Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (21 page)

Back in Tampa, Franks was about to call Myers, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs, when Dailey called with bad news.
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Task Force Sword's luck that evening had run out at Dalbandin, where 26 B Company, 3rd Battalion Rangers, and two 24th STS operators had flown in from the
Kitty Hawk
on Black Hawks to establish a forward arming and refueling point and a quick reaction force to support that night's missions. TF Sword had received word that somehow the locals had learned Americans were coming to Dalbandin, so the Rangers conducted their arrival there as an air assault, rather than as a more routine landing, even though they were still in Pakistan, a notional ally. As the second Black Hawk in—call sign RATCHET 23—was repositioning, it kicked up a dust cloud that obscured the landing zone, creating what aviators call a “brownout” and disorienting the pilots. The helicopter hit the ground hard and rolled onto its right side, pinning several Rangers who'd been aboard the helicopter underneath the fuselage. Despite their colleagues' best efforts, two Rangers—Specialist John Edmunds and Private First Class Kristofer Stonesifer—were killed.
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News of the accident hit the task force like a punch in the gut, but Dailey stayed calm. “To Dell Dailey's credit … he responded relatively well to serious incidents like that,” said a Task Force Sword officer. “He was able to compartmentalize that specific thing and not allow it to drive the rest of the mission.” But others instantly flashed back to the Eagle Claw disaster, which had also occurred as a helicopter repositioned in a brownout at a FARP.
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“The first thing that people said was, ‘Jesus, we're going to have another freakin' Desert One,'” recalled Rakow.

In addition to sadness over the sheer tragedy of the losses, the accident was a source of intense frustration in the 160th. A senior Night Stalker noted that the regiment traced its origins to the aftermath of Desert One. With pre-mission comparisons between the Rhino/Gecko operation and Eagle Claw fresh in aviators' minds, there had been a focus on operating safely at the Dalbandin forward arming and refueling point. “It amazed a lot of people that that's where that accident happened,” he said.

*   *   *

As the Rangers and Delta operators flew back to Masirah and the
Kitty Hawk,
in the JOC a fifteen-soldier team from the 9th Psychological Operations Battalion was editing six hours of raw footage from the Rhino mission into a three-minute clip to be forwarded to the Pentagon. Propaganda, after all, was the mission's raison d'être: to demonstrate the United States' ability to put troops wherever it pleased in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld, who had not watched the missions in real time, but had stayed up to date over the phone, wanted the film available to the U.S. television networks for their evening news broadcasts later on October 20. He got his wish. At a lunchtime news conference that day in the Pentagon, Myers aired the clip, which would be shown on every major news program in the United States and around the world.
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The Joint Chiefs' chairman stayed on message throughout his press conference. He offered little detail about the missions, saying nothing about Masirah or the
Kitty Hawk,
but continually reinforcing his point. “U.S. forces were able to deploy, maneuver and operate inside Afghanistan without significant interference from Taliban forces,” he said. In case the reporters didn't get it the first time, he repeated the point some minutes later: “One of the messages should be that we are capable of, at a time of our choosing, conducting the kind of operations we want to conduct.”
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Assessments of the value of the Gecko and Rhino missions were as divided after the fact as they had been before.

“It was disappointing when they conducted that operation that they didn't catch more, but I have to say that the operation had strategic value,” said a senior member of the Joint Staff. “That changed the way Omar thought about the conflict and the word I heard was that he was terrified that he was not safe and his sanctuary was violated. The operational and tactical effects of a strategic operation are that he becomes isolated, insular, communications are constrained, so that when other things take place … they have more limited ability to react to those things.”

But to the skeptics, the raids had been worse than a waste of time: they had placed troops' lives at risk for nothing more than a propaganda effort that resembled a joint readiness exercise. “So many guys almost died so many times on both targets, for no fucking reason,” said a Delta source who monitored the operation in real time. “That was just a complete JRX done for the sake of the cameras.”

