Free Task Force Black by Mark Urban

and harder to get out into the ‘Red Zone’ – Iraq beyond the confines of the Green Zone – as it was deemed too dangerous. In this situation the CIA was often repackaging INIS reporting and the others scraping about for any credible Iraqi who volunteered his services at a Coalition base. When the humint organisations were so reliant on walk-ins, the scope for them to get scammed or for a single individual to take money from more than one Coalition agency increased considerably. Inevitably, valuable tips were not passed from one organisation to another and there was always the possibility, as the SAS would later discover, that one humint operation would accidentally target the assets of another.
    The US troops had managed to develop a basic ground-level sense of life in many neighbourhoods, but then in February and March 2004 this was abruptly lost. The first major troop rotation of the occupation (American units mostly served on operations for one year) was under way. Some of the departing commanders painted a rosy picture of improving security, and it was true that violence had gone down since those shocking weeks of Ramadan in November 2003. February, with ‘only’ twenty US soldiers killed, was a relatively good month. But what little optimism this crude indicator might have produced was soon dispelled. The insurgency was mutating, taking on a more Islamic flavour, but penetration of the Islamic groups was essentially non-existent. As the veterans went home there was a poor handover to many of the incoming units, leaving them struggling to build a street-level picture.
    Faced with this jumble of acronyms, dysfunction, and bureaucratic bloody-mindedness, Major-General McChrystal, a man who lived by the mantra ‘you need to build a network to defeat one’, decided to create his own. Vital months had been lost while the Pentagon leadership was in denial about the insurgency. By early 2004, it was mutating and McChrystal was one of the few who both understood this and the need to get on top of it. He shut down the special ops facility at Baghdad airport, Camp Nama, establishing a new base at Balad, to the north. Balad was a sprawling air base in which Saddam invested hundreds of millions of dollars, building concrete aircraft shelters and other infrastructure. It became a key logistic and air hub for the US forces. There, McChrystal created a state-of-the-art Joint Operations Centre, where JSOC’s war in Iraq would be run day to day by the commander of Delta Force. It was up and running by July 2004. Teams from each of the different intelligence agencies were established at Balad. Once he had started to milk them for information, McChrystal put it all into a JSOC intranet similar to the one he’d created in Afghanistan. It would allow those at the cutting edge of the US counterterrorism effort to share information worldwide. In order to bypass protocol-obsessed embassies or jealous CIA station chiefs in neighbouring countries, McChrystal also established a network of liaison offices run by his own people across the Middle East.
    McChrystal’s counterterrorist Rome could not be built in a day. It would take much of 2004 to take shape. Many questions were unclear from the outset, not least whether Britain’s Task Force Black could be full partners in this secret network. Until they were resolved, the UK element had to carry on in ‘a semi-detached way’, according to one SAS officer. They could not prosecute the ‘full JSOC target set’, he adds, but were restricted more to ‘arresting old men, the FREs’. Another British officer, a senior figure who served in Baghdad, describes the Former Regime Elements as ‘the pissed-off bourgeoisie – they’d lost their meal ticket’. Iraq being Iraq, their anger took violent form. Some – in MI6 in particular – tried to portray the arrest of old Ba’athists as a vital mission that fitted with their attempts to put out feelers to the nationalist insurgency, and a