My Share of the Task(89)
And, although we rarely talked of it, we knew we could fail.
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Early on, TF 714 lacked a clear mandate to either build a network or get other organizations to join it. Already critics in different parts of the U.S. government felt we were straying outside our traditional role—which we were. But I saw no other organization weaving the kind of web that was needed, and I received strong encouragement from leaders like John Abizaid.
The network I sought to build needed not just physical breadth but also functional diversity. This required the participation of the U.S. government departments and agencies that were involved in counterterrorism, like State, Treasury, the CIA, and the FBI. But we faced a circular dilemma: Because their participation was essentially voluntary, TF 714 needed to be more effective at targeting Al Qaeda for other agencies to want to join our project. But we often needed their support or compliance to be noticeably more effective. The solution, I realized, was to do what we could to improve TF 714 internally to make us more appealing to partners. We began by rewiring TF 714’s units into a network better connected to itself and more accommodating to those agencies we were courting.
To do so, and to posture TF 714 for a more decisive role to defeat Zarqawi’s network, we needed a central hub with a clean deck. In July 2004, amid plans to give control of Baghdad International Airport (BIAP) back to the newly sovereign Iraq, we found that new hub at a former Iraqi air base in Balad, a rural area west of the Tigris, almost fifty miles north of Baghdad.
American forces had occupied the base since the invasion, but the temporary infrastructure reflected the initial Coalition mindset: Get in quickly; get out just as fast. When I visited our section—a dusty area in the northwest corner, crisscrossed by cement roads and runways—nothing usable remained. For security and secrecy, we walled off our plot with concrete blocks and rock-filled HESCO barriers. Across the airfield, on the other side of its two large runways, Coalition forces occupied tents and Saddam-era buildings. Over time, that area sprouted retail shops and several fast-food restaurants housed in small trailers. But our plot remained spartan—which I considered essential to our focus. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Williams, who commanded the British Special Air Service task force later in the war, captured the atmosphere inside our compound vividly: “We were there to fight, to do PT, to eat, to sleep, then to fight again. There was no big-screen TV or other diversion in the barracks. It was a world of concrete, plywood, and gun oil, and it was absolutely intoxicating in its intensity.”
To build that world, we set about clearing and rebuilding, deliberately laying out our facilities and equipment to channel the sustained fight ahead. We put our hooches as close as possible to work areas, including the task force screening facility (which would hold new captures for initial interrogations before we transferred them to internment at Camp Bucca), so that TF 714’s leaders could frequently visit and observe, in the process reinforcing our mission and our values.
We placed our headquarters and that of the Iraq-focused TF 16 inside one of the three hardened air shelters that sat within the TF 714 footprint. A big concrete dome the size of a circus tent, with beige reinforced walls several feet thick and bowed openings at each end, it resembled a giant caramel-colored turtle shell. Its vaulted interior was ideal: By this time, we were convinced the secretive and compartmentalized traditions of special operations forces, particularly TF 714, would doom us. The hard lessons from the previous months—of Big Ben and the unnerving speed of the enemy network—had chipped away at this dogma. But we knew to deliberately craft our work spaces to channel interaction, force collaboration, and ease the flow of people and information.
Rather than divide the interior into a honeycomb of offices, we congregated all of TF 16 in the middle of the hangar and, in an unprecedented move, made the whole cavernous interior a top secret–secure facility: Everything could be discussed on the open floor, so secrecy was no excuse for not cooperating with the rest of the team. Facing a wall of screens displaying a ticker of updates and streaming real-time video of operations, the TF 16 commander and his key staff sat at a rectangular horseshoe table. Behind them were four rows of tables, divided like a theater. Although a few offices lined the perimeter, the sixty or so people who coordinated TF 16’s work—intelligence analysts, operations officers, military liaisons, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) operators, airpower controllers, FBI agents, and medical planners—sat in these rows.