Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (55 page)

First, Yemeni officials seized some of the Army of Northern Virginia's critical signals intelligence technology when it arrived at Sana'a airport, hidden in a larger shipment of gear for U.S. theater (i.e., non-JSOC) special operations forces that were training Yemeni troops. The kit was essential for the unit's mission, but the U.S. embassy refused to pay the import duty that the Yemenis demanded, in the belief that it was a shakedown. Complicating matters was the fact that neither the Yemeni officials nor U.S. ambassador Edmund Hull understood what the gear was for. “He wasn't cleared for that,” said a military source with Yemen experience. (In his memoir, Hull referred to the Yemenis refusing entry to pallets that the U.S. government considered to enjoy the same protection as diplomatic pouches, and listed “radios, weapons, and blood” as among the “equipment” items the pallets contained.) Following the loss of the gear, JSOC personnel were involved in a car crash in early summer 2002 that killed a Yemeni. They had to leave the country. It took several months, Hull's involvement, and the payment of what the military source termed “blood money” before JSOC was allowed back in.

Meanwhile, Hull was resisting what he described as “a great deal of pressure” from Washington for unilateral U.S. combat missions in Yemen. The ambassador opposed air strikes on the grounds that they would “inevitably” result in high numbers of civilian casualties. He acknowledged that special operations forces might “theoretically” provide “a more surgical option,” but added that “planning always entailed options for massive support for the special [operations] forces should they become trapped.” As with its proposal for attacking Ansar al-Islam's camp in Iraqi Kurdistan earlier that year, JSOC's insistence on a massive JRX-style operation became an insurmountable stumbling block. By the fall, JSOC's numbers began to climb again, but in September it only had six or seven personnel in Yemen. The U.S. counterterrorism mission in Sana'a at the time was clouded by a multitude of actors and differing chains of command.
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There was a team from Central Command's special operations headquarters, which commanded the theater special operations forces; the small JSOC element; the CIA station; and a national intelligence support team that included a cryptologic support group from the National Security Agency.
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The JSOC and intelligence personnel were trying to locate Al Qaeda targets, particularly those associated with the
Cole
attack. But there was competition between the CIA and the military over who could get permission to strike first, if one of those targets hove into view. “The Agency was a little faster,” said the military source with Yemen experience. “Probably a lot faster.”

This became clear on November 3, 2002, when the NSA detected a call made on a phone associated with Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi,
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a Yemeni Al Qaeda member who was suspected of helping to plan the
Cole
attack. The United States had been trying to locate Harethi all year using cell phone tracking technology. They had located him at least once before that summer, but while the U.S. and Yemeni governments were planning a strike, the United States monitored a call to Harethi's phone from the Yemeni defense ministry, warning him. Not surprisingly, he disappeared and stopped using that phone. “He went chilly for about three months,” said the military source. Now, for whatever reason, the experienced jihadist had chosen to use it again. This time the Agency was taking no chances. A Predator flew from Djibouti and destroyed the car, which was being driven through the desert in Marib province, about 120 kilometers east of Sana'a, killing Harethi and five fellow passengers. It was the first known lethal drone strike outside Afghanistan.

Orange kept a small team in Yemen, operating out of the embassy, but the next few years were relatively quiet from a counterterrorism point of view. That began to change on February 4, 2006, when twenty-three Al Qaeda members tunneled their way to freedom from the Political Security Headquarters jail in Sana'a.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, back in the Horn, Orange's signals intelligence missions were paying off. “It definitely led to us being able to have much more precise information about what was going on,” said the senior intelligence official. “Those operations gave us pretty good insight into what Al Qaeda was doing in East Africa. They saw it as another safe haven, they saw the opportunity to establish training camps, and they did. And it allowed us to start to plan [counterterrorism] operations against a couple of the key targets.”
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The gear that the operatives used was not much to look at—“essentially it's a box and an antenna”—but emplacing it required significant expertise, said the special mission unit member. “You just can't put it anywhere to get the collection you want. So you really have to go in and survey both the physical geography and the electron environment.” Figuring out the best places “to collect against your signals of interest” was laborious and time-consuming work. “Electronic communications engineers, they love that sort of problem,” he said. “But if you're in a place like Mogadishu, it's a dangerous place to be out, figuring that stuff out.” However, the need to safeguard the technology meant some otherwise optimal locations were ruled out. “You really want it in a controlled place,” the special mission unit member said. “You don't want to lose that stuff.” On some occasions, the operatives settled for “the least bad place to put them,” he said. Of course, once the machines were up and running, someone had to translate the intercepted phone calls. Orange used a combination of its own personnel and contractors—“just phenomenal linguists” who not only understood Somali dialects but “had been doing it so long they could immediately recognize targeted or key individual voice characteristics,” the special mission unit source said.

