Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (18 page)

Loath to put his people under another organization's command, Dailey was therefore opposed to attaching JSOC personnel to the Agency teams going into Afghanistan. Schwitters, the Delta commander, was of like mind. “And if ‘the Unit' commander's against it, how is a guy like Dailey ever going to be for something?” the Delta source said. (Not all Delta operators shared this view of Schwitters, an Eagle Claw veteran. One experienced unit member noted that Schwitters was nicknamed “Flatliner” due to his even-keeled temperament, which some could mistake for a lack of enthusiasm. Schwitters “was all about getting us involved,” but wanted to ensure Delta's unique skill sets would be used for legitimate missions, rather than hollow shows of force, he said.)

Some in Delta argued for deploying an entire squadron into the Panjshir Valley, the fastness in northeastern Afghanistan still held by the Northern Alliance. The CIA's Schroen, already in the Panjshir, supported the plan, saying Delta could “use the valley as a staging area for raids on Al Qaeda leaders behind enemy lines.”
50
But this initiative also foundered on the rocks of Dailey's skepticism.

In the minds of some operators, Dailey was anxious to avoid Delta taking the lead, particularly without a JSOC headquarters in close proximity. Prior to becoming an aviator Dailey had been an infantry officer in the Rangers, and some JSOC personnel perceived a favoritism toward the Rangers and the 160th on the part of their commander. Hall acknowledged a widespread belief in the special mission units, Delta in particular, and that Dailey was biased against them, but said this was a misperception on the operators' part. “He had a very deep respect [for the operators],” Hall said. “Sometimes he wasn't very good at expressing it, unfortunately. Because he didn't speak the language, he wasn't one of them.”

One of the strongest advocates for putting a squadron into the Panjshir, Blaber continued to mount an insurgency against what he considered Dailey's intransigence and lack of imagination. He was not alone. A couple of other operators as well as Phil and one or two others at the CIA kept lines of communication open, working every angle to try to get Delta into the fight. At first, Blaber called Phil on Delta's red classified phones, but after JSOC banned its people from talking to their CIA contacts without going through the Agency's liaison officer at JSOC headquarters, he was forced to call Phil from outside the Delta compound on an untraceable calling card.
51
Eventually the CIA operatives got tired of waiting. “They just got sick of it,” said a Delta source. “They were like, ‘Forget it, man, I'll see you over there.'”

Meanwhile, at JSOC headquarters there was similar frustration with Central Command. Relations between Dailey and Franks were cordial, but the same could not be said for their staffs. The need to go to war in Afghanistan had caught CENTCOM cold and the four-star command was struggling to respond. “They didn't seem to be a heck of a lot of help to us, and [were] almost a hindrance,” Hall said. Only part of that could be put down to “the JSOC arrogance” rubbing CENTCOM staffers the wrong way, he said. “I'm not sure anybody at CENTCOM thought this was really, really serious other than General Franks.… We thought he was pretty much switched on [about] what had to happen, but you certainly didn't have that level of confidence from his staff.”

Indeed, some at JSOC still doubted that they'd be called into action, despite the scale of the September 11 attacks and all the feverish activity since. Memories of being “spun up many, many times before,” only to be dialed back down, were too fresh and too strong, said Hall. Opinion “was probably evenly split” over whether they would be sent into battle, he said. “A lot of us old guys … really wondered if there would be the national will to do that, quite frankly.…

“It was Schoomaker that always talked about the Ferrari that was kept in the garage,” Hall said, referring to the former JSOC commander's comments in Richard Schulz's “Showstoppers” article. “Most of us had grown up in that environment. We figured the Ferrari's still going to be in the garage.” But this time the skeptics were wrong. The garage doors were opening and the Ferrari was about to be taken for a drive. A very long drive.

