Winter Strike showed this might be a long road, but we were moving.
| CHAPTER 8 |
The Enemy Emerges
December 2003–April 2004
About midday on December 13, 2003, I received a phone call while back at Fort Bragg. “Sir, we have intelligence. We think we know where Saddam Hussein is and we’re moving on him now.”
The voice on the other end of the secure phone was Rear Admiral Bill McRaven, one of TF 714’s two assistant commanding generals. Bill, then TF 714’s senior officer in Iraq, was a Navy SEAL I’d known off and on for many years. I had enjoyed the book he wrote, Spec Ops, and earlier that year I had attended his promotion ceremony at the White House, as he moved from working for Condoleezza Rice at the National Security Council to TF 714. Energetic and iconoclastic, he would be a passionate force in shaping the command.
Bill’s call was welcome news. When I took over TF 714 in October 2003, Saddam Hussein was still the biggest target in Iraq. We were not the only unit responsible for his capture—everyone was on the hunt—but the administration and the military looked to us as the premier element. While his role in the growing violence in Iraq was unclear, we knew we had to remove him from the equation.
After Bill’s call, I went immediately to TF 714’s Joint Operations Center at Bragg. The room, with rows of workstations manned by staff and unit operators facing a wall of video screens, was a buzz of controlled excitement. One screen displayed an operational log of ongoing activities, and another showed a live Predator feed of the operation moving on Saddam’s assessed location. As we watched, operators from Task Force 16 and soldiers from Ray Odierno’s 4th Infantry Division moved down a road that cut through farmland in Ad Dawr, south of Tikrit.* We could see operators moving purposefully through empty courtyards. Bill, calling from the TF 16 operations center at the Baghdad airport, reported intermittently. Although I did not know it at the time, our force had brought along a detainee who had been flipped through the smart manipulation of the task force’s interrogation team. After a period of silence, Bill spoke again.
“Okay, they went in there and . . .” He paused. “We’ve . . . got a guy.”
“Do you think it’s Saddam Hussein?” I asked. For a few tense moments, the line was quiet.
Then we heard Bill get back on. “He claims he is, sir.”
“Well, that’s one indicator,” I said, laughing.
Although less refined than many that would follow, the operations that led to the capture of Saddam gave a glimpse into how TF 714 operations would evolve in the coming years. Using a complex combination of intelligence collected from a variety of sources, including detainees, we slowly laid bare the network around Saddam. While the process was slower and less precise than it would ultimately become, our efforts with conventional-force partners, painstaking exploitation of information, and rapid reaction to emerging leads proved an effective combination.
But I cringed when, on December 14, Ambassador Bremer declared, “Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!” This was the kind of triumphalism that I knew would not play well with the Iraqi people. To me, the presentation evoked memories of the previous April. Soon after the capture of Baghdad, newspaper photographs showed U.S. generals sitting on couches and smoking cigars in one of Saddam’s palaces. Annie observed that if she were an Iraqi, even an ardent opponent of Saddam, she would have resented what looked like foreign invaders humiliating Iraq. After Saddam’s capture, my gut told me, the Iraqis should have made the announcement and celebrated it as a victory for the new Iraq. The country’s government, although it did not technically exist, would need as much credibility as possible when it gained sovereignty the following summer, according to the American timetable.