Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steven K. O’Hern (Overland Park, KS) was director of the Strategic Counterintelligence Directorate of the Multi-National Force in Baghdad, Iraq, from April to September 2005. He is also a retired air force colonel, who served as a special investigations and counterintelligence officer and commanded units of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations at bases in Minnesota, Georgia, Oklahoma, and South Korea. Currently, he is vice president for Group Legal of Swiss Re, the world’s largest reinsurer.

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THE INTELLIGENCE WARS

LESSONS FROM BAGHDADBy STEVEN K. O'HERN

Prometheus Books

Copyright © 2008 Steven K. O'Hern
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59102-670-9

Contents

Author's Note......................................................9Foreword Bart Bechtel.............................................13Chapter 1. Getting Acquainted......................................17Chapter 2. A Long War..............................................33Chapter 3. Fourth-Generation Warfare...............................53Chapter 4. Iran's Shadow Falls over Iraq...........................81Chapter 5. HUMINT Sources..........................................117Chapter 6. More HUMINT.............................................163Chapter 7. Stovepipes..............................................207Chapter 8. War among the Intelligence Officers.....................229Chapter 9. The Next War............................................257Index..............................................................279

Chapter One

The war in Iraq has lasted much longer than we were promised. The number of men and women killed and wounded has been high. The war has left its mark on the more than half a million men and women in the US military who served in Iraq, many for multiple tours. Civilians numbering in the hundreds of thousands went to Iraq to drive trucks, provide security, and handle myriad other jobs.

Despite the impact of the war on those who have been to Iraq, back in the United States most people are not personally affected. Only a fraction of our population serves in the military, and most Americans don't have friends or neighbors who have gone to Iraq.

Despite their lack of personal involvement, most Americans have opinions about the war. Regardless of their support for or against the decisions to go to war and to continue an American presence in Iraq, most people are mystified about why the war has lasted so long. The United States Army and Marine Corps captured Baghdad in a matter of weeks. But a few months later resistance to US forces began to build.

By 2004 it was clear that an insurgency against the coalition forces was growing. The opposition to the coalition was a collection of disparate groups that were not centrally controlled. Despite that lack of organization, the insurgents were fighting the same army and Marine Corps that had tossed Saddam Hussein's regime out of power-and they were fighting our army and Marine Corps to a standstill.

The insurgency is the reason the war has lasted so long. The "shock and awe" war became a fourth-generation war. The United States military was not built to fight an insurgency, but has adopted new techniques and relearned forgotten lessons from past wars. The intelligence system that supports our military, however, has not adapted.

I served in Iraq for six months during 2005 as the leader of an intelligence unit that hunted for insurgents. I was on the staff of the military's senior intelligence officer in Iraq. I worked with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the National Security Agency (NSA). From those experiences, I took many lessons. The chief lesson is that our military's intelligence system does not work well for fighting an insurgency.

Knowing that the world's finest military is not well served by its intelligence apparatus when it fights an insurgency scares me. I am troubled because the "long war" against terrorists, especially Islamic terrorists, that President George W. Bush and others have predicted is likely to be a series of wars similar to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Horn of Africa, the Philippines, and Indonesia all have large populations of poor Muslims who are displeased with their governments. We will see more insurgencies.

My lessons about our intelligence system began when I was assigned to be the director of the Strategic Counterintelligence Directorate (SCID) of the Multi-National Force-Iraq (the name of the military force operating in Iraq, abbreviated as MNF-I). The SCID has members from the army, navy, and air force, plus civilian contractors provided by the Defense Department's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA).

Counterintelligence is the part of intelligence work that defeats an adversary's attempt to collect intelligence about our plans and capabilities. In the most glamorous sense, counterintelligence means catching spies. But it can also mean something as mundane as investigating people who work with classified information to make sure they do not present a security risk. Because of its source networks that helped identify insurgents, the SCID's work focused on identifying and fighting insurgents instead of other counterintelligence duties.

The work of intelligence can be divided into broad categories based on how intelligence is gathered. Signals intelligence (SIGINT) concerns collecting, decoding, and translating information gleaned from eavesdropping on conversations or messages (telephones, radio transmissions, etc.). Another broad category is the intelligence gathered from satellites or reconnaissance aircraft, which is broadly labeled imagery intelligence (IMINT). Another "-int" is HUMINT, or human intelligence. This is the work described in spy novels as fraught with danger and beautiful women. In real life, human intelligence is more often the work of identifying and recruiting someone else to acquire information.

In Iraq the SCID had four counterintelligence teams, each with counterintelligence agents from the army, navy and air force. There were two teams in the Green Zone, the Blue Team and the Black Team. A third team was in the city of Irbil, in Kurdish territory in northern Iraq, and the fourth team was in Iraq's second largest city, Basra, in southern Iraq. All of the teams had army military intelligence personnel, Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) special agents, and Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) special agents. Each team worked with a squad of Texas National Guardsmen who served as the security element for the SCID.

The SCID was a human intelligence operation. Intelligence from imagery and intercepted communications added to our picture, but our main method of collecting information was from Iraqis who we recruited and trained. Of course, we were not alone in relying on HUMINT. Several units in the army, Marine Corps, and air force conducted human source operations that focused on areas near their bases or areas of operations in order to better protect US bases or operations. This intelligence collection was one aspect of "force protection" work that consumed large numbers of people in Iraq.

With the capture of Baghdad, the Iraq War entered a new phase, one that wasn't recognized at first. In order to reduce the frequency and severity of attacks on US forces and the process of rebuilding the Iraqi government, the thousands of troops searching for insurgents had to be told where to look. Identifying the people who carried out attacks, built bombs, and provided logistical support to the insurgency may have been the most difficult task in protecting US forces. The insurgents lived and worked among neighborhoods of apparently peaceful Iraqis. Satellites, reconnaissance aircraft, and the interception of radio and cell phone signals were useful, but alone these methods of collecting information could not defeat the insurgency. Sunni insurgents who were loosely linked in shifting and hard-to-identify networks were carrying out attacks against coalition forces daily. Fighting them was...