Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (30 page)

Team 6 was also providing Hamid Karzai's security detail in Afghanistan, a topic that came up during an October 10, 2002, Pentagon briefing by Bargewell to Rumsfeld that Holland, Franks, Myers, Pace, and Dailey all attended. A partial solution to the strain JSOC was under could be achieved simply by pulling some JSOC elements out of Task Force 11 (the renamed TF Sword) if higher-priority missions presented themselves, Rumsfeld said. The discussion then turned to JSOC's 0300 counterterrorism response mission. Despite his previous briefings on JSOC's mission set, Rumsfeld seemed confused about 0300's purpose. “Bargewell spent a fair amount of time giving him an explanation,” as well as articulating SOCOM's view of why a highly classified strategic reconnaissance mission in Indonesia for which Pacific Command had requested JSOC forces was not an appropriate mission for the elite operators, said an officer who was in the room.

Not for the first time, Rumsfeld also inquired after the Army of Northern Virginia, referring to the unit by its latest code name. “Has anyone really got Gray Fox involved in the GWOT?” he asked, using the acronym for the “global war on terror.” “Yes,” Holland replied. “They'll start next week.”
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The secret unit had, of course, already been heavily involved in Afghanistan, but Rumsfeld was concerned that the unique unit had not been committed to the wider war the United States was now waging around the world. The fact that Holland was replying at all to this question was an indication that things were changing for the unit. Although manned by a mix of special operations and intelligence personnel, the Army of Northern Virginia fell under the Army's Intelligence and Security Command for administrative purposes and was considered a strategic asset of the U.S. military. But if Rumsfeld and his aides had learned anything during the previous year, it was that the “war on terror” would place a premium on intelligence, particularly signals and human intelligence, the specialties of the Fort Belvoir unit, which had a squadron dedicated to each discipline. Rumsfeld wanted the unit where he felt it could be most effective in the new fight, and that was under SOCOM, where they could work more closely with JSOC. (Up to that point, although the Army of Northern Virginia sometimes supported JSOC missions, it also performed other non-JSOC tasks for the regional commanders-in-chief.)
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The defense secretary had secured an agreement by early fall 2002 from the CIA's McLaughlin under which small special operations teams could enter countries where the United States was not at war “and work essentially for the chief of station,” said a source in the room when the deal was made. The Army of Northern Virginia's operatives would be perfect for such missions.

A debate ensued over whether to assign the unit directly to JSOC. Those against such a move argued that the unit needed to be kept focused on strategic targets, rather than the tactical ones that often occupied JSOC. Four courses of action were considered: to keep the unit under Intelligence and Security Command; to move it under the Joint Staff's direct control; to assign it to SOCOM with SOCOM retaining operational control; and to assign it administratively to SOCOM but with operational control given to JSOC. On December 9, 2002, over the Army's wishes, Rumsfeld chose the fourth option.
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However, it took the military bureaucracy until 2004 to make the shift.
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As the unit came under JSOC's control, it gained its own color name: Task Force Orange. Most JSOC personnel soon referred to the unit as “TFO” or “Orange.”

*   *   *

It was mid-January 2003 and Dave Schroer was standing before Rumsfeld and the senior brass in the Pentagon. A couple of days earlier, Schloesser had told Schroer to prepare a briefing requested by the secretary on the implications for JSOC's contribution to the “global war on terror” if the United States invaded Iraq, and to recommend how to prosecute the global war if such an invasion occurred. Based on what Schloesser told him, Schroer designed his briefing to answer the question, “Can we do Iraq and continue the GWOT?”

Schroer looked out at a sea of faces that belonged to the most powerful men in the Defense Department: Rumsfeld; Wolfowitz, who had been aggressively advocating a war to topple Saddam Hussein; the Joint Chiefs; the heads of the Joint Staff's directorates; Doug Brown, now the deputy SOCOM commander; Bargewell; and Air Force Lieutenant General Victor “Gene” Renuart, CENTCOM director of operations, among others. Schroer described how the campaign would look if it proceeded on its current trajectory. He noted that there were about half a dozen “forward operating locations” that special operations forces were already establishing or should be creating soon, in places like the Philippines and the Horn of Africa. In addition, forces were still in Afghanistan, and JSOC needed to keep an alert force ready for the 0300 and 0400 missions, he said.

