Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda by Eric Schmitt, Thom Shanker Page A
Authors: Eric Schmitt, Thom Shanker
Tags: United States, General, History, Military, Political Science, Terrorism, Intelligence & Espionage, bought-and-paid-for, 21st Century, Security (National & International), War on Terrorism; 2001-2009, Prevention, Qaida (Organization), United States - Military Policy - 21st Century, Terrorism - United States - Prevention
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emirs,” said a military intelligence officer who worked the trove. “There are automated systems for analyzing and exploiting cell phone numbers. Same with GPS and mini flash drives. We can get data off of anything.”
Another important change was in personnel. As the war in Iraq became more intelligence driven, the number of analysts assigned to the sensitive-site exploitation mission grew from a mere fifty in 2003 to four hundred by the time of the Taji coup at the end of 2006.
While senior military officers and intelligence officials say the working relationship between the troops and analysts is a good and productive one today, the pressure to find new and better ways for analysts to support the war-fighters produced an unanticipated clash of cultures in the early years of the Iraq War. When the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison was breaking in the spring of 2004, tensions were rising between the Special Operations troops and civilian interrogators and case officers from the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) Defense Human Intelligence Service at another secret detention facility in Iraq, Camp Nama. The dispute centered on the harsh treatment of detainees as well as restrictions the Special Operations troops placed on their civilian colleagues, which included monitoring their e-mail messages and phone calls. Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, the DIA’s director, wrote a two-page memo to Stephen Cambone, a close adviser to Secretary Rumsfeld, in which he described a series of complaints from DIA personnel. The most disturbing was a May 2004 incident in which a DIA interrogator said he witnessed soldiers punch a detainee hard enough to require medical attention. The DIA officer took photos of the injuries, but a supervisor confiscated them, Jacoby wrote.
The military-versus-civilians conflict could not be ignored. “These guys wanted results, and our debriefers were used to a civil environment,” said one Defense Department official who was briefed on the task-force operations, speaking of the soldiers. Within days after Admiral Jacoby sent his memo, the DIA took the extraordinary step of temporarily withdrawing its personnel from Camp Nama. Admiral Jacoby’s memo also provoked an angry reaction from Cambone. “Get to the bottom of this immediately. This is not acceptable,” Cambone said in a handwritten note on June 26, 2004, to his top deputy, Lieutenant General William G. Boykin. “In particular, I want to know if this is part of a pattern of behavior.”
John Tyson, the DIA’s top Al Qaeda tracker, recalls the painful birth of this new, intensive relationship between the intelligence community and the soldiers on the ground. “That was a situation where we were building the airplane as we were flying it,” he said. “It was anything but smooth sailing. After 9/11, we had our troops pouring into Afghanistan. These are guys we have worked with for several years. And, they need a lot of intel support. We had to create a mechanism, a process, product lines that supported them, that got to the finite level of detail they needed and that was timely enough for their requirements. That was one of the biggest changes immediately after 9/11.”
There had been spikes in tempo before, of course: The East Africa embassy bombings. The Cole . But as the military moved into the Afghanistan offensive, with bin Laden as their target, there were daily, hourly, even minute-by-minute demands for analysis and targets. “Literally you were talking to the guys who were going to be knocking down doors that night on whatever objective it was going to be,” Tyson recalls. “There was this learning process to the level of detail they needed, when they needed it, how we could get that level of detail in a product that was usable to them. So, there was this huge learning process going on as we were trying to support these operations. That was one of the biggest turning points for us.”
That was the intellectual part of DIA’s
Another important change was in personnel. As the war in Iraq became more intelligence driven, the number of analysts assigned to the sensitive-site exploitation mission grew from a mere fifty in 2003 to four hundred by the time of the Taji coup at the end of 2006.
While senior military officers and intelligence officials say the working relationship between the troops and analysts is a good and productive one today, the pressure to find new and better ways for analysts to support the war-fighters produced an unanticipated clash of cultures in the early years of the Iraq War. When the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison was breaking in the spring of 2004, tensions were rising between the Special Operations troops and civilian interrogators and case officers from the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) Defense Human Intelligence Service at another secret detention facility in Iraq, Camp Nama. The dispute centered on the harsh treatment of detainees as well as restrictions the Special Operations troops placed on their civilian colleagues, which included monitoring their e-mail messages and phone calls. Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, the DIA’s director, wrote a two-page memo to Stephen Cambone, a close adviser to Secretary Rumsfeld, in which he described a series of complaints from DIA personnel. The most disturbing was a May 2004 incident in which a DIA interrogator said he witnessed soldiers punch a detainee hard enough to require medical attention. The DIA officer took photos of the injuries, but a supervisor confiscated them, Jacoby wrote.
The military-versus-civilians conflict could not be ignored. “These guys wanted results, and our debriefers were used to a civil environment,” said one Defense Department official who was briefed on the task-force operations, speaking of the soldiers. Within days after Admiral Jacoby sent his memo, the DIA took the extraordinary step of temporarily withdrawing its personnel from Camp Nama. Admiral Jacoby’s memo also provoked an angry reaction from Cambone. “Get to the bottom of this immediately. This is not acceptable,” Cambone said in a handwritten note on June 26, 2004, to his top deputy, Lieutenant General William G. Boykin. “In particular, I want to know if this is part of a pattern of behavior.”
John Tyson, the DIA’s top Al Qaeda tracker, recalls the painful birth of this new, intensive relationship between the intelligence community and the soldiers on the ground. “That was a situation where we were building the airplane as we were flying it,” he said. “It was anything but smooth sailing. After 9/11, we had our troops pouring into Afghanistan. These are guys we have worked with for several years. And, they need a lot of intel support. We had to create a mechanism, a process, product lines that supported them, that got to the finite level of detail they needed and that was timely enough for their requirements. That was one of the biggest changes immediately after 9/11.”
There had been spikes in tempo before, of course: The East Africa embassy bombings. The Cole . But as the military moved into the Afghanistan offensive, with bin Laden as their target, there were daily, hourly, even minute-by-minute demands for analysis and targets. “Literally you were talking to the guys who were going to be knocking down doors that night on whatever objective it was going to be,” Tyson recalls. “There was this learning process to the level of detail they needed, when they needed it, how we could get that level of detail in a product that was usable to them. So, there was this huge learning process going on as we were trying to support these operations. That was one of the biggest turning points for us.”
That was the intellectual part of DIA’s
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