What CIA field officers said after working alongside the SAS in Baghdad for 6 months. CIA field officers were not easily impressed. The nature of their profession produced a particular kind of professional skepticism about the claims and capabilities of other organizations. And that skepticism had been shaped and reinforced by years of working in environments where institutional reputation rarely matched operational reality.
The field officers who arrived in Baghdad to work alongside the joint task force in 2005 carried that skepticism with them as professional equipment, as useful to them in assessing their military partners as it was in evaluating sources. What they found over the 6 months that followed was a body of operational experience that shifted some of the foundational assumptions they had brought to the relationship.
Not all of their assessments changed, but some of the most important ones did, and they changed in ways that influenced how the CIA thought about its partnerships with military special operations forces for years afterward. Before we dive in, drop a comment and let us know where you are watching from.
If you haven’t already, make sure you hit the subscribe button to not miss any story. And check out our Patreon in the description. We post full uncensored stories there. Every graphic detail, every brutal moment, nothing redacted. Stories YouTube won’t allow. Now, let’s get into it. The operational context in Baghdad in 2005 was one of compressed timelines and high operational density.
The insurgency that had taken root in the city and its surroundings was generating intelligence at a pace that strained the capacity of available analytical resources, and the relationship between intelligence collection and direct action had compressed to a cycle that was measured in hours rather than days. Intelligence developed in the morning could produce a target for the afternoon if the chain connecting collection to analysis to action was functioning efficiently.
And the organizations best positioned to exploit that compressed cycle were those that had learned to operate at its pace without sacrificing the quality of decision-making that the stakes required. The SAS element operating within the joint task force had been organized around exactly this kind of compressed operational cycle.
The regiment had been developing the intelligence-driven network targeted approach to counterterrorism operations since the 1990s and by 2005 it had refined that approach through operational experience in multiple theaters. The SAS understood the insurgent network they were targeting not as a collection of individual targets to be struck in isolation but as a system with nodes and connections and vulnerabilities that could be exploited in sequence.
Each operation generating intelligence that fed the next. Each target removed creating gaps in the network that exposed other targets. This systemic understanding of the adversary was something the CIA field officers recognized immediately as consistent with their own analytical framework and it formed the first significant basis for professional respect between the two organizations.
The CIA field officers initial assessment of the SAS had been cautious rather than enthusiastic. Military special operations forces in the CIA’s professional experience tended to excel at physical execution and struggle with the subtleties of human intelligence. The patience required to develop sources over time, the analytical sophistication needed to evaluate reporting accurately, the cultural and linguistic competence that distinguished useful intelligence from noise. These were generalizations and the CIA officers knew they were generalizations, but they were generalizations rooted in a body of professional experience that gave them some empirical foundation. The SAS had a reputation that preceded them, but reputations were things CIA professionals evaluated cautiously. The first 6 weeks of the partnership were a period of mutual assessment conducted through the medium of operational collaboration.
The CIA officers observed how the SAS collected intelligence, how they evaluated what they collected, how they integrated intelligence from multiple sources, signals, human, technical into a targeting picture, and how they translated that picture into operations. What they observed did not conform to their prior expectations in several respects.
The SAS relationship with human intelligence was more sophisticated than the CIA field officers had anticipated. The regiment’s operators were not case officers in the CIA sense. They did not run long-term source development operations, but they had developed an approach to short-term human intelligence exploitation that was both technically effective and operationally useful.
Detainee questioning conducted by SAS operators with appropriate skills and under the legal frameworks that govern military operations produced intelligence that the CIA analysts found actionable. Source contacts developed by SAS operators during the course of their ground presence in the city, casual encounters, deliberate relationship building with local figures, the kind of low-level human connectivity that produced information about the environment rather than specific targetable intelligence fed the analytical picture in ways that supplemented the more formal collection programs. The SAS also demonstrated a technical intelligence capability that exceeded what the CIA field officers had expected. The regiment had invested significantly in the skills required to exploit the technical materials recovered during direct action operations. The communications equipment, documents, electronic devices, and digital media
that each raid potentially yielded. The speed at which the SAS could move from a completed operation to an intelligence product derived from the materials recovered was faster than the CIA’s own exploitation pipeline for similar material, not because the CIA’s analytical standards were lower, but because the SAS had developed an integrated approach that kept the intelligence exploitation chain within the operational unit rather than pushing it to a separate analytical cell.
