Night Fighter

by Hamilton, William H. ; Sasser, Charles W. ;

  The Spectre circled for the rest of the day and throughout the night, out of range of ground fire and prepared to stop further movements against the trapped SEALs. Lieutenant Bobby McNabb inside the mansion reported one incident that occurred during the night.

  “We called in a strike on an APC on my side of the house. He was trying to hit the plane. You could hear the plane, kind of see it outlined up there. The plane shot the 20mm at him. Every time one of those rounds hit, they kind of gave off a spark. The Spectre hit the APC so many times it had a hellish glow over the top of it. You could see the bodies getting blown about. Oh, man, it was brutal.”

  * * *

  In the meantime, the war continued elsewhere, with A-7 fighter bombers from the carrier USS Independence knocking out anti-aircraft defenses around St. George’s. Two companies of Marines from the 22nd MAU (Marine Amphibious Unit) landed under cover of darkness at St. George’s and at Grand Mal Bay. Reinforced with five M60A1 Abrams tanks, they moved toward Government House and the encircled SEALs.

  * * *

  Delta Force entered the fray, its objective Richmond Hill Prison to release political prisoners. The only intel Delta commanders had about the prison was its general layout. No one realized the prison perched on a ridge overlooking a deep canyon and that the twenty-foot-high walls projected from an extremely steep incline overgrown with jungle—or that PRA headquarters lay only three hundred yards away at Fort Frederick.

  Two Black Hawks loaded with sixty Delta commandos closed in on the prison prepared to land one on each side and discharge the commandos as a blocking and security force while four other choppers raced in to evacuate prisoners.

  Alarms sounded inside the prison as the choppers approached. A company of riflemen armed with AR-47s and a pair of ZPU-4 anti-aircraft machine guns firing six hundred rounds per minute ran toward the prison from Fort Frederick and drove the air assault back. Pilot Keith Lucas was killed, his copilot’s head grazed. The smoking Black Hawk made it to a nearby hill crest before it skidded into a clearing.

  One Huey managed to slide in underneath the fire to fast-rope nine Deltas into the prison yard while a UH-60 Black Hawk provided cover with its guns. The rest of the air fleet headed out to sea with several wounded. The nine commandos inside the prison held out for three more hours until they were rescued.

  * * *

  Over at Government House, besieged SEALs were relieved by Marines at 7:12 a.m. and Scoon and his staff evacuated. Miraculously, the SEALs suffered no casualties during their day and night in battle.

  * * *

  At Point Salinas on the southern tip of the island, giant C-141 Starlighters airlifted in additional elements from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division. Thus relieved, Rangers headed out on their own in a forced march to rescue American students at St. George’s University Medical School. The school was in Ranger hands by 7:30 a.m. However, they were astonished to learn about a second medical school campus at Grand Anse on the west coast of the island, where 223 Americans were trapped.

  Having heard they were to be rescued, students and staff at Grand Anse marked their dormitory roofs with white sheets and covered windows with mattresses to protect against flying glass. All wore white armbands to identify themselves and flattened out on the floors as Rangers arrived to take charge that afternoon. There were no American casualties.

  * * *

  The Rangers had one final objective—Camp Calivigny, the main training base atop a seacoast promontory five miles east of Salinas, where as many as six hundred Cubans and thirty Soviet advisors were believed to be holed up.

  Destroyers blasting with their five-inch guns, 82nd Airborne howitzers thundering death from the airfield, and Navy A-7s and Air Force Spectres on strike missions leveled the camp. Black Hawks carrying Rangers rushed in to mop up. Three choppers either crashed or were shot down during landings. Three Rangers died and four were injured before what was left of the camp’s defenders either fled or surrendered.

  That ended most of the island’s resistance. Mopping up continued for several more days. By mid-December, U.S. combat forces went home and a pro-American government took power in Grenada. Nineteen Americans died and 123 were wounded in the action.

  As with the after-action report from Desert One in Iran, pencil necks like me in the Pentagon rushed in to investigate the Urgent Fury operation. What went wrong and what went right? Every movement came under intense scrutiny.

