Against one wall were the desks where we TAT action officers had camped out since being banded together the previous November. Another wall was covered with maps, charts, and photographs of the target areas. Just in front of the wall, on overhead tracks, were black drapes that could be pulled closed before anyone without the proper clearances came into the SCIF. There were a couple of easels for showand-tell briefings, and under the tables, against the desks, and along the wall, piles of three-ring binders and notebooks provided us with a reference library about Iran, the militants, the Iranian military, the hostages, their families, as well as papers outlining scenarios for every conceivable way to get our people out.
I felt vulnerable and helpless sitting on the edge of a gray metal desk in my shirtsleeves, sipping cold coffee out of a paper cup. I felt I should have been with Delta, or have been infiltrated into Iran to help with the mission, instead of relegated to desk work. We had only one Navy officer with Charlie — the captain who volunteered as a truck driver — and no SEALs. Dammit, I should have been there, too. My eyes wandered around the room, hazy with cigarette smoke. I realized at that moment what the tension must have been like for the mission-control people in Houston as the moon lander left Apollo 11 and started its drop onto the lunar surface.
There was nothing they could have done if anything went wrong. There was nothing we could do if something happened to Delta, either- I finished the coffee, crumpled the cup, and launched a hook shot at an olive-drab wastebasket ten feet away. Swish. Two points. Maybe it was an omen.
We heard Delta’s every move over the speakers. Our secure SATCOM — SATellite COMmunications — system relayed the American chatter. Iranian communications were monitored and passed in real time by the NSA’s big ears out at Fort Meade. It was like a live international radio show, without benefit of announcers or script. We heard Charlie leave Egypt and arrive at Masirah; we heard as our eight RH-53D choppers cleared the deck of the USS Nimitz in the Gulf of Oman on the way to the rendezvous at Desert One, where they’d pick up the rescue team that was flying from Masirah in MC-130 transport planes. We heard the first chopper report “Feet dry” as he crossed the Iranian coastline just west of Chah Bahar.
Almost immediately, bells started ringing in Iran. Military outposts were reporting to Tehran about invaders. Militia units were moving. Jet fighters were scrambled. What the hell was going on? How did they learn about us so soon?
It was a long five minutes before we realized the Iranians weren’t reacting to us — that the scramble was in the northwest, near the Iraqi border. Along the southern coastline, where we were operating, everything was copacetic.
Another chopper called feet dry, and then the rest of them made their landfall. Delta was already more than half the distance to Desert One aboard its MC-130s.
While they were still in the air, we got the first inkling of trouble. An NSA intercept told us one of the choppers was experiencing mechanical problems. We listened as the stricken aircraft autorotored onto the desert and its crew was picked up by another RH-53D. Two other choppers ran into sandstorms and got lost. Well, losing a chopper or two had been foreseen. We were still in a SNAFU mode: Situation Normal — All Fucked Up.
The first element of Delta’s landing at Desert One went smoothly. Then Mr. Murphy’s law really went to work. An Iranian bus drove by the landing site. It was stopped and its forty-five or so passengers were detained under guard. Moments later, a gasoline tanker truck appeared from the opposite direction. It was stopped with a LAWS shot, but the driver jumped into another vehicle that was driving along the road and fled. Meanwhile, flames from the burning tanker were climbing more than a hundred feet into the desert sky.
We’d progressed to the TARFU stage.
“What should we do with the Iranians from the bus?” somebody at Desert One asked General Vaught in Egypt.
I answered for him. “Kill the sons of bitches.”
My colleagues looked at me incredulously. “Just kidding.”
I told them. I wasn’t kidding at all.
Vaught radioed back an order to ship them out on a C-130 and return them after the operation.
There was now real confusion in the disembodied voices on our speakers. Nothing was going according to plan. There were loo many elements. There were multiple aircraft. There were chopper pilots who, despite their training, were still uncomfortable flying long-range missions over desert terrain.
There was a Rube Goldberg chain of command, in which an Air Force ground commander at Desert One answered to an Army two-star in Egypt, who was being second-guessed by hordes of three- and four-stars in Washington. It violated the most important rule I knew about special operations — keep ‘em as KISS as you can, and they’ll probably work.
