Book Coming Soon...

 

Excerpt from book intro...

The wind pulled at my legs, dragging them towards the rear of the UH-60 Black Hawk as my teammates and I sat in the left side doorway awaiting our arrival at this evening’s target. The wind felt good up here as I scanned the horizon through my NODs (Night Optical Devices), cooler than the unforgiving heat on the ground. We had become quite used to these middle of the night raids on various targets in the central Iraq theater, but this one was somewhat different. We had been standing by on red status in our hootches adjacent to the airfield when we got the alert to launch for a HVT (High Value Target) capture/kill. We received the mission, cobbled together an OPORD and were on the birds within ten minutes. We had gone after HVT’s before, but this one was near the top of the wanted list, a high level bomb maker meeting with some of his apprentices. This one also hit home with us in particular, as we had lost more than a few brothers to IEDs during our rotation in country. The crew chief to my right held up his index finger and shouted “one minute”, I repeated this action as did my teammates until the whole group was informed of being one minute out from the target. I could feel the adrenaline starting to rise in my bloodstream, despite having done this many times over there was still the lingering reality that there could be a bullet with your name on it this time, but, you learn to push it to the back of your brain and focus on the mission. The crew chief flashed a “C” symbol with his hand, indicating 30 seconds out. I unhooked the nylon strap that ran across the open door and passed it back to the guy next to me, then ran my left hand down my own safety strap until it met with the carabiner connecting me to the airframe’s deck, unhooking it and re-latching it to the anchor point on my belt. I was looking down for any threats from the approaching ground when we suddenly started to lift back skyward. I looked over at the crew chief and lifted my open palm skyward in the universal “WTF” gesture. Just then our OIC grabbed my shoulder and leaned in to my ear “we just got FRAGO’d, the first team on the ground reports that the target squirted in a vehicle towards the south, we are going to get ahead of them and set an ambush”.

A few minutes later, we touched down in a tilled over field. The bird lifted off from our drop point as we lay in the prone and conducted SLLS. After a few minutes that seemed like an eternity, we rose to our feet and moved towards the target road just to our west. We quickly broke into two elements and set up a hasty V shaped ambush in the tall elephant grass on both sides of the slightly elevated road. We received word from our ISR asset that the suspected target vehicle was approaching our fix from the north. The term “suspected” did not give me a warm and fuzzy as we had been down this road before with faulty intelligence, but such is the nature of war. As the target vehicle came into view, a wave of relief washed over me…they were driving with no headlights, taking advantage of the clear skies and three-quarter moon…this had to be our guy. Who else would be driving blacked out?

As they moved into our kill zone, our SAW gunner on the leading edge of the V put a burst of fire through the grill into the engine compartment, causing the car to quickly come to a stop. We began lasing the occupants of the vehicle as we saw them. The car had barely stopped moving when the driver stepped out onto the road and began to raise a stockless AK-47. He instantly received several 77 grain OTM rounds into his chest, causing him to crumple to the ground. This had the instant effect of the remaining passengers throwing their hands skyward and shouting their surrender, “ la tutliq alnaar!”. We quickly moved up onto the road and began securing the passengers. Once they were zip tied, I clicked on a light and ID’d our target, “bingo” I said out loud. I searched him and retrieved several random items, but of particular note was his cellphone.

 

This, as you may suspect, brings me to the point of this trip down memory lane. The whole reason this mission was launched in the first place was because this bad guy’s cellphone IMEI and IMSI were picked up by our local SIGINT assets. These unique identifiers were on a rather long list of known bad actors’ phones. This particular one had been quiet for months, meaning it had not been powered on in the vicinity of any cell towers/BTS’s. The IMEI, or International Mobile Equipment Identity, is a 15 digit unique identifier tied to the physical phone, while the IMSI, or International Mobile Subscriber Identity, resides on the SIM card and ties the user to the particular service provider. A cellphone will “ping” the nearest cell tower every 3-5 seconds, identifying itself each time with its corresponding IMEI/IMSI pair. This is not the last time this technique would be used by myself and my colleagues during my time in the military and later in the CIA. 

 

Hopefully, this highlights the potential hazards of using technology such as cellphones. In the incident above, the “target” was a wanted Al-Qaeda terrorist, but this technology could just as easily be leveraged against anyone using a cellphone.  

 

The reason I decided to create the GroundRod tradecraft courses and eventually write this book, was to give the average citizen out there a fighting chance with regard to his privacy in this increasingly uncertain digital age. Many people I talk to describe a sense of helplessness when it comes to their privacy and security, stating that they doubt there is anything they can do to counter the threats from invasive corporations, digital criminals and overreaching governments or “Big Brother”. I am here to tell you that there is much you can do, and it is not as difficult as one may think. These are concepts that are covered extensively in my training courses, but I wanted to create a short, simple, easy to digest guide on the subject, written from the “operator’s” point of view. This is that effort...