Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (38 page)

After freeing the entangled tank, the relieved Wolverines followed Blaber's order and withdrew to Grizzly with no casualties.
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The Wolverines spent the next ten days conducting a variety of missions: searching in vain for Scott Speicher, the Navy pilot shot down during the first Gulf War; checking out a suspected WMD facility that turned out to be a barbecue pit; and conducting a series of raids around Baiji. The task force also captured five of Saddam's bodyguards, several Iraqi government ministers, and the Iraqi air force chief of staff, while never missing an opportunity to spread the false story that they were the advance guard of a multi-divisional attack from the west.
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Dailey's preoccupation with weapons of mass destruction became a factor whenever the Wolverines or another Task Force 20 element passed through the massive arms storage areas often located close to Iraq's military airfields. At H-2 airfield, for instance, there were eighty-eight aircraft-hangar-size magazines, each stuffed with crates of munitions from floor to ceiling. “I need a thorough check of each of those to make sure there's no WMDs in them,” Dailey told TF Wolverine. “What do you mean by ‘thorough'?” came the reply. “Go through every box,” Dailey said. “Okay, roger, we're just finishing up right now actually,” said a Delta operator, no doubt shaking his head wryly.

“These generals were consumed [with the thought] that there were WMDs laying around,” a Delta source commented. “Logic said, ‘You're out of your fucking mind.' Nobody stores the object of their desire, the family jewels, in a place that they can't control.”

One mission in which Dailey showed no interest was assigning anyone to guard those arms depots. When the operators had moved on, they would sometimes arrange for Predator drones to stay behind and watch in case enemy fighters were using them as hide sites. What the Predators showed instead was that Iraqis were looting the depots. “It was like watching ants raid a picnic basket,” said a Delta source. When Blaber reported this to Dailey, with a proposal that Task Force 20 use its troops on loan from the 82nd Airborne Division to guard the storage sites, the general rebuffed the suggestion. That was a job for the conventional Army, not his task force, he said. “But they're not here, we're the only ones up here,” Blaber reminded him, to no avail. Task Force 20 left those arms depots wide open, a decision that placed thousands of U.S. soldiers at risk. “It was all those artillery rounds that ended up being IEDs,” said a Delta source, in reference to improvised explosive devices—the homemade bombs insurgents later used to kill and maim American soldiers. “That's where they came from.”
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It was a threat with which JSOC's operators would soon become familiar.

 

16

The Deck of Cards

It was nighttime on June 18, 2003, and three helicopters were flying fast and low across Iraq's western desert. Out of sight far ahead was their quarry, a small convoy of SUVs driving at breakneck speed toward the Syrian border near Al Qaim. In the Task Force 20 operations center on the outskirts of Baghdad, all eyes were on the screen showing footage of the convoy being beamed in real time from a drone. The task force knew the mobile phone numbers being used by the vehicles' occupants. Those phones' call patterns led about half Task Force 20's intelligence analysts to believe Saddam Hussein was in one of the vehicles. That information very quickly made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who got on a secure phone line straight to the JOC. His guidance was clear: “You're not going to let Saddam drive across the Syrian border.”

Although the task force had been tracking the convoy across Iraq, it was late launching the helicopters from the northern city of Mosul. Now, two DAPs and a Chinook full of Delta operators and Rangers were in hot pursuit. Somewhere ahead of them, the most wanted man in Iraq might be trying to make his escape. In the Chinook were Major Clayton Hutmacher, the air mission commander, and a Delta officer nicknamed “Bricktop,” the ground force commander. The Task Force Brown pilots were pushing the helicopters as fast as they could, but their target had too much of a head start and crossed the Syrian border before the task force birds could catch it.

Rumsfeld ordered the task force to intercept the vehicles in Syria. In the JOC, Delta Lieutenant Colonel John Christian, the new task force commander, relayed the convoy's latest grid location to Hutmacher and Bricktop. They called back concerned. Although many Saddam loyalists had fled to Syria, from where U.S. officials presumed they were pulling the strings of the nascent Sunni insurgency in Iraq, until now Rumsfeld had sanctioned no missions into Syria, where a U.S. raid could spark a major international incident. “Do you know this grid's in Syria?” Hutmacher and Bricktop asked. “Yes it is, and you're authorized,” Christian replied. As the JOC fed the officers on the Chinook new location data for the convoy, their concern only mounted. Bricktop called back again: “Hey, these grids are in Syria.” Christian tried to set his mind at rest. “Bricktop, you're authorized to pursue.”

