How The Pentagon’s Top Killers Became (Unaccountable) Spies

[Raymond]

How The Pentagon’s Top Killers Became (Unaccountable) Spies

By Spencer AckermanEmail AuthorFebruary 13, 2012 | 6:35 am |
Categories: Shadow Wars, Spies, Secrecy and Surveillance

This is what people think of when they imagine the Joint Special
Operations Command, or JSOC — the secretive, über-elite military unit
that killed Osama bin Laden. The leader of a JSOC unit in Iraq, known
as K-Bar, gets shot in the chest by insurgents. K-Bar waves away his
medic until he finishes killing his assailants. His reward? Leading
JSOC’s operations in Afghanistan.

Ludicrous acts of superhuman bravado are part of JSOC’s myth and
mystique. That mystique is hard to penetrate: JSOC is so secretive
that it instructs its members not to write down important information,
lest it be vulnerable to disclosure under the Freedom of Information
Act. But a new book reveals that killing might not even be the most
important thing JSOC does.

Marc Ambinder, a former reporter for The Atlantic and National
Journal, goes deep inside JSOC to reveal that it has become perhaps
the government’s most effective intelligence agency. Unassuming office
buildings around the Washington area and beyond have become unlabeled
spy centers that process untold volumes of information extracted from
JSOC’s hunting missions, with such a rapid analytic turnaround time
that the “shooters” of the unit can quickly begin planning their next
kills. In fact, Ambinder reports in The Command, his just-published
eBook, the integration of tactical spying within JSOC is so thorough
that it’s hard to distinguish “shooters” from analysts.

Yet JSOC operates with practically no accountability. In Iraq, it ran
a torture chamber at a place called Camp Nama — until its leader,
Stanley McChrystal and his intelligence chief, Michael Flynn, cleaned
it up. (There’s a debate in military circles about whether McChrystal
or his friend and successor, Adm. William McRaven deserve credit for
JSOC’s resurgence; but Ambinder’s reporting suggests Flynn is the real
father of the modern JSOC.) The unit is supposed to answer to the
chain of command, but it advised President Obama not to ask which Navy
SEAL actually killed Osama bin Laden — and then wouldn’t tell Obama’s
chief of staff, who ignored the advice. Even while the CIA works
intimately with JSOC, it whispers to reporters, self-interestedly,
that the unit is out of control.

But JSOC has the biggest trump card of all to play, institutionally:
it works. Killing bin Laden was just the culmination of a furious,
decade-long pace of lethal operations, involving hundreds of
Afghanistan night raids in a single year; what Ambinder describes as a
“free hand” in Somalia, including last month’s dramatic hostage
rescue; and unseen counterterrorism mission from Pakistan to, of all
places, Peru. JSOC is so busy its leadership thinks it’s exhausted,
and prominent analysts claim it needs to step up its game to prevent
nuclear terrorism.

Danger Room spoke with Ambinder about JSOC’s successes — and the
implications for the secretive organization’s expanded reach into the
spy world, especially as it becomes the lead force waging America’s
Shadow Wars.

Danger Room: How did JSOC become an intelligence agency?

Marc Ambinder: It was born of necessity. As the insurgency in Iraq
became too much for commanders to bear, there was a scramble to figure
out how to get tactical intelligence out of anyone they captured. And
it seemed like the military’s first response, generally, to use a
broad over generalization, for the important people, we’ll rough them
up. At least they’ll say something, and that’ll give us something
tactical. But obviously it didn’t work very well, it’s immoral. They
hadn’t really figured out beforehand that [Iraq] would require a lot
of tactical intelligence. All the intelligence planning that went on
for the Iraq war was strategic.

So there was a huge need for it. Also, there was the timing of it.
JSOC was in charge of finding and interrogating high value targets in
Iraq. They had just launched internal investigation inside the command
into what happened at Camp Nama. There was a lot of sensitivity to the
interrogation techniques that were used there. There are different
accounts as to how precisely this sort of investigative police
directive doctrines became embedded in the minds of the elite, tier-
one warriors. But most people give credit to the J2 [intelligence
chief] at the time, Gen. Mike Flynn. As he describes it, he would
observe your average JSOC operation and you would see insurgents, or
whomever, rounded up, put in the same room, with all the stuff they
had in their hands, all the pocket litter, would be separated and just
kept in a trash bag. And it was brought back to one of the other bases
for processing. That was way too inefficient and way too slow for the
operational tempo of the insurgents. In his mind, Flynn envisioned the
insurgency to be this ever-expanding spider’s web, and the U.S.
military would be like this tiny mouse, clawing at one end of it. And
you needed to speed up.





