by Couch, Dick
The invasion of Panama, launched in the early morning hours of December 20, 1989, was the first combat test of the U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, which was created in 1988 in part as a reaction to the interservice planning and operations failures highlighted by the Grenada invasion.
The SEALs had two major combat missions in Panama, both scheduled for the early morning darkness of December 20, 1989. The first was to disable Noriega’s potential getaway plane, a Learjet, at Paitilla Airport near Panama City. The mission was a near disaster in which, as in Grenada, four SEALs lost their lives. The second operation, to disable Noriega’s potential getaway boat, went off flawlessly.
Soon after forty-eight operators from SEAL Team Four and members of an Air Force Combat Control Team exited their black rubber raiding craft and raced to the Paitilla Airport target area after midnight on December 20, things started going wrong. They were dangerously exposed. The area was illuminated with city lights and landing-strip beacons, and there was little cover. Gunfire noise from other American units around the capital city was quickly waking up the guards at the airport, and the element of surprise was lost. Compared to a basic SEAL operation, which was typically structured around one or two squads of a sixteen-man platoon and a minimum of moving parts, this was an unusually large and unwieldy force based on more than three platoons.
As the SEALs approached, a voice came from the hangar demanding they surrender. “Drop your weapons!” shouted the voice in Spanish. “Drop them or we will shoot!”
“No!” replied a Spanish-speaking SEAL. “You drop your weapons!”
The SEALs were caught in the open by an unknown number of Panamanian snipers. Gunfire erupted from multiple directions, and soon four SEALs were dead and seven wounded, the worst casualty numbers of any SEAL operation up to that date. One of the SEALs, Isaac G. Rodriguez, reportedly bled to death while waiting for a medevac helicopter that was delayed by operational mix-ups.
“We’ve got heavy wounded!” shouted squad leader Lieutenant (jg) Thomas W. Casey into a radio. Nearby, SEAL Lieutenant Pat Toohey calmly reported their plight by radio to a general hovering overhead, “Two KIA . . . three KIA . . . seven WIA . . . need a helicopter.” An officer listening in on the line marveled at Toohey’s serenity under fire, and later told author Orr Kelly, “what I heard in those radio transmissions bespoke a very brave man.” When the general asked Toohey if he wanted to withdraw, the SEAL replied, “Sir, my orders were to seize the airfield and hold it until relieved and those remain my intentions, over.”
“Where’s the Spectre?” yelled one of the SEALs, referring to an Air Force AC-130 gunship that was three thousand feet overhead to provide air support. “Where the f— is that gunship?” But radio communications between the Air Force combat control team on the ground and the Spectre were inexplicably dead.
Inside the circling Spectre, the fire-control officer, who initially couldn’t figure out why no one had asked for fire support, could see the wounded SEALs lying so close to the hangar that he realized that if the AC-130 opened fire, they would risk hitting the wounded. In the hangar, a SEAL fired an AT-4 antitank rocket at Noriega’s Learjet, and scored a direct hit on the forward fuselage, triggering a fireball. After some fifteen minutes of combat, the Panamanians withdrew and the SEALs were in control of the hangar and the airfield. The operation was supposed to last four hours, but the SEALs held the airfield for thirty-seven hours before they were relieved.
Two Navy Crosses were awarded for the action, one posthumously, and the citations offer a glimpse of the ferocity of the brief encounter. The citation for Lieutenant (jg) Thomas Casey, Commander, Golf Platoon, SEAL Team Four, reads: “As the firefight intensified and with nearby aircraft exploding in flames, he placed himself in front of the wounded and delivered devastating covering fire, neutralizing the enemy forces and enabling the wounded to be evacuated.” That for the late Chief Petty Officer Donald McFaul, Platoon Chief, Golf Platoon, SEAL Team Four, states: “He left the relative safety of his own position in order to assist the wounded lying helplessly exposed. Under heavy enemy fire and with total disregard for his personal safety, McFaul moved forward into the kill zone and began carrying a seriously wounded platoon member to safety. . . . He was mortally wounded by enemy fire.”
