Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (66 page)

The operators whose job it was to fix the charges intended to erase all evidence of the helicopter's experimental nature couldn't reach the tail boom, which “was hanging over the wall,” the Team 6 source said. But they had put so much explosive on the rest of the helicopter they didn't imagine they'd need to cover the tail as well. “They thought it would explode anyway, but it didn't,” he said. “It sheared off. But no one got in trouble for it.” The next day that sci-fi-looking tail rotor was the star attraction for the media and onlookers who descended on the compound. It was JSOC's own inadvertent calling card.

Thirty-eight minutes after they had landed, the SEALs were in the air again. Those who had flown in the Black Hawk that had crashed were riding out on a Chinook. But they weren't out of danger just yet. “Shortly after that is when the Pakistanis were able to figure out what happened,” the Team 6 source said. “[They] spun up and scrambled their F-16s to hunt down those helicopters,” which must have come as something of a surprise to the CIA analyst who had guaranteed it wouldn't happen. It should have been a race to the border, with the helicopters having a head start and the jets a significantly faster speed. But the jets flew off in the wrong direction. After the mission, someone in Task Force Brown sat down and did the math. Even had the F-16s flown straight after the helicopters, “it would've been close but they couldn't have got them” before they crossed the border, the source said.

*   *   *

A day or two later, a C-17 touched down near Virginia Beach and the operators dismounted as if returning from just another mission. There was no fanfare, no ticker tape parade.

A little more than thirty-one years previously, a similar group of operators had quietly returned home from a vital mission overseas, also hidden from the public eye. They too were smart, patriotic, and highly motivated. But that is where the similarities end. Their mission—which had failed—had also involved helicopter flights deep into denied territory. Just to put the task force together had been a monumental effort on the part of the nation's military. In contrast, JSOC had run a dozen other missions on the night that Team 6 killed bin Laden.
22
The extraordinary had become routine.

 

28

Successes, and a Failure

Spring 2009 found Team 6 newly in charge of JSOC's operations in the Horn of Africa and Yemen. Events off the Somali coast soon gave the unit an opportunity to prove its worth to a new president in a high-profile mission with no margin for error.

On April 8, 2009, four teenage Somali pirates boarded and seized the
Maersk Alabama,
a 155-meter container ship that was traversing the Indian Ocean a little more than 300 miles from Somalia. The twenty-man crew was well trained in how to respond to pirate attacks and most hid from the pirates, even managing to temporarily capture the ringleader, Abduwali Muse. But the pirates reneged on a deal to trade Muse for the ship's American captain, Richard Phillips, and instead all four pirates took Phillips hostage and sailed off in the
Maersk Alabama
's large, covered orange lifeboat.
1

Piracy had been on the rise in the waters off Somalia since the turn of the century, a result of the anarchy plaguing that country and the demise of its fishing business. In 2008 Somali pirates attacked 111 ships, seizing forty-two.
2

JSOC had not been oblivious to the issue. Around late 2004 McChrystal had asked TF Brown to examine whether it would be feasible to use Little Birds to attack Somali pirates. From late 2004 to late 2005 TF Brown planned against that mission, coming up with a concept that would have had Little Birds operating off a cargo ship. “You could put Little Birds on any cargo ship … and no one would have known at night,” said a TF Brown source. “Had we done that at night under [night vision] goggles over the water, they would not have known what hit them.” The pilots were keen on the concept, so long as it didn't involve “getting stuck on a ship for six months or a year, sitting there waiting to just go shoot boats,” he said. But nothing came of the plans, in the face of stiff resistance from Colonels Andy Milani and Kevin Mangum, who commanded the 160th from 2003 to 2005 and 2005 to 2008 respectively.
3

It might have stayed that way, had the pirates chosen another ship to attack on the morning of April 8, 2009. But their capture—albeit brief—of the
Maersk Alabama
marked the first successful pirate attack on a U.S.-flagged ship since the early nineteenth century. Once they took an American hostage on the open water, the next stage in the drama was almost inevitable. JSOC got the call, and, since it was a maritime scenario, that meant a mission for Team 6.