The professional conversations that developed between the CIA field officers and the SAS operators over the 6-month period ranged across methodology, tradecraft, and the specific operational environment of Baghdad at that moment. The field officers contributed analytical perspective and source access that the SAS valued and could not fully replicate independently.
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The SAS contributed operational execution capability and a tempo of operations that the CIA’s own paramilitary assets could not match. The combination produced results that both organizations assessed as superior to what either could have achieved independently, and the assessment of the SAS that the CIA field officers eventually communicated through their reporting channels reflected this experience accurately.
The most significant shift in the CIA field officers assessment came around the 6-week mark when a specific operational sequence demonstrated the SAS approach to intelligence-driven operations in a way that abstract description had not fully conveyed. A piece of signals intelligence had produced a partial picture of a target’s location.
Partial in the sense that it indicated a general area rather than a specific address. The CIA’s analytical process for developing such a partial picture into a full operational target would normally have involved additional collection against the area, a period of analytical development, and eventual production of a targeting package that met the agency’s standards for confidence and specificity.
This process typically took days. The SAS approach to the same partial intelligence picture was different. The regiment’s operators had developed through operational experience in Iraq and other environments a methodology for using ground presence to close the gap between partial intelligence and operational quality intelligence.
A two-man SAS team was deployed to the area indicated by the signals intelligence, and over a period of approximately 18 hours of careful ground observation developed the additional information that converted the partial picture into a complete target. The CIA field officers watching this process recognized it as something that fell in the space between military reconnaissance and intelligence collection.
A hybrid capability that the CIA’s own paramilitary assets did not fully replicate. The targeting operation that resulted from this process was conducted within 36 hours of the initial signals intelligence product. The CIA’s standard cycle for the same type of development would have produced the operation in approximately five days, assuming no complications in the additional collection phase.
The difference in timeline was not simply a matter of speed. In the operational environment of Baghdad in 2005, the difference between 36 hours and five days was the difference between acting on intelligence while it was valid and acting on intelligence that had expired. The SAS methodology had produced a target that was where the intelligence said it would be.
Whether a 5-day development cycle would have produced a target that had moved was a counterfactual that the CIA field officers were careful about stating as a certainty, but the implication was present in their professional assessment. The SAS also demonstrated an approach to source handling that surprised the CIA officers.
The regiment’s operators had developed relationships with local informants and community contacts in their operational area that were less formally structured than CIA source relationships, but that produced real-time information with a regularity and reliability that the CIA officers found valuable.
The SAS were not running agents in the CIA sense. They were not managing clandestine source networks with the security protocols and operational security standards that CIA tradecraft required. What they were doing was maintaining a level of community engagement that produced information without the full weight of formal intelligence collection methodology, and that information supplemented the CIA’s own collection in ways that had operational value.
The CIA officers’ formal assessment, submitted through reporting channels at the end of the 6-month period, was careful in its language as CIA assessments tended to be, but its conclusions were clear. The SAS had demonstrated an operational capability that the CIA had underestimated at the beginning of the relationship.
Their intelligence exploitation skills were more sophisticated than the CIA had anticipated. Their human contact capabilities, while different from CIA tradecraft, produced results that were operationally valuable. Their operational tempo, the speed at which they could move from intelligence to operation, exceeded what the CIA’s own paramilitary assets could achieve and created effects on the network they were jointly targeting that the CIA’s independent operations had not been producing at the same pace.
The assessment also noted something more intangible but no less real, the professional culture of the SAS, which the CIA officers had been in a position to observe at close range over 6 months, was one that the CIA found congenial in ways that were not always the case with military organizations. The SAS culture of individual competence and collective accountability, the regiment’s approach to understanding the operational environment rather than simply reacting to it, and the quality of tactical judgment that the regiment’s selection and training processes had produced were all characteristics that CIA field officers, who operated in environments that required similar qualities, recognized and valued. The institutional relationship that developed between the CIA element and the SAS during those 6 months was not simply a functional partnership. It was a professional relationship built on
genuine mutual respect of the kind that only develops between organizations that have taken each other’s measure at close range and found it worth respecting. The period following the joint operations with the SAS was one in which the CIA field officers incorporated specific elements of the SAS methodology into their own operational approach.
