By James Gordon MeekDo America’s secret soldiers play well together? There is fresh evidence that the post-9/11 military still is plagued by inter-service rivalries that may be impacting critical counterterrorism operations. The revelations have come out in the extraordinary case unfolding in a tiny makeshift courtroom at Camp Lejeune, N.C., where a Marine “court of inquiry” - the first convened in a half-century - is probing the killings of at least 19 Afghan civilians the morning of March 4, 2007, by a company from the Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command.
On Sunday, I reported in the New York Daily News that at the time of the alleged shooting spree, the unitÂ’s commander, Maj. Fred Galvin, was trying to offer up his small force of specially trained Marines to the CIA for secret counterterrorism missions along the Afghan-Pakistan border. The unit was neither trained for, nor permitted to engage in, covert CIA operations, sources have told me. But the inquiry has also revealed how units primarily engaged in classified missions against Osama Bin LadenÂ’s allies have clashed with each other.
Witnesses in this fascinating case have included Marines, soldiers and Afghan victims of the March 4 shootings, including one man who provided security for CIA operatives as a mujahideen commander during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Their testimony has described not only the complex command structure that governs sensitive military operations along AfghanistanÂ’s eastern border with Pakistan (Regional Command-East), but the fact that the Marine special ops Company Foxtrot - called MARSOC-F - was treated like an ugly stepsister by just about everybody after they arrived at Jalalabad Airfield three weeks before their convoy opened up on civilians.
Here’s how it worked in Nangarhar province, home to the Tora Bora mountains where Bin Laden made his last stand in December 2001 and what remains a hotbed of infiltration by Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hizb-I Islami-Gulbuddin (HIG) and other militias. The “landowner” in March 2007 was Task Force Spartan, commanded by a conventional infantry unit: a brigade from the Fort Drum-based 10th Mountain Division. Spartan had the power to “veto” any covert mission in their area of operations by Navy SEALs, Delta Force operators, Green Berets or Marines, because of the cultural and political sensitivities of combat in the Pashtun tribal lands.
So what did the Marines do? They submitted mission proposals (“con ops” or “concept of operations”) to their bosses at Bagram Airfield north of Kabul, the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan (CJSOTF-A). But they concealed their con-ops from Spartan, which was a violation of chain of command, witnesses testified. To further complicate things, in early 2007 Spartan was in the process of transitioning from a U.S. military force to a NATO/ISAF component. “So officially, we couldn’t coordinate with CJSOTF,” Spartan’s operations officer Army Maj. Thomas Gukeisen testified last week, when I covered two days of the proceedings.
Gukeisen said he took Maj. Galvin on a four-day tour of remote U.S. outposts to meet 10th Mountain company commanders. But Gukeisen had reservations about Galvin’s men. “Operating in Nangarhar with such a large force,” he testified, “could be detrimental for counterinsurgency purposes.”
Later, when he learned Galvin was meeting with Special Forces operators and “OGAs” - a military euphemism for the CIA that means “Other Government Agency” - in another area of operations to the south, he began to think the Marines were “hiding something from us.”
“I thought there was a level of untruthfulness, or not sharing information between organizations,” Gukeisen told the court of inquiry. “I became, in my mind, suspect of what they were doing.”
This is not to suggest that CJSOTF had much affection for the Marine special ops unit, either. Witnesses last week testified that the MARSOC unit was deployed without any support and had to scrounge at Jalalabad for food and potable water, according to the Jacksonville Daily News’ court of inquiry blog. Marine Capt. Robert Olson, the unit’s intelligence officer and executive officer, recounted on the witness stand (under a grant of immunity from prosecution) that CJSOTF regarded him as “a bit of a nuisance” when he embedded with them at Bagram prior to MARSOC’s arrival.
After the March 4 killings on Highway 1, Galvin was relieved of command and MARSOC-F was kicked out of Afghanistan.