Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (12 page)

 

6

Forging Bonds in the Balkans

As the decade lengthened, JSOC's mission set grew. The combination of the command's sizable budget, demonstrated capability, and carefully cultivated aura of secrecy meant “JSOC was asked to solve problems nobody else could solve,” said a retired special ops officer. The attitude of those in the very few rungs in the chain of command above JSOC seemed to be, “if it's really hard and it's really important let's ask JSOC to do it,” said Mike Hall, who was the command's senior enlisted adviser from May 2000 to December 2001, having previously spent four years as the Ranger Regiment's command sergeant major. This applied even to missions for which the Marines or Special Forces or an infantry division might have been better suited. “Some of the things we were asked to do, maybe we weren't best for … but it sort of fell to JSOC because it was the no-fail, risk-averse environment from DoD,” said Hall, who added that by sending the military's “very, very best” on a mission, Pentagon leaders were attempting to insulate themselves from criticism if the mission failed.

JSOC also retained its traditional 0300 mission to conduct counterterrorism operations abroad. Each JSOC unit was on a readiness cycle that kept one element prepared to be “wheels up” four hours after being alerted. In Delta, the unit on standby was called the “Aztec squadron,” in Team 6 it was “the Trident” assault team, and in TF 160 it was the “Bullet package.” Together they were called “the alert force.”
1

But in addition to being prepared to conduct what a retired special ops officer called the “standard reactive” 0300 mission set, which included hostage rescue and responding to a plane hijacking or the takeover of a U.S. embassy, JSOC continued to play a part in plans for much larger combat operations. Since its inception, “JSOC had always been the nation's strategic raiding force,” said the retired special ops officer, citing Grenada and Panama as examples. In September 1994, it appeared that the National Command Authority would order JSOC to repeat those exploits as the U.S. military prepared to invade Haiti to oust the junta that had deposed Aristide in 1991. A JSOC task force that included virtually all of Team 6 plus a Ranger contingent was ensconced on the aircraft carrier
America
ready to launch. Operators from Delta's Operational Support Troop had already infiltrated Haiti undercover and reconnoitered locations critical to the invasion. They took videos of the sites, which were then briefed back in extraordinary detail to the small elements preparing for their missions.
2
But at the last moment, under heavy pressure from a U.S. delegation that included former president Jimmy Carter, retired General Colin Powell, and Senator Sam Nunn, the junta's leaders decided to step down.

Although Team 6 was JSOC's main assault force, Delta operators had done the advance undercover work on land because their SEAL counterparts lacked such a capability. Within a decade JSOC units would be competing to conduct low-vis missions, but in the mid-1990s what the SEALs called “clan [short for clandestine] stuff” was not a Team 6 priority. That hadn't always been the case, however. In advance of the Panama invasion, Rick Woolard, the Team 6 commander, realized he had no good intelligence on one of his unit's likely targets—a favorite beach house of Noriega's at Río Hato. So Woolard cobbled together a few Spanish-speaking Latino operators who might be able to snoop around Panama without drawing attention. In what a senior Team 6 officer later described as a “totally unauthorized” mission, Woolard sent two of the operators to Panama undercover, along with a female supply petty officer, who posed as the romantic partner of one of the SEALs. The mission was a bust—the team couldn't find out anything useful about the beach house and Woolard recalled them—but the Team 6 commander saw the value of such a unit and kept the group of about half a dozen operators together. “They had brown skin so we called them the ‘Brown Boys' and that eventually became Brown Cell,” said a Team 6 officer.

The cell trained for deep reconnaissance and undercover operations, and endured through the rest of Woolard's tenure and that of his successor, Ron Yeaw. But by the time Captain Tom Moser took command of Team 6 in 1992, the attention paid to Brown Cell had become a source of discontent within the assault troops. Moser shut it down. The petty officer who was Team 6's first undercover female operative left the unit and the Navy in 1993 and joined Delta, which had heavily recruited her for its own small band of women operators. She spent several years there before returning to the Navy and retiring.
3

Although JSOC was created to conduct the counterterrorism—or 0300—mission set that revolved largely around hostage rescue scenarios, from the mid-1990s until 2001, two very different missions dominated the command's world.
4
One of these was the hunt for Balkan war criminals, known in the command as PIFWCs (pronounced “pifwicks”): persons indicted for war crimes. Most were Bosnian Serbs accused of committing atrocities against Bosnia's Muslims.