 

9

Risky Missions and Empty Targets

The vastness of the moonless night sky swallowed the turboprop drone of the four blacked-out Combat Talons high above Pakistan's Baluchistan province. Headed north, the planes crossed into Afghan airspace at about 11
P.M.
, October 19, skimming low across the Registan Desert. On board were 199 Rangers with a mission to seize a desert airstrip and thus send a message to the world that the United States was able to put troops on the ground in Afghanistan at will. Within days, the Pentagon would release a video of the operation—produced by a psychological operations unit—to the media, but without the essential context that the airfield seizure was supporting a simultaneous mission taking place about 100 miles to the northeast. There, Chinooks and Black Hawks were slicing through the darkness carrying more than a squadron of Delta operators plus a Ranger company on the night's main effort: a surprise attack on Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar's residential compound in the Taliban's hometown of Kandahar, a mission that would be the farthest air assault in history. After five frustrating weeks, this was the night that the U.S. military's ground war in Afghanistan would begin, and JSOC was taking the lead.
1

At MacDill Air Force Base, Tommy Franks watched as icons representing the MC-130s inched across a map on a giant plasma screen in the Central Command joint operations center. Dell Dailey called with an update from Masirah: “Missions on target in nine minutes.” Despite early indications that both targets were empty, “the freshest reconnaissance imagery revealed the Taliban had installed a security force at Objective Rhino,” Franks would later say. (One planner said the pictures showed “people,” but not necessarily a “security force.” Other sources did not recall this imagery at all.) Now Franks checked with Dailey. “Any activity on the ground, Dell?” Franks asked. “Negative, sir. No issues, no drama,” Dailey said calmly.
2

But JSOC was taking no chances. A Predator unmanned aerial vehicle had already destroyed two armored vehicles on the target.
3
Now, as the Rangers on the Talons made last-minute adjustments to their gear, ahead of them fiery orange blossoms punctuated the darkness of the arid plateau. Global Positioning System–guided 2,000-pound bombs dropped by B-2 stealth bombers were finding their marks. Circling AC-130 gunships also softened up the target, pounding it with 105mm cannon fire. “Initial reports were that eleven enemy had been killed and nine were seen running away,” according to an official history.
4

The Rangers' morale was high. The elite infantrymen saw themselves as the tip of the United States' spear, ready to exact revenge for September 11. They had spent the last ten days sitting on a desert island becoming increasingly frustrated as their leaders worked to keep them focused. Now the time for action was finally at hand. They were just minutes from making the first Ranger combat parachute assault since December 1989's Panama invasion. On each plane, the nervous soldiers together recited the Ranger Creed, the twelve-sentence articulation of the regiment's ethos, ending with the defiant chant: “Rangers lead the way!”
5
Then, after almost four hours in flight, with the aircraft nearing the target and jumpmasters barking orders, they stood up and lumbered forward in ungainly fashion, under the awkward weight of their rucksacks strapped to their thighs, their reserve parachutes on their chests and main chutes on their backs. The Talons were a mere 800 feet above the ground, so low that an influx of dust coated the Rangers as the doors opened for the jump.
6
Outside, the only illumination came from flares the aircraft dropped to ward off the threat of heat-seeking missiles and from fires already burning on the objective.
7
For this jump the Rangers would use a door on each side of the aircraft. After finishing their verbal and hand signal commands, the jumpmasters told the Rangers to “stand by” and turned and readied themselves in the doors. As the muted lights above and beside the doors on the first aircraft turned from red to green, the jumpmasters stepped out into the night.
8

*   *   *

The Masirah airstrip from which the Rangers had taken off had been transformed over the previous fortnight from a deserted stretch of tarmac to a high-tech hub of military activity. A few days into October, massive C-5 transport aircraft carrying everything required to build JSOC's space-age joint operations center began touching down every ten minutes on the runway at the northern end of the forty-mile-long island. In the searing desert heat and stifling humidity, a tent city began to rise.
9
The JSOC advance party deployed from Bragg October 6. Most of the JOC staff followed a day later. The first of eight C-5s transporting TF Brown landed October 8. To deceive any interested parties about JSOC's plans, Dailey directed troops to deploy wearing woodland green camouflage and then change into desert uniforms once they were at Masirah. The Rangers landed in chartered airliners. Combat Talons from the 1st Special Operations Wing arrived. Dailey himself flew over October 10.
10
Twenty-one and a half years after the debacle that resulted in JSOC's creation, America's most elite special operators were back on Masirah. It was from here, hidden from the prying eyes of the news media, that Dell Dailey planned to run JSOC's war in Afghanistan.

