Robert Zimmerman, Navy Frogman WWII

from: Robert Stoner RStoner  CRD21 [at] msn  DOT  com
to: "Erasmo "Doc" Riojas" docrio45  [at]gmail  DOT  com
date :Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 9:24 PM
subject" Narrative Regarding Frogman Training at Fort Pierce During WWII . Important mainly because of the people in the conversation. 

Attached is an excerpt from a document Robert Zimmerman wrote a few years back documenting his experiences in the Navy during WWII. The first part documented his experience on an LCT during the invasion of North Africa and later Normandy. 

After Normandy he went to Little Creek, VA to train as a combat swimmer in the Underwater Demolition Teams. His story picks up in Little Creek. I thought you younger frogs might be interested. Robert Zimmerman lives in Tacoma.

Thank you Bob.  Doc Riojas

The Secret War: How U.S. hunted AQ in Africa

Clandestine SEAL mission planted cameras, but little came out of the images

By Sean D. Naylor - Staff writer
Posted : Sunday Oct 30, 2011 16:32:37 EDT

One night in November 2003, beneath the moon-washed waters off Somalia’s northern coast, a small, dark shadow slipped away from the attack submarine Dallas and headed toward the shore.

The smaller shape was a 21-foot-long submersible called a SEAL delivery vehicle.

Launched from a tubular dry deck shelter on the sub and designed to infiltrate Navy SEALs on covert or clandestine missions, the SDV carries its crew and passengers exposed to the water, breathing from their scuba gear or the vehicle’s compressed air supply. Aboard were a handful of SEALs on a top-secret special reconnaissance mission into a country with which the U.S. was technically not at war.

The SEALs grounded the SDV on the ocean bottom and pushed away from it, taking with them the centerpiece of their mission, a specially disguised high-tech camera called a Cardinal device.

The Secret War

Unbeknownst to them, during the previous 24 hours, their mission had been the subject of Cabinet-level debate in Washington and had almost been canceled until President George W. Bush gave the go-ahead.

Now they were conducting what a special operations source with firsthand knowledge of the operation referred to as “a long swim through some of the most shark-infested waters in the world” toward the coastline that loomed ominously ahead of them. The hard part was just beginning.

The classified mission was an early volley in a decadelong effort to hunt down al-Qaida operatives in the Horn of Africa. Waged largely out of sight by U.S. special operations forces and the CIA, the campaign has featured hard-fought and dramatic successes, extraordinary risk-taking and a lot of frustration.

If there was a moment that launched the campaign, it came in January 2002 in a frigid electrical closet at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base. FBI Special Agent Russ Fincher and New York Police Detective Marty Mahon were interrogating Ali Abdul Aziz al-Fakhri, a Libyan known by his nom de guerre, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi.

One of the most important prisoners taken up to that point in the war, al-Libi had run al-Qaida’s Khalden training camp, which counted “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, the convicted 20th hijacker of the Sept. 11 plot, among its hundreds of graduates.

Using classic interrogation techniques, Fincher and Mahon built a relationship of trust with al-Libi such that the captive talked volubly, giving up much valuable intelligence. What has not previously been reported is what al-Libi told Fincher and Mahon about al-Qaida’s plans to regroup if and when the terrorist organization were forced from its safe haven in Afghanistan. According to a military source who was in Bagram during the Afghan war’s early months, al-Libi laid out al-Qaida’s “multiphased approach.”

The first phase was to flee to Pakistan’s tribal areas that abut Afghanistan “but be prepared because of the way things were going to go further.” The bottom line of al-Qaida’s plan, the military source said, was: We need to reconstitute and the next sanctuaries in which to do that are Yemen and Somalia.

The mission

The SEALs conducting the clandestine camera missions were part of a secret task force established just for that operation. Its commander, Special Forces Col. Rod Turner, also headed two other elements that shared forces and had overlapping chains of command.

One was Joint Special Operations Task Force-Horn of Africa, which fell under Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa in Camp Lemonier, Djibouti. The composition of CJTF-HOA has shifted significantly over the years, but by far its largest operational component in 2003, the task force’s first full year of existence, was Turner’s 350-400 person joint special operations task force.

With the exception of its small staff, the JSOTF doubled as U.S. Central Command’s crisis response element, or CRE, a force led by Turner and available to the CJTF-HOA commander for direct action, special reconnaissance and personnel recovery missions, but which also could be tasked for other missions by CENTCOM commander Army Gen. John Abizaid.

The CRE was a robust force package. It included:

• A Special Forces commander’s in-extremis force, or CIF, company. A CIF is highly trained in direct action and available to conduct no-notice high-risk missions for the geographic combatant commander its parent SF group supports.

• A SEAL platoon, which usually includes two officers and 14 enlisted.

• A Naval Special Warfare rigid-hull inflatable boat, or RHIB, detachment.

• An Air Force special operations package that included four MH-53 Pave Low helicopters and two MC-130P Combat Shadow fixed-wing turboprop aircraft, designed to conduct low-visibility or clandestine air-to-air refueling and infiltration missions, as well as about 200 personnel.

The entire CRE, plus another contingent of SEALs equipped with the SEAL delivery vehicles, also belonged to a third task force commanded by Turner that he stood up for a single highly classified operation that came down from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld

It was that operation that found the SEALs swimming toward the Somali shore on the first of about a dozen missions to install the Cardinal devices along the Somali coastline.

The cameras were disguised to look like natural or other man-made objects, so as not to arouse suspicion. The aim was to place them facing locations such as potential al-Qaida training camps or piers where al-Qaida personnel were suspected of arriving.

