by Ted Gup
One of the most wrenching experiences of his entire military career came early on and not on the battlefield. As part of his training as a medic he was to take a puppy that had been anesthetized and remove one of its legs. For a man who had aspired to be a vet it was almost too much to bear. Even twenty years later he spoke of the experience haltingly as one of the most traumatic events in an often violent life.
But whatever focus he had lacked in the civilian world promptly resolved itself in the military. Freedman discovered that he was born to be a warrior. He had at last found a place where his vices could be turned to virtues, his abandon into valor. Even among the elite of the elite, he determined that he would distinguish himself. He saw himself as one in a long line of Jewish warriors—the last Maccabee.
And distinguish himself he did: two Bronze Stars, a Purple Heart, numerous Good Conduct Medals, the Humanitarian Service Medal, the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, and a chestful of other decorations.
His first Bronze Star dated back to May 23, 1968. Freedman was a senior adviser heading up a team of Vietnamese civilian irregulars on ambush patrol along a North Vietnamese infiltration route. He and his men suddenly found themselves about to be outflanked.
The citation spells out what happened next. “Sensing the enemy’s plans, Sergeant Freedman left cover, and although under murderous enemy fire, ran from position to position redeploying his men and directing their fire. The friendly positions began receiving mortar fire from minimum range.
“Spotting the muzzle flash of the weapon, Sergeant Freedman ran from cover and made his way to within 50 meters of it. Opening fire with his rifle he killed two of the enemy gun crew and caused the remainder to abandon their weapon and run . . . Sergeant Freedman’s actions prevented heavy friendly casualties and were instrumental in the victory over a numerically superior enemy force. Sergeant Freedman’s personal bravery and devotion to duty were in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself, the Special Forces and the United States Army.”
Piece by piece, Freedman assembled all the essential components of the ultimate soldier. In the years ahead he underwent advanced training in parachuting, martial arts, intelligence, and weaponry. He honed his skills as a sniper until he became one of the army’s most accurate and deadly long-range shooters.
But Freedman was not immune to the emotional toll of Vietnam. He told one friend, Nick Garber, how he was firing his weapon to repel an attack while all the while drowning a Viet Cong soldier in a shallow rice paddy with his booted foot. Not until the soldier ceased struggling did he raise his foot. Such images were not easy for him to put out of his mind. On his first visit home from Vietnam his family took him to a nightclub. Freedman sat quietly, declining drinks and answering questions with a stiff “yes” or “no.”
But through it all, his eye for women never flagged. In Vietnam he had met a slender Vietnamese woman named Thuy, then with two children. He married her, adopted her children, to be named Michael and Linda, and together, they had a third child, David. But the marriage was ill-fated. They had little in common and less and less to say to one another. The marriage ended long before the divorce.
There is no doubt he was an incurable flirt, but his approach, like everything else about him, could be highly unconventional. How he met his second wife, Teresa, is a case in point. It was 1978. He had been checking out a woman who lived in an adjoining lot. She was petite and shapely, with long black curls and green eyes. One day as she was hanging her laundry he perched over the back fence and struck up a conversation with her. She seemed to be wilted as if in pain. He asked how she was doing.
“I just had a hysterectomy,” she explained.
“Oh, I just had a vasectomy,” he fired back cheerfully. “We’ll have to have a sterilization party.” He and Teresa married on May 10, 1981, though it, too, would be a turbulent marriage.
With women he was usually the perfect gentleman, romantic to a fault. But he could also be obnoxious and randy. A video captures him chairing a solemn meeting of officers at Fort Bragg. In walks a young lady bearing a surprise birthday cake for him. It is decorated with a menorah made of icing.
“Happy birthday!” she bubbles as she places it before him.
“Great Gugamugal!” thunders Freedman, feigning disappointment. “I told her I wanted a blow job!” Even the officers at the table momentarily fainted away in shock.
But it was never Freedman’s intent to offend. It was just his way of testing for reactions, of seeing whether the person would pass muster or fold in a fit of embarrassment or pique. Often it was the first step toward a friendship.
By the late 1970s Freedman had already established himself as a consummate soldier. But it was now peacetime, a state Freedman was not quite as comfortable with. He preferred action and sought it out at every turn. On March 28, 1978, he became a team member of one of the military’s most elite and shadowy units, the recently formed Special Forces Operational Detachment-D. Today it is known as Delta Force, the legendary counterterrorist group, though the military is still reluctant to acknowledge its existence.
Trained in CQB, close-quarters battle, Freedman’s superquick reflexes were refined and readied for overseas hostage rescue and extraction missions. With his medic’s skills, his talents as a sniper, and his combat experience, he was a valued component of Delta Force. There are many in the military who are crack shots, but the perfect sniper, of which Freedman was one, is a rarer breed. It is said of Freedman that he could hike for two days through a jungle with a ninety-pound rucksack on his back, set up his scope and rifle without pause, and focus for three days on a window waiting for his target to show himself for a second only. His concentration was unflagging and lethal.
