“No subject,” Scott said. “Not yet.” Scott buttoned up his uniform blouse, checked the shine on his jump boots, and found his starched Navy cover. “Just fill me up with the admin flight, so I can do some tree killing on the way down.”
Travel to and from headquarters was so routine that Scott Kerr had a special briefcase prepared for what he called “the admin flight”—work he could do as the helicopter traveled between bases. It was the stuff that made him feel like a travel agent: reports on fuel and ammunition consumption, travel orders, per diem and rental car receipts, performance evaluations, and the reams of paper that torture commanding officers in every branch of the service. As the Team’s blue and silver Hughes 500 flew over Albermarle Sound, Kerr rarely looked out the window as he signed, edited, and “chopped” has way through an Augean stable of administrative horseshit.
The conference room at JSOC is three stories underground, and sits behind a foot-thick, soundproof steel door with both an electronic card reader and an old-fashioned combination lock, like a bank safe in a spaghetti western. Actually there are about six of these rooms at JSOC, but Scott was heading for the one called “Flag”—the one deepest underground and closest to the admiral’s office.
At JSOC, no one calls any of these places “conference rooms,” unless a civilian has been invited. Civilian invitees are usually senators, or secretaries of defense or deputy directors of the CIA or occasionally the FBI or Department of State. Everyone else, everyone military, calls them “the vaults.”
These steel doors outnumber regular doors in the intricately connected basements of JSOC headquarters. All of the conference rooms and most of the working offices have the same gray, oppressive, electronically secured doors. The most important vaults, like Flag, also have an armed guard standing in front of them.
The first hint Scott had that something was afoot was when he walked into Flag A and found only two attendees: Vice Admiral Bill McRaven, JSOC’s commanding officer, and a short, thin-lipped man whom the admiral introduced as Walter Youngblood, an intelligence officer from the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. The admiral and the agency man each had a pair of thick folders in front of him.
When the guard closed the vault door a red light panel switched on: BRIEFING IN PROGRESS. When no one else came into the room, Kerr knew this was going to be interesting. The room was locked and guarded and would stay that way until their meeting was over. Kerr sat when the admiral did. He had known Bill McRaven for more than twenty years, and the six-foot three-inch Texan was known throughout the community for his poker face. The CIA guy was an unknown. He was keeping his expression a near blank, but unlike McRaven the man from Langley was showing a giddy sort of happiness under the surface, like a school kid who’d brought a frog to school in his lunch box. Kerr thought he might have seen the agency guy before, at some conference or another, but he didn’t place him right away.
The admiral came right to the point, “We’re going to need some of your guys for a while. To set up a planning cell.”
“How many?” There were never enough Jedis to go around, and CIA was famous for wanting Team guys to advise their own “experts” on a host of tactical matters. The job was so routine and disliked that the shooters had long ago christened the trips to Langley as “Pet SEAL” operations.
“It looks like we’ve got a line on a high-value individual. And a location this time. It’s firming up, and I want to have an immediate action plan in hand if he looks like he’s going to move.”
Scott Kerr didn’t blink. High-value individual didn’t necessarily mean Osama bin Laden. But the fact that there were only three people in this brief added a lot of gravity. Osama had been the most hunted man in the world for almost a decade—and the SEALs had been close more than once: In September 2008, Scott had participated in a raid launched deep into Waziristan, to a one-goat town called Angoor Ata. CIA provided intel stating that Osama was in residence, but the SEALs came up empty. Since the 9/11 attacks, Osama had been seen everywhere from Tehran to Tripoli. One lady clairvoyant kept sending perfumed letters to JSOC, stating that she had “visions” of Osama hiding out at the Ritz in London.
