Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (54 page)

Sure enough, in 2002 U.S. intelligence noticed small numbers of second-tier Al Qaeda figures moving back and forth between the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater and the Horn of Africa and Yemen, traveling by boat from Oman, past Yemen, and across the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, which separates the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aden, before following the coast of Djibouti down to Somalia. When Al Qaeda also began transferring money into the region—a key indicator that operational planning might be occurring—U.S. leaders became alarmed.

But with a war under way in Afghanistan and another planned for Iraq, the Bush administration decided to wage its campaign against Al Qaeda's East African and Yemeni branches largely in the shadows, using the two weapons upon which it would increasingly rely in the years ahead: the CIA and JSOC.
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For the first four years of the campaign in the Horn, the CIA would take the lead. The Agency gave the campaign a name that recalled JSOC's past experience in Somalia: Operation Black Hawk.

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Starting in early 2002, small teams of U.S. operatives began to conduct missions into Somalia. The first trip was by car, from Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, to Hargeisa, Somalia's second largest city and the capital of the autonomous Somaliland region in the country's northeast. Shortly thereafter the U.S. operatives began flying to Baidoa, a city in southwest Somalia. On these first trips the operatives would start their missions unarmed, before renting AK-series assault rifles once they were on the ground in Somalia. In 2003 the operations center for the clandestine campaign in Somalia switched from Addis Ababa to the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. The teams would drive to Nairobi's Wilson Airport and climb aboard a chartered Bluebird Aviation turboprop that would fly them to the K50 Airport, about fifty kilometers southwest of Mogadishu. Although two Bluebird planes would crash into each other a couple of years later, it's still the case that for the Americans aboard, the flights were probably the least dangerous part of missions that demanded professionalism, courage, and coolness under pressure.

In those early days, the teams combined at least two CIA case officers, two Army of Northern Virginia operatives, and an interpreter. Once the planes landed, the teams would travel to and through Mogadishu in small convoys escorted by fighters loyal to one warlord or another. Different patches of the anarchic city were controlled by different warlords, requiring much coordination to ensure safe passage as the convoys crossed the boundaries between the warlords' territories.

Those warlords were the key to Operation Black Hawk. The CIA was paying them to kill or capture the twenty or so most senior members of Al Qaeda's East Africa cell. If the warlords captured one of these targets, they were to turn him over to the Agency, which would send—or “render”—him to a U.S. ally or one of the CIA's secret prisons. The man in charge was John Bennett, the Agency's highly regarded Nairobi station chief, a former Marine infantry officer who in 2010 would become the head of the National Clandestine Service—the CIA's top spy. Bennett did not travel to Mogadishu, but his leadership was critical to the effort. “The relationship with the warlords was built through … Bennett,” said an intelligence source familiar with the missions. “It was through his sheer willpower and personality. He could do it and nobody else could.”

Bennett also worked well with, and was respected by, JSOC. On those first missions, the military personnel were Army of Northern Virginia operatives, whose primary role was to provide security as the CIA gathered and validated human intelligence. But the operatives came into their own as they began to install gear around Mogadishu to monitor the city's cell phone traffic, which NSA satellites could not capture. “The problem was you cannot do intercept through a lot of national asset capability,” said an officer familiar with the unit's operations in the Horn. “You have to be there on the ground, for a lot of this stuff is very tactical in nature, it's very temporal. You have to be Johnny on the spot.” Just as in Syria, these devices, which were sometimes placed in warlords' homes, had to be serviced and moved regularly as new cell phone towers sprang up and old ones were repositioned. The CIA had its own signals intelligence capability, which it jealously guarded, but it was keen to augment its tiny fleet of signals intelligence aircraft in the region with a modular signals intelligence package that could be rolled on and off a rented plane. The Agency wanted the package to collect cell phone traffic from an airborne position up to four or five miles from the target area. However, significant technical difficulties were involved in making such a system work without integrating it into the plane's airframe. Developing the capability took several years, and the help of Orange (as the Army of Northern Virginia was now known), after which the modular capability was made available to both organizations.