At training exercises he wowed even expert marksmen. At close range his weapon of choice was a Colt .45 that had undergone a “combat conversion,” meaning the magazine would load quicker and the trigger was “tuned” to release without unwanted “creep.” His body, too, was a finely tuned weapon. Each day he ran five miles, pumped iron, and practiced martial arts.
In Delta Force, Freedman was at last among peers, part of a warrior class, a full cut above the rest. But these soldiers exhibited none of the swagger of a John Wayne. They were content to be known as “the quiet professionals.” They strove for invisibility.
Within the subdued ranks of Delta, Freedman maintained a somewhat higher profile. Still known as Superjew, he would literally show up at parties and other affairs wearing a red cape emblazoned with a large Hebrew letter, a gift from sister Sylvia. Freedman’s escapades could be counted on to provide welcomed comic relief.
But sometimes he would make a few too many waves. “He pulled some crap on me and I had to hammer his ass,” recalls one of his superiors from Delta. But Freedman was too talented to dismiss. Most of his offenses were peccadilloes that momentarily irritated the brass but cumulatively endeared him to them. His commanding officers remember him as a silent tiger in the field, a man ready at a moment’s notice to go wherever asked and do whatever was required. “You knew he would always be there,” said retired general Richard Potter, who was three years with Delta. “You may not like how he got there but you knew he would be there.”
General Peter J. Schoomaker, commander in chief of the United States Special Operations Command, was in the field with Freedman and remembers him with affection and respect. In an otherwise low-key unit he was something of a firecracker. And he had a streak of vanity.
“I would say he was narcissistic,” recalls Schoomaker. “He’s the kind of guy that always tries to stay pretty, like his fascination with his hair. He was always a lady’s kind of guy and always upbeat.
“He was one of the guys you could count on being there and also one of the guys who would have a good time. You had to jerk him up every once in a while to get his attention. He was a confident kind of guy who needed to be led well. Otherwise he’d lead you.”
Freedman�
�s missions, all of them still classified, took him to Africa, the Mideast, and the Far East. More than once he undertook covert operations in Ethiopia, a country that was said to be special to him. There was a sketchy story told of him helping a girl in Turkey to come to the United States. He promised to one day look her up in the States. He took out a dollar bill, tore it in half, and presented her with one of the halves. Five years later, in the United States, he presented her with the other half of the bill, redeeming his pledge.
He was even consulted in the design of the presidential limo and tested the armor plating on other vehicles used by ambassadors and visiting heads of state. Who better to test such defenses than a man who, given the order, would be the perfect assassin?
Freedman was extraordinarily closemouthed about his missions, but there was one instance in which a personal indiscretion identified his place of operation. Sometime in the mid-1980s he visited his sister, Sylvia, and called aside her husband, Ivan Doner, a physician. “You have to do me a favor,” he said somewhat sheepishly. “When I was in Ethiopia I performed a transgression over there.”
Doner understood instantly what Freedman was saying. He had had sexual intercourse with a local and now was worried about AIDS. Fearing both the personal and the security repercussions of his actions, Freedman asked that Doner do a blood test and assign him a pseudonym for purposes of the exam. The test came back negative and the usually steely Freedman exhaled a sigh of relief.
The major missions he and Delta Force undertook were often performed in conjunction with the CIA. It was an uneasy relationship between Delta and the Agency. Increasingly the Agency came to view Delta as its paramilitary arm, a role Delta did not relish.
Freedman and the men of Delta knew they could rely on each other. The Agency, on the other hand, had demonstrated a propensity to distance itself from anything that could go awry and seemed to be planning escape routes from responsibility even before operations commenced. “They’ll have you crawl way out on a limb and then saw off the branch,” said one former Delta Force leader. “They’ve done it many times.” Often, too, Agency intelligence was inadequate or flat-out wrong. Freedman and his teammates came to be deeply suspicious of the Agency—and yet, when called, they went without hesitation.
It is nearly impossible to judge the efficacy of Delta’s missions, so shrouded are they even years later. Sadly the one most daring operation and the one for which Delta will long be associated would come to haunt Freedman as it did the others. The code name was Operation Eagle Claw.
It was the spring of 1980. For six months the nation watched with revulsion as fifty-three American civilians were paraded about as hostages, humiliated at the hands of their Iranian captors. With apparent impunity the Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers taunted the United States as “the Great Satan.” President Jimmy Carter saw his political standing and authority dwindle with each passing day. The crisis would define his presidency, cast America as a kind of impotent giant, and embolden other fanatics to strike at U.S. targets.
But in the deepest, most secure recesses of the U.S. intelligence and defense communities an elaborate plan was afoot to liberate the hostages. It would soon be payback time, a chance to regain face and show that the United States would not abandon its citizens. Perhaps not since the Vietnam War had a covert mission of such daring been undertaken. Completely cloaked in secrecy, a key part of the operation was placed in the hands of the country’s most select military unit, Delta Force.
And among those chosen from that crack unit was Larry Freedman.
It was to be Delta’s first real mission, a chance to prove its mettle and demonstrate that two years of training had not been for naught. It was the moment that Delta Force had been waiting for. It was the moment Larry Freedman lived for.
