said one official in the delegation. “And we’d come in under his military/special ops bona fides in countries that recognized the military side. It was an ideal relation. We walked both sides of the street. When one door was closed, you use the other one.”