Chapter 9: The Bloodbath Mission
This is the latest chapter of The Ice Man, my book about the Navy SEAL platoon in Iraq that took the blame for a CIA homicide. The book is available only to paid subscribers.
The events in the Abu Ghraib shower room that resulted in Jamadi’s death fractured the relationship between SEAL Team Seven and the CIA. “It just showed that it wasn’t a good lash-up,” said Alex Krongard, the former commander of Team Seven.
After Jamadi’s death, it was clear to the SEALs that the agency was pulling back, most likely because headquarters realized how out of control things were in Baghdad. Back in Coronado, SEAL commanders had second thoughts about continuing to work with the CIA after Jamadi’s death.
“Personally, my biggest beef was we never got any feedback,” Krongard says. “I think we were getting stuff back, but more often than not it was haphazard.” It also bothered him that the CIA made it impossible to wage a military campaign. A campaign meant focusing on one area and cleaning it up before moving on. The CIA was generating target lists that pointed the SEALs in different directions. One day they were in Mahmudiyah, then the next mission would be in Baghdad, then somewhere else. “We were here, then there, then here, then there. Which was super fun for the guys. Don’t get me wrong. It was fun and professionally rewarding. But it wasn’t how military campaigns are supposed to be conducted. You’re trying to have an effect. You could argue there’s an effect from this but it’s more like a whack-a-mole thing.” Krongard called it the “want ads” approach to warfare. You wake up in the morning and scan the intelligence reports, the want ads, to find the trouble spots and pick one. The SEALs had become little more than the agency’s errand boys.
Krongard, with his Princeton education and voracious appetite for books, brought an intellectual heft to the SEALs. He thought deeply about the problems that bedeviled the early days of the Iraq War. Krongard came to believe that the problems his men faced in working with the CIA stemmed from the differing rules that applied to the military and the spy agency.
Intelligence officers fell under Title 50 of the U.S. Code, which set the rules for “covert action.” Covert action was the president’s third option if diplomacy failed and military action was ruled out. Covert actions—like the 1953 coup in Iran or the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba—were never acknowledged by the US government.
Title 10 of the United States Code governed military operations. The SEALs conducted what was called “clandestine” operations, like the mission to capture or kill Jamadi. These missions were secret as a matter of tactical necessity, but they were not deniable. When the Jamadi mission was over, the military announced his capture. The CIA and the SEALs reported to different chains of command and were ultimately accountable to two different justice systems. The SEALs fell under military justice rules while CIA officers were accountable to the US Justice Department.
Krongard saw the differing rules between the SEALs and the CIA as the problem in Iraq. “It wasn’t even a slippery slope, it was what caused the problem,” Krongard said. “The last time the CIA and the military operated together was in the Vietnam War, and they had to build huge structures to do that. It wouldn’t happen until six years into the (Iraq) War, not six months.”
Others like Andru Wall, a former legal advisor to Special Operations Command, took a different view. The problems in Iraq had nothing to do with who followed what rules. “It’s an excuse,” Wall told me. He had investigated hundreds of war crimes allegations, and he concluded that abuses weren’t a legal problem; they were a command-and-control issue, a matter of good order and discipline. Special operations troops and CIA officers worked together on scores of successful missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. No one ever found out about these missions because everyone followed their own respective rules, stayed in their lanes, and did their jobs.
I put this question about the differing rules to retired General Stanley McChrystal, who commanded Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 until 2008. JSOC’s operations involved the elite of the special operations world: The Army’s Delta Force and Naval Special Warfare Development Group, commonly known as SEAL Team Six. JSOC worked closely with the CIA.
“It’s a question, at the end, that comes down to leadership,” McChrystal told me. “The organization, the people responsible, starting at the top, the president, generals, and however far down you want to go, should understand that their force is not prepared for that which they’re doing. You can’t send people out on a mission knowing that they’re either undertrained or lack the clarity of guidance on how to conduct themselves to do it appropriately. I don’t think that the leadership did it intentionally, but I certainly think there was a failure to provide clarity, at least initially.”
“When we talk about the relationship between the CIA and special operating forces before 2001, it was almost nonexistent,” McChrystal said. “Suddenly, you’re trying to do this operation. ‘The war on terror.’ Pretty grand idea. You’re trying to do a bunch of things and there’s no roadmap. There’s no understood relationship between the military and the CIA. Whatever had been back in Vietnam had long since eroded. My biggest memory is we were almost trying to make it up as we went along, and how people were going to treat detainees. I think even the CIA went through this because, suddenly, we had detainees who weren’t prisoners of war, and they weren’t criminals in a civilian sense.”
For Krongard, the problem with the rules was the symptom of an even larger issue. Krongard felt the most powerful nation on Earth had forgotten what it meant to go to war. The United States had gone to war with what he called an impoverished imagination. “What I mean by that is, before we go to war in Iraq, before we go into Afghanistan, as a military planner or as an intelligence planner, you have to have a certain imagination that can say, ‘This is what we’re going to encounter. This is what structures we have to put into place.’” It took years to put those structures in place. At the outset, it fell to the people on the ground to improvise. They did what they thought was right.
Without real-world combat experience, the void was filled by cultural touchstones from TV and movies. “People didn’t get it. They literally didn’t get it,” Krongard said. “There were enough old movies out there, and cop shows, stuff like that.” A hit TV show at the time was 24, which featured counter-terrorist agent Jack Bauer torturing people to stop an imminent attack. Some SEALs thought it was OK to punch a detainee, most likely because they had seen someone do it in a TV or movie. “In their minds, their understanding of things was that there was a line, but the line was not where they thought it was.”
General McChrystal recalled an incident in the late 1990s when he was a colonel in command of the Ranger Regiment. McChrystal had gone to see Saving Private Ryan. Ralph E. Goranson, the character played by Tom Hanks, was the real-life captain of the 2nd Rangers Battalion. “At the end of the movie, a young American interpreter who survives the last firefight essentially shoots an unarmed German prisoner,” McChrystal recalled. “The German prisoner had not been a good guy and whatnot, but he was standing there, unarmed, with his hands up. And he was young. A US interpreter shoots him, and the people in the audience cheered.”
“Okay, that was a war crime, and I know that war crimes happen in war. And I know during World War II an awful lot did, and so I don’t want to minimize the context of the moment, but I think that’s true,” he continued. “If you watch shows about police, where they go in and where Dirty Harry kills the guy on the football field or Mel Gibson does his thing. They take the gloves off, and they get it done. And they’re doing it to a bad guy, so you’re happy about that. That creates a real lack of clarity for people, almost a contradiction in their minds because the people who really get it done and really care enough about the cause to do everything it takes are the same people who are suicide bombers.”
“That’s the danger here. That’s why I keep circling back to discipline,” McChrystal said. “You have to have values for the force, and you have to have extraordinary discipline because you can’t always do what you want to do. I was there, five years in the fight, and there were a lot of things I wanted to do on an emotional side that we didn’t do because I know it was wrong.”
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