  Almost unanimously, we concluded that the operation was a debacle, a cluster fuck of screw-ups from start to finish. We tabulated the failures: poorly coordinated communications; leaks of pending action to local communist officials; and lack of intelligence about the island, its terrain, and its defenses. On top of all that, a series of mechanical and electronic malfunctions, miscalculations, and SNAFUs added to the turmoil.

  Still, for the United States to mount and execute such a complex operation with only four days’ advance notice was a triumph in itself. Governor General Scoon, his staff, and a number of political prisoners were liberated, and 662 American students rescued without a single death or serious injury among them. An unquestionably brutal communist regime was eliminated and another Soviet-Cuban adventure nipped in the bud. This was the first time since before World War II that an avowed communist government was replaced by a pro-Western one.

  Perhaps the main lesson to come out of all this was a better understanding of the nature of special warfare. SpecOps by its very definition was delicate and highly complex, requiring time to plan, time to rehearse, time to reconsider and re-plan and rehearse again. Above all, success at low cost depended on detailed, up-to-the-minute intelligence. Only the foolhardy exposed relatively few men, no matter how well trained or dedicated they were, to an intensely hostile environment without precise information about the enemy.

  The lesson had been a costly one for special operations forces.

  “We have to get better,” I said.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  GENERAL IBRAHIM TANNOUS, LEBANON’S Armed Forces chief of staff, and Brigadier General Carl Stiner, commander of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Task Force (JSOTF), sat over early-morning coffee in Tannous’s Beirut office when a tremendous blast rocked the building. The two men, Stiner lean and fit, Tannous rather chunky, rushed to the window to see a full black column of smoke tipped by a white spinning smoke ring—like an atomic explosion—rising from an area approximately two miles away, from the direction of the airport.

  “I hope it’s not the Marines!” Tannous exclaimed.

  U.S. Marines at the airport had been under constant threat ever since they arrived in Lebanon to help restore sanity to the savage civil war raging between Israelis, Syria, and elements of the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger insisted the U.S. must take the lead in the United Nations to bring peace.

  A new form of warfare emerged in the 1970s, or perhaps it was a new way of practicing a very old form of warfare—state-supported terrorism. Nations not militarily powerful learned to use terrorist tactics to achieve objectives and concessions they might never win through diplomatic or military means.

  Turmoil in Lebanon traced back to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. France, as the dominant power of which Lebanon was a protectorate, granted the nation independence and pulled out its troops in 1946, leaving a complex ethnic mess more or less evenly distributed between Muslims and Christians, with Muslims divided into two sometimes-opposing groups, Sunni and Shiite. A third sect called Druze combined Christian and Muslim teachings. Add a fourth group to the mixture in the 1970s, the Palestinians, who had been driven out of Israel and Jordan, and the pot became even more chaotic.

  Yasser Arafat’s PLO migrated to West Beirut in 1975 to establish a main base of operations in its continuing feud with Israel. This did not set well with many Lebanese, especially with the Christian militia, the Phalange. Full-scale war broke out between the PLO and the Christian militia, resulting in th
e deaths of forty thousand Lebanese and Palestinians. The Lebanese Army fell apart and became incapable of enforcing the peace as the various factions turned against each other. Most of Lebanon became a battleground, with surrounding nations choosing sides to support.

  Syria first sided with the Palestinian Fedayeen, then switched allegiance to the Christian militias. The USSR supported the Druze and its People’s Socialist Party, or PSP. Israel occupied a security zone in the south where Christians, Palestinians, and Shiite Muslims lived together but hated each other. Iran became the most dangerous of the sponsors when it sided with the Shiite Muslims to spread Islamic revolution through subversion and terrorism. Iran’s sponsorship introduced new forms of terrorist warfare that included suicide bombings and hostage-taking.

  U.S.-educated Hosein Sheikholislam, a disciple of Ayatollah Khomeini, formed Hezbollah, or “Party of God,” as the militant arm for fanatical fundamentalist Shiites drawn from all around the world. Trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, they were the most fearsome of all terrorists, willing to martyr themselves in the name of Allah. They saw Westerners, and particularly Americans, as the “Great Satan” and therefore primary targets.

