Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (11 page)

Garrison believed in Team 6 and said as much to Powell. But the radio silence wasn't helping his case. Yeaw knew he could rely on the SEALs he had sent ashore, who included at least six chief petty officers and two senior chief petty officers, all experienced operators, but he too was keen to hear from them. After some very tense moments, the radio crackled to life. The SEALs reported they had picked up the family and were in the boats en route back to the blacked-out ship, which was sitting in the Port-au-Prince harbor. Soon everyone was on board the cruiser. The Army of Northern Virginia operatives cleaned up the beach and went back to their cars. The entire mission had taken a couple of hours. “Blue pulled it off, Bill Garrison was very satisfied and proud of the results, and defended Blue at the [Joint Chiefs of Staff] level the next time he had to brief them,” said another Team 6 officer. “That was a seminal event, no doubt about it.”

“If it weren't for the success of that mission,” Garrison later told another officer, “SEAL Team 6 probably would have been dissolved.”
2

*   *   *

Nine months later, JSOC found itself in the middle of another manhunt, when in July 1992 Delta deployed eight men to Colombia for Operation Heavy Shadow, the hunt for Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. As leader of the Medellín cocaine cartel and one of the richest men in the world, Escobar had terrorized Colombia for fifteen years, murdering anyone who got in his way, including Colombian presidential candidate Luis Galán. In 1991 he cut a deal with the Colombian government: he promised to turn himself in and be incarcerated with some of his closest allies in a luxurious, custom-built “prison.” The government promised not to extradite him to the United States, which had indicted him on drug trafficking charges. But Escobar did not hold up his end of the deal and fled his gilded cage. President Bush had quickly signed off on the U.S. ambassador to Colombia's request that Delta help the Colombian authorities track him down.

The importance Delta—and by extension, JSOC—attached to the mission can be gauged by the makeup of its team, which was led by Jerry Boykin, now a colonel and the new Delta commander, having succeeded Pete Schoomaker earlier that summer. The barrel-chested C Squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Gary Harrell, also deployed, along with Eagle Claw veteran Sergeant Major Deciderio “Jack” Alvarez and Sergeant First Class Joe Vega, both fluent Spanish speakers. They all inflated their ranks so as to earn respect from Colombian officers, who looked down on enlisted soldiers: Alvarez became a colonel, Harrell a general. Those in Colombia for extended periods also assumed different names.
3

But the Delta operators were arriving a little late to the Escobar hunt. First on the scene was the Army of Northern Virginia. (The nomenclature associated with the unit was particularly confusing, even for the labyrinthine world of special operations naming conventions. In 1989 the Army officially changed its name from the Intelligence Support Activity to the Tactical Coordination Detachment. It was later known as the U.S. Army Office of Military Support. Despite its official cover names, the unit was often referred to by the names of the special access programs associated with it, including Capacity Gear, Centra Spike, Torn Victor, and Gray Fox. Perhaps because of the multiplicity of names, many of the relatively few people in the military community familiar with the unit called it the Army of Northern Virginia.) The unit, which in 1986 had moved into new facilities at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, was still not assigned to JSOC, but its relations with the command and the other special mission units had grown much closer since the fractious days of Dick Scholtes and Jerry King. Indeed, the JSOC commander who'd sent Boykin's team down, newly promoted Major General Bill Garrison, had previously commanded Delta Force shortly after serving as deputy ISA commander. Since 1989, the Army of Northern Virginia had maintained an intermittent undercover presence in Colombia using equipment covertly mounted on two small civilian airplanes—a Beechcraft 300 and a Beechcraft 350—to track Escobar by zeroing in on his radio and cell phone calls.
4

For more than a year, JSOC rotated Delta and Team 6 operators through Colombia, keeping a force of about a dozen between Bogotá (the capital) and Medellín, Escobar's hometown. Their mission was supposed to be limited to training the “Search Bloc,” the Colombian force going after Escobar and his henchmen. But the aggressive, action-oriented operators soon found ways to accompany their trainees on missions. All the while, the Army of Northern Virginia's aircraft and the Search Bloc were narrowing the focus of their hunt to a fifteen-block middle-class Medellín neighborhood. Escobar knew he was being tracked and that his calls were being listened to, so he kept his conversations short and always operated in a way that aimed to mislead the searchers about his real location.