Within a few days, engineers had completed construction of the operations center from which Dailey would oversee combat operations 700 miles away. Consisting of scores of air-conditioned tents arrayed in a spoked-wheel design, the JOC was a testament to the wealth and computing might of the world's one remaining superpower. Inside, the tents were festooned with the communications gear the staff required to stay connected to operators and headquarters around the globe. As with everything else to do with JSOC, little expense was spared. “Within twenty-four hours of our plane touching down, we were watching the BBC on seventy-two-inch plasma flat-screen TVs,” wrote Blaber, who, along with about fifty other Delta operators was among the first to arrive. However, all those laptops, squawking satellite radios, and video screens offered only the illusion of understanding, according to the Delta ops officer. “There was just one thing missing,” he wrote. “We had no situational awareness of Afghanistan, Al Qaeda or UBL.”
11

Despite the size of the tented Taj Mahal JSOC was building at Masirah, the command deployed only a fraction of its ground forces: one Ranger battalion (the 3rd); a squadron-plus from Delta (B Squadron, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Chris Sorenson, plus A Squadron's second troop, or A2—an assault troop); less than a third of the 160th's 1st Battalion, plus a few 2nd Battalion Chinooks; and Team 6's Blue Team. All came with headquarters elements that reported to the JSOC joint operations center. On September 17 JSOC had sent out an “alert force update” with orders to maintain forces ready to conduct 0300 global counterterrorism missions, so the Aztec, Trident, and Bullet packages remained on alert at their home stations, along with roughly half the JSOC staff, ready for any other crisis that might rear its head.
12
Those elements that deployed forward acquired a new name: Task Force Sword.

Time on the island was to be fleeting for some of the new arrivals, however, because after steaming more than 6,000 miles in twelve days, the
Kitty Hawk
neared Oman October 10, ready to receive its complement of about 600 JSOC personnel.
13
These included the Delta and Team 6 tactical elements; 3rd Ranger Battalion's B Company; all twenty Task Force Brown Black Hawks and Chinooks and their crews; and a small Task Force Sword command and control element. While the helicopters and crews self-deployed to the carrier, most others flew out to the ship on a C-2A Greyhound turboprop aircraft.
14
By October 15 the JSOC forces were in place aboard the carrier.
15

Task Force Sword's operational security demands, which to outsiders sometimes appeared to border on paranoia, required the
Kitty Hawk
crew to maintain a five-mile exclusion zone that no other ship was allowed to enter. The sailors began to refer to the ship as the “stealth carrier.” Nor was life for the task force elements aboard the
Kitty Hawk
without its challenges. Unlike 1994's Haiti operation, when the Navy took all the jets off the
America
and turned the carrier into a floating platform just for JSOC, this time a small number of jets, including eight F/A-18C Hornets remained on the
Kitty Hawk,
flying missions over Afghanistan night and day and playing havoc with the “battle rhythm” of the Task Force Sword personnel, who were on a reverse cycle—working through the night and trying to sleep through the roar of fighter-bombers launching off the deck during the day. Although the
Kitty Hawk
had sailed to the northern Arabian Sea with only fifteen of the ninety or so planes and helicopters it could hold, those aircraft still jostled for space with Task Force Brown's Black Hawks and Chinooks. “It was very hard for us and them to juggle twenty-four-hour operations of two totally different types of mission,” said a Brown aviator. “We made it work, but it was a lot of work.”
16

*   *   *

On both Masirah and the
Kitty Hawk,
planning was under way in earnest for JSOC's first missions of the post-9/11 era.