REPORT

Jihadist Gains in Iraq Blindside American Spies

First Crimea, now Iraq. Why does America's $50 billion intelligence community
keep getting taken by surprise?
BY SHANE HARRIS
JUNE 12, 2014
SHANE.HARRIS
@SHANEHARRIS



United States intelligence agencies were caught by surprise when fighters from the
Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) seized two major Iraqi cities this week and
sent Iraqi defense forces fleeing, current and former U.S. officials said Thursday.
With U.S. troops long gone from the country, Washington didn't have the spies on
the ground or the surveillance gear in the skies necessary to predict when and where
the jihadist group would strike.
The speed and ease with which well-armed and highly trained ISIS fighters took over
Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, and Tikrit, the birthplace of former Iraqi ruler
Saddam Hussein, have raised significant doubts about the ability of American
intelligence agencies to know when ISIS might strike next, a troubling sign as the
Islamist group advances steadily closer to Baghdad. And it harkened back to another
recent intelligence miscue, in February, when U.S. spy agencies failed to predict the
Russian invasion of Crimea. Both events are likely to raise questions about whether
the tens of billions of dollars spent every year on monitoring the world's hot spots is
paying off -- and what else the spies might be missing.
The CIA maintains a presence at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, but the agency has
largely stopped running networks of spies inside the country since U.S. forces left
Iraq in December 2011, current and former U.S. officials said. That's in part because
the military's secretive Joint Special Operations Command had actually taken the
lead on hunting down Iraq's militants. With the JSOC commandos gone, the
intelligence agencies have been forced to try to track groups like ISIS through
satellite imagery and communications intercepts -- methods that have proven
practically useless because the militants relay messages using human couriers, rather
than phone and email conversations, and move around in such small groups that they
easily blend into the civilian population.
Policymakers in Washington and other allied capitals were similarly unsure of the
group's true strength or how to respond. In late May, Secretary of Defense Chuck
Hagel met with defense officials from Arab countries in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where
they agreed that ISIS and other Islamic fighters in Syria and Iraq posed a threat to
the entire region, a senior U.S. official said. But no plan on how to counter those
groups emerged from the meeting, and there's no indication that U.S. intelligence
agencies stepped up monitoring of ISIS fighters in Iraq, who also seized control of
Fallujah and parts of Ramadi in January.
"We got caught flat-footed. Period," said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a terrorism
analyst and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who studies
ISIS and other al Qaeda-linked groups. Although for the past three years U.S.
officials had assessed that ISIS was strong enough "to go toe-to-toe" with the Iraqi
military -- a fact the group demonstrated with its operations in Fallujah and Ramadi -
- there has been no indication that the U.S. intelligence agencies knew ISIS was
about to mount a major offensive to take over two more cities simultaneously,
Gartenstein-Ross said.
In the wake of this week's attacks on Mosul and Tikrit, U.S. intelligence agencies
have increased the number of high-resolution images taken from satellites, which
could help find the location of ISIS forces on the ground, a U.S. official said. But it
was unclear whether this information is being provided to Iraqi forces to help them
plan airstrikes or other operations.
Two senior U.S. officials acknowledged that the intelligence agencies' assessment of
ISIS has been overly broad and lacked the type of specifics that could have actually
helped the Iraqi military know when and where to expect an attack. But the greater
concern to the Obama administration has been the strength of the Iraqi forces and
their actual will to fight, they said.
"This has never been about whether we thought ISIS had the capability to launch
attacks. It's always been, do the Iraqis have the capability to defend their country?"
one official said. On that score, the U.S. assessment was more on the mark. Obama
administration officials have hesitated to provide Iraqi military forces with advanced
weapons -- including fighter jets and attack helicopters -- because they've never
shown an aptitude for using them or sufficient resolve to fight their enemies, the
officials said. The Obama administration had also long feared that Iraqi Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite with clear antipathy towards the country's Sunni
population, would use the armaments against his own people.
The intelligence agencies' inability to predict the latest crisis in Iraq is likely to fuel
critics of the Obama administration's management of other global crises, including in
Syria and Ukraine. In the case of Russia's seizure of Crimea, in which U.S. spies were
also caught by surprise, sophisticated electronic eavesdropping systems run by the
National Security Agency were of little use because Russian forces limited their time
on telephones and adopted the techniques of jihadists, sending couriers back and
forth between their units.
But the responsibility for failing to counter ISIS in Iraq cannot solely be placed at
the feet of U.S. intelligence agencies. When American forces were stationed in the
country, they built one of the most successful battlefield intelligence systems in the
history of American warfare. The NSA monitored every phone call, email, or text
message in Iraq, and it provided leads on the location of jihadists and insurgents to
drone pilots and special operations forces, who captured or killed them. U.S.
commandos working hand in hand with the CIA also developed an extensive network of
human spies.
But when U.S. forces left Iraq in 2011, all that intelligence power went with them.
The Iraqi government failed to secure an agreement that would have allowed the
United States to maintain some physical presence in Iraq, which it needed to run the
intelligence networks at full throttle. Today, that intelligence capability has withered.
"The United States has so many intelligence collection efforts occurring
simultaneously. It's especially difficult to collect in a place where we have no
presence," said Christopher Harmer, a former Navy officer and an analyst with the
Institute for the Study of War. Given the lack of human spies in particular, Harmer
said that the United States would be outmatched in Iraq against ISIS because of its
reliance on couriers and the diligence with which it avoids phones and email, which can
be tracked. "What ISIS is best at is exactly what we are worst at. We just don't
have a good human intelligence network" in Iraq, Harmer said.
If the United States has any hopes of gaining some intelligence insights into Iraq, it
might look to the autonomous Kurdish region in the north. "The Kurds begged the U.S.
to keep a base in Kurdistan" prior to the troop withdrawal, said David Tafuri, who
served as the Rule of Law Coordinator for Iraq with the State Department in 2006
and 2007, and is now a partner with the law firm Squire Patton Boggs. "They would
have given the U.S. whatever it wanted to have a base here. And if we did, we'd be in
a much better position to monitor this situation," Tafuri said.
Iraqi officials have been eager to get their hands on U.S. military and intelligence
equipment to assist in their struggle against jihadists. On May 8, Foreign
Policy reported that the Iraqi government was actively seeking armed aerial drones
from the United States to combat al Qaeda militants in the increasingly violent
Anbar province, where fighters from Syria were believed to be spilling over into Iraq.
And in a significant reversal, Iraqi officials said they would welcome American
military drone operators back into the country to target the militants on its behalf,
according to people with knowledge of the matter. But to date, the United States has
only agreed to give Iraq 10 small Scan Eagle drones, which are launched from a
catapult and carry no weapons. Those should arrive by the end of the summer, the
White House said Thursday.
Iran, the United States' most nettlesome adversary in the entire region, is moving
much faster. According to press reports, a 150-man unit of the Quds Force, the elite
wing of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, had been sent to Iraq to bolster the Maliki
government and fight ISIS. Other accounts suggest that a joint Iranian-Iraqi force
has retaken all or most of Tikrit.
"We have seen reports but we cannot confirm them," White House Press Secretary
Jay Carney said Thursday. Asked by a reporter whether the Obama administration
would caution Iraq not to seek assistance from its neighbor, Carney said, "I think
that this is an issue of the government of Iraq, and our view is they ought to make
prudent decisions about how they deal with the [ISIS] threat in the interests of
national unity."
STR / AFP