ROGUE WARRIOR®

by Richard Marcinko

  “So have I.”

  “Well, then, you should have planned better, shit for brains, shouldn’t you? I’ve got the goddamn parade ground blocked off, and that’s the way it’s staying. Course, if you want to share it, there’s plenty of room.”

  His voice turned to ice. “No thank you, Dick. I shall make other arrangements.”

  And so he did. He held his change of command behind the Quonset-hut motor-pool buildings on a small, greasy macadam parking lot. And I held mine on the immaculately manicured parade ground with its bleachers and the big Navy marching band playing “Anchors Aweigh” as the guests arrived.

  I forgot the incident. Ted Lyon did not.

  I spent ten months after I left Two batching it in Montgomery, Alabama, while I attended the Air Command and Staff course at Maxwell Air Force Base. Simultaneously, I got a master’s degree in political science at Auburn University. From Alabama, I moved straight to Washington. Kathy and the kids arrived two months later. There was an action officer’s slot open at OP-06, Navyspeak for Office of the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, Current Plans and Policy Branch. My career was in a “hold” mode: I wasn’t eligible for a second command slot and hadn’t had enough time as a lieutenant commander to be promoted again. So I needed to find a job where I could wait until I made commander, while putting together the network of sea daddies I’d need to make my leap to captain, and then vault on to flag rank.

  Besides, I’d never done a tour at the Pentagon, and the thought of getting to know those 17.5 miles of corridors—not to mention a slew of friendly admirals—seemed like a good idea at the time. The reality of the situation was different from my preconceptions. Navy action officers, either commanders or lieutenant commanders, were the lowest rungs in the “chop chain”—the paper-trail staffing ladder descending from the chief of naval operations, the CNO, and the JCS, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Pentagon’s bureaucracy is much like that in Congress. Up on Capitol Hill, it may be the members who vote on bills. But let there be no misunderstanding: it is the congressional staffs that do the work behind the scenes; it falls to legislative assistants to handle most of the internecine negotiations that make those bills possible; and it is the committee and subcommittee staffs who draft the legislation’s precise language.

  We faceless creatures did much the same for the CNO, just as other action officers from each branch of the armed services worked for their chiefs of staff. Each of us was a mixture of research staffer and lobbyist, negotiating with our counterparts, and trying to sell our particular service’s point of view.

  Once tasked, we’d write a memo for the planning officers, who were generally captains. They were the senior-level staffers, the ones who would venture into three- and four-star heaven to brief the Olympians. Sometimes, junior pukes like me would be invited along to carry someone’s briefcase, run the slide projector, or handle the pointer. But the general rule was that action officers didn’t get much—if any—face time with admirals. So much for networking.

  If we didn’t see them, our paperwork did: we provided virtually all the background memos for the chief of naval operations when he attended JCS meetings. We didn’t brief the CNO, of course—he was spoon-fed his information by the vice CNO or one of the many deputies, assistants, or assistant deputy CNOs. They, in turn, were briefed by planning officers. We briefed the planning officers. It was sort of like the kid’s game “telephone.”

  When the CNO asked a question, it would drop on us like a depth charge. We would scramble to do the research and draft an answer. Our superiors would “chop,” or approve, our work and pass it up the ladder. At each rung, the memo or report would receive a new chop. If it didn’t get one, it would be sent back for more work, or a change of tone or content.

  I enjoyed two incredible strokes of luck, however, which propelled me higher and faster than I had any reason to expect. The first was that I had the good fortune to work for a captain named Ace Lyons. Ace was an Academy grad, a small-waisted, barrel-chested ship driver in his late forties who’d done a three-year stint as the senior aide to the deputy chief of naval operations (Current Plans and Policy). He was one of the Navy’s golden boys—on a fast track to admiral. But unlike most of those frocked to flag rank, Ace thought like a warrior and often swore like a sailor. I found it reassuring when he called me “asshole” and came to realize that I was making progress when that sobriquet changed to “shithead.” It occurred to me more than once that Ace was somehow related to Ev Barrett.

