CIA extensive activity in Mogadisho explained.

[grandpakhalif]

The threat of drone attacks was all that protected CIA agents in the early years of the Agency’s continuing efforts to take out al-Qaeda operatives in Somalia. The thing is, the threat was a hollow one. The drones weren’t there.

That’s just one of the surprising revelations in the latest installment in Army Times reporter Sean Naylor’s investigation of U.S. intelligence operations in Somalia and Kenya.

The U.S. was heavily involved in East Africa in the early 1990s, even spearheading a large-scale humanitarian and peacekeeping operation aimed at stabilizing Somalia during the early phases of its ongoing civil war. But the deaths of 18 U.S. service members in Mogadishu in October 1993 — a tragedy explored in the book and film Black Hawk Down — ended all that. For nearly a decade, the U.S. all but abandoned Somalia. “Nobody had the stomach for it,” a Special Operations source told Naylor.

The CIA returned to Somalia in fits and starts in the years immediately following the 9/11 attacks. The main goal: to track down and capture or kill the growing number of al-Qaeda operatives seeking refuge among Somalia’s extremists. Starting in 2003, small teams of CIA agents, commandos and interpreters flew into Somalia from Kenya aboard the daily flights that delivered khat, a popular narcotic.

American agents used a carrot-and-stick approach to drawing information out of Somali warlords with knowledge of al-Qaeda’s East African operations. Cash payments to warlords represented the “carrot.” U.S. air power was the “stick.”

But until recently, there weren’t any military or CIA drones over Somalia. “We really didn’t have a stick,” an unnamed veteran of U.S. intel ops told Naylor. All of America’s Predator drones were tied up in the skies over Iraq, he explained. In other words, the CIA was bluffing. “But it worked,” the intel official said.


Working with Somali warlords required a light touch and plenty of precautions. John Bennett, the CIA’s station chief in Nairobi, drew up four rules, which Naylor lists:

“We will work with warlords.”
“We don’t play favorites.”
“They don’t play us.”
“We don’t go after Somali nationals, just [foreign] al-Qaeda.”
Protected by a effective bluff and constrained by Bennett’s rules, the CIA’s Somali operations succeeded in buying up dangerous surface-to-air missiles previously in extremists’ hands. U.S. agents also developed information and targeting data that allowed the military to take out several high-profile terror leaders, including Aden Hashi Ayro, killed by a Navy cruise missile strike in 2008.

The CIA’s Somali ops are undoubtedly much more extensive today, now that the U.S. is openly pouring military and intelligence resources into Africa. For one, agents are no longer bluffing when they say there are drone warplanes overhead.

[grandpakhalif]