DR: How complicit was JSOC in torture?

MA: I would say JSOC was moderately complicit. The number of actual
interrogators and tier-one operators who actually participated in
torture was very small. Less than 50. But the number of people who
knew about it, even in a closed culture like JSOC, had to be much
larger. And one of the big questions that still hangs over the head of
Gen. McChrystal, who’s otherwise widely admired for turning JSOC
around and moving it away from these [torture] techniques, is that it
took him seemingly a long time when he took over the command to get
his arms around how the command’s interrogation practices were
actually working. There’s a legitimate and still open question of how
much he knew, and what did about it.

I was able to learn that he did initiate an internal investigation
that resulted in about 30 people being disciplined, with some of them
kicked out of the military or transferred to other units. Because it’s
a secret organization for most part the results of the investigations
remain secret. JSOC prefers to keep its record of accountability in-
house. But if you look at the time line, and look at what’s public —
the torture report from the Senate intelligence committee blacked out
all the references to JSOC. Quite clear that even on a senior level,
task force commanders in Iraq knew what was going on.

DR: So they torture people until Flynn figures out there’s a better
way to get intelligence?

MA: I know that sounds like a neat narrative, and this is a
complicated story. But in essence, that is what happened. While you
have to say the command was complicit in the rough, bad stuff early
on, they figured out what was happening, and they figured out a much
better, humane and more effective way of doing it. Then they
proselytize it, and make sure rest of the military knows they’re doing
it that way. You can’t ever erase the stain of torture, but this
command deserves credit for figuring out what to do about it, and how
to meet the need for intelligence without roughing people up, and how
to get inside the decision loops of the insurgents.

DR: What were some of the intelligence tactics that JSOC would use?

MA: Some of the tactics were as simple as equipping your tier-one
operators — i.e., a Delta Force shooter or a SEAL Team Six demolition
expert, the elite of the elite — with a camera. Instead of rounding up
insurgents, bringing them to one area of a house, they’d have pictures
of them exactly where they are, and take pictures what they have on
them exactly. They’d keep them with their pocket litter until they
were processed. And they’d send pictures back in real time to an
intelligence fusion center. The main one in Iraq was in Balad but
there were others. And you’d have analyst who could use many of
various databases that JSOC had access to, and many that JSOC was
building. The common metaphor was that you’re building the airplane as
it’s taking off. You built all these databases for intelligence and
had secret biometrics processes. There were teams of U.S. intelligence
officers who were trying to get as many fingerprints, DNA samples and
so forth of anyone in Baghdad as they could. The analysts would be
able to create link analysis charts from them.

If you captured Abu So-and-So, you’d be able to say within a minute,
“Hey, I know your uncle is this person, who we really want to get to.
If you can tell me where this person is right now, we’ll give you a
break and even let you go.” And often, that would be what Abu So-and-
So would do, because it would be in his best interest. Within maybe 20
minutes, JSOC could launch a second raid targeting the uncle of Abu So-
and-So.

At a ground level, those kind of techniques, by 2007-8, were used not
just by the elite special operations forces, but also the so-called
white special operations forces — Green Berets and other Navy SEAL
elements, as well as conventional human intelligence brigades that
were attached to combat units.

DR: Is JSOC now the tactical intelligence agency of choice for the
U.S. government?

MA: Not only are they the tactical intel of choice, they also have the
operational capacity to act on that intelligence. So they generate
intelligence, they analyze it, and they act on it, all in one package.

DR: What does that mean for holding JSOC accountable? This is an
extraordinarily secretive military unit.

MA: There are a lot of buried caches in West Virginia and Virginia of
JSOC documents. I only say that with some exaggeration. This is
obviously a command that had to be secret when it was stood up in part
because secrecy is the coin of realm when doing one-off special
operations. The problem generally here is that by law, JSOC can’t
really collect strategic intelligence or intelligence for its own
sake, depending on where they are. In the war zone, in Iraq or
Afghanistan, it’s different; they can collect and use intelligence
there. But they also operate outside of designated war zones in North
Africa, in South America, in Asia, and they use these intelligence
collection techniques there as well.

It’s under the rubric of what they call “Operational Preparation of
the Environment.” Which is to say, any time there’s JSOC operation,
you don’t want them to fly in blind, so you have to collect some
intelligence. But in practice they really stretch that definition.
Elements of JSOC run their own human intelligence sources. I didn’t
put this in the book, but I had one former senior JSOC operator
describing to me a very elaborate JSOC operation in Beirut where a
dozen more human sources were recruited to steal a variety of
documents, relating to international narcotics trafficking. Which
sounds great, until you remember that it’s not law enforcement
officers or the CIA doing it, but the U.S. military doing it.

