by Couch, Dick
As the threat of war between the Soviet Union and the United States waned with the easing of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, a new threat was on the rise: al-Qaeda. In its first attack on America, the terrorist organization bombed New York’s World Trade Center in February 1993, killing six and wounding one thousand. This was the same year that Osama bin Laden urged his followers to kill American soldiers stationed in Somalia as part of a United Nations humanitarian mission. Bin Laden provided military training to Somali tribes opposed to the UN’s intervention.
Rick Kaiser and a small detachment of fellow SEAL operators were sent that same year to Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, a city that U.S. General Tom Montgomery, deputy commander of the UN force there, called the “Temple of Doom.”
“My first actual combat mission was in Somalia in 1993,” Kaiser explained to us. “I was a member of Task Force Ranger, which was a joint special operations task force that went overseas to Somalia to capture Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who happened to be one of the warlords in control of the area at the time. They were taking control of the food, which was causing famine for a lot of people. Innocent civilians were dying; before we had actually deployed over there, they had actually killed a group of Pakistani soldiers and massacred them. So, our job was to go in there and try to capture him. I was part of a small SEAL sniper team of four guys, very close-knit, we had worked together for a long period of time. Our specialty was sniping. We thought that that’s the skill set they needed in Somalia. When we got on the ground, though, it was a different story. The Army was in charge, rightfully so. We were only four SEALs and they decided to use their guys in those [sniper] roles. So we just took it upon ourselves to find a job. You know, that’s what SEALs do. We weren’t just going to sit on the cots at the airport.”
Kaiser continued, “Before the big Battle of Mogadishu on October third, we had already conducted six other missions, all of which gave us, I think, overconfidence that we could do whatever we wanted in the city, that the enemy was not that fierce. But unfortunately, as events unfolded on October third, when we were doing another typical mission to go into the city, to a hotel in the heart of the bad-guy territory, one of our helicopters got shot down.” The plan, wrote Calvin Woodward of the Associated Press, was that “U.S. soldiers would drop down ropes from Black Hawk and Little Bird helicopters, onto streets so narrow the rotors barely fit between buildings, so dusty the pilots could hardly see. They would snatch militia members and spirit them away in a convoy of vehicles that was to meet the choppers at the scene.” The reality unfolded over seventeen hours of brutal combat that saw ninety-nine U.S. servicemen stranded in the middle of a hostile city: “a successful roundup, a sudden blizzard of opposing fire, one Black Hawk shot down, then another during a frantic rescue attempt, combat and confusion that stretched through the night, [and] the bodies of two of the 18 dead Americans dragged through the streets.” One Army Ranger staff sergeant said, “I had the distinct impression that everyone in this task force was going to die.” The operation was memorialized in the book and movie Black Hawk Down, and few know that a small team of Navy SEALs worked to help rescue the downed Americans.
Rick Kaiser remembered, “We were in a gun battle from about noon that day until about noon the next day. The SEAL Utility Vehicle was our transportation, even though it was not armored at all. It was very dangerous. So anyway, we went in to reload our magazines, get some water, and get ready to go back out. I went to the bathroom and when I came back, all the guys were in the vehicle already, ready to go except for one place: the driving seat. And I looked at them and said, You bastards! Because the worst place to be is in the driver’s seat, because you can’t shoot, you’ve got to just drive, especially since you’ve got no door and no armor. They all looked at me and a couple of guys were laughing at me! I thought, Man, it didn’t pay to go to the bathroom. Back on the streets we took wounded guys in and went back out and fought some more, took some more wounded back in, and then we went out a third time to rescue the guys in the helicopter. And we did. We finally got ’em out.”
While eighteen Americans died in the fiercest firefight since Vietnam, every SEAL who was in Mogadishu earned a Silver Star for valor in combat. But the brutality of the battle was broadcast and had consequences on future U.S. foreign policy. President Clinton soon ordered American forces out of Somalia. The warlord Aidid was never captured and was killed by a rival militia faction in 1996. Known as the “Mogadishu Effect,” fear of public humiliation underscored many future American military decisions. Kaiser noted, “What we found out later is that this was really a test for al-Qaeda and other Islamic militants for the future, because what they saw us do was when the going got tough and Americans got killed, we left. So, it really gave them the courage to carry on and fight us, all the way up to 9/11.”