The mission was accomplished, but at the cost of four SEALs’ lives. Debates over the operation have raged in the SEAL community ever since. Some SEALs figured it just shouldn’t have been a SEAL mission in the first place; but foremost a job instead for either a larger conventional force or a smaller special operations team. “If the mission was to take and hold the airfield, Army Rangers or Marines are better-equipped for the job,” said one anonymous SEAL to a reporter shortly after the event. “Taking out the planes was a standoff operation, a job for a three-man team equipped with AT-4s and machine guns,” he argued. “If the job was to deny entry and exit to the airfield, a single team spotting for naval gunfire or using the AC-130 gunship overhead could have done the job. There were alternatives,” he declared. Another SEAL later argued, “In Panama we violated our own doctrine, we tried to act as light infantry, or a Ranger force, which we were never trained to do. But when wars happen, you don’t want to be left out, that’s sort of the thinking, and everybody wants to get in the game.”
One former SEAL, Bob Schoultz, said of the Paitilla Airfield operation, “They overplanned this operation to where every time they went through it, another contingency was thought up and they put more pieces into it to cover those contingencies until it got to be so big and so complicated that it was not flexible enough to respond quickly to changes. That whole thing could have been handled by four to six people. One of the things I think the SEAL community did badly is there was never a ‘hot wash’ to sort it out. I was in the Navy for another fifteen years after the Panama event and I never saw an after-action review that laid out for people on active duty here’s what we learned, here’s where we made mistakes, and here’s what we want to make sure we never do again. That I think is a real crime, a shame, I’m not sure why it didn’t happen.”
Commander Gary Stubblefield, a Vietnam veteran and respected former commander of SEAL Team Three, wrote a highly critical letter about the Paitilla Airfield operation to his superiors on January 7, 1990, soon after the invasion concluded. “The objective, no matter how stated,” the letter stated, “was to prevent General Noriega from using the airfield for evacuating the country. This could easily have been accomplished with a small number of SEALs using some of the advanced weapons and technology we have been spending large amounts of money to develop and procure over the past two decades. Instead, our leaders sent too many troops, who are not accustomed to working in larger numbers, against the defended position when it was absolutely unnecessary in order to achieve our objective. These leaders must be held accountable and not allowed to lead our fine young SEALs into such unwarranted and costly scenarios again rather than given praise for a job well done.”
Stubblefield’s comments generated pushback from senior SEALs in the Naval Special Warfare chain of command, and a lot of controversy. Yet it is noteworthy that in this first operation following the establishment of the U.S. Special Operations Command, operational SEALs were the first to stand up and criticize an operation. It was the mark of an increasingly professional standard that was emerging within the SEAL Teams and indeed, all of American special operations. “We learned a whole heck of a lot,” concluded former SEAL and Vice Admiral Joseph Maguire. “You have to get better and you have to improve because they bury the guy who comes in second.”
In sharp contrast to the Paitilla Airfield operation, the simultaneous SEAL mission to disable Noriega’s potential getaway patrol boat Presidente Porras went off without a hitch, and it was the first publicly identified SEAL “combat swimmer” demolition attack. At about the same time their fellow SEALs were assaulting the airfield, four SEALs from “Task Unit Whiskey” were swimming under the waters of heavily defended Balboa Harbor. U
sing Draeger LAR-V oxygen rebreathing devices that left no air-bubble trail, they attached satchels full of C-4 explosive on the patrol boat, and silently slipped away to their extraction point. As one SEAL reported, at exactly 1 A.M. on December 20, the sixty-five-foot Presidente Porras blew up “ass-end destroyed, the engine vaporized as it went straight up and then straight down into the harbor.” Another of the SEALs on the operation, Randy Lee Beausoleil, later recalled, “my dive buddy was Chris Dye, the most calm, cool, and collected cucumber you could ever find to dive with. . . . All in all, the operation probably took us about five hours, in and out. It was a long op, but it was standard. There was nothing we did that any other SEAL Team couldn’t have done. We were just lucky enough that our platoon was there. And I feel that we were the most prepared for that particular job. The dive went flawlessly.” Other SEAL missions in Panama included working with Army Special Forces to track down Manuel Noriega, and raiding several islands believed to house PDF troops.
