After Beirut and Grenada, the commanders at JSOC realized that they could not depend on conventional intelligence channels to gather targeting information, or frame predictive actions by the enemy. Privately, JSOC planners began to refer to NSA, CIA, and FBI as “the Three Stooges.” A combination of petty politics, technical shortcomings, interagency rivalry, and serial incompetence made it obvious that if JSOC wanted timely, target-specific information they would have to gather it themselves.
As SEAL Team Six expanded, JSOC set about gathering its own specialists in technical and signals intelligence and investigations and research. A fourth operational element would join JSOC and complete the “Invisible Empire.” JSOC’s intelligence component was the blackest of all black programs. It would go through many names and monikers and frequently change its organizational structure and physical location, making it impossible for anyone outside JSOC to either find it physically or figure out exactly what it did. The name given to this new unit was fitting: It was called “Grey Fox.”
As the war on terror went on, JSOC did its own analysis and picked its own targets. Over at CIA there were a few human intelligence types left, but those working counterterrorism were as petty and incestuous as the creative writing department at an Ivy League college. Several former SEALs founded defense contracting firms that provided assessments of terrorist operational techniques and abilities. Even SEALS who weren’t SEALs anymore were beating the agency at its own game.
It’s one thing to break the enemies’ codes—it is another thing to just capture the guy who wrote the message and have him read it to you. NSA’s billion-dollar super computers were increasingly irrelevant as JSOC came to grips with terrorist organizations who were smart enough to stay off their satellite phones and rely on trusted couriers to communicate their orders and plans.
In 1985, half a dozen Palestinian hijackers stormed aboard the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship in the Mediterranean. Intending originally to head for Syria, they were refused entry. In frustration, they murdered Leon Klinghoffer, a disabled Jewish-American passenger.
SEAL Team Six deployed and prepared to take back the ship. Warned of the coming assault by Russian code breakers in Damascus, the hijackers put the ship around and hightailed into the Egyptian port of Alexandria. They were welcomed as heroes. There, President Hosni Mubarak cut a cash deal with Yasser Arafat and put the hijackers and their boss—master terrorist Abu Abbas—onto an Egypt Air 737. Escorted by a squad of Egyptian secret police, the airliner took off for Tunisia. It didn’t get far. Tomcat fighters from the carrier USS Saratoga forced the Egyptian airliner to land at the NATO airbase in Sigonella, Sicily.
Waiting for them on the runway was a squadron of Bones Men led by Lieutenant Commander Avril Pikeman. He quickly deployed snipers, blocked the aircraft’s wheels, and demanded that the terrorists surrender. Moments later, two C-141s containing assault elements from the Red Men landed behind the Egypt Air passenger liner. The hijackers had been hijacked.
Faced with an ultimatum, the terrorists quickly surrendered.
The surrender deal stipulated that they would be taken into Italian custody. That was a mistake. Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi quickly cut a side deal that separated Abu Abbas and two other senior PLO terrorists from the actual trigger pullers. Within hours, Craxi had provided the terrorists with Italian air force uniforms, fresh travel documents, and a police escort onto an Iraqi Air flight departing for Baghdad. Klinghoffer’s murderers were eventually brought to trial in Italy, but Craxi made sure that the big fish got away.
In April 1986, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi ordered the bombing of a Berlin disco, killing two U.S. servicemen and four German civilians, and wounding more than two hundred and fifty people. President Ronald Reagan ordered Operation El Dorado Canyon in response.
On the night of April 14, SEAL Six inserted two target-spotting elements across the beach into Tripoli. Call signed Apache and Arapahoe, these elements set up laser-target designators and illuminated Colonel Gaddafi’s headquarters at Bab al-Azizia.
Still smarting from the Achille Lauro, Italy did everything it could to thwart the American operation. First, the Italian government refused permission for the strike airplanes to fuel at the NATO airbase in Sigonella. Then Prime Minister Bettino Craxi crossed the line from obstructionism to treason. He placed a phone call to Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi and warned him that an American air strike was on its way. Gaddafi fled from his palatial compound moments before the bombs struck. He was lucky he did.