I had real bad vibes about what was happening in Iran.
And yet — it had to work. We’d been at it for five months.
This was the Super Bowl and the World Series all wrapped up in one.
At the desk next to me, a CIA guy I’ll call Jones shook his head in frustration. “You were right, you know,” he said.
Jones was an old-fashioned warrior who fought against the ClA’s increasing bureaucracy and its technological predilections under Stansfield Turner. We spoke the same language.
“This is gonna be a goatfuck,” he said quietly.
I nodded in agreement, although there was nothing Jones or I wanted less to be true.
Only six of the eight choppers arrived at Desert One; only five were in fiyable condition. The plan had always called for a minimum of six to carry Delta to the hide site, then come into Tehran and snatch the hostages and their rescuers. Charlie decided to abort. It was his call. General Vaught, in Egypt, wanted him to go on. So did others, including me. But you don’t second-guess the man on the ground. It was Charlie’s call, and he decided to scrub. He sounded like a man who’d just lost his best friend when he announced he was coming home.
Then shit really happened. One of the choppers, maneuvering to top off its fuel tanks for the long return flight to the Nimitz, hit an EC-130 refueling aircraft in which Delta’s Blue element had just loaded. The chopper and the plane both exploded in a huge fireball. The mission had gone all the way to FUBAR.
Fists clenched, numbed into horrified silence, some of us swallowing back tears, we could hear screams and chaos— the sounds of brave men burning to death. Then, finally, after what seemed like an eternity of shouting, confusion, explosions, and devastation, we listened as the remaining C-130s got off the ground, and what was left of Delta flew back to Masirah.
To say that we all sat in that smoky, dead-air room stunned would be a gross understatement. This was the unthinkable.
We’d just failed in an operation that had been almost half a year in the planning and billions in the funding. And there was no way of salvaging it. The black eye the United States was about to receive in world opinion would be a long, long time in healing.
The world’s alleged dominant superpower had just blown a one-timer against a bunch of rag-head terrorists, and we’d done it to ourselves. Bye-bye, au revoir, ciao, aloha, adios, sayonara. There wasn’t going to be any tomorrow.
To be honest, I don’t remember much about the rest of that night. Yes, there was work to be done. Salvage work— like bringing back the human assets we’d left behind in Tehran. But I don’t recall very much at all about what was said, or what I or anyone else did. I do recall I felt like putting somebody’s head through a wall, except I couldn’t figure out whose head I wanted to smash.
Not even Risher’s death affected me as badly as the debacle at Desert One. Risher had been responsible for himself — it was his own recklessness that had killed him. And besides, it happened in battle. Men die in battle. At Desert One, we’d all had a hand in the deaths of men who died for no reason at all; brave men were killed before they’d been allowed to do what they’d been trained to do-
From the top down, it had been one humongous goatfuck.
One
big waste.
Chapter 17
At the movies, the sound track would swell into “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha and the gaUant soldiers would rise from the ashes, go out, and win one. In real life it doesn’t happen that way. In real life soldiers die. In real life the gods on Capitol Hill and in the White House demand human sacrifices. So Charlie Beckwith and Jim Vaught were offered up by Davey Jones and the rest of the brass, even though the buck hadn’t stopped with them.
Charlie — no politician — didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late. I met him wandering down an E-ring hallway about a week after Desert One. His eyes had a befuddled, thousand-yard stare. “Dick,” he said, indicating the JCS’s offices with his thumb, “them boys just left me out there.”
The experience was a real big tic on the learning curve for me, too. I saw them eviscerate Charlie Beckwith, a good and tough man who had gone out and put his life on the line because he believed in his mission and he believed in his men, but he wasn’t given a chance to do things his way. And then, having taken much of the command and the control away, the big bureaucratic machine blamed him for its mistakes.