This incorporation was selective rather than wholesale. The CIA and the SAS had different institutional mandates, different legal frameworks governing their operations, and different long-term objectives that shaped the value of different methodologies. What the CIA took from the SAS experience was primarily the integrated intelligence exploitation approach and the compressed cycle from intelligence to operation adapted to CIA authorities and procedures.
The SAS, for their part, continued their operational work in Baghdad without direct knowledge of how the CIA’s subsequent practice had been influenced by the joint experience. The regiment’s operators did not track the institutional effects of their methods on partner organizations. That was not their business.
Their business was the operational tasks in front of them, and those tasks were pursued with the same approach regardless of who was observing or what conclusions those observers were drawing. The formal assessments that the CIA field officers produced about the SAS during and after the 6-month period were classified at the appropriate level and distributed through appropriate channels.
The conclusions they contained did not become public, but the informal professional assessments, the things that CIA officers said to colleagues in the kinds of conversations that intelligence professionals had in the margins of formal discussions, were more direct and more specific than formal reporting language allowed.
The SAS had exceeded expectations in specific ways that the CIA had not anticipated. The regiment had demonstrated capabilities in human intelligence and technical exploitation that the CIA had not expected to find in a military unit. And the professional culture of the SAS, the institutional values, the approach to the work, the relationship between individual capability and collective effectiveness had produced in the CIA field officers the kind of professional respect that those officers extended to very few organizations outside their own. The specific capabilities that the CIA field officers had not expected to find in a military unit were concentrated in the areas of human intelligence methodology and technical exploitation. The SAS operators had developed through operational experience in Iraq and Afghanistan a practical proficiency in
both areas that went beyond what their formal training classification suggested. They had learned through doing, through years of working in environments where intelligence collection and tactical exploitation were tightly integrated, and where the gap between the last operation and the next one was measured in hours rather than days.
The CIA’s own methodology in both areas was more formalized and more deeply developed than what the SAS brought. What the SAS brought that the CIA found valuable was not superior technical capability, but superior integration. The ability to connect intelligence collection, tactical action, and exploitation in a single operational flow without the organizational seams that separated these functions in most intelligence-military partnerships.
The SAS operators collected, acted, and exploited as a continuous process rather than a sequential one, and the intelligence products that resulted from this integrated approach were generated with a speed that the CIA’s more compartmentalized methodology could not match.
The 6-month joint period produced intelligence that influenced coalition targeting for a period well beyond the immediate partnership. The networks that the joint operations had illuminated remained illuminated. The intelligence picture that the targeting cycle had built did not degrade as quickly as intelligence pictures built through less integrated methodologies because the exploitation had been thorough, and the cross-referencing between human intelligence and technical collection had been done as each operation’s findings were still fresh. The CIA field officers understood what had produced this result, and their professional assessments reflected that understanding with a specificity that went beyond generic praise of allied capabilities. The institutional lessons the CIA drew from the 6-month joint period were not immediately applied at the organizational level. Institutional learning in large intelligence organizations operated on
timescales longer than the operational period that had generated the lesson, because the lesson needed to travel from the field officers who had experienced it through organizational channels to the training and doctrine processes that could act on it. By the time the lesson reached those processes, the operational context that had made it vivid was months or years in the past, and the people making institutional decisions about how to act on it had not personally experienced what the field officers had experienced. This was a common pattern in institutional learning across government organizations, and the CIA was not exceptional in exhibiting it. What made the SAS joint period notable in this context was the specificity with which the field officers were able to communicate what they had observed. The precision of their professional language allowed them to describe the SAS methodology in terms that translated more cleanly into institutional learning
inputs than vaguer accounts of allied performance might have. The field officers knew what they were looking at, could describe it with precision, and could explain why it produced the results it produced. That quality of description made the lesson more transmittable. The individual changes that CIA field officers made to their own practice were more immediate and more direct than the institutional changes.
Field officers who had worked with the SAS and absorbed specific elements of their methodology applied those elements in their subsequent operational assignments without waiting for institutional authorization. The individual learning cycle was faster than the institutional one, which meant that the SAS’s operational influence diffused through the CIA’s operational workforce before it was formally recognized in institutional doctrine.
