Isegoria

Nada Bakos explains (in The Targeter) how the CIA and SOF followed different paradigms:

Or, by simple process of elimination, would going after a certain target automatically finger the source on the ground who’d provided us the information, thereby blowing an Agency asset? Sometimes days of work to identify a target led to the decision to do nothing at all.

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Couriers don’t have the same ability to hide as their elusive superiors do. Those middlemen made easier targets for the less experienced staffers to identify.

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We had been watching him for months and had decided that he was more useful outside of our custody because of the intelligence we were collecting. He had a few dating profiles in the various countries in which he was working.

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Just as the CIA — the most hallowed intelligence agency in the world — responded to the attacks by stepping outside its established comfort zone and growing its paramilitary capabilities, McChrystal wanted SOF to expand its intelligence capabilities.

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Actionable, life-threatening intelligence collected by the CIA can be immediately shared with the military. But in order for the Agency to share strategic intelligence derived from human assets, CIA protocol dictates that the information has to be scrubbed clean of any detectable clues that might give away the source’s identity. Adhering to that standard is something the Agency takes very seriously — and unlike, say, supplementing official cables with a little back-channel communication to a teammate in the field, jeopardizing an asset’s safety is a line you simply don’t cross.

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The military doesn’t recruit and train its intelligence personnel the same way the CIA does.

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They had terrific soldiers, and we were eager to use whatever information they could gather by kicking down doors, but they simply weren’t seeing the same information we were.

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I wanted to disrupt and degrade Zarqawi’s group systematically in as few steps as possible. In most cases, I led my team to find shura council members, operations leaders, access players — bomb builders, mission planners, regional leaders, couriers, and perhaps some of Al Qaida in Iraq’s recruiters. In 2003 we had already developed a good idea of who those people were using multiple sources, and it was only a matter of time before we pinpointed where they were as well.

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SOF was taking a more horizontal approach, looking for insertion points where they could find them. Boom-boom-boom: they were daisy-chaining, grabbing a player and then going after the next viable target that guy knew.

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Burrowing through to an inner circle like Zarqawi’s, I believed, required the insight that Agency teams achieve only after years of analysis, human intelligence gathering, technical collection, and assistance from foreign partners.

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We saw very quickly that the SOF military-style vision led to their misunderstanding individuals’ roles within Zarqawi’s network — if those individuals were part of the network at all. SOF commanders later told reporters that they were hitting the right individuals and raiding the right homes only around 50 percent of the time — and that they were satisfied with that.

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By late 2004, we could see SOF approaches in Iraq becoming a quintessential example of how a tactical military operation can directly oppose a larger counterterrorism strategy. By necessity we had to allow some bad guys to continue to operate, because a slash-and-burn approach does not make trust and intelligence sharing possible. This meant keeping bad actors in place for the time being so they could inadvertently continue providing the CIA with valuable intelligence.

I understand that highly trained operators find that approach disagreeable. But my team got equally tired of SOF complaining, “Why don’t you have any new information for us?” and having to respond, “Well, the other day you killed the guy we were getting the information from.”

The American Army had been ineffective at Koje-do, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), and the reasons lay in the background of the POW question:

The United States had never faced handling massed POW’s since the War Between the States, and both sides had botched it then; in World War I the Allies shouldered the burden; and in the last war it was not until 1943 Americans had any prisoners, and these were from a foe of the same basic culture, who sensed they were already beaten.

There had never been enough Japanese POWs to matter.

But in Korea the United States not only had taken thousands of POW’s of alien culture; it faced an alien psychology also. The “specially trained” guard units sent out from the States understood neither Orientals nor Communists.

In Iraq, as Nada Bakos explains in The Targeter, she drove a Toyota pickup:

The pickup was one of a dozen or so the Agency had flown in for use by CIA personnel. Unlike the Pentagon, whose employees went around in armored carriers, and the State Department and USAID, whose diplomats were transported in caravans of fortified Chevy Suburbans, the CIA wanted its employees to operate anonymously. To blend in. So we drove this fleet of well-used trucks.

The Toyota Hilux — known to Americans as the Tacoma — is arguably the AK-47 of trucks.

When Boatner came in to replace Colson at Koje-do, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), he noticed that everyone there was wearing different uniforms:

“Fitzgeral, speaking of uniforms, why are there so many different kinds around?”

“General, you wouldn’t want your own headquarters wearing the same uniform as the troops!”

Boatner, who had been on Heartbreak Ridge, was speechless. But only for a moment. “Dammit, that’s exactly what I want! Furthermore, some of the troops are wearing side arms, some aren’t. Put everybody under arms.”

“Oh, please, General, don’t do that. You’ll be sorry.”

“Why?”

“There’ll be so many accidental discharges around here, somebody’s going to get hurt.”

“Goddamit!” the Bull roared. “Goddamit, if a soldier can’t handle his weapons, what the hell kind of outfit have we got? Put ‘em under arms!”

“General, I wish you’d reconsider —”

The summation of Boatner’s further remarks was No.

Nada Bakos noticed there were differences between the army special operators and the navy special operators working with the CIA in Iraq, as she explains in The Targeter:

The army guys had a steely focus about them, emphasizing thorough plans and clear processes for their missions. They were almost aloof at times, and I came to appreciate their quiet professionalism. Talking to navy special operators, on the other hand, tended to feel like being back at a college fraternity party. They were the ones who tended to boast or get in your face. Though as members of perhaps the world’s most iconic special operations unit, who’d then been handpicked to join an even more elite combined task force, they had reason to be boastful. And the creative flexibility they demonstrated on the fly was at times remarkable.