Understandably, the Rangers' mood was somber, the twist of fate that took the lives of two of their buddies serving as a wake-up call for the young soldiers. The task force held a memorial service for Edmunds and Stonesifer at Masirah October 23.
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Then the Rangers turned their minds to the future. They would soon be back in action.

 

10

“Carte Blanche”

At 10:30
P.M.
on November 13, the silence of another moonless Afghan night was disturbed by the thrumming of a single Combat Talon's four turboprops 800 feet above the desert about fifty miles southwest of Kandahar. From the plane tumbled forty dark shapes that floated to earth in a matter of seconds after parachute canopies blossomed above them, barely visible against the night sky.

The parachutes belonged to thirty-two Rangers from 3rd Battalion's B Company and an eight-man 24th STS element. Their mission was to seize a desert landing strip named Bastogne and prepare it to receive two Combat Talons, each loaded with a pair of AH-6 Little Bird gunships, a mobile forward arming and refueling point, and the pilots and other personnel to man them. The Little Birds were then to fly off to attack preplanned targets. Bastogne was the Rangers' second combat parachute assault of the war,
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but unlike the seizure of Objective Rhino, this mission was most certainly not a propaganda exercise. There would be no Pentagon press briefing about it, ever. Rather, the Bastogne mission was the latest step in a campaign of deception and destruction Task Force Sword had decided to wage across southern Afghanistan.

The details of that campaign would remain secret for years, but even the broad brushstrokes had not been imagined when, with the Gecko and Rhino raids finally out of the way, the staff on Masirah pondered Sword's next move. There was no long-term plan. Everything was a seat-of-the-pants decision. “After we did this first mission, we went, ‘All right, what are we going to do now?'” said the retired special ops officer.

The first days after the October 19 missions saw a flurry of administrative activity as the task force conducted after-action reviews and prepared for the arrival of Franks, who secretly visited Masirah and the
Kitty Hawk
October 22. The Delta elements on the
Kitty Hawk
quickly returned to Masirah, but Brown, Team 6, and Ranger elements remained on the ship. Possibly as a result of meeting with Franks, Dailey issued new guidance October 22 instructing Sword planners to draft “a campaign plan” with missions centered on Kandahar.
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Operators and planners on Masirah brainstormed. Delta personnel resurrected their 1998 plan to ambush bin Laden as a basis for planning new missions. Key to the original scheme had been landing Combat Talons on one or more dry lake beds around Kandahar. “We determined that we could land large fixed-wing aircraft (C-130s) on these dry lakebeds in the middle of the night without anyone seeing or hearing us,” Blaber wrote of the 1998 effort.

Before Sword could launch any such missions, Dailey apparently had a change of heart. In the first week of November, he ordered the task force to start planning immediately for redeployment to the United States. By then it was clear that, enabled by 5th Special Forces Group, the CIA, and U.S. airpower, the Northern Alliance's campaign against the Taliban was gaining traction, leaving JSOC, supposedly the United States' premier special operations organization, on the sidelines. Aghast that JSOC might leave the theater with the Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders—and thousands of their forces—still at large, Blaber and others of like mind put together a few concepts on the fly and forwarded them up the chain. Somehow they persuaded those at the top, Dailey included, to allow them to proceed. “Only because they were so beaten down and in such dire straits with … CENTCOM did JSOC headquarters go, ‘Okay, we're willing to try anything' and turned the whole thing over to us for those next few days,” said a Delta source. “At this point, the staff of our higher headquarters was ready to approve just about anything we brought to them—and they did,” according to Blaber.
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“Anything we wanted to try for years, we finally got carte blanche to do it,” said another Delta source.

