Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (67 page)

The rescue of Phillips was at the time the most high-profile mission Team 6 had ever undertaken. It was also the first occasion on which the United States' new president, Barack Obama, had had to rely on JSOC. When word of the success reached the White House, Obama called McRaven in Afghanistan. “Great job,” he told the admiral.
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It would not be the last time the president had cause to congratulate him.

*   *   *

Five months later Team 6 was back on a destroyer sailing off the Somali coast. This time their target was Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, the senior East African Al Qaeda leader JSOC had been hunting for years and had missed with a cruise missile strike in March 2008.

For several months a combination of human and signals intelligence had allowed JSOC to track Nabhan around the clock. The Al Qaeda figure had become lazy with his security arrangements. “There was a sense that he had gotten very loose and arrogant, using his phone as often as he could,” said a military intelligence official. “[He] set a lot of patterns—always traveled certain roads.” The analysts had refined Nabhan's pattern of life to the point that they could forecast where and when he would be traveling through Somalia, along what roads, and in what vehicle. With Nabhan's movements so predictable, JSOC began to work on plans to kill or capture him, while at the same time engaging in an arduous process to get White House approval for the mission, just as it had for the previous year's failed strike. The prospect of U.S. special operators fighting it out with Al Qaeda militants on the ground in Somalia made policymakers even more risk averse than usual. Several Obama administration national security officials had been in government at the time of the October 1993 Mogadishu battle in which eighteen U.S. soldiers died, almost all from JSOC's task force. “Any time you say ‘Somalia [and] task force,' instantly 1993 gets thrown up in [your] face,” said an officer who helped plan the Nabhan mission. But JSOC had assembled its arguments well. Its analysts expected Nabhan to drive along southern Somalia's coast road soon, and they divided the route they expected him to take into red, yellow, and green sections, depending on the risk to civilians of any strike in those areas. They determined that there was an excellent opportunity to strike Nabhan as he drove through an isolated area.
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In the second week of September, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen chaired an early evening secure video-teleconference of about forty officials in which McRaven gave a highly classified PowerPoint briefing that detailed three different options for getting Nabhan. The first was a missile strike, delivered either from an aircraft or a Navy ship. This option carried the least risk, but also the least potential reward, as there would be no way to exploit the site for intelligence afterward, and Nabhan would be dead, and therefore unavailable for interrogation. The second option was also a lethal strike, but carried out by two Task Force Brown AH-6 Little Bird attack helicopters, with a small force of less than a dozen Team 6 operators following up on a pair of MH-6 Little Bird lift helicopters to exploit the site and collect Nabhan's body, or at least some DNA extracted from it, to confirm his identity. The third option was a helicopter vehicle interdiction, like the second, but with the aim of capturing Nabhan rather than killing him. This was the highest-risk option. All the forces required for each option were already in position. The SEALs and the Little Birds and crews had flown out to the region almost four weeks previously and were on two destroyers, one of which was the
Bainbridge,
sitting off the coast of Somalia just out of sight of land.

Despite the group's initial reluctance to countenance a mission in which there was any possibility of putting U.S. boots on the ground—“Somalia, helicopters, capture. I just don't like the sound of this,” said Daniel Benjamin, the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator during the meeting—the upshot of the meeting was that the president was presented with a kill option and a capture option. However, the officials did not really see the capture option as viable, because the Obama administration had yet to figure out a policy for dealing with terrorists captured by U.S. forces outside Afghanistan and Iraq. If the United States wanted to remove Nabhan from the battlefield, it would have to kill him. JSOC had done its preparatory work well. At the cabinet level, the reaction of the Obama administration's senior national security leaders was, “This is clean,” according to a source privy to the discussions. Obama signed off on the lethal strike that night.
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The next day, September 14, Nabhan set out with three colleagues to make the 300-mile trip from Merka to Kismayo in southern Somalia, just as JSOC's analysts had predicted. JSOC's plan had evolved since McRaven's PowerPoint briefing. It now involved Task Force Silver, the covered Air Force unit, flying a civilian-style propeller aircraft made by the Spanish firm CASA along Nabhan's route and firing a Griffin missile at his car. Designed to minimize the risk of collateral damage while neutralizing the intended target, the Griffin could be used as a rocket-powered missile or a guided bomb and had only been in production since 2008. But at the last moment, with the plane in the air, clouds rolled in and foiled the plan. “They could not see the car and therefore could not use the Griffin,” said a Team 6 source. The backup plan of using Little Birds and SEALs from Team 6's Gold Squadron was now the last, best option, much to the operators' delight. “They were praying for clouds,” the Team 6 source said. The helicopters launched from the destroyer, which was just over the horizon, and flew fast and low in the broad daylight toward the Somali shore. They aimed to intercept Nabhan's vehicle outside the town of Baraawe, about fifteen miles inland.