The devices were set to photograph the locations and then transmit the images automatically via satellite back to what a senior intelligence official described as “a limited pool of customers” in the U.S. The targets along the northern coast were code-named Cobalt Blue while those along the eastern coast were code-named Poison Scepter, said the special operations source with firsthand knowledge of the operation.

With its combination of derring-do and high-tech gadgetry straight out of a James Bond movie, the mission was by no means universally popular among the few U.S. officials who had prior notice of it. The U.S. ambassador to Kenya, William Bellamy, and the CIA station chief in Nairobi, Kenya, John Bennett (who now heads the agency’s National Clandestine Service), were opposed to the whole enterprise, sources said. (Because Somalia had no effective government, and therefore no U.S. Embassy, the CIA ran its Somalia campaign out of Kenya.)

The plan was to emplace 17 cameras along the Somali coastline, according to the special ops source. But the embassy “didn’t see the wisdom in any of them,” said an intelligence source with long experience in the Horn. In Bellamy’s view, the hidden camera operation “was overkill,” the intelligence source said.

The question being asked in the embassy was, “Why are we creating this Ferrari when all you had to do was pay a guy to go in” and set up the cameras, the intelligence source said. To U.S. officials in Nairobi, it appeared to be the SEALs who were pushing hard for the mission, the source said.

Matters came to a head 24 hours before the first Cobalt Blue mission was due to launch. Bellamy called the CJTF-HOA commander, Marine Brig. Gen. Mastin Robeson, and asked him to stop the mission because it would put agency assets in danger, said the special ops source with firsthand knowledge of the operation. Robeson, one of only four people in the CJTF-HOA headquarters who knew about the missions, refused because the operation was being conducted at the direction of the defense secretary, the source said. But Bellamy repeated his request in a cable to Robeson, he said.

Within hours, the argument had reached Rumsfeld and Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet. The two senior officials argued their respective cases to the president, who, according to the special ops source with firsthand knowledge of the operation, quickly came to a decision: Execute the Cobalt Blue targets as planned and renegotiate the others with the embassy. As a result, of the 17 cameras, “we ended up putting 12 to 14 in,” the special ops source said.

Dangerous waters

The SEALs preparing to execute the first Cobalt Blue mission knew nothing about this back and forth, and power politics did not affect the mission timeline. That first target’s identity remains classified, but it was chosen because it was the least challenging of the northern set of missions, said the special ops source. “They were not in a sequence that went from west to east,” he said. “This one was chosen specifically out of order because it was to be a confidence target [to answer the question], ‘Will this thing work?’”

“The intelligence value on this particular target was rated as low, but so was the threat,” he said. “It’s bad enough when you’re getting in this little sub in some of the worst waters in the world and you’re going into a place we haven’t been in a long, long time, and so we did it so the operators could gain confidence that they could do it, in probably the least hostile environment in which they could be compromised.”

That first mission was deliberately conducted with “a full moon … [or] a fairly full moon,” so “the moon would be … waning as we went to more and more difficult targets,” he said.

For the Cobalt Blue missions, a single Navy flattop was positioned off the coast, courtesy of 5th Fleet. The flattop functioned as the command ship for Cmdr. Mark Mullins, who was in charge of the SEALs conducting the SDV missions, according to the special ops source. (Those SEALs were drawn from a SEAL team on the East Coast of the U.S., but not Naval Special Warfare Development Group, sometimes known as SEAL Team 6, the special ops source said.)

Air Force special operations AC-130 Spectre gunships based in Kuwait provided air cover for the Cobalt Blue targets. But the gunships didn’t have the range to support the Poison Scepter missions, so for the eastern leg of the operation, 5th Fleet provided a second flattop with Marine Corps AH-1W Super Cobra attack helicopters aboard to provide close-air support, if needed, the special ops source said.

“Fifth Fleet was very helpful in providing assets at different periods for different lengths of time that they put under [our] command and control to be able to conduct classified operations,” said a senior CJTF-HOA official from the period, who declined to talk about the SEAL missions in detail.

The flattops stayed 60 to 70 miles out at sea during the day, but the one that functioned as Mullins’ command ship and which also carried the RHIB element would come closer on nights the SEALs were going ashore, he said.

The AC-130s and Super Cobras were not the only backup available to the SEAL elements. There were also two separate quick-reaction forces available for each mission. One was another SEAL element in RHIBs floating near Mullins’ command ship that could race in if the SDV team got into trouble near the shoreline. The other consisted of a couple of 12-man Special Forces operational detachments-alpha, or A-teams, drawn from A Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group.

Between the gunships, the SEALs bobbing up and down in their RHIBs and the SF soldiers waiting with Navy HH-60 helicopters, “no matter what, we’d always be able to get the four guys out of there,” said the special ops source.

Once the SEALs had swum ashore, their first task was to find the right spot to emplace the camera. Although the general locations had been selected ahead of time, the SEALs “had to make the final site selection themselves,” said the special ops source. This required a combination of tactical skill and raw courage, given that they were often operating in urban and semiurban terrain.

“They did some ballsy stuff — these things were not stuck out in the middle of nowhere,” the special ops source said. The SEALs “were operating in some of the most heavily congested areas” in Somalia, he added.

For about 24 hours prior to the mission, overhead coverage of the target location came courtesy of Navy P-3 Orion reconnaissance planes flying from the Seychelles augmented by the Dallas’ periscope.

“We gave ourselves an additional 24-hour window for each target if for some reason a threat appeared or bad weather moved in,” said the special ops source.

Stealthy shooting

The SEALs used photos taken by the P-3 to help decide where to put the cameras.

