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

evolution. The other part, physical, was the physics of the process. “The other thing, which goes along with that, was then figuring out how to get your national-level analysts here, out to the field from here to support those operations,” Tyson said. “It is just critical to be actually tied to that operational unit. You just can’t do it from DC, and that is one of the lessons we took away: You just can’t do it from here.” Issue number one, he said, was getting traditionally desk-bound analysts into a mind-set that prepared them for going forward into these dangerous places. “We just hadn’t been asked to do it, and it wasn’t necessarily an expectation of someone coming into the agency at that time—like it is now,” said Tyson, who has deployed to the combat zone as often as many military personnel. “So, there was a lot of learning on all our parts, absolutely.” Issue number two was just exactly how do you do it? “How do you even equip an analyst to get out there? How do you get them out there? If they are on a military bird, do they need a visa for anyplace? All these little pieces that you had to get together,” Tyson said. “When they get out there, what are you going to do, when are they going to contribute, what is their connectivity going to be? So, immediately after 9/11, that was sort of one piece that was swirling.”
    By the time of the Taji breakthrough in December 2006, those pieces were not swirling but were in place, and helped account for a big score.
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    What was pulled out of the Taji trove was so valuable that one military officer compared it to the Allies’ success in breaking the Nazis’ Enigma codes during World War II. In that conflict, the operation at Bletchley Park in England enabled British and American commanders to read the Nazis’ operational orders for their land, sea, and air forces and to dispatch their own aircraft and ships to attack German troops and submarines. Intelligence helped win the day then, and was winning it again in Iraq. In advance of the Battle of Baghdad in 2007, the American commanders who were managing the successful deployment of the surge forces sent by President Bush would have the Taji cache to thank: They were given hand-drawn maps, one identified by intelligence officers as having been the work of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Some showed exactly what the terrorists knew about the location of American checkpoints. There was Google Earth imagery with Xs marking American forward operating bases and their perimeter defenses. And so much more.
    “It gave us their whole game plan for Baghdad,” said one intelligence officer who worked on the Taji trove. As tens of thousands of additional American forces were surging into Iraq in early 2007, Al Qaeda and its allies were planning their own offensive to take over the Iraqi capital. The intelligence seized at Taji contained the location of Al Qaeda safe houses and arms caches, detailed information on IED cells, and guides for planting roadside bombs. It showed the adversary’s lines of attack as originating in the volatile belt of villages circling Baghdad along routes into the capital and the order for isolating the capital, neighborhood by neighborhood. The enemy military planners proved they had no lack of diabolical imagination for their tactical campaign of terror. There were orders for the mass murder of any sanitation workers spotted on the street, “so garbage would pile up and outrage the population against the central and local governments,” recalled the intelligence officer. “When the trash piles up, it gets unbearable.” There also were battle plans to kill all the bakers, since buying fresh bread daily is a sign of stable urban life and anger, frustration, and unease work in favor of the opposition. “This gave us the Al Qaeda order of battle, lines for their course of action, and operations for isolating neighborhoods and then the