Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda by Eric Schmitt, Thom Shanker

a black satchel briefcase, a laptop computer, a half-dozen hard drives, smaller thumb drives, and sheaves of documents. Flanders had been trained not to boot up the computer; a favorite terrorist trick was to booby-trap their laptops with explosives in case they were seized and someone tried to turn them on without putting in a pass code. Even so, he was beginning to suspect that this was a major intelligence find. It was almost 2:00 a.m. as Flanders and his soldiers finished inspecting the car, photographing the seizure, turning the confiscated material over to the battalion intelligence officer, and passing the detainee to a medical team who would examine him before turning him over to Army interrogators.
    The day after the sunset encounter with the dark Mercedes, Flanders told his soldiers it was time to get back out there and “out-G the G.” Another patrol, another mobile checkpoint. But over the next few months, they heard the rumors. Their detainee was a major Al Qaeda courier. He proved too well trained at countering interrogation techniques to be cracked even at the central “high-value detainee” facility in Iraq at Camp Cropper and eventually was separated from the run-of-the-mill detainees and sent for higher-level interrogation by the CIA. Their cache—the computer and drives—was a treasure trove of valuable data. Four-star generals were briefed on their find. Even the president knew about it. Or so the soldiers of 1st Platoon told themselves over a steady diet of PowerBars and Red Bull.
    At the headquarters of the 1st Cavalry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, Colonel Paul E. Funk II, in command of Flanders’s unit, sat looking at the map of the huge area of responsibility he had inherited a month before. He had to exercise control over more than 350 square miles of Iraq, from Tarmiyah through Taji, around to the western deserts and down to Abu Ghraib. Every commander knew this was to be one of the lines of attack into Baghdad by the antigovernment forces. The IEDs told him that. But he had more to worry about. An Air Force F-16 had just gone down, and his troops were securing the area to ensure that its high technology was not scavenged. The intelligence bonanza secured by Flanders’s platoon was being examined; the brigade’s intelligence-exploitation teams had been poring over the maps, translating the documents, and cracking open the computer for about ten days. Their ace in the hole was an analytical team on loan from the National Security Agency, the nation’s premier electronic intelligence-espionage organization, but one that had never before assigned its experts down to the brigade level, where they get a fingertip sense of the threat in a combat zone. The analysis is painstakingly detailed work, carried out in the midst of a war.
    Funk had already alerted his boss, the 1st Cavalry’s assistant division commander, Brigadier General John Campbell, who had come to the division by way of Army Special Forces and then a stint as executive officer to the Army’s chief of staff. Campbell was eager to move on the platoon’s find. He pushed the trove up to his commander, Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, in charge of the day-to-day fight as the top officer of Multinational Corps–Iraq. From there, it went to the intelligence community in Washington and back to Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. (The troops assigned there call the headquarters Tampa-stan.)
    It took weeks to crack the computer and thumb drives and translate all the documents. It would have taken even longer, but the military headquarters in Baghdad was able to send digital files of all the data and images over a secure forty-megabyte transmission line that had been installed to connect a number of bases across Iraq and Afghanistan earlier that year. This was a major change in operations. “They did an initial triage and sensitive-site exploitation downrange—phones, e-mails, signatures for guys they knew to be