Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (10 page)

Most of the fighting was over within twenty-four hours, but mopping up continued for several days. For JSOC, the key mission that remained was a harbinger of the operations that would define the command in the years ahead. That mission was to find Noriega, who had gone to ground during the invasion's first hours, evading Delta and Team 6 elements tasked with his capture. This led to what Stiner later described as “one of the most intensive manhunts in history,” with Delta searching in Panama City and SEAL Team 6, led by Captain Rick Woolard, operating in western Panama and Colón on the Atlantic coast. To give his forces agile, responsive mobility, Downing used a small armor force made up of 82nd Airborne Division Sheridan light tanks, Marine light armored vehicles, and Army M113 armored personnel carriers. This was a first for many operators, but it would by no means be the last time in JSOC's history that conventional armor units were “sliced” to the special mission units. Delta conducted forty-two raids in seventy-two hours, going after Noriega's associates and dismantling his “Dignity Battalions,” the gangs of armed thugs the dictator had established to strengthen his grip on the population. Operators kicked in the doors of safe house after safe house, immediately interrogated any Noriega cronies they found, and then launched new missions based on that intelligence.

These nonstop operations set a precedent for future missions in Afghanistan and especially Iraq. Although nobody in 1989 was talking about Noriega's “network,” that's exactly what JSOC was attacking. But the Noriega manhunt also taught the command how difficult it can be to find someone who is on his own turf and doesn't want to be found. Despite the raids, Noriega stayed one step ahead of the task force until December 24, when he took refuge in the papal nunciature—the Vatican's embassy in Panama. Delta quickly surrounded the location, establishing a sniper nest in a luxury high-rise apartment that turned out to belong to boxer Roberto Durán.

After high-level negotiations between Washington and the Vatican,
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Noriega surrendered on January 3, 1990, and was put on a Combat Talon for his flight to trial (on drug smuggling charges) and captivity in the United States. His signature red underwear, which he believed protected him from harm, ended up in a display case in Delta's compound at Bragg.
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For JSOC, Operation Just Cause was a major success and represented a remarkable turnaround from Grenada. “Panama was really where they stepped up to the plate,” said a Special Forces general who did not serve in JSOC. There were several reasons why Just Cause was such an improvement over Urgent Fury. JSOC (and the rest of the U.S. forces) enjoyed some obvious advantages this time around. The tension with Noriega had been building for more than a year, so they had a long time to refine their plans. For instance, Delta built a three-quarter-scale replica of the Modelo prison at Hurlburt Field, Florida, and rehearsed Muse's rescue many times.
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The 12,000 U.S. troops permanently stationed in installations across Panama gave the invading forces a greater understanding of the country and much better intelligence than was available to those who invaded Grenada. In addition, many JSOC troops actually infiltrated Panama quietly in the weeks preceding the operation.
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But JSOC and the Pentagon had also applied the lessons of Urgent Fury. There was no last-minute dickering by service chiefs to gain a bigger share of the operation. The chain of command was tight and the head of the operation, Stiner, understood JSOC's requirements intimately, as he had recently commanded the organization. The initial assault happened at night, maximizing the advantage conveyed by JSOC's ability to fight in the darkness. In almost all cases, units were assigned missions appropriate for them. For all those reasons, and with the exception of the Paitilla fiasco, Panama was the finest hour of JSOC's first decade.

There was one other way in which Just Cause set a precedent for future JSOC operations. It marked the major operational debut of the command's use of color-themed task forces as code names for its units. Thus Delta became “Task Force Green,” Team 6 “Task Force Blue,” TF 160 “Task Force Brown,” and the Rangers “Task Force Red.”
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Some of the other color codes changed hands—the non–SEAL Team 6 Naval Special Warfare elements were “Task Force White” in Panama, but that moniker was soon given to the 24th Special Tactics Squadron (the new name for the 124th STS), for instance, and others were added. But the system endured formally or informally for another two decades, with special ops insiders often referring to Delta as “Green” or Team 6 as “Blue” in casual conversation. With the special mission units frequently changing their “official” cover names, the color codes just made things easier. JSOC headquarters soon acquired its own name in this system, taking the color the military uses to refer to anything multiservice or “joint”—“Task Force Purple.”

