Intelligence Wars: Lessons from Baghdad - Hardcover

Steven K. O'Hern; Bart Bechtel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1591026709 ISBN 13: 9781591026709

Publisher: Prometheus, 2008

Synopsis

In this revealing insider's look at the US intelligence community's efforts to fight the insurgency in Iraq, author Steven K. O'Hern, who served in Iraq in 2005 as a senior intelligence officer, offers a critical assessment of our intelligence failures and suggests ways of improving our ability to fight an often elusive enemy. O'Hern criticizes America's military leaders for being enamored with high-technology solutions for all situations, including intelligence operations. Essentially, we are still relying on an intelligence system that was designed to beat the Soviet army. Using examples from human source operations conducted in Iraq, this book explains why human intelligence-not technology-is the key to defeating an insurgency and why the US is so poor at using what the military calls "HUMINT."O'Hern also cites internal structural problems that work against effective intelligence operations. The author gives examples of missed opportunities that resulted from information being caught in "stovepipes" and red tape. In conclusion, he cautions that these unresolved problems will continue to affect the United States in any future conflict against an insurgency.

About this title

About the Author

Steven K. O'Hern (Overland Park, KS) was director of the Strategic Counterintelligence Directorate of the Multi-National Force in Baghdad, Iraq, from April to September 2005. He is also a retired air force colonel, who served as a special investigations and counterintelligence officer and commanded units of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations at bases in Minnesota, Georgia, Oklahoma, and South Korea. Currently, he is vice president for Group Legal of Swiss Re, the world's largest reinsurer.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE INTELLIGENCE WARS

LESSONS FROM BAGHDADBy STEVEN K. O'HERN

Prometheus Books

Copyright © 2008 Steven K. O'Hern
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59102-670-9

Contents

Author's Note......................................................9Foreword Bart Bechtel.............................................13Chapter 1. Getting Acquainted......................................17Chapter 2. A Long War..............................................33Chapter 3. Fourth-Generation Warfare...............................53Chapter 4. Iran's Shadow Falls over Iraq...........................81Chapter 5. HUMINT Sources..........................................117Chapter 6. More HUMINT.............................................163Chapter 7. Stovepipes..............................................207Chapter 8. War among the Intelligence Officers.....................229Chapter 9. The Next War............................................257Index..............................................................279

Chapter One

The war in Iraq has lasted much longer than we were promised. The number of men and women killed and wounded has been high. The war has left its mark on the more than half a million men and women in the US military who served in Iraq, many for multiple tours. Civilians numbering in the hundreds of thousands went to Iraq to drive trucks, provide security, and handle myriad other jobs.

Despite the impact of the war on those who have been to Iraq, back in the United States most people are not personally affected. Only a fraction of our population serves in the military, and most Americans don't have friends or neighbors who have gone to Iraq.

Despite their lack of personal involvement, most Americans have opinions about the war. Regardless of their support for or against the decisions to go to war and to continue an American presence in Iraq, most people are mystified about why the war has lasted so long. The United States Army and Marine Corps captured Baghdad in a matter of weeks. But a few months later resistance to US forces began to build.

By 2004 it was clear that an insurgency against the coalition forces was growing. The opposition to the coalition was a collection of disparate groups that were not centrally controlled. Despite that lack of organization, the insurgents were fighting the same army and Marine Corps that had tossed Saddam Hussein's regime out of power-and they were fighting our army and Marine Corps to a standstill.

The insurgency is the reason the war has lasted so long. The "shock and awe" war became a fourth-generation war. The United States military was not built to fight an insurgency, but has adopted new techniques and relearned forgotten lessons from past wars. The intelligence system that supports our military, however, has not adapted.

I served in Iraq for six months during 2005 as the leader of an intelligence unit that hunted for insurgents. I was on the staff of the military's senior intelligence officer in Iraq. I worked with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the National Security Agency (NSA). From those experiences, I took many lessons. The chief lesson is that our military's intelligence system does not work well for fighting an insurgency.

