intelligence of different kinds was coming together, often under the aegis of SIS. ‘We got serious UK buy-in,’ notes one SAS officer. ‘The Americans were going to support us but they didn’t want us to become a draw on resources.’
During the dying days of A Squadron’s four-month deployment, the character of the SAS operation in Iraq was changing once again. It had gone from the invasion and Operation ROW, through the G Squadron tour when it was expected to pursue the bewildering range of missions of Operation PARADOXICAL, to finding a new focus as a counterterrorist force operating from the country’s capital. Its masters in the UK, Charles Beaufort and the Director of Special Forces had, as part of the price of convincing other Whitehall players who did not believe in their mission, been forced to place the operation under the control of the Chief of Joint Operations in Northwood – the command centre that runs Britain’s worldwide operations – instead of running it on their own.
Some argue that this new arrangement would not have happened had Graeme Lamb still been DSF. In July 2003 he had been promoted to major-general and given command of an armoured division. In his place came Brigadier Peter Rogers – who, perhaps, was not inclined to take on the fight so early in his tenure. The change might seem like a dry, bureaucratic distinction, but it was important in defining what happened subsequently. It meant abandoning an element of the independence the SAS enjoyed during the invasion and Operation PARADOXICAL. The free-wheeling days of that summer and autumn, in which G and A squadrons had been joined at the hip to Delta and JSOC, were over. And, as the soldier-monk refined his ideas, it would become more difficult for the SAS to cooperate fruitfully with McChrystal. UK special forces lost their distinct chain of command in accepting the ‘interference’ of officers in Northwood, some of whom were deeply sceptical about the Iraq mission. A few of these figures, even if they understood why the main deployment of British forces in southern Iraq was politically necessary, couldn’t see why the SAS had to be in Baghdad at all. One officer who fought this battle of office politics back home recalls that some were asking, ‘Is this the SF out on the flank doing their own fucking thing again?’ The new DSF, Peter Rogers , ‘wanted to tread more lightly in Whitehall than Graeme Lamb had. [He] had to put the whole thing on a more sustainable footing, and a joint operation was a sort of loss leader.’
So the SAS got its helicopters and expanded military intelligence capability. In return, it gave up some operational independence to the Chief of Joint Operations (CJO) at Northwood and planted the seeds for possible conflict with the classified American operation of JSOC. There were various things that the SAS had not or could not be given as A Squadron was replaced late in 2003. Britain did not at that time have its own Predator drones for live video coverage of targets. It had to rely on limited coverage from Nimrod manned surveillance aircraft, but even that was often unavailable. It did not have its own detainee facilities in Baghdad either. And it was in this area that trouble was brewing for both the British and the new JSOC commander.
This establishment of a ‘semi-detached British operation’ in Baghdad, under closer supervision from UK-based officers, ran counter to the network that McChrystal wanted to develop. But at that moment the finer points of command structures or UK–US cooperation were hardly at the forefront of most people’s minds. For at the time the new JSOC commander arrived and A Squadron mounted its Ramadi operation almost every aspect of the US project in Iraq was going wrong. Lives, and American prestige, were haemorrhaging away.
The Coalition Provisional Authority, set up to run the country until an Iraqi government could be established, had proven inefficient, misplacing
During the dying days of A Squadron’s four-month deployment, the character of the SAS operation in Iraq was changing once again. It had gone from the invasion and Operation ROW, through the G Squadron tour when it was expected to pursue the bewildering range of missions of Operation PARADOXICAL, to finding a new focus as a counterterrorist force operating from the country’s capital. Its masters in the UK, Charles Beaufort and the Director of Special Forces had, as part of the price of convincing other Whitehall players who did not believe in their mission, been forced to place the operation under the control of the Chief of Joint Operations in Northwood – the command centre that runs Britain’s worldwide operations – instead of running it on their own.
Some argue that this new arrangement would not have happened had Graeme Lamb still been DSF. In July 2003 he had been promoted to major-general and given command of an armoured division. In his place came Brigadier Peter Rogers – who, perhaps, was not inclined to take on the fight so early in his tenure. The change might seem like a dry, bureaucratic distinction, but it was important in defining what happened subsequently. It meant abandoning an element of the independence the SAS enjoyed during the invasion and Operation PARADOXICAL. The free-wheeling days of that summer and autumn, in which G and A squadrons had been joined at the hip to Delta and JSOC, were over. And, as the soldier-monk refined his ideas, it would become more difficult for the SAS to cooperate fruitfully with McChrystal. UK special forces lost their distinct chain of command in accepting the ‘interference’ of officers in Northwood, some of whom were deeply sceptical about the Iraq mission. A few of these figures, even if they understood why the main deployment of British forces in southern Iraq was politically necessary, couldn’t see why the SAS had to be in Baghdad at all. One officer who fought this battle of office politics back home recalls that some were asking, ‘Is this the SF out on the flank doing their own fucking thing again?’ The new DSF, Peter Rogers , ‘wanted to tread more lightly in Whitehall than Graeme Lamb had. [He] had to put the whole thing on a more sustainable footing, and a joint operation was a sort of loss leader.’
So the SAS got its helicopters and expanded military intelligence capability. In return, it gave up some operational independence to the Chief of Joint Operations (CJO) at Northwood and planted the seeds for possible conflict with the classified American operation of JSOC. There were various things that the SAS had not or could not be given as A Squadron was replaced late in 2003. Britain did not at that time have its own Predator drones for live video coverage of targets. It had to rely on limited coverage from Nimrod manned surveillance aircraft, but even that was often unavailable. It did not have its own detainee facilities in Baghdad either. And it was in this area that trouble was brewing for both the British and the new JSOC commander.
This establishment of a ‘semi-detached British operation’ in Baghdad, under closer supervision from UK-based officers, ran counter to the network that McChrystal wanted to develop. But at that moment the finer points of command structures or UK–US cooperation were hardly at the forefront of most people’s minds. For at the time the new JSOC commander arrived and A Squadron mounted its Ramadi operation almost every aspect of the US project in Iraq was going wrong. Lives, and American prestige, were haemorrhaging away.
The Coalition Provisional Authority, set up to run the country until an Iraqi government could be established, had proven inefficient, misplacing
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