Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (46 page)

The June 17 assault marked the first time that Delta had lost more than one operator on a mission since Mogadishu. The three “deaths hit the unit like a shudder,” McChrystal wrote. The loss of Horrigan was a particularly tough blow. “That rocked a lot of guys,” said a Delta source. Hugely respected and well liked in Delta, among Horrigan's many exploits was his infiltration of Afghanistan's Shahikot Valley as a member of AFO's India Team during Operation Anaconda. A former Ranger and Special Forces soldier, the forty-year-old Horrigan was on his last combat deployment, due to retire in a matter of months to focus on his booming custom knife-making business. A military plane flew about forty of Horrigan's Delta colleagues plus McChrystal—in whose Ranger company he'd served as a private in the 1980s—to his funeral in Austin, Texas.
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In mid-2005, four major changes to task force operations were taking place simultaneously: the expansion to the west, the surge of JSOC forces into Iraq, the shift from a “decapitation” strategy to one focused on midlevel insurgents, and an increasing willingness to conduct daytime operations. The reason for the last change was simple: “The bad guys were getting smart to our night tactics,” said a Task Force Brown source. “We'd been hitting targets all over Baghdad for probably a year.” Most of those raids keyed off signals intelligence from monitoring insurgents' cell phones. Al Qaeda in Iraq had gotten wise to this. “They quit turning cell phones on at night,” the Task Force Brown source said. “They just stopped operating at night. They started operating during the day. So McChrystal said, basically—obviously with TF Green influence—‘Hey, we need to start hitting these targets during the day.'”

Combined with the westward expansion, this had major implications for Task Force Brown. Whereas in Baghdad Delta typically sent a ground assault force (GAF) mounted in Pandurs to an objective, distances in the west were so vast that often only a helicopter assault force (HAF) would suffice. (These phrases soon became acronyms and then verbs in JSOC-speak: operators would talk of “GAFing” or “HAFing” to a target.) But the potential move to daylight ops represented “a significant emotional event” for the TF Brown crews, “who didn't want to fly during the day, being known as Night Stalkers,” the Brown source said. Used to flying missions at night, when their helicopters were more easily hidden from insurgent small arms and RPGs, the Night Stalker pilots pressured Task Force Brown's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Schiller, to push back against McChrystal and Task Force Green. Schiller took their arguments straight to the top. “If you're going to do this, we're going to have helicopters shot down,” he told McChrystal. The general replied that he was willing to assume that risk.
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As Task Force Brown split its force between day-alert and night-alert crews and the pilots came to terms with their increasingly dangerous mission profile, losses were mounting for Delta, a unit singularly unaccustomed to taking casualties. On August 25, a task force convoy traveling through the town of Husaybah next to the Syrian border struck an IED (improvised explosive device—an insurgent-manufactured booby trap) made of three antitank mines stacked on top of each other. The explosion devastated a B Squadron team, killing three soldiers immediately: Delta operators Master Sergeant Ivica “Pizza” Jerak, forty-two, and Sergeant First Class Trevor Diesing, thirty, as well as Corporal Timothy Shea, twenty-two, of 3rd Ranger Battalion. A third Delta operator, Sergeant First Class Obediah Kolath, was mortally wounded and died August 28 after being flown to the military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. The blast badly wounded several other operators. The team leader was blown out of the vehicle but survived.
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The fight in Anbar became the bloodiest test of wills that Delta had faced in its history. During one squadron's three-month tour, “almost 50 percent of the entire force had been wounded on that one rotation—an astronomical number,” said a Little Bird pilot. The fact that many of these casualties were taken chasing lower-level targets only heightened the frustration of some Delta operators. But McChrystal's sheer willpower, combined with the strength of character for which Delta screens all applicants, meant that the task force drove on regardless of the cost. “McChrystal was relentless in not letting it affect anybody,” said a task force officer. “He stayed on his task and pressed on.”

