And we kept practicing all our other skills as we got ready for our first operations. My rock-climbing abilities even got a little workout outside of duty hours on occasion. In our penthouse apartment in Alexandria, you had to push a button to be let in if you didn’t have a key. Kitty had my key most of the time, and somehow Pooster could never manage to keep one.
There was the occasional evening when Kitty thought the two of us were arriving home at an unacceptable hour, or in an unacceptable condition. It didn’t really matter which, the results were the same. We’d push the buzzer and she wouldn’t let us in. The building was seven stories up to the penthouse and constructed of brick. So when Kitty wouldn’t let us in, we just climbed up the outside of the building. If she was really mad at us, the balcony door would be locked. So we would end up spending some quality time on the balcony, jimmying open the door.
The apartment building was managed by a retired Navy captain. There was one neighbor who didn’t think a lot of us climbing past his window at night, and he complained about us regularly to the manager. That captain finally told us we couldn’t climb up the outside of the building anymore. What he said was something along the lines of “If you do that one more time, I’m going to have to evict you!” So we tried to behave.
That wasn’t the only time Pooster and I had adventures at the penthouse. He had his own style of living that made things kind of interesting. There was one particular night when I came home later than he did, and I knew he was already pretty well wasted long before he got home. When the elevator doors opened outside the penthouse, one of Pooster’s boots was lying in the hallway. The other boot was just outside our door, which was open a crack.
Apparently he had been trying to get undressed to save a little time before he went to bed. He didn’t make it. Inside his bedroom was Pooster, pants around his ankles, kneeling on the floor with his head on the bed. Kitty and I picked him up and heaved him the rest of the way in.
More details on how Red Cell would operate were worked out as we went along. Soon we were fully equipped to conduct any operation necessary. All we would need was transportation to a target area. Even our communications details were worked out by the use of code names.
During an operation, we would have to be able to address each other both face-to-face and on the radio, but not with our real names. This not only maintained our anonymity, it made it harder for our captives or security to get a fast handle on who we were. The psychological factor of “unnatural” names would also help raise stress levels for our hostages.
Everyone came up with a name. Dick Marcinko was the Silver Bullet, his old call sign from his SEAL Team Two Vietnam days. We never called him Dick anyway. He was always the Skipper. Pooster picked his name up because his hair stuck up much of the time like a rooster’s comb. Our corpsman was Doc, but that hadn’t been much of a stretch. Then came me. The Skipper couldn’t think of a name for me right away, so I went home to think about it.
When I was first at SEAL Team One, I had been called Macho Man from the popular song of the time. My first leading petty officer had tagged me with that. But that wasn’t going to be my handle at Red Cell. That night I watched Escape from New York with Kurt Russell. With the earring, long hair, and mustache, Russell’s character seemed to fit. The next day I was just joking around when I said a line almost straight from the movie: “You can call me Snake, Snake Chalker.” And it stuck.
CHAPTER 20
A VISIT TO NORFOLK
Our first Red Cell operation was in familiar territory, the huge Naval base at Norfolk, Virginia. Knobber had his own pilot’s license, which made for some interesting transportation possibilities. He wasn’t the only pilot we had in Red Cell—Butch also had his license—but Knobber was an ex-cropduster and one of those people who could fly anything. And he flew everything with the same lunatic abandon.
In the early spring of 1985, we rented a plane, a twin-engine 401, and flew it down to Norfolk, landing at the air station there. That got us on the base in an easy penetration. The commander’s house faced the air strip, so we just taxied to the front of the house.
The Skipper kind of sat to the side and observed the developing situation rather than taking an active hand in the action. He would make the report to the higher command at the base, telling them how and what we did. To make certain we didn’t cross the line legally, a lawyer observed with the Skipper, recommending or advising against a course of action as it came up. It was supposed to be a test and a training operation. We were acting the part of terrorists, but we were still Navy personnel working for the general good of our service.
One exercise the Skipper wanted to see was a hostage-taking scenario. The captain who was the base commander knew what we were going to do. He just didn’t know how we were going to do it.
That morning, the captain was sitting at his breakfast when six black-clothed, balaclava-wearing terrorists burst in through his front door to take him and his family hostage. While this was good experience for the Navy base’s security team, it was also an opportunity for the local civilian security forces. Hostage negotiation is a tricky thing, and any practice or practical experience that can be obtained without someone’s life actually being in danger adds to the overall quality of the security force.
A couple of people from the FBI negotiation school had been sent to the Norfolk area to gain experience through our exercise. These guys had the excellent luck to be sitting at breakfast with the base commander when we barged in. Knobber, Butch Cassidy, and I were assigned to put these two individuals through some stress to see if they would break.
We knew who the negotiators were; we had a picture of one of the pair who wore glasses. Grabbing one of them, I shoved him into a kitchen cupboard, knocking pots and pans out of the way as he went in. It was manhandling, but we were being careful not to injure anyone. Still, injuries weren’t the only mistakes that could be made.