This pattern, individual operational learning outpacing institutional adaptation, was characteristic of how effective allied relationships influenced each other in mature operational environments. The formal mechanisms of knowledge transfer were slower than the informal mechanisms, but the informal mechanisms depended on the personal professional relationships that joint operations created.
The SAS’s 6 months alongside CIA field officers in Baghdad had created those relationships and activated those informal transfer mechanisms. The intelligence community would feel the effects for years in specific operational approaches of specific officers who had worked through a specific operational period with a unit that had shown them something they had not seen before.
The specific operational methodology that the CIA field officers found most valuable in the SAS’s approach was what they described as the absence of functional handoffs. In standard intelligence to action cycles, the handoffs between collection, analysis, targeting, and exploitation introduced delays and information loss at each transition.
The person who collected the information was not the person who analyzed it. The person who analyzed it was not the person who acted on it. The person who acted on it was not the person who exploited the results. Each handoff required translation between contexts and translation introduced both delay and distortion.
The SAS’s integrated approach compressed or eliminated many of these handoffs. The operators who conducted the operation were the operators who had contributed to the intelligence development that shaped it, and they were the operators who conducted the exploitation afterward. The information that shaped each phase was held by the people who had collected it, had lived with it, and understood its context in ways that analytical summaries could not fully capture.
This contextual richness made each phase more precise because the people executing each phase were working from a fuller picture than handoff-dependent processes provided. The CIA’s institutional structure made comprehensive adoption of this approach impossible. The agency had functional divisions that existed for good reasons, including the specialization that allowed deep expertise to develop in each functional area.
But the observation that handoffs cost something, and that minimizing unnecessary handoffs improved operational quality, was applicable within the CIA structure as a principle of process design even when full functional integration was not achievable. The field officers who carried this observation back into the CIA’s organizational life did so in ways that were calibrated to what was actually changeable within the institutional structure they inhabited.
They were not proposing that the CIA reorganize itself around the SAS model. They were proposing specific targeted reductions in specific handoffs in specific operational workflows that were within the field officers’ authority to influence. Small changes, specifically targeted, implemented by people with direct operational experience of why they mattered.
That was how large institutional cultures absorbed lessons from outside themselves, not through wholesale transformation, but through the accumulated weight of specific, targeted changes made by practitioners who understood the specific difference each change would make. The specific operational methodology the CIA field officers found most valuable was what they described as the absence of functional handoffs.
In standard intelligence-to-action cycles, handoffs between collection, analysis, targeting, and exploitation introduced delays and information loss at each transition. The person who collected the information was not the person who analyzed it. The person who analyzed it was not the person who acted on it.
The person who acted was not the person who exploited the results. Each handoff required translation between contexts, and translation introduced both delay and distortion. The SAS’s integrated approach compressed or eliminated many of these handoffs. The operators who conducted the operation were the operators who had contributed to the intelligence development that shaped it, and they were the operators who conducted the exploitation afterward.
The information that shaped each phase was held by people who had collected it, had lived with it, and understood its context in ways that analytical summaries could not fully capture. The CIA’s institutional structure made comprehensive adoption of this approach impossible. The agency had functional divisions that existed for good reasons, including the specialization that allowed deep expertise to develop in each area.
But the observation that handoffs cost something, and that minimizing unnecessary handoffs improved operational quality, was applicable within the CIA structure as a principle of process design, even when full functional integration was not achievable. The field officers who carried this observation back into the CIA’s organizational life did so in ways calibrated to what was actually changeable within the institutional structure they inhabited.
They were not proposing wholesale reorganization around the SAS model. They were proposing specific targeted reductions in specific hand-offs in specific operational workflows that were within the field officer’s authority to influence. Small changes, specifically targeted, implemented by practitioners who understood the specific difference each change would make.
This was how large institutional cultures absorbed lessons from outside themselves. The institutional lessons the CIA drew from the 6-month joint period operated on time scales longer than the operational period that had generated them. By the time the lessons reached the training and doctrine processes that could act on them, the operational context that had made them vivid was months or years in the past.
