The Secret Sentry (43 page)

Beginning in late 2004, U.S. commanders in Afghanistan were gratified to see signs appearing in the battlefield SIGINT they
were receiving that some of the Taliban guerrillas operating inside Afghanistan were demoralized and on the run. An anonymous
U.S. intelligence officer was quoted as saying, “We actually overheard a Taliban fighter break out into a lament, saying ‘Where
are you [Mullah] Omar, why have you forsaken us?’ ”
⁵²

U.S. military commanders launched their own PR offensive, releasing selected intelligence assessments intended to convince
the American public that the Taliban in Afghanistan were all but beaten. First came the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
General Richard Myers, who described the security situation in Afghanistan as “exceptionally good” during a visit to Kabul.
In a meeting with American reporters in Kabul in April 2005, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General
David Barno, confidently predicted that “the Taliban militia would collapse as a viable fighting force over the next several
months,” adding that he believed that the Taliban rank and file would accept an amnesty offer from Afghan president Hamid
Karzai to lay down their arms and join the Afghan government.
⁵³

But the spin campaign was already backfiring in late March 2005, when Tal-iban guerrilla teams once again began surging across
the border from their safe havens in northern Pakistan, but this time in numbers never seen before. In a matter of weeks,
the security situation inside Afghanistan deteriorated rapidly. The number of attacks on American military installations and
Afghan police posts and government offices in southern Afghanistan rose dramatically, as did the number of civilians killed
by the Taliban.
⁵⁴
Intelligence analysts confirmed on the basis of SIGINT intercepts that the number of Taliban guerrilla teams operating inside
Afghanistan had also risen dramatically in the previous two months. Moreover, intercepts confirmed that two of the Taliban’s
best field commanders, Mullah Dadullah and Mullah Brader, had crossed over from Pakistan and were leading large Taliban guerrilla
detachments in Kanda-har and Zabul Provinces.
⁵⁵

By late spring of 2005, large chunks of three important southern Afghan provinces— Kandahar, Uruzgan, and Zabul— were controlled
by the Taliban, with the exception of the major cities and a few isolated firebases, which remained in the hands of American
forces. When Lieutenant Colonel Don Bolduc’s First Battalion, Third Special Forces Group, arrived in Kandahar in June 2005
to take over the responsibility for garrisoning southern Afghanistan, his men found that the U.S. Army unit that they were
replacing had done little to prevent the Taliban from consolidating its hold on these three provinces, preferring instead
to focus its operations on clearing the areas around the few remaining army firebases in southern Afghanistan. Between January
and July 2005, the Taliban, thanks to this complacency, had been allowed to establish permanent base areas in the provinces.
It was also furiously reinforcing its forces in these sanctuaries with new guerrilla units infiltrated in from Pakistan and
new levies recruited from among sympathetic local tribesmen.
⁵⁶

The situation in Zabul Province was particularly grim. A longtime Taliban stronghold, Zabul was so hostile that some American
troops referred to it as “Talibanland.” Others called it the “Fallujah of Afghanistan,” a reference to the Iraqi insurgent
stronghold in al-Anbar Province. Patrols from the 173rd Airborne Brigade operating in Zabul were repeatedly attacked by groups
of as many as 100 to 150 Taliban fighters. Over and over again, army SIGINT personnel accompanying the 173rd Airborne’s patrols
picked up heavy volumes of Taliban walkie-talkie traffic closely monitoring their movements and coordinating attacks on their
positions. The Taliban suffered heavy casualties, but it was clear that the province had become a far more dangerous place
than it had been after the U.S. invasion in 2001
^.57

But no matter how good the SIGINT was, U.S. forces could clear but not hold the ground they took. Take, for example, what
happened after a three-day running battle in August 2005 in the Mari Ghar region in the heart of Zabul Province, which pitted
more than two hundred Taliban guerrillas against a twelve-man Green Beret team from the First Battalion, Third Special Forces
Group commanded by Captain Brandon Griffin, and a sixteen-man detachment of Afghan army troops. When the battle was over,
Captain Griffin’s team had killed sixty-five guerrillas, losing only one man in return. But no ground had been gained during
the battle. Despite three days of near-continuous running battles with the Taliban, Griffin’s team had been forced to leave
the Mari Ghar region in the hands of the Taliban. It was the same old story— the U.S. Army just had too few troops in Afghanistan
to hold anything more than the string of firebases that it occupied throughout the country.
⁵⁸

