Introducing Task Force Orange

by Timothy Chilman

email: timothychilman@yahoo.com

Our story begins on April 24, 1980, with Operation Eagle Claw, thedisastrous attempt to rescue hostages held at the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

Six EC-130 Hercules transport aircraft and eight RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters were to fly under radar and rendezvous at a secret landing strip in the Iranian desert code-named Desert One. All aircraft bore black-red-black identification stripes. At Desert One, the aircraft would refuel from Hercules-mounted bladders containing 6,000 gallons of jet fuel and the helicopters transport an assault force of 120 men to Desert Two, an isolated mountain hiding place, after which they would set off for Tehran in vans. This would have been the first mission of the US Army's recently created Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta (Airborne), better known as Delta Force, which had been set up by Vietnam veteran Colonel “Chargin' Charlie” Beckwith following the example of the British Special Air Service.

RH-53D helicopters aboard the USS Nimitz immediately before Operation Eagle Claw. Photo: PH1 K.D. HOMEDALE

At least, that was the plan. Two hours after taking off from the USS Nimitz, the rotor blades of the USMC Sea Stallion helicopter Bluebeard 6 cracked. Bluebeard 1 malfunctioned upon entering a dust cloud—a haboob, a sandstorm following a thunderstorm where the sand is like talcum powder. Bluebeard 1 returned to the Nimitz. As radio silence was observed, the helicopters were not

informed that the air at Desert One was clear, and the pilot latercommented that he would have continued had he known. The hydraulicpumps of Bluebeard 8 failed en route to Desert One.

The aftermath of the U.S. attempt to retrieve its hostages from Iran. Photo: United States Special Operations Command History, 1987-2007

A minimum of six helicopters was required, so the mission was aborted. When Bluebeard 3 took off, a dust cloud obscured the viewof the pilot, causing vertigo. Disoriented, his aircraft drifted toward a Hercules, against which the rotor blades impacted. The helicopter crashed and its fuel tanks exploded. Ammunition also exploded, and shrapnel damaged the remaining helicopters. Five AirForce personnel and three Marines died. A memorial to them stands at Arlington National Cemetery. The helicopters were abandoned, and U.S. forces departed. Two of the U.S. helicopters now serve with the Iranian Navy.

Eagle Claw had involved all U.S. armed services: Navy helicopters with Marine crews, Air Force airplanes, and Army soldiers. The deficiencies of the mission as identified by the report of the investigative panel chaired by aviator Admiral James L. Holloway Jr. were in mission planning, command and control, and interservice operability. The key failings were that insufficient helicopters were used—ten would have been required—and those present had been prepped on the Nimitz for marine conditions when they were traveling to the desert. Al Jazeera ascribed the helicopter shortage to the timidity of politicians.

Hence a unified entity, the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), was established and commenced operations on April 16, 1987. USSOCOM comprises the Navy SEALs of Task Force Blue, the

Delta Force troopers of Task Force Green, and the signals specialists of Task Force Orange. Sometimes the Task Forces work with Task Force Black—the British Special Air Service and Special Boat Service (formerly Squadron).

Task Force Orange has in the past been called Cemetery Wind, Centra Spike, Gray Fox, Torn Victor, and Quiet Enable. It is knownformally as the US Army Intelligence Support Activity and informally as just Orange or the Activity.

Task Force Orange collects actionable intelligence for use by the others units of USSOCOM. It boasts its own wing of aircraft at Baltimore/Washington International Airport. The American Special Ops website states that Orange consists of around 300 people, the Washington Examiner puts the figure at 600, while AOL goes for more than 1,000. These people are from each of the armed services and sometimes allied forces.

Task Force Orange collects intelligence from such parties as insurgents. Photo: در س�لام ب�� الاAgents are run. Human intelligence is collected. Reconnaissance ofa safe house by operatives would include working out routes of ingress and egress, blind spots, and the number and disposition ofhostile forces. Signals intelligence is obtained, for instance, locating people who use cellphones or monitoring a terrorist entity through its communications. In Iraq, Al-Qaeda operatives used cellphones constantly to coordinate activities and detonate explosives. Seized cellphones often gave access to a list of key phone numbers. In 2006, the new division of Computer Network Operations was created. Monitored emails could be used to focus efforts.