The December 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that marked the end of the Bosnian war stipulated that war criminals would stand trial at a tribunal in The Hague. The challenge was finding and then nabbing them. With Bosnia divided into American, British, and French sectors, this entailed a complicated command and control setup in which an American-led intelligence-gathering task force was supposed to locate the hostages, before special operations forces—the nationality of whom depended on which country's sector of Bosnia the hostages were located in—were deployed to find them. If the mission was in the U.S. sector, then a JSOC task force would get the job.

The task force's first venture, Operation Tango, aimed to capture Simo Drljaca and Milan Kovacevic, two Serbian warlords accused of horrible war crimes in the town of Prijedor. Team 6 elements flew into the NATO base in Tuzla, Bosnia, on a C-17 transport. To hide from Serbian spies, they deplaned inside shipping containers that were taken inside a hangar, where the operators jumped out. After conducting surveillance of the pair's daily routines, the task force sprang into action on July 10, 1997. A combined force of Team 6 and British SAS operators killed Drljaca at a fishing retreat at a remote lake after he reportedly resisted arrest by shooting and wounding an SAS man. Simultaneously, 100 miles away, a Team 6 element posing as Red Cross personnel arrived at the hospital clinic where Kovacevic worked, talked their way past the receptionist, entered his office, and subdued him. The operators placed Kovacevic in a wheelchair, took him out a back entrance, and loaded him into a waiting truck.

Shortly after Operation Tango, the United States placed Jerry Boykin, now a brigadier general and fresh from a stint as deputy chief of the CIA's Special Activities Division (which included Ground Branch), in charge of the intelligence-gathering task force, whose overall mission to seize the PIFWCs was called Operation Amber Star. In theory, Boykin reported directly to Army General Wes Clark, the head of U.S. European Command and NATO's supreme military commander, but in practice he cleared everything through Army General Eric Shinseki, the NATO commander in Bosnia, before briefing Clark. From the moment they landed in Bosnia, the JSOC elements fell under Shinseki, who demanded reams of supporting intelligence before approving a mission. “It was a delicate and confusing situation,” said a senior task force officer. Technically headquartered at European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, the task force (also called Amber Star) had two “command and control centers” in the Bosnian cities of Tuzla and Sarajevo as well as “a series of satellite centers scattered across the Balkans from which we could run our intel collection activities,” according to Boykin. The task force focused on a list of a “dirty dozen” individuals. By March 1998, it had rolled up seven.
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The task force did not let up and was still grabbing war criminals in April 2001, when a group of at least six reconnaissance personnel (two from Team 6 and at least four from Delta's Operational Support Troop, including one woman) in two vehicles captured Dragan Obrenovic, a former officer in the Yugoslav army wanted for his involvement in the 1995 massacre of prisoners at Srebrenica.
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“Some of the PIFWC snatches were kind of legendary,” said a Delta source who served multiple tours in Bosnia, noting that the missions helped the unit develop new tactics, techniques, and procedures. Many operations involved intercepting and seizing someone traveling in a moving vehicle, often with bodyguards. The task force would surreptitiously attach a tracking beacon to the target's car. Delta was already experimenting with technologies that used an electromagnetic pulse to shut a car's battery down remotely. The unit also used a catapult net system that would ensnare car and driver alike. Once the car had been immobilized, operators would smash the window with a sledgehammer, pull their target through the window, and make off with him, shooting any bodyguards who posed a threat, while an outer security perimeter kept anyone who might interfere at bay. The operators had a name for these snatches:
habeas grab-ass
.
7