“We changed targets at the last minute a couple of times based on intel from the Orion,” said the special ops source.

But the SEALs also had the flexibility to change their decisions once they had come ashore. The cameras’ ingenious design gave them numerous options.

“It could be disguised in any way,” the special ops source said. “It could be disguised as a man-cut block to put in a sea wall, it could be disguised as a piece of a pier, as part of an old rusty ship, as a … pineapple plant.”

On at least one occasion, the best place for the camera turned out to be on a rusted, wrecked ship in a harbor, the special ops source said. On another occasion, the SEALs put the camera on a breaker made of rocks near a pier, he added.

The farthest the SEALs had to travel upon hitting the beach was “less than a mile,” but they had to move stealthily while carrying “pretty heavy equipment,” the special ops source said.

After emplacing the Cardinal device, the SEALs had to test its ability to take and transmit a photo before they returned to the Dallas.

On most of the missions, which stretched over a six-week period in November and December 2003, the SEALs spent about 2½ to three hours ashore, but one mission required them to spend five to six hours out of the water, said the special ops source.

It was critical that the SEALs were not seen at any point during the mission.

“Success is not getting the camera taking pictures,” said the special ops source. “Success is getting in and out of there without being detected ... If you get the camera set up, but you get detected, you’ve blown it.”

With targets located in or near major ports like Kismayo and Merka in southeastern Somalia, this presented a major challenge. But the SEALs stayed undetected and made it back safely from each mission.

“They were never seen,” the special ops source said. There were not even any close calls, he added, crediting that to “detailed planning by Mark Mullins and his crew … [and] the professionalism of the SEALs. They executed it according to the plan and everything went like clockwork.”

Interesting catch

On Jan. 12, 2004, fishermen from the village of Ras Kamboni made an odd discovery on the rocky, depopulated island of Buur Gaabo, just off the southeastern Somali coast: one or more cameras “and other electronic devices,” according to the website Somalilandtimes.net. They could only guess at the equipment’s origin and purpose, but it seems clear they had stumbled upon a Cardinal device, underlining Bellamy’s reservations about the SEAL missions.

“What the ambassador was a little bit upset about was the devices were compromised,” said the intelligence source with long experience in the Horn.

There were other drawbacks to the Cardinal device. It had been developed to watch Scud missile launchers during the invasion of Iraq earlier that year, but had not been fielded in time and was now “a device looking for a mission,” said the special ops source. One camera died prematurely, according to the intelligence source.

To save battery power, the cameras were set to take photographs every 12 hours, too long a gap to be of value in the hunt for individuals. Consequently, the pictures relayed were “less really good intelligence and more really good atmospherics,” said the senior intelligence official. (The devices’ batteries likely expired several years ago, sources said.)

The intelligence source with long experience in the Horn spoke derisively of a cannery that became a Cobalt Blue target known as “the tuna factory.”

“They were trying to validate that this tuna factory was an al-Qaida support [facility] of some kind,” the source said.

The Nairobi station had been openly skeptical of the tuna factory theory, the source said — “What were they using the tuna factory for? Night classes?” As it turned out, no evidence ever indicated that the “tuna factory” was anything more than a cannery.

‘Unblinking eye’

Asked what the secret camera missions achieved, the intel source with long experience on the Horn answered bluntly: “Nothing.” The senior intelligence official was only slightly more diplomatic. “If it were a business, it’s not making any money,” the official said.

What the extraordinary nature of the SEAL missions underlined, the senior intelligence official said, was the paucity of technical intelligence collection assets — especially Predator drones — available to the military and CIA officials charged with tracking down al-Qaida operatives in Somalia.

“If we’re having to go to that extreme, it’s because we lack other capabilities because they’re drawn elsewhere,” the senior intel official said. “Instead of doing it like that, you’d want to have more Predators.”

The official referred to Joint Special Operations Command’s notion of “the unblinking eye” — using intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets to keep a target under constant watch. In Iraq and Afghanistan, JSOC was “developing the concept of ‘we don’t want any blinks in our collection’ — the unblinking eye,” the senior intel official said.

But the wars in those countries deprived commanders in the Horn of the overhead assets they needed, “so in Somalia, it was a blink all the time,” the official said, adding that commanders “would go days without any kind of overhead collection capability” they controlled.

The intel operatives and special operators retained access to “national” intelligence products such as satellite photos and the National Security Agency’s signals intercepts, but that wasn’t enough, the senior intelligence official said. “There was always national, but national just doesn’t do it,” the official said.

It was that desperation for more granular intelligence that drove the Cardinal device operation and other missions.

“We were just kind of out there almost, if you will, shooting at clouds, hoping a duck would fall down,” said a military targeting official said. “So there was a bunch of stuff put out there … but not a lot of fidelity came back out of it.”

Lack of human intel hampered AQ hunt in Africa

It was late summer in the hot, dusty Ethiopian town of Gode and Marine Capt. Rye Barcott wandered into a mud hut restaurant in an attempt to talk to the locals. Inside were four ethnic Somalis — the norm in the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia. Barcott, armed only with a pistol, spotted two AK-series assault rifles beside them.

He tried to engage the men in conversation, but their tone turned bitter when the subject of the Ethiopian army arose.

“They’re the same as they were during the Dergue,” one man said angrily. “They’re f——— dogs. You understand? You understand what they do to us, to our women? Nothing has changed. Only now they wait until you turn your back.’”

The Secret War

This was the sort of candor Barcott craved as an intelligence officer, but he had a problem.

Despite leading a six-person human intelligence team with responsibility for the Horn of Africa — and with Ethiopia a priority — Barcott had no idea what the man was talking about.