Major combat operations in Panama were largely wrapped up within days of the invasion, and Manuel Noriega was captured on January 3 after taking refuge in the Vatican embassy. He was flown to the United States, convicted of drug trafficking, money laundering, and racketeering, then extradited to France, where he was convicted of money laundering. Eventually he was extradited back to his home country, where he remains in prison. Twenty-three American service personnel died during the invasion, along with several hundred civilians. After the removal of Noriega, Panama returned to a democratic government, and today it has one of the fastest-growing economies in Central America.
“THE GROUND WAR STARTS at 0400 hours,” said Lieutenant Tom Dietz. “Let’s go in and blow the shit out of the beach!”
In the early morning hours of February 24, 1991, hours before the first Gulf War began, a small team of U.S. Navy frogmen from SEAL Team Five’s Foxtrot Platoon pulled off an audacious stunt at Iraqi-held Kuwait’s Mina Saud beach that may have helped save thousands of Iraqi and American troops from dying in the desert.
In one of the cleverest “head fakes” of modern warfare, they tricked Iraqi troops into thinking a massive amphibious assault by seventeen thousand U.S. Marines was being launched in the dark waters off Kuwait. But the Iraqis had no idea that instead of two U.S. Marine divisions, they were facing only fifteen lightly armed Navy SEALs carrying 160 pounds of C-4 explosives, machine guns, and grenade launchers.
The Persian Gulf was familiar territory for the SEALs. In the late 1980s they performed a number of operations to help protect international shipping in the oil-rich region during the Iran-Iraq War, including capturing oil platforms and intercepting ships in “visit, board, search, and seizure” operations. But when American military planners prepared to enforce UN Security Council resolutions and liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in early 1991, the SEALs were almost nowhere to be seen in the order of battle. “We didn’t have a major role” in the war, said Captain Walter S. Pullar III, a SEAL and commander of Naval Special Warfare Group Three. “We weren’t part of the strategic picture. We were part of the tactical picture—a small one.”
General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the Allied commander, was said to favor conventional forces over special operations units like the SEALs. Newsweek magazine reported, “The movies might glamorize secret commandos like . . . the Navy SEALs, but to an old foot soldier like Schwarzkopf they were nothing but trouble—weirdos and ‘snake-eaters’ who had to be rescued by the regular grunts when their harebrained operations went awry.” The SEALs, however, were eager to pitch in, and they came up with a potentially brilliant idea to help kick off the Allied ground invasion scheduled to launch in the early morning hours of February 24. Schwarzkopf listened to the plan, and approved it.
At about 10:15 P.M. on February 23, platoon commander Lieutenant Tom Dietz and his fifteen SEALs quietly approached Mina Saud beach in Iraqi-held Kuwait in three eighteen-foot rubber Zodiac 450 Combat Rubber Raiding Craft or CRRCs, stopping less than a thousand yards off the beach. The SEALs knew the target well, having secretly scouted the area in reconnaissance missions on two previous nights. The ground war was scheduled to begin in less than six hours, and what the SEALs were about to attempt could significantly affect the outcome. From intelligence reports and his own observations, Dietz understood there to be as many as 2,500 Iraqi troops dug into bunkers around the area.
A highly choreographed sequence of maneuvers now unfolded, all designed to fake Saddam Hussein and his generals into switching thousands of his troops away from the Saudi-Kuwait border, where American and allied forces were poised to punch through and around their defensive lines, and toward the beach to block a nonexistent amphibious assault.
It looked a lot like the kind of job the UDTs performed in World War II and Korea: a small team of frogmen approaches an enemy beachhead—and sets off demolitions.
Six of the SEALs climbed out of the boats and began swimming gently on the surface of the water toward the beach. Each man wore a wet suit for protection against the cold 54-degree water, gloves, fins, pocket lights, a life vest, an emergency three-minute SCUBA bottle in case they had to escape underwater, a pistol, and a Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun or M-16 rifle fitted with a grenade launcher in case a shoot-out broke out on the beach. Their faces were smeared with black camouflage paint, and they had knives strapped on their legs in case they got snagged in seaweed or barbed wire. Dietz had picked up his own knife at a San Diego dive shop.
