One Perfect Op

by Dennis Chalker

  Whoever had constructed the brick wall had built it solidly, but only as tall as it had to be. Climbing up on a desk and raising one of the ceiling tiles showed us an almost three-foot gap between the top of the brick wall and the solid ceiling itself. Going back into the false ceiling and over the wall put us inside the office we had targeted.

  We weren’t going to target the vault itself. We would have had to take over the building completely and either use a lot of equipment or blast with demo, damaging some expensive government property in the process, to breech that vault. Instead Pooster and I just settled in for the night. Making ourselves comfortable, we waited for the office to open in the morning.

  The Navy chief who opened that secure office in the morning was more than a little startled to see us. His eyes bulged out as he stared at us and the special Naval Security Coordination Team badges we held out to him.

  This action brought big attention from just about everyone. We debriefed the situation, and the Old Man explained our actions. “But how did you get in?” we were asked. “Our walls are solid.”

  “They’re solid all right,” we told them, “up to within three feet of the ceiling.”

  I lifted up a panel of the false ceiling and pointed out the big gap at the top of the wall. “See where your wall is?” I said. “Three feet. We crawled right through there, and here is the panel we came through.”

  There was still some dust and debris on the desktop where we had climbed into the secured room. There wasn’t any way they could deny the situation. A lot of other times we would just leave calling cards or signs saying “Red Cell was here!” This time, because of the sensitivity of the target, we decided to stay and wait for someone to come in, preventing any possibility of denying the penetration.

  We were not out to bust anyone’s chops. We didn’t have a vendetta against the Navy. We were all career Navy people and this was our service. But we could make a base commander or security chief look pretty bad. So a lot of the time we would be told, “No one got past my post!” or “That couldn’t happen here!” Out would come the videotapes, and everyone could see exactly what had happened.

  Some of our scenarios involved detaining the CinCs of an area or command. Our objective on one exercise was to secure the CinC from his house, remove him from the area, and detain him at a location of our choosing. This would force the local security unit not only to react to the loss of their CinC but also to track us down and work in unknown territory. This would force them into closer cooperation with local authorities if our hideout was off base.

  Good plan. Only trouble was we didn’t get our hands on the CinC. Mr. Murphy showed up, and Plan A kind of fell through. Butch and I had been tasked to commandeer the CinC, a three-star admiral, while on his way to work from his home on base. Even though the home was on base, and there were roving guards around, we had no trouble scouting the place just driving around in our own car.

  The house was by the water, and water is the natural home of a SEAL. There was a small inlet near the base, lined with civilian housing on either side, that we were going to use as our way in. Running off the inlet was a canal that bordered the base proper. Slipping into the inlet late one night, we swam across to the canal and followed it along the base up to a small bridge.

  There was some late-night traffic on the bridge, but those people weren’t looking for anything in the black waters below them. And I’m sure no one would have expected to see two swimmers moving up the canal.

  Near the bridge was a partially submerged sewer pipe, a storm drain really, without a grate over its end. The pipe led into the base proper, and we knew from our earlier scouting that there were manholes near our target. A section of metal fencing had been placed in front of the pipe, but that was more to keep critters and junk out than any real protection. Just by lifting up the fence, holding our breaths, and ducking under, we gained access to the pipe system.

  That pipe was one of the nastier ways in we ever used on an operation. We worked our way up the pipe, slipping through some very dank and tight areas, counting manholes and storm drains, until we came up at the side of the road near the house. We just lifted up the hatch cover and moved along carefully to our target.

  The admiral had a large house with pillars in front facing a tree-lined side street on the base. This was a residential area of the base, so there was little in the way of regular military traffic. In front of the house, the admiral parked his official Navy vehicle. In addition to the Navy car, the admiral was known to have a classic convertible that was his pride and joy.

  The convertible was kept in a garage near the house but not attached to it. Usually the admiral would take his Navy car in to work, but occasionally he drove his private vehicle. Our plan involved making certain that he drove his classic convertible to work.

  Having slipped up to the garage near the house, Butch quietly picked the lock and broke into the building. The admiral’s garage was going to be the staging area for our little kidnapping. I climbed a tree nearby and kept watch on the house.

  It was getting toward four o’clock in the morning, and we had a feeling for what the roving guards were doing. They didn’t have a real routine, but we figured we had a window of opportunity. We slipped up to the admiral’s official car and let the air out of several of his tires. One tire we flattened completely, and the others we let down partway. Now, even if the admiral decided to have the tire changed, he would only have one spare in the car.

  The Navy car was in a wide-open area, and it would have been very hard if not impossible for us to grab the admiral without attracting a lot of attention. But if the admiral came into the garage to use his personal vehicle, we would have our best chance to grab him while remaining under cover.

  Lights started coming on in the house, and we knew we wouldn’t have long to wait. The admiral went to his official car, started it up, and began to drive off. As he started to slow down, we figured we had him. Then he picked up speed and continued down the road, the flat tire flopping along.