“The Dergue?” he replied. “My interpreter looked at me like I was about to get shot or something, so I didn’t pursue that line of questioning,” he said in a recent interview with Army Times.

The conversation ended quickly, but Barcott’s interpreter wasn’t ready to let the matter lie. “Afterwards he’s like, ‘Listen, the Dergue was the communist regime that ran this place. … Everybody knows the Dergue. Come on, these are very basic things.’ ”

The exchange in Gode happened in 2004. The chastened Barcott had run head first into one of the major problems that plagued U.S. operations in the Horn of Africa in the years after 9/11: the lack of a basic understanding of the region among the personnel charged with operating there.

“At that time, DoD had f—- all in terms of HUMINT in the Horn,” said an intelligence source with long experience in the region.

“At a very fundamental level, we simply lacked that baseline that we needed,” said a military targeting official. “We didn’t understand the culture, we didn’t understand the people … in a real sense we didn’t understand the players and how they related in the various organizations inside the various cities in the Horn.”

That part of Africa had gained sudden prominence in U.S. strategic calculations in the wake of 9/11, when the United States looked for regions beyond Afghanistan that might serve as safe havens for al-Qaida. Information from several sources quickly focused U.S. attention on the Horn.

This new intelligence did not come as a shock. Al-Qaida had already demonstrated its presence in the region with three devastating attacks: simultaneous suicide truck bombings on Aug. 7, 1998, that targeted the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 223 people, most of whom were local civilians; and a suicide attack Oct. 12, 2000, that killed 17 sailors and badly damaged the destroyer Cole as it lay moored off the Yemeni port of Aden.

As they examined new streams of intelligence, what the spooks saw alarmed them. The flow of individuals from the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater to Yemen and Somalia amounted to no more than what a senior intelligence official described as “a trickle,” but what “worried” U.S. officials was “which kind of personalities were showing up,” said a special operations officer who had access to the intelligence.

The intelligence did not link al-Qaida supremo Osama bin Laden or his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri to Somalia or Yemen, but it strongly suggested that second-tier al-Qaida leaders were moving back and forth between that region and the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater, according to the special ops officer.

The indications were that al-Qaida was moving people by boat from Oman, past Yemen and across the Bab-el-Mandeb straits that separate the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aden, before following the coast of Djibouti down to Somalia, said a special ops source with firsthand knowledge of operations in the Horn.

“There were pretty good indications that it was small, seaborne [movement] that was way, way, way below the radar,” the special ops officer with access to the intelligence said. At first, “we weren’t sure if they were looking for a place to go to ground or … going to start more trouble,” he said. However, the officer added, “some intel indicated that al-Qaida was preparing another attack.”

As much as the movement of senior al-Qaida individuals, it was the network’s transfer of money into the region that set alarm bells clanging in Washington and elsewhere because that was considered a key indicator that operational planning was occurring, he said.

But with a war underway in Afghanistan and planning for the invasion of Iraq in full swing, the George W. Bush administration made the Horn of Africa an economy of force campaign and placed the CIA in the lead. What the public saw instead, however, was the Defense Department’s November 2002 creation of Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa.

A third front

Based at Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti, CJTF-HOA was a small force established to forestall al-Qaida’s growth in East Africa. But with few conventional maneuver forces at its disposal, the task force focused mainly on civil affairs missions and strengthening the capacity of host nation security forces in its area of responsibility.

“CJTF–Horn of Africa was stood up because there had been significant terrorist activity in that part of the world,” said a senior CJTF-HOA official from that period. “It was readily apparent that there was an East African al-Qaida cell in that part of the world and that ... with a fairly manpower-intensive operation going on in both Afghanistan and Iraq, what we couldn’t afford was a third front. So it was as much to try to engage those countries in [our] area of operation, partner with them, and prevent the next round of attacks.”

By 2003, the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command were also establishing an operational presence in the Horn. Their mission was focused on killing or capturing al-Qaida in East Africa’s senior members, often referred to as high-value individuals, or HVIs. But veterans of that period, including senior members of CJTF-HOA, which rotated commanders at least once a year, differ as to the role of that thinly-resourced task force in that hunt and whether the Pentagon established it in part as a cover for JSOC or other covert activities in the region.

“[C]JTF-HOA, which was always led by a flag officer, was a very good and very mature yet underresourced command that allowed us to have this blanket of cover, if you will, in order for us to do our HVI mission,” said the senior intelligence official.

The special ops source with firsthand knowledge of operations in the Horn echoed this view. When asked if CJTF-HOA was really a screen to hide JSOC and other special operations missions, he replied: “Yes, in a way.”

But senior leaders from the first years of CJTF-HOA’s existence denied this.

“It was not a cover for JSOC,” said the senior CJTF-HOA official from the period. Rather, he insisted, the hunt for al-Qaeda cell leaders “was absolutely in the mission set” of the task force. However, “that had to be done with a host nation lead,” the official said. “So we worked hard to facilitate the host nation’s ability to connect the dots on who the bad guys were and where they were, but for them to do the capturing or killing.”

However, retired Marine Lt. Gen. Sam Helland, who led CJTF-HOA from 2004 to 2005, said the manhunt for senior al-Qaida figures in the Horn was not his focus. The division between CJTF-HOA operations and the JSOC/CIA operations was like “the separation of church and state — they were state, I was church,” Helland said. “They did what they did … We stayed on the civil affairs side, drilling wells, building roads, schoolhouses, churches.”

A U.S. Central Command spokesman declined to release the 2002 operations order that established CJTF-HOA, saying it was still classified.