By now, McChrystal's zeal had become an obsession. In October, he began his third year as JSOC commander, having spent most of the first two forward. He gave those around him the impression that the only thing that mattered in his life was the fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq, and that it was the only thing that should matter in theirs. It was a message that he drove home in meetings, video-teleconferences, and one-on-one conversations with subordinates, once telling a commander who was trying to ensure some home time for his troops, “I need them to realize that they don't have a life—this is their life.” This unwavering determination was a double-edged sword, inspiring many but rubbing others the wrong way. “That dude's hard as fucking nails and probably the best war-fighting general we've had … since Patton,” said one of McChrystal's color task force commanders. “But his shortcoming there was he expected that out of everybody, and he didn't realize that not everyone … [had] the drive to perform at that level.” The general summed up his view during a visit to B Squadron at Al Qaim on August 28, 2005. “I told the men that day what I believed and what had come to be my life,” he wrote.
“It's the fight. It's the fight. It's the fight.”
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Throughout 2005, JSOC's task force in Iraq continued to refine its tactics, techniques, and procedures as it ramped up its operational tempo. As the number of raids rose dramatically, so did the amount of material seized on those raids. Under Mike Flynn's direction, the task force changed what it did with this material, which had originally been nobody's priority—assault teams had tossed it into trash bags to which they affixed sticky notes. That changed by summer 2005. Flynn established and filled a series of workspaces at Balad where specialists mined every piece of pocket litter (the items lifted from detainees' pockets) and digital device taken off a target. The JSOC intelligence director ensured that the leader of an assault team that captured a suspect took part in the detainee's interrogation, so he could explain the exact circumstances under which the suspect was taken and any material seized.

A major breakthrough came when McChrystal and Flynn met a man called Roy Apseloff while visiting CIA headquarters. Apseloff ran the Defense Intelligence Agency's National Media Exploitation Center (NMEC) in Fairfax, Virginia, and offered to help JSOC derive useful intelligence from material taken in raids. The task force gained control of a massive amount of bandwidth, thus enabling it to immediately email NMEC the contents of everything seized on a mission. In Fairfax, Apseloff's thirty-strong staff used innovative software not only to access the data even from broken hard drives, but to link it together to create a better picture of the insurgent networks. Apseloff's team was responsible for what McChrystal called an “exponential improvement” in the task force's ability to process the raw material it was capturing into actionable intelligence.
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The task force “created a social network database, and every raid made the database better,” said a Special Forces colonel.

Meanwhile, as McChrystal and Flynn had reformed the task force's detainee operations, the CIA, DIA, and FBI had all reconnected with JSOC after keeping the task force at arm's length over concerns regarding detainee abuse.
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From its difficult beginnings, McChrystal's effort to build “a network to defeat a network” was surpassing perhaps even his own expectations. At the height of the campaign against Al Qaeda in Iraq, there were nearly 100 CIA representatives and eighty FBI personnel (“Fox Bravos,” in JSOC-speak) in Balad.
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“McChrystal had a remarkable ability to bring everybody inside the tent and make them feel like a team player,” said a retired Special Forces colonel who saw him at work. “He'd co-opt them so in some respects when they went back to [their] agency they became his ambassadors and advocates.” The sheer adrenaline rush that came with participation—even from the relatively safe confines of Balad—in the task force's operations was a major factor in gaining support from these representatives from other government agencies. “For the average civil servant,” said the retired colonel, tours with the task force were “a pretty strong narcotic.”

McChrystal's decision to design a JOC conducive to collaboration was paying off handsomely. “Everybody wore different hats, but they all seemed to be working together,” said an officer who visited the task force in Balad. “It just didn't seem like it was very compartmented, which is how I had always envisioned that world.” The officer was also struck by how the task force, and therefore the JOC, stayed on reverse cycle for years on end. “It's odd when you go during the daytime and there's like no one there,” he said. “And then you're there [at night] when things start happening and the place is buzzing, it's just hopping.”