But the individual changes that CIA field officers made to their own practice were immediate and direct. Field officers who had worked with the SAS applied specific elements of the methodology in their subsequent assignments without waiting for institutional authorization. The individual learning cycle was faster than the institutional one, which meant that the SAS’s operational influence diffused through the CIA’s operational workforce before it was formally recognized in institutional doctrine. That diffusion was the most consequential form of the 6-month professional legacy. The 6-month joint period in Baghdad in the CIA field officers who participated in it a professional frame shift that was more consequential than any specific technique or methodology they had observed. The frame shift was about the relationship between intelligence collection and tactical action, about the possibility that these two functions, which in the CIA’s
organizational model were largely sequential and largely separated, could be more integrated than the CIA’s structure assumed, and that the integration produced a quality of result that the sequential model consistently fell short of. The SAS demonstrated this integration not by explaining it, but by doing it, operation after operation, over 6 months in conditions that allowed the CIA field officers to observe the full cycle from intelligence development to action, to exploitation, and back to intelligence development. The cycle was not perfect. No operational cycle in a complex environment is, but it was faster, tighter, and more self-reinforcing than the CIA’s operational cycle in adjacent areas. And the difference was visible enough that the field officers could not miss it. What the CIA field officers said about the SAS in informal professional contexts was, in aggregate, a precise
and credible professional assessment of a partner organization’s operational methodology. It was not a fusillade of praise. It was specific professional recognition, the acknowledgement that specific aspects of the SAS’s approach produced specific results that the CIA’s approach was not producing at the same rate, and that the difference was methodological rather than resourced or circumstantial.
This kind of specific professional recognition from a partner organization as rigorous and demanding as the CIA was not something the SAS sought, and was not something it received frequently. The CIA did not give it lightly. The 6 months had been long enough, and the operational evidence had been substantial enough that the assessment was grounded in something more than the first impressions that shorter partnerships generated.
The SAS had performed consistently over a sustained period in front of professional observers who were qualified to assess what they were seeing. The assessment that resulted was the natural product of quality observed over time by people capable of recognizing it. The professional respect the CIA field officers had developed for the SAS was, by the end of the 6-month period, specific enough that it survived the transition back to normal operational life and the rotation of personnel that followed.
Officers who had worked with the SAS in Baghdad carried the professional assessment with them into subsequent assignments, and the assessment influenced how those officers thought about military intelligence integration, about the design of intelligence to action cycles, and about the specific qualities that made partner organizations genuinely useful rather than nominally useful.
The SAS, for its part, had conducted 6 months of operational work in Baghdad alongside the CIA and had formed its own professional assessment of the partnership. The CIA’s collection capabilities and analytical depth were resources the SAS had used effectively and respected professionally. The CIA’s analytical tradecraft, the systematic approach to building and testing intelligence pictures, was more developed than anything the SAS had in-house, and the SAS operators who had worked closest to the CIA’s analysts had absorbed professional approaches to intelligence assessment that informed their subsequent operational work. Both organizations had contributed to a joint operational period that was, by the professional assessment of the people who participated in it, more effective than either could have been operating independently in the same environment. The joint effectiveness was not automatic. It had been built through the professional work of specific people
on both sides who were willing to engage honestly with each other’s methodologies and to integrate rather than coordinate. Integration was harder than coordination. Coordination kept each organization’s methods intact and passed information between them. Integration allowed each organization’s methods to shape how the other approached its work.
The Baghdad period had achieved integration in specific areas, and the specific areas where it had achieved it were the areas where the joint operational output had been most notably effective. The 6 months concluded, the personnel rotated, the operational record was filed. The professional relationships endured in the informal ways that genuine professional relationships endure.
In occasional correspondence, in the professional conversations that happened when people crossed paths at courses or assignments, and in the specific ways that each participant’s professional practice was influenced by what the Baghdad period had developed. The professional landscape of the coalition’s intelligence military integration had, by the point when the CIA field officers were working with the SAS in Baghdad, been shaped by years of operational experience across Afghanistan and Iraq that had produced lessons, failed experiments, successful models, and a general professional awareness that the integration was both necessary and difficult. The CIA SAS partnership was one episode in this longer story, and its value was partly in the specific operational results it produced, and partly in the specific contribution it made to the coalition’s accumulated understanding of what successful intelligence military
integration looked like in practice. Successful integration, the Baghdad experience confirmed, required specific conditions that were not automatically present when intelligence and military organizations were placed in operational proximity. It required personal professional relationships between specific individuals who trusted each other’s competence and were willing to share information and methodology that organizational cultures tended to protect.
