Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (15 page)

The JRX concept's value “depended on where you sat” in the JSOC world, said a Delta staff officer. “To the individual, younger operator the value of the training was not as good because you could get better training day to day on the range,” he said. But at higher levels of command, “it was absolutely necessary to exercise that whole thing and get all the pieces moving.” However, he acknowledged that some of his peers feared JSOC was losing the very nimbleness the special mission units were supposed to embody. “It became the massive staff drills,” he said. “It became the cookie-cutter process; you had to do it, you couldn't vary from it.” He blamed the “inflexibility” on the Rangers who dominated the JSOC staff. They were more likely to think like conventional infantrymen and plan a real-world operation a certain way “because this is how you did it in exercises—it's that muscle memory, task, conditions, standards type stuff,” he said. But others saw value in having Rangers—who were renowned planners—in the JOC. The reactive nature of the 0300 and 0400 missions placed a premium on quick planning, noted a retired special operations officer. “JSOC was a fucking planning machine,” he said. “It could plan anything fast.”

Some operators blamed the reluctance of the National Command Authority (the president and the defense secretary) to send JSOC into action on the unwieldy, “all or nothing” mentality that seemed to have gripped the command's planners. They had a point, but the behemoth that JSOC's standard deployed task force had become was far from the only factor. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Bob Andrews, the acting assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, hired respected historian Richard Shultz as a consultant to research why Washington had never used JSOC to conduct the sort of counterterrorist missions for which it had been formed. Shultz came up with nine “showstoppers,” as he called them, which he outlined in a classified study for Andrews and an unclassified article published in
The Weekly Standard
. The article quoted Pete Schoomaker, who had commanded Delta, JSOC, and, between 1998 and 2000, U.S. Special Operations Command, lamenting the failure to commit his forces to battle. “It was very, very frustrating,” he said. “It was like having a brand-new Ferrari in the garage, and nobody wants to race it because you might dent the fender.” One of Shultz's “showstoppers” was indeed what he called “big footprints,” his phrase for the huge task forces JSOC would put together for operations, which in some cases scared off civilian policymakers. But others included the military hierarchy's disdain for special operations forces and, crucially, “risk aversion.”
11

There are no better examples of this risk aversion than what befell Delta's plans to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in 1998 and 1999. (And no better example of irony: had Delta been successful then, JSOC might never have garnered the resources, the authorities, and the roles that put it at the forefront of the U.S. military effort over the next decade.)

In 1998, Delta spent two weeks drawing up a plan to snatch bin Laden by inserting operators and vehicles onto a dry lake bed near the Al Qaeda leader's compound outside Kandahar and then either seizing bin Laden at home or ambushing his convoy on the road between Kandahar and Khowst.
12
If the task force opted to ambush the convoy, Delta would have provided the ground force while six or eight snipers from Team 6's Red Team riding on MH-6 Little Birds would have the mission to stop bin Laden's vehicle using Heckler & Koch 21 light machine guns firing 7.62mm “slap rounds,” which had tungsten penetrators cased in plastic. The SEALs had already boarded an Air Force plane containing several Little Birds and their crews at Oceana Naval Air Station, close to Dam Neck, and were preparing for takeoff to conduct the mission when they got word it had been scratched.
13
The Clinton administration had decided to pursue what it considered less risky options in its pursuit of bin Laden.
14
On August 7, 1998, after the Delta plan had been shelved, Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 200 people, including twelve Americans, and wounding several thousand. Two years earlier bin Laden had declared war on the United States.
15
Now he was delivering on that grim promise.

In 1999, Delta planned again to target bin Laden. This time, the mission was to kill him. Four undercover OST operators would infiltrate (or “infil,” in JSOC-speak) Afghanistan, identify bin Laden using binoculars, then call in either a smart bomb from a jet or Hellfire missiles from a pair of AH-6 Little Birds on his position. (A Combat Talon would have flown the helicopters onto the same dry lake bed.) The operators and the Little Birds rehearsed the mission at White Sands Missile Range. A TF Brown source familiar with the plan doubted that a Hellfire, a shaped charge weapon designed to penetrate tanks, would have created enough shrapnel to kill bin Laden if he was in a cave. But a Delta source thought chances were good that they would catch him in the open. “That plan would have worked,” he said. Neither got a chance to find out. After the operators were kept on standby for several months, the mission was called off, with consequences that would not become clear until two years later when Delta and the Little Birds assembled again, this time on a damp afternoon in Hungary.
16

 

PART II

A NEW ERA DAWNS

 

8

“Fairly Ponderous and Enormously Heavy”

With U.S. airspace closed to international commercial flights for several days after 9/11, it had taken the better part of a week for the hundreds of JSOC personnel spread across Europe to find their way home from Jackal Cave. The travel difficulties served to remind them that their world had just changed, permanently. As if to reinforce that message and motivate them for the challenges ahead, the pilots of a C-5 taking 160th personnel back to Fort Campbell flew directly over Manhattan, so the aviators could gaze down at what one described as the “smoking hole” that had been the World Trade Center. Along with the absence of any other aircraft in the sky, the sight “really drove home the reality” of the attacks, he said.
1

The Delta and JSOC compounds to which many of the JRX participants returned were abuzz with anticipation. “Everybody was running around,” said a JSOC staffer. “Everyone was amped.” However, he added, “there was a lot of uncertainty of what we were going to do, where we were going, who was in charge.”

For Delta, there was a near-term requirement to be ready to respond if terrorists hijacked more commercial airliners. “That kind of occupied a lot of the initial thought process,” said an operator. “But … for us, that was, ‘Okay, all you've got to do is give us the scenario. We're trained, we've got all our equipment, the Aztec squadron is prepped and waiting.'”