As I was shoving my man into the cupboard, Knobber called out to me. “Snake!” he said, indicating the man he had secured. Knobber had the glasses-wearing FBI man in his hands. Well then, who was it I was shoving into the pots and pans? Pulling the man out of the cupboard, I found out. It was the Navy captain who lived in the house, the commander of the base.
Oh, that was really good.
Pulling the man back out, I shoved him down into his seat. He sat there a bit stunned. He wasn’t the only one who was in shock from the suddenness of our little encounter. The captain’s wife was standing at the kitchen stove, frozen in the same position she was in when we all arrived. At the table sat a younger woman, the other member of the negotiation team.
We isolated everybody, putting the young woman in the dining room and the man in the living room. Butch secured the guy in the living room and started a little modern torture on him. Turning on the TV set, Butch set it on a station showing cartoons and left the guy there watching them.
Knobber and I had a different assignment: we were running a Mutt and Jeff routine on the young woman. I was the bad guy, Knobber was the good guy. It started out with Knobber being nice to the girl, asking her if she was okay and saying that she shouldn’t be scared. Then I would barge into the room, being a badass and manhandling the woman a bit.
There wasn’t any physical abuse, no slapping or actual striking. But it doesn’t take much shoving around from a guy who’s been working out with the Teams for the last five years to make you feel physically intimidated and helpless. I shoved her down on the floor, holding her there and telling her how I hated females and all that kind of shit. Then I put her in one of the chairs and pulled a bag over her head. This was all intended to get the woman riled up and upset so that she wouldn’t feel in control of the situation.
Then Knobber would come back into the room and shove me away from the woman. Slapping me—no one cared if we hit each other—Knobber would holler, “Snake!” I would just answer with a nasty “Fuck you” and storm out of the room. Then Knobber would turn to the woman and as
k her if she was okay and act all concerned for her welfare. This show went on for at least two hours.
The negotiators were one aspect of the exercise, but it was primarily a hostage rescue situation for the security personnel. We kept our hands off the captain and his wife; at least I wasn’t pushing him into any more cupboards. The Skipper was talking to the captain, keeping him informed of the situation and what would be coming up next. The captain wasn’t too upset with me for roughing him up, not even when he found out I had broken one of his dining room chairs when I was playing bad guy and shoving the woman around.
Meanwhile we had secured the house and put up barricades as best we could. Base security had been brought in, surrounding the area and keeping outsiders away. They had even brought up an ambulance and had it on call, showing good foresight. Negotiations began and continued throughout the incident.
There was no real physical abuse in any of our simulations. All the military personnel involved had been through far worse in their own training. SERE (Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Evasion) school, which all the pilots and many others had gone through, was many levels worse than anything we did. But it didn’t take very much for some people to break down or just feel completely helpless.
The woman said the nasty talk had gotten to her the worst. Later I had shoved her into a closet, still with the bag over her head. With a cigar I was smoking, I would blow smoke into the bag. This was irritating but hardly dangerous. It still got to her. Minor irritations can grow out of all proportion if you think about them too much.
The woman did really well, we all thought. We went through almost the whole exercise without any trouble from her, though toward the end she was reacting to the stress a bit. We had one of her own people with us to observe the situation, but she didn’t know that. Finally we ended the situation with the woman and the guy.
We called up the ambulance and told them we were going to release somebody and medevac them out. When the ambulance arrived, we took it over. Using our hostages as a shield, we escaped the area in the ambulance. Once we had gotten out of the area, the exercise was over.
The whole incident lasted about six hours. Afterward we debriefed and explained to them what we had observed and how we had conducted our operation. A film unit made up of ex-SEAL Team Six operators had been hired by Red Cell to videotape all our operations. Being ex–Six SEALs, the camera crew could keep up with us and maintain our security during an operation.
The base security unit had done a good job. We had never given them a chance to do a dynamic entry on our position, so they held the position secure and let the negotiators do their job. Our first Red Cell operation turned out to be very productive for all concerned. The Skipper talked to the negotiators and the security people, telling them how the negotiation went and what else could have been done to manipulate the “terrorists.”
We explained to them that they would want to hold us secure and in position for as long as possible. Once the site was secured, a specialized team should be called. These specialized teams trained for these situations constantly and should be brought in to deal with the situation directly. Usually there would be a problem over one security agency or group calling in another one, especially a military base calling in a civilian organization. No security chief wanted to admit that there were actions his team couldn’t deal with. This wasn’t always true, however, and Red Cell went a long way to point this out to people.
A local security force couldn’t be trained in one day on how to do a dynamic entry. Entering a hot area and dealing with hostages and targets all mixed in with one another is very hard and takes specific training to have any chance of success. We had trained for years at SEAL Team Six just for that kind of operation. So we could explain the situation well to the security forces we were testing with Red Cell.
