Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (8 page)

JSOC was on a four-hour “string,” meaning it had to be able to get a task force appropriate for whatever no-notice mission it was handed in the air within four hours of being alerted. Specific mission requirements would dictate the exact makeup of that task force, but the perceived need to always take a significant slice of the JSOC headquarters, as well as TF 160's entire alert package and a series of other “enablers,” guaranteed a large force would deploy. In the
Achille Lauro
case, JSOC was deploying a high-tech JOC, at least twenty helicopters and 500 personnel on a dozen transport planes, including four huge C-5s, in order to take down four lightly armed hijackers on a cruise ship. The command could argue that when the task force launched, its leaders couldn't be sure how the crisis would develop nor exactly what circumstances it would encounter on the objective, and so they needed the extra forces to hedge against risk.
15
But it was also clear, despite Stiner's claim that “this was a much larger force than was normally required,” that by late 1985 the massive, unwieldy task force the command put together for the
Achille Lauro
mission was becoming the norm, rather than the exception. It was this formulaic approach, in which a big task force was deemed the solution to almost every problem, that critics would later say robbed JSOC of its ability to react nimbly, let alone to deploy clandestinely.

Already observers were critical of the time it took JSOC to deploy. Stung by the TWA hijacking fiasco, Reagan put his vice president, George H. W. Bush, in charge of a task force on combating terrorism. The staff director was James Holloway, the retired admiral who had recommended JSOC's creation after the Eagle Claw failure. Now tasked with evaluating the progress JSOC had made in the past five years, he was disturbed to discover that JSOC took as long as seventy-two hours to get going once it had been alerted. Holloway told Stiner that if the military couldn't accelerate JSOC's deployment timeline, it might as well shut the command down.
16

Part of the problem was that until Stiner's bravura performance in the Tank a few months previously, JSOC had no control over the aircraft on which it deployed. This was still the case at the time of the
Achille Lauro
hijacking, because although Stiner had persuaded the Joint Chiefs to give the command its own dedicated airlift, the wheels of military bureaucracy had not yet turned far enough to make that happen.
17
As before, JSOC was left playing catch-up from the moment Stiner walked into his operations center the morning of October 7.

It took about eighteen hours, or until 1
A.M.
October 8, to get the task force airborne. Even then, Team 6 was delayed for several hours because its C-141 suffered maintenance problems. Again, Stiner had the task force fly first to Sigonella, where he dropped off a small SEAL element and a couple of Little Birds, and then on to Akrotiri, which was barely big enough to handle the air armada headed its way.

The task force used the time in the air to plan.
18
In the best case scenario, the mission would be a classic “under way,” so called because it involved the SEALs assaulting the ship while it was steaming ahead. This was a core Team 6 mission, and the unit trained for it repeatedly. Typically it involved blacked-out aircraft dropping SEALs into the sea at night alongside small Zodiac rubber boats several miles behind the cruise ship. The operators would clamber aboard the Zodiacs, ride up to the stern undetected (cruise ships are so loud it would be impossible for anyone on the ship to hear the Zodiacs approaching), then climb aboard using a scaling ladder hoisted up and hooked onto the ship's railing by a SEAL using a thirty-five-foot pole, as helicopters arrived bearing more SEALs. The concept was simple, but the execution could be terrifying in heavy seas for operators trying to first grab the swaying ladder in the darkness and then climb up while getting smashed against the vessel by large waves. Once on the ship, the SEALs were to kill or capture the hijackers and search the vessel for any hidden terrorists or explosives. Variations of this method involved the SEALs assaulting from MH-6s that would approach the stern just above sea level before flaring to hover above the fantail as the SEALs fast-roped down, and other SEALs or Delta operators reinforcing the initial assault force from helicopters landing on or hovering above the deck. The
Achille Lauro
offered an excellent chance of success. The ship's tapered stern could not be seen from the bridge, and the four hijackers would be tired and separated from each other trying to keep track of the hostages in three locations on the liner.
19

