Night Fighter

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

  Killing unbelievers is a small matter to us.…

  Allah deserves killing them to manifest the religion.…

  Fight everyone in the way of Allah and kill those who disbelieve Allah.…

  I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads.…

  And the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say, “Oh, Muslim. There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”

  I have been made victorious with terror.…

  I have been commanded to fight against people till they testify that there is no god but Allah.…

  The second genocide of the twentieth century occurred beginning in 1915 when Muslim Turks rounded up and slaughtered more than a million and a half Armenian Christians. (The first occurred when a mercenary army raised by German settlers in what is now Namibia attempted to exterminate the Herero people.) The New York Times quoted Doctor M. Simbad Gabriel on the genocide in its September 25, 1915, issue:

  The doctor said that greed, religion, and politics all combined to induce the Turks to massacre the Armenians. The government was always behind every massacre, and the people were acting under orders.

  When the bugle blows in the morning, Turks rush fiercely to the work of killing the Christians and plundering them of their wealth. When it stops in the evening, or in two or three days, the shooting and stabbing stop just as suddenly then as it began.

  Hitler may have been as much inspired in his “final solution” by the example of the Armenian massacre as Islamic terrorists were by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and by former SS officer Otto Skorzeny with his Werewolf campaign after World War II.

  Modern international terrorism sprang out of the rise of Marxist nationalist and revolutionary movements with their view, especially in the Islamic world, that terrorism was effective in reaching goals. Radical Palestinians unable to confront Israel militarily led to plane hijackings, kidnappings, bombings, and shootings. By the 1980s the Palestinian network supported by various state sponsors such as the Soviet Union and Iran had created an extensive transnational network that became the major channel for terrorist techniques worldwide.

  Hezbollah, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, PLO, Al Fatah, Amal … none of these groups expected to destroy the West in a single blow or in a series of blows, not unless one of them first obtained nukes. What they did was exploit weaknesses—economic, political, psychological, physical—to create tension and erode the will of their enemies to continue the struggle. It was a process that could take a very long time. Years, even decades of patience. But, after all, radical Islam had been on this path to conquer the world for Muhammed and Allah since 1632.

  Training camps for jihadists to learn their bloody work sprang from fertile soil in the hidden valleys of Lebanon, the deserts of Libya and Iran, the desolate mountain passes of Afghanistan. … After releasing the American Embassy hostages, Ayatollah Khomeini established an international training camp in Manzareih in Iran. His faculty included translators, commandos from North Korea, security experts from Syria, Soviet KGB officers, Palestinian veterans, advisors from Libya, and radical experts from terrorist movements all over the world. The first class of 150 graduated in July 1981.

  A year later, 240 terrorist organizations from eighty different countries met in Tripoli for the International Conference of the World Center for Resistance to Imperialism, Zionism, Racism, and Fascism. Organized by the Soviet Union, Iran, and Muammar Gadhafi of Libya, the conference formed a committee consisting of representatives from Libya, Cuba, Iran, Syria, and North Korea with the goal of forming an international terrorist training program to prepare revolutionaries to battle the “oppressors,” primarily the United States.

  It was difficult to believe the preparations these nations and movements were taking for war against the West. As many as eighteen functioning training facilities staffed by experts in modern combat and sabotage—in effect Nazi Werewolves—were turning out thousands of terrorists. The largest of these camps, Sikilabad, boasted a Western-style airport mockup complete with modern equipment and supplies. Students became trained in sabotage, aircraft boarding, hostage taking, political kidnapping, and control of airport facilities. Special camps trained women and suicide fighters.

  Insanity on a global scale. During the 1970s, the total number of confirmed domestic and international terrorist incidents numbered 8,114, with 4,978 people killed and 6,902 injured. These statistics were already more than tripling into the 1980s with nearly thirty thousand incidents worldwide. Over sixty thousand people had been killed and forty thousand injured in aircraft hijackings, kidnappings, suicide bombings, and random other acts of mayhem—and the decade was not yet over.