For a few hours, it seemed as if Delta would get that chance. Shortly after the government allowed normal commercial flights to resume on September 14, rumors flew that another jet had been hijacked and was sitting on the tarmac at Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C.
2
Hijackings in the United States were usually the purview of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, but after September 11 there was a sense at Bragg that the old rules might no longer apply.
3
“We flexed on that and got ready to deploy the aircraft takedown team up there,” before the truth that there was no hijacking reached Bragg, said the Delta source.

Meanwhile, Delta's operators brainstormed. To deter future hijackings, they suggested that the government, in conjunction with the FBI and the airlines, “leak out that there are Delta operators on board almost every flight and then do a fake takedown” using role players “in a first-class compartment that's all stooges” on an otherwise regular commercial flight, said the Delta source. A “terrorist” would attempt a hijacking before operators in plainclothes took him down “with hand-to-hand or something,” the source said. “Get that out [via the media]. Get inside their heads.” The aim was to “at least make [Al Qaeda] think twice and begin to think, ‘Hey, they're on to us, there's special mission unit guys on every airplane.'”

But with Delta commander Colonel Jim Schwitters offering only lukewarm support for the proposal, Dailey vetoed the idea.
4
This typified the relationship between the JSOC commander and Delta, which was marked by a mutual distrust. “Dailey already had ideas on things and was unwilling to accept ideas that were starting to percolate up,” the Delta source said.

Responsibility for fleshing out Dailey's ideas fell to a planning cell the general established within a few days of returning to Pope. Dailey staffed the cell with about twenty to thirty personnel from JSOC and its component units, but rather than keep it at Pope, he put it in some drab offices in the Ranger Regiment's gray cinder block headquarters at Fort Benning. By now it was clear Al Qaeda was responsible for the September 11 attacks. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was pressuring the military for retaliation options. The cell's job was to identify targets that JSOC could strike as soon as possible, and then plan missions against those targets.
5
But that was easier said than done.

Based in landlocked Afghanistan, Al Qaeda was sheltered by that country's Taliban regime. A harshly Islamist group that had seized power in 1996, the Taliban had been nurtured by Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency as a hedge against Indian influence in Afghanistan. Drawn almost exclusively from the Pashtun ethnic group that dominated the country's southern and eastern provinces, by September 2001 the Taliban controlled all Afghanistan, save for the northeastern corner. There, the Northern Alliance, which drew its support from Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras, fought a bitter defensive struggle. But on September 9 Al Qaeda had dealt the Alliance a crushing blow, assassinating its legendary military leader Ahmad Shah Massoud.

As it became increasingly clear that the Taliban would not turn over bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders to the United States, as demanded by President George W. Bush in a September 20 address to Congress,
6
it became equally apparent the United States was going to go to war in Afghanistan. The only questions were when and how.

The Taliban's ragtag armed forces—officially Afghanistan's military, but in reality little more than a collection of Pashtun militias—offered few major targets for the vast, high-tech military machine now focusing its attention on the impoverished Central Asian country. There was a small antique air force that the United States and her allies would soon put out of action, but no major early warning radar systems, armored divisions, or naval shipyards against which to deliver devastating attacks. The same was true, on a smaller scale, of Al Qaeda, a terrorist organization whose strength lay in its members' dedication, not in any particular piece of hardware. Other than its key leaders, whose location the U.S. intelligence community was frantically trying to divine, Al Qaeda possessed little worth bombing or raiding.

At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld was quickly becoming frustrated by the shortage of options that the military was presenting him.
7
“We were being pressured enormously by Rumsfeld to do things and come up with ideas,” said a senior member of the Joint Staff (a headquarters staff in the Pentagon that supports the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff).

That pressure soon cascaded down to Tommy Franks, the bluff Army general who ran Central Command, or CENTCOM, which encompassed the Middle East, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and to JSOC, its component units and the planning cell. “All the organizations were told:
Try and find targets,
” said Mike Hall, Dailey's senior enlisted adviser. The warrant and senior noncommissioned officers who labored in the intelligence “shops” at JSOC and its special mission units scoured maps, imagery, and intelligence reports for anything that might be of value to the Taliban or Al Qaeda that JSOC could strike.
8
They passed what they found to the planning cell, but the fact was there weren't many good targets to be had in Afghanistan, for JSOC or anyone else. This would soon lead to a clash between Dailey's preference for the sort of elaborate, set-piece operations to which the joint readiness schedule of the 1990s had accustomed the command, and the desire of others in JSOC, particularly in Delta, for less visible, more patient work to hunt down Al Qaeda's leadership.

For the planning cell, eighteen- to twenty-hour workdays in overcrowded offices cluttered with papers, maps, laptops, and printers were the norm. “Dailey would come in, give a little bit of guidance, a little bit of focus, and then he'd leave,” said a planner. The mood was “100 percent mission focus and figuring out how we could best meet Dailey's intent, right or wrong,” the planner said. “You woke up and that's all you did and you just quit when you were too tired.”

The limited menu of targets from which to choose was not the only constraint under which the planners worked. They also were hostage to the twin tyrannies of time and distance. In keeping with JSOC's modus operandi at the time, the missions had to begin and end during the course of a single night, or, in JSOC-speak, one “period of darkness.”
9
JSOC's operational approach, honed over dozens of JRXs, was to establish an intermediate staging base, or ISB, close enough to the target that the mission could be launched directly from the ISB, but secure enough to host the joint operations center. The most obvious location would have been one of the numerous military airfields along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. But Pakistan would only allow support flights—such as combat search and rescue missions or quick reaction forces—to be staged out of its territory. Direct action missions were out of the question.