SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (7 page)

All of this equipment, and more, is issued to students arriving to try out for Green Team. How long they hold on to it is up to them. Green Team is a year-long ordeal, every bit as physically and mentally demanding as BUD/S. There are SEAL Team Six operators who tell you that they thought it was tougher than BUD/S—much tougher.

“At BUD/S it’s a question of survival,” one Team Six operator summed up. “You get up in the morning and you try to survive until breakfast. But Green Team isn’t just a matter of obeying orders and hanging on. You’re competing against the best SEALs in the business. Green Team is a race, and the prize is a slot on the operational team.”

A few months after Gormly assumed command, in October 1983, a coup d’état occurred on the Caribbean island of Grenada. Its circumstances were highly suspicious. On Grenada, hundreds of Cuban “construction workers” had been sent to the island to complete work on an international airport. American satellites revealed that the runway had been completed in reasonable time, but the Cubans stayed on, using bulldozers to push dirt back and forth over the pavement. Ominously, the Cubans began receiving ever-increasing shipments of “equipment” that were transferred from the docks, at night, and assembled in closed hangars. The Cuban engineers were in fact Special Forces soldiers, and the equipment turned out to be armored vehicles, antiaircraft guns, and surface-to-air missiles.

Hudson Austin, a Grenadian army officer with communist leanings, had the island’s president, Maurice Bishop, assassinated. He also kidnapped the island governor-general, Sir Peter Schoon. When the Grenadian people started to protest, Austin ordered a twenty-four-hour-a-day, shoot-on-sight curfew. It was then that the Cubans played their hand. The armored vehicles and antiaircraft guns were driven to key places on the island. This was a Cuban show all the way.

There were about a thousand U.S. medical students on Grenada, attending the University of St. George. The Cubans surrounded the university and ordered the Americans into their dorm rooms. Fearing a repeat of the Iranian hostage drama, President Ronald Reagan ordered an invasion.

Operation Urgent Fury was a turning point for Naval Special Warfare.

Team Six had spectacular successes but it also had tragedy; before the opening of hostilities, four SEALs were lost conducting an at-sea rendezvous. The loss was made bitter because of its futility. It was a needless accident caused by complicity.

Once on the ground in Grenada, SEAL Six more than proved its mettle. Led by Bob Gormly, operational elements of SEAL Team Six rescued Governor-General Scoon, and took out the radio transmitter of Radio Free Grenada—two epic special operations that proved to JSOC and to Washington that SEAL Six could deliver.

Postinvasion analysis showed that the intelligence about the island had been woefully inaccurate. CIA officers provided one SEAL assault element with a tourist brochure with a target location circled in ballpoint pen. Assessments of the fighting capabilities of the Cuban engineers, too, had been dangerously underestimated. U.S. ground forces found themselves facing state-of-the-art Soviet-designed, Cuban-manned antiaircraft weapons. Combat-hardened Cuban forces drove armored vehicles that were able to shoot down helicopters and surround inserted SEAL Teams. It was a rude awakening.

On Grenada, the CIA continued to disappoint. When a SEAL element, led by Commander Donald Campbell, took over the studios of Radio Free Grenada, his mission plan stated that a CIA guide would lead a Marine company to the transmitter to secure it by 0900 hours.

The CIA never showed. The Marines were willing, but had no maps—the CIA was supposed to provide those as well. Campbell and his team of Red Men held the radio station for more than ten hours—beating off repeated attacks by Cuban infantry backed up by armored vehicles. Campbell’s SEALs, finally running out of ammunition, set explosive charges, blew up the station, and fled into the jungle.

Campbell and three of his team were wounded, and their satellite radio had been shot to pieces. They went to two prearranged pickup positions, only to find that the CIA, again, had forgotten to show. Disgusted, hunted by Cuban armor and infantry, Donald Campbell played the only card he had left. As night fell, he ordered his men to jump off a cliff into the water. Though wounded himself, Donald Campbell dragged another more seriously wounded member of his team out into the Atlantic, and led his team on a five-mile swim to an American destroyer.

From that moment forward, SEAL Team Six would never again put a mission into the field based on CIA-provided information. Though relations at the top remained cordial, on the operator level, the CIA became a joke.