Each SEAL pushed a flotation bag containing a haversack filled with twenty pounds of C-4 explosive, and one of a series of four-foot-wide orange channel buoys to be strung out as signal markers to simulate an imminent amphibious landing. As was routine in a SEAL operation, they had planned for unexpected contingencies and “what-ifs” by bringing multiple backups: backup timers for the charges, backup lights, backup knives, even a backup Zodiac CRRC. The six SEALs approached the shoreline in a horizontal line that fanned out to cover 250 yards of beach.
The assault leader, twenty-nine-year-old Tom Dietz, was a compact, highly athletic New Jersey–born Naval Academy graduate who joined the SEALs in 1986. He had planned this night’s deception operation with Captain Ray Smith, the commander of Naval Special Warfare Task Group, Central, who was commanding SEAL operations in the Middle East. Their plan called for the charges to be set in shallow water at 11 p.m., to detonate two hours later at precisely 1:00 A.M. on Sunday, February 24, when the receding tide would lower the C-4 directly onto the beach, three hours before the allied ground forces began punching across the border of Kuwait. Twenty-four hours earlier, as part of the deception, U.S. military aircraft and naval artillery abruptly stopped their relentless bombardment of the area around Mina Saud beach, creating an ominous silence intended to goad the Iraqis into believing that something big was about to happen.
Working in shallow water just east of the beach’s edge, the SEALs positioned the haversacks on the ocean floor, pulled the timer pins, and swam back into the dark sea to rendezvous with the Zodiacs and their host speedboats, both manned by the nine other SEALs in the platoon.
The fireworks began at 12:30 A.M. and lasted for a solid thirty minutes. As an opening act, the SEALs’ speedboats moved toward the shoreline and began strafing the beach with .50-caliber machine-gun fire, .762 chain guns, and 40 mm grenades for fifteen minutes, to throw the Iraqi coastal defenders out of bed and alert them the “invasion” was on. For extra effect after the strafing, ten 4-pound charges of C-4 were tossed into the water, exploding over the next ten minutes. Then at exactly 1:00 A.M. the six main charges began detonating along the beach, creating tremendous fireball explosions that could be felt for miles away. Any Iraqi soldier poking his head out toward the mayhem would come to one deeply unsettling conclusion: Here come the Marines. The SEALs escaped to their boats, and back to their quarters at the Saudi naval base at Ras al-Mishab. Hours later, Lieutenant Dietz got word of the mission’s impact through a cable from Captain Ray Smith, the SEAL commander in the Pers
ian Gulf. The cable read, “Your mission was a success. Elements of two separate Iraqi divisions moved to the beach immediately after your operation. Pass it on to your men. Job well done.”
“It worked!” thought Dietz.
The SEAL officer later learned that as many as several thousand Iraqi troops reacted to the deception, were pulled off the Saudi-Kuwaiti border, and were sent toward the coast to block the phantom amphibious invasion, likely allowing the allied land invasion to proceed with less difficulty and fewer casualties. Dietz was quietly proud to have played a small but important role in the liberation of Kuwait. “Naval Special Warfare went over there with 275 personnel,” he remembered, “and we returned with 275 personnel. When everybody comes back and the task is accomplished, it is a success by every measure of the word.”
DESERT ONE AND GRENADA marked the beginning of a turning point, a boundary in SEAL history. The SEALs had always been tough guys who were smart, brave, and could improvise, but now they were becoming even more professional, well-drilled, experienced operators. After Desert One, Grenada, and the establishment of the U.S. Special Operations Command in 1987, they morphed into professional, well-drilled, experienced, responsible operators with a strong organization framework to include better screening, expanded training, dedicated mission sets, and forward-deployable command and control. Flexible, but with a strong measure of interoperability and professionalism. They honed a set of “best practices,” like other warfare communities in the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
Grenada, Panama, and the Gulf War all saw SEALs deployed in direct-action, special-reconnaissance, or search-and-rescue roles. In most of these operations their work was maritime related, and in support of conventional battle plans or expeditionary warfare objectives. And in each of these conflicts, SEALs worked largely alone, or as a diversion to main force activity. Through the 1990s, there were isolated engagements with the emerging threat that could be categorized as terrorism.
