Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (22 page)

The United States was not unmindful of collateral damage, going to some lengths to preserve a degree of proportion. Regulations stipulated that civilians could be killed but not too many, at least not without clearance from higher authority. “Our number was thirty,” explained Garlasco. “So, for example, Saddam Hussein. If you’re gonna kill up to twenty-nine people in a strike against Saddam Hussein, that’s not a problem. But once you hit that number thirty, we actually had to go to either President Bush, or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.” As it happened, approval from higher authority was pretty much pro forma; following the invasion, General Michael Moseley, then vice chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, reported that the necessary clearance to risk thirty or more civilian lives in this manner had been requested at least fifty times. In no case had it been refused.

Following the defeat of the Iraqi military and the installation of the occupation regime in Baghdad, the manhunt for Saddam continued. Spurring such efforts was the widespread belief that the source of the escalating insurgency was the deposed leader and his diehard followers. So when he was finally run to ground on December 13, 2003, his capture inevitably monitored in real time via Predator by generals at their U.S. headquarters, hope blossomed that resistance might now begin to taper off. As Colonel Jim Hickey, the Chicago-born leader of the unit that unearthed Saddam, remarked the day after his capture, “From a military point of view, if you lop the head off a snake, the snake’s not going to be so viable after that.”

But that turned out not to be the case.

At the end of March 2004, four employees of the Blackwater military contractor corporation were ambushed and killed in the town of Fallujah, their incinerated bodies strung up for all to see. Meanwhile the popular Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr threatened to ignite an uprising among the previously quiescent Shia population. All the while, the number of lethal attacks with homemade bombs against American soldiers had been ticking remorselessly upward. The mounting chaos sparked a heated reaction in Washington, where the administration had hitherto believed that the insurgency was largely the last gasp of Saddam’s defeated regime. On April 7, a week after the Fallujah ambush, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Colin Powell held a videoconference with General Ricardo Sanchez, the overall commander in Iraq. As later related by Sanchez himself, Powell (often cited as the cerebral moderate in that administration) set an emotional tone, declaring: “We’ve got to smash somebody’s ass quickly. There has to be a total victory somewhere. We must have a brute demonstration of power.” As Sanchez recalled, the meeting became even more bellicose. “Kick ass!” exclaimed the president. “If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell!… There is a series of moments, and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!”

That same month the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, General Stanley McChrystal, moved his headquarters to Iraq. As in the unhappy saga of Task Force 11 at Takur Ghar, the elite JSOC had been active in Afghanistan. McChrystal himself, though not directly engaged in Special Operations there, had been the aggressive chief of staff of Combined Joint Task Force 180, which according to a later report by officers who served in it, had conducted its affairs according to the principles of effects-based operations, defined in a military publication as “producing desired futures.” The principal effect of these operations was of course to embitter the population. Thanks to a steady surge of ill-judged arrests and incarcerations, the Taliban was reviving.

In Iraq, JSOC components such as the elite Army Delta Force and Navy Seal Team 6 had been initially engaged in rounding up the “deck of cards,” the leading officials of Saddam Hussein’s defeated regime whose names and faces had been printed up by the Pentagon as playing cards and distributed to soldiers before the invasion. But that was about to change. A new kingpin had appeared on the scene, a suitable candidate to succeed Saddam as the advertised source of all evil in occupied Iraq.

The Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (a nom de guerre, his real name being Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh) had been a petty criminal in his native country before moving to Afghanistan, arriving too late to join the anti-Soviet jihad but staying on to train with members of al-Qaeda. In early 2003, he was plucked from obscurity by Secretary Powell, who, in his notorious UN address justifying the upcoming attack on Iraq, singled out Zarqawi as the link (nonexistent in reality) between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

A gifted organizer and propagandist, Zarqawi appreciated that self-promotion, as a ruthless champion of fundamentalism, would attract funds and recruits to his banner. In May 2004, a gruesome video appeared online with the caption “Abu Musab Al Zarqawi slaughters an American,” the American in question being Nicholas Berg, an independent civilian contractor kidnapped in Baghdad the month before whose head Zarqawi sawed off with a carving knife for the benefit of the camera. This and other videos had wide distribution and impact thanks to one of the occupation’s few success stories, the construction of cell-phone networks in Iraq, none of which had existed in the old regime. Inaugurated in February 2004, the Egyptian-owned Iraqna network, which covered Baghdad and central Iraq, was soon attracting subscribers at the rate of 100,000 a month. Insurgents rapidly adopted it as a tool for detonating bombs, while Zarqawi and others utilized its potential for communication and propaganda. Soon, it would become the most essential tool in the U.S. counterinsurgency arsenal.

Thanks to his carefully crafted public relations campaign, Zarqawi was soon cast in Saddam’s old role in U.S. demonology. In many ways he was ideally suited for the part. Along with his evident psychopathic cruelty, his former association with al-Qaeda bolstered the notion that Iraq and 9/11 were somehow linked, while his foreign origins and the foreign volunteers in his group could be taken as demonstrating that the insurgency was the work of international terrorists, not disaffected Iraqis. To guarantee his high-value status as the cause of all ills, beginning in 2004 the U.S. military mounted a propaganda campaign aimed not only at Iraqis but also at Americans: internal military documents cited the “U.S. Home Audience” as one of the targets of the campaign.

Paradoxically, having created a larger-than-life high-value target, the military command themselves came to believe in it. By 2005, according to a British report, Zarqawi was dominating the command’s thinking about the war almost to the point of obsession. A participant at the two morning videoconferences held by General George Casey (who replaced Sanchez in June 2004) reported: “[I]t was mentioned every morning [in both venues] in the mistaken belief that if you got him the insurgency would collapse.”

Marketed as a master-terrorist, Zarqawi was an ideal target for Joint Special Operations Command and its ambitious commander. Rapidly jettisoning the redundant “deck-of-cards” targets, McChrystal set to work reorganizing his command for a confrontation with the foe. JSOC moved out of its initial Camp Nama headquarters at Baghdad airport, where investigators had discovered prisoners being tortured with electric shocks and held in cells the size of dog kennels, to a new headquarters at Balad, the sprawling air force base forty miles from the capital. Impatient with the cumbersome system by which intelligence collected by the elite Delta Force, SEAL, and Ranger units was shipped off elsewhere for analysis, he promoted a “flattened” system in which intelligence was analyzed on the spot and acted on immediately, producing further intelligence for instant analysis, and so on. Communal spirit among the headquarters staff was enhanced by the new working space, a single large room without partitions, in which everyone could watch the fruits of their efforts on “Kill TV,” large plasma screens on the office wall streaming video footage of air strikes and raiding parties in action. It was a very self-contained operational headquarters, with all components of the JSOC machine, including aircraft and helicopters as well as the men of the elite special operations units, together in one facility. Prisoners were also housed there, although for some time British special operations units were forbidden to hand over any prisoners to McChrystal’s command on the grounds that prisoners at the new headquarters were again being held in “tiny” dog kennels.

The operation ran twenty-four/seven, three shifts a day. Although he was a two-star general overseeing a far-flung operation, McChrystal immersed himself in the day-to-day battle, working right next to officers, planning and directing the night’s raids, and often accompanying them himself. A videoconference, starring the general—one camera was trained on McChrystal throughout—and linking thousands of people across the globe, from intelligence agencies in Washington (timed to suit their convenience) to forward-operating bases in the mountains of Afghanistan, occupied several hours of his day and consumed unimaginable amounts of bandwidth. By 2007, writes McChrystal in his memoir: “[T]he O&I (operations and intelligence) was a worldwide forum of thousands of people associated with our mission.”