But the weekend wasn’t even over. Across the world, another SEAL Team was about to get a very unpleasant surprise … and this, too, because local CIA case officers hadn’t seen the ball since kickoff. While the combined task force of SEALs, Delta, U.S. Marines, and Army Rangers were mopping up in Grenada, a new enemy reared its head.

In Beirut.

GOING SOLO

ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 23, 1983,
a four-ton Mercedes truck passed through a Lebanese Army checkpoint and into the parking lot of the Beirut International Airport. It turned a circle, gathering speed, then crashed through a steel fence. The truck bulldozed its way through the sandbagged bunker at the entrance of the headquarters. Tires squealing on lobby tiles, it plowed on, dragging Marine sentries on its bumper as it rushed into the open center courtyard of the building.

Then it detonated—killing 243 American Marines who had been sent to Lebanon as part of a multinational peacekeeping force. The bomb that took out the Marine Battalion Landing Team headquarters in Beirut was the largest non-nuclear explosion in the history of warfare. Great portions of the building were turned to powder. Across town, twenty-eight seconds later, a second, identical, truck bomb was detonated outside the headquarters of the French Foreign Legion detachment. This bomb killed sixty French paratroopers and wounded fifty more. Until 9/11, the Beirut bombings were the most deadly acts of terrorism ever committed against the United States.

A simple bronze statue in Jacksonville, North Carolina, was erected to honor those killed in the Beirut Marine Barracks bombing. Under the figure of a Marine standing in combat uniform are four words: “They Came in Peace.” The statue, like the incident itself, has been mostly forgotten.

In Washington, D.C., the forgetting was much more purposeful. The Beirut station of the CIA had no idea that anyone was planning to bomb the Marines that October. To the SEALs on the ground in Beirut, the CIA in country had proven itself a nonplayer. But there was an American intelligence agency that was gathering information in Lebanon. The only problem was, they weren’t sharing.

Early in October 1983, the National Security Agency intercepted radio traffic between Tehran and the Iranian embassy in Damascus. Though not decoded until weeks after the attacks, these messages proved that two massive, sophisticated truck bombs were ordered by the Iranian government. The VBIEDs (vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices) were built by technicians of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and transported through the Bekaa Valley with the complicity of the Syrian army.

The date chosen for the attack was a Sunday morning, October 23, 1983—six years to the day since the United States granted political asylum to the shah of Iran. All of this could have been known, in advance, by the NSA—had they translated a backlog of intercepted message traffic. The failure of the National Security Agency to provide actionable intelligence to the Marines in Beirut was the single most negligent and catastrophic failure of U.S. intelligence since Pearl Harbor. The NSA would fail again, even more horrendously, on 9/11. But that was two decades in the future.

After the Beirut bombing, the NSA launched one of the most shameful and cynical cover-ups in American history. Even before the last Marine body had been pulled from the wreckage, the NSA began to stonewall.

As the Marine Corps, and then Congress, conducted hearings on the military disaster, NSA director Lincoln D. Faurer failed to disclose certain NSA intercepts. This cynical move ensured that blame for the attack would fall on the few Marine officers who survived the blast. The NSA, abetted by the CIA, went so far as to create “battle damage assessments” that blamed the two highly sophisticated truck bombs on a Beirut street gang called Amal. The fix was in.

Colonel Tim Geraghty, the Marine commander in Lebanon, then a likely candidate for general, had his career ended by the issuing of a “nonpunitive letter of caution,” blaming him, incredibly, for failing to anticipate the bombing. His executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Gerlicht, had been made a quadriplegic by the blast. He had his career-killing letter handed to him in the Bethesda Naval Hospital.

The CIA and NSA made sure that the Marine officers at the airport took the rap. There’s no other example in American military history of more cold-blooded or ruthless interagency politics. Lincoln Faurer lived to see the Marine officers sent into early retirement and disgrace, while he managed to hold on to his job and get promoted to four-star general.

Transcripts of the Tehran–Damascus messages were only released in 2003, after repeated Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed by Colonel Geraghty, the commander of the Marine forces in Beirut. For the two decades following the Beirut attack, the National Security Agency would continuously fail to issue timely, predictive, or even relevant intelligence to decision-makers and military commanders. JSOC watched all of this and learned.

