Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (26 page)

The Chinook took off. The helicopters now had less than ten minutes before they would have to leave in order to make their refueling rendezvous. Wracking their brains trying to figure out how to locate their “precious cargo,” the Night Stalkers scanned the ground for the fire that was supposed to serve as a beacon. But the planners had not accounted for the fact that on a cold night in Afghanistan many fires would be visible, lit by locals for light and warmth. Telling one from the others seemed an impossible task.
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The hostages had lit none of those fires, however. Somehow the word to build one never reached them. “We knew the helicopters were not looking for a fire,” Curry and Mercer said somewhat incongruously in their written account of the episode. Instead, they were sitting on the PZ straining their ears for the sound of helicopters and getting increasingly desperate. After what seemed an eternity but was actually about fifteen minutes, the hulking shapes of two twin-rotor aircraft appeared overhead, circling the PZ and twice making a low-level sweep directly over them before flying off a little. Frantic, the women serendipitously took it upon themselves to light a fire using their headscarves as fuel, hoping to draw the aircrews' attention to themselves, apparently ignorant that this was the plan all along. The Afghans with them threw planks onto the blaze. The detainees were on the verge of giving up when the helicopters returned, hovering directly overhead, before maddeningly flying away again.
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As Brown flew over the town's mud houses, investigating as many of the fires as possible in the hope of some form of recognition, Mancuso came up on the net. “I have a fire on the main road down the street from the soccer field,” he said. “They appear to have about ten people huddled around it. Two appear to have burkas as well.” Brown landed in the soccer “field,” which was nothing but dirt, causing a massive brownout that briefly disoriented the SEALs as they left the helicopter. An aviator who had noted the hostages' location jumped off the bird and grabbed the SEAL commander by the shoulder. “Follow me!” he yelled, and led the SEALs to the corner of a wall and pointed down the street to the group gathered around the fire. The lead SEAL gave him a thumbs-up, then quickly briefed his men before they advanced toward the anxious figures.
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Twenty agonizing minutes after the helicopters had initially flown away, several dark shapes appeared out of the darkness and approached the hostages. “Covered in gear, they looked like Martians,” recalled Heather Mercer. “Are you the detainees?” yelled a SEAL. “Listen and do exactly what we say!”
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The aircrew sat and waited. Even hostage rescues in which no bullets are fired can be time-consuming affairs. It wasn't just a case of grabbing the people to be rescued and throwing them on the aircraft. “That only happens in the movies,” said a JSOC source. The SEALs needed to positively identify the detainees by comparing them to photographs and to search them (in case their captors had hidden explosives on them). Already at “bingo” fuel—the point at which it was essential to depart in order to make the refueling rendezvous in Pakistan—Beef Brown called the MC-130 pilot and persuaded him to move the refueling point into Afghan airspace, reducing the time the Chinooks would need to fly there. That move was technically against orders, so nobody coordinated it with the JOC, in case someone on the Sword staff tried to overrule it.

In less than fifteen minutes, the SEALs returned with all eight hostages. They lifted off, and the three helicopters made a beeline south, “running on fumes,” as a TF Sword source put it, as the MC-130 flew as fast as it could toward them. The rendezvous came off perfectly and the Chinooks made the three-hour flight to Jacobabad, where they landed at dawn, pulling up to the back of another MC-130 with a medical team on board in case any hostage needed immediate medical care.
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For the Shelter Now personnel there followed reunions with their families and, in the case of Curry and Mercer, a phone call from President Bush.
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For Task Force Sword, it was mission complete.

It could be argued that as far as hostage rescues go, Angry Talon was almost a nonevent. There was no shooting and by the time the rescue occurred, the Shelter Now personnel weren't even prisoners. That didn't stop Dailey transmitting a “Congrats to the Blue shooters” message across the command, which provoked scorn among some Delta operators.
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“There was no rescue,” said one. “It was more like picking up a downed pilot in the middle of nowhere.” Of course, it could also be argued that a rescue mission in which no bullets were fired represented the most elegant solution to the crisis. The onset of war had done little to diminish the rivalry between Team 6 and Delta, which would reassert itself—at times with venom—over the years ahead.

