Authors: Sean Naylor
The breachers spent long hours experimenting with explosives, and a lot of time away from home getting “special schooling,” a Delta source said. “These are the guys in the unit who had gone through all the basic atomic energy training.” However, he said, even that training has its limitations. “You can go through all the training you want, but the last thing we're going to be recovering is a U.S.-made atomic bomb. It's going to be jury-rigged [and] foreign-made.”
Delta operators also delighted in confounding JSOC exercise planners by figuring out ways to penetrate the facilities that didn't involve drilling and blasting. “We'd have the rest of the troop or squadron scour this place for access points and most of the time it was a simple fix,” said an operator. “One time we used a high-lift jack, lifted the door off its hinges, it fell in. It took like six minutes. The JSOC folks are like, âThat's a six-hour door!'” On another occasion, during a joint readiness exercise at an old Russian nuclear weapons storage depot in Poland, the heavy breachers had barely gotten their drills and explosives unpacked when operators found an air shaft and fast-roped down it into the facility to open the door from the inside.
In a rare on-the-record interview in 1997, JSOC commander Army Major General Michael Canavan told
Armed Forces Journal International
that the command was at “about a 60 percent solution” with regard to its counter-proliferation mission. “Right now we're as good as our equipment,” he said. “Our biggest challenge is getting into these deep underground shelters. Once you get in that environment, you run into real problems in terms of seeing, in terms of communication, in terms of breathing.” By the late 1990s the concept had expanded beyond “drill and blast,” according to a commander of one of JSOC's colored task forces. “There are all these fast-burning lasers and all kinds of fancy things that they are trying to do besides explosives to get into hardened buildings that are underground,” he said. “It's a huge effort.”
The challenges of the 0400 mission were extensive and went beyond the physics of how to penetrate concrete that was
x
meters underground and
y
meters thick. “You start to look at [operating in] tunnels,” a retired special ops officer said. This required “battery-powered vehicles” so there would be no emissions, as well as being able to operate without line-of-sight radio signals. In addition, all the 0400 mission kit had to fit on a variety of military aircraft, and the crew for those aircraft, whether they were Air Force planes or the 160th's helicopters, had to be able to fly in while wearing fully sealed nuclear-biological-chemical protective gear.
The JSOC task force would be augmented on these missions by civilian nuclear experts from the national laboratoriesâknown as the Lincoln Gold teamâwho were on alert, just as JSOC units were. Sometimes the mission would require a direct real-time video link back to Department of Energy experts in the United States. The final and most dangerous piece of the mission fell to explosive ordnance detachment personnel recruited by Delta and Team 6 especially for this purpose, but the retired senior special ops officer said it would be a mistake to assume their job was little more than deciding which wires to snip. “It isn't cutting wires like you see on TV,” he said. “It's much more hard science.”
In the early 1990s Iraq's presumed nuclear weapons program was JSOC's priority target. Saddam Hussein “became the living, breathing model” of the madman bent on destruction that Delta and (especially) JSOC hypothesized in their increasingly elaborate Joint Readiness Exercise (JRX) scenarios, which typically climaxed in James Bond style with Delta's heavy breachers racing to burrow into a nuclear facility hidden beneath the desert after Rangers had seized an airfield always conveniently located nearby, a special operations source said. (An enemy T-72-tank-equipped heavy division would also be within a few hours' drive of the facility, so the Delta breachers and their civilian expert colleagues would be toiling under pressure, knowing the tanks were closing in.)
