Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (28 page)

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The more Rumsfeld learned about JSOC, the more he was drawn to the command. His first exposure to JSOC was the morning of March 27, 2001, when Dailey, Hall, and a couple of special mission unit senior enlisted personnel had given him and Wolfowitz an introductory briefing on the command in a Pentagon conference room. Rumsfeld's handlers had told the JSOC team they would have only twenty minutes with the secretary, but the meeting stretched to a couple of hours. “He had a bunch of questions and Wolfowitz had a bunch of questions,” said Hall, who added that much of the conversation revolved around the type of people who served in JSOC units. “It turned into a great capabilities brief.”

A few months later, Rumsfeld got a chance to witness some of those capabilities firsthand during a visit to Fort Bragg. On a warm, sunny November 21—the day after Franks had met with Mark Erwin and Gary Berntsen in Bagram—the defense secretary visited the Delta compound to take in a stage-managed JSOC “capabilities exercise”—a demonstration designed to impress visiting dignitaries. Delta operators typically viewed these exercises as “a pain in the ass,” because they robbed the unit of precious training time, according to then Major Tom Greer, whose A1 troop was responsible for the show that day. But this time was different. The nation was at war and the man who signed off on every combat deployment had appeared on Delta's doorstep. “We wanted to impress the hell out of Rumsfeld,” Greer wrote in his memoir,
Kill Bin Laden,
which he published under the pen name Dalton Fury. In this respect, the exercise was an unqualified success.

The visit began with Delta operators portraying terrorists “ambushing” the bus carrying Rumsfeld and his party, before more operators—playing themselves—stormed the bus and “rescued” the VIPs. (To Rumsfeld and most of his party, the “ambush” was a complete surprise. In on the secret were the secretary's bodyguards—to ensure they didn't pull their weapons and fire real bullets to defend him—and an individual with a heart condition.)

Shadowed by Holland, Doug Brown—now a lieutenant general and head of Army Special Operations Command—and Air Force Brigadier General Greg Trebon, JSOC's deputy commander and the host for the JSOC portion of the trip, Rumsfeld toured displays and watched a demonstration of “super marksmanship with .50 caliber sniper rifles,” said Andrews, who accompanied Rumsfeld on the trip. “Essentially it was a Delta show,” as Andrews put it, but the other JSOC units got to showcase their abilities. In Team 6's case, this included a demonstration of the unit's HALO freefall technique, which the Navy operators regarded as one of their specialties. “These guys put on a parachute infiltration of a single agent into an area, where he skydives out at high altitude, lands, jumps out of his jumpsuit, and has a business suit on and a briefcase and walks down the street,” Andrews said. This impressed Rumsfeld, as did a live-fire hostage rescue scenario in a shoot-house.

The JSOC visit ran long, just like the Pentagon briefing in March, cutting into time set aside for a visit to Army Special Operations Command. The JSOC hosts “liked to cheat … [and] were deliberately taking more time than they were” allotted, another Rumsfeld aide said. But the tactic paid off. About an hour into the trip, Rumsfeld spoke to Greer, the main briefer. “What we really need is small groups of folks, say two to four people, that can go anywhere in the world and execute discreet missions against these people [i.e., Al Qaeda],” he told the Delta officer. In his book, Greer relates how “shocked” he was that Rumsfeld seemed ignorant of the fact that his desired capability had existed in Delta “for many years.” The special operations brass at the exercise quickly reassured Rumsfeld that he already had a force that could do what he had just described.

