They were often led to a particular safe house by a suspect’s IP router address that U.S. intelligence had already obtained. Because the United States wanted to keep this ability secret, while still proving to the Syrian regime that it knew what was going on at a particular location, the operatives’ mission was to gather more tangible evidence, often by photographing safe houses, hotels, mosques, and bus stops used by foreign fighters.
These missions combined high technology with classic espionage tradecraft: cover identities and counter-surveillance practices that included ducking into public bathrooms to change disguises — including wigs — to throw off any tail. “I go in a public restroom, do a quick [disguise swap] and I come out as a seventy-year-old man because I’ve got the bald head,” said a special mission unit veteran. In theory, anyone tailing the hirsute man who entered the bathroom would ignore the bald guy coming out. Meanwhile, “you’re off and onto public transportation, going to do an operational act.”
Sometimes that act was even more dangerous than secretly photographing jihadists in public. On occasion, operatives would pick the locks of al Qaeda safe houses, filming and photographing what was inside, and presumably copying the contents of any digital devices they found. “They had guys on the ground basically breaking into the people’s apartment and getting information,” said a special ops source familiar with the missions. “If they would have been caught, they were done.”
But American commanders felt the missions were worth the risk, in large part because the United States used intelligence that JSOC obtained in Syria as leverage with President Bashar al-the Assad’s regime, presenting it to Damascus in demarches in an effort to pressure Assad to crack down on the foreign fighter networks. Sometimes this was done indirectly via Jordanian government intermediaries and at other times by the U.S. government itself, including, on at least one occasion, by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
But not wanting to reveal to the Syrians that American troops had been spying in their country, the U.S. government told Damascus that the material had been seized in raids on foreign fighter safe houses in Iraq. Disguising and altering the material to conform to that cover story represented a “delicate art,” a special mission unit veteran said. JSOC and the CIA went to great lengths to figure out whether to actually change the documents and photos, or to keep them as they were and tell the Syrians, “This was pulled off this guy’s Nokia 3200 cell phone in Baghdad — this is the guy’s name, here’s his bus ticket; he laid this all out on who was assisting him. Here’s all the evidence. Do something about it. We know they’re coming through here.” Sometimes this required technological wizardry. For instance, if the cover story for a photograph taken by an operative in Aleppo was that it was pulled off a foreign fighter’s iPhone in Baghdad, it might need to be digitized so that it looked like an iPhone photograph. The Assad regime remained completely ignorant that the intelligence being presented to them was obtained by undercover U.S. troops in Syria.