Plans were soon afoot to deploy Team 6's Red Squadron, which had the Trident alert mission, to a ship off the Somali coast.
4
In the meantime, early on April 9, the
Bainbridge,
a U.S. Navy guided missile destroyer, arrived on the scene and began shadowing the lifeboat containing Phillips and his four captors. It was soon joined by the
Halyburton,
a U.S. Navy frigate. In a desire to get operators into position as soon as possible, while waiting for the White House to decide whether to order the alert package to deploy, JSOC ordered a handful of Team 6 operators from Team Nairobi to fly to Djibouti, pick up some parachutes, and then jump in to the Indian Ocean beside the
Bainbridge
.
5
They arrived on the night of April 8.
6
A little more than twenty-four hours later, in the early hours of April 10, Phillips attempted to escape by jumping into the water, only for the pirates in the lifeboat to catch up with him.
7

Meanwhile, in and around Dam Neck, Virginia, beepers started going off April 10. Team 6 had been in existence for almost three decades, but the alert standard was still the same. Each operator who got the word had to be ready to launch in four hours. Most of Red Squadron descended on Oceana Naval Air Station, where two J-alert birds, which were now C-17s, not the C-141s of the 1980s and 1990s, were waiting. The SEALs loaded two high-speed assault craft on each plane, and took off for the Indian Ocean. The operation to rescue Phillips now had a name: Lightning Dawn.
8

After an almost twenty-hour flight, with two aerial refuelings, the planes' back ramps opened, the sunlight streamed in, and the four assault craft flew out, followed by about fifty Team 6 personnel. Those fifty jumping into the Indian Ocean included most of Red Squadron, a few intelligence and communications guys, plus the assault craft boat drivers. (The high-speed boats and crewmen were primarily there in case the pirates managed to get Phillips to land, forcing the SEALs to go ashore to rescue him.) The need to bring the intelligence and communications personnel, for whom military freefall jumping was not usually a job requirement, meant three operators had to tandem jump with them, meaning the inexperienced personnel were strapped to the SEALs under one parachute. For at least one communications tech, this meant his first parachute jump of any kind was a freefall jump into the Indian Ocean on a combat mission. Captain Scott Moore, Team 6's commander, also jumped in to handle the interactions with Rear Admiral (lower half) Michelle Howard, who was commanding Combined Task Force 151, a multinational force assembled to combat piracy in the Indian Ocean. Howard's flagship was the
Boxer,
an amphibious assault flattop sitting over the horizon from the
Bainbridge
and the pirates. It was into the patch of sea beside the
Boxer
that the Team 6 contingent jumped. Moore and the Red Squadron commander stayed on the
Boxer,
while the squadron's executive officer, a lieutenant commander named Walt, took an assault team and some snipers to the
Bainbridge
.
9

Once on the destroyer, the operators considered the challenge before them. They had, of course, trained for hostage rescue missions at sea, but usually with the idea that the hostages would be on a cruise ship taken over by terrorists, requiring Team 6 to use its trademark “underway” techniques to board the moving ship. “This was a much different problem,” said a Team 6 source. “It was a single floating room.… It would have been easier for us to clear the
Maersk Alabama
than the
Maersk Alabama
lifeboat, because there's so many ways that you can board the
Maersk Alabama
with the element of surprise and never be seen, and there's so many ways that you can move on that ship without them ever seeing you, and then you can be on them in the bridge in a second.” The lifeboat's enclosed design meant it lacked gunwales for boarders to grab on to. “It was like a space capsule,” the source said. Moore asked a couple of Red Squadron's senior master chiefs for their thoughts on how to tackle it. “No one had any answers,” the source said. “Okay,” Moore told them. “We just need to let the situation develop safely.” As long as the pirates weren't threatening to kill Phillips immediately, there was time to figure something out, the SEALs thought.

One option that the operators considered and rejected as too risky was swimming up to the lifeboat in the dark and killing the pirates. However, the SEALs did disguise themselves as regular sailors taking food to the lifeboat in order to get a closer look at the pirates and the layout of the small craft. Whether or not the pirates noticed the SEALs' full beards—which had become a tradition for operators headed to Afghanistan, where Red Squadron was due to deploy in a couple of weeks—is a matter of conjecture.

