The secret team that killed bin Laden

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http://ca.news.yahoo.com/the-secret-team-that-killed-bin-laden.html

The secret team that killed bin Laden

By Marc Ambinder - National Journal | Yahoo! Canada News – Mon, 2 May, 2011 1:50

PM EDT

..From Ghazi Air Base in Pakistan, the modified MH-60 helicopters made their way

to the garrison suburb of Abbottabad, about 30 miles from the center of

Islamabad. Aboard were Navy SEALs, flown across the border from Afghanistan,

along with tactical signals, intelligence collectors, and navigators using

highly classified hyperspectral imagers.

After bursts of fire over 40 minutes, 22 people were killed or captured. One of

the dead was Osama bin Laden, done in by a double tap -- boom, boom -- to the

left side of his face. His body was aboard the choppers that made the trip back.

One had experienced mechanical failure and was destroyed by U.S. forces,

military and White House officials tell National Journal.

Were it not for this high-value target, it might have been a routine mission for

the specially trained and highly mythologized SEAL Team Six, officially called

the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, but known even to the locals at

their home base Dam Neck in Virginia as just DevGru.

This HVT was special, and the raids required practice, so they replicated the

one-acre compound at Camp Alpha, a segregated section of Bagram Air Base. Trial

runs were held in early April.

DevGru belongs to the Joint Special Operations Command, an extraordinary and

unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions

units. They report to the president and operate worldwide based on the legal (or

extra-legal) premises of classified presidential directives. Though the general

public knows about the special SEALs and their brothers in Delta Force, most

JSOC missions never leak. We only hear about JSOC when something goes bad (a

British aid worker is accidentally killed) or when something really big happens

(a merchant marine captain is rescued at sea), and even then, the military

remains especially sensitive about their existence. Several dozen JSOC

operatives have died in Pakistan over the past several years. Their names are

released by the Defense Department in the usual manner, but with a cover story

-- generally, they were killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan.

That's the code.

How did the helicopters elude the Pakistani air defense network? Did they spoof

transponder codes? Were they painted and tricked out with Pakistan Air Force

equipment? If so -- and we may never know -- two other JSOC units, the Technical

Application Programs Office and the Aviation Technology Evaluation Group, were

responsible. These truly are the silent squirrels -- never getting public credit

and not caring one whit. Since 9/11, the JSOC units and their task forces have

become the U.S. government's most effective and lethal weapon against terrorists

and their networks, drawing plenty of unwanted, and occasionally unflattering,

attention to themselves in the process.

JSOC costs the country more than $1 billion annually. The command has its

critics, but it has escaped significant congressional scrutiny and has operated

largely with impunity since 9/11. Some of its interrogators and operators were

involved in torture and rendition, and the line between its

intelligence-gathering activities and the CIA's has been blurred.

But Sunday's operation provides strong evidence that the CIA and JSOC work well

together. Sometimes intelligence needs to be developed rapidly, to get inside

the enemy's operational loop. And sometimes it needs to be cultivated, grown as

if it were delicate bacteria in a petri dish.

In an interview at CIA headquarters two weeks ago, a senior intelligence

official said the two proud groups of American secret warriors had been

" deconflicted and basically integrated " -- finally -- 10 years after 9/11.

Indeed, according to accounts given to journalists by five senior administration

officials Sunday night, the CIA gathered the intelligence that led to bin

Laden's location. A memo from CIA Director Leon Panetta sent Sunday night

provides some hints of how the information was collected and analyzed. In it, he

thanked the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence

Agency for their help. NSA figured out, somehow, that there was no telephone or

Internet service in the compound. How it did this without Pakistan's knowledge

is a secret. The NGIA makes the military's maps but also develops their pattern

recognition software -- no doubt used to help establish, by February of this

year, that the CIA could say with " high probability " that bin Laden and his

family were living there.

Recently, JSOC built a new Targeting and Analysis Center in Rosslyn, Va. Where

the NationalCounterterrorism Center tends to focus on threats to the homeland,

TAAC, whose existence was first disclosed by the Associated Press, focuses

outward, on active " kinetic " -- or lethal -- counterterrorism-missions abroad.