In the late 1990s, several press accounts linked the SEALs to operations in Bosnia, offering possible glimpses of missions that are still classified, and probably will remain so for many years to come. On July 6, 1998, U.S. News & World Report ran a major report of what it called “secret missions” to hunt “persons indicted for war crimes” in northern Bosnia. The article, written by Richard J. Newman and titled “Hunting war criminals: The first account of secret U.S. missions in Bosnia,” claimed that about sixty-five SEAL commandos were hidden inside eight-foot-high metal containers placed inside the hull of a C-17 cargo jet, and shipped to the U.S. base in Tuzla, Bosnia, in December 1997, as part of a $50 million, 300-person multinational task force assigned to apprehend five suspected war criminals. This SEAL operation was canceled, according to the report, when General Eric Shinseki decided there wasn’t enough accurate intelligence to launch one of the planned raids, for which the target may also have been tipped off. The SEALs went home. Not long after the aborted raid, according to the U.S. News report, the SEALs returned to Bosnia, and this time they scored a victory, taking three war crimes suspects into custody. “One suspect named Miroslav Tadic,” the article reported, “was physically tackled by SEALs.”
In 1997, veteran New York Times correspondent David Binder reported on “credible information” of a joint Navy SEAL–British SAS operation that killed Serbian war crimes suspect Simo Drljaca near Prijedor, Bosnia, on July 10 of that year. According to the reporter, President Bill Clinton personally signed off on the operation. On May 7, 2010, the British paper the Daily Mail reported that Radislav Krstic, an imprisoned former Serb general convicted of Europe’s worst massacre since World War II, had his throat slashed by three Muslim prisoners in a British jail. The paper reported that Krstic, who was linked to the massacre of more than eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys near Srebrenica in July 1995, was originally arrested “in a daring joint SAS and U.S. Navy SEAL snatch in Bosnia in December 1998.” He survived the prison attack.
In the wake of al-Qaeda’s bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, and the USS Cole, something rather unusual was unfolding with the SEALs and other special operations forces. They weren’t being used much. According to Richard H. Schultz Jr., the director of the International Security Studies Program at Tufts University, they “were never used even once to track down terrorists who had taken American lives.” Schultz was told by General Peter Schoomaker, head of the Special Operations Command in the late 1990s, that “it was like having a brand-new Ferrari in the garage, and nobody wants to race it because you might dent the fender.”
For most Americans, the war on terrorism began on September 11, 2001, the day Islamist terrorists attacked the United States. Those in the intelligence business and those who studied terrorists prior to 9/11 knew differently. But to have a war, there must be two combatants, and prior to the attacks of September 11, there had been only one. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, “they” killed more than 350 of our citizens in and around the Middle East and in the United States, even though most Americans believed we were living in a period of peace. As a re
sult of the first attack in 1993 on the Twin Towers in New York City, six Americans died. Around the world, hundreds of foreign nationals also lost their lives, and hundreds more of our citizens were wounded. These attacks, even though they were organized, coordinated, and directed by Islamist terrorists, were treated as criminal acts, not acts of war. We had simply become accustomed to a periodic loss of life through terrorist activity. Our response was to try to bring these criminals to justice, so we deployed FBI agents and evidentiary teams.
Not all Americans believed that we were at peace, and among those were the SEALs who regularly deployed to the Central Command. They saw the carnage at the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983; they saw the body bags with American sailors being carried from the USS Cole. Many of them thought our nation was not doing enough to meet this growing threat, and more than a few thought that they were being unnecessarily restrained.
For example, in late July 1996, a naval task force was hastily assembled when it was thought that Imad Mugniyah, the Hezbollah security chief and the most wanted terrorist in the world, was aboard the freighter Ibn Tufail as it made its way around the Arabian Peninsula and into the Persian Gulf. He was the man responsible for the deaths of 241 Marines and sailors in Beirut, and he was believed to be the commander of kidnap squads who took nearly one hundred Westerners and foreign nationals hostage in Lebanon from 1982 to 1992. The task force, with a complement of Marines and two SEAL platoons, shadowed the Ibn Tufail. They were in position to seize the ship and had a plan to capture this infamous terrorist. The SEALs were to fast-rope onto the vessel and seize control. The Marines would then come aboard and do a thorough search.
“We were locked and loaded, sitting aboard the helos,” one of the SEAL assault leaders recalled, “and the helos were turning on deck, ready for liftoff. We had the ship in international waters and we had the force in place. We even had the diagrams of the internal ship spaces. Then the word came down—‘mission canceled.’ We were told that there was insufficient intelligence; that he may not have been aboard. We were absolutely stunned. It really shook our Marines; this guy killed over two hundred of their brothers. I still think about it. It was my platoon’s one chance to make a difference, and we were stood down. If it had been after 9/11, we would have taken that ship, or any other vessel in open waters, if there was a hint that there might be a terrorist leader aboard.” The aborted 1996 mission to capture Mugniyah was a “spin-up and spin-down,” when special operations forces are loaded aboard choppers and even moving toward the target when the order is given to cancel and turn back. For the special operators, it is a brutal feeling. There have been many spin-ups and spin-downs for the SEALs in recent years, and they have gotten used to the emotional roller coaster they create. There has been much subsequent debate as to whether Mugniyah was or was not aboard that ship in the Gulf in 1996. On February 12, 2008, Imad Mugniyah was killed by a car bomb in Damascus, Syria. The identity of his assailants remains unknown.
