A biting, wintry desert wind swept Balad when we arrived in the early morning the day after the mess-hall bombing. December turned the ubiquitous dust, powderlike during the scorching summer, into a soupy, adhesive mud, and we walked carefully to avoid it as we returned to our hangar. At daybreak, Tom D. and Tres moved into two empty white corrugated metal trailers and began to set up shop. That day the trailers had no chairs, tables, or computers. JIATF-West had only Tom D. and Tres. But within weeks, analysts from the CIA, FBI, NSA, NGA, and DIA were working inside. The trailers quickly became a critical piston of our war machine, now moving in wider concentric movements.
TF 714’s demonstrated battlefield effectiveness made us increasingly legitimate in the counterterrorism community. By affiliation, the JIATF grew in prestige. Its own weekly VTC began with a modest audience but soon included chiefs of station from across the Middle East, deputy directors, and three dozen agencies. Because we did not hesitate to share operational details with them, D.C.-based analysts knew that a weekend in their office doing work for “the task force” might lead to an arrest in the back alleys of a casbah. Deploying forward to serve in a JIATF became sought-after duty.
The JIATF’s essential products were information-rich, five-page targeting folders on key enemy operatives. Each included exhaustive background on the target, his activities, and often enough specific location and pattern-of-life information for a host nation to capture him.
A key to doing so was the web of liaisons whom we had seeded across the region and who worked with U.S. country teams to ensure that local authorities saw the JIATF’s communiqué so they could make an arrest. I learned early on that our influence in the embassies and agencies we were wooing often depended on the simple charisma, integrity, and competence of our liaisons. So I carefully selected the professionals we placed there, routinely diverting world-class commandos or peerless intelligence professionals to serve as liaisons, despite the impact on our operations. The trust they had earned toiling away by themselves in isolated embassies—far from their tight-knit units and the comparative glory of the fight—was vital.
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Our concern about the strategic threat that the refreshment of foreign fighters posed had been building in the months prior to the December mess-hall bombing and the inception of JIATF-West. Beginning that fall, I met with the leaders of TF 714 and TF 16 in a series of two- and three-hour-long sessions. In front of maps and whiteboards, we discussed the evidence and potential ways to combat the problem. Bennet Sacolick, the Green commander, had returned to the States to oversee the unit there, leaving Colonel John Christian in charge of TF 16. “Big John,” as Graeme Lamb later warmly called him, was indeed that. With cropped whitish hair and a big, sculptural face, he looked like a bust of a Hellenistic soldier. He was articulate and persuasive, speaking in a distinctive baritone and cleanly enunciating the last syllables of his sentences. He had been commander of TF 16 during Big Ben and throughout the previous summer had gone back and forth with the Marines’ intelligence shops, who disagreed that there was a significant “Al Qaeda problem” in Anbar.
John was a perceptive leader who often saw and understood trends before hindsight put them in relief for the rest of us. He had been deploying to Iraq since the summer of 2003 and before then had been a military adviser in the Philippines with Wayne Barefoot. There, the two had followed Islamic extremist groups like Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah, elements with regional and national agendas but aspirations toward Al Qaeda’s sophistication. Their experience watching these groups as they networked, cohered, and grew helped Wayne and John divine some of Al Qaeda in Iraq’s more opaque patterns.
During these sessions, we tried to do more than parse calculations of foreign fighters. We questioned our underlying assumptions about the insurgency—its strategy, depth, and leaders—that led us to see what we thought we were seeing. These debates inevitably turned to discussions about Zarqawi and what the influx of foreign volunteers revealed about his proficiency as a manager: AQI’s swift fielding of these volunteers required mature processes. The increased number of volunteers implied they believed Zarqawi’s was a winning team, while the strict deployment of suicide bombers against select targets revealed an ability to design and execute a strategy with discipline. That Zarqawi could keep this regional network glued spoke to his pull as a leader.