Task Force Black (15 page)
Authors: Mark Urban
Each new piece of intelligence caused A Squadron to tailor its rescue plan. Having arrived at Basra airport, its members commandeered some vehicles and went to the outskirts of the city, a couple of miles from the Jamiat, where they began their assault preparations. When word reached them that their two comrades had been taken through the cordon around the Jamiat to a house not far away, they altered their plan accordingly. A couple of blades would go with the green army armour to the Jamiat, while the main ground assault force would hit the house where
Campbell
and
Griffiths
were being held. Those involved in the events of 19 September 2005 still debate whether this second part of this plan, the house assault, was ever specifically authorised by Brigadier Lorimer.
There is disagreement too about whether the SAS had reason to believe its men were about to be executed. Intercepted communications, however, revealed that
Campbell
and
Griffiths
had been transferred to a radical fringe group called Iraqi Hezbollah. If the militants were abandoning the constraints forced upon them by keeping the men in police custody, it was certainly not a good sign.
*
At 9 p.m., the order was given for the armoured column to move in. Warriors and Challengers sped past the crowds near the Jamiat, while A Squadron’s assault force moved towards its own target.
Brigadier Lorimer’s armour burst into the police station, driving over cars and a couple of flimsy temporary buildings for good measure. The Iraqi police condemned it as vandalism and wanton destruction. One of the tank drivers later told friends it was the best evening of his life.
When the blades hit the house to which their comrades had been tracked by the Broadsword, it was eerily quiet. They blew in doors and windows and stormed the place only to find ‘the guys had been left there in a locked room. So the assault went in without resistance.’ The squadron would later speculate that neighbourhood ‘dickers’ or lookouts had warned those in the house, who made good their escape. There was relief all round as the troops involved in the mission returned to base. But the reckoning for the Jamiat was just beginning.
It was immediately obvious that the Iraqi political figures in the city, who stood to benefit from humiliating the British, would be livid. Mohammed al-Waeli, Governor of Basra Province, described the assault on the Jamiat as ‘barbarous’. His relationship with the British army was already difficult – one senior officer in Basra, describing Mr Waeli to me a few weeks after the incident, termed him ‘a crook and a bastard’. But once the name-calling died down there was a big problem. The Governor ordered his police force to end all cooperation with the British.
The Jamiat affair demonstrated more clearly than ever that the Basra police needed more mentoring and supervision, not less. Yet in the weeks afterwards British soldiers who turned up at Iraqi police stations in order to inspect them or mount joint patrols were often turned away or even threatened. Sometimes they succeeded in browbeating a few officers out on to the streets with them. The IPS in the city had become a focus of overt conflict instead of the people who would help the British out of Iraq. In Whitehall they still believed ardently in a ‘conditions-based withdrawal’ where security improvements would allow Britain to turn its four provinces to Provincial Iraqi Control (‘Pic’), allowing their troops to move into the background or, in the jargon of the time, ‘operational overwatch’. Following the Jamiat incident, the path to improved security, Pic and operational overwatch seemed to have reached a dead end.
British officers did not only feel the wrath of Governor Waeli. During the next day’s Huddle, just after his morning Video Tele-Conference, General Casey took his British deputy commanding general to task. This rebuke, witnessed by several senior figures in the Coalition military setup, ‘left a bad taste’.
In the hours after the storming of the Jamiat, when the entire British effort in Iraq seemed to be tottering, senior officers and ministers were noticeable by their absence from broadcast media in the UK. The capture of the HATHOR men and subsequent assault on the police station had generated a torrent of comment. It fell to Brigadier Lorimer to appear on BBC Radio 4’s
Today
programme to justify his actions.
‘I became more concerned about the safety of the two soldiers after we received information that they had been handed over to militia elements. As a result I took the difficult decision to order entry to the Jamiat police station,’ said the brigadier, adding that ‘by taking this action we were able to confirm that the soldiers were no longer being held by the IPS. An operation was then mounted to rescue them from a house in Basra.’
Even this version reflected the difficulty of the position that Whitehall and PJHQ had placed the brigadier in. Those involved are quite clear: the SAS house assault was planned before the Jamiat raid but executed at the same time. Some even characterise the attack on the police compound as no more than a diversion. But the brigadier’s words reflected the bureaucratic state of play on 19 September – he had been authorised only to move against the police station itself, as outlined in his initial orders. Later, John Reid, the Secretary of State for Defence issued a statement backing the troops. But officers who had taken part in the events spoke with great anger about the way their brigadier had been left as the solitary voice justifying their actions, while those in Whitehall silently made their assessment of the political damage.
Issues of media handling should not have mattered too much, given the successful outcome, but they revealed deeper truths. These events caused bitterness in the SAS. At Hereford, in the hours before the rescue, there had been dark rumblings that the entire regiment should go on strike if their colleagues were not brought out – or rather that they should refuse to operate in Iraq if the government was going to be so weak. As one member reflects, ‘The incident brought out a huge number of issues: the infiltration of the IPS by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and the lack of will on the UK’s part to name but two.’ As for the Americans, he adds, they reflected that the apparent lack of British determination to confront that infiltration of the police or even save their own men were explicable ‘as part of their [the British] stubborn move to operational overwatch’.
It was this feeling, flagged up explicitly by Steve Vincent in his last column from Basra, that the British were, by their inaction, actually making things worse in the city, that gained currency in the American military. From General Casey downwards, there was a suspicion that the British were so determined to get out as soon as they could that the increasingly ugly ground realities of southern Iraq could not be allowed to get in the way.
As far as A Squadron was concerned, many were quite happy to leave the mess down south to the green army. The HATHOR detachment remained in place, mainly supporting MI6, but a commitment of only a few blades was an acceptable price to maintain this relationship. The rest of Task Force Black could return to its focus of developing operations in and around Baghdad, where the ‘forward-leaning American approach’ was more to their liking.
