Secret Armies Of The Night

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Sometimes they just got lucky: a 12-man Green Beret team in customized humvees came upon a Shi'ite cleric and several hundred of his anti-Saddam disciples near Basra on March 20, according to the team's intelligence officer. The cleric sheltered the U.S. troops and their vehicles in warehouses as they plotted joint maneuvers. The Americans deputized the locals and then passed out Chinese-made weapons to the cleric's men and led them on a number of successful raids, seizing more than 100 antitank missiles. When the same Green Berets couldn't dislodge a well-entrenched Iraqi detachment from around a bridge in Basra, they broadcast the sound of approaching tanks from their humvees, drawing the Iraqi troops out of hiding and exposing them to fire--a model psychological operation. "It was bait-and-ambush," the intelligence officer said later.

Some of the special-forces troops in Iraq had seen it all before--12 years ago, to be exact. Long before the war with Iraq began, officials at the U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., combed service records for names of commandos who had seen action in 1991's Operation Provide Comfort, which gave food and shelter to Kurdish refugees after Saddam crushed their rebellion. The goal: to lure these American soldiers out of private life and back into action. "We wanted them for the places they'd been and the people they knew," said a top officer. Army rules prohibit the service from relying on more than 100 retired commandos at any time; by mid-March, a top Army official told TIME, 88 had been tapped to return to the region.

Grouped in tiny knots of fewer than half a dozen, many of these special-forces veterans were dropped into northern Iraq months before the war. The teams began to renew old ties and make new ones, traveling with interpreters, wearing local garb, trying to blend in and take control. An Army captain who jumped into the region with a team of four others told TIME that his detachment suddenly found itself in charge of 300 Kurdish fighters from the north, known as peshmerga, who had been fighting Saddam for a dozen years. Joint strategy meetings were anything but regular Army. "A lot of communication goes on over pita bread, chai and rice," said the U.S. officer. "We ate what they ate."

But they fought with very different weapons. The Army captain carried a special scope that enabled him, while hiding several miles away, to fix on elements of an Iraqi artillery battalion south of Arbil, moving toward the city. With U.S. and Kurdish troops blocking the way, the Army officer radioed targeting information on his scope to Air Force air-traffic controllers. They sent B-52s packing a flurry of 2,000-lb. bombs to push the Iraqis 10 miles back down the road. Several U.S. officials who worked on coordinating air strikes for special-forces teams told TIME that often as little as 10 minutes elapsed between an initial call for help from the Kurdish-controlled areas of the north and the first bombs falling. "How do you make 50 special-forces teams look 10 feet tall?" asked General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the war's opening days. "You put Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force power with them. With the right communications and laser designators, you've got a pretty formidable force."