Day of the Rangers: The Battle of Mogadishu 25 Years On

by Leigh Neville

  The relationship between Steele and Delta was captured in both the book and film Black Hawk Down. Some, including Colonel Danny McKnight in his memoir, felt that the difficulties have been overstated: “It may be somewhat correct relating to some very specific situations, but by no means correct in the normal day-to-day environment.”16 He goes on to pinpoint the origin of the alleged discontent to one particular member of Delta, most likely then-Sergeant First Class Paul H, team leader of E-Team. Paul H, who declined to be interviewed for this book, spoke to Mark Bowden and formed a major part of his re-telling of Delta’s role in the Gothic Serpent missions. He was scathing of Steele and of the performance of some of his Rangers.17

  Ranger Sergeant Keni Thomas gave his own account of the issues between Steele and some members of Delta and perhaps strikes at the heart of the issue. He quoted Steele telling him:

  You know, Sergeant Thomas, it’s not that I don’t respect how good they are at what they do. I get that. But what you have to understand is that these men are seasoned NCOs [non-commissioned officers] with years of experience. You know why our training has to stay so basic? It’s because we have privates who are new and inexperienced soldiers coming into the regiment. It’s our job to get them up to combat speed quickly and efficiently. We have to keep it simple.18

  Thomas further noted that “It’s not that Mike Steele disliked the men of Delta or believed them to be ‘undisciplined cowboys’ as the movie portrayed. He respected their level of training and expertise. But their methods were not our methods. For command and control purposes, he could not afford to mix the two.”19

  The two units had often served alongside each other but never on the same objective. The Rangers would typically provide the perimeter security whilst the operators would conduct the actual assault. On October 3 both units were forced into operating alongside and intermixed with each other, something that neither had trained for nor anticipated. Arguably Steele had his soldiers’ best interests at heart. He was visibly shocked and saddened for instance at the casualties from October 3.

  One example of Steele’s fractious relationship with Delta has now become a celebrated internet meme and even a tee-shirt design after it was first detailed in Bowden’s book and film, the infamous “This is my safety” line. In the movie, actor Eric Bana playing Norm “Hoot” Gibson, a character based on a number of operators but most obviously Sergeant First Class Norman Hooten, is stopped in the hangar by Jason Isaacs playing the role of Captain Steele. Isaacs’ character notes that Gibson’s weapon is not on safe. In response, Gibson holds up his trigger finger and states disparagingly, “This is my safety, sir.”

  Norm Hooten explained that Bowden and the screen writers had conflated two separate incidents:

  There’s a little bit of truth to it. The story is that he came up to me in the cafeteria and he said, “Hey, put your weapon on safe.” We would clear our weapons and drop the hammer on it which when you drop the hammer on a carbine you can’t put it on safe, it won’t go on safe. The bolt is forward and the magazine is out, the tension’s off the sear. It’s a way for us to tell a weapon is clear at night for example without looking at it – if it won’t go on safe I know it’s clear.

  He said, “put your weapon on safe.” I said, “It’s clear,” and he goes, “Put it on safe.” I said, “You put it on safe – because the gun is clear, it won’t go on safe.” I said, “Don’t worry about it, I got it.” That was it. Later on that night, some of the Rangers were doing a skit and in the skit they did the finger thing [also seen in the film being performed by Ranger Sergeant Dominick Pilla, played by Danny Hoch].

  They did that because we’d been out teaching them CQB that same day and I told them, “The gun has got a safety on it but your primary safety is your finger and that’s the only one connected to your brain so use that one as your primary safe.” So they took that and they combined it with that incident in the chow hall and it went down in the movie as that’s the way it happened. I got a kick out of it.