  The second break came after about five months on the job, when I was given an additional portfolio—intelligence. The intel officer was leaving; he knew I’d been an attachè, which meant I knew about intelligence work. Moreover, as a SpecWar operator, I understood how valuable “hot” intelligence could be. Ace had given me the freedom to expand SpecWar ops into JCS plans. I’d been able to meet most of the key players at the four-star level. The intel job gave me the real key to power at the Pentagon: close-hold information. I was now cleared to read material no one else except the CNO or the deputy CNO could see. That gave me large amounts of face time with them both.

  Every morning I’d get to work two hours early and read the cable traffic, browse the CIA and DIA messages, and check the NSA intercepts. Then I’d highlight the most important sections, straighten my tie, slip on a sports coat, and go brief the deputy CNO for plans and policy, a straightshooter three-star named William Crowe, who later went on to become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  I liked Crowe, a big, amiable bear of a man who had a reputation as a first-rate though somewhat bookish administrator. A 1946 Naval Academy grad, he’d gotten his MA at Stanford, his Ph.D. at Princeton, and his education as an adviser to the Vietnamese Navy. Despite his courtly manner with subordinates and soft Kentucky accent, he was one of those admirals I could say “fuck” to. His office on the fourthfloor E ring was huge, and the shelves behind his desk were filled with an immense collection of hats—everything from old fire hats and French berets to English bobbies’ helmets and plaid golf caps.

  It didn’t take more than a few months before Crowe started calling on me every time he needed something from the intel shops. I became a pseudo crisis-control officer, dealing with action officers from the CIA, NSA, DIA, NSC—the whole alphabet soup of spookdom. My clearances were astronomical—code-word letter stuff—that allowed me to see everything from high-resolution satellite photos to underwater intercepts.

  The late seventies were a time of flux in the intelligence community. President Jimmy Carter’s director of central intelligence, Admiral Stansfield Turner, redirected the priorities away from human-based intelligence—“HUMINT” is what it’s called in “intelbabble”—and more toward signals interception, technical information gathering, and electronic surveillance, which are known as SIGINT, TECHINT, and ELINT, respectively.

  The impersonal nature of SIGINT, ELINT, and TECHINT probably appealed to the remote Turner, a nuclear-Navy dipdunk, who was one of those men in the Hyman Rickover mold who prefer statistical models to real life because they are neater and don’t complain. But there’s a problem with that: war doesn’t follow any statistical pattern. War is totally unpredictable. It is a continual series of screwups, each one worse than the last.

  Even the lowliest dogfaces of WWII knew that. “How’s it going, soldier?” SNAFU, they’d say: Situation Normal, All Fucked Up. Or TARFU—Things Are Really Fucked Up. Or FUBAR—Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. But Turner’s kids didn’t know SNAFU, TARFU, or FUBAR because they’d never sweat their balls lying in ambush waiting for Charlie to show up and watching the situation turn to shit.

  TECHINT’s biggest flaw is that it relies on statistical models. Let’s say the U.S. has a Key-Hole spy satellite up in the air. And let’s say that the object of its cameras is obscured by low clouds. Then what most often happens—because you need intelligence now—is that the whiz kids will take frames from previous passes and develop a simulation. “This is what happened before,�
�� they say, “so this must be happening now.”

  Except, whiz kids are mathematicians and analysts and professors, and they’ve never been shot at. They don’t understand decoys and deception; they don’t understand the enemy’s will to win, or the genius of one particular commander. They can’t tell you if the porosity of the sand you’re looking at will support the weight of a C-130, or only an Arava STOL (Short Takeoff Or Landing) aircraft. Or whether the sandy patch two hundred miles below is really a quicksand pool that formed only two weeks ago.

  So, as I relayed intel briefs to Crowe and his crowd, I’d often add my own insights—gathered from other sources—giving them a better idea of the alternatives available; adding how SpecWar operators could provide information no satellite system or high-flying SR-71 “Blackbird” could ever deliver. By late 1978, Bill Crowe and I were on a first-name basis: he called me Dick, and I called him Admiral.

  On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and took all its diplomatic personnel hostage. Eight days later, Major General James Vaught was charged by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to form a task force—it was called a TAT, or Terrorist Action Team—that would plan a military hostage-rescue option. I was assigned to the TAT as one of two Navy reps.