For once, JSOC unleashed the power of its operators' imaginations. In short order, they produced concepts with two aims: to “develop the situation”—in other words, to gain a deeper understanding of the situation on the ground—in southern Afghanistan, and to convince the Taliban that there was a greater U.S. presence along the southern stretch of Highway 1 (the ring road that connects most major Afghan cities, including Kabul and Kandahar) than there actually was. The latter aim meshed perfectly with Dailey's penchant for deception operations. Unlike the unconventional warfare campaign being waged by Special Forces and the CIA in northern Afghanistan, which involved tight coordination with the Northern Alliance, Sword's operations in the south were unilateral missions. Rather than taking and holding territory, the intent was to distract the Taliban and prevent them from concentrating their forces in Kabul and Herat.
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Although the ultimate goal was to clandestinely infiltrate teams of operators, the first fruits of the brainstorming sessions required no boots on the ground. A couple of nights after Dailey announced that Sword would be going home, a series of parachutes dropped from a Combat Talon flying over the hills outside Kandahar. Attached to the parachutes were large blocks of ice. The idea was that once the parachutes landed the ice would melt and the chutes would blow across the landscape until someone found and reported them, sowing seeds of paranoia in the Taliban's minds as they wondered where the paratroopers might be. “We later learned that the phantom parachute drops not only confused the enemy, they also terrorized the enemy,” Blaber wrote.
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Within a few days of the ice block deception, the dark shadows drifting to earth were real operators, conducting some of the most daring missions JSOC had executed in years: high-altitude, low-opening (HALO) freefall jumps.

Although glamorized in video games and movies, actual combat HALO missions—in which operators jump from as high as 34,900 feet and freefall for as long as roughly two and a half minutes before opening their parachutes just a few thousand feet aboveground in order to minimize the chance of being observed—are rare. When a reinforced team from Delta's B3 troop (B Squadron's reconnaissance troop) led by Major Brad Taylor HALO'd in northeast of Kandahar to call in air strikes against Taliban and/or Al Qaeda targets fleeing southwest from Kabul, Tom Greer, at the time a major in Delta and commander of A1 Troop, called it “the first nighttime combat HALO … parachute jump since the Vietnam War.” The “death-defying” jump was “one of the riskiest missions” of the war, said a Delta source. “It had everything: cold, night, the unknown, high winds, all that stuff,” he said.

The team's mission was to establish an observation post in some high ground near the road. But it immediately went awry when Christopher Kurinec, nicknamed “CK,” was badly hurt as he landed. Kurinec had “jumped the bundle,”
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meaning that in addition to his own gear he had the team's “bundle” of supplies (usually water, ammunition, and medical kit) strapped to him when he jumped. Because the extra weight increases the speed at which the operator hits the ground, the bundle makes an already difficult task that much more awkward. For that reason, the operator with the bundle is usually one of the team's most experienced freefall jumpers.
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Despite Kurinec's injury, the team drove on with the mission, climbing to the place they had picked out for their observation post and in the process discovering an operator from a previous generation had apparently shared their assessment of the spot's usefulness. “They got up into the side of the mountain there, set up their OP in a little cave overhang, and they found a can from a Soviet K-ration, which at the time we imagined very likely was a Spetsnaz [Soviet special operations] guy who had been in that same cave, same [observation post],” said a Delta source.

Team 6's Blue Team and the Rangers' Regimental Reconnaissance Detachment also got in on the freefall act (with a SEAL badly injuring his knee in a jump to secure a landing strip),
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but the unit that did the most HALO jumping during this period was 24th STS, whose mission was to validate each desert landing strip using a tool called a penetrometer to ensure the soil could support the weight of the Combat Talons. “The STS was clearing every one of those and they loved that mission. That was their heyday right there,” said a Delta operator closely involved with the operations. “I would estimate they probably did at least ten separate jumps in.”

All these jumps were done to enable the arrival of Combat Talons bearing a mobile ground force or Little Bird gunships. These missions followed Delta's rough operational concept for 1998's canceled bin Laden raid: Talons would land on dry lake beds, then offload wheeled vehicles, operators, and AH-6 and MH-6 Little Birds. Such was the case with the Bastogne mission. Special mission unit operators (almost certainly from 24th STS) had scouted the landing strip ahead of the Rangers' jump, while the Regimental Reconnaissance Detachment HALO'd in ahead of the main Ranger body and stayed until the B Company paratroops landed, according to Rakow. “That was the first HALO operation in a combat environment that they had done,” he said.