Despite JSOC's increasing ability to track targets in Somalia, the command mounted no successful air strikes or raids into the country during the first half of the decade. During that period, warlords paid by the CIA helped render “seven or eight” Al Qaeda figures out of Somalia, said an intelligence source with long experience in the Horn. Reluctant to put these detainees on trial in the United States, for fear of divulging the intelligence “sources and methods” that led the CIA to them, the Agency transferred at least some of them to its “Salt Pit” secret prison in Afghanistan.
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While Orange's technologies helped locate Islamists targeted for rendition, the CIA's warlord allies were letting it down on the wider battlefield. The Islamic Courts Union steadily gained ground during the first half of 2006, finally taking control of Mogadishu the first week of June, when it ran the secular warlords out of town.
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The warlords' defeat was a disaster for U.S. policy, for the CIA's strategy, for JSOC's operational ambitions, and for Orange's signals intelligence program. Not only did Orange—and therefore JSOC and the National Security Agency—lose access to the locations where it had been setting up its devices, it also lost a couple of the devices themselves when the Islamic Courts Union fighters overran the positions in which they'd been positioned. The devices, of which Orange had fewer than ten in its inventory, were not disguised. “This is clearly Western intelligence agency equipment, which was the biggest concern,” said the special mission unit member. “So losing those was not good.” The loss of the kit not only meant “a loss of collection,” but also that the United States' enemies in Somalia, realizing that they were being listened to, might start engaging in deception when talking on their cell phones. “So you've got all sorts of problems created by that,” he said. It took about a year for JSOC to regenerate its signals intelligence capability in Somalia.
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Part of JSOC's problem was that, just as Dave Schroer had predicted to the Defense Department leadership in early 2003, the demands of the Iraq War had forced JSOC to neglect the Horn of Africa. Now, three years after the invasion of Iraq, the growing Al Qaeda presence in the Horn and Yemen so alarmed senior military and intelligence leaders that they were prepared to take risks in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to deploy more ISR assets to the Horn.
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In late 2006, however, the JSOC presence in Kenya consisted of no more than a dozen military personnel: two or three Team 6 operators; a technical surveillance equipment support service member, also from Team 6; one or two Orange signals intelligence squadron personnel; a Joint Communications Unit radio expert; and an officer to command the team, which operated out of the Nairobi embassy. Only the SEALs and the Orange personnel would go into Somalia.
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The Team 6 operators were in trouble and they knew it. There were just a couple of them, plus a 24th Special Tactics Squadron combat controller, embedded in a larger unit of the security services of northeastern Somalia's autonomous Puntland region, and they had bitten off more than they could chew. It was June 1, 2007. They had been on the hunt for a multinational group of Al Qaeda fighters who had arrived a few days earlier in the Somali town of Bargal, on the very tip of the Horn of Africa, having traveled up the coast from southern Somalia. But the hunters had become the hunted. Outnumbered and outgunned, the operators turned to the combat controller as a last resort.
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The operations that led up to the Battle of Bargal began in late December 2006, when Ethiopia invaded Somalia in response to the growing strength of the Islamic Courts Union. (Ethiopia's traditional enemy, Eritrea, had been funding and supplying the Islamists.) In a December 6 cable, U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia Donald Yamamoto accurately predicted that Ethiopia would invade later that month and that the incursion might “prove more difficult for Ethiopia than many now imagine.” But oddly, although JSOC had been building up a small force at Dire Dawa in eastern Ethiopia throughout late 2006, presumably in preparation for combined operations with the Ethiopian forces in Somalia, the invasion took JSOC by surprise. “We should have been leaning forward to capitalize on this, and we did nothing,” said a senior military official. JSOC was forced to scramble. It took until late March or April to deploy about a dozen operators to link up with the Ethiopians in Somalia. Most were from Team 6's Gold Squadron, along with a few Delta and 24th Special Tactics Squadron operators. Split into two- and three-man teams and inserted into Ethiopian infantry units, their mission was to advise and assist the Ethiopian forces, who were ousting the Islamists from Mogadishu and driving them south toward the Kenyan border. Even that tiny deployment, which required Rumsfeld's approval, created heartache among Washington policymakers who were fearful of a repeat of 1993's costly Mogadishu battle. “It was very uncomfortable,” the intelligence official said, adding that if McChrystal had had his way, JSOC “would have gone with a much bigger capability and been much more aggressive.”
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The command also stationed two AC-130 gunships at Dire Dawa, to which the Ethiopian government consented on the condition that their missions and presence on Ethiopian soil remain secret. At least one gunship was soon in action, striking a column of suspected Islamic Courts Union and East African Al Qaeda fighters on January 7 near the port of Ras Kamboni in southern Somalia. The main target of the attack, Aden Hashi Ayro, leader of the Islamic Courts Union's al-Shabaab militia, was wounded but survived and escaped. Another series of air strikes in the same area followed two days later. But a third mission near the Kenyan border a little more than two weeks later proved to be the gunship deployment's undoing. The early morning strike targeted Ahmed Madobe, a deputy of Islamic Courts Union head Hassan Turki, but only succeeded in wounding him and killing eight of his companions. A few hours after the strike, a helicopter landed carrying Ethiopians and Americans who seized him and took him to a facility near the Somali city of Kismayo, where they interrogated him and treated his wounds.