But on December 2, 1993, he finally made a mistake, staying on the phone with his son for several minutes instead of the customary twenty seconds. The phone tracking devices the Americans had taught the Colombians to use led the Search Bloc straight to a two-story house. Escobar and his bodyguard were gunned down as they tried to flee across the rooftops. The shot that killed the drug lord entered his brain via his right ear. Persistent rumors suggested it was made by a U.S. operator, perhaps a sniper stationed on a nearby rooftop. No one has ever produced any evidence or witness that validates this claim and Boykin has gone on record to say Delta didn't pull any triggers that day.
5

Whoever took the final shot, JSOC chalked Escobar's death up as mission success. It would also have long-lasting impact on the command, as it provided “the template” for how to use a quarry's cell phone to track him down, said a special mission unit member. Heavy Shadow also underlined the lesson learned four years earlier by the operators who had hunted Noriega through Panama City: finding a man of resources who is hiding in his hometown is a difficult task. As the search for Escobar was reaching its climax in fall 1993, another, much larger JSOC task force on the other side of the world was learning a similar lesson. That manhunt did not end quite as well.

*   *   *

In December 1992, U.S. forces deployed to Somalia as part of an international peacekeeping force charged with delivering humanitarian assistance to the famine-gripped East African nation. Operation Restore Hope, as the U.S. government dubbed it, was well intentioned but naive. The main problem gripping Somalia was not famine, but the clan-based civil war that had raged for more than a year. This violence, combined with endemic corruption, prevented the troops from delivering the humanitarian assistance to many who needed it. The United States withdrew most of its troops in mid-1993, but Mohammed Farah Aideed, a Somali warlord who controlled much of Mogadishu, the capital, viewed the United Nations–backed international force that remained as a threat. In August, with the capital deteriorating into a state of open war between Aideed's militia and the U.N. force, President Bill Clinton approved the deployment of a JSOC task force to Mogadishu to capture Aideed.

The roughly 450 personnel JSOC deployed included headquarters personnel to man the operations center, a reinforced company from 3rd Ranger Battalion, about sixty Delta operators, plus elements of Echo Squadron, TF 160, 24th STS, and a four-man sniper element from Team 6's Red Team. Other than a handful of SEALs on the JOC staff, the four snipers were the task force's only Naval Special Warfare representatives. Team 6's Blue Team had been under the impression that it would be the force to support Delta by establishing blocking positions and hitting ancillary targets. In what they thought was a preparation for that mission, Blue Team's operation had spent several weeks working with Delta at Bragg's urban warfare training site and on their own at a similar facility at the Marines' Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina. But during a JSOC capabilities exercise—a demonstration designed to impress visiting dignitaries
—
at Bragg in late August, the SEALs noticed C-141s taking off from Pope. It was the J-alert birds taking the task force to Somalia, leaving the SEALs at home. Wayne Downing, by then a four-star general and the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, which was JSOC's higher headquarters, had decided to send the Rangers instead. The decision crushed the SEALs and added to their perception that the Army generals who dominated JSOC and SOCOM undervalued them. As if to rub salt in Team 6's emotional wounds, the Pentagon named the JSOC force Task Force Ranger to obscure the fact that Delta's C Squadron, commanded by Gary Harrell, was its centerpiece. TF Ranger's commander was Garrison, an officer steeped in covert operations since Vietnam, where he'd been part of the Phoenix Program that aimed to destroy the Vietcong infrastructure in South Vietnam. Straight out of central casting, the tall, laconic general was highly respected by his men and rarely without an unlit cigar clenched between his teeth. In Mogadishu the two-star general wore a lieutenant colonel's rank insignia in an effort to hide his role.

But although he projected confidence to his men, the seasoned covert ops veteran had confessed to serious misgivings about the mission when he visited an old friend in the Pentagon prior to the deployment. “I hate it,” he said, with his boots on his pal's desk. “This is not a good mission.”

