Free Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill Page B

about what he does on one condition: we do it in person.
    I decided to call him “Hunter” because when I finally met him, it was at a dingy motel a stone’s throw from Fort Belvoir in Virginia, the home of JSOC’s intelligence wing . The motel was called “The Hunter.” It turned out to be an appropriate venue for the first of what would be many meetingsover the years. Hunter had served under General McChrystal, Admiral McRaven and various Special Ops task force commanders, and he had a front-row seat for the secretive organization’s operations at the most transformative moment in its history.
    There is not much I can publicly reveal about what Hunter did or does because of the tight-knit nature of the Special Ops community and because I gave him my word that I would never compromise his identity. The members of that community almost never speak to reporters, and certainly not about some of the most sensitive operations they have conducted. What I can say is that after I began meeting with Hunter, I eventually pressed him to give me evidence that he was who he said he was and had participated in or witnessed the events he gave me information about. Over the years, he would show me his various DoD badges and evidence of his clearances, as well as photos of himself in countries around the world. I vetted his documents with knowledgeable sources, while concealing his identity, and verified that he was the real deal. Beyond saying that he worked with JSOC and on several classified task forces involving operations on acknowledged and unacknowledged battlefields, there is little more that I can, in good faith, share about him.
    Over the course of several years and scores of meetings and conversations, Hunter shared with me his analysis of JSOC’s rise. He was clear that he would not divulge classified information to me and would not compromise the integrity of any operations. He told me he has great reverence for General McChrystal and Admiral McRaven and described the people who make up JSOC as the best warriors available to the United States, calling them “people that have a true belief in the nation and our ideals.” He described the training required to produce SEALs, Delta Force and other operators as the most rigorous on the planet. These Special Mission Units “are given a large degree of autonomy to execute direct action, special reconnaissance counterterrorism missions on behalf of the United States Government, almost exclusively in secrecy.” Because of the nature of their work and the secrecy surrounding it, he said, “there is a potential for abuse there.”
    Hunter attributed JSOC’s rise to prominence as the lead antiterrorism force after 9/11 to a belief within the Bush administration and the Special Ops community that the CIA was not up to the task of waging a global war. “There was a deep dissatisfaction with the level of human intelligence, and paramilitary operations that were being conducted on behalf of the Agency, and over time the Joint Special Operations Command, in effect, became a paramilitary arm of the administration, in that it would do the bidding of top policy makers in pursuit of political goals,” he told me in one of our early meetings. After 9/11, JSOC’s “mandate was expanded, significantly,and the funnel, if you will, was turned on. And there was billions upon billions of dollars poured into the Special Operations Command, which was then, in turn, directed to JSOC. And that coincided with a much greater latitude and freedom of movement—autonomy.”
    Hunter pointed to Cheney, in particular, as the administration figure most obsessed with transforming JSOC’s role. “I was always under that impression that [Cheney] understood the ins and outs of the Department of Defense and all of its various components and agencies,” Hunter recalled. Cheney “understood that in order to radically reshape the