Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (13 page)

Bosnia also gave JSOC's lesser known elements a chance to come into their own. Delta's Operational Support Troop, which did a lot of the unit's deep reconnaissance and undercover work, was heavily involved. The urban settings allowed the troop to take advantage of one of its secret weapons: its small number of female operators, who combined with male counterparts to form “guy-girl teams” that masqueraded as romantic couples while reconnoitering targets.
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The women occupied an almost unique role in the U.S. military. In early 1982, at the request of Delta commander Colonel Rod Paschall, Army Secretary John Marsh authorized Delta to use female operators in direct combat roles. (They were banned from such jobs in the rest of the Army.) But that early experiment failed. Although four women graduated from a “modified” assessment and selection course, Delta's men were not yet ready for coed operations. “It didn't work out and they all kind of drifted away and the unit soon reverted to being an all-male preserve,” said a Delta officer. However, mindful of the advantages mixed-sex couples enjoy on reconnaissance missions, where they are presumed to evoke less suspicion than “singleton” men or male duos, under Schoomaker's command, Delta tried again in 1990 and this time stuck with the program, despite continuing disapproval on the part of some male operators.
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The difference this time was that the unit put more thought into the women's assessment and selection process, a Delta officer said. “It wasn't just about whether they could run a hundred miles,” he said. “It was very physical, don't misunderstand me, but it was also a lot more emphasis on the psychological testing, so it worked out a lot better.”

By the early 2000s OST had about half a dozen female operators, according to an experienced unit operator. The women “were every bit as capable” as its men, he added. “They were there for the same reasons the guys were—they wanted to serve their country and do missions.” But he acknowledged his view was far from unanimous in Delta. “I didn't have the issues [with the women] that a lot of guys had,” he said.

Delta's Echo Squadron also played a major role in Bosnia, albeit one hidden in plain sight. The covered air squadron was still a small organization in the 1990s with only about fifteen pilots, but its capabilities had grown since its Seaspray days. One technological development in particular had major tactical and operational consequences: the Wescam ball, which had already made an appearance in Mogadishu in 1993. A gyro-stabilized camera in a spherical mounting fixed to the underside of an aircraft, the ball could track a target and, using “basic line-of-sight digital radio secure technology,” transmit live video of whatever it tracked back to the JOC, according to a Delta source. It quickly became JSOC's eye in the sky. The camera included a forward-looking infrared lens, a regular infrared lens, and a telescopic lens.

Echo fixed the Wescam balls to turboprop planes made by Schweizer, a firm that specialized in gliders and quiet reconnaissance aircraft. The Echo pilots would climb to altitude, then cut the engine and use the plane's long wingspan to descend in circles, before drifting away, flying out of the area, returning to altitude and repeating the process. “You couldn't hear a thing,” said a Team 6 operator. The Wescam ball would be transmitting live down to operators riding in the back of a nondescript van. “We had little video screens watching the Wescam ball track cars and stuff right into our ambushes,” said the Delta source. “They were at the forefront of all that technology that today is in Predators and everything else.”

But Echo's value went far beyond the Wescam ball. The squadron had three basic missions: “sensor”—visual reconnaissance and surveillance missions involving high-tech gear like the Wescam ball; “shooter”—using civilian-style helicopters as attack aircraft; and “transport”—moving special mission unit operators and other sensitive personnel covertly. (The “sensor” mission originally included signals intelligence, but in 1987 the unit lost that part of the mission to the ISA, which also had a covered aviation element.)

The unit's pilots trained on a wide variety of rotary and small fixed wing aircraft, with a particular emphasis on the Soviet-designed Mi-8s and Mi-17s that allowed them to operate covertly in the many parts of the world where those airframes are ubiquitous. Sometimes Echo would rent helicopters abroad and convert them. At other times they'd steal them. Either way, the shooter or sensor packages would be secretly shipped to the U.S. embassy via diplomatic “pouches” (in reality, large boxes or crates), then Echo would marry up the airframes and the military gear out of sight in a remote airfield hangar. While Echo always operated undercover, that cover was often official: flying routine missions for a U.S. embassy, or, in regions where there were large U.S. military deployments, conventional military aircraft reconfigured to accommodate special mission equipment invisible to the casual observer. The squadron flew regular “signature missions” to different parts of the world where it might have to fly real-world missions someday, in order to condition those countries' security forces to the sight of the aircraft. Then if an actual mission required the unit's presence (and it wasn't already there), its arrival wouldn't raise too many eyebrows.

