Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (6 page)

On Friday, October 21, Scholtes briefed the services' three-star operations deputies in the Pentagon on how JSOC envisioned conducting the assault. He was due back October 23 to brief the Joint Chiefs, but that morning the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad militant group killed 241 U.S. servicemen, including 220 Marines, in Beirut, Lebanon, by destroying their barracks with a truck bomb. The Marine losses prompted the Corps' commandant, General Paul X. Kelley, to petition Vessey for a prominent Marine role in the Grenada invasion scheduled less than forty-eight hours from then. Vessey relented. Carefully drafted plans had to be hastily rewritten as Vessey gave the Marines all targets in the northern half of the island.

The late addition of the Marines resulted in U.S. Atlantic Command changing the operation's H-hour (the mission start time) from 2
A.M.,
which had been JSOC's preference, to first light, allowing Grenadian forces and their Cuban allies to take JSOC forces under heavy, effective fire when they conducted their air assault and airborne missions. TF 160's Black Hawks were riddled with bullets as they tried to infiltrate Delta and Team 6 operators. U.S. forces, who outnumbered trained enemy forces on the island about ten to one, eventually triumphed, but with the loss of nineteen men killed in action, of whom thirteen were JSOC task force personnel. These included four Team 6 SEALs who drowned after a night parachute jump into the sea forty miles from shore and three Rangers killed when three Black Hawks collided as they landed during an air assault.

The operation was hobbled by a confused chain of command, a failure to properly prepare (U.S. forces conducted no rehearsals and invaded without any good maps of Grenada), poor to nonexistent communications between different elements of the invading force, and woefully inadequate intelligence. (Scholtes had refused ISA commander Jerry King's offer to have his unit conduct advance reconnaissance for the task force, because he had no faith or trust in him, a personality conflict that limited cooperation between the two organizations throughout the 1980s.) As many as a third of U.S. killed and wounded in action may have resulted from friendly fire.
20
The invasion was the United States' first major combat operation since the fall of Saigon and it revealed that much had been forgotten about the importance of unity of command and thorough preparation. The Pentagon had established JSOC in part to avoid a repeat of the ad hoc nature of Eagle Claw. But Grenada showed that while JSOC and its component units worked reasonably well together, there was still much progress to be made when it came to coordination with conventional forces.

JSOC was also hamstrung in this regard by the obsessive secrecy that permeated and surrounded the command. It was a principal factor behind the shambolic performance in Grenada, because many senior conventional force commanders were not even aware of JSOC's existence, let alone knew how best to employ its units. “It was so, so top secret that it was extremely difficult to do our job,” said a senior JSOC official. The extraordinary level of secrecy that shrouded JSOC's missions, units, and personnel became a touchstone for the command and its subordinate elements, to the extent that an operator's commitment to this code of silence was considered a demonstration of his special ops bona fides. But Scholtes, like other JSOC commanders after him, chafed against it because of the constraints it placed on his operations. Indeed, it had come as almost a relief when the
Fayetteville Times
first reported JSOC's creation in October 1980.
21

Grenada left deep scars in JSOC's collective psyche. Scholtes remained deeply embittered by the eleventh-hour interference in his plan.
22
Nor was he the only senior JSOC officer angered by the events surrounding the commitment of the elite forces to the fight. The Det 1 MACOS commander, Colonel John Carney, retired in disgust shortly after the operation.
23
Scholtes would eventually have an opportunity to air his frustrations in a way that counted. But not all the mistakes resulted from issues beyond JSOC's control. There had been several major errors internal to Scholtes's task force. Urgent Fury put JSOC on notice that the command and its subordinate elements still had a way to go to become truly effective combat units.

 

3

Frustration in the Middle East

The Pentagon's wholesale commitment of JSOC to combat in Urgent Fury proved an exception to the rule during the early and mid-1980s. Not that there weren't numerous crises—terrorist-related and otherwise—for which the command prepared, and sometimes deployed. But when push came to shove, the Reagan administration displayed a marked reluctance to commit its most elite forces to battle. Nowhere was this more so than the Middle East in general, and Lebanon in particular.