  Despite whatever difficulties existed between Steele and Delta, they still had a job to do and that job depended upon timely, accurate, and actionable intelligence. From the start, the struggle for “ground truth” was an uphill battle. The US Army history of operations in Somalia notes “The task would prove extraordinarily difficult, for Aideed had gone underground after the AC-130 air raids and ground assaults on his strongholds in June and July.”20

  US Army Major Timothy M Karcher documented these difficulties in Understanding the Victory Disease:

  During the preceding months, the US Joint Special Operations Command had sent two different reconnaissance parties to Mogadishu to determine the feasibility of capturing Aidid [sic] and to gain an initial intelligence assessment. The initial reconnaissance party reported that the capture of Aidid was possible, due to his very public movements. However, by July, Aidid had significantly curtailed his public appearances due to his increasingly hostile stance toward the UN, thus the likelihood of capturing him became quite remote.21

  The members of Task Force Ranger, somewhat divorced from the cloak and dagger world of intelligence collection and targeting, remained optimistic. “We found out that starting this operation was going to be difficult as there was no real intelligence network established at the time, at least as far as I was privy to. But I had no worries. After all, we were well-armed, well-equipped Rangers and this enemy was living in the Stone Age. That was my thoughts on the Somalis,” explained Matt Eversmann.

  CIA veteran Jack Kassinger noted that even before the arrival of Task Force Ranger, CIA assets had been deployed to Somalia to support the US humanitarian mission: “The first teams into Somalia were CIA/DO [Directorate of Operations]/SAD [Special Activities Division] paramilitary personnel with elements of JSOC. They conducted very high risk, advanced force operations prior to the entry of the follow-on forces. The first casualty of Operation Restore Hope was a CIA officer, Larry F, who was assigned to one of these teams.”22 Larry F was Sergeant Major Lawrence Freedman, a former Delta operator who was killed in a landmine strike on November 22, 1992 in Bardera, southwest Somalia.

  An impressive array of intelligence assets were deployed in support of Task Force Ranger in an attempt to provide actionable intelligence that would lead to the capture of Aideed. The JSOC J-2 or “intelligence shop” was headed by the late Colonel David “Dave” McKnight (with no relation to the Ranger battalion commander, Danny McKnight). Dave McKnight worked with both his own JSOC analysts and elements from the CIA and a covert Army unit that specialized in signals intelligence (SIGINT), then known as the Office of Military Support, which we will return to later in this chapter.

  HUMINT remained largely the domain of the CIA. An American commander, Major General Carl Ernst, mentioned the inherent difficulties of deploying undercover CIA or army personnel on the streets of Mogadishu: “Intelligence collection was complicated because we didn’t look like them. It is how we appear, the way we walk and talk and so it’s very difficult to break into a society that’s clan by culture, and then its sub-clan and they know everybody.”23 Instead the Task Force and CIA relied upon locally recruited sources whose loyalty and basic competence, particularly in tradecraft, was always in question.

  Professor James Howcroft, Director of the Program on Terrorism and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall Center and a 30-year Marine Corps Intelligence veteran, later explained some of these unique difficulties:

  Just like SIGINT, it takes time to set up HUMINT networks in a new city. HUMINT professionals need time to understand the ethnic/tribal makeup and power dynamics of the city, which will have an effect on who reports on whom and how reliable that reporting will be.

  It will be tough to ascertain the reliability and truthfulness of local population reporting – after all, it is your actions that are bringing death and destruction to their neighborhoods, putting their families at risk and causing them to flee. They don’t know yet if you are going to win or how long you will
be around. Talking to you compromises their families.24

  The CIA eventually recruited a Somali warlord who offered to lead them to Aideed, for a price. A veteran CIA officer who had previously acted as the warlord’s handler, known by the codename of Condor, was flown in to manage the source. Crucially, Condor was both a very experienced intelligence hand with a field career dating back to Vietnam and he was African-American, a trait which allowed him somewhat of a better chance of blending in with the Somalis, at least from a distance or in a vehicle. Condor’s job was to get his warlord in close proximity to Aideed to allow independent verification of Aideed’s location before a strike could be launched.25

  The Office of Technical Services at the CIA’s Langley headquarters had developed a solution befitting the mythical Q-Branch of James Bond fame – an ivory-handled walking stick containing a hidden homing beacon that would silently transmit its location to aircraft overhead. The CIA’s plan was for the warlord to give the walking stick to Aideed as a gift. With any luck, Aideed would keep the walking stick which would lead the CIA, and ultimately Task Force Ranger, directly to his location. Before the gift was delivered to Aideed, however, fate played its brutal hand. The warlord shot himself in the head with a revolver playing a drunken game of Russian roulette. The CIA were back to square one.