  Hezbollah located its main Lebanese base and terror training facility at Baalbeck in Syrian-controlled territory in the Bekaa Valley, only an hour’s driving time from Beirut.

  In June 1982, Israel finally got fed up with PLO terrorism and launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon to clean out the Palestinian terrorists once and for all. In two weeks it drove the Palestinian army from strongholds near Israel’s northern border, destroyed a major part of Syria’s forces occupying the Bekaa Valley, and pushed all the way to Beirut, where it linked with the Christian Phalange militia and surrounded Muslim West Beirut, the center of militant Muslim activity in the capital.

  Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel, whose daughter had been killed earlier in an ambush meant for him, was bomb-assassinated on September 14, 1982, by a Syrian agent. The Phalange then massacred more than seven hundred unarmed Palestinians in West Beirut refugee camps, from September 16 to 18. In April 1983, a suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing sixty-three people in the explosion, among them seventeen Americans, including the CIA station chief and all but two of his officers.

  In spite of his reservations, President Reagan sent 1,500 Marines to Lebanon in July 1983 to protect West Beirut. They settled in at an airport barracks, one of the strongest buildings in the city.

  General Stiner arrived in Beirut at about the same time with orders from General Jack Vessey, JCS Chairman: “The Lebanese Army is the only effective institution of government to which we can tie our assistance program. I want you to work closely with General Tannous in coordinating the timing of Israel’s withdrawal with the development of Tannous’s forces, so the Lebanese will be able to effectively relieve the Israel forces. We want to eliminate the possibility of a void that will encourage renewed fighting by the factions.”

  Renewed fighting. It had never stopped. Beirut remained an armed camp where fighting might break out at any time. Lebanon began a more rapid and uncontrolled descent into a deeper hell as Israel began withdrawing on September 3, 1983. At midnight, a heavy Druze artillery and rocket barrage killed two Marines at the airport.

  Marine Detachment Commander Colonel Tim Geraghty dispatched a sitrep (situation report) through his chain of command: “The stakes are becoming very high. Our contribution to peace in Lebanon since 22 July stands at four killed and 28 wounded.”

  “We’re nothing but sitting ducks for all sides,” a Marine complained.

  At approximately 6:30 a.m. on October 23, a yellow nineteen-ton Mercedes-Benz stake-bed truck drove onto the Beirut International Airport. The driver of the hijacked truck circled the parking lot before accelerating through a barrier of concertina wire. It sped past two sentry posts, over an open vehicle gate in the perimeter chain-link fence, crashed through a guard shack and into the lobby of the barracks building where U.S. Marines were billeted and headquartered.

  The force of the explosion, equivalent to approximately twenty-one thousand pounds of TNT, collapsed the four-story barracks, sheared the bases of steel-reinforced concrete support columns, dug an eight-foot crater through a seven-inch floor of reinforced concrete, and reduced one of the strongest buildings in Beirut to a pile of pancaked rubble. Generals Stiner and Tannous felt the massive shock wave from two miles away and watched the ball of flaming gas scald the morning sky. Twenty-four Marines died in the bombing.

  Ten minutes later, a similar attack against a French military barracks six kilometers away in the Ramlet al Baida area brought down a nine-story building and killed fifty-four French paratroopers.

  U.S. intelligence intercepted a cryptic message minutes after the bombing: “We were able to perform the spectacular act, making the ground shake underneath the feet of the infidels.”

  That same afternoon, a previously unknown group calling itself Islamic Jihad telephoned a Beirut newspaper. “We are soldiers of God and we crave death,” the terrorist spokesman gloated. “Violence will remain our only path if the foreigners do not leave our country. We are ready to turn Lebanon into another Vietnam. We are not Iranians or Syrians or Palestinians. We are Lebanese Muslims who follow the dicta of the Koran.”

  Terrorists further celebrated their “victory” by spreading picture-posters of both “martyred” truck drivers throughout the Shiite suburbs of Beirut. Sheikh Fadlallah, Hezbollah’s spiritual leader, had blessed the drivers before they set out on their missions, apparently promising them an easy life in Paradise surrounded by their seventy-two virgins.