Cellphone monitoring
Working with the warlords required extraordinary care and judgment.
“Much of what the warlords told us was true,” the intelligence source said. But, the source added, before running operations against targets based on what the warlords had told them, U.S. intelligence and special ops personnel always checked that information against what unilateral spies being run by U.S. intelligence said.
In an effort to develop targets, the CIA, supported by TF Orange, ran a series of missions into Mogadishu to “seed” the city with devices that monitored cellphone traffic, according to a senior military official. This required repeated trips to Mogadishu, said the senior military and intelligence officials.
“You’ve got to reposition [the devices] as they add cellphone towers or reposition them,” the military official said.
These missions allowed the Orange personnel to come into their own. Close-in signals intelligence is an Orange specialty, but on the first forays into Mogadishu, the Orange personnel, who were “really good ground tactical guys,” functioned primarily as security, said the intelligence source with long experience in the Horn.
“Initially the Orange guys were strictly protection, [although] they always thought their role was much larger,” the source said. The missions to install the monitoring gear allowed them to put their unique skills to use.
(The “Orange” name comes from the color code traditionally assigned to the Fort Belvoir, Va.-based special mission unit’s personnel when they formed part of a larger Joint Special Operations Command task force. The unit has gone by many other names, including the Intelligence Support Activity and the Mission Support Activity, and is often referred to by JSOC insiders simply as “the Activity” or “Orange.”)
While the Orange troops were on the missions because of their technical expertise, the CIA personnel were the ones talking to the warlords.
“They knew these guys,” the senior intelligence official said. “They were in charge of the handling [of the warlords], any kind of negotiations that were being done. It was a good relationship, actually.”
‘Hundreds of bad guys’
In a country in which any operation carried major risks, “some of these sensitive missions in downtown Mogadishu” were the most dangerous carried out by U.S. personnel in Somalia during the past 10 years, said the intelligence official.
“We could have had two or three U.S. citizens [taken prisoner] and they could still be held hostage today,” the official said. “And there would have been no doubt who they were or what they were.”
No aircraft monitored these missions.
“We had very, very few imagery assets available — everything was still dedicated to Iraq,” the official said.
That left each team of operatives reliant on shaky deals with ruthless warlords in an anarchic city of roughly 2 million overrun by competing militias.
“All these bad guys had not a couple of bad guys with them but hundreds of bad guys with them,” said a military targeting official. “If you put somebody in there … you’re going to be in the middle of hundreds of bad guys almost instantaneously, and if you don’t have this thing just absolutely soup to nuts, you’re probably going to wind up with a lot of dead people, including friendlies, including our guys. You could never quite get around that.”
But unbeknownst to all but a few not directly involved, there was a force ready to come to the rescue, in case the teams in Mogadishu got into trouble. That force was the Joint Special Operations Task Force – Horn of Africa, based at Lemonnier.
Led by Col. Rod Turner, a Special Forces officer, the force was tasked to be prepared to conduct personnel recovery missions, code named Mystic Talon missions, in the event that the CIA/JSOC forays into Mogadishu ran into problems, according to a special operations source with firsthand knowledge of operations in the Horn.
If the order came to launch the rescue force, the task force’s four Air Force special operations MH-53 Pave Low helicopters would take off carrying as many members as possible of the Special Forces company assigned to Central Command’s Crisis Response Element, a special ops force available to Turner for certain missions. That company was a commander’s in-extremis force, or CIF, company, which is specially trained and resourced for direct-action missions.
Each Pave Low was manned by a crew of six and equipped with an air-to-air refueling probe, rapid-firing mini-guns in the doors and a .50-cal machine gun mounted on the tail.
“They were flying arsenals but with this big layer of armor blankets in them,” the special ops source said.
But the weight of that armor, plus the heat of Somalia, severely limited the number of SF soldiers who could take part in the mission. That number also depended on how many personnel needed to be rescued: the more Americans in trouble on the ground, the fewer SF troops the helicopters could carry. Most scenarios for which the task force planned would see about six SF soldiers — and no more than 10 — aboard each helicopter, the special ops source said.
“It would be based on the information provided at the time of notification,” the special ops source said.
If the message from the team on the ground was, “We are decisively engaged, we can’t get out of where we’re at, and we need as much firepower as we can to save our lives,” then the priority for the rescue force would be to put as many guys on the ground as possible, rather than “getting in and extracting them,” the source said.
In such a worst-case scenario, the thinking went, “maybe we can get a ship up the shore or something and get something in off the ship,” he said.
On the other hand, the special ops source said, “If it was, ‘Hey, we’re hauling ***, heading west, there’ll be five of us,’ then it would probably be maybe a five-man package per bird. Just something to go in, lay down a quick base of fire, go in and pull these guys out and then leave.”
In addition, Turner ordered that plenty of space be left on the helicopters in case one or more of them did not make it back, and the task force planned every personnel recovery mission with the requirement that it could still be accomplished if a helicopter was lost.
“The plan was to launch all four with the expectation that [the task force] would have to do self-recovery if one of them went down,” the special ops source said. “When that aircraft went down, one aircraft would have to stop and pick them up and would turn around and bring them home. So you basically have maxed out that aircraft if you have five or six SF guys on it and a crew of five guys. … [We’re then] sticking another 10 guys on an already almost overloaded airplane, trying to limp it back to Djibouti. So it was a very slim package.”
If two helicopters went down, the mission would be aborted, but everyone on the four outbound helicopters flights would fit on the remaining two, if need be, according to the special ops source.
As it was, despite the extraordinary risk involved, no mission into Mogadishu ran into the sort of trouble that required the rescue force from Djibouti.

[grandpakhalif]

