Drone Warrior Page 8

  I had been deployed with the unit’s “vehicle interdiction troop,” which meant my job for the next four months was to stop the flow of bomb makers, suicide bombers, and terror leaders as they snuck across borders and between major cities. We were a stopgap to break the links that connected the enemy to each other across the various safe havens in major cities in northern Iraq. Our team was outfitted with its own fleet of 160th SOAR Black Hawks and Little Birds. The pilots were by far the best in the world. We needed to be as quick and mobile as the enemy and the fleet allowed us to travel anywhere we needed to go on a moment’s notice.

  We flew with the chopper doors flung open, 100 miles per hour, ready to jump into action. Sitting on the edge of the chopper, racing through the blue sky, legs dangling, and watching the open, mostly empty desert as an occasional village flashes past was a powerful feeling. It felt like we were explorers heading to stake our claim in a new territory.

  When we landed, there was no time to waste. We had only four months to do as much destruction to the terrorist network in Mosul and the surrounding provinces as possible. I dropped my black duffel bag in one of the trailers hidden behind big cement blocks called T-barriers and headed straight to the Box.

  Around the base, few knew what to make of our white trailers and the blacked-out choppers racing in and out night and day, all of it cordoned off from the rest of the U.S. soldiers. The trailers were windowless, equipped with satellite dishes on top, and locked at all hours. Our entire perimeter was covered by guards; they would not allow any other military personnel or locals inside. As far as the enemy was concerned, we were invisible. They had no idea we were there—and that’s how it needed to be.

  The Box was a double-wide trailer and had been outfitted with one long plywood table standing across a cold cement floor, and a twelve-foot wall of flat-screen monitors. Images of a drone and the desert landscape streamed across them. Here we go, I thought. Inside I was nervous as hell, but on the outside I was weirdly calm. I had been preparing for this moment for a long time. I slugged a cup of black coffee that had been burning on a hot plate in the back—and got to work.

  ONE QUESTION IS AT THE HEART OF EVERY TARGETER: WHERE DO YOU BEGIN THE hunt?

  Finding terrorists who have spent their lives eluding U.S. forces is an art, not a science, and there were only a handful of targeters who could do it successfully night after night. We could find anyone if given the opportunity and resources—and our multimillion-dollar drones gave us the ability to do it with precision.

  Every hour wasted debating would be another minute the target had an opportunity to adapt to our technology or plan his next attack on an unsuspecting populace. We needed to move at the speed of war because the enemy wasn’t waiting.

  A lot of misinformed people in the international intelligence community thought we had some Wizard of Oz in the sky magically locating guys we wanted to hunt down—with just a tap, tap, tap of a few buttons on our keyboards.

  That’s a joke.

  Even within the U.S. intelligence community, most don’t understand how it works or how an enemy leader is taken off the battlefield when they read about it in the news.

  When an intelligence group from the United Arab Emirates special forces visited one of our teams at a U.S. military base as part of a routine partner nation exchange, they couldn’t get over the fact that our targeting teams only contained a dozen or so personnel and that we could locate a guy based on a scrap of intelligence, and then pinpoint him for a kill in short order, hours in some cases, when it took them and others months, if they got their target at all.

  “Where do you get the software to find these guys?” one of the men asked. “We’d like to buy it for our computers.”

  “Ha! What software?”

  “You know, the analysis software that tells you guys which terrorists to strike and predicts exactly where they are in the world.”

  Typical Emirati. He thought he could buy whatever he wanted if he threw enough money on the table. Like others, he couldn’t seem to grasp that it was only a few analysts doing the painstaking work manually behind the scenes—not some whiz-bang technology.

  There was no magic formula to finding a terrorist. It was a combination of things, and every target was unique in its own way. We had several intelligence teams, which worked in different parts of the world, swooping in and out in the cover of night. Usually the deployments were four months at a time, depending on the mission, but it always felt longer because few of us slept much.

  As targeters we had to be historians, reporters, and prophets at the same time. Not only did we need to understand a target so well that we could recite an enemy’s life story, but we also were constantly providing up-to-date assessments to commanders and others high up in the U.S. government and ultimately predicting a target’s next move.

  Every one of our targets deserved what they had coming. With every one there was overwhelming evidence that he had actively engaged in planning, approving, or carrying out attacks against U.S. interests. Not a single one of them would think twice about killing an American—man, woman, or child—if given the opportunity.

  You have to understand something about how terrorist networks are structured. Generally, an Al Qaeda or ISIS cell consists of several emirs: administrative, military, logistics, security, sharia (Islamic law), media, and the overall emir. I liked to target the admin emirs because they always have the most information about the cell and connections to every other part. The admin emirs are also a lot less fanatical, sort of boring, like accountants—unlike the military emirs, who would usually rather blow up in a ball of flames than be captured.