Lit up by Apache and Arapahoe, thirteen out of sixteen laser-guided bombs splashed the compound—the best hit-to-miss ratio of any component of the air raids. Gaddafi would later claim that an adopted stepdaughter had been killed in the attack. That’s unlikely, but the colonel realized just how close he had come to dying for his country. Gaddafi would spend the rest of the eighties and nineties moving between a dozen different houses scattered throughout the country, seldom sleeping in the same place twice.
Other targets were struck in the El Dorado Canyon Operation, including military airfields and terrorist training camps. In the confusion following the air strikes, the SEALs of Apache and Arapahoe slipped through a girls’ military college, crossed the beach, and were extracted at sea.
One member of Arapahoe remembered watching the Libyan antiaircraft gunners splattering tracers up into the dark, empty sky. “It looked like Disneyland,” he said. Bab al-Azizia was a fantastic SEAL Team Six accomplishment.
SEAL Team Six carried out numerous supporting roles in the Persian Gulf during Operation Prime Chance in 1987. Assisted by elements of the Army’s Night Stalker Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR), SEAL Teams boarded and captured an Iranian warship named Iran Ajar. The ship’s deck was full of sea mines she had been sowing into the Persian Gulf.
Other SEAL operations ambushed Iranian Boghammar patrol boats that were stalking the sea lanes to attack neutral shipping. SEALs captured oil rigs in the Persian Gulf that were being used as Iranian observation and weapons platforms. All of these successes were carried out with minimal CIA input, and no help from the NSA. The SEALs liked it that way.
SEAL Team Six carried out clandestine missions in the disputed zone between Chad and Libya in Operation Mount Hope III in 1988. In the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, Operation Just Cause, SEAL Six hunted for Panamanian strong man and drug boss Manuel Noriega—helping corner him in the Vatican embassy. During operations in Kuwait and Iraq (Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm) in 1991, SEAL Team Six carried out numerous special reconnaissance operations, penetrating deep behind Iraqi lines. Fast attack vehicles (FAVs) from SEAL Team Six were first into Kuwait City, and liberated both the parliament and the American embassy.
The command carried out operations in Somalia, both overt in Operation Restore Hope, and covert in the chillingly named Operation Gothic Serpent, where SEAL Team Six elements hunted Somali warlords.
After 9/11, SEAL Team Six’s deployment cycles doubled, and then tripled. SEAL Six has carried out countless operations against high-value targets in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor have they neglected their worldwide commitments. In Operation Aztec Silence in 2003, SEAL Team Six broke up an Al Qaeda plan to kidnap drivers in the Paris to Dakar car rally. The command has participated in numerous other still-classified special operations, including High Value Individual (HVI) operations in Chad, Somalia, the Philippines, Syria, and Pakistan.
There is no place on Earth or in the sea that is beyond the reach of Team Six. And on April 8, 2009, when a gang of armed Somali pirates hijacked an American cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden, they would prove it.
MAERSK ALABAMA
MANY OPERATIONS PROVIDED LESSONS used in Operation Neptune’s Spear. One of them was a mission that SEAL Team Six called “The Bainbridge Op.”
In the Gulf of Aden there is little twilight; at dawn, purple clouds give way to a blazing sun, and at the end of each fierce, blistering day, there are only a few minutes of dusk before the s
un sinks toward the African shore, taking with it all the light, like debris pulled down around a foundering ship.
This close to the equator, halfway into the Indian Ocean, there are no seasons—there is only a rolling blue sea and the pitiless sun. On the night of April 8, 2009, the sun went out of the sky almost at once. The moon had yet to rise when four pirates set off from a mother ship two hundred miles off the coast of Somalia. Armed with automatic weapons, they turned a high-speed motor launch north and east toward the Gulf of Aden. Their target: a U.S.-flagged containership carrying relief supplies to Mombasa, Kenya. The vessel’s name: Maersk Alabama.
Operating from the postapocalyptic port of Eyl, on the Horn of Africa, a flotilla of pirates has attacked almost a hundred merchant ships since 2008. The ransoming of cargo and crews has emerged as a multimillion-dollar business in the failed state of Somalia. It was inevitable that they would eventually attack a U.S.-flagged vessel. Unfortunately for the pirates, SEAL Team Six was ready.
Using grappling hooks, the pirates climbed Maersk Alabama’s stern and rushed across her decks. In moments, they were in control of the bridge. At gunpoint, they ordered the navigator to set a course for their base in the harbor at Eyl—where the hostages were to be sold to the highest bidder. For the first time since 9/11, Americans had fallen into the hands of hijackers.