Key targets
The ability to listen to al-Qaida in East Africa’s phone calls paid big dividends.
“It [the phone monitoring] definitely led to us being able to have much more precise information about what was going on, what actually was happening,” the senior intelligence official said. “Those operations gave us pretty good insight into what al-Qaida was doing in East Africa. … They saw it as another safe haven, they saw the opportunity to establish training camps and they did. And it allowed us to start to plan CT [counterterrorism]-like operations against a couple of the key targets.”
Those targets included Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of the original al-Qaida in East Africa leaders, as well as two senior figures in Somalia’s al-Qaida-linked al-Shabaab militia: Aden Hashi Ayro, who allegedly trained in al-Qaida’s Afghanistan camps, and Ahmed Abdi Godane, the group’s leader from 2009 to 2010, according to the intelligence official. (After Ayro was killed in a 2008 cruise missile strike, al-Shabaab reportedly suspected the U.S. had tracked him via his iPhone and banned the use of similar devices.)
But monitoring al-Shabaab and al-Qaida phone traffic did more than help U.S. intelligence officials with their manhunts. It also gave them a deeper understanding of how interlinked some of the violent Islamist groups were, according to the intelligence official.
“There were [telephone] communications between Pakistan and Somalia,” the official said. “It was the communicators for the key [al-Qaida] guys [in Pakistan], and also from Yemen and from Iraq and from North Africa. So we really saw this blossoming of their network start to grow, and that’s really, really when we began to realize just how much they were franchising the movement out of Pakistan. And all these guys, all these leaders, at one time or another, all met in the training camps of Afghanistan. And, to a degree, some — not many — met with bin Laden when he was in his days in Sudan.”
The phone-monitoring gear is probably still operating, the intelligence official said.
“I’ve got to believe it’s still there, because it was a pretty capable system,” the official said, adding that now, “It’s probably better.”
However, the official said, publishing the history of the cellphone monitoring system would not compromise ongoing operations. The targets in Somalia know their phone conversations are being monitored, but unlike their counterparts in Pakistan’s tribal areas, they are not constantly reminded of the dangers of using their phones.
“They’re not hearing the Predators overhead all the time,” the intelligence official said. “It’s like guys in Iraq and Afghanistan — they know it … [but] they can’t help themselves.”
(However, the intelligence source with long experience in the Horn said that the al-Qaida cell began to move its communications to the Internet. And with reports that the U.S. is increasing its drone activity around the Horn, Islamists in Somalia may soon become more aware of Predators overhead.)
Training camps
Not all U.S. intelligence efforts were aimed at Mogadishu. American operatives were also interested in potential al-Qaida activity in Ras Kamboni, a coastal town about two miles from the Kenyan border. In the first years after 9/11, there were persistent rumors of al-Qaida training camps in the town.
“We were throwing people at Ras Kamboni … in late ‘01, early ‘02,” the intelligence source with long experience in the Horn said. Then interest in the town abated before picking up again in late 2003 to early 2004, when U.S. personnel flew over Ras Kamboni but saw no sign of any training camps, the source said.
In addition, case officers in the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi “ran numerous unilateral assets against” Ras Kamboni, the source said. These were “Somalis who had businesses in the region, Somalis who had reason to be there,” the source said. “People we could depend on.”
The U.S. paid the spies roughly $1,000 to $2,000 a month to enter southern Somalia and report what they observed. But even these local hires found little evidence of al-Qaida in Ras Kamboni, according to the source.
It was not until 2007 that the U.S. became convinced that “hundreds” of fighters were training in camps in and around Ras Kamboni, the senior intelligence official said. “We observed two that had at least 150 personnel per [at any one time],” the official said.
Al-Qaida in East Africa’s tentacles spread beyond Somalia. The group’s “center of gravity” was clearly Mogadishu, “but there was a huge support cell split between Nairobi and Mombasa,” a port city in Kenya, said the intelligence source with long experience in the Horn.
However, the source added, it wasn’t clear whether al-Qaida in East Africa was planning attacks in Nairobi or whether its presence in the Kenyan capital was a holdover from the 1990s.
“We were tracking several targets in Nairobi,” the source said. “A lot of our operations in Nairobi were technical operations — phones and computers.”

[AhlulbaytSoldier]

Ceyrow fucked things up for himself when he allowed eelays, sandniggers and dooros to stay in dhuusomareeb & guriceel while making a khaariji maamul there and at the same time denying the cayrs to make their own maamul.

He fucked it up real bad, thats what caused his death.

Aweys made the same mistake, so now he is a dead man walking.

[The_Patriot]

Granpakhalif extensive activity in Somalinet explained

[grandpakhalif]

Ceyrow fucked things up for himself when he allowed eelays, sandniggers and dooros to stay in dhuusomareeb & guriceel while making a khaariji maamul there and at the same time denying the cayrs to make their own maamul.

He fucked it up real bad, thats what caused his death.

Aweys made the same mistake, so now he is a dead man walking.

He is not tribalist like you and loved his muslim brothers, may allah accept him!

[Jaidi]

These articles are informative, but aren't critical at all. Its from the Army Times which basically is made for soldiers to read. The U.S. lost it after 9/11 and ended up growing what they thought they were destroying. This article doesn't address that at all.

But lol @ giving Aideed JR 300 K for 17 antiaircraft missiles he got robbed

[SahanGalbeed]

U.S. lost it after 9/11 and ended up growing what they thought they were destroying. This article doesn't address that at all.

what do you mean ?
lost what ? and ended up growing what ?