With Rumsfeld still on the line, the three helicopters crossed the border.
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After the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, albeit with Saddam himself still at large, Dailey's instinct was to get his force back to the States as quickly as possible. A senior JSOC officer later characterized the mind-set at the top of the command thus.
“We don't need to be here anymore. The main effort is go back and practice.… The war's over. There are no weapons of mass destruction.”

But first, JSOC had some unfinished business to which to attend. Abu Abbas, the Palestinian mastermind of the
Achille Lauro
hijacking in 1985, had escaped justice when the Italian government let him go. He had eventually settled in Baghdad. From there, sheltered by Saddam, he had been running the Palestine Liberation Front while still functioning as a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization's executive committee. With U.S. forces encircling Baghdad, Abu Abbas had made several unsuccessful attempts to flee to Syria. Once Task Force 20 reached Baghdad, finding him became a priority.

On the morning of April 14, U.S. intelligence tracked Abu Abbas to a farm on the western bank of the Tigris on Baghdad's southern outskirts. From a hangar at Baghdad airport, Task Force 20 quickly planned and launched a classic direct action mission. Rangers from 2nd Battalion's A Company moved out in a ground convoy and isolated the farm, blocking all possible routes of escape or reinforcement. As two AH-6 gunships covered the ground force, four MH-6 Little Birds deposited Team 6 Gold Team operators who stormed the compound.

They were too late. Abu Abbas had driven off in his black Range Rover minutes previously. The assaulters questioned the people on the objective, seized one of the terrorist leader's passports and several weapons, and waited in vain for his return, before heading back to the airport after a few hours.

Task Force 20 would not have to wait long for another chance to grab Abu Abbas. By day's end, intelligence indicated the Palestinian was in east Baghdad's Fateh Square neighborhood. Again the task force moved out, this time borrowing twenty-four Bradley Fighting Vehicles and four M113 armored personnel carriers from 3rd Infantry Division to transport the Rangers to their blocking positions. Two AH-6 gunships and five MH-6s carrying the assault force dodged wires and other obstacles to arrive simultaneously with the ground convoy. Rangers from 2nd Battalion's B Company cordoned off the objective. Team 6 operators swept through the target building but found nothing of interest while 1st Battalion's B Company cleared structures on the opposite side of the street, detaining every man they found. One detainee immediately stood out: a six-foot-tall, 220-pound man with a notably casual demeanor. When the assaulters returned to his comfortable apartment, they found several passports and $35,000 in cash. The task force had its man.
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Despite Dailey's wish to take the task force home, the National Command Authority had other plans. Oblivious to the fertile ground the invasion had created for an Islamist insurgency to take root, the Bush administration was focused on destroying all remnants of Saddam's Ba'ath Party and capturing or killing the leading figures of his regime still at large. Thus, on May 16, Paul Bremer, the head of the U.S.-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority, which served as Iraq's transitional government, issued CPA Order No. 2, disbanding the Iraqi army. As Iraq teetered on the brink of chaos, JSOC's mission was to go after “the deck of cards”—the top fifty-five members of the Saddam regime, memorialized on an actual deck of playing cards distributed to U.S. forces ahead of the invasion. Within that deck, the task force's primary focus was the ace of spades: Saddam Hussein himself.
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Task Force 20 set up its JOC at what had been an Iraqi Special Republican Guard base at the capital's main airport, now renamed Baghdad International Airport (BIAP, pronounced “Bye-App”). The compound badly needed cleaning up before Task Force 20 moved in, which is how it acquired its nickname. Dailey, standing in the airport terminal with some JSOC staff, referred repeatedly to it as “that nasty-ass military area.” A logistician mentioned the phrase in notes that got wide distribution in the task force, and “Camp Nama” was born.
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The deck of cards mission notwithstanding, Dailey still pulled 80 percent of the task force out of Iraq. Delta's B and C Squadrons went home. A Squadron took their place. The task force's other principal elements were most of 2nd Ranger Battalion, a small Task Force Brown detachment, and the JOC staff. Delta remained Task Force 20's central assault force, but there was a shift in command. Blaber returned to the States, to be replaced by John Christian, who commanded the unit's Combat Support Troop, which contained the heavy breachers and the rest of the unit's counter-proliferation specialists. Tall and endowed with a deep, booming voice, Christian's strikingly large head topped with silver hair earned him his Delta nickname: “Buckethead.” His role would be to run the JSOC task force on a day-to-day basis from Nama.
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But A Squadron was not based at the airport, which was too far from central Baghdad, the site of many of its missions. Instead, Delta put its squadron headquarters at a large Ba'ath Party villa in the Green Zone, the chunk of central Baghdad adjacent to the Tigris that the international Coalition walled off to serve as a safe haven for Coalition and Iraqi leaders. The squadron also had a troop in Mosul and smaller elements at BIAP and Tikrit, but for the early stage of the occupation, Delta's base was at the villa. Named after the unit's only casualty since September 11, the building was known as Mission Support Site Fernandez and boasted a pool, a gym, and enough space that each team was spread between two bedrooms. Task Force Brown kept aircraft and crews on a stretch of blacktop behind the villa, while the British SAS, known early in the Iraq War as Task Force 14 and later as Task Force Black, moved into the villa next door.
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Task force operators quickly realized they were missing something vital to any manhunt: actionable intelligence—the sort that could be used to launch a mission immediately. The CIA was unprepared for the nascent insurgency, which senior Bush administration officials were still attributing to Saddam regime “dead-enders.” “There was no intel” when A Squadron arrived, a Delta operator recalled. It became the job of the Delta cell at BIAP to sort through the Agency's cables and turn them into targets to be divided between Task Force 20, the “white” Special Forces, and the conventional Army. “All the staff officers in JSOC say intel drives operations, right?” said the operator. “It was just the fucking opposite. We had no intel, so operations were driving intel [because of] what we found on these targets. We'd pick on a sweater and we'd pull that string. And sometimes you pull a string on a sweater and it's nothing and sometimes it unravels, and over time that intel picture starts to develop.”