But the hijackers’ plan had gone badly awry. Though the pirates had captured the ship’s captain and one of the officers, the rest of the crew had made it to a secure hiding place. In a secondary control room the ship’s engineers, led by Chief Engineer Mike Perry, first cycled the ship’s rudder, swamping and sinking the pirates’ speedboat. Belowdecks, Perry took control of the ship’s systems, rendering the bridge controls useless.
At the risk of their own lives, Perry and his gang were able to disarm and capture one of the pirates—seizing his weapon. After a tense standoff, Perry offered a trade: Give us our captain, and we’ll give you back your pirate. The pirates pretended to agree, and then pulled a double cross—as they were being shown how to launch a motor lifeboat, they pushed their captive, Captain Richard Phillips, inside the boat and fled, setting off an epic, globe-spanning special operation.
Within hours the destroyer USS Bainbridge and the carrier USS Boxer surrounded the pirates and their captive. Negotiations started immediately over the lifeboat’s radio. The pirates had no idea that SEAL Team Six had parachuted an entire assault element into the shark-infested waters of the Gulf of Aden, and put a team of snipers onto Bainbridge.
Beyond USS Boxer lurked a pair of SEAL Team Six deadly high-speed assault craft. Invisible to surface radar, armed with chain guns, automatic grenade launchers, and capable of forty knots, these boats were the SEALs’ knockout punch. Also parachuted onto the Bainbridge was another SEAL Team Six secret weapon, a mobile tactical operations center (TOC), manned by a platoon of non-SEAL überdweebs assigned to Team Six. The Navy called them Support Detachment Alpha, but to the shooters they were “the Twidgets,” geeks on steroids. The TOC was their Super Bowl. They quickly established communications with Washington and with a Seawolf-class submarine trailing the lifeboat at a depth of three hundred feet. These same men would prove invaluable during Operation Neptune’s Spear.
Battlefield information, however exquisite, does not exist in a vacuum, and flickering on a separate set of fourteen-inch screens was a slice of the real world: the network news feeds from Fox, CNN, the Reuters wire service, and the BBC Web page.
Det Alpha set up shop in the Bainbridge’s wardroom, running a parallel and complimentary operation to the Command Information Center on the destroyer’s bridge. Captain Greg Wilson, the commanding officer of SEAL Team Six, was the on-scene commander, and though he was riding Commander Frank Costello’s ship, eating his chow, and borrowing his bunk, Greg Wilson’s command wire went straight to Vice Admiral Bill McCraven at the Joint Special Operations Command. From JSOC, by one remove, Wilson’s orders came from National Command Authority—the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the president.
The situation was deteriorating. A day into the hostage taking, Captain Phillips had taken a chance and tried to swim away—but was recaptured by the pirates. On the morning of the eleventh, pirates had fired shots at a frigate, the USS Halyburton.
As the winds and seas picked up, negotiators aboard Bainbridge persuaded the pirates to accept a towline from Bainbridge. The SEALs waited. Almost two days passed before a decision came down from President Obama, and when it did it was excruciatingly vague. The SEALs and the crew of Bainbridge were authorized to take action if they deemed that the hostage’s life was in immediate danger. It was a political shrug. Succeed, and you’ll be heroes. Mess up, and we’ll disavow that you were given any orders to act.
The SEALs kept the lifeboat under constant twenty-four-hour surveillance with video and thermal imagery. In the intel feed from the boat they were identified as Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Delta. Subject Charlie—the pirate named Nadif—did the most talking. Bravo, Erasto, did the least. Subject Delta, Ghadi, had a high-pitched, nasal voice. He bitched about everything.
The pirates agreed to accept a transfer of food and water, and one of them, Subject Alpha, Abduwali Muse, took the opportunity to come aboard Bainbridge to “negotiate.” As soon as he was aboard the American destroyer Muse surrendered and started talking to an interpreter and a pair of FBI negotiators. His almost casual surrender had reduced the bad guys’ firepower by 25 percent.
The SEALs were able to listen to conversations within the boat by pointing a laser beam at the lifeboat’s Plexiglas windows. The pirates’ conversations were translated in real time and transcribed on typed sheets. Since Abduwali had gone aboard the destroyer, the pirates became increasingly nervous. The plan was to sweat them, stress them, and it was working. Wilson now hoped it wasn’t working too well. He thought the pinch would come at dusk, and it had.