  In our world, we had crafted and refined a specific methodology for this cycle of relentless pressure on our enemy.

  The methodology was simple in concept, but difficult in execution.

  I was always looking for that critical player in the networks, the one emir whose death could degrade the overall group the most.

  Every terrorist had his vulnerability. These guys were human, after all. I had to get into the mindset of a terrorist operator, think like he did.

  I usually started with the target’s full name. Names are hidden gems in the Middle East—and usually overlooked by others. Men are named after their forefathers, so the second name would come from his father and the third from his grandfather, and then a part would also tell you where they were from.

  One thing we had to be careful about were kunyas—fake names terrorists give themselves to hide from trackers like me and my team. Within jihadi circles, these men use kunyas when talking to each other to mask their true identities in the event that their associates are captured.

  We diagrammed full names and families as a baseline for our search. An analytic tool helped me see inner circles clearer, organize my findings, detect patterns, and manually draw quick diagrams and charts about his world, particularly who else I might need to go after to get the target in question. Oftentimes we had to track down two or three levels, such as a friend or family member unaware of the illicit activities, just to get to the primary target.

  All the names that came up were then run through advanced software specifically for targeting, some of the best tools and tech money can buy.

  Then we go through their shit—their cars, homes, phones . . . everything. And we look for pressure points (friends, family) at the same time. There’s no more useful leverage than family in these parts of the world.

  Then we start to build a pattern of life (POL) on the target—places they visit, previous residences, even if they know that U.S. forces are following them. Still, I needed to find a real “startpoint,” a spot in the sky to start the drone.

  Startpoints are numerous at the early stage of the hunt. We collect additional ones outside of a target’s family, looking at any information we might glean from Internet sites, reports, and databases. Locations could be anything, such as a distant relative’s house, local stores, a mosque, historical sites tied to other member
s of his immediate group, small villages we came across that had similar tribal characteristics or that shared a common background with him and his family.

  Sometimes the key to finding our target could be the simplest thing that others had overlooked. An office building he used to work at years before he turned extremist, a café he was known to frequent, the mosque where he prayed. I was also looking for key things such as his education or distinguishing features like a broken nose or a limp.

  While this was going on, our resident signals intelligence specialist who sat with my team would comb through signals intelligence related to a target—any communications, online propaganda videos, whatever he could dig up. Access like this made us unstoppable. For each target, we compiled PowerPoint slides that detailed everything about the target and their activities—the “baseball cards.” Officially, the process was known as target “nomination.” Those slides would then make their way up the chain of command.

  With all that in place and a mission approved, we’d start the hunt. Following leads, connections, and relationships until we’d catch a break—an exchange between parties that was out of the ordinary, a trip into the middle of nowhere in a white bongo, multiple stops at markets without a single purchase, a visitor to a residence who suddenly appeared one day with no rhyme or reason.

  We’d log such stops and the locations of any interactions into the maps, all while talking with the team and cross-referencing each stop with our database for any suspicious connections—other targets who might have used the locations before. We’d map not only their own history, but a given terror network’s history, tagged by place, and cross-referenced with phone calls, text messages, and emails that related to any of it: the target’s pattern of life starting to take shape.

  Information was the key to our success—the large databases we built over the years included terabytes of terrorist dossiers, source reports, open-source information, interrogations, and detailed assessments of a village’s allegiances to terror groups and religious sects.

  Based on years of data contained in my maps, I could zoom over a house with the drone and tell you who lived there and if there had been an operation conducted before. Often terrorists liked to reuse other terrorists’ houses (generally after their buddies had been captured or killed), as if America somehow forgot where any of these people lived.

  All this happened in real time. Once we had eyes on the right people who were a degree or two of separation away from the target, we’d almost inevitably get to our guy—provided we had done the right intel work, were patient enough, and didn’t have some disruption in pursuit, like bad weather or a target lost in traffic.

  And then? Ninety percent of the time we captured targets. The other times we shot them down with Hellfire. The criteria for kills varied. There were a lot of questions I would ask myself during the process, like, What would killing this person mean to the overall network or even to the local authorities? How would it help us? Would it make things worse? Did the target deserve to die?

  OUR FIRST TARGET WAS AN ISI LEADER WE CALLED USAMAH. MY MIND HAD BEEN SET on going after him before we’d even arrived in the country. He was the admin emir for Salah ad Din province, which comprised a nine-thousand-square-mile swath of territory in the north—about the size of New Jersey. His responsibilities, coupled with the importance of this province to the overall strategic mission of ISI, meant that Usamah was a few removed from the top of the food chain and managed numerous files for the group’s finances, he was the record keeper. He had a deep understanding of the men who made up the numerous terrorist cells operating throughout the north, as well as the finances and revenues of the group. He spent time with the commanders day in and day out; he had their routines down. We needed whatever he knew.