But circumstances conspired yet again to rob JSOC of the chance to conduct a set-piece hostage rescue operation. The U.S. Navy lost track of the
Achille Lauro
as it headed east. When it finally stopped off Tartus, Syria, and broke radio silence, the hijackers murdered a disabled American passenger named Leon Klinghoffer, shooting him in the head and chest before having crewmen dump his body in the sea. Syria refused entry to the hijackers, who turned back toward Egypt. The Navy again lost track of the ship but Israel spotted it and relayed its location to the United States. JSOC's plan was to stage off a Navy ship just over the horizon from the
Achille Lauro
and to launch the attack after dark on October 9. The rotors of the helicopters taking the SEALs to their drop-off point at sea were already turning when Stiner learned the mission was off. The hijackers had surrendered to the Egyptian authorities “without preconditions.” Furious U.S. officials suspected that either the Italians or the Egyptians had warned the PLO, whose leaders had become involved in the negotiations, that the Americans were planning a rescue mission.

Stiner ordered his force to head back to the United States. That movement was soon under way. But the drama wasn't over. With the Egyptian government's help, the hijackers tried to flee to Tunisia October 10 on an Egypt Air Boeing 737. Reagan ordered F-14s from the aircraft carrier
Saratoga
to intercept the flight and divert it to Sigonella, where the skeleton Team 6 force Stiner had left there surrounded it as soon as it landed shortly after midnight on October 11.

The aircraft carrying Stiner, his command group, and a couple of Team 6 platoons landed shortly thereafter. They soon discovered that in addition to the crew and four hijackers, the 737 was carrying eight to ten Egyptian commandos, an Egyptian intelligence officer in plainclothes, and two PLO officials, including PLO executive council member Abu Abbas, who U.S. officials suspected of masterminding the entire operation. As phone calls flew back and forth between Washington, Rome, and Cairo, a bizarre and potentially disastrous turn of events occurred when Italian troops and police surrounded the SEALs who were in turn surrounding the Egypt Air jet. The Italian authorities had decided to assert their authority over the hijackers, as it was an Italian ship they had hijacked. After much delicate negotiation between Stiner and the senior Italian general on the scene, and between Washington and Rome, a compromise was reached whereby the Italians would prosecute the four hijackers, but, to the Americans' frustration, the two senior PLO officials were allowed to leave Italy.
20

For JSOC there was satisfaction that the command helped apprehend the four hijackers—all but the youngest of whom received lengthy prison sentences—mitigated by bitterness that Abu Abbas escaped justice. For the operators, there was again the frustration that came with being “spun up” for a mission that then evaporated before their eyes. JSOC and Team 6 would wait more than seventeen years for a reckoning with Abu Abbas.

*   *   *

The following year, 1986, as part of a wholesale overhaul of the military's special operations structure, Congress held a series of hearings that allowed Dick Scholtes to finally have his say about the myriad problems that had bedeviled the JSOC task force in Grenada. Having waited almost three years for an opportunity to vent his frustrations, the two-star general retired from the Army in order to speak his mind. His August 5 testimony before a closed session of the Senate Armed Services Committee's Sea Power and Force Projection Subcommittee was widely considered “the most compelling” case Congress heard on the issue, according to Jerry Boykin's Army War College thesis on the subject. Scholtes's argument that conventional commanders ignorant of JSOC's unique capabilities had misused his forces in Urgent Fury, resulting in significant casualties, was critical in persuading Senators Bill Cohen of Maine and Sam Nunn of Georgia to introduce an amendment to the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act that would change the course of U.S. special operations history. Among other steps, the Nunn-Cohen Amendment, passed as a rider to the 1987 Defense Authorization Act, created a four-star unified command—U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM—that would be the equal of the military's geographic unified commands like European Command and Pacific Command, and would oversee JSOC. It also created an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict office in the Pentagon to oversee all special operations matters.
21
These steps were taken despite bitter resistance from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who feared they would lead to the creation of a fifth service, but they laid the groundwork for JSOC's journey over the next two decades from the margins of the U.S. military to the centerpiece of its campaigns.
22

 