Then Schroer turned to what would happen if the forces needed to invade and occupy Iraq were removed from that plan. Were that to occur, it would be impossible to sustain the global war, even as “an economy of force,” Schroer told his audience. (“Economy of force” is the U.S. military's term to refer to the allocation of the minimal force necessary to sustain a secondary effort.) In particular, an invasion of Iraq would result in a critical shortage of special operations helicopters available for the global war, he said. “When you looked at what folks said they needed for Iraq, you were nowhere close,” said a source in the room. “So either you stopped most of the five or six [forward operating locations], or you short-sheeted Iraq.”

As Schroer continued his briefing, he could tell that he wasn't getting through to the secretary. “I don't understand, what are you telling me?” Rumsfeld said. Schroer gave him the bottom line: “You can't do it—you can't get there from here.” The Counterterrorism Campaign Support Group's recommendation was “Do not do Iraq now.”

The reaction in the room was “almost comical,” said the source who was there. “There were flag officers looking for places under the table to dive.” Schroer suddenly realized the decision to invade Iraq had already been made, and he was the only person in the room who didn't know it.
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13

Bin Laden Slips Away

Not long after dawn on December 9, 2001, a convoy of ten white Toyota pickup trucks was bouncing over a rutted dirt road heading south from the city of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan's Nangarhar province. A casual observer might have remarked on the relative newness of the vehicles, but otherwise would have seen nothing unusual about a convoy of trucks carrying several dozen scruffy, bearded fighters, long hair flopping from under their traditional Afghan
pakool
caps.
1
In this part of the world, most men had guns, and those of substance traveled with a well-armed entourage. For the last several years Taliban convoys had become commonplace in Nangarhar, as had those of Al Qaeda fighters, whose leader had something akin to a country estate in the mountains up ahead.

But if a passerby had the opportunity to take a closer look, he'd have noticed that the trucks' interiors were a little unusual. They had been stripped for action, with the backseats and anything else superfluous ripped out to lighten the vehicles and create more room. The pickups were now small enough to squeeze onto a Chinook and light enough to fly on small fixed wing aircraft. Delta's engineers had even made them sturdy enough to be airdropped from a Combat Talon.
2

As for the passengers, some were indeed local Afghan militiamen, but many others were assaulters and snipers from Delta's A1 and A3 troops, respectively. The weapons the operators gripped under their blankets were not the AK-series assault rifles ubiquitous in these parts, but SR-25 sniper rifles and M4s spray-painted in camouflage patterns and tricked out with laser designators and holographic sights. Other cutting-edge technology was stowed in their rucksacks or the many pockets of their customized gear.

The convoy was nearing the end of what an operator described as a “hellacious” thirteen-hour drive from Bagram, broken only by a couple of hours' break at a Jalalabad safe house. Now, with the mountains looming ahead, the trucks suddenly pulled over and stopped. The operators dismounted and turned their gaze south, focusing on a small dot in the azure sky far ahead of and above them, a Combat Talon flying through a patch of the heavens that until then had been the domain of B-52s and fighter-bombers. As they watched, an even smaller speck tumbled from the plane, floating toward the mountains under a parachute barely visible from the road. Most of the operators watching realized that up close, that speck was the size of a car and contained 12,600 pounds of explosive. One of the largest conventional bombs in the world, the BLU-82 daisy cutter had been designed to clear landing zones in the Vietnamese jungle. Now the United States was employing it to seal caves in the Afghan mountains. For several seconds the watchers held their breath. When the bomb detonated, the effect was underwhelming. The ground did not shake as expected, nor did the sound of a massive explosion reach the operators' ears. What one described as a “nice mushroom cloud” rising over the snowcapped peaks was the only indication that a major blast had just shaken the mountains several miles ahead.