Even worse, tactical SIGINT also showed that the Taliban had morphed from a motley group of insurgents into a heavily armed
and well-led guerrilla force, which proved to be insurgents and foreign fighters who, according to a U.S. commander, “were
resolute. They stood and fought.”
⁵⁹

The Surge

Following the Battle of Fallujah in November 2004, the security situation in Iraq continued to deteriorate rapidly as the
level of sectarian violence between the country’s Sunni and Shi’ite militias steadily mounted and insurgent attacks on U.S.
forces shot up. In this savage and unforgiving environment, SIGINT became increasingly vital to U.S. military commanders as
the Iraqi insurgents dried up intelligence by closing down (i.e., killing) most of the U.S. military’s HUMINT sources. By
2005, SIGINT had once again supplanted HUMINT as the principal source of intelligence for the United States. A postmortem
re-port on the U.S. Army Third Corps’s tour of duty in Iraq had this to say about SIGINT’s effectiveness:

Our SIGINT collection was the most spectacular intelligence discipline on the battlefield, as we were able to collect on many
targets cued by other intelligence disciplines. Trusted and useful, SIGINT provided an abundance of intelligence on insurgent
networks, named persons of interest, and enemy operations. SIGINT is a critical area where continued development of linguists,
not only in skill but in numbers, must occur.
⁶⁰

Army and marine commanders in Iraq found that SIGINT by itself was only moderately effective at the street level. But when
combined with reasonably effective tactical HUMINT gathering, its value soared dramatically. Colonel Emmett Schaill, the deputy
commander of the army’s First Brigade, Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, which operated in Mosul, in northern Iraq, from September
2004 to June 2005, recalled that SIGINT and unmanned drones played an important supporting role in finding Iraqi insurgents
in his sector, but were less important than the HUMINT assets that his brigade developed during its tour in Iraq. Leveraging
the intelligence he collected with information from national intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA, by the end of his
tour Schaill was able to lead his brigade to destroy 80 percent of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al Qaeda cells in northern Iraq,
a fact confirmed by SIGINT intercepts of al Qaeda cell phone traffic.
⁶¹

Even after Schaill’s brigade left Mosul and returned home, SIGINT continued to produce valuable intelligence that, working
in conjunction with HUMINT and unmanned drones, resulted in heavy insurgent casualties. On August 12, 2005, SIGINT intercepts
led U.S. Army Special Forces to an al Qaeda in Iraq hideout outside Mosul. When the firefight was over, three senior al Qaeda
in Iraq leaders were dead, including the commander of al Qaeda in Iraq forces in Mosul, Abu Zubayr (aka Mohammed Sultan Saleh),
who was killed while wearing a suicide vest packed with explosives.
⁶²

But SIGINT is an inexact science, especially against an enemy that knows that its communications are almost certainly being
monitored. This has meant that American intelligence analysts in Iraq have often not been able to exploit the intercepts they
get. Take, for example, a typical “cordon and search” operation launched by a company of U.S. Marines and a battalion of the
Iraqi army on June 29, 2005, near the town of Saqlawiyah, an insurgent stronghold in al-Anbar Province. The goal of the operation
was to surround the town and conduct a door-to-door search of all houses in certain neighborhoods looking for weapons and
insurgents. An army report on the operation recounts, “During the search, a [marine] radio battalion reported picking up insurgent
radio traffic that identified individuals by name. The suspected insurgents were instructed to remain in their hideout.”

The problem was that the cell phone call that the marines had intercepted did not identify who the insurgents were other than
by their first names. Those unfortunates who had those first names were detained—and then released for lack of evidence.
⁶³

U.S. intelligence officials now candidly admit that the turning point of the war in Iraq occurred in February 2006, when Sunni
insurgents bombed a mosque in the city of Samarra, which was one of the holiest shrines for Iraqi Shi’ites. The Samarra bombing
unleashed a wave of sectarian fighting that led to unprecedented slaughter in Iraq. All of the progress in winning the “hearts
and minds” of Iraqis was swept away, and the carnage dominated the nightly news in the United States. This outburst of violence
came at a time when HUMINT in Iraq was, in the words of a commentator, “fairly scarce and usually unreliable.” The U.S. military
had to depend on SIGINT to help it combat this rising tide of violence.
⁶⁴