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At this early stage of what President Bush was already calling the “war on terror,” JSOC had not fully come to terms with the fact that its world had changed permanently. The command was “designed to do in-and-out operations, not sustained combat,” and the Sword JOC was therefore structured and manned for sprints, rather than marathons, said a retired special operations officer. On reverse cycle since early October, the staff on Masirah was under tremendous strain. “We worked for eighteen hours, nineteen hours a day and then crashed when daylight hit,” he said.

Dailey wanted to rest his troops. The arrival off Pakistan of the Marines' Task Force 58 offered him a chance to do so. “By the end of the month, the level of lunar illumination would exceed the special operations forces' comfort zone, presenting an opportunity for an operational pause between 20 November and 8 December,” according to an official Marine history. On November 25, five weeks after the Rangers seized Objective Rhino, Task Force 58 flew in to the airstrip intending to continue the fight in southern Afghanistan as, in the Marine history's words, “Task Force Sword prepared to withdraw from the battlefield.”
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But a source in Masirah said the pause had more to do with Sword's new orders to hunt for bin Laden and Mullah Omar than it did with the lunar cycle. Nonetheless, the decision to curtail Sword's campaign in the south deeply frustrated the operators creating havoc in the deserts and hills surrounding Kandahar. “Just as we were learning everything and getting more and more confident/brazen in our ability to go right up into Kandahar, we pulled the plug on it,” said a Delta source. “We were like, ‘operational pause'? Why would we pause right now? It's not like this is so complex we need a break so we can wrap our heads around it.”

Three Sword operators who weren't withdrawing from the battlefield were the trio who had accompanied Karzai, Spider, Amerine, and their men into Uruzgan the night of November 14. They included two seasoned OST operators: Sergeants Major Morgan Darwin and Mike “Flash” Johnston. While many of their Delta colleagues had yet to hear a shot fired in anger since September 11, these three had seen more than their fair share of action during their first few days in-country. Barely forty-eight hours after arriving, the tiny band of U.S. fighters—supported by a withering aerial barrage—had destroyed a Taliban convoy racing to retake Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan's small capital.
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(Having come down with a nasty case of dysentery, Darwin rode in the convoy to Tarin Kowt “kitted out for combat while hooked to an IV,” according to one account.)
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From there the Americans and Karzai's band of fewer than 200 lightly armed and even more lightly trained Pashtun irregulars drove south to Shawali Kowt, ten miles from the center of Kandahar city on the north bank of the Arghandab River. There, the combined force of U.S. special operators, CIA operatives, and Karzai's Pashtuns fought a back-and-forth battle with the Taliban for control of the only bridge across the river for miles in either direction.
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To the surprise of Amerine's team, who had now been joined by a battalion headquarters element, in the middle of the fight, on the night of December 4–5, TF Sword delivered Delta's A2 Troop and three Pinzgauers via MH-47 to give the Karzai force more firepower and mobility.
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Later that day, the Delta operators were lucky to survive a tragedy that almost changed Afghanistan's history. An airman attached to the Special Forces battalion headquarters mistakenly called in a bomb on his own position. Three SF soldiers and at least twenty Afghans died in the accident, with many others seriously injured. In the aftermath of the attack, the Delta operators—all of whom had extensive medical training—were invaluable in tending to the wounded and securing the site's perimeter. Karzai was in a building 100 meters from the blast and emerged with only a small cut on his face from flying glass. (Spider had dived on him to shield him when the bomb hit.) About fifteen minutes after the explosion, Karzai received a call on his satellite phone from a BBC reporter telling him a conference of Afghan factions in Bonn arranged by the United States had named him head of the interim Afghan government.