The AH-6s took the lead, with the MH-6s following about a mile behind, so as to give the gunships time to shoot, turn around, and either shoot again or confirm the vehicle had been stopped. As staff in multiple operations centers around the world followed Nabhan's vehicle on video feeds from a Predator drone and a U-28A manned ISR aircraft, the AH-6 flight lead, Chief Warrant Officer 4 Jay Rathbun, finally got the vehicle in view as it motored along the road through the Somali brush. The four men it held, including Nabhan in the backseat, would have had little if any warning of the danger as the Little Birds closed on them. “It's tough to see them,” said a Task Force Brown source. “They're like little gnats, and then you've only got a matter of seconds.”

On his first pass, Rathbun had trouble lining up a good shot, but declined to say “alibi,” the code word that would pass the target to his Dash-2. “As the flight lead, you're in a once-in-a-lifetime mission, the chances of you saying ‘alibi' are just about zero,” said a Little Bird pilot familiar with the mission. “So the guy lived probably another fifteen seconds, because that's how long it took to get that aircraft round and take a shot.” Rathbun brought his helicopter around to face Nabhan's vehicle before diving in and firing minigun rounds that stopped the vehicle and killed those inside, blowing some of them apart.

Rathbun chose to fire the 7.62mm minigun, rather than the 30mm chain gun or rockets, in order to preserve the bodies as much as possible and to minimize damage to any materials of intelligence value in the car. “If you hit it with rockets or 30[mm] then you're going to destroy it,” the Little Bird pilot said. “It's going to be hard to piece together, frankly, who's who. And if you catch the car on fire, that's the worst case, because then it's real hard to get the DNA.”

After the car had been stopped, the MH-6s arrived carrying between six and eight Team 6 operators on their pods. At least one SEAL shot at the car, firing a burst from his M240 machine gun while seated on an MH-6 pod, but there was nobody left to kill. JSOC's number one enemy in the Horn of Africa was dead. It had been well worth the wait for the men on the helicopters. However, the Team 6 source said, much of the credit belonged to the analysts who were able to predict Nabhan's route with such accuracy: “Those intel folks really won the day.”

The analysts got their reward. After making sure all four vehicle occupants were dead, which didn't take long—“They were picking [body] parts out of the trees,” the Team 6 source said—the operators turned to their next tasks: collecting DNA from the corpses and scooping up anything of intelligence value. This was a major advantage of Rathbun firing the minigun instead of rockets. “Had a rocket gone into that thing, everything would have been damaged,” said a Team 6 source. Instead, although the minigun rounds had done brutal work to the car and the people inside, a camera was the only sensitive item in the vehicle not to survive the attack unscathed. The SEALs retrieved a trove of valuable information, according to a military intelligence source: “Two laptops, a multitude of disks and then … I want to say three phones, but each one had multiple SIM cards,” in addition to two “push-to-talk communications devices … like walkie-talkies.” The SEALs took all four bodies, or what remained of them, out of the car, put them on the aircraft, and flew them back to the ship, where, after Nabhan's corpse had been positively identified, they were buried at sea.
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Other than the intelligence value the United States derived from the mission, and the death of Nabhan, the significance of the mission was that it demonstrated to officials both inside and outside JSOC that the command retained the ability to conduct lethal clandestine operations with a small U.S. footprint. This was a relief to some in JSOC, who were growing concerned that so many years spent operating out of large, well-equipped bases in Iraq and Afghanistan had blunted the command's ability to conduct missions in more austere environments. The Nabhan strike allowed JSOC “to get back to the roots of the organization,” said an officer who helped plan it.

