Deep State by Marc Ambinder & D. B. Grady

Author:Marc Ambinder & D. B. Grady
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

Under the large umbrella of “preparing the battlefield,” which later became “preparing the environment” (an environment being a bigger thing than a battlefield), and based on their successes elsewhere, there was reluctance in the Bush administration to de-conflict cases where the CIA and JSOC had different ideas about what they wanted to do in a country where the president had signed a finding. For example, the CIA objected to a JSOC Somalia mission at the last moment in 2003; the National Security Council sided with SOCOM. The CIA had legal authority, but SOCOM had, by presidential fiat, the lead in terms of counterterrorism. When the twain diverged in thinking, significant interagency conflicts resulted.

When it came to unleashing JSOC in countries with which the United States was not at war, the NSC was cautious. Terrorists on the target lists were fair game pretty much anywhere in the world, and the sovereignty of several countries was quietly disregarded as tiny hunter-killer teams invaded. Large-scale military involvement, however, was iffier, and although the White House had embraced the kinetic success of JSOC in Iraq, it would not endorse the same type of resource surge into places such as East Africa, to which terrorists were fleeing. This was maddening for JSOC commanders: they were “lawnmowers,” chopping the heads off of al-Qaeda. They had successfully disrupted Iranian attempts to use Hezbollah to destabilize any number of operations—and now Washington was suddenly very cautious? There was a resource crunch too. General Doug Brown of SOCOM didn’t have the resources he needed for foreign internal defense operations in Africa, “and that vacuum could be, and was, in some cases, filled by Al Qaeda,” he told a historian.7

JSOC’s role in some of the more legally marginal elements of the war on terrorism had brought unwanted attention and significant friction with the State Department. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice encouraged ambassadors in countries where JSOC operated with impunity to speak up. One was Peru, where a DEVGRU operator with red hair (his nickname was “Flamer”) got into a physical dispute with some locals. JSOC wanted the CIA to help exfiltrate him from the country. The CIA refused, and JSOC had to scramble its own assets to collect its sailor. Why was JSOC in Peru? It’s not clear. The NSC, not wanting to unleash JSOC’s capacity in areas outside the war zone and cognizant of the publicity that the units were getting, began to pull back on the reins.

The United States believes that in the summer of 2007, as many as three hundred al-Qaeda-trained fighters fled to the Horn of Africa. Though JSOC was on the ground, missions were highly restricted by an overly cautious Washington. “Flynn watched, literally, because they had these guys tracked, as hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters went to Somalia and into Yemen and elsewhere in the Horn and got better trained,” a senior military official said. It would take a new president and a new classified presidential order to unleash JSOC’s global strike capability again.

Lieutenant General

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