  DCI William Casey and CNO James Watkins weren’t going to like my assessment: Eventual war on a scale that eclipsed all wars combined since the beginning of the nineteenth century. And, sooner or later, Islam jihadists would obtain nuclear weapons and would have no qualms about using them.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  THE DEPUTY CHIEF OF naval operations for plans and operations, Admiral James “Ace” Lyons, summoned Dick Marcinko and me to his office one morning in early 1985.

  “All right, you two. You’ve been bitching about this long enough. Sit down.”

  I glanced at Marcinko. He shrugged. I pulled up a chair. Marcinko stood; he always said it was better to take an ass-reaming standing up than sitting down. Maybe Ace would kick us back out into the fleet if we screwed up badly enough. I was up for promotion to captain. A captain should have a command.

  “As an institution,” the admiral began, “the Navy is so focused on the Soviet threat that we don’t take the time or energy to deal with other equally dangerous potential adversaries.”

  I looked at Dick. He shrugged again.

  “We’re a peacetime Navy, and we think like a peacetime Navy,” the admiral continued. “That makes for liabilities when it comes to dealing with terrorism. The Germans, the Italians, the French, the Brits—they all deal with terrorism on a daily basis while we just go blithely along. Then all of a sudden the shit hits the fan. Some asshole blows up our embassy in Beirut or we get intel the Iranians are going to target the Sixth Fleet with remote-controlled boats and we go apeshit because we’re not prepared.”

  I was beginning to understand. Dick and I had been trying to convince the chain of command that defensive counterterrorism measures were something the Navy needed. Most fleet commanding officers were more concerned about wives’ clubs than they were of being blown up by a terrorist operative.

  The Joint Special Operations Task Force commanded by Brigadier General Carl Stiner had developed force packages for virtually any anticipated crisis situation. Databases covered every known terrorist organization on the planet. My beef with JSOTF was that it was largely reactive, not proactive. We thought about offense after we were attacked, not defense before it happened.

  “The bottom line is that the Navy is not prepared,” Lyons continued. “The Navy doesn’t have a damned manual about what to do if we’re faced with the possibility of a suicide bomber or a remote-controlled speedboat filled with Semtex. We stamp millions of papers Top Secret, but our most sensitive installations are open to attack twenty-four hours a day. You can’t lead people to change their thinking about terrorism. You have to push them.

  “That’s why I’m going to turn you two loose to shake up the whole system. Rattle the Navy’s cage like it’s never been rattled before. I want our base commanders to see how vulnerable they really are. I want to stick it to them—and have them learn from the experience, learn something they won’t put in a file drawer and forget. I want an end to all the complacency. The jihad threat is real. I know it. You know it. And it’s about time they knew it too.”

  Despite his impish smile and merry fifty-seven-year-old cheeks that made him look like a cherub, Lyons was viewed around the Pentagon as a hard-line rabble rouser with an intractable stubbornness that other four-st
ars found difficult to tolerate in the D.C. political climate. His was a warrior’s mentality, audacious and unconventional. Through him, Dick and I had finally caught someone’s attention.

  He appointed me immediately to a new special staff section charged with testing the security of key naval installations against sneak terrorist attacks.

  “Bone, you’re appointed titular head of this with Marcinko as your deputy because Marcinko hasn’t the finesse to do anything but piss off everybody he comes in contact with. Keep Marcinko out of sight when there’s brass around, but otherwise give him the rein to build this thing. The two of you have been carping about this for years, and now we’ve got authorization from the CNO to do something about it.”

  Admiral Lyons dispatched a memo to CNO Watkins outlining our concept: “I have established the Red Terrorist Cell under the Code of OP-06D. This cell will plan terrorist attacks against U.S. naval ships and installations worldwide. They will identify the vulnerabilities of the targets and plan the attacks within the known capabilities, ethnic characteristics of the terrorist factions, and the political objectives of the sovereign states involved. In conjunction with the attack scenario, this group will also recommend actions which can be taken which will either inhibit or so complicate any planned terrorist action that they will not occur.”

