An Inside Look at Covert Ops - by Christopher Deliso

Shadow Wars: Special Forces in the New Battle Against Terrorism
David Pugliese
Esprit de Corps Books (2003)
207 pp., two maps and 97 photos (26 color)

Billed as "a must-read for anyone interested in learning more about the world of covert warfare," Shadow Wars is a fairly objective and clearly written account of the role special forces units are playing in today's "war on terror." Throughout the text, detailed exploits of American, British, Canadian, Australian, and even Russian special units are recounted. The story is told with an emphasis on military tactics and a minimum of political commentary.

The author, a journalist at the Ottawa Citizen with over 20 years' experience in writing on military affairs, clearly knows his subject – something that results in a tendency to talk shop at points. Yet while Pugliese's plethora of military acronyms and detailed discussions of weaponry may be lost on the casual reader, armchair generals will love it.

Action in Afghanistan

The book opens with a detailed account of how American and British special forces helped put down the "prison riot" at Qala-i-Jangi, which, in the author's estimation, was actually a full-fledged battle against 400-500 Taliban prisoners who seized the arsenal of the fort where they were being held. The battle saw the death of CIA operative Johnny Span, as well as a catastrophic friendly fire incident that left five Northern Alliance troops dead and five Green Berets wounded. The mishap occurred when a fighter pilot punched in the wrong coordinates on his satellite-guided "smart bomb."

U.S. Army planners would put a lot of time into analyzing what went wrong here and in other cases during the war. Pugliese makes good use of the lengthy report prepared by Stephen Biddle of the U.S. Army War College ("Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy"), which draws on scores of interviews with U.S. special forces personnel who had participated in specific controversial operations, as well as input from the generals. Supplementing such inside accounts with media accounts and specialist publications on the various special forces units involved, the author is able to shed new light on events that were already known, but incompletely. And Pugliese's detailed coverage of the role played by Canada's mysterious secret unit (Joint Task Force 2) is preceded only by another work of his – Canada's Secret Commandos: JTF2, the first-ever work on the subject.

The best part of the book is arguably the first half, devoted to the war in Afghanistan. It is certainly the most exciting part. This mysterious war took place in inaccessible mountains, and the outside world was far less saturated with images and accounts than has been the case with Iraq. In many ways, Afghanistan remains only hazily known to the general public. Pugliese attempts to remedy this situation by focusing on major events in Afghanistan (the battle of Tora Bora, Operation Anaconda, and the Qala-i-Jangi Prison uprising, etc.) that were widely reported in the press when they occurred. In his detailed recounting, we get an inside view of what went on from the perspective of the allied special forces soldiers involved in the fighting. This more intimate and certainly more exhilarating view takes up the bulk of the book's first five chapters.

Operations Gone Wrong

Despite his generally uncritical attitude toward the American war on terror on the political level, Pugliese does take an unflinching look at military failures when and where they occur. Primarily, the author would like to draw our attention to these issues because they illustrate both the challenges military strategists face and the hardships soldiers endure.

Chief among these is the battle of Tora Bora, a heavy-handed bomb-a-thon with scant ground support that allowed important al-Qaeda and Taliban (and perhaps even Osama bin Laden himself) time to flee across the mountains to Pakistan (pp. 31-34). We are also treated to a comprehensive discussion of the botched Operation Anaconda (pp. 48-58), which took place 150 km (93 mi.) south of Kabul in the Shah-e-Kot Valley, and which saw the participation of elite units from the U.S. Army, Navy SEALs, and coalition special forces from Canada, Australia, Germany, Norway, and Denmark. (The Canadian experience of this battle is recounted in Chapter 5).

In his blow-by-blow account of the latter battle, Pugliese shows how a reliance on duplicitous Afghan troops and the failure to begin the engagement with a "massive aerial bombardment" brought about a situation that would tax the special units to their utmost. The riveting description of battles in steep mountain passes against an unseen enemy, and courageous rescues of stranded soldiers is slightly bombastic, and smacks somewhat of the Hollywood "leave no man behind" syndrome; nevertheless, it does make for gripping reading. A good example is the following excerpt, from an account of a helicopter downing and rescue mission carried out in waist-deep snow during the operation:

"[T]he Chinook had put down on a flat area along the ridge on Takur Ghar. On the other side was a cliff face dropping off about 300 meters. Communications problems meant that Razor 1's pilots didn't know in advance that al-Qaeda were swarming all over the landing zone. Bullets tore into the cockpit, slamming into the legs of one of Razor 1's pilots. Other men were gunned down as they exited the MH-47.