A February 2006 report notes that an army SIGINT platoon located south of Baghdad was “working miracles and helping us put
lots of insurgents into Abu Ghurayb [
sic
] prison.”
⁶⁵
In July, intelligence generated by the SIGINT platoon assigned to the 506th Regimental Combat Team led to the capture of four
of the top ten Iraqi Shi’ite insurgents known to be operating in the unit’s area of operations. The commander of the small
and overworked team reported that his platoon “continues to exploit and unravel insurgent networks in Eastern Baghdad which
is saving American and Iraqi lives every day.”
⁶⁶

But arguably, SIGINT’s greatest single success in Iraq occurred on the eve-ning of June 7, 2006, when al Qaeda in Iraq leader
al-Zarqawi and five others were killed by an air strike conducted by two U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter-bombers on al-Zarqawi’s
safe house five miles north of the city of Baquba. The U.S. military, in celebrating this success, may have gone too far—
it revealed and compromised the means used to track al-Zarqawi down, a combination of SIGINT (cell phone interception), HUMINT,
and imagery collected by unmanned reconnaissance drones. SIGINT tracked the movements of al-Zarqawi’s spiritual adviser, Sheikh
Abd al-Rahman, by tapping his cell phone and tracing his movements. HUMINT found the safe house where al-Zarqawi was hiding.
And imagery intelligence determined with pinpoint accuracy the coordinates of the house, which was struck by laser-guided
bombs dropped by the F-16s.
⁶⁷

But as of the end of 2006, SIGINT had “won battles,” a now-retired senior Marine Corps officer said, “but it did not get us
any closer to winning the war.”
⁶⁸
It was not until spring of 2007, four years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, that SIGINT finally hit its stride, producing
some of the best intelligence then available to U.S. commanders about the identities and locations of Iraqi insurgents. Concurrent
with the beginning of the U.S. Army’s “surge” operation in and around Baghdad, SIGINT suddenly became a critically important
tool to locate and destroy insurgent cells operating in the Baghdad area and in al-Anbar Province to the west. A large part
of the credit for SIGINT’s increasing effectiveness was due to the efforts of navy captain Steve Tucker, who since February
had held the position of chief of NSA’s Cryptologic Services Group (CSG) Baghdad, which was situated in the Al-Faw Palace,
west of Baghdad. By the time Tucker arrived, CSG Baghdad had ballooned into NSA’s largest overseas liaison organization, consisting
of 116 military personnel and NSA civilians in Baghdad and ten locations throughout Iraq. It was responsible for feeding national
and tactical-level SIGINT not only to the commander of U.S.

forces in Iraq, but also to three division headquarters and twelve brigade staffs, as well as to the headquarters of the secretive
Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, which controlled all U.S. military special forces in Iraq.
⁶⁹

But most of the credit for SIGINT’s increased effectiveness on the battlefield, according to senior U.S. military and intelligence
officials, goes to the new commander of U.S. military forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, who assumed command of U.S.
forces in January 2007. According to sources familiar with U.S. intelligence operations in Iraq, Petraeus, who was acutely
aware of the vital importance of intelligence, especially SIGINT, in counterinsurgency warfare, went out of his way to understand
how the technology worked, and as a result, made much more effective use of SIGINT against the Iraqi insurgents than his predecessors
had.
⁷⁰

In part, this was due to the introduction of far more effective equipment like a new intercept system called Prophet Triton,
which arrived in Iraq in August 2006 and reportedly revolutionized army SIGINT units’ ability to identify and locate the origins
of enemy cell phone communications. This system proved to be an extremely valuable intelligence source during the surge counterinsurgency
in Baghdad in the summer of 2007.
⁷¹
Also arriving on the Iraqi battlefield in 2007 were other newly developed SIGINT collection systems—Cellex, DangerMouse,
Searchlite, and SIGINT Terminal Guidance, all of which have improved the U.S. Army’s ability to intercept and locate the origins
of the cell phone calls of Iraqi insurgents and allied foreign fighters from al Qaeda in Iraq. One of the most advanced of
the new systems is an NSA-designed piece of equipment called simply RT-10—but the high-quality intercept intelligence it produces
is made available only to selected army and marine commanders and their intelligence staffs.
⁷²