Despite the setback, the Taliban resistance at Shawali Kowt evaporated. Two days later, Karzai, whose reputation among Pashtuns had been growing rapidly since the Tarin Kowt battle, entered Kandahar in triumph.
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The last major city in Afghanistan—and the one that was the Taliban's power base—had fallen. Unnoticed by the news media, Delta's A2 troop had remained with their Pinzgauers in southern Afghanistan. When Mattis's Marines arrived at Kandahar airfield on December 14,
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the Delta operators “met them, turned the key over, and took off,” said a JSOC staff officer.

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Up in Kabul, things had also been moving fast. After the successful Shelter Now hostage rescue removed their original raison d'être in Afghanistan, two of the original three Delta operators who arrived October 26 to work with the CIA had been attached to an Agency team that Berntsen sent to Jalalabad in pursuit of Al Qaeda forces fleeing east. In their place, Berntsen wrote, Central Command deployed another small “JSOC advance team” to work with Berntsen and “to prepare the ground for a large JSOC contingent to follow”
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—a classic AFO mission.

The new team's leader was Lieutenant Colonel Mark Erwin, the wiry, brown-haired commander of Delta's Operational Support Troop.
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Erwin had been a star NCAA Division I soccer player for his alma mater, Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, leading the nation in scoring in 1983. After entering the Army in 1984 as an infantry officer,
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Erwin had been selected for Delta. But after commanding a B Squadron troop his career had stalled, at least temporarily. He had been passed over for squadron command by the special mission unit board, while the regular Army had not selected him to command a maneuver battalion. Instead the Army had selected Erwin for a less prestigious basic training battalion command at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, said two Delta sources. Rather than lose Erwin from Delta, unit commander Jim Schwitters and his deputy, Colonel Ron Russell, gave him command of the Operational Support Troop in order to evaluate him and then, based on his performance, put him back in front of the special mission unit board, the source said. That job found him seated beside Berntsen on the evening of November 20, driving the forty miles north from Kabul to Bagram air base in a new blue Ford pickup flown in for Erwin and his three-man team. (The ruined base, fought over for years by the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, had been in American hands since October 21.) As they motored carefully past the rusted hulks of Soviet tanks, Erwin told his Agency counterpart about his soccer background. Berntsen was suitably impressed by Erwin, past and present: “He was now in his late thirties and hard as nails.”
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There had been a few bumps in the road, but JSOC and the CIA were demonstrating an ability to work well together downrange. Sources in both organizations said the Karzai missions exemplified the benefits to be gained from a close—some would say symbiotic—relationship between the Agency and the military's most elite special operations units. At the core were personal links forged in the Balkans. “The real bond between the CIA and Delta started in Bosnia … face-to-face, working a real-world mission, getting to know each other, realizing once again that neither organization can do what they want to do without the other,” said a Delta source. “That's the genesis of the whole relationship. That thing with Karzai was an extension of it.”

Crumpton found JSOC's cooperative attitude a refreshing change from the Agency's recent experience butting heads with Rumsfeld in the Pentagon. “It was all driven by mission, and the further you got away from Washington, the easier it was,” he said. “I can't say enough good things about Dell Dailey.… I can't say that about DoD, but I can say that about JSOC.” There would be further tensions between the two organizations as they shouldered the bulk of the responsibility for the secret wars across the globe, wars the U.S. government was only now beginning to contemplate. But things were off to a reasonable start.

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Erwin and Berntsen were driving to Bagram to meet Franks, whose C-17 landed shortly after the pair had arrived at the base, and the two moved up to the runway to await the general. Berntsen's account hints at the importance Franks attached to JSOC's AFO effort: “With the engines still running, the back hatch opened and a dozen U.S. soldiers with helmets, weapons, and night vision goggles spilled out. One of them crossed the fifty meters of apron to shake the Lt. Colonel's hand, then escort him back to the C-17.” Only after conferring with Erwin for a couple of minutes did Franks, with the JSOC officer by his side, stroll over to greet Berntsen, the senior CIA officer in-country.
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