SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden

by Chuck Pfarrer

  Two nights earlier, the SEALs had captured one of Zarqawi’s couriers, a nineteen-year-old Jordanian who had volunteered as a shaheed—a martyr. When captured, the would-be martyr had a change of heart. Soon after processing, he asked about the bounty that coalition forces had offered for information leading to Zarqawi’s whereabouts.

  The defector was told that if he wanted cash he had to provide something valuable. He did. He gave up both his boss’s location and a cell phone number. Drew and Johnny were inserted even before the man had finished talking.

  Nothing had happened for twelve hours, and now, as usual, everything was happening at once. An hour after dark, a car arrived and two men got out. Another two arrived on foot and went inside. Two more pickup trucks arrived, delivering about a dozen more men into the house. Johnny had seen AK-47s and RPG launchers, and heavy backpacks that might contain explosives—or things that were even more dangerous.

  Now there were at least fourteen armed men inside the house … maybe more. It occurred to both of the SEALs that they might have been lured into a trap. Johnny and Drew had infiltrated as stealthily as possible; they had a plan to defend themselves, and another plan to break contact, but both knew they were very far from help if things should really go south.

  Drew sent an update on his burst transmitter: “14 MAM, small arms Location Fisher Cat No Joy on HVI.” Fourteen military-aged males, with AKs and RPGs at the target—and still no sign of Musab al-Zarqawi.

  Drew was careful to keep the light from the screen covered as an answer scrolled back from the Joint Operations Center at Task Force 20: “Ears on.”

  Drew tapped his partner on the shoulder. He placed two fingers of his right hand under his eyes, the SEAL hand signal meaning “enemy in sight.” Drew touched his headphone and Johnny nodded—they had their man on the cell phone, and he was talking.

  At 10:10 p.m., Musab al-Zarqawi finally made a call, and Task Force 20 was listening. Zarqawi’s words were beamed around the world, compared to previously intercepted communications, and his voiceprint was analyzed. Technicians in Langley, Virginia, confirmed the identification, and a second text message was flashed by satellite.

  “Stingray Zero Two is cleared hot.”

  For the past eighteen months, Zarqawi had recruited truck bombers, killed journalists and politicians, and staged videotaped beheadings—all to force the nation of Iraq to adopt a government based on Islamic law. Now he was presiding over a meeting of armed men. No one had any idea what Zarqawi had planned for the night—a kidnapping, a bombing, or maybe both.

  Zarqawi was in the building, and the SEALs had authorization to engage the target. The fact remained that Johnny and Drew were outnumbered, but being invisible had its advantages. The two SEALs had the element of surprise, and they had technology. Drew’s thumb depressed a switch on a rectangular box fixed to the receiver of his rifle. From an AN/PEQ-2 laser illuminator, an invisible, infrared beam streamed toward the second floor of the building.

  Johnny typed out another text: “Laser hot.”

  The answer scrolled back: “Reaper Copies.”

  Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had less than ninety seconds to live.

  Six miles above the date grove, unseen and unheard, a Predator drone, call sign Reaper Three Zero, banked at the edge of the stratosphere. Its sensors rolled over the city below. Streetlights, car headlights, the lights of houses spread in a rolling blanket, like a mosaic of stars. The lights marked progress and peace, businesses and places where families lived. In the dark places there was poverty, frustration, and anger. The dark places were where men like Zarqawi preached hatred and planned murder.

  One hundred miles away from Baghdad, in an air-conditioned van parked off the runway at a secret air base, a pair of CIA pilots sat in front of a wall filled with computer monitors. Some of their screens showed maps, others flight paths, some showed the status of communication links and satellites, and some of them were digital representations of flight instruments that controlled a forty-six-foot-long, turbo-powered messenger of death.

  The pilot pulled back a small joystick and placed a Predator drone into a lazy figure-eight turn, while the copilot armed up a pair of AGM 114 Hellfire missiles. Cameras zoomed: the pilots could see the Euphrates River snaking through the center of Baghdad; the north part of the city; Sadr City, gloomy and sprawling; and the sharp edge of the Army Canal. The cameras that panned in the feed went to infrared. The lens drifted over Bilal al Habashi Street, where the fields started to open up. Then the dump, the playing field, and the date palms, all rendered in shades of green.