 

5

Manhunts, Motorboats, and Mogadishu

If JSOC was at the very center of the action for Just Cause, it was anything but during Operations Desert Shield and Storm, the United States' response to Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

U.S. Central Command boss General Norman Schwarzkopf, responsible for American military operations in the Middle East, harbored a profound suspicion of special operations forces. JSOC had recently finished an exercise that stretched across Texas and New Mexico in which Delta, the Rangers, and TF 160 conducted a deep strike against a hidden strategic target deep inside a made-up country in southwest Asia. But despite entreaties from Stiner and Downing, he seemed determined to exclude JSOC from any role in the military effort to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait. (Schwarzkopf made one exception, insisting a Delta bodyguard team augment the military police personal security detail the Defense Department had given him.) The four-star general dismissed Downing's suggestions to have JSOC launch a rescue mission for Americans trapped at the U.S. embassy in Kuwait City and to conduct direct action strikes deep into Iraq.

JSOC also did “a lot of planning” for the most sensitive mission possible: sending operators into Baghdad undercover to kill Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. “There was an effort to just solve the problem by taking out Saddam Hussein,” said a Pentagon special operations source. The project was “sanctioned by the White House, [but] that was one of those things where you provide enough cutouts you can't track it back to the president,” he said. JSOC considered a range of methods for killing Hussein, from shooting the dictator with small arms to having operators call in an air or missile strike. In the end, the officer said, the planning foundered on an all too common failing: “The intel just could not provide the proper foundations for being able to launch a mission like that.”

JSOC finally elbowed its way into the war after Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's forces began firing Scud missiles into Israel on January 17, 1991. Fearful that Israel would retaliate militarily, thus breaking apart the fragile coalition of Arab and European states lined up against Saddam, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell pulled rank on Schwarzkopf and dispatched Downing and his forces to Saudi Arabia January 28, with orders to neutralize the Scud threat. Within about a week, Downing had deployed a 400-strong task force that included two Delta squadrons, a reinforced Ranger company, some Team 6 boat crews, a TF 160 package, and a JSOC command and control element. The task force based itself in northern Saudi Arabia at Arar, a small town with an airfield about fifty miles southwest of the Iraqi border.

The operators began cross-border operations February 6. Their mission was to shut down the Scuds, which were being fired from western Iraq, in any way they could. After coordinating with the British SAS, who were also part of the “Scud Hunt,” Delta focused on the northwestern section of Iraq close to the Syrian border and conducted roughly fifteen missions into the desert looking for mobile Scud launchers. Each mission followed the same template. Helicopters would insert a team and one or two four-wheel-drive vehicles, sometimes hundreds of miles into Iraq. The operators would stay behind Iraqi lines for up to three weeks, holing up in hide sites during the day and hunting for Scuds at night, calling in air strikes on likely targets. While there were several firefights in which operators needed close air support to save them, the only casualties JSOC suffered were four MH-60 crewmen and three Delta operators killed when their helicopter crashed in bad weather near Arar. (In an indication of how long operators tended to stay in Delta, one of the dead, Sergeant Major Pat Hurley, was a Desert One veteran.)

After the war there was disagreement over whether Delta had been responsible for the destruction of any real Scuds, with suggestions that many targets were decoys. However, there was no disputing that once JSOC's campaign in western Iraq began, the number of Scuds fired declined by 80 percent, to an average of just one launch per day. The war ended with a comprehensive coalition victory February 28. The following week Schwarzkopf secretly visited Arar and spoke to the assembled task force. “What you've done is never going to be made public and we can't make it public,” he intoned. “You kept Israel out of the war.”
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It was a remarkable and ironic turnaround for a general who had worked assiduously to keep JSOC out of his combat theater. In future years, JSOC would make converts of many other senior conventional force officers. The operators, and those who came after them, would also have cause to revisit the tactics and locations of their brief foray to southwest Asia. In the meantime, they had business elsewhere.