The visit was a critical inflection point in how Rumsfeld perceived JSOC and its potential role in the forthcoming campaign. “He probably would have stayed there forever if I had let him,” said the second Rumsfeld aide. “I had to finally pry him out of there. But he was very intrigued by the capabilities [and] by the quality of the people that they had doing this stuff.… They got their money's worth out of the dog-and-pony show.” As Andrews said, “It was enough for him to say, ‘This is where I want to put my money, this is where I want to invest some effort.'”
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But despite—or perhaps because of—his repeated exposure to briefings on the high-end counterterrorism that was JSOC's forte, Rumsfeld's understanding of special operations remained superficial and unbalanced. He did not recognize the value of unconventional warfare and foreign internal defense (helping an ally defeat an insurgency), which were the specialties of Special Forces as well as SOCOM's psychological operations and civil affairs units. To Rumsfeld, the value of special operations lay only in the spooky and lethal activities JSOC exemplified, not in training foreign militaries or standing up local militias.
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“There were some things that Rumsfeld said and did that indicated that we, his staff, had not fully and well explained to him the nature of special operations forces,” said Andrews, a former Special Forces officer. “He didn't understand and we didn't try to beat into him an appreciation of counterinsurgency as foreign internal defense, UW [unconventional warfare], the ‘white' stuff.”

“Rumsfeld … didn't care about setting up networks, he didn't care about establishing forward operating bases, he didn't want to hear all that shit,” said a Special Forces officer who briefed the secretary frequently. “He just wanted a way for bodies to show up.” The result was Rumsfeld's almost blind faith in JSOC. “He didn't truly understand us, but he trusted us,” Hall said.

JSOC's administrative chain of command ran through Holland to Rumsfeld. But the SOCOM commander's reluctance to take control meant JSOC became “almost an independent military force for Rumsfeld,” said a senior Joint Staff officer. Above Rumsfeld, there was only one more link on the chain of command: the president. For JSOC, therefore, a whole set of circumstances had fallen into place serendipitously: the emergence of a global terrorist threat; a defense secretary frustrated with the conventional military's business-as-usual mind-set and drawn to what he perceived as the more decisive and innovative approach of special operations forces; and an action-oriented president heavily influenced by a vice president infatuated with covert operations. After years spent honing its skills with the help of steadily climbing budgets, JSOC's rocket was on the launch pad. The stage was set for liftoff.

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In the late afternoon of October 30, 2001, the Defense Department's most senior military and civilian officials gathered in Rumsfeld's conference room for a Joint Staff briefing on how to expand the war against Al Qaeda beyond Afghanistan. The briefers were Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem, the Joint Staff's deputy director for global operations, and Colonel Jeff Schloesser, a former commander of the 160th's 1st Battalion who had just taken charge of a new Joint Staff planning cell for the “war on terror.”

The briefing quickly bogged down in a debate over the definitions of terms like “defeat” and “destroy.” Rumsfeld, who seemed to exist in a perpetual state of impatient frustration, made clear his dissatisfaction with what he saw as the glacial pace of the military's efforts to widen the war. “There is no need to wait until after Afghanistan is complete,” he said. “As I've said a hundred times already, I would dearly love to attack in another AOR [area of responsibility] now.” The rest of the briefing fell flat and Rumsfeld rose to take a call from the president. “I could have written this briefing myself,” he said as he exited.
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Rumsfeld had gotten his point across. From that point on, “we became much more expansive,” said a Joint Staff source. “At that point I fully understood—and I think so did all the other senior military leaders—what he was trying to get at.” But as the secretary had learned from Holland's September 24 briefing, there were legal and practical hurdles to overcome before he could dispatch special operators around the globe to attack terrorist targets on a moment's notice.

Nested in the Joint Staff's strategic plans and policy directorate, Schloesser and his small staff held a series of video-teleconferences with the regional commanders-in-chief. The upshot of those discussions was the discovery that the military lacked the legal authorities to deploy forces into the countries about which it was most concerned: Yemen, Somalia, Kenya, Sudan, Pakistan, Iran, Georgia, the Philippines, and South America's tri-border area (where Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil meet). In some cases, particularly Yemen and the Horn of Africa countries, these were places to which the military feared Al Qaeda leaders and their forces might flee as they lost their Afghan sanctuary. “We don't really understand that Pakistan's going to become quite the safe haven that it actually proves to be,” said a Joint Staff officer. “Everybody's thinking that bin Laden, Zawahiri, and everybody else is going to move out and that they're going to move fairly freely.”

While Pentagon staffers worked feverishly to get special operations forces—which usually meant JSOC elements—the authorities they needed to operate in these countries, the Defense Department issued a series of what the military called “execute orders” allowing the regional commanders-in-chief to take certain steps within their areas of responsibility.