Lack of continuity

Barcott was leading a CJTF-HOA human intelligence team when he ran into difficulties in Ethiopia.

He blamed the difficulty U.S. officials, including himself, had making sense of events in the Horn in part on the United States’ lack of sustained focus on the region. Barcott has written about his travails in his book: “It Happened on the Way to War — A Marine’s Path to Peace.”

“It’s the lack of continuity, structurally,” he said. “These places are complex, and coming in for six months, you’re only going to have a superficial understanding of what the hell’s going on, if you even have that.”

This problem hampered the hunt for the leading al-Qaida figures in East Africa. On numerous occasions as the military tracked al-Qaida members in the Horn, “you got down to a certain level of fidelity and then you lost it because you didn’t have that real background, that baseline of knowledge that let you say, ‘OK, what that really means is this, this and this, and therefore you need to be looking for this,’ ” said the targeting official.

“You couldn’t make those last two leaps. [It was] frustrating as hell. It started out well intentioned as we were sinking a bunch of money into putting the toys in place, getting the right gear there to get some basic collection, but we didn’t have the fundamental understanding of either the physical area or the culture underneath it to really make all these things connect. It was one of these things where you felt like, ‘Jeez, we need to almost go back to school here.’ ”

What was missing “was human intelligence on the most fundamental level,” the targeting official said. “It was ‘do we really understand what they mean in this culture when they say this?’ ... It’s not enough to simply translate something; you need to understand it.”

The search for a high-tech solution led to the daring mission in 2003 when a team of SEALs slinked ashore and planted a dozen disguised cameras, strategically placed to send pictures to U.S. intelligence.

But some leaders didn’t understand that technology could not compensate for this lack of understanding, according to the targeting official. “You’ve got the three-star and the four-star who are yelling for results. They want something to happen in the next 15 minutes, and you come back and say, ‘Well, Jeez, boss, maybe it could happen in the next 15 months,’ ” the targeting official said. “Their answer would always be — the JSOC guy or the SOCOM guy or the CENTCOM guy — their answer would be, ‘Well, if you can’t do that, how about we put another platform out there?’ And the answer was, ‘Well, no, the platform ain’t going to give me anything,’ and of course they didn’t want to hear that.”

The United States was paying the price for its failure to the region a priority in the years prior to 9/11.

“Historically it hadn’t been a place where we had invested a lot of time and resources so you just didn’t have a lot of deeper historic relationships that had been built up, number one,” said Lt. Cmdr. Eric Greitens, a SEAL officer who commanded a joint special operations task unit in Manda Bay, Kenya, in early 2005, and whose book, “The Heart and the Fist,” deals in part with his experiences in the Horn. “Secondly, culturally it’s just not a place that many Americans have studied. The whole time I was there, I never met one area expert who I thought really understood the region.”

But the view that the intelligence available to U.S. forces in the Horn during the first half of the decade was inadequate is not shared by all who served there. Helland said the criticism didn’t square with his recollection, but he noted that the hunt for al-Qaida members was not his job. “Since I wasn’t responsible for the hunt for the terrorist organizations, etc. etc., the information I received was pretty fair, based on what we were doing and what we were focused on,” he said.

However, intelligence was “so hard to collect since no one speaks Somali or they don’t speak the dialects up in Eritrea,” he added. “It was adequate for what we had to do.”

The other senior CJTF-HOA official was more positive in his assessment of the intel that he and other task force leaders received on al-Qaida activity in the Horn.

“I thought both the human intelligence and signals intelligence that I got was exceptional, but everyone did not have access to that nor did they need access to it,” he said. “A lot of it was compartmentalized within the command.”

Task force leaders didn’t have everything they wanted in terms of information or intelligence assets, he acknowledged. “But it was a very large area of operation and there were two other fights going on simultaneously, so … [we were] very generously supported when [we] needed support,” he said. “[CENTCOM commander] Gen. [John] Abizaid worked very hard to give [us] the intelligence and the assets that [we] needed to be able to get the job done. But there was a limit to what was available. … Iraq and Afghanistan were both ongoing and requiring large amounts of intelligence capabilities.”

Indeed, officials said it was impossible to overstate the drain on ISR resources that the war in Iraq, in particular, represented.

“There were not enough assets in this half of the galaxy for what they were asking for in Iraq,” said the military targeting official. “If we’d had 2,000 Predators, there were enough people asking for Predator time in Iraq that they could have used all 2,000. It was insane. And so … unless you could come up with this driving piece of information that said, absolutely, no kidding, this is going to give me something [in Somalia], the answer was, ‘I’ve got a higher priority in Iraq.’ So all sorts of assets kept getting sucked into the black hole of Iraq.”

But by 2006, senior military and intelligence leaders had become so alarmed by what they perceived to be a growing al-Qaida presence in the Horn of Africa and Yemen that they were prepared to take risk in the two major combat theaters in order to divert ISR assets to the Horn. The senior intelligence official even described al-Qaida’s presence in Somalia as being a greater threat to the U.S. than its presence in Pakistan, where Ayman al-Zawahiri, the group’s leader, is presumed to be hiding. “Somalia is definitely worse [than Pakistan],” said the intelligence official. “From 2001 to today, Somalia hasn’t gone exponentially up in terms of a threatening environment. It’s sort of a sine wave, but it’s a sine wave that has gone gradually up and [is] probably still on the rise.”

“As our human intelligence network got better, our confidence level as to what these [al-Qaida] guys were doing really grew,” the intelligence official said. “So we argued and debated and finally won to get the right amounts of ISR … because in order to understand what the hell’s going on, you’ve got to build human intelligence networks, you’ve got to build technical networks — Predators, Global Hawks, etc. — to be able to understand the environment.