  CIA-intercepted messages between Iran’s Foreign Ministry in Teheran and the Iranian ambassador in Damascus exposed Iran’s complicity. One of these messages, dated a few days before the bombings, urged a major attack against all Americans.

  Suspiciously, Iran’s chief terrorist, Hosein Sheikholislam, checked out of the Sheraton Hotel in Damascus on October 22, the day before the attack on U.S. Marines. Also, the Iranian embassy in Damascus inexplicably evacuated just hours before the bombing occurred.

  Two weeks later, a young woman astride an explosives-laden mule rode up to an Israeli outpost on the edge of the southern buffer zone. The mule blew up, killing its rider and fifteen Israelis. The woman’s picture-poster went up in Beirut, Damascus, and Teheran alongside those of the two suicide truck bombers.

  The U.S. embassy, the U.S. Marines, the French barracks, the mule—clear evidence that we in the United States were faced with a virulent pattern of state-sponsored terrorism.

  “Islamic jihad?” CNO James Watkins mused. “Is this something new, Commander Hamilton? What’s your assessment?”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  ISLAMIC JIHAD, WHILE NOT exactly a new term, was one not so familiar with many of us in the U.S. military. I was both intrigued and horrified at the fanaticism demonstrated in someone strapping dynamite to himself and committing suicide in order to kill not only a military enemy but also innocent civilians who might not share his particular philosophical or religious convictions. My God, how did you stop a people who “crave death”? Who were not only willing but even seemingly eager to blast themselves into the afterlife in Allah’s name?

  What is the Muslim religion? I asked. What is jihad? Charged with providing the CNO an assessment, I pored over an English translation of the Quran, striving to decipher the motivations behind the violence and fanaticism rising throughout the Middle East and understand what it portended for the United States and the world.

  Barbara looked quizzical when she found me in my recliner puzzling over a hand-marked and dog-earned copy of the Quran.

  “What are you doing, Bill? Converting?”

  “Barb, what’s the Agency doing about Islamic jihad?”

  She knew the term. She still worked as an analyst for the CIA. “Ronald Reagan is convinced that the heart of all evil resides in the Soviet Union.”

  “You
find the Russkies nipples-deep in insurrection no matter where it occurs. They agitate in Beirut, in Iran, creating unrest and revolution among Muslims. What’s that old phrase? Something about the Devil and his playmates?”

  “Bill, you need to talk to Bill Casey.”

  I had met Casey after the Iranian hostage crisis when President Reagan appointed him new director of Central Intelligence. He was a balding older man with a ring of white hair above his ears and wire-framed glasses perched on his nose.

  “You’re a smart girl, Barbara. That’s why I married you.”

  We had set a record. We had been married to each other more years than I had been married to my previous three wives together.

  “Get back to your studies, you big lout.” She smiled and kissed me. What a woman!

  Jihad? Defined as “struggle in the way of Allah.” Both a personal spiritual struggle as well as a military struggle. Innocuous enough in the first instance. Not so much so in the second.

  The long struggle between Christianity and Islam that began with the Crusades had succeeded in containing Islam and eventually dissolving the last caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, after World War I. However, Muslims still yearned for a “new caliphate.” In Islamic theology, there is a strong conviction that the world is disintegrating and Allah will usher in a new era in which Muslims rule the globe. Shiites especially believe that only catastrophic violence against infidels will bring Allah to earth, and that in the meantime jihad continues until the populations of every nation convert.

  DCI Bill Casey and I understood that only a small fraction of Muslims were terrorists. However, for would-be terrorists seeking to achieve world domination, passages in the Quran and in Muhammad’s recorded sayings in the Hadith supplied sufficient ammunition for them to justify their actions:

  It is the duty of those who have accepted Allah’s word and manage to strive unceasingly to convert or at least to subjugate those who have not. This obligation is without limit or time or space. It must continue until the whole world has either accepted the Islamic faith or submitted to the power of the Islamic state.…