On the night of April 24–25, 1980, Freedman was aboard an EC-130, part of a larger group of modified Hercules aircraft and RH-53D helicopters known as Sea Stallions. They were to rendezvous at a prearranged refueling site inside Iran, code-named Desert One.
Dressed in a black field jacket, Levi’s, boots, and a naval watch cap, Freedman sat quietly as the massive plane droned on through the night toward its destination. On his right sleeve was a strip of tape concealing a small American flag that he was to peel off once in Teheran as a sign to the hostages that he was part of a rescue team. In his mind he went over and over the welter of intricate steps that lay ahead. He and the rest of the team were convinced that the plan would work. Just get them to Teheran and leave the rest to them.
Freedman had been assigned to the “Blue Element.” He was to be a “blocker,” making sure that the crowds that could be expected to assemble outside the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, where the fifty-three hostages were being held, did not make it past him. With his sniper’s rifle and the support of a machine gunner, he was to provide a delay, if need be laying down deadly fire, while the hostages were removed and led to safety. Few in the operation would be more exposed to risk.
But of the eight Sea Stallions assigned to the mission, three either never made it to Desert One or were stricken with mechanical problems. It was decided that there were no longer enough choppers to make the operation work. The radical change in temperature from the cold of a desert night to the heat of daytime was deemed certain to ground another one or two choppers. That would leave just three to ferry to safety Delta, a Defense Department contingent, the fifty-three hostages, and the assault unit that was to storm the Foreign Ministry Building, which housed another three hostages. In all, 178 people would have to be carried out. It was cutting it too close.
The decision was made to abort.
On the ground at Desert One a Sea Stallion was repositioned for its return. Close by was the EC-130 with Freedman and his fellow Blue team members aboard. As the chopper moved to get into position, its rotors ripped through the cockpit of the EC-130 and instantly set off an explosion, igniting both aircraft. Suddenly the desert went from night to day, and the mission was transformed into a tragedy. Colonel Charles Beckwith would remember the Redeye missiles eerily “pinwheeling” through the desert night as on the Fourth of July.
Freedman and others of his team escaped the flames and leaped to safety, rolling in the sand to put out the flames that licked at their clothes. Freedman returned to the aircraft to help carry away one of the crew who was badly injured and screaming for help. But trapped inside the inferno, now fed by hundreds of gallons of fuel, were eight members of the rescue mission.
Four hours and fifty-six minutes after landing at Desert One, Freedman and the others were forced to abandon the site and head for the safety of the Indian Ocean. The flight back was nearly silent. Freedman and his fellow team members sat sullenly, some with tears sliding down their cheeks. They had come to rescue Americans and show that the United States would not abandon its citizens. But behind, on the desert floor, amid the twisted and burned-out wreckage of Sea Stallion and Hercules, were eight charred corpses. It was the most dramatic defeat since Vietnam. The enemy had been sand and night and, perhaps too, a lack of fundamental coordination. America’s humiliation was now compounded by horror.
Such was the legacy of Operation Eagle Claw. But while it was an unambiguous fiasco, it also made Delta even more determined to play a frontline role in any future covert rescue and extraction operation. Freedman was convinced that had Delta been in control of the operation, they could have pulled it off. In this he was not alone.
In time, his grief gave way to rage. The aborted rescue mission was a subject he disciplined himself not to dwell on. Rarely would he speak of it and only to those who had played a role in the operation. The pain, the injury to pride and profession, the loss of friends, dogged him as nothing else would.
In October 1982 Freedman left Delta Force. His subsequent military record grows more murky with each passing year as he descended into increasingly sensitive and compartmented operations. On November 5, 1982, only weeks after leaving Delta, Pentagon records note he was an “infa
ntry man (special project).” A year later he became a “special projects team member.” None of those operations have come to light.
By December 1, 1984, his record clarifies somewhat with the notation that he had been made noncommissioned officer in charge of the Interdiction Branch, a position he held until 1986. In those years he trained Delta and other Special Forces units at Fort Bragg in many of the arcane arts he had mastered. In the “interdiction” course he taught advanced marksmanship, judging distances, camouflage and concealment techniques, observation skills, and how to “deliver precise rifle fire in support of special operations.” It was the Special Forces version of Sniper School.
That same year he attended a birthday party for his old Philadelphia friend Petey Altman, who was turning forty-four. Altman had been smoking pot and was stoned. Freedman avoided him throughout the evening until Altman finally cornered him. Freedman glowered, and it was clear to Altman it was over drugs. “It occurred to me that here he was literally risking his life to stop this stuff and here I was at the other end of the pipeline being the retail consumer,” recalls Altman. “That summer I gave it up altogether.”
As Freedman approached his forty-fifth birthday, his career took a turn. He temporarily left the field for a classroom at the U.S. Army Sergeant Major’s Academy at Fort Bliss, Texas. There, for the first time, he got a great report card. His transcript declared: “He is a true professional of the highest caliber and has exhibited the potential to succeed in any position at any organizational level within the Department of Defense.” In August 1986 he returned to Fort Bragg as a sergeant major.
He continued to train Special Forces at Fort Bragg’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, passing along to the next generation his skills and knowledge acquired over two decades of combat and covert missions.