"Moving quickly from the disabled Chinook, Air Force Staff Sergeant Kevin Vance saw the carnage al-Qaeda forces had inflicted. The helicopter's door gunner was laying on the aircraft's back ramp, an AK-47 bullet in his head. A second person was at the end of the ramp face down in the snow. He had been shot in the chest. A third dead man was sprawled on the ramp lying on his back. Another Ranger had been hit while still inside the aircraft and killed instantly....

"From his position on top of Takur Ghar, Sergeant Vance could see the Razor 2 rescue force climbing toward him as al-Qaeda started lobbing mortar bombs down on them. It would take two hours but the exhausted Rangers from Razor 2 were eventually able to reach the top of the mountain and link up with their comrades. There, for the next twelve hours, the two groups of Rangers and their Air Force special operations comrades fought off the al-Qaeda attacks." (pp. 56-57).

An Unusual Addition

Considering that Shadow Wars is largely devoted to Western forces fighting in George Bush's conventional imperial campaigns, Chapter 6 – on the October 2002 hostage crisis in a Moscow theater – may seem somewhat unusual. However, since the author does indeed try to frame his book in the context of terrorism in general (he mentions, in addition to 9/11, the Bali bombing, the Marriott Jakarta bombing, and Abu Sayyaf attacks in the Philippines), including this account of the daring Chechen seizure of a theater packed with over 800 people makes sense.

Further, Pugliese is able to find an interesting angle in recounting the story of this event and the controversial Russian response to it. Relying primarily on Russian accounts, the author discusses the immediate reaction of the premier Russian counterterrorism units, Alpha and Vympel, and the various plans they considered for removing the terrorists. During this story, we learn of several remarkable exploits, such as how the Russians were able to, unbeknownst to the terrorists, commandeer the basement of the facility, drill a hole in the wall, and insert a camera to monitor their movements. We also learn that other special teams started immediately practicing how they might storm the building on an empty theater on the other side of Moscow.

However, the conclusion of the hostage crisis engendered much controversy, as well over 100 people died from the tranquilizing gas (Fentanyl) that was used to overcome the hostage-takers. Pugliese points out the inherent difficulty involved here, as "the Russians were breaking new ground" in using the narcotic. Since it had not been used before in such a case, it would be impossible to know how much would be too much; for children, the elderly, and those with health problems, ingestion could be fatal. On the other hand, 800 people had been trapped for 58 hours inside a theater guarded by increasingly edgy Chechens who had rigged the theater with explosives and were openly declaring their desire to detonate the place and go happily to Allah.

Considering this and that the terrorists were widely scattered throughout the theater, with some completely incognito and hidden within the crowd, Russian options were limited. Any attempt to storm the building would probably allow the suicide bombers enough time to detonate at least some of their explosives, leading to an unknown number of deaths. In the end, the Russians had little choice but to use the gas if they were to retain any tactical advantage.

The controversial deaths aside, Pugliese's narrative of what happened after the gas started to take effect shows that the Russian special forces teams were anything but incompetent; they were able to eliminate all of the heavily armed Chechens before any had a chance to detonate their explosives. His account of the raid makes for exciting reading (and an even better movie). In general, Pugliese's treatment of the Moscow hostage crisis is evenhanded and illustrates the intractable dilemmas all countries face today in dealing with terrorist acts.

Softball

While commenting on political logic and decision-making is not within the purview of Shadow Wars, the author inevitably must confront these issues in the course of the narrative. The failure to be more critical of the American rationale for war and explanations of reality is, arguably, problematic because in some cases it does impinge upon military matters.

For example, Pugliese does not question the American government's 2002 claim about al-Qaeda fighters in Georgia (p. 130), a claim that was shortly thereafter denied even by Georgia's minister of defense and which always seemed like just a convenient way for the U.S. to gain a military foothold in the south Caucasus state, which it quite effortlessly did. Instead of pointing this out, the author attempts to argue that the Bush administration's new "awareness" of the Chechen-al-Qaeda link in the Caucasus was leading it toward a closer alliance with Russia. As if! The U.S. action in Georgia was actually driven by hostility to Russia, not a new desire to tackle the Chechen problem together.