The CIA used a carrot-and-stick approach to working with the warlords, handing them suitcases full of hundreds of thousands of dollars, but with the implicit threat of U.S. air strikes if they betrayed the United States. “They were risky missions,” said the intelligence source. “You could never actually trust the warlords—they're subject to the highest bidder.” But the Americans were bluffing about the air strikes. No U.S. aircraft were nearby, not even drones to monitor the missions. The escape and evasion plan in case a team got into trouble was “Get to the coast and hope for the best,” said a JSOC staffer. At the time, the staffer noted, the Navy had no ships in the Indian Ocean, and the closest “fast-mover” jets that might provide close air support were five hours away, in Qatar.
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After Bennett left in August 2003, the CIA station's focus began to shift and its appetite for risk waned, according to a JSOC source stationed in Nairobi. For two years, the CIA operatives who flew into Mogadishu never left the plane, holding their meetings with the warlords on the Bluebird. During one such meeting, the warlord pointed out of the window to four white female reporters going about their business. His point was clear:
Those unarmed Western women aren't scared to work in Somalia—why are you?
The three-man JSOC teams that accompanied such flights but were also confined (on the ambassador's orders) to the aircraft were now filled by a couple of Team 6 operators in addition to an Orange signals intelligence soldier. Ironically, the Agency treated the operators as “hired guns,” but banned them from bringing rifles on the missions, said a SEAL. The Orange operative would either position his phone-monitoring device at the airport near Mogadishu or would have an Agency source emplace it.
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While the CIA was in overall charge of the Black Hawk missions, the JSOC personnel reported to a Team 6 or Delta officer in Nairobi who oversaw a small interagency team established in mid-2003 under JSOC auspices, staffed with intelligence and law enforcement personnel and working out of two small rooms in the embassy. He in turn worked for the Orange commander, who between 2003 and 2005 was Konrad Trautman. (Just as McChrystal had given Iraq to Delta, he had placed Orange in charge of the Horn and Yemen.) JSOC doubled its tiny resources in the Horn between 2003 and 2005, focusing more tightly on intelligence collection and target development. These efforts meant “we gained a lot of understanding of what was going on,” a senior intelligence official said.
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McChrystal began conducting Horn of Africa–specific video-teleconferences that connected operators, ambassadors, and CIA station chiefs with officials in Washington. He also placed a small team in Addis Ababa as part of this effort to thicken JSOC's network in the Horn. JSOC was seeking to target Al Qaeda and its associates in the Islamic Courts Union, an Eritrean-financed Islamist force that had gained control of much of southern Somalia. Conversely, by the middle of the decade, the Nairobi CIA station seemed more interested in collecting intelligence for its own sake than on hunting Al Qaeda. “The Black Hawk team was not interested in CT [counterterrorism], they were interested really in foreign intelligence collection,” said a Team 6 operator, adding that the warlords got the better part of the deal. “They were paying these warlords vast sums of money for nothing,” he said. “From my perspective it was a complete failure. I'm sure from the Agency's perspective it was not.”

(A JSOC staffer took issue with the operator's account, and said Team 6 deserved some blame itself. Orange “had safe houses all over Somalia by the time Blue came in,” he said. “All that went [away].” A U.S. intelligence officer, meanwhile, disputed the notion that the CIA's Nairobi station became less interested in counterterrorism after Bennett's departure. “Every day [the new chief of station] was hammering, ‘What have we done on CT?'” he said.)