“Aha,” the voice inside my head that always sounded like Everett E. Barrett growled to me: “Marcinko, you shit-forbrains numb-nuts asshole geek, if they ever give you a similar opportunity, they’ll mud-suck you just as bad as they mudsucked Charlie Beckwith.”
And although no one was singing “Impossible Dream” (or anything else, for that matter), work on Operations Snow Bird and Honey Badger, the second set of plans to rescue American hostages in Iran, began on April 26, 1980, just two days after Desert One.
Concurrently, a Joint Task Force, or JTF, was organized at the behest of the secretary of defense, Harold Brown. The mandate was to plan and conduct military operations that would counter terrorist acts directed at the United States, its interests, or its citizens. Although the JTF would include Army, Navy, and Air Force elements, each service would be outside its normal administrative chain of command, reporting instead to an Army general at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina.
The idea was pretty radical for the armed forces. It meant that instead of each service working separately and often in direct competition with one another, the forces assigned to the JTF would work together. Command and control would be unified. The left hand would know what the right hand was doing. Or, as I’d preached to my SEAL platoons in Vietnam, there would be unit integrity. Talk about a revolutionary concept!
I was assigned to the JTF as a Navy action officer and helped frame the initial language that defined its mission and organization. I worked out of a basement office in the bowels of the Pentagon, which — considering the mood of the building — suited me just fine.
Three floors above me, Charlie Beckwith was also helping draft the JTF papers. A unified special-operations command was something Charlie had dreamed about for years. Being the loyal Army Special Forces type that he was, Charlie designed his version of the JTF around Delta’s unique capabilities. But since he was also a realist, Charlie soon saw the JTF would also need SEALs to target maritime objectives: tankers, cruise ships, and military assets like navy yards, aircraft carriers, and nuclear submarines.
I, too, believed SEALs must be included, but not as an add-on element under someone else’s thumb. I was convinced an entire SEAL team was essential to the JTF. So, when the first draft of the staffing papers floated across my desk in May of 1980,1 changed Chargin‘ Charlie’s prose slightly. As written, the staffing memo called for a SEAL element. I whiled out the word element and replaced it with the word Command.
The different meaning of those two words was immense.
A SEAL element was a small group — one or two platoons— that would become a maritime auxiliary of Delta Force, putting the Navy in the untenable position of being ancillary to the Army- Indeed, while the JTF was designed to diminish interservice rivalries, there was a certain amount of Navy institutional ego and pride at stake no matter what the secretary of defense or anyone else may have liked to believe.
A SEAL Command meant a self-contained SEAL unit, under its own CO. A SEAL Command would become an equal player in the JTF, along with Delta Force, and the Air Force’s First Special Operations Wing.
I passed the memo along. The next time it came back across my desk, the words SEAL Command were still there. In midJune, the final draft of the JTF memo was about to be voted up or down by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. If approved, which was a virtual certainty, it would be sent as doctrine to all the major theater commanders as well as the heads of the military intelligence agencies. The new SEAL Command would be written in stone.
Of course, in making my editorial change, I’d created one tiny, little problem: there was no existent SEAL Command that could become part of the JTF. Therefore, before the plan went into effect, I’d have to create one.
The question then became, which SEALs should become part of the JTF? The Navy had already established specialized countertenor — or CT— training for SEALs. On the West Coast, four of SEAL Team One’s twelve platoons had received CT training. On the East Coast, SEAL Team Two had dedicated two of its ten platoons to CT activities, A young lieutenant commander I’ll call Paul Henley, the officer who ran the CT program at Two, called his CT platoons MOB-6, or MOBility-6.
Despite the fact that the West Coast had trained more SEALs in CT than the East Coast, Paul Henley’s CT oper-ations were better planned and executed than anything on the West Coast. One reason was that, at SEAL One, operators got their training and then returned to their regular platoons.
On the East Coast, MOB-6 worked as a unit all the time. I liked that. It indicated that MOB-6 had unit integrity.