There are legal restrictions on what the CIA can do in terms of covert
operations. There has to be a finding, the president has to notify at
least the “Gang of Eight” [leaders of the intelligence oversight
committees] in Congress. JSOC doesn’t have to do any of that. There is
very little accountability for their actions. What’s weird is that
many in congress who’d be very sensitive to CIA operations almost
treat JSOC as an entity that doesn’t have to submit to oversight. It’s
almost like this is the president’s private army, we’ll let the
president do what he needs to do. As long as you don’t get in trouble,
we’re not gonna ask too many questions.

You don’t want the command to brief members of Congress before every
operation. On other hand, regular briefings every three months might
give some sense of the military intelligence collection that goes on.
And when you collect intelligence, it’s not just satellites that’s
listen to conversation. You’re making in a lot of cases very
difficult, grey, moral choices like the CIA does all the time. There’s
an argument to be made — incidentally, it’s one that Republican [Rep.]
Mike Rogers, the head of the House intelligence committee agrees with
— for more regular briefings from JSOC, to get a more granular sense
of how JSOC uses and distributes the money it’s given for intelligence
gathering. He understands that a lot of vital strategic intelligence
isn’t being collected by CIA, it’s being collected by JSOC, in pursuit
of legitimate objectives without oversight.




DR: Does JSOC need to get better at preventing nuclear terrorism, as
some critics you cite allege? You wrote a piece recently that
discussed U.S. planning to seize loose Pakistani nukes. Won’t it be
JSOC that does that?

MA: Adm. Eric Olson, the former commander of [U.S. Special Operations
Command], has begun to express that worry publicly. JSOC has become
the world’s premiere counterterrorism force, but other skills have
atrophied, and that includes the ability to secure nuclear weapons.
The command is aware of that. They will tell you that they still have
the same number of people trained to do counterproliferation work. But
you can argue that over the past ten years that the amount of
counterproliferation work needs to be done, or the level of threat
from nuclear proliferation has increased or is rising to the level
that requires JSOC to reorient its focus. One argument is that JSOC
should be used for special missions, not your average Army Ranger door-
knock operation. That’s something Gen. McChrystal came to believe,
something I believe Adm. McRaven also agrees with. So I think you’ll
see over the next couple years the command reorient itself around
counterproliferation.

DR: What does that mean in practice? JSOC is going to swoop into
former Soviet states and snatch nuclear material?

MA: They have done that. In practice, though, the real secret of the
Pakistan nuclear question is that there’s no way that there are enough
trained American — or American and British and Israeli — soldiers to
go into Pakistan and seize their nuclear arsenal and render it safe.
There’s just no way. It would take an entire army of people who were
extremely well trained to do that. But the concern is that, in
general, you have proliferation concerns and you have forces that
haven’t trained to confront them in a way that they should.

DR: What was JSOC doing in Peru?

MA: My understanding is that they were pursuing the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah elements that were laundering
money and using Peru as a base of operations for that type of activity
throughout South America. Technically JSOC was attached to the embassy
through the cover of one of these Defense Intelligence Agency
programs. There were [bureaucratic] outposts that Donald Rumsfeld
created to expand JSOC’s footprint across the world.

DR: Should we expect to see JSOC become a global strike force, rather
than one that operates at the periphery of the war on terror?

MA: Yes. McRaven has not told me this directly, but I believe he wants
to turn JSOC into the non-missile equivalent of Prompt Global Strike.
If there’s an acute problem somewhere in the world, not just a bunch
of people with guns can be there, but an entire integrated military
operation can be transported there as a package, with all the branches
— communications, intelligence, everything — devoted to the problem
and can fix the problem. One gets the sense that the way the
administration is budgeting for defense that they agree.

The phrase that’s used all the time is “creating lilypads” across the
world, from which you can hop into hot zones if necessary. It’s a way
to cope with the reduction in conventional forces. The idea is that
elite forces are force multipliers. If you look at the way the command
is structured now, with the number of command posts they have
throughout the world, it’s hard to see them as anything but a Prompt
Global Strike capacity absent active wars. And very soon they’ll have
a larger presence in Afghanistan. But absent Iraq, absent Afghanistan
over the next couple years, that’s what it’s gonna be. And their focus
will be on counter-proliferation, counter-cyber — that’s a word we
haven’t really heard before; JSOC is building a cyber capacity —
counternarcotics.

I think one of big challenges will be to figure out how you create
legal framework for that that allows for a prompt response that at the
same time assures accountability. And I would hope members of Congress
are thinking about that.

Photos: U.S. Air Force

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