There was, though, a reckoning even within the SAS about the Jamiat. Some were beginning to feel that the surveillance reconnaissance skills that had for so long set them apart, earning the esteem of the Americans, might no longer be possible in such dangerous environments. If even Staff Sergeant
Campbell
, a denizen of the Surveillance Reconnaissance Cell, had been compromised and captured, what future was there for such operations? And if surveillance reconnaissance was a busted flush, could the regiment find new missions?
There was one last reckoning from the Jamiat; it was political. On 5 October a group of diplomatic correspondents filed into the press briefing room at the Foreign Office in London. It was a regular event, being conducted on background terms. The journalists would refer to their briefer only as ‘a senior British official’, or in other similarly roundabout ways. Their speaker that morning was William Patey, the British Ambassador to Iraq who was on one of his regular trips home because of the presence in London of Iraq’s President.
As the meeting got under way it became clear that Patey, normally careful in his diplo-speak, had some very blunt things to say about what was happening in southern Iraq, and in particular about Iran’s role in creating this situation. He reflected on the Iranian nuclear issue, and the election in June 2005 of a tough, ideological new President, Mahmud Ahmedinejad. He alleged that Iran was supplying insurgent groups in Iraq with sophisticated new bombs that had already claimed the lives of eight soldiers and two civilian security guards, and said the Iranians might be ‘sending a message’ about the nuclear issue. They might also be acting to frustrate Britain’s objectives, Patey commented: ‘If Iran wants to tie down the coalition in Iraq, then that is consistent with supplying insurgent groups.’
This accusation brought terse – and predictable – denials from the foreign ministry in Tehran. But the Ambassador had let the genie out of the bottle, and the following day the Prime Minister joined the fray when asked at a Downing Street news conference with the visiting Iraqi President about the alleged help being given to insurgents by Iran.
‘There have been new explosive devices used – not just against British troops but elsewhere in Iraq,’ said Tony Blair. ‘The particular nature of those devices lead us either to Iranian elements or to Hezbollah… however, we can’t be sure of this.’
This statement from Blair put the issue significantly higher up the international agenda, and the Americans soon followed suit with their own condemnation. But, as the Prime Minister had hinted, there was a lack of clarity about the intelligence concerned. By making public an issue that was then being hotly debated in secret by the professionals, Blair may simply have been venting his frustrations, albeit at the risk of embroiling himself in further controversy involving the words ‘Iraq’ and ‘intelligence’.
Explosively Formed Projectiles or EFPs had been in use since 2004. The bombs, which look a little like large tin cans with a concave face pointed towards the target, are manufactured in such a way that this front piece of metal is flipped into a metal bolt by the explosive behind it – a transformation that takes place with such speed and energy that the resulting bolt or projectile can pierce almost any armour.
In May 2004, intelligence experts believed, the first British victim of these devices was claimed when an EFP detonated in Maysan Province. Iraqi border guards operating in the area seized some smugglers with unexploded EFPs near the Iranian border not long afterwards. In June 2005 a British bomb disposal officer successfully defused an array of ten EFPs, allowing experts to make a detailed study of the devices. They were impressed not just by the manufacture of the bombs, which required high production tolerances, but by the infrared device used to trigger them. The bombs were similar to ones used against the Israelis by Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
American J2 officers in Baghdad were soon connecting the dots. They were losing soldiers to a sudden spate of EFPs in Baghdad. They had human intelligence that Iran was not just supplying bombs but training Iraqi insurgents in how to use them. One of the British intelligence officers who was party to those discussions in Iraq felt a distinct sense of déjà vu, a worry that information was being stove-piped or selected to reach a particular conclusion. ‘The Americans couldn’t get their mind around the idea that these things might be produced in Baghdad, in someone’s back yard,’ he says. ‘It had to be another country as far as they were concerned.’
During these discussions, the MI6 station expressed doubt about the credibility of the idea that Iran was directly supplying the insurgents or using Hezbollah know-how to raise the game of the Mehdi Army or other Iraqi insurgent groups. The service simply did not believe that the intelligence proved such suppositions. Views were split though within British military intelligence, as some saw the new roadside bombings as acts beyond the competence of typical Iraqi insurgents.
The individual bombings had generated less media attention or soul-searching than the Jamiat. In the wake of that incident, both the Ambassador and Prime Minister decided to blame Britain’s troubles, at least in part, on Iran. Given the ongoing arguments about the intelligence concerned, they were taking a significant risk. Despite this, the
Sun
and other newspapers soon adopted a narrative that the Iranians were behind the death of ‘our boys’.
For the SAS or soldiers conducting strike operations in southern Iraq, it was already obvious that Iran and its Revolutionary Guards Corps provided some kind of inspiration for the insurgents. They could see the posters and pamphlets; the growing threat from roadside bombs was eroding previous assumptions that the south was much safer than the areas patrolled by the Americans. But public accusations of Iran at the highest level changed the nature of this confrontation. It was, without doubt, political escalation at a time when many of those running operations in Iraq would have preferred not to have gone in search of new enemies.
Further north, violence was stepping up relentlessly. The Sunni insurgency was mutating in an alarmingly sectarian way. With Sunni and Shia murdering one another in growing numbers, as well as campaigning against foreign forces, the chance of the Coalition getting a lid on the violence seemed increasingly remote. But beneath this tide of violence there were important developments and the SAS would be at the centre of them.
In the weeks following the Jamiat incident, operational pressure caused by an ever-rising tide of violence, and a change in personnel brought an important shift to Task Force Black. These developments unfolded against the backdrop of a new hostage drama that was to prove far more protracted than the late unpleasantness in Basra.