  The new outfit would be formally known as Naval Security Coordination Team, but informally it became Red Cell. During war games, commies were the Red Team. Good guys were the Blue Team. Red Cell would play the part of commies and jihadists in exposing installation weaknesses to encourage commanders to beef up security against real terrorists.

  “Stray from what we’ve agreed on, and you and your boys will be history,” Admiral Lyons warned. “The idea is not that you assholes shoot and loot like a bunch of crazies. The idea is that we teach the Navy how to make life difficult for terrorists. Now go out there and build me a Red Cell.”

  Red Cell originally consisted of fourteen men. All but one were former members of SEAL Team Six; the whole team wanted in on the action when it heard Marcinko was involved. Steve Hartman was the one non-SEAL exception. He was a former Force Recon Marine who won two Silver Stars on secret missions into Laos and North Vietnam. His talents included lock-picking, motorcycle racing, parachuting, and saloon brawling. He possessed black belts in three different forms of karate.

  Red Cell soon looked like a band of pirates and terrorists. Dick was good at that kind of transformation. A thick book of guidelines made sure we played fair and didn’t go too far. A Navy lawyer traveled with the unit to enforce rules. Each scenario we developed had to be approved by the CNO and the commander of our targeted victim. Umpires were used, as in any war game. We videotaped each exercise for later study.

  The world was our playground. We operated like real terrorists. Traveling incognito, scoping out targets, improvising demolitions by buying what we needed at hardware stores or stealing from military bases.

  The waves we stirred up became a tsunami that put the entire Navy on edge.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  RED CELL CONDUCTED its live dress rehearsal at the Norfolk Naval Base, Virginia. The SEAL Marcinko called Minkster phoned the base commander and in his best Arab accent threatened, “This is the Movement for the Free Ejaculation of Palestine. Free all our prisoners, or you Zionist infidels will suffer.”

  We successfully infiltrated the installation and placed mock explosives on the roof of the command center where more than a dozen admirals worked. Within the next few days we wreaked havoc on Second Fleet and Atlantic Fleet Headquarters with bombs, booby traps, and smoke grenades. Adding insult to injury, we returned a few weeks later and captured the base commander’s home and took his family hostage while others of us carried out a mock attack on planes and docked ships.

  I laughed with Barbara when I told her what we had done.

  “You’re like a bunch of rowdy boys on Halloween turning over the preacher’s outhouse,” she said.

  It was, for a fact, great fun, but with a serious purpose. I couldn’t always tag along, but I took every opportunity to join Dick and the Cells and get away from the Pentagon and its stuffy atmosphere. Admiral Lyons seemed to enjoy poking the brass as much as Dick and I did.

  After Norfolk, we went for the Navy’s nuclear submarine base at New London, Connecticut. Three years earlier, dope-smoking hippie activists armed with hammers attacked a Trident ballistic missile submarine in the vicinity—base security was that weak.

  We set up shop among civilians down the road and began to probe. Marcinko rented a small plane. Our unit pilot, Horseface, flew him under the I-95 bridge and buzzed the submarine pens. No one waved the plane off.

  On another day we rented a fishing boat and, flying the Soviet flag on its stern, chugged past the base and openly shot film of submarines in dry dock. We could have rammed or booby-trapped the subs had we been so inclined.

  Terrorists love to scout bars and clubs near military posts where servicemen hang out. It was easy while lounging around drinking beer and smoking cigarettes to pick sailors’ pockets for wallets containing IDs and everything else from the combination to safes containing classified documents to details of the next fleet movements. Add a good-looking babe from the local population, throw in a few beers, and we could have almost owned our own submarine.

  Hell, it was embarrassing to me how easy it was to breach security.

