Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (64 page)

At the same time, Bush administration officials were debating the potential value of a JSOC raiding campaign. Prompted by a “mountain of [intelligence] reporting” that tied the highest levels of the Pakistani government to the support Inter-Services Intelligence was continuing to provide the Taliban, the administration was more willing to risk a Pakistani reaction in order to hit the terrorists that had found a haven in its tribal areas. “The White House let it be known that nobody wanted to be blamed for the next 9/11,” said a Bush administration national security official. Nonetheless, getting the president to sign off on just one raid was a significant achievement for those advocating such a policy shift. “It was a big deal,” said the official. “There were a number of meetings getting the president to approve it.” The first strike would be McRaven's preferred option: the lowest-ranking target JSOC had, a minor Al Qaeda facilitator. “It was basically for a nobody,” a Team 6 operator said.

Blue Squadron's 1 Troop—about two dozen operators—conducted the mission on September 3, flying as close as possible to the Pakistan border and then walking over the border at last light. A quick reaction force on Chinooks was also on standby. The target, named Objective Ax, was in the village of Angoor Adda near Wana in South Waziristan. Although it was a troop-level mission, the political sensitivity meant the Blue Squadron commander came along. Someone high up the chain of command had stipulated “that that level of rank was going to control it on the ground,” the operator said. The SEALs arrived at the objective unseen, having walked virtually under the noses of a Pakistani military checkpoint. Operators scaled the compound walls, dropping down into the courtyard and opening the gate for the rest of the troop to enter. Then a door opened. A resident fired a shotgun blast at the SEALs. The next couple of minutes were chaos. “There were women on the target who started tackling our guys, and there were guys having to disarm these women, including throwing them on the floor,” said a senior Team 6 source. “Nobody shot any women. They shot a few guys. But all these women started coming at them.… Guys were getting away, guys were fleeing.” In the midst of the confusion, an aircraft nearby reported that Pakistani forces were moving toward the SEALs. That was all the squadron commander needed to hear. He called in the Task Force Brown helicopters—two MH-60 Black Hawks—and the troop departed at about 3 or 4
A.M
., taking a few detainees with them and having suffered one minor wound from a shotgun pellet.

As the Team 6 leaders had predicted, Pakistan's government reacted strongly to the raid. Officials there claimed twenty locals had died. Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Sadiq called it “a grave provocation.” U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson was also angry with JSOC, telling task force leaders that they had put her in a very awkward position with the Pakistanis. “There was a lot of damage control and really it got pretty ugly,” said a JSOC source. In light of the Pakistani reaction, President Bush forbade further raids. “The value gained from that op,” said a senior Team 6 officer, “was zippo.”
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A Reckoning in Abbottabad

In late January 2011, Bill McRaven was in Afghanistan when he received a call from Mike Vickers, the acting undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Vickers had some important news. The CIA thought it had a lead on bin Laden. Soon McRaven was on a plane back to the States, where he visited the Agency's Langley headquarters for a briefing from Michael Morell, the head of Special Activities Division. Morell told McRaven about the intelligence that led the Agency to believe there was a good chance that bin Laden was living in a walled compound in the town of Abbottabad, about fifty miles north of Islamabad.

McRaven said he thought a special operations raid on the compound would be “relatively straightforward,” at the tactical level. The challenges would be getting to Abbottabad, which was about 120 miles from the Afghan border. McRaven also said he had two individuals in mind for key roles: a Team 6 squadron commander he liked, who he thought could handle something going wrong on the objective, and a SEAL captain who had long experience in Team 6, whom he soon assigned to work with a planning team at the Agency.
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(For the captain, there was a certain symmetry about being placed in such a key role: he had been one of the first JSOC officers into the tribal areas on the AFO teams after Anaconda. His career had since taken him to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Horn of Africa, as he rose to become Team 6's deputy commander.)