Of its three mission types, “shooter” was the one Echo executed least often. “We don't prefer arming” the helicopters, said a retired special operations officer, adding that ambassadors were unlikely to approve such missions.

Echo rarely if ever participated in JSOC's big quarterly exercises, now called joint readiness exercises, for fear of burning its cover, but it trained with Delta and Team 6 in more secluded settings on everything from jungle operations in Guyana with the former to cruise ship takedowns with the latter. The squadron also trained with the CIA's Special Activities Division. Indeed, that division's Air Branch was largely made up of former E Squadron pilots. The unit became so proficient that, according to a Delta source, by the late 1990s JSOC leaders became jealous of Delta's ownership of Echo and wanted the squadron to report directly to the joint command. Several cover and code names (Latent Arrow, for example) were associated with Echo and its special access programs, but by the end of the 1990s it was known in the wider military—when it was known at all—as Flight Concepts Division. On September 11, 2001, most Flight Concepts “assets” were still in the Balkans.
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Most JSOC operations in the Balkans were designed to be low-vis (at least before the JOC staffers flew in all wearing special ops patches on their uniforms), but in 2000 the command came close to executing an operation there that more closely resembled the Grenada and Panama invasions than it did the clandestine and covert work in the Middle East or Colombia. That operation was Aurora Lightning, the code name for the invasion of the tiny country of Montenegro.

With a population of 620,000, Montenegro was very much the junior partner with the much larger Serbia in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the rump state that remained after the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Montenegro was led by Western-leaning Milo Dukanovic, whose government Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic repeatedly tried to undermine.

With critical elections pending in Montenegro in September 2000, the Clinton administration—apparently concerned that Serbian forces would take over Montenegro or at least depose and detain Dukanovic—ordered JSOC to plan for a major operation to safeguard Montenegro and its leader. Planning began in 1999. Late that year, under the code name Knocking Door, the command held a large rehearsal at Fort Campbell that included a “big, big airfield seizure that replicated the airfield” in Montenegro, said a mission planner. “It was a big package to go in there,” so big that the operators took to calling the exercise “Knockers Galore,” he said. “It wasn't going to be a permissive [uncontested] environment. It was semi-permissive at best, which is why we were going with so many guns.” Under the guise of preparing for the “Y2K” computer bug, JSOC used an EC-130J Commando Solo aircraft to take over the frequencies of radio stations near Fort Campbell and broadcast a test message. The actual operation was to involve the Commando Solo seizing control of Montenegro's airwaves and broadcasting U.S.-controlled information over them. The plan was to “put the [Montenegrin] president in a van and have him broadcast up to Commando Solo, which would then broadcast out to the nation ‘I am safe, blah blah blah,'” said a JSOC staff officer.

TF Brown's contribution included eight Little Birds and four Direct Action Penetrators, or DAPs (pronounced “dapps”), which were Black Hawks that functioned as attack helicopters, rather than troop carriers. The “Smokey and the Bandit” truck-mounted capability would be used to get some of the Little Birds into the fight. There were also plans to fly at least one Abrams tank into Montenegro. Fort Campbell was home to the massive 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and numerous smaller formations, but they had no say in what happened. “We came in and took over,” said the JSOC staff officer. “All training on the ranges was canceled, everything; units were thrown off [training areas] so that JSOC units had free run of the entire base.”

