The most fundamental increase was in Joint Special Ops Command, or J-SOC. This body had existed for years before 9/11, but as a low-profile and principally defensive structure. Two men would convert it into the largest, most aggressive and most lethal private army in the world.
The word “private” is justified because it is the personal instrument of the President and of no other. It can conduct covert war without seeking any sanction from Congress; its multibillion-dollar budget is acquired without ever disturbing the Appropriations Committee, and it can kill you without ruffling the even tenor of the Attorney General’s office. It is all top secret.
The first transformer of J-SOC was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. This ruthless Washington insider was resentful of the power and privileges of the CIA. Under its charter, the Agency needed to be answerable only to the President, not Congress. With its SAD units, it could conduct covert and lethal operations abroad on the Director’s say-so. That was power, real power, and Secretary Rumsfeld was determined to have it. But the Pentagon is very much subject to Congress and its limitless capacity for interference.
Rumsfeld needed a weapon outside congressional oversight if he was ever to rival George Tenet, Director of the CIA. A completely transformed J-SOC became that weapon.
With the agreement of President George W. Bush, J-SOC expanded and expanded, in size, budget and powers. It absorbed all the Special Forces of the state. They included Team 6 of the SEALs (who would later kill Osama bin Laden); the Delta Force, or D boys, drawn from the Green Berets; the 75th Ranger Regiment; the Air Force’s Special Ops Aviation Regiment (the Night Stalkers’ long-range helicopters) and others. It also gobbled up TOSA.
In the summer of 2003, while Iraq was still blazing from end to end and few were looking elsewhere, two things happened that completed the reinvention of J-SOC. A new commander was appointed, in the person of General Stanley McChrystal. If anyone thought J-SOC would continue to play a largely domestic Homeland role, that was the end of that. And in September 2003, Secretary Rumsfeld secured the President’s agreement and signed the EXORD.
The Executive Order was an eighty-page document, and within its pages, buried deep, was something like a huge Presidential Finding, the highest decree in America, but without specific terms. The EXORD virtually said do what you want.
About that time, a limping Ranger colonel named Dale Curtis was finishing his one-year, post-injury paid sabbatical and convalescence. He had mastered the prosthetic on his left stump with such skill that the limp was virtually undetectable. But the 75th Ranger Regiment was not for men on prosthetics. His career appeared over.
But like the SEALs, a Ranger does not leave another Ranger in the lurch. Gen. McChrystal was also a Ranger, from the 75th, and he heard of Col. Curtis. He had just taken command of the entire J-SOC and that included TOSA, whose commander was retiring. The post of commanding officer did not have a field-action posting. It could be a desk job. It was a very short meeting, and Col. Curtis jumped at the chance.
There is an old saying in the covert world that if you want to keep something secret, do not try to hide it because some reptile from the press will sniff it out. Give it a harmless name and a thoroughly boring job description. TOSA stands for Technical Operations Support Activity.
Not even “Agency” or “Administration” or “Authority.” A support activity could mean changing the lightbulbs or eliminating tiresome Third World politicians. In this case it is more likely to mean the second.
TOSA existed long before 9/11. It hunted down, among others, the Colombian cocaine lord Pablo Escobar. That is what it does. It is the manhunter arm called upon when everyone else is baffled. It has only two hundred and fifty staff and lives in a compound in northern Virginia disguised as a toxic-chemical research facility. No one visits.
To keep it even more secret, it keeps changing its name. It has been simply the Activity, but also Grantor Shadow, Centra Spike, Torn Victor, Cemetery Wind and Gray Fox. The last title was liked enough to be retained only as the code name of the commander. Upon his appointment, Col. Dale Curtis vanished and became Gray Fox. Later, it became Intelligence Support Activity, but when the word “Intelligence” began to attract attention, it changed again — to TOSA.
Gray Fox had held his post for six years when, in 2009, his chief manhunter retired, took a headful of really top secrets and went off to a log cabin in Montana to hunt steelhead trout. Col. Curtis could hunt only from behind a desk, but a computer and every access code in the U.S. defense machine is quite a head start. After a week, a face came up on the screen that jolted him. Lt. Col. Christopher “Kit” Carson — the man who had carried him out of the Shah-i-Kot.
He checked the career list. Combat soldier, scholar, Arabist, linguist, manhunter. He reached for his desk phone.
Kit Carson did not want to leave the Corps for the second time, but for the second time the argument was fought and won over his head.
A week later, he walked into the office of Gray Fox in the low-rise office block in the center of a woods in northern Virginia. He noted the man who limped as he walked to greet him, the cane propped in the corner, the 75th Ranger tabs.
“Remember me?” said the colonel. Kit Carson thought back to the freezing winds, the boulders beneath the combat boots, the gut-tearing weight on his back, the let-me-die-here-and-now exhaustion.
“Been a long time,” he said.
“I know you don’t want to leave the Corps,” said Gray Fox, “but I need you. By the by, inside this building we use only first names. For the rest, Lt. Col. Carson has ceased to exist. For the entire world outside this complex, you are simply the Tracker.”
Over the years the Tracker was alone or instrumental in tracing half a dozen of his country’s most wanted enemies. Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistani Taliban, dispatched by a drone strike in a farmhouse, South Waziristan, 2009; Abu al-Yazid, al-Qaeda founder, financier of 9/11, taken out by another drone strike in Pakistan 2010.
It was he, with others, who first identified al-Kuwaiti as bin Laden’s personal emissary. Spy drones tracked his last long drive across Pakistan until, amazingly, he turned not toward the mountains but the other way, to identify a compound in Abbottabad.
There was the Yemeni/American Anwar al-Awlaki, who preached online in English. He was found because he invited fellow American Samir Khan, editor of the Jihadist magazine Inspire, to join him in northern Yemen. And al-Quso, traced to his home in South Yemen. Another drone launched a Hellfire missile through the bedroom window as he slept.
The buds were coming on the trees this April when Gray Fox came in with a Presidential Finding brought from the Oval Office by courier that morning.
“Another online orator, Tracker. But weird. No name, no face. Totally elusive. He’s all yours. Anything you want, just ask for it. The PF covers every requirement.” He limped out.
There was a file, but it was slim. The man had gone on air with his first online sermon two years earlier, shortly after the first cyberpreacher had died with five companions by the side of a track in North Yemen, September 30, 2011. While Awlaki, who had been born and raised in New Mexico, had a distinct American accent, the Preacher sounded more British.
Two language laboratories had had a go at trying to trace the voice to a point of origin. There is one at Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters of the vast National Security Agency. These are the listeners who can pluck any snatch of conversation by cell phone, landline, faxed letter, e-mail or radio out of space anywhere in the world. But they also do translations from a thousand languages and dialects and they do code breaking.
The other belongs to the Army, at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. They had both come up with much the same. The nearest guess was a Pakistani born into a cultured and educated family. There were clipped word endings in the Preacher’s tone that smacked of the colonial British. But there was a problem.