Clairvoyants aside, there was some very serious speculation within JSOC that Osama was dead. No one thought anymore that Osama was hiding out and living on Pashtun hospitality. There was a $25 million bounty on his head. Hospitality or no hospitality, for $25 million most people will turn in their grandmothers. Many people in JSOC thought that Osama was being sheltered by a government, either dead or alive. The “He’s Dead” theory went that Osama had been murdered by the Pakistani ISI, and that they had concealed his death to make sure that the “boogeyman” of international Jihad kept the money flowing to the Pakistani armed forces. It was starting to make sense to a lot of people, especially since more and more of Al Qaeda’s intercepted communications indicated a simmering power struggle between Osama and Ayman Zawahiri. Zawahiri had turned back up in late 2003, crossing into Pakistan. Like Bin Laden, he was figured to be in the tribal areas, or maybe southern Iran.
Scott Kerr looked across the table to the CIA guy, a perfectly anonymous-looking person in a suit that you wouldn’t remember either. That’s where he remembered him from—Angoor Ata.
“All right,” Kerr said. “Tell me what’s up.”
Kerr knew better than to ask exactly where they thought this high-value individual might be. Operators know better than to ask noun-verb-object questions when they are first being “written in” on a project. They listen first. And strange as it might seem, for most of Kerr’s intents and purposes, exactly where the HVI might be located was irrelevant. If this was Osama, his geospatial location mattered only to the extent that it affected a SEAL Team’s insertion and extraction. McRaven knew, and Walter had a pretty good idea how SEAL Team Six conducted actions at the objective.
McRaven was leaning back in his chair and had one hand on the edge of the table. Kerr noticed he wasn’t touching the files yet. The admiral said, “I talked to the DCI yesterday, he wants us to open the file and start the planning cycle.”
The DCI, director of Central Intelligence, was Leon Panetta. McRaven dropped this name as an overture to what Walter would now tell Scott Kerr. It made Scott pay attention, perhaps more than he normally would to another CIA theory on Bin Laden’s secret hiding place.
“There’s a compound,” Walter said. “We’ve had it under surveillance for a couple of weeks now. We’re certain there’s a high-profile individual inside.”
Maybe they weren’t talking about Osama at all.
“How high profile?” Kerr looked at the admiral.
“He’s in a walled compound,” McRaven answered. “Maybe an acre and a half, photographs are in the target folder. The best we can tell, he’s in there with about two dozen people. There’s no telephone lines into the building, and no Internet. These guys burn their own trash, keep their gates locked, and homeschool their kids.”
“How many kids?”
“A dozen. Something like that,” Walter said.
That complicated things immensely. It’s one thing to hit a high-value target—that’s pretty straightforward. But to hit a target that is also an elementary school would be a lot different.
“How heavily defended is this place?”
Walter spoke. “There doesn’t seem to be much overtly defensive behavior.”
Kerr looked at McRaven again. “Overtly defensive behavior” was not a term in the SEAL Team lexicon.
McRaven’s voice was even. “We haven’t seen any armed guards, uniformed or not. The defenders keep a low profile. That doesn’t mean people aren’t in there with guns. There are at least five military-aged males in the compound and the guesthouses. They are certainly armed.”
Walter said, “What we’ve been seeing are some women and children in the compound. We think they are all related. Multiple families.”
“How many people total?”
“Twenty or so. Twenty-five.”
“The
re’s a structure on the roof of the main building. A three-sided box, open at the top. It looks like it was built for some antiaircraft equipment, a machine gun probably. The gun isn’t mounted now and they haven’t seemed to be putting it up at night. It’s not impossible that there are some Strela missiles in there.”
“That’s not good,” Kerr said aloud. Strelas were helicopter killers.
“CIA is going to start putting some assets in on the ground. They’re going to start seeing if we can get a make on the occupant.”
Scott Kerr looked at his boss. In the days of digital camouflage uniforms with slant pockets and Velcro, Bill McRaven still wore an old school green woodland-pattern battle dress uniform. It made a statement about how he approached special operations. That’s not to say he wasn’t innovative— fresh tactics and out-of-the-box thinking are what make special operations succeed. Bill McRaven’s Naval Postgraduate School thesis had blossomed into a three-hundred-page survey of ten of the most important special operations in military history. Like most other SEAL officers, Scott had read the admiral’s book. Bill McRaven generally knew what he was talking about.