The Washington Post
reported on the raid on January 24, infuriating the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, who had stressed the need for operational security and urged the United States to keep a “light footprint” in the area. Meles asked that gunships leave Ethiopia and for the United States not to engage in military strikes in Somalia, but to pass targeting information to his forces instead. In a January 25 cable, Yamamoto said he agreed with Zenawi that the gunships should depart. “Heavy press interest has made it difficult to secure and protect the AC-130 operations,” he wrote. The gunships left shortly thereafter.
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Planned as a quick in-and-out operation to dislodge the Islamists, the Ethiopian invasion soon bogged down into an occupation. The JSOC operators spent only a few weeks with the Ethiopians before pulling out, their most serious casualty a SEAL who came down with malaria. By then, JSOC had opened an “outstation”—a small base or safe house from which a handful of operators and support personnel worked with local forces—in Bosaso, a port on Puntland's northern coast. “That was a relationship that started with the Black Hawk teams that we pretty much took over,” said a Team 6 source. It was a team from Bosaso that found itself pinned down in Bargal on June 1. Out of other options, the 24th STS combat controller called the one source of U.S. firepower nearby: the
Chafee,
a Navy destroyer off the coast. The
Chafee
fired more than a dozen rounds from its five-inch gun. That naval gunfire—rare in the twenty-first century—enabled the U.S. and Ethiopian troops to break contact and get away.
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JSOC's missions in Somalia were taking on a lethal aspect. The aim increasingly became to kill targets, rather than to capture them. But that shift required a much bigger support presence in Nairobi to enable JSOC's small teams in Somalia. Accordingly, the task force presence in the embassy quickly grew to about seventy people as intelligence analysts and other support personnel arrived. But as 2007 wore on, the relationship between JSOC and the Ethiopian military began to fray. This was in part because the Ethiopians did not want to be seen as U.S. proxies, but also because the priorities of the United States and Ethiopia overlapped, but were not the same. Ethiopia's primary goals were to oppose the threat posed by the Islamic Courts Union and to prevent its bitter enemy Eritrea from using the group as a proxy to attack Ethiopia. The United States was focused on killing a handful of people at the top of the East Africa Al Qaeda cell, and had little interest in killing large numbers of Islamist foot soldiers. “If we wanted to kill a couple of thousand guys, we could have done that pretty much any time,” said the senior intelligence official.
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