“It was unclear and unsatisfactory to him who was in charge of what,” recalled Garrison's friend. “He had a premonition that he was going to get this thing hung around his neck if it went south.”

As was the norm, the task force set up its JOC in a bullet-riddled hangar by the main airfield. At its heart, TF Ranger's mission was another manhunt. JSOC put the lessons learned in Panama and Colombia to use and launched half a dozen operations in August and September designed to strip away the layers of protection that surrounded Aideed. On the afternoon of October 3, based on an informant's tip, the task force launched a seventh mission, an air assault raid on a meeting of Aideed's inner circle at the Olympic Hotel in the Bakara Market neighborhood, the very heart of Aideed territory. The timing of the raid was not ideal—JSOC preferred to operate at night, rather than in broad daylight—but the transitory nature of the opportunity left the task force little choice.

The raid was going well, with the targets all captured and loaded into a ground convoy for the trip back to the airfield, when a militiaman shot down a TF 160 Black Hawk with a rocket-propelled grenade. About twenty minutes later another RPG shot down a second Black Hawk. What had been a routine, if dangerous, mission that should have lasted no longer than an hour descended into chaos. Task force elements were able to secure the first crash site, but not the second. Delta snipers Master Sergeant Gary Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randy Shughart, on another Black Hawk, volunteered to insert to try to hold off a mob of militiamen and enraged civilians at the second site. But after heroically defending the position against impossible odds, they died when the mob finally overran them. (The pair received posthumous Medals of Honor for their actions.) It was early the next morning before a rescue convoy finally reached the pinned-down troops.

The battle left eighteen U.S. soldiers dead and scores wounded (as well as many hundred Somali casualties). In addition, Aideed's forces captured a TF 160 pilot, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Michael Durant, the only survivor of the second crash, who they released October 14. (In a cruel coda to the battle, two days after it ended, a mortar round killed Sergeant First Class Matt Rierson, the Delta NCO who'd led the assault force into the Olympic, and badly wounded Harrell, Boykin, and Delta surgeon Major Rob Marsh as they stood talking outside the JOC.)
6

Operation Gothic Serpent, as JSOC's Somalia deployment was named, had significant repercussions for the command. Although Garrison, Boykin, and many others in TF Ranger viewed the Mogadishu battle as a success, albeit one they had paid an extraordinarily high price to achieve, that perspective was not shared in Washington. Having taken its eye off the ball in Somalia, the Clinton administration had been shocked by the battle's carnage. Clinton doubled Task Force Ranger's size immediately after the battle, but, to the operators' immense frustration, he withdrew the force altogether shortly thereafter, with Aideed still at liberty. The fear of having a JSOC operation turn into a nasty political surprise would color the government's use of the command for years to come, leading to greater micromanagement and risk aversion.

The battle was, naturally, a searing experience for all involved. It dominated tactical training for Delta and the Rangers for the rest of the decade. “The Mogadishu scenario was ‘it' in the unit until '01,” said a Delta operator. “That's what you trained for because that was the last fight.” Mogadishu veterans disproportionately rose to positions of authority in JSOC and the wider special ops world.
7

There were also recriminations. As he had predicted, Garrison ended up paying for the bloody debacle with his career, while friction between Delta and the Rangers over the latter's conduct in the battle led to JSOC having to change the units' readiness cycles so that C Squadron was no longer tied to 3rd Battalion.
8

The massive publicity accorded the battle, both in its immediate aftermath and several years later with Mark Bowden's bestselling book
Black Hawk Down,
which Ridley Scott turned into a successful film, made it even harder for JSOC to hide itself from the public, especially as the Internet began to dominate the information age.

A particularly keen observer from afar of events in Mogadishu was a young Saudi Islamist leader named Osama bin Laden, then living in Sudan. His organization, Al Qaeda, was five years old and had yet to make a name for itself, but its leader had great ambitions. The conclusion he drew from Mogadishu was simple: once they had taken a few casualties, “the Americans ran away.”
9