There was much speculation later about why Team 6, rather than Delta, was handed the bin Laden mission. Some suggested that it was because the JSOC commander, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were all Navy admirals. The real reason is much simpler: if bin Laden was found in Afghanistan or Pakistan, it was always going to be Team 6's mission. The so-called Af-Pak region was Team 6's theater of operations. The unit had planned and trained for a bin Laden mission for years, and had already conducted multiple cross-border missions into Pakistan.
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But beyond deciding that if President Barack Obama ordered him to mount a raid, Team 6 would be the unit for the mission, McRaven did not follow convention. Instead of tapping the Team 6 commander, Captain Pete Van Hooser, or “PVH,” as he was known, and letting him decide how to run the mission and whom to send, the JSOC commander declined to inform Van Hooser about the mission immediately. Instead, he went around Van Hooser, reached into Team 6, and selected a particular squadron—Red—and squadron commander for the operation. McRaven also waited several days after informing the Red Squadron leadership about the mission before telling the Team 6 commander, all of which made Van Hooser, the oldest SEAL in the Navy, “just livid,” said a Team 6 source. The silver-haired Van Hooser, who had lost a leg in a parachuting accident, had been brought back onto active duty from retirement to run Team 6.
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McRaven's selection of Red Squadron, which was not Team 6's Trident, or alert, force at the time, also perplexed some Red Squadron operators, and led to a certain degree of cynicism. “Everyone knew the squadron that was already deployed could have pulled it off just as well as we could,” said Matt Bissonnette, a Red Squadron SEAL chosen for the mission. “The only reason we were tasked with this mission was because we were available to conduct the needed rehearsals to sell the option to the decision makers at the White House.”
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Some in Team 6 viewed the friction between McRaven, fifty-five, and Van Hooser, who at sixty-two was only on active duty by virtue of an age waiver, through the prism of McRaven's personal history with Team 6. As a young lieutenant, McRaven had served in Team 6 during the unit's early years under Richard Marcinko. But after only three months on the job Marcinko had fired him. The setback had no long-term impact on McRaven's career, and in retrospect, getting fired by Marcinko, who served time in jail, did not look so bad on his résumé. But McRaven never served in Team 6 again. Some operators thought he continued to hold a grudge against the unit because of his experience more than a quarter century previously.
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“He [McRaven] holds his bad time at DevGroup against everybody,” said a Team 6 source, using a common abbreviation for Team 6's cover name. McRaven denied this, making the point to the author in 2014 that if he had held any grudges against Team 6, “it would not have been involved in all the operations it has been involved in over the last five years.”
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The tension between McRaven and Van Hooser reached a breaking point during an early planning meeting at the CIA attended by a handful of people, including JSOC's deputy commander, Brigadier General Tony Thomas, and Command Sergeant Major Chris Faris, McRaven's senior enlisted adviser. The JSOC commander told Van Hooser that his responsibility for the mission would be limited to overseeing the training in the United States. When the force deployed to Afghanistan, it would be commanded by the Ranger Regiment commander, Erik Kurilla, who was running JSOC's Afghanistan task force at the time. Incensed, Van Hooser tried to resign on the spot, turning as if to leave the room. McRaven called him back, and everyone else left the room while the two SEAL officers hashed out their differences. By the end of the conversation, McRaven told Van Hooser that he could run the operation.
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*   *   *

Shortly thereafter, about thirty Red Squadron operators gathered for a meeting in a secure conference room at Dam Neck. They were told they'd be doing some training down in North Carolina for a joint readiness exercise, but they all understood something else was going on. It was clear from who was and was not in the room that the squadron's commander and command master chief had handpicked the most experienced operators from across the squadron to form a large troop of all-stars, rather than use an existing troop whose operators were used to working with each other in a team. Almost all the operators present “had double digit deployments” to Afghanistan, according to Bissonnette,
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so the end result was a highly experienced set of individuals. But the decision not to just go with one of the squadron's organic assault troops rankled many operators and left lasting bitterness. “They cherry-picked all the guys that they wanted, who were their friends, and made the ‘Super Troop,'” said an operator. “It totally destroyed unit connectivity.… A lot of people just up and left after that.”