  Condor volunteered to instead employ the warlord’s men in two local units of spotters, Team One and Team Two, and send them out into the city to track down Aideed. The plan was agreed by Langley and Garrison, and Condor was moved to a rented safe house accompanied by the four SEALs from Task Force Ranger. The SEAL snipers were to provide security for the safe house which was subsequently codenamed Pasha. It was located in the Lido district of northern Mogadishu, named from the Italian for beach. Along with functioning as a base of operations for Condor’s locally recruited surveillance teams, Pasha was also the home of a team of Army and CIA SIGINT specialists.

  The SEALs kept watch from the flat roof with their sniper rifles. Should an informant be followed, they were under orders to engage whoever was tailing the asset. The operators established procedures for an emergency escape should the safe house come under concerted attack. The SIGINT gear would be carried out in rucksacks and whatever couldn’t be carried would be denied to the enemy by the use of thermite grenades. The SEALs ensured all personnel maintained a “bug-out bag” ready for just such an eventuality. Thankfully it was never required, although the SEALs did their bit for neighborhood security by engaging and killing three gunmen trying to break into a neighboring house.26

  Despite the risks, CIA operatives did go out on the ground in an attempt to pinpoint Aideed themselves. One CIA officer codenamed Leopard attempted to meet a local Somali source who said he was willing to sell out Aideed in exchange for the $25,000 in reward money offered by Admiral Howe after the murder of the Pakistani peacekeepers in late June. Instead, Leopard was led into an ambush and severely wounded. He was lucky to escape with his life: his team’s vehicle, an unmarked and unarmored Isuzu Trooper, had been hit some 49 times.

  The CIA and SIGINT elements stationed at Pasha were under increasing threat. A CIA source told them that Aideed’s militia knew the makes of their vehicles and how they were armed, and knew that Condor was a CIA officer. A CNN film crew were ambushed, according to SEAL Howard Wasdin, because the Habr Gidr mistook them for the CIA team and their SEAL minders. An interpreter and four local security officers were killed in the incident.27

  When news reached the CIA on September 11 that Pasha had indeed been compromised and Aideed was planning to directly attack the safehouse, Garrison ordered the Americans to leave. They drove to the Pakistani-controlled soccer stadium to the north of the city and were flown out immediately by helicopters from the 160th SOAR. The CIA’s local Somali assets continued their mission, infiltrating Habr Gidr and SNA gatherings and searching for the scent of Aideed.

  Garrison was growing tired of the antics of some of the local sources recruited and funded by the CIA.

  Generally [the local asset] appears to believe that a second-hand report from an individual who is not a member of the team should be sufficient to constitute current intelligence. I do not. Furthermore when a team member is reporting something that is totally different from what our helicopters are seeing (which we watch here back at the JOC), I naturally weigh the launch decision toward what we actually see versus what is being reported.28

  Known to be working alongside the J-2 Cell and the CIA were the operatives of the US Army’s Office of Military Support (OMS). The OMS had operated under a bewildering variety of titles and codenames, many referring to the Special Access Program designations in which the unit was routinely hidden. Originally called the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), the unit was also known to Delta at the time of the Mogadishu operation as Centra Spike. Their involvement in Gothic Serpent was perhaps facilitated by Dave McKnight who was their former Operations Officer. Garrison himself had also served in the unit.

  The CIA had embedded an operative within Task Force Ranger to work directly with Garrison to ensure the smooth flow of intelligence between the CIA and JSOC. This operative, with the codename of Buffalo, had flown in with Task Force Ranger and had even shaven his head to blend in with the Rangers. Garrison also placed one of his own JSOC intelligence officers, codenamed Gringo II, within the CIA station to coordinate activities between the Agency and his own J-2 Cell. This officer was likely from the OMS, a unit he later commanded.