  The taste of bad coffee still in my mouth, I called out instructions to Jake, the tactical controller, who sat next to me typing it all into the system’s chat for the camera operator and Predator pilot back stateside. Four others worked alongside us: my deputy sifting real-time intelligence, a radio guy talking to other agencies looped in on the hunt, as well as three people doing signals intelligence, essentially eavesdropping on various electronic devices—email, cell phones, texts of our targets.

  For days we used a rotating fleet of Predators and other aircraft to survey areas of interest—little villages and larger cities just outside Mosul. The team before us had done the same during its deployment and handed over to me all their knowledge from the previous months of targeting. Usamah was what we called “OPSEC (Operational Security) savvy”—meaning that he was very aware of his wanted status and knew he could be taken out at any moment. He did everything he could to minimize our ability to track him. But there was one thing I learned early on: the terrorists I tracked eventually slipped up. And that’s when we got them.

  Usamah was good: he didn’t leave much of a signature on the ground and his experience eluding forces for so many years made him a worthy ghost for our team to hunt. We would get word of his presence through sources catching glimpses of him walking through a local market in Mosul one day; a rumor of him making an appearance at an ISI underground meeting in the southern corridor of the city the next. With each new discovery, dots placed on our maps started to take shape and tell a story; still, he disappeared too quickly at these sightings to develop any regular pattern of life.

  It was probably a week before we got a break. After drilling into old intelligence files, we noticed that Usamah traveled each week from Mosul south to the city of Bayji to collect and distribute illicit funds to members of his tight-knit group within ISI.

  The small city was vital to his extortion racket, which involved millions of dollars being siphoned out of the Bayji oil refinery.

  There was a dusty road that stretched about 110 miles between Mosul and Bayji—I determined that Usamah would be most vulnerable on the road because it took him out of his comfort zone in Mosul, where ISI leadership had created a safe haven by lining the pockets of security forces and intimidating the local population. The only people who could keep ISI in check at the time in this area were U.S. forces; the Iraqi security forces just couldn’t be trusted.

  We had figured out that Usamah traveled to Bayji once a week on the same day and time in the morning, but we still didn’t know where in the city he was going or who he was meeting.

  We delved further into old files on Usamah’s associates and family members. In Bayji, we soon discovered three homes where some old associates potentially lived. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for a hunt.

  “Z IN ONE,” I SAID OVER THE RADIO.

  The drone camera panned in on the dusty landscape through the electro-optical day-TV lens and zeroed in on the city of Bayji. We’d gotten word that Usamah had come.

  I had played out this moment for months, dreamed of being a part of something like this, of taking the enemy down.

  Where was he?

  “Z in two,” I said. A row of mud and stone houses came into sharp view, the camera got closer, and there was house number one: gray concrete, two stories, owned by Usamah’s cousin at one point, according to the intel I uncovered in old files.

  This was our first startpoint. The plan was to hop quickly with the drone to each of the three potential houses to look for something out of place.

  There was no front yard, only a small, jagged fence separating it from the empty, dusty street. The drone orbited, allowing us to see every angle of the place, even through the window openings.

  There was no one there.

  “Move on,” I said.

  “Roger that.”

  We didn’t have much time, knowing Usamah would only remain in Bayji for about three hours before returning to Mosul. Knowing how paranoid he was, we would be lucky if we found anything at all.

  The second house was a small apartment complex in the downtown market center. Usamah’s first wife’s home. But it was too crowded to see much as the drone orbited. Laundry was hanging out most of the windows
, so it was near impossible to get a good view inside. Traffic was jammed up and hundreds of people moved through the street.

  “Dry hole,” I said.

  There was no way we’d find Usamah there. This wasn’t promising.

  I fought back the gnawing feeling that we might be screwed and made the call to head to the third house.

  “Raise altitude,” I called out. A suspected ISI associate owned the third house—a quiet spot outside the city. This had its dangers: if we kept the drone too low, someone might hear it.

  The house was similar in size to the first one, except it was surrounded by ten-foot-high concrete walls that ran around a dirt yard. Perched on the northwestern corner was a satellite dish and I could see a dog slowly meandering around the small steps leading to the driveway.

  Zooming in further, we could see a white station wagon parked not too far from the front door, its tracks still pressed in the dirt. It had rained heavily only days before, turning the dirt into thick mud.

  We continued to take snapshots of the home, focusing in on windows, entrances, and hidden areas for us to reference later if necessary.

  “Switch to infrared,” I said.

  As the drone camera changed from day TV to infrared, the images became sharper, white against black like an X-ray. This was typical and used to see different views of the target from the drone sensor even though it was still daylight. It also helped me get a better view of what we were staring at when heavy sandstorms blew through.

  There wasn’t any movement at the house, from what we could tell. But I was more interested in the station wagon. If Usamah was just visiting for his weekly finance run, this could be his car.