In 1981 Delta began routinely deploying two operators—one each from A and B Squadrons—on three-month stints as bodyguards for the U.S. ambassador in Beirut. The Lebanese capital was the most violent city in the world, with numerous armed militias vying for power and influence. After the United States deployed a Marine task force to Beirut as part of a “peacekeeping” force in 1982, some local factions, rightly or wrongly, viewed the United States as party to the conflict. On April 18, 1983, militants detonated a truck bomb in front of the embassy, shearing the front off the structure and killing sixty-three people. The blast wiped out virtually the entire CIA station. It also took the life of Sergeant First Class Terry Gilden of Delta's A Squadron, who was waiting for the ambassador with the rest of the chief of mission's dozen-strong security detail at the front of the building when the explosion killed them all.
1
Gilden was the first Delta operator killed in action.
2
When yet another bomb attack damaged the new U.S. embassy in September 1984, it was another A Squadron operator, Eagle Claw veteran Sergeant First Class Edward Bugarin, who pulled injured ambassador Reginald Bartholomew to safety.
3
(The action earned Bugarin a Soldier's Medal—the highest U.S. Army award for bravery not involving conflict with an enemy.)
4

Protective detail deployments to Beirut continued into the late 1980s. Delta usually did not use them as cover for any other low-visibility activities. “When we went over for our protection missions, that's all we did,” an operator said. But according to Eric Haney, an operator who later wrote of his experiences in Beirut, there were occasional deployments to Beirut for other missions, such as the time he and a partner successfully targeted a pair of snipers who had wounded several Marines.
5

In his autobiography, Richard Marcinko also describes a December 1982 deployment of a dozen Team 6 operators to the Lebanese capital with a mission to analyze threats to the embassy and the Marines and recommend security improvements. In Marcinko's version of the story, he told a senior embassy official that the embassy was vulnerable to a car bomb, but the diplomat dismissed the SEAL officer's concerns and refused to take his advice, which was to station a “black box” device on the embassy roof that could detonate radio-triggered car bombs at a safe distance. The SEALs left Beirut the next day, about three months before the car bomb attack that destroyed the embassy, but not before they had tested their device by driving around Beirut until a house in a residential neighborhood “erupted” as they approached it. Marcinko implies the device he was holding caused the explosion. He describes a scene of devastation in which “dozens of Lebanese, some of them in pieces, lay in the street” as he watched others try and fail to rescue two women who were trapped in a car and burned to death.
6

Intelligence officials later surmised that the organization responsible for the truck bombs that shattered the embassy and destroyed the Marine barracks that October was Hezbollah, the Shi'ite militant group also behind the spate of kidnappings of Westerners in Lebanon that began in 1982. Hezbollah in turn was largely a tool of Iran, the country whose actions had prompted JSOC's formation, and which the command would repeatedly confront over the next thirty years.
7

The kidnappings drove JSOC to employ innovative countermeasures. “We were concerned about security for some of our ambassadors, so we were looking at how could we identify where they were if they were kidnapped,” a senior JSOC official said. “We developed a tagging system based on the polar bear systems that were used in Alaska.” The initial tag design was cylindrical, white, a few inches long, and was actually called the “polar bear.” It worked on a line-of-sight basis, so JSOC needed an aircraft somewhere in the area to locate the tag. The Joint Communications Unit was at the center of the effort, which placed the tags in the belts, waistbands, or—for women—brassieres of ambassadors and any other individuals JSOC considered most at risk of kidnapping.
8

Another new technology, the satellite fax, proved its worth in July 1983 when JSOC had to respond to a hostage crisis in Sudan. Two dozen Southern Sudan Liberation Front “rebels”—in reality little more than poorly equipped bandits—had taken five Westerners, including two American missionaries, hostage in the jungle of the Boma plateau in the southeastern tip of the country. Delta's Jerry Boykin led a small team to Khartoum and then Juba in southern Sudan to advise the Sudanese hostage rescue force, which by good fortune he and other JSOC personnel had helped establish a few months previously.