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On a warm, almost moonless night in the first week of October 1991, a small group of Team 6 operators climbed down a caving ladder thrown over the side of a Navy nuclear guided-missile cruiser, boarded four Zodiac F470 small rubber boats, and motored across calm Caribbean waters toward the coastline about 1,500 meters to the northeast. Wearing dark camouflage face paint and night vision goggles, the SEALs scanned the shoreline. They had only a three-hour window in which to execute their mission, and the beach they were approaching, in the shadow of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, appeared deserted. But when the SEALs flashed red lens flashlights, the agreed-upon recognition code, they saw similar red lights winking up ahead. A short radio call confirmed the flashlights on the beach were being wielded by undercover operatives from the unit previously known as the Intelligence Support Activity, which many now referred to by its nickname: the Army of Northern Virginia. A few hundred meters from the shore the SEALs cut the outboard motors and paddled quietly the rest of the way. One of the boats headed left and another right, each carrying SEALs who were there to provide flank security. The two “pickup” boats, carrying operators from Team 6's Red Team, went straight ahead and landed on the beach. Waiting in the brush on the other side of fifteen feet of sand, right where they and their Army of Northern Virginia protectors were supposed to be, were what a source familiar with the mission estimated at about nine Haitians that the U.S. government felt it was imperative to rescue, and had turned to JSOC to make it happen.

(More than twenty years after the mission, sources who took part are divided about the identities of the “precious cargo”—as those rescued in such operations are called—and why the U.S. government was so keen to get them out of Haiti. The CIA had been in charge of that side of the operation. “The details of that were very compartmented,” said an Army of Northern Virginia source, adding that not even the operatives from the Fort Belvoir unit knew who they were taking to the beach. “Our job was to be the driver and facilitate, get them to the right spot and hand them off,” he said.

Some in Team 6 thought they were rescuing relatives of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the populist Haitian president elected the previous year but deposed September 29 in a military coup. The coup leaders had already forced Aristide into exile, but his relatives had been forced to remain behind and were considered at risk. “My understanding at the time was it was members of Aristide's immediate family,” said a Team 6 source. But the JSOC staff was under the impression that the people being rescued were a U.S. intelligence asset and his family. “It was a source that had been providing information to U.S. intelligence and it got too hot for them and they had to come out,” said a senior JSOC officer. Another special operations officer familiar with the preparations for the mission said U.S. officials feared that Haitians suspected of helping the United States would suffer death by “necklacing,” the practice of burning victims to death by forcing gasoline-filled tires around their bodies and setting the tires alight. Of course, these two accounts are not mutually exclusive. A third version of events, which appears in the autobiography of Dennis Chalker, a Team 6 senior chief petty officer on the mission, holds that the key individual being rescued was an eighteen-month-old baby girl who was a U.S. citizen. However, other, more senior, sources say that while the baby was part of the group rescued, she was not the reason for the mission.

Briefed ahead of time that he'd be taking a baby back to the ship, Chalker had come prepared. He had brought along his own daughter's baby carrier, repainted in black, along with a pacifier.

Team 6's commander, Captain Ron Yeaw, was heading a tiny command and control cell on the ship, but he could not have imagined that his unit's future was riding on the mission's outcome. Code-named Victor Squared, the mission was considered so important in Washington that Colin Powell was following it in real time from a Pentagon operations center. Powell was talking on a secure line with Major General Bill Garrison, the brand-new JSOC commander who was running the mission from the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. (The Team 6 operators had also flown to Guantánamo and boarded the cruiser there.) But Powell was no friend of the SEALs, having held a grudge against them since at least the costly Paitilla Airport raid in Panama. His dislike only deepened in the aftermath of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, when he suspected SEALs of telling the press about a mission they had wanted to conduct that Schwarzkopf had rejected. When Yeaw temporarily lost UHF satellite communications with his operators heading to the beach, Powell let the JSOC commander know he was on the verge of shutting down Team 6 for good. “Our command was on the chopping block,” a Team 6 officer said.