While the National Security Agency (NSA) has unparalleled eavesdropping technology, it is unable to penetrate a fiber-optic telephone cable. At sea, U.S. submarines splice cables, and on land the job falls to Task Force Orange.

After the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Task Force Orange operatives entered the tribal areas of Pakistan and planted listening devices. Al-Qaeda operatives were reputedly located in this fashion. U.S. spy satellites are thought to not be sufficiently sensitive to detect cellphone or hand-held radio transmissions.

Ali Qaed Senyan al-Harthi was the primary planner of the attack onthe USS Cole in 2000. He is believed to have once been Osama bin Laden's bodyguard. He was the highest-ranking Al-Qaeda member in Yemen. In 2001, Yemeni troops assaulted his village of al-Hosun inthe lawless-but-oil-producing province of Ma'arib, in a mountainous area 100 miles east of the capital, Sana'a. 18 soldiers and six tribesmen were killed, but al-Harthi escaped. On November 3, 2002, a GPS fix on his cellphone allowed him to be killed with six others by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predatordrone as he traveled in a jeep. One of the others who perished wasa U.S. citizen.

On January 7, 2006, insurgents in Iraq kidnapped the U.S. citizen Jill Carroll, a freelance journalist working for the Christian Science Monitor. Task Force Orange picked up the communications ofmen associated with the kidnappers. SEALs and Delta Force operatives kicked in doors and killed some people. One raid revealed information which led to the next. It was determined thatCarroll was usually held at a farmhouse in Baquba, north of Baghdad. USSOCOM, including Task Force Black, raided the farmhouse, capturing twenty terrorists and killing five. Carroll was absent but subsequently released. One of the USSOCOM operatorsremarked that the kidnappers had decided: “Here, you take her. Getoff our backs.”

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a hyperactive child and a bully, then a high school drop-out, then a simple, short-tempered, barely literate petty drug dealer accused of sexual offenses, and finallythe most wanted man in Iraq. The bounty on his head was $25 million, just like bin Laden.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. WP:NFCC#4

In October, 2002, Zarqawi was blamed for the murder of USAID official Lawrence Foley in Amman. In February, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that the presence of al-Zarqawi in Baghdad showed a “sinister nexus” between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein; although then a major plank of the case for war, that onenow appears distinctly questionable. Al-Zarqawi sought to inflame sectarian tension and mostly killed Shia civilians. He was behind the truck bombing at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad on 19 August, 2003, which killed 23 people, one being U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello. He was also implicated in a bombing ten days later which killed the senior Shia cleric Ayatollah Baqer al-Hakimand over 85 more at the revered Imam Ali mosque in Najaf. On February 1, 2004, during the Ashura festival, he organized the killing of 185 celebrants in Baghdad and Karbala. His followers boasted of killing 35 children in Baghdad on September 30, 2004. He has been connected to the train bombing that killed 191 people in Madrid on March 11, 2004. He wielded the machete when U.S. contractor Nick Berg, U.S. engineer Eugene Armstrong, and British engineer Ken Bigley were beheaded in October, 2004. In that same month, the Jordanian government charged him with leading a plot touse chemical weapons in Amman. In November 2005, he sent four suicide bombers to three hotels in Amman, and 57 people were

killed, some of them guests at a wedding reception. He was a very bad man, O.K.?

Al-Zarqawi was a hands-on manager who owned no cellphone, instead using those of others. Agents downloaded software at internet cafes that allowed the reading of emails. Often, code was used, so“I've got the groceries” could mark that a terrorist had acquired guns or bomb components. Emails from Al-Qaeda members were matched to cellphones simultaneously in the vicinity. Signals fromthese cellphones were intercepted and the speakers identified. A list of al-Zarqawi's followers was compiled. Task Force Orange waslistening when an Islamic religious adviser, Sheik Abdul Rahman, spoke telephonically of visiting al-Zarqawi. When he traveled to the man's hideout near Baquba on June 7, 2006, USSOCOM had its man. An F-16 delivered two 500-pound bombs precisely on target.

Al-Zarqawi was killed by an airstrike thanks to information collected by Task Force Orange. This was his safe house. Photo: Sgt. Zach Mott

Mullah Dadullah was a warlord who lost a leg fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. He was a member of the Taliban's ruling ten-man leadership council before the U.S.-led invasion andwas described as "Afghanistan's top Taliban commander" after. Videos of military exercises and the beheading of suspected spies produced for his unit at the Taliban's media center in Quetta, southern Pakistan, proved extremely popular ($4 a pop, with discounts for multiple purchases).