Knowing that the world's finest military is not well served by its intelligence apparatus when it fights an insurgency scares me. I am troubled because the "long war" against terrorists, especially Islamic terrorists, that President George W. Bush and others have predicted is likely to be a series of wars similar to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Horn of Africa, the Philippines, and Indonesia all have large populations of poor Muslims who are displeased with their governments. We will see more insurgencies.

My lessons about our intelligence system began when I was assigned to be the director of the Strategic Counterintelligence Directorate (SCID) of the Multi-National Force-Iraq (the name of the military force operating in Iraq, abbreviated as MNF-I). The SCID has members from the army, navy, and air force, plus civilian contractors provided by the Defense Department's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA).

Counterintelligence is the part of intelligence work that defeats an adversary's attempt to collect intelligence about our plans and capabilities. In the most glamorous sense, counterintelligence means catching spies. But it can also mean something as mundane as investigating people who work with classified information to make sure they do not present a security risk. Because of its source networks that helped identify insurgents, the SCID's work focused on identifying and fighting insurgents instead of other counterintelligence duties.

The work of intelligence can be divided into broad categories based on how intelligence is gathered. Signals intelligence (SIGINT) concerns collecting, decoding, and translating information gleaned from eavesdropping on conversations or messages (telephones, radio transmissions, etc.). Another broad category is the intelligence gathered from satellites or reconnaissance aircraft, which is broadly labeled imagery intelligence (IMINT). Another "-int" is HUMINT, or human intelligence. This is the work described in spy novels as fraught with danger and beautiful women. In real life, human intelligence is more often the work of identifying and recruiting someone else to acquire information.

In Iraq the SCID had four counterintelligence teams, each with counterintelligence agents from the army, navy and air force. There were two teams in the Green Zone, the Blue Team and the Black Team. A third team was in the city of Irbil, in Kurdish territory in northern Iraq, and the fourth team was in Iraq's second largest city, Basra, in southern Iraq. All of the teams had army military intelligence personnel, Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) special agents, and Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) special agents. Each team worked with a squad of Texas National Guardsmen who served as the security element for the SCID.

The SCID was a human intelligence operation. Intelligence from imagery and intercepted communications added to our picture, but our main method of collecting information was from Iraqis who we recruited and trained. Of course, we were not alone in relying on HUMINT. Several units in the army, Marine Corps, and air force conducted human source operations that focused on areas near their bases or areas of operations in order to better protect US bases or operations. This intelligence collection was one aspect of "force protection" work that consumed large numbers of people in Iraq.

With the capture of Baghdad, the Iraq War entered a new phase, one that wasn't recognized at first. In order to reduce the frequency and severity of attacks on US forces and the process of rebuilding the Iraqi government, the thousands of troops searching for insurgents had to be told where to look. Identifying the people who carried out attacks, built bombs, and provided logistical support to the insurgency may have been the most difficult task in protecting US forces. The insurgents lived and worked among neighborhoods of apparently peaceful Iraqis. Satellites, reconnaissance aircraft, and the interception of radio and cell phone signals were useful, but alone these methods of collecting information could not defeat the insurgency. Sunni insurgents who were loosely linked in shifting and hard-to-identify networks were carrying out attacks against coalition forces daily. Fighting them was like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. As soon as insurgents were knocked down, others popped up. Collecting intelligence to locate and capture insurgents and to defend coalition forces from future attacks was critical to success in Iraq. We could not eliminate violence, but reducing it enough to allow orderly life to return to Iraq would be essential to a successful Iraq government friendly to the United States.

On my second day in Iraq, Frank Brown, the army civilian intelligence officer I was replacing as the director of the SCID, took me to a house we called the White House. Like the other SCID houses in the Green Zone used to house and office our personnel and vehicles, it was named after a color. The Blue and Black houses were named for the teams they housed. The White House, named for its exterior color, was the main office for the SCID and housed several interpreters, civilian analysts, soldiers, the operations officer, and the director.