“We really took [a] risk in Iraq and Afghanistan and brought resources there [to the Horn,” the intel official said. “That began in the 2006 time frame and that went all the way through ‘til now, and those decisions have been made at the highest levels of the military to shift resources from one theater to another. And CENTCOM was able to do a lot of that.”

Despite this, the senior intel official said, “ISR today remains a challenge in the Horn of Africa.”

Clandestine Somalia missions yield AQ targets

Starting in 2003, small teams of U.S. operatives would clamber aboard a civilian turboprop plane at a Nairobi, Kenya, airfield to embark on one of the most dangerous missions conducted by U.S. personnel in Somalia since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The teams combined CIA case officers and “shooters” from a secretive special operations unit sometimes called Task Force Orange, said an intelligence source with long experience in the Horn of Africa. “There were always at least two CIA case officers, and there were always at least two shooters,” the source said. “Everybody was armed.”

Those first secret missions were all about gathering human intelligence — “collecting information, validating information,” said the source. But they soon expanded to include working with warlords to hunt al-Qaida members, tapping cellphones, purchasing anti-aircraft missiles and, ultimately, developing a deeper understanding of al-Qaida’s East African franchise and how it fit into the wider al-Qaida network.

The Mogadishu missions became one of the most successful U.S. intelligence operations in the Horn.

The Secret War

The teams would hop a commercial flight that departed Nairobi every morning bringing the day’s supply of khat — the plant whose leaves are chewed as a narcotic stimulant by Somali men — to the Somali capital of Mogadishu, the intelligence source said.

“The safest flight you can be on in Somalia is the khat flight,” the source said.

The plane would land at the K50 airport, about 50 kilometers southwest of Mogadishu.

The operatives set out to build relationships with the warlords who had held sway in Somalia for the previous 12 years in hopes of enlisting the warlords in their manhunt for the members of al-Qaida in East Africa. That organization had been responsible for the Aug. 7, 1998, bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and it remained a potent threat in the eyes of some U.S. officials.

Since al-Qaida’s eviction from Afghanistan in late 2001, U.S. intelligence had tracked personnel and money moving from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region to the Horn of Africa with growing alarm.

But with the ill-fated 1992-1994 U.S. military intervention in Somalia fresh in policymakers’ minds, there was no appetite in Washington for committing significant numbers of troops to the country.

“The United States still has a hangover from ‘Black Hawk Down,’ “ the intelligence source said, in a reference to the book and movie about the October 1993 Battle of Mogadishu that cost the lives of 18 U.S. soldiers — almost all of whom were part of a Joint Special Operations Command task force.

“Nobody had the stomach for it,” agreed a special ops source with firsthand knowledge of military operations in the Horn.

Instead, the CIA ran the U.S. effort against al-Qaida in East Africa out of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. But the name given to the venture was a deliberate reference to the 1993 battle: “Operation Black Hawk.” John Bennett, the agency’s highly respected Nairobi station chief, was in charge, said the intelligence source with long experience in the Horn. (Bennett now heads the CIA’s National Clandestine Service and is no longer under cover. He declined to be interviewed for this series.)

Operation Black Hawk’s aim was to kill or capture the 20 or so main members of the al-Qaida cell in East Africa. But rather than use U.S. forces to do this, the CIA’s plan would have Somali warlords capture the al-Qaida personnel before turning them over to the U.S. to send — or “render” — them to an American ally or one of the agency’s secret prisons, said sources who served in the region.

From 2001 on, U.S. operations in the Horn “were focused on extraordinary rendition,” said the intelligence source with long experience there. “Extraordinary rendition” means “you’re going to deliver that person to a foreign country and/or use foreign assets — a surrogate force — to conduct the operation,” the source said.

Thus small teams composed of CIA case officers, TF Orange special operators and what a senior intelligence official called “really high-end interpreters” would land at K50 and travel to and through Mogadishu in small convoys escorted by fighters loyal to one warlord or another. The convoys’ routes crossed the boundaries between several warlords’ territories, so a lot of coordination was required between the U.S. personnel and the warlords and among the warlords themselves, according to the intelligence source.

Key to the missions was Bennett, the experienced station chief who “was very professional,” said the special ops source with firsthand experience of military operations in the Horn. “He’s a really unbelievable team player,” said the senior intelligence official.

Bennett did not go on the missions because, according to the intelligence source with long experience in the Horn, “[He] didn’t need to — it was unnecessary risk.” But his personality was critical to the effort. “The relationship with the warlords was built through … Bennett,” said the source. “It was through his sheer willpower and force of personality. He could do it and nobody else could.”

Bennett laid down some ground rules for operating in Somalia, the intelligence source said. These included:

• “We will work with warlords.”

• “We don’t play favorites.”

• “They don’t play us.”

• “We don’t go after Somali nationals, just [foreign] al-Qaida.”

The last stipulation was key because “the warlords were in it just for the money,” the intelligence source said. “They had no problems knocking out non-Somalis.”

(However, this rule applied only to operations conducted by, with and through the warlords, the source said. It did not apply to U.S. “unilateral efforts,” nor to bilateral operations with the Kenyans, which in each case sometimes targeted Somali Islamist militants.)

The CIA worked with “just about all” the warlords, said the intelligence source. “The warlords really didn’t have a dog in the fight,” the source added.

The Americans used a carrot-and-stick approach, offering the warlords cash if they helped, with the implicit threat of U.S. air power if they didn’t.

“They were risky missions,” the intelligence source said. “You could never actually trust the warlords — they’re subject to the highest bidder. That’s why we wanted to have that stick.”

