President Donald Trump’s announcement of the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi revealed a slew of sensitive details about the secret military operation that could imperil future raids, special operations and intelligence, veterans fear.
Trump, who spoke for a full 48 minutes and took a series of questions at the White House, went into unusual detail about the mission inside hostile territory in Syria that he said he watched in real time “as though you were watching a movie."
Among the most striking were his descriptions of how the Army Delta Force was inserted into the heavily fortified compound, breached its walls to avoid booby-trapped doors and pursued the terrorist kingpin into a network of tunnels, where he detonated his suicide vest, killing himself and three children. But considered especially egregious were Trump's remarks about the number and route of the commando's helicopters.
“I always get a little bit nervous when people without knowledge of operations start describing operations,” said Michael Nagata, a retired Army lieutenant general who was the senior special operations commander in the Middle East during the early stages of the anti-ISIS campaign. “It’s a good story, and I can understand the impulse to tell a good story. Telling it can have positive benefits. But the benefits are unpredictable and marginal, whereas the harm could be more substantial."
Taken together, some of the details Trump revealed could help terrorist groups piece together new information about how U.S. counterterrorism forces gather intelligence and execute such dangerous missions, said veterans of previous operations.
"I’m surprised that he went into that level of granularity,” said a former senior military officer who has commanded troops in the region and like some others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject.
Nagata stressed that Trump is not alone in the practice. He cited the 2011 raid in Pakistan that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, which was recounted in significant detail at the time by Obama administration officials.
"This tradition two administrations have established of talking about the details of missions like these may actually make them more dangerous and more difficult in the future,” said Nagata, who was also the senior U.S. military officer in Pakistan at the time of the Bin Laden mission.
Here are a few examples of things Trump shared on Sunday that have been raising eyebrows.
The intelligence
Trump didn’t offer specifics about how the U.S. located Baghdadi. But he keyed in on the highly sensitive discipline of signals intelligence — or the remote monitoring of enemy communications — that struck several with deep experience as better left alone.
“These people are very smart, they’re not into cell phones anymore," Trump said. "They're not — they're very technically brilliant. You know, they use the internet better than almost anybody in the world, perhaps other than Donald Trump. But they use the internet incredibly well."
"Why mention it?” asked Nagata. "It could contribute to a reverse engineering of our intelligence methods by the adversary, and if there’s any possibility of that, why do it?”
Trump also described the layout of the compound. "The tunnels were dead end for the most part," he recounted. "There was one we think that wasn’t but we had that covered too,” he said, seemingly suggesting the U.S. mapped the tunnel network ahead of time.
“That’s a bit sensitive,” said a former special operations commander who also asked that he not be identified. “The enemy knows to some degree that we have technology that can detect that. But they don’t know how it’s done or how good we are at, and we don’t want them to.”
“This is something the president should not have said about the target development,” added Eric Robinson, a former Army officer who held positions in intelligence and special operations forces until last year. “It’s reckless. But it’s not as bad as hanging the satellite image of the Iranian space launch site two months ago. That was bad.”
The raid
Trump also specified the number of helicopters the commandos used — eight — and reported that, upon landing, the commandos “blew holes into the side of the building, not wanting to go through the main door because that was booby-trapped.”
“Aircraft counts and means of conducting a breach are [tactics, techniques and procedures] that special operations forces have developed and learned the hard way,” said Robinson. “That wasn’t helpful to talk about.”
"The enemy sees the scene after, they’re on the ground, they see the breaching holes in building — but come on, let them figure it out on their own, don’t tell them," one of the former special operations commanders remarked.
Trump also said the commandos were in the compound for two hours.
"There’s no reason to reveal that,” the former special operations commander added. “You’re giving them another way to think about how long forces on the ground are vulnerable. Timing on an objective is something where you never want the bad guys to know what your procedure was or how long it took.”
What was seized
Before departing, the American commandos gathered intelligence, Trump said, noting some of the seized files included information on “ISIS’ origins, future plans, things that we very much want.”
It’s well known that U.S. troops are trained to gather whatever new information they can from such operations; a treasure trove of intelligence was pilfered from the bin Laden raid, much of it declassified in the decade since.
“But they don’t need to know what we took out of there," said the former special operations commander.
The helicopters' route
Finally, when the helicopters carrying the commandos and their haul took off, they “took an identical route” back to friendly territory, Trump revealed.
That detail bothered the former military officials more than any of the others. “That’s the most worrisome," said Nagata. "The force is vulnerable throughout the operation, but arrival and departure by helicopter are very dangerous. For me, the idea that anyone would talk publicly about how we did the most dangerous part of the operation — the risks far outweigh the storytelling value.”
"I don’t know why the f--- he would say that, honestly,” fumed the other former special operations commander. “If we’re doing the same approaches and egresses, that can get helicopters shot down. It’s happened in Afghanistan.”
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