As I walked toward the White House I saw the additional challenge the SCID would face. Black and gray, not white, were the dominant hues. A fire two days before my arrival had nearly destroyed the building. Frank had discovered the fire in a storeroom near his office. The few people in the house at the time had used fire extinguishers on the growing blaze while the fire department was responding. The fire department had just begun to fight the fire when ammunition in the storeroom began detonating from the heat, forcing the firefighters to pull back. Part of the building was a total loss. Smoke and water damage were present throughout most of the building.

On my third day in Iraq, I made the second of many trips up and down Route Irish to meet my boss, who worked at Camp Victory, one of the many bases in the Baghdad International Airport (BIAP, pronounced "bye-app") complex. Route Irish was one of several highways in Iraq named by the army as main supply routes (MSRs). The highway that ran east from BIAP into the heart of Baghdad was part of MSR Irish, better known as Route Irish. The divided four-lane highway was the only direct route from BIAP to the Green Zone; any other route forced you to travel through dangerous territory for a much longer distance.

The area around BIAP was host to several army bases and camps, including Camp Victory, Camp Liberty, and Camp Slater. In addition, the air force operated a passenger terminal on the west side of the two north-south runways at the airport, at Sather Air Base. The BIAP complex of bases was home to thousands of army soldiers and the headquarters of the Multi-National Force-Iraq and Multi-National Corps-Iraq (MNC-I).

Large numbers of soldiers were required to secure the miles of walls and fences around BIAP. Within the BIAP complex, separate forward operating bases (FOBs) and camps were secured by their own checkpoints. In addition to supporting the 3rd Infantry Division and the many FOBs in and around Baghdad, the BIAP complex also provided the logistics that supported the US Embassy in the Green Zone and provided a location for the United States to train Iraqi military and police personnel. Civilian workers performed countless other services, such as operating several dining facilities, a well-stocked Post Exchange, and the passenger terminals for airplane and helicopter flights, and constructing and managing quarters to house the military and civilian personnel.

While Frank and I were at Camp Victory, he introduced me to my new boss, Brig. Gen. John DeFreitas III. He had been selected for promotion to major general and I was told that he would become the commander of the army's Intelligence and Security Command when he left Iraq. The general was running late so our conversation was brief. He shook my hand, welcomed me to Iraq, and then left to go to another meeting.

The next day, Frank departed for the Baghdad airport. Because of the fire in the White House, I spent the next week sharing the deputy director's office in the embassy with Mark Johnson. I asked Mark dozens of questions a day. Five days later Don Everest arrived to replace Mark as the deputy director.

Possessing a wealth of experience, Don was showing up for his third or fourth war. He spent multiple tours of duty in Vietnam as a soldier before being recruited into the army's military intelligence. Ending his military career after twenty years, Don was immediately hired as a civilian military intelligence agent. He came to the SCID after being operations officer of a unit at the army's Foreign Counterintelligence Activity.

Another key member of the SCID was Tom Reid, a Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent who was the SCID's operations officer. Tom had one of the most critical jobs at the SCID. He was responsible for supervising our team chiefs, agents, and analysts as they recruited and handled sources, reported information in intelligence information reports, and analyzed the information received from sources.

Nothing had prepared me for the level of detail I needed to know about Iraq's political factions, the history of Saddam's regime, and the operations of several insurgent groups in order to understand what we were doing and what we needed to do. I spent hours reading classified reports and talking with intelligence analysts.

The civilian intelligence analysts at the SCID were a big asset. At the time I arrived at the SCID, they were a mix of men ranging from their late twenties to their fifties who came from varied backgrounds. Later in my deployment, several female analysts arrived. Some were retired from the army or Marine Corps; others had separated from the military after a few years service. The SCID was supposed to have fifteen analysts, but the agency that supplied them, the Counterintelligence Field Activity, was not replacing analysts who were leaving after a one-year tour of duty. One of the problems Frank Brown briefed me about was his fight to get CIFA to honor its commitment to supply fifteen analysts. As a short-term solution for our analyst shortage, CIFA had recently sent four analysts on sixty-day tours.