4

Payoff in Panama

The TWA 847 and
Achille Lauro
crises were just two of at least eight “real-world” JSOC deployments in the three years following Grenada.
1
The possibility of invading Suriname arose again in late 1986, when the U.S. and Dutch governments planned a joint operation aimed at arresting Bouterse. The plan came to light in 2010 when Ruud Lubbers, prime minister of the Netherlands at the time of the planned invasion, disclosed it to a Dutch newspaper. The report said the United States was prepared to support the operation with ships, planes, and helicopters, but made no mention of U.S. troops on the ground. In fact, JSOC had a major role. The command had earmarked the Rangers for the airfield seizure mission, which had become their specialty. Delta was going to launch its attack from a Navy helicopter carrier and had conducted a couple of rehearsals for the operation, including at least one at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. However, Lubbers called off the invasion after becoming uncomfortable with the prominent Dutch role.
2

The furious pace of training and operations continued into 1987, when Stiner changed command with Army Major General Gary Luck, who spent two years in Special Forces from 1963 to 1965, including time in Vietnam, but who had had no special operations assignments since then.
3
JSOC and its units trained all over the United States and the rest of the world, from the vast desert tracts of the American Southwest to the claustrophobic confines of metropolitan skyscrapers and Central American jungles.

With the command so busy, the Pentagon gradually expanded the size of its formations. Delta added a third “sabre” squadron of operators—C Squadron—and moved into a lavishly equipped new headquarters at Bragg's Range 19 complex in 1987.
4
The unit now had about 200 operators and 300 support personnel,
5
but a ruthless assessment and selection process meant it always had trouble keeping its squadrons filled.

In 1989 Delta expanded further when Seaspray became the unit's aviation squadron and was renamed E, or Echo, Squadron. Earlier in the decade, then JSOC commander Dick Scholtes had considered making a play to get the brand-new unit assigned directly under JSOC but decided against doing so “before they were fully qualified,” a senior JSOC official from the period said. (By coincidence, Scholtes's son later served in the unit.)
6

But Delta's absorption of the covert aviation element didn't mean Delta stopped working with TF 160. The two aviation units had very different capabilities and mission sets. “Echo Squadron's a much smaller capability [than the 160th],” said an officer familiar with both organizations. While the 160th was a purely military organization and made no effort to be clandestine, Echo Squadron provided a capability to support JSOC and the intelligence community with undercover pilots and civilian-looking aircraft that came with a full cover themselves, but which could be armed. Although now officially part of Delta, to avoid any public links to its higher headquarters the squadron remained at Fort Eustis. It continued to support all JSOC's special mission units and, on occasion, the CIA.
7
“This is a niche unit for very highly specialized missions,” said an officer familiar with E Squadron.

SEAL Team 6 was also growing quickly. In 1987 the unit boasted about 225 personnel, of whom no more than half were SEALs. The unit's three assault teams—Blue, Gold, and Red—provided its cutting edge. Team 6 had also formalized its selection process, replacing the alcohol-soaked interviews of the Marcinko era with a six-month selection and training course. A fourth team, Green, ran the course, which roughly half the candidates failed to complete. A fifth team, Gray, operated the unit's boats. (Gray Team was originally manned by Navy construction battalion men—Seabees—but by the end of the decade SEALs were replacing them.) Within three years the unit's strength had grown to about 550 personnel. In 1989 Team 6 also adopted a new cover name, replacing “Marine Environmental Services Facility,” or MARESFAC, with “Naval Special Warfare Development Group,” often shortened to DevGroup or DevGru. In doing so the unit followed the usual rule of thumb in such matters: the blander the name, the more interesting the unit. (Delta would later go by “Combat Applications Group.”) Events many years hence would make both SEAL Team 6 and DevGru almost household words in some quarters, but at the time the unit was only interested in burrowing deeper into obscurity.
8
“MARESFAC was getting kind of worn and it didn't seem like it really fit our mission very much anymore and it was too hard to maintain, so we changed it to something we thought nobody would ever have heard of and would give us a lower profile,” said a senior Team 6 officer, chuckling. “It's funny in retrospect, but it made absolute perfect sense at the time.”