  I liked Vaught instinctively. He was a slow-speaking, coolheaded South Carolinian, a bony, white-walled airborne, exenlisted rifleman who’d seen service in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. He never seemed comfortable in a suit or a Class-A uniform, but wore off-the-shelf fatigues as if they’d been custom-made for him. Vaught looked and talked like my old Eighth Platoon guys from Vietnam—Frank Scollise or Hoss Kucinski—men who always seemed to be in pain, but just kept going and going.

  The man picked to lead the rescue, Colonel Charlie Beck with, I’d first met in Vietnam. Chargin’ Charlie, as he was often called, was one of the Army’s best unconventional warriors. A profane, Georgia-drawling veteran of hundreds of Special Forces ops, Charlie had realized early on there was a need for an elite, mobile, highly trained unit to fight terrorism, conduct surgical behind-the-lines operations, gather intelligence, and provide nonconventional options to lowintensity-conflict scenarios. The unit he’d conceived and built to do the job was called SFOD-D—Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta—or more commonly, Delta Force.

  The chairman of the JCS, Air Force general David Jones, was precisely the wrong man to be in charge of any mission calling for SpecWar capabilities. He had the sort of personality that would have guaranteed him a successful career at a major corporation. He was tall, distinguished looking, bright—scholarly, even—and reportedly a gifted although cold manager. No one, however, ever referred to him as a charismatic leader of men.

  General Jones loved to discuss options. Endlessly. At one point, he ordered us to write up and brief him on forty-two separate options for the rescue mission, each one more farfetched than the last. One of his whiz kids came up with a chopper-crash option, in which the hostages would be rescued by a force that would crash-land their choppers on the roof of the embassy. And how would they escape? Aha—you just found the one small flaw in the plan!

  Like most military apparatchiks, Davey Jones was squeamish about the thought of casualties. I discovered this when we were planning a penetration operation to test the porosity of the sand at the landing site we called Desert One. The test was necessary to see if the ground would hold the weight of fully loaded C-130s.

  Someone asked the obvious question “What happens if a couple of Iranians show up when you’re running the test?”

  Without thinking, I said, “You kill the cocksuckers.”

  The room went silent. Davey Jones’s face turned to stone. He glared at me, and if looks alone could have courtmartialed, I’d have already been in the stockade at Leavenworth doing hard labor.

  “How could you even think that?”

  How could I not? I tried to deflect him. “I’m sorry, General, but if somebody’s out there, then he’s violating the Iranian curfew, and so all I’d be doing is carrying out Allah’s will.”

  The chairman did not find me amusing. But I saw Jim Vaught stifle a giggle.

  Jones canceled a diversionary scheme of mine because he thought it would cause too many Iranian casualties. One potential problem Delta would face was the Iranian Air Force. The rescue plan called for the hostages to be choppered from Tehran to an unused Iranian airfield called Manzariyeh, about a half-hour’s flight from Tehran. Delta and the hostages were vulnerable—during the on-load, the chopper flight, and the transfer—to IAF strikes. My idea was to bomb the runways at Tehran’s airport—which was used for military flights—so Delta and the hostages could not be pursued. I designed a one-plane air strike that I called Attack of the Wooden Soldiers.

  It was a real KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) operation: a C-130, from which I and two other SEALs would toss dozens of explosive-laden railroad ties that had been attached to parachutes with static cords. The wooden soldiers would be rigged to explode on impact. The ten-foot craters they would make in the runways would render the facility inoperable.

  Other, smaller charges would also be dropped. These were tubes packed with plastic explosive and bomblets that would devastate any on-ground personnel. The tubes would be wrapped with chains, whose links would break apart and spread like grapeshot when the C-4 exploded, just like oversized Claymore mines. The red-hot chainlinks would damage support equipment, puncture and ignite fuel tanks, and help cause general chaos. Another group of wooden soldiers would have explosive squibs attached, so as they descended, they’d go brrrrp, as if paratroopers with tommy guns were attacking.