Red Squadron's leadership picked twenty-three operators for the mission, plus a couple of alternates in case someone got hurt during training. The plan was to fly twelve men on each of the two helicopters earmarked for the mission, in addition to the aircrews. The ground force's twenty-fourth man was a CIA interpreter who took part in the training from the beginning. A military working dog—a Belgian Malinois named Cairo—would complete the ground force, which had about six weeks to prepare.
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Team 6 had been training for almost a decade to conduct a freefall parachute assault on bin Laden's location. Even though he had been found deep inside Pakistan, rather than in the tribal areas abutting Afghanistan, some experienced operators saw no reason to abandon that option, even though it would have required a Combat Talon to carry the assault force deep into Pakistani airspace. “The preferred course of action would have been the airdrop one,” said a Team 6 source. “The guys would get in virtually undetected.… We trained for years for that.”

But decisions made far above the operator level had determined that the assault force would infiltrate on helicopters, that it would fly to the X (i.e., fly straight to the objective, rather than landing at an offset location and creeping up to the objective), and that the helicopters carrying the operators on the most important mission of their lives would be like none they had ever seen before.

*   *   *

The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment and the combat development organizations that support it had been experimenting with stealth technologies for many years, beginning with a program to create a stealthy Little Bird. The program progressed to include the Black Hawk, the 160th's principal assault aircraft. The work had two overall aims: to reduce a helicopter's radar signature by giving it a different shape and coating it in special materials, and making the aircraft quieter, which usually involved development of a Fenestron, or shrouded tail rotor. (Much of a helicopter's noise signature comes from its tail rotor.) The 160th took the issue of reducing aircraft noise very seriously. In training exercises the unit would time how far from the target—in time of flight—the rotor sounds could be heard. As a rule, the larger the airframe, the farther out the target could hear the helicopter. The 160th wanted to reduce the time between an enemy hearing a helicopter approaching and it arriving overhead by as much as possible. “Even [cutting] fifteen seconds is huge,” said a 160th veteran. “And thirty seconds is amazing, because then you can be on top of the target and fast-roping people down.”

The stealth Black Hawk gained almost mythical status, like a unicorn. “I remember first hearing about it … in 2000 to 2001,” said a Delta source. The program quickly gained traction. “I remember in 2004 hearing that it was a line item in the budget,” he said. Knowledge of the special access program was on a strictly need-to-know basis, and hardly anyone needed to know. Shortly thereafter the 160th regimental leadership came looking to 1st Battalion—the core unit of Task Force Brown—for two crews to go down to Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, and start training on the new helicopters. In the end one crew went after a couple of pilots volunteered. “I never saw them again,” said a 160th source. “They'd be permanently assigned out there.” The program became more formalized. The aircraft were based at Nellis, but 160th crews trained on them at some of the military's other vast landholdings in the Southwest: Area 51; China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station in California; and Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona. U.S. Special Operations Command planned to create a fleet of four and make them the centerpiece of a new covered aviation unit in Nevada. By 2011 Special Operations Command had canceled that plan, but the first two stealth helicopters still existed, and certain 1st Battalion crews would rotate down to Nellis to train on them.

The additional material that made the helicopters invisible to radar also added weight and made them difficult to fly.
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This gave Team 6's most experienced men pause. Rehearsals had revealed that the “helicopter was very unstable when they tried to hover,” said a Team 6 operator. “Those things had been mothballed. The [pilots] hadn't flown them in a while, but they got back out there.” However, he added, “rehearsing it in the United States is not like flying the thing in actual combat conditions. Combat is not the first time to try something, and an operation like that—a mission like that—is certainly not.” But when David Cooper, Team 6's command master chief, put this view to McRaven early in the planning process and suggested the task force at least plan an alternative infiltration method, the JSOC commander gave the idea short shrift. (In fact, McRaven found Cooper's argument disrespectful and pressured Van Hooser to fire his command master chief, which the Team 6 commander refused to do.)
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