  Marine guards manned a side gate where a single road led to the submarine base hospital. Avoiding the road, Red Cell operators came in from even further to the rear, rappelled down cliffs and crept through a wide-open “back door” while everyone watched the front door. Marcinko and his rowdies burrowed underneath a chain-link fence, sneaked around the dark side of an ordnance facility, and “shot” a security guard with a silenced pistol. That left the place wide open.

  Our intruders picked the lock on a side door and entered. Inside, working quickly, they attached a timer-detonated charge next to a nuclear weapons prep area and hid IEDs (improvised explosive devices) among an arsenal of torpedoes. They slipped back out again and disappeared, leaving an insulting sign inside on an office door: KA-BOOM! LOVE AND KISSES FROM THE MOVEMENT FOR THE FREE EJACULATION OF PALESTINE.

  The base commander, a captain, was not happy when he saw the film evidence of our night’s work. He came complaining to Dick and me. “You didn’t play fair. You didn’t play by the rules.”

  “What rules?”

  “Well, you climbed down the cliff to raid my ordnance facilities. You never told me you’d do that—you only said you’d attack it. You swam downriver and came up under the docks when you attacked the submarines. If we knew you’d come from that direction, we’d have been waiting. We can’t have people watching everywhere.”

  “I’m sure the real People’s Front for The Liberation of Ejaculstan will take your views into account if they decide to stage an actual hit on your base, sir.”

  He kept pissing and moaning. “Your so-called terrorists phoned up and said they were going to hit the PX. We were ready, but they didn’t.”

  “We attacked the commo center instead. This may surprise you, sir, but terrorists don’t operate by rules. You have a nice, neat base here. I’m sure you run it very efficiently. But as far as security is concerned, you’re very vulnerable. The tapes we took show how we blew up two of your nuclear submarines and could have blown ’em all up. All the bad guys have to do is bend a shaft or screw up a diving plane and your fleet of multimillion-dollar nuke subs is bottled up.”

  Each month we terrorized another installation. Our “attacks” proved acutely embarrassing, especially since, according to the rules, we gave advance warnings. They were frighteningly realistic, and that led to a number of bitter complaints. Rumors always floated out ahead of our pending operations.

  No one could ever accuse Marcinko of having tact or sensitivity. During a pre-attack briefing, Dick would come out with something like, “We won’t break any skin. We won’t dra
w blood. No broken teeth. Everything else is mine.”

  To a woman, he might say, “We’re not going to pull your skirt over your head and tie your hands behind your back.”

  “Dick, you could be a bit more subtle,” I scolded him.

  “Huh? You mean that wasn’t subtle enough?”

  In Naples, Italy, the team kidnapped an admiral and his wife by forcing their car off the road following a speech he delivered at a Navy club. Marcinko released him—and kidnapped him again the following morning.

  At Subic Bay in the Philippines, Red Cell stole a native’s boat and rammed it into the carrier Kitty Hawk as it steamed into harbor.

  Our pirates captured a local ice cream store in Japan and used its employees and customers as hostages to test a base hospital’s mass casualty capabilities.

  Marcinko and I and the Minkster penetrated the Charleston, South Carolina, naval base using IDs we stole from a couple of civilian base workers at a bar downtown. Dressed in scroungy clothing, unshaven, we drove unchecked through the front gate and spent the next several days sabotaging a nuclear storage area and sneaking aboard nuclear-powered submarines. No one ever challenged us; I don’t think they even saw us.

  Even the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, proved susceptible to our tender ministrations. Whenever he vacationed at his California ranch 125 miles south of Point Magu, Air Force One remained tethered at the Point Magu Naval Base.

  The base was like a sleepy little southern California town in the hours before Labor Day weekend when its commander received the call: “This is the Movement for the Free Ejaculation of Palestine. If the Israelis do not free 173 of our political prisoners within two hours, your facilities will be bathed in American blood. The mother of all wars will begin on your accursed Zionist-loving territory.”