The plan evolved through summer 2000. At one stage it involved Team 6 assaulting at least five coastal defense cruise missile sites, before it was scaled back to an operation designed mainly to spirit Dukanovic and his family to safety. JSOC prepared multiple options. The preferred course of action was for Echo Squadron to fly the family out. Under that scenario, responsibility for safeguarding them would fall to Delta, which already had OST operators on the ground in Montenegro. Should that option fall through, Team 6 was prepared to pick up Dukanovic on the beach. On September 21, 2000, the
Saipan,
a helicopter-carrying U.S. Navy flattop, arrived in the Adriatic Sea off Montenegro to support Aurora Lightning. Shortly after the ship arrived on station, out of sight of land, Team 6's Red Team parachuted from three C-141s in mid-afternoon into the ocean close to the
Saipan
with six 40-foot, high-speed assault craft. Those “military cigarette boats,” as a Team 6 officer called them, could race through choppy seas at up to 60 knots per hour. “We sunk our parachutes,” said a SEAL. “No one ever knew about it.” Meanwhile several Air Force Special Operations MH-53 Pave Low helicopters flew to the
Saipan
to provide assault aircraft, should they be needed.

But the internal frictions that so often plagued JSOC reared their head again. Dailey, the new JSOC commander, was in Tuzla with a Delta squadron and TF Brown. After talking with Schoomaker, by now the SOCOM commander, Dailey announced that the Delta squadron and TF Brown would fly to the
Saipan
and become the lead force for Aurora Lightning, with the SEALs relegated to a backup role. The JSOC commander then flew out to the
Saipan
with Delta commander Colonel Jim Schwitters, to be greeted by Team 6 operators quietly seething at being passed over yet again. But complications arose when TF Brown's munitions turned out not to meet the Navy's strict safety requirements, meaning the 160th helicopters couldn't land on the
Saipan
. In the end, it was all for naught. The elections went off without incident and what might have been JSOC's largest combat operation of the Clinton era faded away, leaving nary a shred of public evidence it had ever been considered.
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There was at least one long-term consequence of the late decision to favor Delta over Team 6. Dailey had told the SEALs that Delta was getting the mission in part because the Army unit's OST operators were already on the ground working undercover. Lesson learned, shortly thereafter Team 6 resurrected its Brown Cell concept for a subunit that specialized in clandestine activity. The new organization began as “a baby team,” one operator recalled, but would grow to play an increasingly important role in the years ahead.
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Loose Nukes and Missed Opportunities

While JSOC honed its man-hunting skills during “real-world” operations in the Balkans, its training exercises increasingly focused on countering the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Known within JSOC as the 0400 mission, counter-proliferation had come to dominate the command, to the extent that by the late 1990s every joint readiness exercise scenario revolved around it.

Two main factors were behind the Pentagon's decision to throw money at JSOC to spend on counter-proliferation. One was the fear that the Soviet Union's breakup would result in “loose nukes” ending up in the hands of terrorists or “rogue” states like Iran, Iraq, or North Korea. The other was that after the 1991 Gulf War demonstrated that the U.S. Air Force could destroy anything on the earth's surface with “smart” bombs, the Pentagon assumed that enemies would seek to hide what they held most dear—especially their nuclear weapons programs—underground.

It fell to Delta to figure out how to penetrate these lairs, which were termed DUGs, for deep underground facilities, or HDBTs, for hard and deeply buried targets. A senior JSOC official summed up the challenge Delta faced: “If it was designed to defeat the biggest bomb that the United States Air Force had, how were you going to get in there with a few men and be able to defeat that system without killing yourself?”

Delta concluded that the best way to do it was using high-tech drilling and breaching equipment wielded by well-trained, experienced soldiers. “Drill and blast, that's the name of the game,” said a Delta source. After initially training operators to do it, the unit changed course and recruited Special Forces engineer sergeants and a handful of other soldiers to form a heavy breaching section, which at its height numbered no more than about twenty soldiers assigned to the unit's Combat Support Troop. The heavy breachers were specially selected but did not go through Delta assessment and selection nor the operator training course through which all those who make it through assessment and selection must pass. The section worked with private firms to have some of the world's best drilling equipment designed to its specifications.