But the warlords’ fear of being whacked by U.S. air power was groundless. There were no U.S. aircraft overhead.

“We really didn’t have a stick,” the source said. “Not in a hundred years. But it worked.”

At first the CIA-TF Orange teams would fly in and out of Somalia on the same day, but as their relationships with the warlords became more comfortable, they began visiting at least once a week and staying overnight in the Somali capital, the source said. Those relationships were paying off by late 2003, when the CIA persuaded Mohammed Farah Aideed Jr., the warlord son of the late militia leader whose forces the U.S. military had fought in 1993, to sell it 37 SA-7 and four SA-18 man-portable surface-to-air missiles, according to the special ops source.

“The 18s were brand-new, in a crate,” he said.

The intelligence source with long experience in the Horn confirmed that Aideed Jr. provided the CIA with “about 40” surface-to-air missiles. “To this day I don’t clearly understand what his motives were, but it worked for us,” the intelligence source said.

Both sources said the CIA paid Aideed Jr. about $360,000, which the intelligence source described as “peanuts,” for the missiles, any one of which could bring down a civilian airliner. After the agency bought them, the missiles were stored briefly at an arms depot at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, before an Air Force C-17 flew them away, the special ops source said.

Cellphone monitoring

Working with the warlords required extraordinary care and judgment.

“Much of what the warlords told us was true,” the intelligence source said. But, the source added, before running operations against targets based on what the warlords had told them, U.S. intelligence and special ops personnel always checked that information against what unilateral spies being run by U.S. intelligence said.

In an effort to develop targets, the CIA, supported by TF Orange, ran a series of missions into Mogadishu to “seed” the city with devices that monitored cellphone traffic, according to a senior military official. This required repeated trips to Mogadishu, said the senior military and intelligence officials.

“You’ve got to reposition [the devices] as they add cellphone towers or reposition them,” the military official said.

These missions allowed the Orange personnel to come into their own. Close-in signals intelligence is an Orange specialty, but on the first forays into Mogadishu, the Orange personnel, who were “really good ground tactical guys,” functioned primarily as security, said the intelligence source with long experience in the Horn.

“Initially the Orange guys were strictly protection, [although] they always thought their role was much larger,” the source said. The missions to install the monitoring gear allowed them to put their unique skills to use.

(The “Orange” name comes from the color code traditionally assigned to the Fort Belvoir, Va.-based special mission unit’s personnel when they formed part of a larger Joint Special Operations Command task force. The unit has gone by many other names, including the Intelligence Support Activity and the Mission Support Activity, and is often referred to by JSOC insiders simply as “the Activity” or “Orange.”)

While the Orange troops were on the missions because of their technical expertise, the CIA personnel were the ones talking to the warlords.

“They knew these guys,” the senior intelligence official said. “They were in charge of the handling [of the warlords], any kind of negotiations that were being done. It was a good relationship, actually.”

‘Hundreds of bad guys’

In a country in which any operation carried major risks, “some of these sensitive missions in downtown Mogadishu” were the most dangerous carried out by U.S. personnel in Somalia during the past 10 years, said the intelligence official.

“We could have had two or three U.S. citizens [taken prisoner] and they could still be held hostage today,” the official said. “And there would have been no doubt who they were or what they were.”

No aircraft monitored these missions.

“We had very, very few imagery assets available — everything was still dedicated to Iraq,” the official said.

That left each team of operatives reliant on shaky deals with ruthless warlords in an anarchic city of roughly 2 million overrun by competing militias.

“All these bad guys had not a couple of bad guys with them but hundreds of bad guys with them,” said a military targeting official. “If you put somebody in there … you’re going to be in the middle of hundreds of bad guys almost instantaneously, and if you don’t have this thing just absolutely soup to nuts, you’re probably going to wind up with a lot of dead people, including friendlies, including our guys. You could never quite get around that.”

But unbeknownst to all but a few not directly involved, there was a force ready to come to the rescue, in case the teams in Mogadishu got into trouble. That force was the Joint Special Operations Task Force – Horn of Africa, based at Lemonnier.

Led by Col. Rod Turner, a Special Forces officer, the force was tasked to be prepared to conduct personnel recovery missions, code named Mystic Talon missions, in the event that the CIA/JSOC forays into Mogadishu ran into problems, according to a special operations source with firsthand knowledge of operations in the Horn.

If the order came to launch the rescue force, the task force’s four Air Force special operations MH-53 Pave Low helicopters would take off carrying as many members as possible of the Special Forces company assigned to Central Command’s Crisis Response Element, a special ops force available to Turner for certain missions. That company was a commander’s in-extremis force, or CIF, company, which is specially trained and resourced for direct-action missions.

Each Pave Low was manned by a crew of six and equipped with an air-to-air refueling probe, rapid-firing mini-guns in the doors and a .50-cal machine gun mounted on the tail.

“They were flying arsenals but with this big layer of armor blankets in them,” the special ops source said.

But the weight of that armor, plus the heat of Somalia, severely limited the number of SF soldiers who could take part in the mission. That number also depended on how many personnel needed to be rescued: the more Americans in trouble on the ground, the fewer SF troops the helicopters could carry. Most scenarios for which the task force planned would see about six SF soldiers — and no more than 10 — aboard each helicopter, the special ops source said.

“It would be based on the information provided at the time of notification,” the special ops source said.

If the message from the team on the ground was, “We are decisively engaged, we can’t get out of where we’re at, and we need as much firepower as we can to save our lives,” then the priority for the rescue force would be to put as many guys on the ground as possible, rather than “getting in and extracting them,” the source said.