Greg Wilson had deployed SEAL snipers into an aft compartment below Bainbridge’s flight deck. During the day they draped a piece of mosquito netting over the inside of a pair of portholes that faced aft, a technique that works remarkably well to prevent a distant eye from seeing in an open window. The sniper cell rotated a shooting pair, one trigger and a spotter, on and off in four-hour shifts. The first few rotations the shooters ran pieces of tubular nylon webbing from shackles on the overhead. Looping the cord around the fore grips of their rifles allowed the snipers to keep their weapons constantly trained on the lifeboat. The snipers were in the TACTAS compartment, a room intended to be the underwater eyes of the ship during antisubmarine warfare; now the compartment looked backward as Bainbridge towed a boatload of pirates.
The muzzles of the snipers’ weapons were a foot back from the openings, allowing them to observe and cover the lifeboat from air-conditioned comfort. No shooters were visible on the fantail or flight deck. During the day the mosquito netting prevented even a glimpse inside. At night, the pairs rotated, the net was lifted and optical scopes were traded for electronic, low-light aim points.
The snipers’ craft and equipment was impressive. The SEALs have no “standard” sniper weapon—no single firearm could perform all the jobs the SEALs are required to do—and the Navy gives individual operators considerable leeway. But there are favorites. One is the Heckler & Koch PSG-2. The weapon is essentially a match-grade version of the German G-2 assault rifle. The PSG-2 is an exceptionally accurate and versatile weapon. It can use five-, ten-, or thirty-round magazines, has provision for fast changes of aiming packages, and has the option of fully automatic fire.
The PSG-2 has earned its spurs with the SEALs, and has served in combat as a precision rifle and antisniper weapon in hundreds of deployments. It was the weapon of choice for the primary shooters in the TACTAS perch. The snipers were loaded with M855 green tip “Predator” cartridges. Unlike ball ammunition, or even conventional hollow points, Predator rounds can be counted on to fly straight and true, even after initial impact. The bullet itself is an aerodynamic masterpiec
e. A case-hardened steel needle is covered with an aluminum “ogive,” a shroud designed to allow the bullet to pass through the outer walls of a vehicle, building, or boat and still retain linear flight—that is, until it hits something soft, where the bullet is designed to spall and do maximum damage.
Predator rounds would allow the snipers to engage targets inside the boat.
Every SEAL marksman is paired with a spotter, who is himself a trained and designated sniper. The spotter’s job is to provide cover for the primary shooter, work communications, and update firing information. In a fixed hide position, or “stoop,” the spotter will usually observe the target with a powerful optical spotting scope. In the TACTAS compartment, the snipers were “screwed in,” meaning they had established a fixed, customized shooting stage. Settled in, zeroed out, the snipers came to know by face and body movements each of the men on the lifeboat. They knew them all, and kept a running fix on where in the boat they were at any moment. The lifeboat was thirty feet long and nine feet wide. Three pairs of eyes and three trigger fingers were fixed on it twenty-four hours a day.
The sniper cell was run by Master Chief Mel Hoyle, a huge, shambling bear of a man with a slow walk and a West Virginia drawl. Mel is a twenty-five-year veteran of the SEALs; for nineteen of those years he has been an operator at Six, first as a “door kicker” on an assault team, where he helped to capture Abu Abbas. He was then selected for sniper training with the British Special Air Service. Mel is a prickly, exacting man, with a reputation for telling it like it is; he is also very seldom wrong. Since the jump, Mel had supervised the deployment of the sniper team members, those rotating through the TACTAS room, and a pair on five-minute standby with a Seahawk helicopter aboard USS Boxer. Mel and his leading petty officer, John Hall, filled in on all the slots, taking their own turns behind rifle scopes, in addition to standing six-hour desk watches in the TOC. Mel was big, but no one ever saw him eat; as far as his teammates could tell, he ran on caffeine and nicotine. He constantly had a cup of coffee in hand and a dip of Copenhagen snuff packed into his lower lip. In the last five days Mel had racked up maybe ten hours of sleep, most of that on the rolling deck in the TACTAS room.
SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden Page 6