  Delivered properly, the whole package would take Tehran airport out of the picture. Equally important, it would provide a significant diversion while Charlie and his Delta guys were busting into the embassy compound in the middle of the city. And if the Iranians shot us down, well, then it was one C130, five fliers, and three SEALs lost—nothing to write home about.

  For security reasons—like the fact that the Soviets were constantly eavesdropping on the high volume of message traffic in the area—Charlie Beckwith moved Delta from its headquarters at Ft. Bragg, just outside Fayetteville, North Carolina, to a smaller and more secure training area. Delta referred to it as Camp Smokey, but the place was actually Camp Peary, the CIA’s huge site for training spies, infiltrators, and covert operators. The Farm, as it’s called in the spook world, is a 25-square-mile parcel of land just northeast of Williamsburg, Virginia, running between U.S. Route 64 and the James River. It was where the CIA built Charlie and his men a model of the Tehran embassy compound so they could rehearse their every move once they went over the wall.

  Meanwhile, I perfected my wooden-soldier project. After work at the Pentagon, I’d drive or fly down, meet the SEALs I’d recruited to help me—a couple of enlisted men from SEAL Two named Larry and Bob—and we’d set to work, often going all night. At oh dark hundred I’d head north again—to arrive in time to read and prècis the daily intelligence package for Admiral Crowe before the official workday began at 0800.

  Charlie Beckwith liked the idea of wooden soldiers. David Jones did not. To scotch it—and anything like it—the chairman put out a ridiculous obiter dictum: Thou Shall Not Kill, he told his soldiers.

  A second—and more significant—failure was in the area of HUMINT. To put it succinctly, there was none. The CIA didn’t have a single on-the-ground operative in Iran, so far as I could tell. We were able to obtain fragments of information through foreign embassies, and there was still a large contingent of foreign nationals in Iran—Turks, Germans, French, Irish, Canadians—but there was no organized network, and nobody supplying the “hot” information a team of special operators needs to mount a rescue operation.

  One of the TAT’s goals, therefore, was to infiltrate as many operators into Iran as we could, in order to have at least a few assets on the ground. Each service was instructed to search for Farsi speakers, and given the operation security require
ments of the rescue mission, I was selected to be the Navy “cutout” for all potential infiltrators. Sailors who spoke Farsi were culled through a computer search. They’d be ordered to leave their units—without knowing the reason—and take a plane to Washington. More than a dozen sailors showed up at various airfields in the capital area. I’d meet them, bring them to my home, swear them—and sign them—to secrecy, then pass them along to the flesh handlers on Vaught’s staff. Some were rejected, others chose not to volunteer. Among those who did choose to become part of the mission was a Navy captain from Annapolis who agreed to drive a truck loaded with Delta troopers into Tehran.

  Two SEALs also ended up as infiltrators. Both had worked for me when I commanded SEAL Team Two. One—I’ll call him Kline—was a first-generation American who had grown up speaking German at home. He was slipped into Iran as a German businessman, and his information about the embassy compound proved invaluable. (He was “thanked” by being left behind after the debacle at Desert One—with no hint of what had happened. Being a SEAL and therefore self-reliant, he walked the six hundred miles from Tehran to the Turkish border, got himself across to safety, and came looking for the whiz-kid assholes who’d left him high and dry with murder in his eyes. Incredibly, Kline, whose real-time intelligence was crucial to the mission, was never recognized for what he did. No medals, no commendations, no promotions, not even an “attaboy.” I couldn’t blame him for being bitter.) The second SEAL was a little guy named Joey, who got in masquerading as a monk. He should have been called Friar Dick, because he was a ladies’ man. Joey wasn’t on the ground very long—only a couple of days. But he did his job, and he got out clean.

  The night of April 24, 1980, was probably the longest one of my life. There were roughly forty of us crammed into a SCIF—Special Classified Intelligence Facility—on the second floor of the Pentagon, just across the corridor from the big JCS situation room with its wall-sized screens, state-of-theart communications, techno-bells, and electro-whistles. There, on the other side of the hallway, behind thick, padded doors, Chairman Jones and the rest of the Joint Chiefs sat in their upholstered swivel chairs doodling on their personalized notepaper or doing whatever four-stars do.