  Either he suspected something, or he just didn’t care about the tire. Either way, he continued on to his aide’s house, where he got a ride in to work, and we stood there in the garage wondering what to do now.

  Here we had been waiting all night and now nothing. Suddenly we heard a dog making noises, and there were sounds coming from the house. The admiral’s wife wasn’t part of the problem, so we didn’t want to startle her or anything. And we certainly didn’t want to be detected in the admiral’s garage by his family dog!

  Then the wife started jogging down the street, taking her dog with her. The animal hadn’t been excited about detecting us; it just wanted to go on the morning run. Now that the immediate excitement had died down, we had to decide on our next plan of action. It was daylight now, and we would have to work our way off the base, hoping we didn’t get caught along the way.

  On the bounce, being ever resourceful Navy SEALs, we came up with an impromptu Plan B. We would commandeer the admiral’s personal vehicle and use it to make our escape off the base. It would be a good test to see if the gate guards stopped us or let the car go on through.

  So we hot-wired the admiral’s classic convertible and drove it out of the garage. We had the top down and didn’t exactly look like the admiral’s normal friends, not in our black sweatshirts and with our long hair and my Fu Manchu mustache. The Marine guard at the gate was doing his job and checking the vehicles ahead of us. Pulling up to the gate, we were ready to brazen it out with him.

  It turned out we didn’t have to worry about anything at the gate. Instead of stopping and questioning us, that Marine guard saw the three-star sticker on the bumper of the car and immediately snapped to attention, rendering a nice hand salute as we drove by.

  We drove through another gate and on to the compound at the rear of the base where we were staging our operations. Pulling the car into the back, we told the Old Man, “Hey, look what we brought you.”

  Marcinko got a
kick out of our bringing him the car, though I think he would have preferred the admiral. We took some pictures of the bunch of us with the car, and then thought about what to do next. The Skipper was fairly certain the car would be missed soon and someone would be pissed that we had it.

  Phone calls were made, and we received a message regarding our recent acquisition: we had an hour to get the car back in the garage and there would be no repercussions. Presuming, of course, that there was no damage whatsoever to the car. We got the car back quickly, and it was unharmed by its little adventure. I think we brought a little heat down on the Old Man for that adventure, not that he seemed to mind very much. But when in doubt, go to Plan B.

  The point we had been striving for, and pretty much proved by taking the car, was that we had been there and the admiral was vulnerable. He could easily have been in the trunk of that car as we took our salute and went out the gate. If violence was our game, an assassination would have been simple for the admiral and his whole family. And the proof was, we had taken the car.

  The whole operation had pointed out a common choke point. Security could be tight everywhere else, but people tended to relax once they got home. Most assassination hits or kidnappings, as we had found during our studies of terrorists, took place at or around the home.

  Taking the admiral’s wife wouldn’t have been a problem: the noisy little dog would just have been an irritation. The dog might have tried to protect his mistress, but it sure wasn’t a German shepherd.

  Still, the admiral himself had been the objective. If the right opportunity had come up, we would have rushed the house and snatched him right there with just the two of us. Our original plan had been to grab him and move on to the main base to run the rest of the scenario. I have to give the admiral credit for continuing to drive on his flat tires, even though it wrecked our plans for him.

  Even though we hadn’t completed our mission, we had made a number of points. In spite of the area having good fences, there hadn’t been a grate over the storm drain. A heavy grate would have kept us out, but the simple bit of cyclone fence that had been there was insufficient protection.

  That snatch wasn’t the only Red Cell operation we went through in Norfolk where we had to adapt to a changing situation quickly. Butch Cassidy and I were targeting one of the Naval bases in the Norfolk area where the destroyers and other major fighting ships are. We were walking in the area of the piers, scoping out the base. Our plan was to go through one of the strategic gates, where all the personnel are allowed on and off the more sensitive areas of the base, and set some devices.

  For our attacks, we made up IEDs (improvised explosive devices), relatively simple bombs put together from components we could easily buy on the open market. A number of us had gone through Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) training, in addition to our demolition training in the Teams, where we learned to make these devices and have them work and look real. There was never any explosive in our IEDs, but they had some red sticks or blocks to simulate live explosives, with “RED CELL” written on them plainly, along with a timer, batteries, and usually a flashbulb to simulate an explosive. Using these devices stepped up the realism of our exercises and allowed EOD units to play their part in the scenarios.

  So we had a device in a paper bag and we were going to leave it by one of the gates. The trouble was, security was doing its job pretty well, and we figured we had been made. Before we could be picked up, we commandeered a Navy van at gunpoint.

  Like our explosives, our guns were real enough but had a lot of safety built into our using them. The muzzle and the front of the barrel were blocked and covered in red tape, so the guns were closed up, couldn’t be loaded accidentally, and were well marked in red to show just what they were. In addition to our blocked guns, we always carried our creds (credentials) with us in the form of our Naval Security Coordination Team badges along with our Navy ID cards.