It required operational pace that created the pressure to integrate rather than to coordinate, the pressure of time that made the handoff costs of sequential methodology too high to bear. And it required institutional tolerance on both sides for the departure from standard operating procedure that genuine integration demanded. The CIA field officers had found the SAS to be partners who met all three conditions consistently across six months.
The trust had been established early and maintained through operational performance. The operational pace had been high enough to make integration functionally necessary. The SAS’s institutional culture was, in the specific operational context, tolerant of the departures from standard procedure that working closely with a foreign intelligence organization required.
The six months had been productive because the conditions for productivity had been present, and the conditions had been present because both organizations had invested in making them present rather than in protecting institutional prerogatives at the cost of operational effectiveness. What the CIA field officers said about the SAS in informal professional conversations was, in the end, not dramatically different from what elite organizations said about other elite organizations when they had worked together long enough to form genuine assessments. It was praise that was specific, qualified, and grounded in direct experience. It acknowledged areas of genuine capability and said nothing about areas that were outside the scope of the six months experience. It was the kind of assessment that serious professionals gave to other serious professionals, neither hagiographic nor diplomatically muted, but honest and precise and calibrated to the evidence available. The SAS had earned that
assessment by performing consistently across six months of operational work in conditions that were genuinely difficult and that provided genuine tests of the capabilities the assessment credited. The performance had not been uniform, no operational performance across six months was, but the quality had been high enough and the specific capabilities demonstrated had been relevant enough to the CIA field officers operational requirements that the assessment was clearly supportable.
The lasting contribution of the Baghdad partnership to the coalition’s operational effectiveness was not in the formal reporting that documented it or in the specific intelligence products that the joint operations produced, important as both were. It was in the professional understanding that the CIA field officers carried with them about what military intelligence integration could look like when the conditions for genuine integration were present and in the SAS operators understanding of what intelligence professional depth looked like when CIA analysts were working at full capability on problems the SAS’s operational work had generated. Both organizations were more sophisticated partners for having worked together and more sophisticated partners made the coalition more effective in the subsequent operational environments where both continued to operate. The six months concluded, the personnel
rotated, the operational records were filed, and both organizations moved forward into the next phase of their respective work. What the Baghdad partnership had produced in intelligence, in operational effects, and in professional understanding was absorbed into the ongoing work of two organizations that continued to operate in overlapping environments across the years that followed.
The specific people who had been there carried the professional experience of the partnership into their subsequent work and the experience shaped their professional judgments in ways that were real and persistent, even when the specific source of those judgments was not visible in the formal products the judgments informed.
This was how operational experience influenced institutional culture over time through the professional understanding of the people who had accumulated it, carried forward into the roles those people subsequently occupied and exercised in the decisions those roles required. The CIA and the SAS had worked together across six months of joint operations in Baghdad and had produced together results that neither had produced independently at the same rate in the same period.
The partnership had required professional investment from both sides in trust, in honest engagement with each other’s methodologies, and in the willingness to depart from institutional defaults when the operational requirements of genuine integration demanded it. The investment had been made. The results had followed. The professional relationships the six months had built continued in the informal ways that genuine professional relationships continued, shaping the professional judgments of the people who held them across the subsequent years of their careers in organizations that continued to operate in overlapping domains. The CIA and the SAS had each contributed professional qualities the other respected and learned from. The six months had produced results that served the coalition’s campaign, professional relationships that served the alliance’s longer-term effectiveness, and professional understanding that continued to shape the work of the people who had
accumulated it. The SAS had come to Baghdad to conduct operations. The CIA had come to Baghdad to collect intelligence and support operations. Together, they had done both better than either would have managed separately. The partnership had been worth building, and it had had built by people on both sides who understood what it was worth and invested accordingly.
Both organizations had worked and the work had produced results. The professional relationship the work had built was the result that lasted longest and it had been built on the foundation that sustained operational quality in shared conditions always built. The foundation was solid. The six months were done.
The work had been worth doing. The professional assessment reflected the truth of what had been observed, which was all any professional assessment was supposed to do.