“So is this Bert or Ernie?” Kerr asked.
Over the last couple years, SEAL team intelligence analysts had christened Osama bin Laden as “Bert” and Ayman Zawahiri, his second in command, as “Ernie.” One was tall and taciturn and the other was a short, round yapper. They were named after the famous Muppet characters on Sesame Street. Some wag in intel had come up with the handle, and it stuck.
Walter didn’t get the reference to Sesame Street. JSOC’s official handle for Osama was “Crankshaft.”
“Our technical people got a voiceprint,” Walter added quietly. “The recordings were a little sketchy, but the voiceprints are telling us at about sixty or seventy percent that this is probably our guy.”
“Technical” meant listening devices or communications intercepts. A voiceprint was a pretty good hook to hang an identification on.
“National Reconnaissance Office has parked a satellite over the place. They got a measurement on his shadow,” McRaven added. “He’s over six feet tall.”
For the first time in the meeting, Scott Kerr felt his pulse quicken. Putting a satellite over a target was not something that just happened. Reconnaissance satellites were national assets. They didn’t just get pointed over places of routine interest. This was beginning to look like the real deal.
McRaven was as good at reading expressions as he was at controlling his own.
“I’ve got another meeting with the president on March fourteenth. I am looking at three courses of action. One is a JDAM.” A JDAM was a smart bomb with a range of thirty or forty miles. They were relatively low tech, and had a better ability to penetrate hard targets than a cruise missile. Unlike cruise missiles, a JDAM couldn’t get shot down, and very seldom went off course. JDAMs were usually dispensed by Stealth bombers, and whatever they hit usually stayed dead. Really dead. There was the strong possibility that if a couple of JDAMs were used to take out Osama there wouldn’t be much left, of him, his house, or the neighborhood.
McRaven continued, “The second option is a combined operation with the host nation.”
The words “host nation” were another tripwire.
“Host” implied that this six-foot person was a “guest” somewhere. If Kerr were being tasked to conduct an operation in Iraq or Afghanistan, no one would have implied that a host-and-guest dynamic might be involved. As a rule, JSOC confined joint operations to trusted NATO allies. What SEAL Team Six did might be fairly well guessed at, but how they went around getting it done was a zealously guarded secret.
Kerr’s next question would narrow the possible locations for him considerably. “Is this a permissive or a nonpermissive environment?”
“Nonpermissive,” Walter said.
Nonpermissive environments were ones in which the governments were hostile to the United States. A special operations team entering a non-permissive environment could count on being shot at. At this point, Kerr’s possibilities for a host nation included Syria, Lebanon, and Iran—with Libya and Somalia as long shots. Semipermissive environments would have included Yemen and a couple of other places without zip codes.
At this point Scott Kerr was thinking Iran, but he kept his mind open. He didn’t expect to be told exactly where they thought Osama was. It was not at all unusual for SEALs to train for a mission, even extensively train, and not be told until the last minute where the target would be. Scott looked again at the thick folder in front of Admiral McRaven.
“How am I going to insert?” Kerr was not asking for advice. This was another question that would help him to both narrow down the target list and start to train his guys.
“TF-160,” McRaven said. “Range from doorknob to doorknob will be about two hundred miles.”
That meant helicopters. A hundred miles into the target and a hundred miles to get back out. Kerr’s operators would be limited in their time on target, and they would be in hostile territory. Helicopters need a lot of fuel to fly two hundred miles, plus whatever loitering time it took to wait for a SEAL Team to do its thing. A two-hundred-mile trip would involve refueling, a tricky process in a combat zone.
“Plan on inserting with Ghost Hawks,” McRaven said.
That clinched it for Kerr.