The main thing we tried to do with our exercises was demonstrate site vulnerabilities and how to set up perimeter security and begin negotiations. The idea behind perimeter security was to leave no holes through which we could escape the area, as we showed the Norfolk security team during that first op.
For the hostage, it was a different kind of training situation. It might be compared to an advanced SERE course for possible targets and for the negotiators who would have to deal with the situation. We worked hard to give the hostages a feeling of not being in control, something that’s very difficult for senior Navy officers and other VIPs to accept. What was even harder to accept for some of the individuals was how they reacted to the stress.
The physical intimidation added greatly to their overall feeling of helplessness. The language we used, shouting, fast constant movement, and general intimidation didn’t give the individuals time to think. It was a lot like breakout, the first hour of Hell Week in BUD/S, where the instructors are all shouting orders, firing blanks, and causing confusion among the students. Red Cell’s students were the hostages we took. Only they couldn’t quit the course.
To the hostages, our planned confusion and actions seemed a lot worse than they actually were. Shaking someone by the shoulders or grabbing them by the back of the neck or the shirt was usually all we did. The barking and shouting normally intimidated them enough all by itself; it was never necessary for us to throw a punch or anything more.
The force we did use was actually so minor that most of our hostages didn’t believe it later on. They would swear we did a lot more than even the observers would tell them we did. The fact that we videotaped all of our actions, the better to review them during the debriefing, helping prove our points.
In addition, some of the hostages couldn’t believe we were only playing a part. The evening after that first exercise, we went out to a Pizza Hut on the beach to get together and relax with all the parties who had been involved. Sitting at the table with us was the same woman I had been dealing with that morning. It was obvious she didn’t mind sitting next to Knobber, but she also made known her feelings about me by giving me dirty looks all night. “Hey, look,” I finally told her, “I’m really a nice guy. We’re just doing our job.”
That explanation fell on deaf ears, except for those of my Teammates (Cellmates?), who got a good laugh out of it. I decided that was the last time I was going to play bad guy for a while.
We continued with exercises in the Norfolk area. We did a number of moderate hits, penetrations at different points of entry on the base. We found weak spots in the fence, dark areas where there should have been more security in the form of roving guards or other measures. We gathered our own intel on such spots for later use or pointed out examples to the security force during a post-op debrief.
HUMINT (human intelligence) was something we also gathered for our own use. Women were very good for this—wives or girlfriends or women recruited from on the base proper. They would gather intelligence on the target for us, especially on open penetration points where they would talk to the gate guards around the base. Who knows, maybe today it wouldn’t look out of place for a guy like me to be engaging a gate guard in conversation. In the mid-1980s, my flirting with a military gate guard would have stood out. The ladies, though, could do that very well.
There was one security building on the main base that we considered a primary facility target. The base held the headquarters of the Atlantic Fleet as well as the Second Fleet, so their facilities had to be secure. Now we were going to test that security.
One of our targets of opportunity for the exercise was a building that held a vault full of classified materials. The office adjoining the vault was full of various pieces of technical gear that were also highly classified. The security level of the room next to the vault would be Top Secret, very limited accessibility, and certainly not open to the likes of us.
We studied the structure, gathering intel on the building itself and its internal layout. None of this information was given to us beforehand; we had to develop it all on our own at the site as part of the exercise. It was this intel gathering and target analysis that made s
ome of our earlier SEAL training and experience so valuable. Without our skills, we couldn’t have pulled off the operation or kept it as controlled and safe as we did.
Going up and over the fence gave us access to the base. Getting over the three strands of barbed wire at the top of the fence took a matter of seconds for Pooster and myself. Penetrating the building itself was a direct result of my SEAL Team Six training. At a dark corner of the building was an old-style iron drainpipe secured to the brick wall. The two of us free-climbed up that drainpipe, quickly gaining the roof after several stories.
We knew where we were going from our studies of the base. During the daytime we had scouted the base by just driving through the gate. There hadn’t been an ID check, so a simple sticker on the windshield got us in. Looking at the outside of the different buildings located our targets for us. When there was an opportunity, we just walked into some of the buildings, took a look around, and walked back out. No one challenged us or even asked if we needed any help.
Going up the drainpipe was a fairly easy climb. We had done far worse ones going up wet girders on oil platforms in the Gulf during our Six training. Once we were on the roof, we located a vent that was held shut with a padlock. No alarm systems were evident, so we found our way in. My lock-picking skills weren’t the best in the unit, so we adopted a simpler solution. A small pair of cutters eliminated the padlock, and we climbed in the vent.
We came down into the rafters of the building, stepping carefully above a false ceiling. Lifting one of the ceiling tiles showed us an open admin-type office below us. We had a good idea of what we were looking for in the way of the vault room. Moving around on the ground brought us to a door set into a brick wall. On the other side of that high-security door was the office next to the vault itself. The door would be a bitch for us to open, and there wasn’t any other way through the wall. But there turned out to be another way into the room.
One Perfect Op Page 18