In such a worst-case scenario, the thinking went, “maybe we can get a ship up the shore or something and get something in off the ship,” he said.

On the other hand, the special ops source said, “If it was, ‘Hey, we’re hauling ass, heading west, there’ll be five of us,’ then it would probably be maybe a five-man package per bird. Just something to go in, lay down a quick base of fire, go in and pull these guys out and then leave.”

In addition, Turner ordered that plenty of space be left on the helicopters in case one or more of them did not make it back, and the task force planned every personnel recovery mission with the requirement that it could still be accomplished if a helicopter was lost.

“The plan was to launch all four with the expectation that [the task force] would have to do self-recovery if one of them went down,” the special ops source said. “When that aircraft went down, one aircraft would have to stop and pick them up and would turn around and bring them home. So you basically have maxed out that aircraft if you have five or six SF guys on it and a crew of five guys. … [We’re then] sticking another 10 guys on an already almost overloaded airplane, trying to limp it back to Djibouti. So it was a very slim package.”

If two helicopters went down, the mission would be aborted, but everyone on the four outbound helicopters flights would fit on the remaining two, if need be, according to the special ops source.

As it was, despite the extraordinary risk involved, no mission into Mogadishu ran into the sort of trouble that required the rescue force from Djibouti.

Key targets

The ability to listen to al-Qaida in East Africa’s phone calls paid big dividends.

“It [the phone monitoring] definitely led to us being able to have much more precise information about what was going on, what actually was happening,” the senior intelligence official said. “Those operations gave us pretty good insight into what al-Qaida was doing in East Africa. … They saw it as another safe haven, they saw the opportunity to establish training camps and they did. And it allowed us to start to plan CT [counterterrorism]-like operations against a couple of the key targets.”

Those targets included Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of the original al-Qaida in East Africa leaders, as well as two senior figures in Somalia’s al-Qaida-linked al-Shabaab militia: Aden Hashi Ayro, who allegedly trained in al-Qaida’s Afghanistan camps, and Ahmed Abdi Godane, the group’s leader from 2009 to 2010, according to the intelligence official. (After Ayro was killed in a 2008 cruise missile strike, al-Shabaab reportedly suspected the U.S. had tracked him via his iPhone and banned the use of similar devices.)

But monitoring al-Shabaab and al-Qaida phone traffic did more than help U.S. intelligence officials with their manhunts. It also gave them a deeper understanding of how interlinked some of the violent Islamist groups were, according to the intelligence official.

“There were [telephone] communications between Pakistan and Somalia,” the official said. “It was the communicators for the key [al-Qaida] guys [in Pakistan], and also from Yemen and from Iraq and from North Africa. So we really saw this blossoming of their network start to grow, and that’s really, really when we began to realize just how much they were franchising the movement out of Pakistan. And all these guys, all these leaders, at one time or another, all met in the training camps of Afghanistan. And, to a degree, some — not many — met with bin Laden when he was in his days in Sudan.”

The phone-monitoring gear is probably still operating, the intelligence official said.

“I’ve got to believe it’s still there, because it was a pretty capable system,” the official said, adding that now, “It’s probably better.”

However, the official said, publishing the history of the cellphone monitoring system would not compromise ongoing operations. The targets in Somalia know their phone conversations are being monitored, but unlike their counterparts in Pakistan’s tribal areas, they are not constantly reminded of the dangers of using their phones.

“They’re not hearing the Predators overhead all the time,” the intelligence official said. “It’s like guys in Iraq and Afghanistan — they know it … [but] they can’t help themselves.”

(However, the intelligence source with long experience in the Horn said that the al-Qaida cell began to move its communications to the Internet. And with reports that the U.S. is increasing its drone activity around the Horn, Islamists in Somalia may soon become more aware of Predators overhead.)

Training camps

Not all U.S. intelligence efforts were aimed at Mogadishu. American operatives were also interested in potential al-Qaida activity in Ras Kamboni, a coastal town about two miles from the Kenyan border. In the first years after 9/11, there were persistent rumors of al-Qaida training camps in the town.

“We were throwing people at Ras Kamboni … in late ‘01, early ‘02,” the intelligence source with long experience in the Horn said. Then interest in the town abated before picking up again in late 2003 to early 2004, when U.S. personnel flew over Ras Kamboni but saw no sign of any training camps, the source said.

In addition, case officers in the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi “ran numerous unilateral assets against” Ras Kamboni, the source said. These were “Somalis who had businesses in the region, Somalis who had reason to be there,” the source said. “People we could depend on.”

The U.S. paid the spies roughly $1,000 to $2,000 a month to enter southern Somalia and report what they observed. But even these local hires found little evidence of al-Qaida in Ras Kamboni, according to the source.

It was not until 2007 that the U.S. became convinced that “hundreds” of fighters were training in camps in and around Ras Kamboni, the senior intelligence official said. “We observed two that had at least 150 personnel per [at any one time],” the official said.

Al-Qaida in East Africa’s tentacles spread beyond Somalia. The group’s “center of gravity” was clearly Mogadishu, “but there was a huge support cell split between Nairobi and Mombasa,” a port city in Kenya, said the intelligence source with long experience in the Horn.

However, the source added, it wasn’t clear whether al-Qaida in East Africa was planning attacks in Nairobi or whether its presence in the Kenyan capital was a holdover from the 1990s.

“We were tracking several targets in Nairobi,” the source said. “A lot of our operations in Nairobi were technical operations — phones and computers.”

 Contributed by:  John Westfall <westfallj  [at]  pioneernet  DOT net>