My Share of the Task(123)
J.C. and his team had seen the Samarra bombing and its aftermath from the States and sensed the stakes were now higher. After digesting the current intelligence traffic and digging up some past leads, they identified a number of intelligence lines to pursue. Before they deployed, J.C. had given his team a challenge: This would be the rotation on which TF 714 got not only Zarqawi but also the man we thought would replace him, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the second-in-command. The TF 714 machine, he felt, was simply too proficient to allow Zarqawi to survive their three-month rotation. The information being pumped through it was richer than it ever had been. The capacity to exploit intelligence had taken another huge leap in the six months since his last rotation. The hard bargaining of the previous two years had won us more surveillance assets. And Zarqawi was getting sloppy.
When J.C.’s team arrived, they developed a set of targets for the squadron to hit at the beginning of their rotation. By the spring of 2006 this was a standard, if unstated, practice in our task forces. Striking a series of targets in the first days after arrival would shake any cobwebs off the operators, but more important, the strikes could yield a wealth of intelligence leads that could then guide follow-on operations. This fight was about gaining and maintaining momentum, and our forces sought to grab it immediately.
On that target list the task force added NAI 152. Allan remained convinced that it was an important site, and his assessments were respected. Even though it was squarely in the middle of AQI territory, it had been quiet. This made it a good target for the new squadron, coming in cold, to warm up on.
They wouldn’t get the chance. In the late morning of Saturday, April 8, before the squadron assault teams rotated, Allan saw a convoy of vehicles approach NAI 152. After three months of monitoring the target, he knew the activity merited a strike. The operators trusted him, boarded helicopters in Baghdad, and launched a daytime assault.
A short time later, just before 1:56 P.M., the Green teams landed at NAI 152. In the firefight, five insurgents were killed. The Green team suffered no fatalities. Inside the house, the teams found suicide vests and an explosives-laden van with a huge tank inside—likely bound for Baghdad’s streets. The operators who entered the house, like TF 714’s SEALs and many of the Rangers, had been trained in forensic techniques at our Sensitive Site Exploitation (SSE) course, one of a number of schools we set up to develop in-house expertise. There in Yusufiyah that afternoon, they meticulously searched the house, tagging each item of intelligence value and recording exactly where in the house it had been found. They transmitted any key data back to the headquarters in Baghdad and the Iraq task force’s headquarters in Balad. As had become the norm, analysts there immediately began exploitation, while pumping both the raw information and their initial assessments to the wider intelligence community.
As the assault teams were airborne toward NAI 152, the Baghdad outstation monitoring the operation had seen a car drive to a second location up the road. Soon the task force picked up more vehicles approaching the follow-on target. Helicopters went airborne, and the second target was hit at 4:11 P.M. Two hours and fifteen minutes had elapsed since the assault teams first landed in Yusufiyah earlier that afternoon.
The second target, now named Objective Mayers, went down more quietly than the first. The operators arrested all twelve of the men they found at the mud-and-brick farmhouse. In the backs of the helicopters that lifted off from Yusufiyah a short time later, the assault teams squeezed in next to the flexi-cuffed men and returned to Baghdad.
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“We picked up twelve guys at Mayers last night,” Wayne Barefoot said, bringing up a slide on-screen in an intel brief the next day, April 9. Wayne was in Iraq coincidentally. He was in transition to a new job, but Scott Miller had asked him to come back to Iraq and make any final adjustments, now that Wayne was free of the time constraints that came with being the TF 16 intel chief. That role was newly filled by Major M.S., Wayne’s deputy at the time and a seasoned intelligence officer. An avid athlete, M.S. had the combination of intellect, common sense, and people skills necessary to succeed in the traditionally all-male community of special operations. She was serious, unflappable, and demanding.