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Although the task force's main effort was Anbar, its components elsewhere were not letting up. Delta's Task Force North element in Mosul was also hanging it out there in a big way. “In Mosul they were gunning a lot of dudes down on the streets,” said a Delta operator. “They'd ID a guy, catch him driving, and just fucking shoot him in traffic and keep driving.” This account appears to contradict McChrystal's memoir. “No raid force under my command ever went on a mission with orders not to capture a target if he tried to surrender,” the general wrote. “We were not death squads.”
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But another task force source's description of a Delta team's daytime mission in Mosul seems to confirm the operator's contention. The team used a small civilian van to get close to their target, the second source said. The van was decorated in typical fashion for that part of the Middle East, but a special covering in the rear windows made the vehicle appear full of blankets, when in fact it was driven by operators disguised as locals with more operators concealed in the back. Hiding in plain sight, the Delta operators drove through the Mosul traffic with their quarry in view. “They were able to, using that vehicle, pull right next to his vehicle and then slide the door back and make the hit on this terrorist,” the task force source said. After shooting the target and someone with him, the operators grabbed the bodies and brought them back to the base.

As the year lengthened there were signs that McChrystal's gamble in the west was paying off. The number of suicide car bomb attacks declined about 80 percent between July and December 2005, something McChrystal attributed to Operation Snake Eyes.
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But at the end of each busy period of darkness, when McChrystal, Flynn, and Miller retired to their stiff green Army cots to catch a few hours' sleep as dawn broke, each knew that somewhere out beyond the wire, Zarqawi still loomed.

 

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Killing Zarqawi

In late June 2005, McChrystal was back in the United States hosting a JSOC commanders' conference at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when he received a summons to the White House to brief a National Security Council session on Zarqawi. On June 29, the general found himself in the White House Situation Room briefing the president and what amounted to his war cabinet. When McChrystal concluded, Bush fixed him with his eyes. “Are you going to get him?” The JSOC commander's response was firm. “We will, Mr. President,” he said. “There is no doubt in my mind.”
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As the National Security Council meeting indicated, Washington increasingly saw the complex struggle in Iraq, which combined traditional insurgency, Islamist terrorism, sectarian civil war, tribal conflict, and a proxy war between the United States and Iran, as a war with one man's organization: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq. To a degree, Washington merely reflected the thinking in Casey's Baghdad headquarters, which over the course of a few months had shifted from doubting that Zarqawi was playing an important role to believing that removing him from the battlefield would collapse the insurgency.
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The task force had already missed a golden opportunity to test that theory. On February 20, 2005, after learning that Zarqawi was due to travel down a stretch of highway along the Euphrates between Ramadi and Rawa during a certain time window, the task force set up an elaborate ambush. But Zarqawi was late, and the U.S. troops had relaxed their guard by the time his vehicle came into view. Zarqawi's driver blew through a Delta roadblock and approached a Ranger checkpoint at high speed. A Ranger machine gunner had the AQI leader in his sights and requested permission to fire, but his lieutenant denied the request because he did not have “positive ID” of the vehicle's occupants. To the intense frustration of other Rangers at the checkpoint, Zarqawi's vehicle flew past, with the Jordanian staring wildly at them. He was close enough for them to note he was gripping a U.S. assault rifle and wearing a Blackhawk! brand tactical vest. “He was shitting his pants,” a special operations source said. “He knew he was caught.”

A Predator kept Zarqawi in sight as Delta operators on the ground roared after him. Realizing they were being chased, Zarqawi and his driver turned onto a secondary road. With the Delta team about thirty seconds behind, Zarqawi jumped out and ran for it, leaving his driver, laptop, and $100,000 in euros to be captured. Staffers in the operations center tried to follow Zarqawi with the drone, but at that moment its camera suffered a glitch, switching from a tight focus on Zarqawi to a wide-angle view of the entire neighborhood. By the time the frantic staffers had refocused the camera, their target had vanished.
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