This illustrated another problem that existed throughout the Iraq theater. It takes about four to six weeks for someone to acclimate to the environment, the climate, the numerous hostile groups in play, and the current situation in order to be effective. That time line was the same for all of the people at the SCID, whether the director, operations officer, team chief, agent, analyst, linguist, or member of our security element. Turnover was a constant battle for all elements of the military and the State Department. At the SCID we faced turnover in waves. The army sent all of its counterintelligence agents to the SCID in one rotation every six months, while the air force's agents also served six months but came in four rotations per year. NCIS agents served three months and rotated all at once, except for the polygraph examiner, who was on his own schedule. The army supplied a platoon of infantrymen to serve as our security element for a one-year rotation. Linguists and analysts came over as we hired new ones and generally served a one-year tour.

My boss, Brigadier General DeFreitas, was the deputy chief of staff for intelligence of the Multi-National Force-Iraq for a one-year tour. In army jargon he was the DCSINT (pronounced "des-scent") of MNF-I. The DCSINT was also called the C-2, the chief intelligence officer for a coalition operation.

Iran had been a sensitive topic in discussions between Frank Brown and my new boss. Frank and Mark Johnson told me that DeFreitas believed the attacks on US forces by the insurgency required our attention and he didn't want the intelligence issues caused by Iran's involvement in Iraq to distract us from that primary task. Even as a newcomer to the theater, I thought the Iranians were going to have a lasting effect on our presence in Iraq, so I was surprised to hear that the senior military intelligence officer in Iraq didn't want us to focus any attention on Iran. I would soon learn how serious the general was about that.

The SCID had been instrumental in uncovering Iran's involvement in unleashing an increasing number of deadly bombs known as explosively formed penetrators against US forces in Iraq. Combat casualties in Iraq came from three main sources: direct fire such as gunfire or rocket propelled grenades, indirect fire such as mortars or rockets, and bombs such as the ones that the military labeled as improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Bombs were set up beside roads, buried under roads, and placed in parked cars, and a triggerman watching the area would detonate the bomb. Another type of bomb frequently used was the suicide bomb carried on the bomber's body, often in a vest, or in a car driven by the bomber.

In Iraq roadside bombs have caused most of the deaths in the war. Most of the roadside bombs experienced in 2003 and 2004 were IEDs made with unused ordnance such as artillery shells attached to some type of detonator and a triggering device. Because most Iraqi ammunition storage areas were not guarded after the Iraqi army abandoned them, explosives were not hard for insurgents to acquire. IEDs could be set off using a cell phone or garage door remote control. Another way to set off an IED was to run a wire from the detonator attached to the explosive to a control held by the triggerman. Either method required someone to be able to view the IED's kill zone in order to activate the bomb.

IEDs that used artillery shells or homemade explosives sent their blast in all directions. In response to IEDs, US forces began using more armored vehicles. At the time of the invasion of Iraq, most of the Humvees in Iraq were unarmored. Similarly, the State Department and the military also used unarmored SUVs that lacked protection from IEDs or gunfire.

As more armored vehicles, such as light armored vehicles (suburban utility vehicles with armor) and armored Humvees were used, US personnel were better able to survive IED attacks. In 2003 a new kind of bomb, the explosively formed penetrator, began to appear. The EFP was constructed to channel the force of the explosive through a tube that was capped by a copper plate, creating an antiarmor cannon. The explosive formed the metal plate into a molten projectile that penetrated armor and caused severe damage inside the vehicle.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE INTELLIGENCE WARSby STEVEN K. O'HERN Copyright © 2008 by Steven K. O'Hern. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Prometheus
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1591026709
• ISBN 13: 9781591026709
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 292