  Tucked into the edge of the date grove was Stingray Zero Two. Drew and Johnny showed up as hot, oblong blips, betrayed by body temperature.

  As the pilots watched, Drew’s laser beam glittered and pointed across the open spaces, illuminating the second floor of the mud-walled house where the road turned into the fields. In the Predator’s control van, the pilot pressed a button. A pair of missiles dropped from the drone’s outboard pylons and silently fell away into the dark sky. Their rocket engines ignited, and the missiles started to spiral toward their target.

  The Hellfires quickly went transonic, then supersonic, traveling faster than the roar made by their rocket engines. The warheads homed unerringly on the laser beam. In the date grove, Drew and Johnny waited for the sound of the rocket motors’ ignition, a sort of muffled thud from the clouds above. They heard it, ten seconds after it happened, a sound like someone shaking dust from a rug, whump, whump.

  It meant the missiles were on their way.

  Even if Musab al-Zarqawi looked up and saw them coming, there was no place he could run. Johnny made sure that the laser was locked on the building. If Zarqawi jumped into a car, Johnny would put the laser on him.

  It was over.

  Zarqawi didn’t show his face, but it didn’t matter. The missiles found him.

  Moving too fast to see, the first Hellfire ripped through the roof of the house and detonated in a splash of orange-white light. The initial explosion seemed to widen the walls and lift the roof. The second missile struck the courtyard just in front of the building, cratering it and destroying the three vehicles parked on the road. But then another blast tore through the building. It was what the SEALs called a secondary; the missiles had set off a cache of explosives—bomb-making materials Zarqawi had planned to use in his campaign of terror. This last explosion obliterated the structure, turning it upside down and inside out.

  The explosions echoed back from the riverbanks, and as they faded away, there came the sound of whizzing bits of concrete, the fluttering descent of shattered doors and roof tiles, the thuds made by bits of furniture, the clank of car parts, pots and pans, ammo crates and bits of glass. Also falling to earth were pieces of men.

  Drew remembered that after the blast, the night seemed impossibly still and quiet. For five minutes, not even the crickets sang.

  The two SEALs collected their equipment, checked their weapons and slipped back into the dump, over the crumbling wall toward their extract point. The mission was over, and now all they had to do was get out.

  Musab al-Zarqawi, Osama bin Laden’s handpicked deputy in Iraq, had killed thousands of people in an attempt to send the world back to the sixth century. In a fitting bit of irony, two operators from SEAL Team Six had killed him with an invisible laser beam and a flying robot.

  * * *

  The United States military has a long on-again and off-again love affair with special operations forces. Throughout its history, the United States has created special purpose units, battalions of sharpshooters, rangers and pathfinders, parachutists, and various sorts of frogmen and commandos, only to disband the units after their wars had been won.

  As the Cold War wound through the fifties and sixties, the Pentagon faced a series of low-intensity conflicts with Soviet proxies, but still had to worry about fighting “the Big One,” a global war with the Warsaw Pact. While it was correctly seen that brush wars did not require the deploym
ent of Normandy-style invasions, the Pentagon was not allowed the luxury of creating purpose-built special operations forces to fight boutique wars. The threat posed by the Soviet Union meant that the U.S. had to keep a large, standing force in being.

  The Green Berets and the SEALs were both created by President John F. Kennedy in 1962. The U.S. Army’s special forces were originally envisioned as trainers. In the event that the Soviet Union invaded Western Europe, the Green Berets were to be left behind to organize resistance movements within the occupied countries. Each Green Beret A-Team was designed to form a nucleus about which guerrilla forces could grow. Of course, in order to teach the black arts, it is first necessary to master them, and the Green Berets were superbly trained. Each member of a Green Beret A-Team had both language training and an operational specialty. Some were communicators, some demolition experts; some were air operations specialists and some were scuba trained. All Green Berets were parachute qualified and schooled in intelligence collection, covert communication, tradecraft, and operational planning.

