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Inside U.S. Commandos’ Shadow War Against Iran
The U.S. military’s cadre of elite special operations forces has spent the last 14 years taking on terrorists—and finding Iran’s hand pulling the jihadi strings.
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It was July 25, 2004. Violence was escalating in Iraq, the Taliban were reasserting themselves in Afghanistan, and Joint Special Operations Command—the U.S. military’s cadre of elite special operations forces—was already deploying operators to the Horn of Africa and Yemen. But for the first day of the three-day JSOC commanders’ conference at Fort Bragg, the country under discussion was Iran.
In the days after September 11, JSOC was running at least two undercover agents into Iran. But the command wanted to know more—much more—about the would-be regional superpower it seemed to confront at every turn.
Today, the U.S. and Iranian governments are in a period of political détente, with the nuclear deal signed in Vienna. Tehran and Washington’s militaries are even cooperating—if at arm’s length—in the fight against ISIS.
But this is hardly a friendship, especially not with Iran’s long, long history of supporting terror—and JSOC’s history of trying to kill those Iranian-backed terrorists.
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After 9/11, about 10 leading al Qaeda figures, including bin Laden’s son Saad, had fled Afghanistan for Iran. The Pentagon tasked JSOC to plan a mission to seize the al Qaeda personnel. Planners considered infiltrating SEAL Team 6 operators via submersible or helicopter. “The SEALs really definitely wanted to do it ... because it would have proven a few of their new technologies,” said a Joint Staff source. But attempts to plan a raid foundered on a lack of intelligence. JSOC simply did not know the al Qaeda personnel’s exact locations. The command conducted several rehearsals in Texas before Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Richard Myers canceled the mission on the grounds that the risks—both tactical and political-military—exceeded the potential gains.
The U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq gave JSOC more opportunities to penetrate Iran. After the invasion, the U.S. Army’s Delta Force and a secret human and signals intelligence unit nicknamed Task Force Orange did quiet work along the Iranian border, particularly in Kurdistan, where Delta quickly made connections with the Asayish—the Kurdish intelligence organization that had one or more spies reporting on the Iranian nuclear program. Delta enlisted the help of other Iraqis as well in its twin campaigns against al Qaeda in Iraq and Iran’s covert operatives, but “the guys with the greatest access and placement were the Kurds,” said a task force officer. “They delivered some bleep huge targets to us.” Delta wasn’t the only unit working with the Asayish. “There’s a long history between Orange and the Kurds going back to at least the early 1990s,” said a special mission unit officer.
JSOC personnel also worked with the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), a militant Iranian exile group that had based itself in Iraq after falling afoul of the ayatollahs’ regime in Tehran. The State Department had placed the MEK on its list of designated terrorist organizations, but that didn’t stop JSOC from taking an attitude of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” toward the group. “They were a group of folks that could transit the border, and they were willing to help us out on what we wanted to do with Iran,” said a special operations officer.
But JSOC was keen to get more of its own people into Iran.
In 2003, tantalizing information reached the command that caused JSOC chief Maj. Gen. Stan McChrystal to direct the advance force operations cell to examine ways to infiltrate Iran. JSOC heard that Iran had moved Saad bin Laden and the other al Qaeda exiles from Afghanistan to a comfortable “country club”-like facility in downtown Tehran, according to a JSOC staff officer. The JSOC commander wanted the AFO cell to determine the feasibility of entering Iran, going to the prison in Tehran, and confirming that Saad was being held there. Inside JSOC, it was considered a very high-risk mission. But the AFO personnel were surprised to discover that someone could drive to the Iranian border, show an American passport, get a ten-day tourist visa, and enter the country immediately, whereas if the same person applied for a visa through an Iranian embassy or consulate, “then they’re going to pull your Social Security number, then they’re going to do the background diligence on you,” said a source familiar with the operation. Nonetheless, the AFO cell’s assessment was that it would take at least a year to be able to work up a “legend” (a spy’s claimed biography—his cover story) and a cover that would allow a special mission unit operator to enter Iran, get to the prison, gather information, and then leave without attracting suspicion.
McChrystal wasn’t happy. “I need it sooner than that,” he said that fall. When the AFO cell came back to him a month later with the same assessment, this time backed up by the new Orange commander, Colonel Konrad “KT” Trautman, McChrystal told Trautman he wanted Orange to take a closer look at how the mission might be conducted sooner.
The Defense Department considered the program so hush-hush that the officer recalled being ushered into ‘the room within the room within the room’ in the Pentagon to receive a briefing on the topic.
But while Orange planned, the growing concern over Iran’s suspected nuclear program changed the mission from reconnoitering the prison to determining whether fissile material was being produced at certain sites. By spring 2004, Orange had selected a two-person male-female team for a proof-of-concept mission and figured out an effective cover for them. McChrystal approved the plan and sent it up the chain of command. But because it involved undercover operatives on a clandestine mission into a country with which the United States was not at war, Orange also needed the CIA’s approval, which proved harder to obtain. “We had a really difficult time getting it approved by the Agency,” said an officer. “They had their own equities to protect.” After the CIA agreed, President Bush gave his okay. The mission finally launched in fall 2004, a delay that appeared to prove the AFO cell correct in its assessment of how long it would take to prepare for such an operation. The operatives’ cover was strong enough to get visas through an Iranian consulate, so they dispensed with the idea of driving up to the border and instead flew commercial into a major Iranian city and checked into a hotel. They spent several days taking taxis around and outside the city, and determined that it would not be difficult to get close enough to the suspected nuclear sites to take a soil sample. But on this occasion, they chose not to. “That wasn’t the mission,” said the source familiar with the operation. “[The mission] at the time was just to get in and get out.”
That kind of caution was typical. The United States’ post-9/11 occupation of Afghanistan gave U.S. forces access to that country’s border with Iran. But for several years, risk aversion restricted almost any effort to take advantage of that for human intelligence purposes. It wasn’t until 2007 that JSOC started a program to penetrate Iran using trained Afghan surrogates. “It was kind of one of those things . . . that the rest of the world assumes that we’re [already] doing,” said a special operations officer. Nonetheless, the Defense Department considered the program so hush-hush that the officer recalled being ushered into “the room within the room within the room” in the Pentagon to receive a briefing on the topic. The officer’s reaction to the briefing was, “You mean we’re not doing this already?”
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