But the strike had little long-term effect on the war against Al Qaeda and al-Shabaab, said an intelligence officer. “It really had no impact on al-Shabaab's operations, other than they knew that we would be willing to do it,” he said.

*   *   *

Operation Lightning Dawn, the rescue of Richard Phillips from the clutches of Somali pirates, would spawn a hit movie starring Tom Hanks. But nobody wanted to make a movie about Team 6's next major hostage rescue mission at sea, even though, according to multiple sources in the unit, what transpired was a direct result of the Phillips mission.

The incident began on February 18, 2011, when nineteen pirates, all but one of whom were Somalis, captured the SY
Quest,
a yacht that four middle-aged Americans—two men and two women—were sailing around the world. As the pirates sailed the yacht toward northern Somalia, the U.S. Navy sent four ships to intercept it: the aircraft carrier
Enterprise,
the guided missile cruiser
Leyte Gulf,
and the guided missile destroyers
Sterett
and
Bulkeley
. The ships caught up with the yacht February 19.
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Meanwhile, JSOC had dispatched a Gold Squadron contingent under Commander John Rudella to handle the crisis. The operation was called Manor Press. Although the ratio of pirates to hostages was far from ideal, the SEALs realized that only five or six pirates—the ringleaders—had guns. The operators were confident they could handle them. “The boys had a plan to take out the top guys ready to go,” said a SEAL officer.

Rudella asked for “emergency assault authority,” which McRaven had given Moore during Lightning Dawn. But this time the JSOC commander, who was at Fort Bragg, wanted to keep a tighter rein on the SEALs than he had managed during the earlier crisis, and declined Rudella's request, according to Team 6 sources. In particular, he refused to let them try the sort of tricks that Red Squadron had used on the pirates who took Phillips hostage, they said. “He had felt that [Team 6] had manipulated him during the Captain Phillips rescue,” said a senior Team 6 source. “From the time that the guys got on station, McRaven said, ‘Hey, you manipulated me during Lightning Dawn, it's not going to happen again,'” said another Team 6 source. “And he made every call, every single call, during [Manor Press].” McRaven told Rudella that if fired upon, his SEALs were not to fire back.

Nonetheless, the Team 6 snipers set themselves up on one of the ships following the sailboat, much as the Red Squadron snipers had done during Lightning Dawn.
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“They have already figured out who the real bad guys are, who's there really to kill somebody and who's along because they've got to get some money and they have khat and whatever,” said the senior Team 6 source. The pirates were all within view of the snipers. “They weren't down belowdecks,” the source said. “They were sitting there in the back of the sailboat, underneath the awning.” However, the orders prevented the snipers from taking action. “Under no circumstances were they allowed to fire,” he said.

The Navy brought two pirates on board the
Sterett
for negotiations. But when one of the ships approached the yacht it unnerved the pirates. On the morning of February 22, a pirate fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the
Sterett.
It missed the ship, which was about 600 meters away, but it was a sign that the pirates' mood had turned ugly. Shortly thereafter, some of the pirates shot the four hostages to death, thinking that the Navy would leave them alone if they killed the Americans.

“They gunned them down as the snipers are watching through their scopes,” a Team 6 operator said. The Team 6 force immediately launched a boarding party. The SEALs dove off their high-speed assault craft onto the yacht and rolled into a standing position ready to shoot. But for the hostages, it was too late. All four Americans were dead or mortally wounded. So were two pirates, having died at the hands of their comrades. A third pirate was “playing possum” in the tangle of bodies, then jumped up and attacked one of the SEALs, who wrestled with him briefly before killing him with a combat knife. After another pirate in the cabin was shot by an operator, the remaining pirates surrendered.