Close to one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Dadullah was linked to guerrilla operations in Helmand Province, the dispatch of suicide bombers, and the kidnapping of Westerners, including Italian journalist Daniele Mastro-Giacomo. His brother, Mullah

Shah Mansoor, and four other Taliban were released in a much-criticized exchange for Mastro-Giacomo. Her translator was not released.

Mullah Dadullah. Photo: DTN News

Mansoor's communications were monitored by Task Force Orange, showing him traveling to a Taliban training facility in Quetta. A satellite phone of one man present was monitored, allowing the group to be followed from Quetta to Afghanistan: A convoy went to Bahram Chah in southern Helmand province, close to Pakistan's border. Usually, Delta Force troopers would have been summoned, but they were otherwise engaged, so it was instead soldiers of theBritish Special Boat Service fighting alongside Afghan soldiers who overpowered the 20 defenders after a four-hour gun battle on 12 May, 2007. The Afghan intelligence service announced that Dadullah had been tracked “with the> most modern intelligence technology.” Kandahar governor Assadullah Khalid had Dadullah's body put on display.

The piece de resistance, of course, is the killing of Osama bin Laden hisself. Prisoners interrogated at Guantanamo Bay divulged the name of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who was claimed to be close to bin Laden, Khalid Shaik Mohammed—one of the planners of 9/11—and Abu Faraj al-Libbi, Al-Qaeda's third-in-command.

Mohammed was captured in Rawalpindi in 2003. He was waterboarded 183 times but maintained that al-Kuwaiti was unimportant. Abu Faraj al-Libbi was captured in 2005 while in a store in the Pakistani town of Mardan. Under interrogation, he remarked that hehad never heard of al-Kuwaiti. The steering of attention away fromal-Kuwaiti aroused curiosity, and emails and telephone calls from the man's family were monitored by Task Force Orange.

An Al-Qaeda trainee named Ahmed Siggiqui was captured and revealedto his questioners that bin Laden was in Abbottabad, 40 miles fromthe capital of Pakistan. CIA agents had obtained the registration number of al-Kuwaiti's white Suzuki four-wheel drive and tracked the vehicle to number 3, street 8-A, Garga Road, Thanda Chowa, Hashmi Colony, Abbottabad. This house stood out. Its structure wasdifferent from those of other buildings in the area: It was taller, the walls were three-feet thick and eighteen-feet high, and, in contrast to other, nearby buildings, there was all that barbed wire and surveillance cameras. Three gas connections had been installed within days of construction three years earlier, when others faced a wait of weeks or months.

An intelligence source divulged, “We put 24/7 eyes on it.” Those within the house would travel for a minimum of 90 minutes before even inserting batteries to their cellphones. The building's occupants had told locals they had to protect themselves, having enemies in their home village. They did, however, interact with the local community to some extent: 12 year-old resident Zarar Ahmed was an occasional visitor to the house and was once given a gift of two rabbits.

After the assault that killed bin Laden, techies from Task Force Orange helped to collect a “treasure trove” of intelligence comprising a handwritten journal, five computers, 10 hard drives, 110 thumb drives, and numerous documents. One local groused: “It'sgoing to destroy property prices in the area.”

Task Force Orange had a hand in the killing of Osama bin Laden. Photo: www.canadafreepress.com

Task Force Orange, meanwhile, also played a major role in the

killing of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar in 1993, training local forces to use phone tracking devices that proved instrumental when Escobar stayed on the phone for a few minutes instead of the usual 20 seconds. It was troopers of Delta Force and Task Force Orange who pulled deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from a spider hole in 2003. British citizen Mohammed Emwazi acquired the nickname Jihadi John and became a hate figure in the West when he appeared on video beheading seven western hostages; in 2015, he was, as the Pentagon put it, “evaporated” bya Hellfire missile fired by a Reaper drone after being tracked by Task Force Orange.

It was troopers of Delta Force and Task Force Orange who found Saddam Hussein in 2003. The man pictured with him was a civilian translator called Samir who did not wish his surname to be disclosed. Photo: U.S. Army

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