Amber Star was the logical follow-on from the hunt for Pablo Escobar. The operators refined their man-hunting techniques, with an emphasis on low-vis operations. “It was a pretty steep learning curve,” a Team 6 operator said. But the operators soon learned that to blend in they had to dress and act exactly like the locals. That might mean washing their hair less often, wearing locally bought clothes, smoking local cigarettes (even the special mission units' health-conscious athlete-warriors learned to smoke constantly when out on a mission), and doing close-target reconnaissance in locally purchased vehicles complete with the right license plates for whichever town they were in. Doing that sort of drive-by reconnaissance of a target's home might require the operators to drive from one safe house to another, where they'd swap vehicles before driving to a third location to pick up the “covered” vehicle they would use on the mission. “It takes a lot of discipline to do it right,” the Team 6 operator said. “We were just starting to get it correct. It's a lot of stuff the Agency had figured out for years.”

As in Colombia, the command worked closely with the CIA, whose job it was to find the PIFWCs, with JSOC brought in to capture the individuals once they'd been located. That division of labor led to frustration at JSOC headquarters. “We thought the Agency was fucked up and we were on a wild-goose chase 90 percent of the time in the Balkans,” a retired special ops officer said. Nonetheless, the two organizations forged close relationships in the Balkans that would stand each in good stead after September 11. It was not unusual for Delta officers and CIA case officers to work side by side in an “R and S” (reconnaissance and surveillance) base with Army of Northern Virginia personnel and signals intelligence experts from the National Security Agency.
8
(The Army of Northern Virginia operatives were responsible for “infrastructure”—renting safe houses, buying cars, handling money, running sources.)

The personal connections that were forged in the Balkans between the special mission units and the CIA's Special Activities Division would prove crucial in the next decade. “The real bond between the CIA and Delta started in Bosnia, where [we were] face-to-face, working a real-world mission, getting to know each other, realizing once again that neither organization can do what they want to do without the other,” said a Delta source. “That's the genesis of the whole relationship.”

But no such bonds yet existed between the JSOC and CIA headquarters, however, according to Hank Crumpton, who was in charge of global operations for the CIA's Counterterrorist Center in the two years prior to September 11.
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“Shockingly, in that period I basically had no interaction with JSOC,” Crumpton said. “I had requested it, I had wanted it, I had needed their support, their resources, their air capability to get my teams into Afghanistan [in September 1999].… And there was just really zero interest from DoD or the special ops command.”

Although the U.S. news media barely registered JSOC's PIFWC missions,
10
the Clinton administration closely monitored them. The president himself authorized the January 22, 1998, mission in which Team 6 operators snatched Goran Jelisic, the so-called “Serb Adolf,” outside his house in Bosnia's Serbian enclave, for instance, and was woken at 5:30
A.M.
and told of its success.
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But this level of political attention was accompanied by a requirement to keep friendly casualties low to nonexistent in the operations, which were usually “urban raids in dense population centers,” said a senior special ops officer familiar with the task force. That in turn meant “your planning has to go into infinite amounts of detail.”

It also led to an extraordinarily risk-averse environment in which JSOC commander Army Major General Bryan “Doug” Brown, who led the command from 1998 to 2000, and his successor, Major General Dell Dailey, a former 160th commander, felt compelled to deploy hundreds of personnel plus the JOC for each snatch mission. “So for picking up an old man who's walking between the bread store and his house, JSOC has to fly over, set up, and run the operation,” commented a Delta source bitterly. By 2001, “everyone kind of acknowledged that you don't need to bring a squadron over to do a job that four people can do,” said another Delta operator. However, Mike Hall, Dailey's senior enlisted adviser, said the general flew over to oversee operations not because he didn't trust the operators, but to act as a buffer between the operators and senior leaders in Washington uncomfortable with the thought of a lieutenant colonel running a national-level mission. “If he wasn't there as a two-star to deal with the bureaucracy, then those guys would have zero chance of executing that operation,” Hall said.