This was indeed net-centric warfare in action, complete with all the esoteric (and costly) technology associated with the concept. The underlying premises of the revolution in military affairs had been that information is the key to victory and that it is possible to have near-perfect intelligence concerning the enemy, thereby enabling precise military operations, including the targeting of precision weapons with accurately predicted effects. Tellingly, McChrystal, at that time and since, liked to repeat the mantra “it takes a network to defeat a network,” referencing the theories propounded by think tankers John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, academic popularizers of “netwar” and staunch adherents of Andrew Marshall and the revolution.

Successful net warriors of course demand “information dominance” (Arquilla served as a Pentagon adviser in that field during the Kosovo conflict). But despite repeated promises, such high-level target intelligence never quite materialized, as had been apparent in Vietnam, 1991 Iraq, and the Balkans. The arrival of the cell phone in war zones held out the prospect of a giant leap forward, rendering it possible, in theory at least, to map the enemy network, to determine desirable targets, and to target them. In the days of Task Force Alpha, sensors were distributed across the landscape in hopes that they would detect the enemy and signal his whereabouts. Later, as with JSTARS, the sensors became airborne. Now the enemy was obligingly carrying their own sensors—cell phones—with them at all times, not only continually broadcasting their location but also continually updating connections among individuals in the target network: who was calling whom, how often, who got the most calls, and so on.

In the 1990s the leadership of the Drug Enforcement Agency had forged a profitable relationship with the National Security Agency following its adoption of the kingpin strategy. JSOC under McChrystal’s command similarly turned to the powerful National Security Agency, exploiting its technological resources and bureaucratic clout. NSA, under the ambitious command of General Keith Alexander, responded readily, instituting a program called Real Time Regional Gateway to collect every Iraqi text message, phone call, and email on the principle that it was better to “collect the whole haystack” rather than look for a single needle.

No less prized than the actual recordings was the “metadata” of all calls made and received. So-called traffic analysis has long been an intelligence tool: the British, for example, used it in World War II to track German submarines via their radio transmissions even when unable to read the actual messages. Now, computer-aided analysis made it possible to display instantly patterns of communication within the relevant population. By looking at these links it supposedly became possible to construct intricate diagrams of the enemy network.

First, however, it was obviously essential to find out people’s phone numbers. Zarqawi was unlikely to list his number in the phone book, and neither would anyone else of interest. That was where a classified technology developed by NSA and known by a variety of names, including Triggerfish, Stingray, and IMSI Catcher, was introduced. These devices in essence mimic a cell tower, getting a cell phone or cell phones, even when several kilometers away, to connect and thereby reveal the respective number(s) and location(s). Portable (very little power is needed to override the real tower’s signals) and functioning even when the targeted phones are inside buildings, this technology rapidly became central to JSOC’s manhunts. “It’s simple,” a former intelligence operative in Iraq explained. “I’ve walked past buildings with the device in my backpack and scooped up the numbers of all the people inside. So you have the numbers. Then, later, when we went to get one of those people, the device pings his phone and tells us where he is.” The devices, also known generically as “virtual base-tower receivers,” could be carried not only by a person or vehicle but also in a pod mounted on a drone.

The implications of these developments in tracking technology were thrilling, at least to the NSA and its partners. An NSA document dated March 3, 2005, and later released by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden asks rhetorically:

What resembles “LITTLE BOY” [one of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan during World war II] and as LITTLE BOY did, represents the dawn of a new era (at least in SIGINT and precision geolocation)?

If you answered a pod mounted on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that is currently flying in support of the Global War on Terrorism, you would be correct.

If and when everything worked as planned, the drones would not only help locate targets via their cell phones but also stream video of them and their locations before they finally broadcast dramatic imagery of their destruction for screening to an appreciative audience on Kill TV. But of course things did not always go as planned. Clearly, a lot depended on the phone being correctly associated with the target. But the target might easily have passed his phone on to someone else, or the original link between phone and person could be in error.