As Delta began to develop its own source networks, friction grew between the operators and Agency case officers. According to Delta operators, they were far more comfortable than their CIA counterparts with the risk that accompanied low-vis missions in a high-threat environment. Delta acquired a fleet of beat-up local cars to carry them unobtrusively to meetings with sources. The CIA “would go pick up sources we'd been working for a while in three black [Chevy] Suburbans,” an operator said. “The source would turn up dead the next day … [But] if it wasn't three black Suburbans, they couldn't do it.”

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On June 11, the Rangers took advantage of what for JSOC was a rare opportunity: a set-piece battle against a large, unsuspecting enemy force. U.S. intelligence had alerted the task force to the presence of a large terrorist training camp near Rawa in Anbar, about thirty miles from the Syrian border. The 101st Airborne Division had been preparing an assault on the position, but intelligence indicated the terrorists were readying a major attack on Coalition forces and the 101st needed more time to plan, so the mission was given to Task Force 20. In less than twenty-four hours, 2nd Ranger Battalion's B Company and Task Force Brown's Little Bird guns launched under the cover of darkness.

Two platoons air-assaulted onto the terrorist training camp—Objective Reindeer—located in a deep wadi, while another drove 175 miles from BIAP in ground mobility vehicles along with the battalion mortars to arrive simultaneously with the air assault. Jets dropped six air-burst Joint Direct Attack Munition bombs on the position, but the militants had plenty of fight left in them. Fierce point-blank combat with grenades and automatic weapons ensued. Withering AC-130 and AH-6 gunship fire supported the Rangers. When the dust cleared, eighty-four enemy fighters lay dead. No U.S. soldiers were killed, but one lost his leg to a grenade. The militants also shot down an AH-64 Apache gunship helicopter that arrived with a relief force from the 101st. Rangers rescued its crew. Along with 2,000 RPGs and fifty RPK machine guns, the Rangers found eighty-seven SA-7 surface-to-air missiles at the site. The task force's victory and the lopsided casualty figures were a testament to the “bilateral” training the Rangers and Task Force Brown conducted routinely.
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