  The Navy created its special warfare program from the famed Underwater Demolition Teams who served in World War II and Korea. This new force would be called the SEAL Teams— “SEAL” being short for the elements in which they would be trained to operate—sea, air, and land.

  The operational element of the Green Berets is an A-Team, a unit roughly analogous to a SEAL platoon, that is, two officers and twelve enlisted men. A-Teams tend to specialize: one might be trained demolitionists, another arctic warfare specialists, and still another equipped to carry out high-altitude parachute operations. The Army set out to create the skeleton around which it could grow partisan armies to harass the flanks and rear of the Soviet juggernaut.

  The SEAL Teams were created with another mission in mind—direct action against the enemy. SEALs retain the ability to serve as special operations trainers, and have the capability to organize indigenous forces, but their primary mission, their raison d’être, is hurting the enemy. And in that mission, they are the best in the world.

  It is one thing to announce the formation of a handpicked unit. It is quite another thing to bring one into existence. When President Kennedy authorized the formation of the Green Berets and the SEAL Teams, the Pentagon had to answer two questions: Whom do you pick? And how do you train them?

  The Army split the difference between quantity and quality. The Navy set out from the beginning to make Cadillacs. The SEAL Teams started with slightly over fifty men on two coasts. SEAL Teams One and Two were so top secret that volunteers from the Underwater Demolition Teams were initially not told the name of the unit or its mission. They had to volunteer blind.

  The men chosen for the first SEAL Teams underwent a whirlwind of training. It was decided from the beginning that every SEAL operator would be trained in every skill. There would be no specialist subunits. Every SEAL was to be proficient in all aspects of special ops. Each trained to jump, dive, do underwater demolition, navigate small boats, and operate in all environments— jungle, swamp, and glacier. From the outset, SEALs took on missions that were beyond the Army’s capability—maritime sabotage and submarine-based reconnaissance. Because their training is so much more expensive, the SEALs have always been a considerably smaller outfit. By 1964, there were thousands of Green Berets. In 1965, the Navy had fewer than one hundred SEALs.

  In Vietnam, SEALs appeared where no enemy thought possible and struck with a ferocity far out of proportion to their number. The Vietcong called them “the men with green faces,” and put bounties on their heads.

  Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL (BUD/S) training takes place on the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado, California. A mile or so down from the picturesque Hotel del Coronado, and nestled among the whispering dunes of California’s Silver Strand State Park, it’s ironic that one of the most beautiful places in the state of California is the epicenter of so much misery. BUD/S is considered to be the toughest school in the United States military. The course of training is so difficult that there have been classes where no one graduated—everyone quit. It is especially daunting for SEAL students when they remember that BUD/S is not the end of their selection and training as Naval special warfare operators—it is only the beginning.

  Of a thousand volunteers who want to become SEALs, only about two hundred will actually be placed into a class. Before the first day of training, a would-be frogman is subjected to medical, psychological, and academic testing. Immediately disqualified are applicants with police or juvenile records, domestic violence convictions, substance abuse problems, bankruptcies or excessive debt—even being a suspect of a crime is enough to disqualify a candidate. Students selected for a BUD/S class must have perfect hearing and meet stringent vision requirements. They must pass the Navy’s comprehensive aviation and diving physicals. Trainees are poked, prodded, X-rayed, CAT scanned, interviewed by shrinks, and then examined again. All of this is done, not to keep people out of SEAL training, but to make sure that the students admitted to the program are highly qualified and therefore most likely to succeed.

  The Navy has spent millions of dollars on testing and psychological profiles to identify what type of man is most likely to hold up under the stress. But the truth is, they don’t know. Olympic athletes, NFL players, survivalists, and fitness gurus have all numbered among the dropouts. And among the graduates the Navy can count surfer dudes, carpenters, computer geeks, and farm boys from Iowa who’d never before seen the ocean. No one can tell if a man has what it takes to become a Navy SEAL. There is no way to quantify desire.