Meanwhile, a small ISA element located the rebels and their hostages by getting a fix on the shortwave transmitter they were using to negotiate with the Sudanese authorities. With the target location in hand, a Keyhole reconnaissance satellite was positioned overhead. But the satellite transmitted its photos back to Washington, not Sudan. This is where the satellite fax came into its own.

Boykin's team had arrived in Sudan with recent satellite imagery of the target area, which they had given to the CIA station chief in Khartoum, who in turn had passed it to the Sudanese military. But the details the hostage rescue force required—the location of guards, for instance—changed frequently enough to quickly render the photos out of date. After some urgent transatlantic phone calls to North Carolina, an officer in JSOC's operations directorate called the command's Washington office staff. It was a Saturday morning, but the staffers returned to the Pentagon and got hold of the latest Keyhole pictures. The staffers compared the new pictures with the originals in Boykin's hands, noted the differences—“where they could see people on the roof of a building or where a guard post had been established”—and then traced those differences onto a new piece of paper sized to the exact dimensions of the original satellite photos and faxed that image to Boykin's team, who used it as an overlay for their imagery. “It was very rudimentary, but it was effective,” said a Delta officer.

After two weeks the Sudanese military made their move and rescued the hostages unscathed in an air assault mission that killed most of the kidnappers. As Boykin relates in his memoir, he and Delta Sergeant First Class Don Feeney flew down to Boma for the mission, but took no part in the action. It was one of a series of behind-the-scenes advisory efforts on JSOC's part that led to successful hostage rescues during the early 1980s. Others included a March 1981 operation by Indonesian commandos to free the passengers and crew of a hijacked Indonesian airliner at Bangkok airport, and Venezuelan forces' July 1984 storming of a hijacked Aeropostal jet in Curaçao.
9

A frustrated Scholtes left JSOC in August 1984 to command 2nd Armored Division. He was replaced by another infantry officer, Army Major General
10
“Country” Carl Stiner, whose only previous special operations experience had been two years with 3rd Special Forces Group in the mid-1960s. Stiner took over a headquarters that had grown to about 120 people,
11
but which was still figuring out where it fit in the crowded national security structure. There were plenty of envious stares cast JSOC's way by conventional military leaders, who by nature and tradition are usually suspicious of “elite” units and resentful of organizations that receive a disproportionate share of the Pentagon budget, as JSOC and its special mission units assuredly did.

Other military organizations were not the only partners with whom it was in JSOC's interest to stay on good terms. The command also relied on the intelligence agencies to provide it with mission-critical information. Although Scholtes didn't much care for CIA director Bill Casey, JSOC's overall relationship with the CIA was good. The Agency kept a representative at JSOC's headquarters, but Scholtes's determination to keep his staff at a manageable size meant JSOC did not place a liaison at Langley.
12
JSOC also enjoyed a “good relationship” with the Defense Intelligence Agency, but the command's “best relationship” was with the National Security Agency, which specialized in collecting signals intelligence around the globe, a senior JSOC official said. “They were very good to us,” he said. Hidden from the American people, that relationship would only improve over the next three decades.

Stiner took command of what he would later describe as “the best trained and most competent joint headquarters and the finest special missions units in the world.” But although JSOC had seen fierce combat in Grenada and had undertaken numerous advisory and training missions abroad, the command had yet to conduct a major hostage rescue or other major counterterrorist mission—the sort of operation that was supposed to be its raison d'être. The following year, however, events in the Mediterranean twice almost put JSOC to just such a test. Two hijackings would reveal how far the command had come in less than five years, and how far it still had to go.