  Lieutenant Colonel James “Tommy” Faust, the second-in-command and Operations Officer of the JSOC J-2 Cell, mentioned “several airborne SIGINT platforms based out of country and supporting TFR [Task Force Ranger].”29 These were more than likely OMS teams, as a similar mission was then ongoing in Colombia in support of the hunt for Escobar. In fact, a number of these assets were redirected from that effort to support Garrison. Faust also noted the addition of a “SIGINT Research & Development capability”30 that mirrors what little is known of OMS capabilities.

  There is scant open-source information available on OMS and even those within the SOF community are often ignorant as to its actual role. US Navy Admiral Harry Harris, former head of Special Operations Command in the Pacific, jokingly commented in 2016: “The Office of Military Support doesn’t sound very ‘hooah’ so I had some folks tell me what it actually does – and all I can tell you is that it does some ‘hooahingly’ interesting things.”31

  The unit was organized into troops as per the Delta model and had an Operations along with a Mission Support and SIGINT Squadron. It is from the latter squadron that the aerial SIGINT teams supporting Task Force Ranger were likely drawn. OMS operated its own highly modified civilian prop aircraft, typically Beechcraft 300s and 350s. Their mission in Somalia was to scan the airwaves for mentions of Aideed or his chief supporters, hoping that one would slip up and lead Task Force Ranger to their target. Some personnel from the OMS’s Operations Squadron may have also deployed on the ground as sources mention three women operatives from the unit being present in Mogadishu, although there may have been confusion with Delta’s F-Troop.

  Alongside the SIGINT intercept efforts of the OMS, a range of other aerial intelligence-gathering platforms flew in support of the Aideed mission. These ranged from Army reconnaissance helicopters equipped with video cameras to a once secret Navy reconnaissance aircraft and “a quiet, manned surveillance aircraft”32 controlled by the CIA.

  The non-classified reconnaissance helicopter assets present were OH-58D Kiowas from Task Force Raven which were drawn from the US Army’s Task Force 2-25. Raven had temporarily detached, or “chopped,” their Fort Hood-based aircraft to Task Force Ranger for the duration of the mission. The OH-58D’s unique mast-mounted optics and Forward-Looking-Infrared laser (FLIR) could be downlinked directly to Garrison’s JOC, although the technology was still very much in its infancy. Little Bird pilot Chief Warrant Officer Karl Maier explained that “[It] was very, very primitive back in those days. They had one video feed the
re on a small screen but most of it was sitting around a table with a radio in the middle of it, listening to the radio. [They] are so different now.”

  Despite this, the video technology gave the chain of command a unique perspective on the battlespace during the Gothic Serpent missions. This would be the first time in history that a land battle would be observed by its commanders in real time via airborne cameras, a first that would lead directly to the development of the far more advanced camera systems employed on today’s Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles.

  There has been some question over whether Delta’s own covert air wing was also deployed to Somalia. The unit, known as Echo Squadron, was rumored to operate unmarked versions of the MH-6 Little Bird outfitted with cameras and sensors to conduct surveillance in preparation for Delta assaults. Author and historian Sean Naylor has stated that the deployment of Echo Squadron to Mogadishu was confirmed to him by sources within JSOC but the author has been unable to independently verify this.33

  A curious entry in the Task Force Ranger operations log notes “Recce launch (2 x H-530 & 1 x OH-58D)” indicating the use of two commercial Hughes 530s, which are similar to the Little Bird type airframe. All other sources, including veterans from both Delta and the 160th SOAR, only note the presence of the OH-58Ds. A minor mystery we will perhaps never solve.

  An aircraft that has been confirmed to have been flying over Mogadishu during the hunt for Aideed was a specialist variant of the US Navy’s P-3 Orion surveillance and search aircraft. Although a number of accounts claimed this was a standard specification P-3, records indicate that it was in fact a classified model known as a Reef Point. Reef Point was the codename for a specialist variant of the P-3 flown by the Navy’s Special Projects Patrol Squadron, who conceal their aircraft within the regular Orion fleet. Today known as Iron Clad, the Reef Point was a specially equipped covert surveillance aircraft carrying telescopic infrared video cameras that could beam a wide-angle view of the action, in colour, directly to Garrison’s JOC.