Its creation surprised the NCTC's director, Leiter, who was suspicious

about its intent until he visited.

That the center could be stood up under the nose of some of the nation's most

senior intelligence officials without their full knowledge testifies to the

power and reach of JSOC, whose size has tripled since 9/11. The command now

includes more than 4,000 soldiers and civilians. It has its own intelligence

division, which may or may not have been involved in last night's effort, and

has gobbled up a number of free-floating Defense Department entities that

allowed it to rapidly acquire, test, and field new technologies.

Under a variety of standing orders, JSOC is involved in more than 50 current

operations spanning a dozen countries, and its units, supported by so-called

" white, " or acknowledged, special operations entities like Rangers, Special

Forces battalions, SEAL teams, and Air Force special ops units from the larger

Special Operations Command, are responsible for most of the " kinetic " action in

Afghanistan.

Pentagon officials are conscious of the enormous stress that 10 years of war

have placed on the command. JSOC resources are heavily taxed by the operational

tempo in Afghanistan and Pakistan, officials have said. The current commander,

Vice Adm. McRaven, and Maj. Gen. ph Votel, McRaven's nominated

replacement, have been pushing to add people and intelligence, surveillance, and

reconnaissance technology to areas outside the war theater where al-Qaida and

its affiliates continue to thrive.

Earlier this year, it seemed that the elite units would face the same budget

pressures that the entire military was experiencing. Not anymore. The military

found a way, largely by reducing contracting staff and borrowing others from the

Special Operations Command, to add 50 positions to JSOC. And Votel wants to add

several squadrons to the " Tier One " units -- Delta and the SEALs.

When Gen. Stanley McChrystal became JSOC's commanding general in 2004, he and

his intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Flynn, set about transforming the way

the subordinate units analyze and act on intelligence. Insurgents in Iraq were

exploiting the slow decision loop that coalition commanders used, and enhanced

interrogation techniques were frowned upon after the Abu Ghraib scandal. But the

hunger for actionable tactical intelligence on insurgents was palpable.

The way JSOC solved this problem remains a carefully guarded secret, but people

familiar with the unit suggest that McChrystal and Flynn introduced hardened

commandos to basic criminal forensic techniques and then used highly advanced

and still-classified technology to transform bits of information into actionable

intelligence. One way they did this was to create forward-deployed fusion cells,

where JSOC units were paired with intelligence analysts from the NSA and the

NGA. Such analysis helped the CIA to establish, with a high degree of

probability, that Osama bin Laden and his family were hiding in that particular

compound.

These technicians could " exploit and analyze " data obtained from the battlefield

instantly, using their access to the government's various biometric,

facial-recognition, and voice-print databases. These cells also used highly

advanced surveillance technology and computer-based pattern analysis to layer

predictive models of insurgent behavior onto real-time observations.

The military has begun to incorporate these techniques across the services. And

Flynn will soon be promoted to a job within the Office of the Director of

National Intelligence, where he'll be tasked with transforming the way

intelligence is gathered, analyzed, and utilized.

[Guest guest]

I've known about SEAL Team 6 for a long time, along with Delta Force and the others like the intelligence groups that work with them.

Its all pretty interesting stuff though I worry because a lot of the intelligence methods are being moved from the hands of military elite to domestic federal and even state and local agencies and it is aimed inward at Americans rather than at external enemies.

In a message dated 5/3/2011 12:28:36 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, no_reply writes:

The secret team that killed bin Laden

[Guest guest]

I've known about SEAL Team 6 for a long time, along with Delta Force and the others like the intelligence groups that work with them.

Its all pretty interesting stuff though I worry because a lot of the intelligence methods are being moved from the hands of military elite to domestic federal and even state and local agencies and it is aimed inward at Americans rather than at external enemies.

In a message dated 5/3/2011 12:28:36 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, no_reply writes:

The secret team that killed bin Laden