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Delta had a secret advantage in planning operations against Saddam's nuclear facilities: it had undercover operators visiting them regularly as part of the United Nations inspection teams. Their presence, if not their identities, was not a real secret to the Iraqis or the United Nations, which requested military personnel for its teams. (Other countries, among them Russia, also included special ops forces in their contribution to the inspection teams.) There wasn't a Delta presence on every inspection mission, but the norm was for two operators to go on the missions, which, including train-up and debrief, could last as long as three months. “If the Iraqis pushed back hard, or if it was going to be a long mission, we'd go,” a Delta source said. The operators were there in part to acquire a basic familiarity with Iraq, and also to be available should the U.N. team run into trouble. But of course, the trips were very useful in enabling JSOC to plan how it would take down any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction establishments if ordered to do so. Intelligence personnel would brief the operators before they went on what to expect and what to look for at the Iraqi facilities. The operators therefore took careful note of everything they saw, on the assumption that even if they weren't tasked to assault that particular facility, they might get ordered to assault similar ones.
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Toward the end of the decade, the focus of the WMD exercises shifted somewhat. The primary target against which the scenarios were modeled became the Libyan facility at Tarhuna, a vast complex built into a rocky hillside. Muammar Gaddafi's regime claimed it was a waterworks project, but the U.S. government, in the person of Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch in February 1996, accused Libya of “building the world's largest underground chemical weapons plant.”
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“We looked at it for a long time and the IC [intelligence community] was convinced that it was some sort of WMD production facility,” said a Delta staff officer. “It was clearly pushed to the world as a great waterworks project but the geospatial information just didn't support it.” (A decade later, however, some observers would cast doubt on the conclusion that Tarhuna ever was a chemical weapons plant.)
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As the new century loomed, suspected Iranian and North Korean nuclear facilities also featured in JSOC's planning and exercise scenarios, as did the spread of biological weapons such as anthrax. But some missions the regional U.S. military commanders-in-chief dreamed up for JSOC were little more than wishful thinking.
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“People have unfeasible notions about what you can accomplish with small teams,” said a retired special operations officer. A raid against a WMD facility in North Korea or Iran would have needed the support of at least two divisions' worth of conventional troops, he said.
While Delta's heavy breachers were the core of that unit's counter-proliferation capability, Team 6 leveraged the Navy's traditional strength in explosive ordnance disposal, or EOD, to earn itself a key role in JSOC's mission to “render safe” any WMD device. Not only did Team 6 have the lead for any shipborne nuclear, biological, or chemical threat, it also had a particularly important part to play on the domestic side of JSOC's mission. The unit was on a one-hour string to deploy a team to Andrews Air Force Base, just across the Maryland border from Washington, D.C., to advise civilian officials on how to handle a WMD threat in the national capital region. Originally Delta's, by 1998 JSOC had given the mission to Team 6 in part because Dam Neck was closer than Bragg to Washington, but also because of Team 6's strong EOD capability. “The SEALs were cleared all the way up to frickin' nuclear to disarm manually,” but could also “reach back” to experts at the national laboratories, a JSOC staff officer said. In most cases it wouldn't be SEALs doing the technical work, but Team 6's EOD personnel, typically an officer and four enlisted men.
The “render safe” mission did not require the special mission units to completely neutralize a device, just to “render it safe for movement” by ship or aircraft to the tiny Johnston Atoll in the Pacific, where it would be made “final safe,” a Team 6 officer said. (Biological or chemical threats might be taken to Utah's Dugway Proving Ground.) In a worst-case situation in which even Team 6's experts were unable to stop a ticking bomb, the task force commander would face “an emergency destruct decision,” the officer said. “It's going to fuck things up and people up. We've been through that one [in a joint readiness exercise] as well.”
As part of its domestic counter-proliferation mission, JSOC participated in congressionally mandated Top Officials Exercises, or TOPOFFs, designed to test the U.S. government's ability to handle WMD crises in the United States. The first TOPOFF, held in spring 2000, involved multiple simultaneous WMD scenarios across the country,
6
including a bomb hidden in Anacostia, a poor Washington, D.C., neighborhood. “A device was going to be planted, the SEALs were going to have to find it,” said the JSOC staff officer. To eliminate the chance of terrorists detonating either the bomb or an anti-handling device attached to it via a cell phone signal, Doug Brown, the JSOC commander, wanted to shut down a large part of the capital's cell phone coverage. The command's information operations office drafted a cover story blaming the cell phone blackout on a power failure. At “the eleventh hour” the Department of Justice blocked the move, the staff officer said. The workaround was to place the device on a boat and direct the anti-cell-phone technology away from the city.