The troops got back on the trucks and continued south. The sleep-deprived operators were exhausted but impatient to get to their destination. They represented the most elite troops the United States had to offer, but the most important battle of the war had started without them, at a place called Tora Bora.
3

*   *   *

More than twelve weeks after September 11, JSOC was finally on the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The command had developed a certain man-hunting expertise through its pursuits of Noriega, Escobar, Aideed, and the Balkan war criminals. But until Dailey's November 17 change-of-mission video-teleconference, finding the Al Qaeda leader was considered strictly the CIA's job. “No one tasked JSOC” to go after bin Laden in the weeks after September 11, a retired special operations officer said. “The CIA thought that was their mission and they didn't need any goddamn help doing it.” To an extent, this was a repeat of the Balkans, where the CIA did much of the work locating the targets, with JSOC elements deploying to execute the culminating raids.

In time, JSOC would gain a reputation as the nation's premier man-hunting organization, but in late 2001 it lacked the intelligence infrastructure required for such missions. “JSOC was a reactive, ‘you've got the intelligence for me, I will execute this hard target' organization,'” the retired special ops officer said. “Intelligence wasn't JSOC's strong point.”

As it turned out, the CIA was doing its job reasonably well, and by late November had received multiple reports that bin Laden had retreated to his mountain base in Nangarhar.
4
That base's name was destined to become a catchphrase, in the United States, at least, for missed opportunity: Tora Bora.

Bin Laden's presence there should have come as no surprise to the U.S. forces on his trail. The Al Qaeda leader's historic association with Tora Bora was no secret. He knew the area intimately and felt secure there. It is a truism regarding hunted individuals that they tend to go to ground where they feel most at home. Bin Laden was no exception.

In the first weeks after September 11, Al Qaeda's leader had mostly divided his time between Kabul and his headquarters outside Kandahar, opting for Kabul once the bombs started falling. But when the Taliban fled the capital in mid-November, he withdrew to the region he knew best: the Jalalabad area. Nestled in a broad valley that terminated at the fabled Khyber Pass into Pakistan, the city had been bin Laden's home after he moved his headquarters to Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996. About thirty miles to the south, on the northern slopes of the Spin Ghar Mountains, lay Tora Bora, which functioned as both a beloved vacation home and a military redoubt for the Al Qaeda leader. The mountains' southern slopes were in Pakistan, the border of which jutted into Afghanistan in a twenty-mile-wide protuberance known as the Parachinar salient. Bin Laden had first gotten to know the area—and the Pashtun warlords, tribal chiefs, and village elders who ran society there—during the 1980s war with the Soviets and their Afghan communist allies. He had gained combat experience near there in 1987's battle of Jaji. He had also financed and built a rudimentary road from Jalalabad to Tora Bora and on to the Pakistan border. After constructing what amounted to a settlement above the snow line at Tora Bora, he would take his sons on regular seven-to-fourteen-hour hikes into Pakistan, telling them: “We never know when war will strike. We must know our way out of the mountains.”

Now bin Laden's multinational force, composed mostly of Arab and Central Asian fighters, was retreating to Tora Bora from battlefields the newly enabled Northern Alliance had forced them to abandon. Soon they were at work digging trenches and stockpiling food at the base, which was organized around modest bunkers and smallish caves, rather than the Bond-villain subterranean lair imagined by some in the West. Sometime in the week prior to November 25, bin Laden and Zawahiri left Jalalabad in a convoy of four-wheel-drive vehicles that took three hours to ascend the Spin Ghar foothills and reach Tora Bora. It was there that bin Laden planned to make his final stand in Afghanistan.
5

*   *   *

As November gave way to December, Delta's A Squadron (minus A2 Troop, which was already in Afghanistan) boarded two C-17s at Pope Air Force Base and flew to Masirah. The newly arrived operators stayed on the desert island just a few days, getting brought up to speed by their outgoing B Squadron counterparts and receiving Dailey's guidance before flying on to Bagram on December 5. The dilapidated and heavily mined air base had spent much of the past decade on the front lines of the various Afghan civil wars, changing hands several times, and its cratered runway, pockmarked buildings, and junked aircraft symbolized the backward steps Afghanistan had taken in that time. Few structures had complete roofs and none had running water or electricity, but Delta's engineers went to work to create conditions that could support operations.
6
The Afghan winter had just begun to bite.