  To be selected for SEAL training, one must already be in the Navy. A small handful of students might come directly from Navy boot camp, but most are petty officers and officers who have undergone at least a year or so of training. All, of course, are volunteers.

  The youngest sailor in a BUD/S class might be seventeen and a half, a rare occurrence, as this would assume that his mother signed a note allowing him to join the service. The oldest student in a SEAL class would be age thirty-three, positively ancient. Such a candidate would likely be a chief petty officer or a Navy lieutenant with as much as eight or ten years of sea time. Older students are expected to emerge as class leaders—if not physically, then morally. This double burden makes it even harder for an old dog to be taught new tricks. It is possible to receive a waiver to attempt training after age thirty-four, but that sort of paper is about as worthless as Confederate money.

  BUD/S is a six-month-long ordeal that is blithely described by the Navy as being “physically and mentally demanding.” That might be one of the understatements of all time. After being classed up, students begin a two-week regime of “pretraining.” During long days and nights, trainees learn the ropes. If they somehow graduated boot camp without a grasp of marching and polishing shoes and brass, they are reintroduced to the practices. Their beachfront rooms are inspected, found to be filled with sand, torn apart, and inspected again. They are introduced to a program of extreme calisthenics called “BUD/S PT.” This muscle-racking set of exercises was designed by kinesiologists to stress and flex literally every muscle in the human body. For the next six months the students will perform this ninety-minute set of exercises daily.

  They will run, they will run, and they will run. The students are led on an ever-lengthening series of “conditioning hikes.” At least that’s what it says on the schedule. Prodded together into company-sized groups, the classes are led on beach runs by SEAL instructors who never seem to break a sweat. As weaker runners fall back into the pack, the fastest assume the first ranks behind the instructor. To fall back into the pack is to stumble among the pounding feet of fifty other men who are breathing the dust of fifty more in front of them.

  Nor is the SEAL at the front of the pack the only one the students have to worry about. During pretraining no run leaves the compound without a half-dozen instructors following close behind. Like wolves picking off migrating Bambis, the instructors dart in and out of those trailing behi
nd. Slower students are encouraged to run harder by being given push-ups, sit-ups, and jumping jacks to do while their classmates trudge ever farther toward the horizon. Soon, the instructors have achieved their aim—to cut off the slowest 20 percent of the class.

  These men are harried and circled into a separate group called the Goon Squad. The Goon Squad gets its name because the slowest people on any run tend also to be the largest. Members of the Goon Squad are frequently over six feet tall. A significant percentage of students who were football players or bodybuilders wind up as denizens of the Goon Squad.

  There, they find themselves in the tender care of instructors who earnestly entreat them to run faster. And to do it quickly. The instructor’s orders are hard to comply with, because members of the Goon Squad are frequently given numerous opportunities to rest—in push-up position, with generous helpings of California surf smashing down over their backs. For good measure, members of the Goon Squad can always enjoy a sugar cookie—which means rolling on the beach until every square inch of their skin and every orifice of their body is filled with sand. Thus fortified, they can return to their run.

  Every day, the slowest students are badgered in this manner. Instructors continually tell the class that “it pays to be a winner,” and “the only easy day was yesterday.” No matter how bad training gets, a student can always tell himself, “At least I’m not on the Goon Squad.” Almost every trainee will wind up being gooned at least once. It’s an experience no one wants to repeat. But for some students, the Goon Squad is an everyday occurrence.

  After a couple of weeks, a certain mystique begins to form around the survivors. The other students watch as the Goon Squad guys get hammered, morning, noon, and night. Often these are some of the most determined men in the class. The men of the Goon Squad have what it takes to become a SEAL in every respect—except for being able to run like a gazelle, swim like a dolphin, or negotiate the obstacle course like a chimpanzee. Some Goon Squadders will go on to become the SEAL Teams’ strongest and best operators. But mostly, cut off from the pack, alone and overwhelmed, they will just quit.