In The Targeter, Nada Bakos explains that a book she threw in her bag before leaving Washington — Buddhism without Beliefs, by Stephen Batchelor — was surprisingly helpful as she began to interview detainees in Iraq:

“A compassionate heart still feels anger, greed, jealousy, and other such emotions. But it accepts them for what they are with equanimity, and cultivates the strength of mind to let them arise and pass without identifying with or acting upon them.”

That seemed like a valuable ethos for an interviewer. Little did I know how many times I would need to repeat this to myself in the coming weeks.

To expect an Asian nation accustomed to famine to feed its prisoners of war better than it own half-starved peasantry, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), was — and remains — wishful thinking:

The evidence does not suggest that the Chinese deliberately tried to starve the POW’s with the end of extermination in mind, in the footsteps of the Nazis. When in late winter the death rate climbed alarmingly, to twenty-eight men each day, the Chinese commandant of Camp 5 showed signs of concern; he ordered the American doctors in the camp to stop the deaths, at once. More medicines were made available — but the commandant angrily resisted the Americans’ demands for more food.

He admitted the POW’s were fed worse than the guards — but they were receiving the same diet that class enemies of the Chinese state received, who not only had to undergo two or more years of reorientation on such ration, but hard labor, too.

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And one fact that stands out starkly among the pieces of evidence is that while 50 percent of the American POW’s died, and a percentage of British that caused grave concern later to her Majesty’s Government, few South Koreans experienced much difficulty, and not one Turkish prisoner of war died.

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The Turks were a completely homogeneous group, with common background and common culture, and with a chain of command that was never broken.

They remained united against the enemy, and they survived.

The Turks did not come from an admirable society. Only a few decades back in time, Turks were slaving in Egypt, and conducting vast pograms in Armenia. In the last century Turks still blew living men from the mouths of cannon for minor crimes and punished more serious ones by impalement — a peculiarly horrible form of execution, in which a man was seated on a sharpened tapered stake, toes off the ground, and his body weight, and movements, slowly drove him downward.

There had never been anything approaching freedom, or democracy, in Turkey. Election have been held, but the loser normally wind up in jail.

Turkey had journeyed partway into the twentieth century only under the iron fist of Kemal Atatürk and his successors, who were just as determine as the Chinese Communists to destroy an ancient, backward, Oriental way of life.

Atatürk was determined to Westernize his people by force. He broke the power of the Moslem clergy, revised education, changed the traditional head-gear and alphabet.

But in the middle of the century the Turkish soldier who served his country’s colors was still a fanatically devout custom-ridden peasant, close to the soil and survival, accustomed to the fiercest discipline of all his life, from father, state, and army — but with a barbarian’s pride in himself and his people.

He would take baths only with his clothes on in the prison camps, or allow a nonbeliever friend such as Schlichter to view his Koran only through the seven veils, and he went white with outrage if venereal disease were even discussed. But he was completely aware of what he was — he was a Turk, and a Turk was unquestionably the finest of all possible things to be, even as there was no God but Allah. These matters he felt no need to prove or argue; he had imbibed them with his mother’s milk, and his mind had not been cluttered with other notions since.

He knew Russians were Communists, and he knew Russians were enemies, always had been, always would be. He hated Russians; he hated Communists. The matter was not arguable.

He was close to the soil, and knew hardship; he ate what Allah or the dogs of Communist Chinese provided, without complaint. He also knew enough to eat any scrap of greenery he could place his hands on, and in the camps many better-educated Americans watched him eat weeds in amazement. Later, many of them followed suit.

He was barbarian-proud of his manhood and his fighting ability. He knew, dimly, that his ancestors had been the backbone of Near Eastern armies since the Empire of Rome and that their courage with cold steel had rarely been equaled. He knew, dimly, that firepower had vanquished his vaunted empire and that economically he was backward, but this had not lessened his faith in Turks or Turkdom. What schools he had attended used no economic argument in teaching the greatness of Turks.

Even after thirty years of state anticlericalism, his faith in his God was childlike, ignorant, and complete.

He had enlisted for a minimum of six years, and he could not hope to become a sergeant until after that first six year. He had served long with the men about him in these camps, and he expected to serve beside these same men again, if Allah willed him to survive. He could not understand these Americans who often acted like strangers to one another, and as if they would never see on another again.

His senior enlisted man took command in the prison camp, because he was senior. Neither he nor the British N.C.O.’s held an election, as did the Americans — who elected in Camp Five a corporal masquerading as a sergeant who was popular with the Chinese guards.

His senior enlisted man ran a detail roster daily. There was never any question of who would chop the wood, haul the water, or care for the sick — while American N.C.O.’s and doctors and chaplains often begged men to feed the sick, wash the unconscious, or go outside for firewood — and were told, “Go to hell, you’re no better than I am!”

When his senior enlisted man was threatened by the guards for defiance, it did them no good to remove him. The second, the third, even the hundredth senior man took over, and nothing changed.

When on Turk was too friendly with the Chinese, court was hel, and Sergeant Schlichter was invited to observe. The senior N.C.O. sat as judge, and trial was held, with argument and testimony. When one Turk was found guilty of amiability toward the enemy, he was severely beaten. His defense counsel was beaten, too, for daring to extol such a traitor.

When Schlichter asked, “What happens if he does this again?” he was told,

“Then we shall kill him.”

It was a rigid society, far from admirable by Western standards. Disturbingly, it had the best record of any group in Communist captivity.

Americans should remember that while barbarian may be ignorant they are not always stupid.