By the late 1990s, in an effort to avoid having to conduct the sort of dramatic, last-ditch missions envisioned in the JRX scenarios, Team 6 had begun to think differently about counter-proliferation. The new approach, called “pathway defeat,” involved preempting threats by intercepting or otherwise interfering with an enemy's ability to obtain precursor materials like centrifuges needed to create weapons of mass destruction. By then, even the counterterrorism mission was morphing into counter-proliferation, or CP. “We started seeing less desire to take hostages and more desire to commit atrocities and it was believed that it was going to go towards CP,” said a senior Team 6 officer. “We didn't think we'd see an aircraft with hostages anymore. The
Achille Lauro
wasn't happening again. Instead it was something [terrorists] were transporting [on] a ship.”
Team 6's counter-proliferation mission meant an influx of money, enabling the unit to buy a couple more Beechcraft King Air civilian-style planes, doubling the unit's fleet of the small turboprop aircraft. The original aircraft transported leaders and staff to meetings at JSOC headquarters. The new planes were intended to fly the SEALs to Andrews quickly. Team 6 also purchased the
Del Monte,
a disused cargo ship the unit used for static training. Training on the
Del Monte
was mostly unrelated to WMD, “but [the ship] was paid for with WMD money,” a Team 6 officer said. The money for the ship and the planes was but a small fraction of the “hundreds of millions of dollars a year” a Delta source said the Pentagon was shoveling into JSOC's coffers for the counter-proliferation mission, which had become the command's highest priority. “All the way up to 9/11 it was the premier mission,” he said. “It was the can't-fail mission.” That money was helping to make JSOC a very rich, powerful organization. As the Delta source put it, the command had “tons of fucking cash.”
The resources the American taxpayer wasâlargely unwittinglyâlavishing on JSOC were spent in part on exercises across the globe. By the mid-1990s, quarterly joint readiness exercises were planned two years in advance. At the end of the decade, “every JRX we did for three years for both Green and Blue was WMD,” a Team 6 officer said. Roughly a third of the exercises were abroad, in locations as diverse as Panama, the Bahamas, Poland, Israel, and Jordan.
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In the latter case, Delta “infiltrated hundreds of kilometers in the desert [using] a combination of off-road vehicles and our ⦠Nissan pickup trucks,” an operator recalled. The Jordan JRX lasted three weeks and, like numerous others, was aimed at penetrating “hardened targets” in the desert, another participant said.
JSOC also held many exercises in the military's immense facilities in the American Southwest, which had the advantage of roughly replicating the flat desert that was home to many WMD targets while offering protection from prying eyes. Among the installations used were White Sands Missile Range and Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, and the Nevada Test Site for nuclear weapons, where the tunnels were 3,000 meters long.
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These exercises were not risk-free. In 1992 twelve Ranger and Air Force special operations personnel died when their Air Force MH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter crashed in bad weather into the Great Salt Lake en route between Hill Air Force Base and Dugway during an exercise. The casualties included the commanders of 1st and 3rd Ranger Battalions and the Air Force's 55th Special Operations Squadron.
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The command also continued to train regularly in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. “My first time in New York, I rode a Little Bird that buzzed the Statue of Liberty,” a Delta operator said. Although always coordinated with local authorities, the secrecy that surrounded these exercises often provoked thousands of panicked phone calls from residents about “black helicopters” and explosions in their neighborhoods.
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But the epic scale of the counter-proliferation scenarios and the command's decision that, according to a retired special operations officer, “every component of JSOC was part of the WMD mission,” meant JSOC was in danger of becoming a prisoner of its own exercise process, unable to conceive of an operation that didn't involve almost every facet of the command and a cast of thousands. The quarterly exercises began to inspire a mixture of scorn and apprehension among participants. “Everybody just dreaded these things,” said a Delta source.