By now the pirates were getting very jumpy. They had run out of khat, the mild narcotic plant to which many Somali men are addicted and which helps prevent seasickness. And the U.S. Navy had surrounded them, preventing their efforts to reach Somalia, even though they were drifting in that direction.
10

On the morning of April 12 the SEALs persuaded Muse, the pirates' leader, to come aboard the
Bainbridge,
ostensibly to help with negotiations and to get medical treatment for a cut on his hand he had suffered in a fight with a crewman during the initial hijacking. But in Phillips's opinion, Muse had decided to abandon his colleagues. “I think the Leader got off that boat because he saw bad shit coming down the pike,” he later wrote in an account of his ordeal.
11

Meanwhile, the lifeboat was floating toward the twelve-nautical-mile line marking Somalia's territorial waters. No one on the
Boxer
could tell Moore what the legal ramifications would be if the lifeboat crossed that invisible line. So in order to prevent that eventuality, the SEALs persuaded the pirates to allow the
Bainbridge
to attach a line to the lifeboat and tow the small craft, under the rationale that it would ensure a smoother ride for the three pirates (plus Phillips) left on the lifeboat. What it also allowed the
Bainbridge
to do was surreptitiously pull the lifeboat ever closer.

But McRaven, the JSOC commander, had his own ideas about how to solve the problem. From Afghanistan, he had told the White House his men were going to ram the lifeboat, according to Team 6 sources. “Our high-speed assault craft are still on the
Boxer,
” recalled a SEAL. “We're using the ship's RHIB [rigid hull inflatable boat] from the
Bainbridge
. He's telling them he's going to launch it to ram the boat.”

The operators viewed McRaven's actions as micromanagement. In their view, ramming the boat was “an Israeli tactic” that would have the disadvantage of knocking the SEALs off balance. Moore's goal was to get the pirates to give up peacefully. But figuring out what was going on in their heads was no easy task, once they exhausted their supply of khat. At that point, “they're getting really weird,” recalled a Team 6 source.

McRaven wanted the
Bainbridge
to stop towing the lifeboat, but gave Moore “emergency assault authority,” meaning that if there appeared to be an immediate threat to Phillips's life, the Team 6 commander had the authority to act. But while Moore and McRaven were discussing what steps to take next, Walt had taken the initiative and positioned snipers on the destroyer's fantail, ready to take out all three pirates on the lifeboat should the opportunity present itself. That chance came soon. The tension, lack of khat, and sleep deprivation were affecting the three remaining pirates. Phillips was acting belligerently with them. A pirate fired an AK round off the front of the lifeboat. But as the pirates argued with each other and Phillips that night, they finally exposed themselves simultaneously to the snipers on the
Bainbridge.
Walt called Moore. “They're losing it,” he said. “We got the third shot.” “Cleared hot,” Moore replied. “But don't fuck it up.”
12

Half a dozen shots rang out in the space of a couple of seconds and all three pirates dropped dead or dying to the floor. One squeezed off a single harmless AK round as his last act alive. Huddled on the lifeboat floor, Phillips was safe, a fact confirmed by two operators who slid down the rope to get onto the lifeboat as quickly as possible.
13
The snipers had performed perfectly, even though killing the pirates was not the SEALs' most desired outcome. “Our team tried everything in our power to get those fuckers to give up,” said a Team 6 source. “We weren't looking to fucking plug 'em.”

Walt waited to get Phillips onto the
Bainbridge
before passing the good news to the
Boxer.
In the meantime McRaven called again to order the SEALs to stop towing the lifeboat. Instead, Moore was able to tell him that the pirates were dead and Phillips was on the
Bainbridge.
It was a remarkable success. But it took a while before either JSOC or the Obama administration decided to shower the SEALs with plaudits.
14
“We were not instantly heroes,” said a Team 6 source. “It took about twelve hours for … JSOC and the administration to realize that the Americans that know about this are like, ‘Wow, these are the greatest guys ever!'”