We encounter this kind of a softball attitude again when the narrative moves to Iraq in Chapter 7 ("Turning Point: Operation Iraqi Freedom"). Rather than point out that the Bush administration had brazenly lied about the existence of WMD and the great danger of Saddam Hussein, the author merely says that it "would be a highly controversial issue long after the war ended" (p. 133). The failure to be more critical about the U.S. line in light of basic truths, here and elsewhere, is a clear deficiency.

Enter Iraq

Yet whatever the reader may think about the political issues clouding the whole issue of Iraq, some pleasure can be derived from following the little-known exploits of allied special forces units as they lay fiber optic cable in the sewers of Baghdad and commandeer air-dropped supplies in the western desert. One of the most interesting accounts found here, because it did not receive good coverage at the time, is the description of the U.S.-Kurdish joint operation against Ansar-al-Islam in late March 2003 (pp. 142-143). While "American officials played down suggestions that many Ansar guerrillas escaped," some did indeed live to fight another day (as Pugliese's publisher unfortunately found out).

Nevertheless, in Shadow Wars we get an incomplete picture of the war in Iraq and perhaps are missing the juiciest bits about special forces there, because the book (published in 2003) by necessity could not include operations that have taken place in 2004, when the resistance became much more formidable and well organized. While the hard-pressed American forces in Iraq have had to be bolstered by too many overweight, under-trained weekend warriors from the National Guard, the shadow warriors are still out there, fighting in the most dangerous and challenging theater of war America has seen since Vietnam.

Some Drawbacks

Perhaps the relative lack of political criticism throughout Shadow Wars was what allowed the author to gain access to scores of official photos, 26 of them in color, from the American, Canadian, British, and Australian defense departments. Although a fair amount of the pictures were taken at training locations, there are others from the battlefield. These photos, which show the various special forces units all decked out in their distinctive uniforms (Canadian abominable snowmen in their white winter garb, the Aussies in their colorful desert camouflage, bearded Green Berets disguised as Afghans on horseback, etc.) make a welcome addition to the text narration. These photos provide a helpful visual accompaniment to the sometimes puzzling descriptions of abstruse weaponry.

Aside from some mention of the Polish GROM special forces units in Iraq, we don't hear much about the other allied forces. Particularly in Afghanistan, where we're told of contributions from allegedly "pacifistic" Scandinavian and German countries, it would be interesting to know more about these forces, their capabilities, and the role that they played in the fighting. Similarly, there is scant coverage of training methods used by the U.S. and its allies. Sure, we all know that the U.S. special forces must be tough – as the stated high dropout rate among recruits attests – and for precisely this reason we would like to know more about how and what the U.S. and its allies train, and whether these methods have changed since 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

What the Future Holds

Indeed, the reader might also like to know about how U.S. special forces have been used at home since 9/11 and the new obsession with homeland security. Since there have been no attacks, we have not had a chance to see them in action; but from plans drawn up for the future, Pugliese relates one example of how the special forces are being trained for a more lively role:

"[U].S. Air Force tactical units whose job is to respond to an intrusion or takeover at America's nuclear missile silos have a new set of orders in the aftermath of September 11. Past tactics, which called for containing the situation and establishing communications with individuals who had gained access to a missile silo, are a thing of the past. Now, the first team on the ground is to immediately engage and eliminate intruders with maximum violence" (p. 184).

It's clear that the author wants to play up the threat of terrorism at home, as a gung-ho book deserves a similar ending. "Time is irrelevant to them," says a Navy SEAL commander, speaking of al-Qaeda. "Targets are everywhere." However, despite the claim that the terrorist group is a "patient organization that carefully selects its targets and painstakingly prepares its missions" (p. 186), real disagreement now exists about the size, cohesion, and ability of al-Qaeda, and to what that famous name may actually refer anymore. Still, whatever we want to call it, there is certainly more than enough danger and intrigue around today to make Pugliese's subject an interesting and important one.

On balance, Shadow Wars is a stimulating and timely read. It offers expert insight and analysis of the enigmatic military men who are, along with covert intelligence agents, the most intriguing, inaccessible, and storied characters in any government's security apparatus.