If he had any doubts whether this might be an elaborate sort of exercise, they vanished in this instant. The Ghost Hawk helicopters were among the most highly classified aircraft possessed by the U.S. military. SEAL Six used them routinely and they were only used by Six and Delta. They were Jedi rides, so secret they were only flown at night, and kept in locked, guarded hangars during the day. The Ghost Hawks were so low noise that the SEALs joked that they flew in “whisper mode.” The newest version of the Stealth helos, the GEN 3s, were even quieter than the previous editions called Stealth Hawks. The Ghost Hawks were invisible to radar and emitted zero electromagnetic radiation. They had shielded exhausts so they put off not much more heat than a Harley motorcyle. They were only used on the most important missions.
“Who’s standing down now?” McRaven asked.
“The Red Men,” Kerr answered. During “stand down,” a squadron went for a month performing weapons and equipment refurbishment and sent operators to various schools to keep their skills sharp.
“All right,” McRaven said. “Start bringing them back from their trips. I’m looking at a ninety-day planning and ranging window.” McRaven pushed one of his folders across the table, and Walter added one of his to McRaven’s.
“Read yourself into the target. Who’s the Red squadron leader?”
“Frank Leslie.”
“Okay, send him up, with his master chief, and we’ll give them some offices…” McRaven broke off. “Walter will give them some offices, up in Langley.
“I am going to want a tentative full-mission profile. Be ready to brief it back to me in forty-eight hours. The object of the mission is close hold. Nobody knows about who you’re going after or where it might be. No speculation.”
“Check.”
“You can have your Seabees build a mockup to these specifications and then we’ll run a cycle of rehearsals at Tall Pines.”
Tall Pines was a sprawling, secret Army training facility tucked in Camp Pickett, which was itself put off into the far corner of a national forest in an eastern state. Lots of spooky things happened in Pickett, and the SEAL Teams have trained there for years. Far from the prying eyes of the public, surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of woodland, dozens of target mockups dot Tall Pines’ rolling hills. Some nights, strange, silent lights are seen over the forest and UFO calls are made to the sheriff. Camp Pickett is SEAL Six’s playground.
“What’s the time frame on this?” Scott asked.
“If you mean when will this go down, that’s up to the president,” McRaven said. “Get your guys up to Langley, and start in on a detailed plan.”
It was a pretty tall order to pre
pare the full battle plan in two days, but Scott knew his guys could do it. Their entire career had been full of planning, intense, complicated work often done at the last minute because when orders come down from on high, the suits usually want it done ten minutes ago. The full mission plan would take weeks to craft and would be informed by more intelligence as it came to light.
Scott lifted the files and stood. “Easy day,” he said.
He shook McRaven’s hand and thanked him, nodded to Walter and walked back out into the low-ceilinged corridor. Walking back toward the stairwell was a bit like passing down the passageways belowdecks on a ship. There were no windows.
At the stairwell Scott ran into Colonel Jim Overall, a friend, and his opposite number from TF-160, the “Night Stalker” helicopter squadron. Jim Overall commanded the Ghost Hawk squadron as well as the rest of TF-160. They’d worked together on hundreds of operations, and hosted each other at barbecues and the family birthdays. Now they passed each other with only a nod.
Jim Overall looked down and saw the files in Scott’s hand, and heard Admiral McRaven’s deep bass voice welcoming him from the door of the conference room. Kerr knew that it was Jim Overall’s turn next—they were going to brief the pilots separately.
Scott and Jim exchanged a look that meant Good luck and I’ll talk to you later. Nonverbal communication skills are vital in special operations.
Scott started up the stairs as the vault door closed behind him. The red BRIEFING IN PROGRESS light again switched on. Scott knew that Jim Overall would be getting pretty much the same brief, but with a little more geographic information. Jim would have to plan flight operations, and one of the first things a pilot needs to know is where he is going. Keeping the information in separate pipelines was called compartmentalization.
The wires of this operation would be kept apart until the last minute.
At the top of the stairs Scott Kerr pushed open the door and emerged into daylight. The sunshine made him blink his eyes. Jesus Christ, Kerr thought, this might really happen.
SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden Page 18