The CIA had also decided that there weren't enough targets being developed in Somalia to keep its Predator fleet in nearby Djibouti, a tiny Muslim country that had agreed to host U.S. forces. The drones went away.
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But the U.S. military was building up its forces in Djibouti, creating Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa in November 2002. That task force ostensibly focused on civil affairs missions and on strengthening the capacity of allies in the region. It also gave the small but growing JSOC presence in Djibouti a larger organization in which to hide.
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In late summer 2005, the Black Hawk teams got permission to occasionally get off the planes and go into Mogadishu again. The CIA tried to extend the rule that banned rifles on the planes to the missions in which operators—from Team 6, Delta, and Orange—disembarked and went into Mogadishu, sometimes staying overnight at the residence of Bashir Raghe Shiiraar, a secular warlord. The Agency argued that the warlord militias would provide enough protection. An incident at a Somali airfield soon exposed the emptiness of that promise. A Black Hawk team that included a couple of Team 6 operators was sitting on the plane for a warlord meeting when a rocket-propelled grenade flew across the runway. The warlord's forces who were supposed to be protecting the Americans disappeared. The SEALs, who had been carrying their rifles broken down in their packs, quickly put the weapons together, got off the plane, and seized the highest ground they could, which was a berm around the airfield. Whoever had fired the RPG disappeared. The CIA officers said nothing about the weapons.
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The friction between the Agency and JSOC in the Horn extended to the highest levels. In 2005 McChrystal visited the embassy in Nairobi. The station chief let it be known ahead of the visit that McChrystal “had better be prepared to get down on bended knee.” When the meeting took place, the station chief, a short man with a “huge ego,” according to a source who worked close to him, condescended to the JSOC commander. McChrystal, who as Ranger Regiment commander had overhauled the regiment's hand-to-hand combat program, sat and listened. “When the guy stopped talking, McChrystal finally says, ‘Hey look, if you ever talk to me that way again, I'm going to come around this desk and beat the shit out of you,'” said a source who was in the room. “And that changed the whole tone between the two of them. It became that old cartoon Spike and Chester, Spike's the bulldog and Chester's always jumping over him saying, ‘Can I be your buddy, Spike, can I be your buddy?' All of a sudden [the station chief] now wants to be McChrystal's buddy. It was disgusting actually but I'm thinking to myself, ‘That's all it would have taken—just threaten the guy physically.' Classic move.”

By late 2005, the Orange operatives' courage and professionalism had earned the respect of their peers in the Horn. “Orange did a great job,” said a Team 6 operator. At any one time, there were between two and six operatives—i.e., those personnel who went into Somalia with the signals intelligence gear—in Nairobi. They were there on typical JSOC three-to-four-month rotations, using fake last names with thin official cover while there. Orange had selected a few personnel for the mission whose ethnicity would not draw attention, meaning a greater range of covers was available to them. “A lot of them you wouldn't recognize as Westerners,” said a special mission unit member. For instance, one operative was a black American who, in civilian clothes, could pass as an African and spoke fluent Swahili, he said.

Of course, these covers came with their own risks. During the 2005 to 2006 winter, an operative who resembled a member of Kenya's ethnic Indian merchant class was shot in the abdomen late at night at a gas station as he filled the tank of his SUV in an affluent part of Nairobi near the U.S. embassy. The operative was rushed to a nearby hospital and survived. “Of course, this sent everyone spinning to [figure out], have we been compromised? Are people following us?” said the special mission unit member. However, in part because the robbers stole the operative's wallet, the consensus was that he was the unfortunate victim of a crime of opportunity.
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With every trip into Mogadishu's urban jungle, the Orange operatives strengthened the United States' ability to keep tabs on its enemies in the Horn. But events beyond JSOC's control would soon undo much of that work, while ultimately offering the command new opportunities.

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As with the Horn, JSOC's post-September 11 presence in Yemen started small. In summer 2002, three Delta operators under official cover, including a male-female team, arrived in the country on a classic advance force operation. Their job was to begin to gain an understanding of the political-military environment and how transnational factors were affecting it.
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Two Army of Northern Virginia operatives had actually preceded them, arriving in February 2002. By the end of the year, the unit had been placed under JSOC and become Task Force Orange, but the plan to ramp up the military's clandestine force in Yemen had already suffered a couple of setbacks.