  When we seized the van, our rules of engagement for the scenario immediately took effect. We told the two people in the van that we were Red Cell and that they had become part of the problem. We took them hostage and got in the van ourselves. Driving down to the gate, we planned to go off base.

  Gate security was doing a good job, checking the vehicles going through the gate. We wanted to develop the scenario further, so we got out of the van along with our hostages and began moving them along at gunpoint. “This is Red Cell. This is Red Cell. Exercise. Exercise,” I called out. “We’re taking these people hostage, and we are taking them off base.”

  All of a sudden this civilian security guard came up and pointed his pistol directly at me.

  “This is an exercise,” I said.

  “Drop the weapon!” he shouted. “Drop the weapon!”

  “I’m not dropping the weapon,” I shouted back. “This is an exercise, and this person is my hostage. You either let us pass or I’m going to shoot him.”

  We eventually worked our way to the edge of the gate. The scenario didn’t go much further; they had us cold and we weren’t getting past easily. But their reactions were something we were trying to test. It was during the debriefing later that we found out just how interesting those actions could have been.

  That civilian guard told me, “I didn’t know there was an exercise going on. The word never got down to me, and I had live bullets in my weapon.”

  This was not good news. I just kind of looked at him for a moment, frozen in place. I wanted to kill this sucker who had been pointing a live weapon at me. He was just doing his job, but then so was I. From then on, we made even more sure that the rules of engagement were known to everyone who might be involved in an exercise, and the message was passed to all Naval and civilian personnel. Once we called out “Red Cell. Exercise,” everyone would know that a scenario had started and not to shoot us!

  It was obvious that there had been a miscommunication between the Naval security force and the civilian security contractors. The situation could have ended a lot more seriously, especially for me, but instead we had learned a very significant lesson. Norfolk was a huge facility, made up of a number of smaller Navy bases, and there were just too many people in the chain to be absolutely sure the proper communications went to everyone involved, especially those people carrying weapons.

  We had more hazards to face during our Norfolk operations. Pooster and I did one op where we were going after the ships at the piers in close to a classic swimmer attack. Wearing black rubber wet suits, we slipped into the water unseen and swam along the surface, with our faces barely showing as we moved across the sea wall. We planned to place devices on the ships and maybe the gangplanks.

  Swimming in that water was like slipping through petroleum. The oil and sludge floating on the surface was rank and even worse under the piers where we slipped in for cover. It was a good thing we hadn’t been using Draegers and swimming underwater because that crap would have contaminated our rigs and maybe worse.

  Swimming up to this one ship, there wasn’t anyplace I could put the IED, it was so covered with crud. The fumes under the pier made our eyes water, and it was more than a little hard to breathe. I started getting sick from the fumes and I don’t think Pooster was doing much better. We finally gave up on using the IEDs; there was so much crap around, no one could have seen them anyway.

  By the time we finally left the water, the only spots on our faces that were reasonably clean were our eyes and mouths. Everything else was covered in oil. Our wet suits were so oil-soaked we ended up throwing them away. There was no way to get them clean enough to use again.

  The water, if you can call it that, was nasty in that area. And we didn’t light up any celebratory cigars after that op either. Something about not wanting to go up in a ball of flame. It was weeks before we had all the oil cleaned off ourselves. I was even thinking of shaving off my mustache I was getting so sick of the smell.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE SUBS OF NEW ENGLAND

  The New London submarine base in Connectic
ut is home to part of the U.S. Navy’s nuclear submarine fleet, which makes it a strategically important site and one that should be as secure as possible. To check on that security, Red Cell staged a visit to the New London base in June, soon after we left Norfolk.

  The New London sub base is on the Thames River, just a few miles upriver from Long Island Sound. Taking a boat up the river, we were able to penetrate the base by jumping the fence at several locations. We were all making our way to our targets when we were detected in the area. Security was alerted to our presence and the chase was on.

  Security was doing a good job of hunting us down. There was some digging going on at the side of the street I was running down just ahead of the security forces. Coming into the street, I could see that the ditch was only about eight feet deep. A new sewer pipe or whatever was being installed, and I saw that as my escape route. At the bottom of the ditch might be a pipe or something I could follow, just kind of crawl into it and see where I turned up. Two of my Teammates split off to one side while my partner kept on going straight ahead. Figuring to break off even further from everyone else and give security multiple targets to chase, I jumped into the ditch.

  The ditch was a little deeper than I had thought, though, and the dirt was a whole lot harder. I smacked into the bottom of a square hole feeling like I had broken every bone in my body. Then I scrambled up and started looking for my escape route. Only trouble was, there was no escape route. There wasn’t any pipe leading from the hole I had jumped into, it was just a deep square box in the hard earth with me at the bottom of it.

  Security pulled up and I was apprehended immediately. The security guys were happy, which is a lot more than I could say about myself. I could hear them saying to each other, “We got a Red Cell guy, we got a Red Cell guy,” and I was anything but glad for them. As they put me in the back of their truck, I was thinking, “Oh god, here we go.”