On December 1, Schloesser gave a briefing to Rumsfeld titled “Next Steps in the War on Terrorism” that laid out a series of options for where to take the war next. These included “maritime interdiction operations” (boarding, searching and seizing, or destroying ships) in the Mediterranean and off the Horn of Africa; operations to deny terrorists safe haven in Somalia; missions to disrupt Islamist terrorist logistics in Bosnia and Kosovo; helping the Philippine armed forces defeat the Abu Sayyaf Group; and actions in Yemen and Sudan.

Much of the discussion concerned the Army of Northern Virginia, the intelligence and advance force operations unit. “In all these areas there are some preparatory operations that would have to be done,” said a source who attended the briefing. Much of that work—advance force operations on steroids—was the Army of Northern Virginia's responsibility.

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Over the course of the next year, the Joint Staff worked on three major interconnected initiatives that combined would go a long way toward empowering JSOC for the campaign ahead: gaining JSOC the (U.S.) legal authority to operate in specific countries; giving the command the authority and the resources to target the Al Qaeda senior leadership; and creating an intra-governmental system to enable “time-sensitive planning” so that if the intelligence community or JSOC located a high-value target, the government could get a decision brief to the president fast enough for him to approve a mission to capture or kill that person before the target moved beyond reach.

All these came together in a document known as the Al Qaeda Senior Leadership Execute Order, or AQSL ExOrd. The ExOrd originated with an order from the Joint Staff's director of strategic plans and policy, Army Lieutenant General George Casey, to Schloesser to spend the weekend of June 29–30, 2002, developing a plan to capture or kill Al Qaeda's two top leaders—bin Laden and Zawahiri—and seven other senior figures in the group.

A Joint Staff officer deeply involved in the staff work described the strategy as “cutting off the head of the snake.” During that first year after the September 11 attacks, Schloesser's planning cell, in concert with the Joint Staff's operations and intelligence directorates, was “trying to understand how do you defeat an organism or a network,” the officer said. “First of all we said, ‘Hey, we can do it by [eliminating] leadership.'” That approach, so enticing to policymakers because it seemed to offer a neat and relatively cheap solution to the intractable global problem of violent anti-Western Islamism, also perfectly matched JSOC's skill set, something not lost on Rumsfeld.

On July 1, 2002, the defense secretary sent a memo to Feith, titled “Manhunts.” “How do we organize the Department of Defense for manhunts?” the memo asked. “We are obviously not well organized at the present time.” The memo reflected a critical moment for Rumsfeld and JSOC, according to Andrews. “Once he fastened on the manhunt thing, he looked at that as the silver bullet against terrorism and he built a unit [JSOC] that can do manhunts,” he said. With Dailey already aware of the secretary's interest in this approach, Joint Special Operations Command was also rewiring itself for manhunts. When Jim Reese returned from Afghanistan that spring Dailey sent him to Israel to speak to officials there about their experiences with man-hunting, and in particular the years-long effort to track down and kill the Palestinian Black September terrorists who murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. What JSOC came to realize, according to an officer at the command, was that effective man-hunting required both military capability and legal authorities. “If you have the authorities to do things, and then the capability, look out,” he said. “It's all about authorities and capability.”

The next several years would prove that a so-called decapitation approach to counterterrorism was no silver bullet, but in the spring and summer of 2002 its limitations were far from clear. “Eventually you'll find that we got that partly wrong,” the Joint Staff officer said. “We understand that fairly fast, but AQSL has a life of its own.”

The formula was known as “two-plus-seven” but in reality it quickly expanded to “two-plus-seven-plus-thirty,” best envisioned as a series of concentric circles with bin Laden and Zawahiri in the bull's-eye. The ring around them consisted of seven key Al Qaeda facilitators, surrounded by an outer ring of thirty slightly less senior but still important Al Qaeda operatives. Schloesser's strategic planning cell and the Joint Staff intelligence directorate maintained the list. As one of the seven was captured or killed, the next in line from the outer thirty would take his place in the diagram. “Eventually, I think essentially almost all of them are captured or killed,” said the Joint Staff officer. “And so they change out.”