After Beirut and Grenada, the commanders at JSOC realized that they could not depend on conventional intelligence channels to gather targeting information, or frame predictive actions by the enemy. Privately, JSOC planners began to refer to NSA, CIA, and FBI as “the Three Stooges.” A combination of petty politics, technical shortcomings, interagency rivalry, and serial incompetence made it obvious that if JSOC wanted timely, target-specific information they would have to gather it themselves.

As SEAL Team Six expanded, JSOC set about gathering its own specialists in technical and signals intelligence and investigations and research. A fourth operational element would join JSOC and complete the “Invisible Empire.” JSOC’s intelligence component was the blackest of all black programs. It would go through many names and monikers and frequently change its organizational structure and physical location, making it impossible for anyone outside JSOC to either find it physically or figure out exactly what it did. The name given to this new unit was fitting: It was called “Grey Fox.”

As the war on terror went on, JSOC did its own analysis and picked its own targets. Over at CIA there were a few human intelligence types left, but those working counterterrorism were as petty and incestuous as the creative writing department at an Ivy League college. Several former SEALs founded defense contracting firms that provided assessments of terrorist operational techniques and abilities. Even SEALS who weren’t SEALs anymore were beating the agency at its own game.

It’s one thing to break the enemies’ codes—it is another thing to just capture the guy who wrote the message and have him read it to you. NSA’s billion-dollar super computers were increasingly irrelevant as JSOC came to grips with terrorist organizations who were smart enough to stay off their satellite phones and rely on trusted couriers to communicate their orders and plans.

In 1985, half a dozen Palestinian hijackers stormed aboard the
Achille Lauro,
an Italian cruise ship in the Mediterranean. Intending originally to head for Syria, they were refused entry. In frustration, they murdered Leon Klinghoffer, a disabled Jewish-American passenger.

SEAL Team Six deployed and prepared to take back the ship. Warned of the coming assault by Russian code breakers in Damascus, the hijackers put the ship around and hightailed into the Egyptian port of Alexandria. They were welcomed as heroes. There, President Hosni Mubarak cut a cash deal with Yasser Arafat and put the hijackers and their boss—master terrorist Abu Abbas—onto an Egypt Air 737. Escorted by a squad of Egyptian secret police, the airliner took off for Tunisia. It didn’t get far. Tomcat fighters from the carrier USS
Saratoga
forced the Egyptian airliner to land at the NATO airbase in Sigonella, Sicily.

Waiting for them on the runway was a squadron of Bones Men led by Lieutenant Commander Avril Pikeman. He quickly deployed snipers, blocked the aircraft’s wheels, and demanded that the terrorists surrender. Moments later, two C-141s containing assault elements from the Red Men landed behind the Egypt Air passenger liner. The hijackers had been hijacked.

Faced with an ultimatum, the terrorists quickly surrendered.

The surrender deal stipulated that they would be taken into Italian custody. That was a mistake. Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi quickly cut a side deal that separated Abu Abbas and two other senior PLO terrorists from the actual trigger pullers. Within hours, Craxi had provided the terrorists with Italian air force uniforms, fresh travel documents, and a police escort onto an Iraqi Air flight departing for Baghdad. Klinghoffer’s murderers were eventually brought to trial in Italy, but Craxi made sure that the big fish got away.

In April 1986, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi ordered the bombing of a Berlin disco, killing two U.S. servicemen and four German civilians, and wounding more than two hundred and fifty people. President Ronald Reagan ordered Operation El Dorado Canyon in response.

On the night of April 14, SEAL Six inserted two target-spotting elements across the beach into Tripoli. Call signed Apache and Arapahoe, these elements set up laser-target designators and illuminated Colonel Gaddafi’s headquarters at Bab al-Azizia.

Still smarting from the Achille Lauro, Italy did everything it could to thwart the American operation. First, the Italian government refused permission for the strike airplanes to fuel at the NATO airbase in Sigonella. Then Prime Minister Bettino Craxi crossed the line from obstructionism to treason. He placed a phone call to Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi and warned him that an American air strike was on its way. Gaddafi fled from his palatial compound moments before the bombs struck. He was lucky he did.