Moreover, because SEAL Team Two operated primarily (though by no means exclusively) in NATO countries, MOB-
6 had done joint exercises with Britain’s Special Boat Section, the SBS; the German Gremschutzgruppe-9 (GSG-9);
France’s GIGN (Groupement d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale); the Italians’ Groupe Interventional Speciale (GIS); the Royal Danish Navy’s Fwmanskorpset combat swimmers; as well as CT units from such countries as Turkey, Spain, and Belgium. I liked that, too.
On the West Coast, CT training centered mainly around shooting skills. MOB-6’s commander, Paul Henley, improved his men’s shooting skills, too. But unlike the West Coast SEALs, his MOB-6 platoons had also boarded ships underway alongside SBS teams. They’d experimented climbing oil rigs in the North Sea. They had practiced rescuing hostages and neutralizing hostage-takers. Henley trained his men the way I would have done if I’d still been CO at Two. But no matter how good they might have been, there were still only two platoons in MOB-6. I’d need at least six platoons to form the nucleus of a new command. Meaning that four platoons would have to come from the West Coast or from non-MOB-6 SEAL Two personnel. The COs wouldn’t like it at all. Still, that’s what we needed: six platoons of phoques. Phoque six. Mean motherphoquers. And terrorists would become the phoquees.
I did some mental arithmetic, a lot of scheming, then worked my butt off writing a memo outlining the idea of a new SEAL unit specifically trained to fight terrorists in a maritime environment. I rewrote my prose for three days, until it glowed like the shine on my Geek-polished combat boots.
My nominal boss, a captain named Jim Baker, was so used to my forays into the world of black programs and SpecWar that he’d developed the running gag of taking an occasional glance at my work by covering his eyes then spreading his fingers apart half an inch.
“Ormgod,” he’d say. “Richard, what are you doing to me?
Let me take a look.“ As soon as he saw what I’d written, he’d cover his eyes again. ”I don’t want to see, I don’t want to know.“
“Then how do we deal with this unseen, unknown document that suggests murder and mayhem?” I would always ask politely.
“Forge my chop on it and send it up the line.” Then we’d laugh like hell.
This memo,
however, I kept to myself. Captain Baker would slip up behind my desk and try to peek, but I was having none of it. I’d flip the papers before he could see anything, climb out of my chair, and sit on them.
“You brute,” he’d say, trying to move me aside. “I outrank you. Give us a break here.”
I shrugged helplessly. “Do you have three stars?”
“Richard…”
“Have you ever eaten cobra?”
“Richard…”
“Jim, this memo can only be read by people who have A, three stars on their shoulders, or B, eaten cobra.” I flashed the cover page in his direction. “See?”
Baker retreated to his desk. “You are going to give us a heart attack, Richard.” He watched as I slipped my little missive into a code-word-secret folder with a vivid, inch-anda-half stripe the color of violet grenade smoke running diagonally across both front and back. He was used to that.
Much of the work I did was related to spookdom.
“Oh, I get it — it’s that kind of memo.”
I winked at him and waved the folder in his direction.
“Right, Captain. I could tell you what’s in here — but then I’d have to kill you.”
He flushed red as a beet and giggled, “Omigod, omigod, okay, okay, okay. okay, okay. I don’t want to know anything.
I never saw you. I don’t even know your name.“
Folder tucked under my arm like a football, I sprinted up five nights of steps and marched down the fourth-floor E-ring corridor, my shoes beating out a tattoo on the marble floors.
Just outside Bill Crowe’s suite, I paused to catch my breath.
I was about to play some very high-stakes poker, and I wanted to appear calm. Crowe was then the deputy chief of naval operations for plans and policy. Despite the fact that he was subordinate to the vice chief of naval operations. Admiral James Watkins, Crowe had supplanted Watkins as CNO Thomas Hayward’s closest and most trusted adviser. That was natural: Crowe handled operations; Watkins was chiefly an administrator. Thus, Bill Crowe’s relationship to the CNO was more of an XO’s relationship than an admin assistant’s — less formal and more conversational. Whatever the reason, according to Pentagon scuttlebutt, Crowe had virtually replaced Watkins as the CNO’s top gun. If I wanted to get the CNO’s blessing on my plan, it would need Bill Crowe’s chop first.
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