THE MOST SUSTAINED SEAL activity of the mid-to-late 1990s were operations to support the oil embargo imposed by the UN on Saddam Hussein and enforced largely by the U.S. Navy. In a campaign to block oil from being smuggled out and contraband in, SEALs boarded ships bound to and from Iraq. This activity was known as VBSS—“visit, board, search, and seizure.” Saddam tried to get his oil to market by sneaking it out in tankers. SEALs, fast-roping from helicopters, boarded the tankers in international waters and detained them.
It was a cat-and-mouse game, with the SEALs swinging aboard at night, while the tankers raced for the safe-haven territorial waters of friendly Arab states. In the summer of 2001, just a few hours before dawn, two American helos caught up with the Saddam Maru. This was not the real name of the ship, but until the SEALs boarded and were able to make a closer inspection, it would do.
On a moonless night in the Persian Gulf two H-60 Black Hawks carrying a complement of SEALs approached the ship. Inside the lead helo, the rope master tossed out a length of fast rope, a thick, feltlike line that served as a fireman’s pole for getting SEALs from a hovering helo to their target.
In the cockpit, the Navy pilots, wearing night vision goggles, deftly matched the speed of the tanker and kept the Black Hawk in a hover over the deck. These were fleet pilots, adept at hovering above moving vessels.
“Can you hold it there, sir?” the rope master said in his boom mike. “We’ll do our best,” the pilot’s voice replied in his earpiece. “Roger that. First man is on the way.”
The rope master tapped the thigh of the SEAL seated on the metal deck with his legs hanging out, and the SEAL popped from the door of the helo and dropped into space. Other SEALs took his place and vaulted into the void. Then another.
It was a rough boarding. A gust of wind pushed the helo above its hover point and two of the SEALs ran out of fast rope before their boots hit the deck. One tucked and rolled, but another was knocked unconscious. When the second helo came in with its load of SEALs, the fast rope became entangled in a boat davit and one of the SEALs came close to going over the side. He managed to grab the guardrail and scramble back onto the deck of the tanker.
With the platoon medical corpsman tending to the downed SEAL, the team gathered on the long foredeck and moved across the darkened, thousand-foot-long ship to the aft superstructure.
A load of oil like that carried by the Saddam Maru meant $10 million or more in Saddam’s pocket. And this U.S. mission was a combined effort that largely put Saddam out of the illegal oil business. The two skills that combined to shape the SEALs’ victory in this dangerous contest were VBSS and CQD, or Close Quarters Defense.
VBSS is a core SEAL maritime skill. During SEAL Qualification Training, the new men are introduced to this skill, usually with the pier-side boarding of a derelict ship, moored at a deserted dock for training purposes. During the SEAL squadron predeployment training, this evolution moves up a notch or two. VBSS drills are scheduled aboard naval vessels, in port and under way, and on offshore oil platforms. When possible, these exercises are conducted with noncompliant role players, usually at night.
Moving as a team through the target platform or ship in the dark requires the highest order of discipline and professionalism—and many hours of practice. Team commanding officers and squadron commanders are always looking for opportunities aboard naval vessels, merchantmen, and oil rigs where their SEALs can practice these skills. Naval task force commanders at sea off San Diego and Norfolk are constantly pestered by SEALs preparing for deployment; they especially want to train against ships under way at sea. Since the attack on the USS Cole, those afloat commanders have been a great deal more responsive to these requests. They have to train their crews in counterboarding measures, so it’s been a win-win situation.
Surprise may be achieved during stormy weather or on a mild, cloudless day. Once aboard, they move like a football offense breaking from the line of scrimmage. The element of surprise, hopefully; violence of action, always.
As Saddam’s financial situation worsened, he became more dependent on smuggled oil. With the approach of the coalition invasion of Iraq, the game took on a spy-versus-spy tone, with moves and countermoves on either side. The Iraqi tanker crews took a number of measures to oppose the boarding parties. One of the most successful was welding up entryway hatches and porthole windows to deny boarders access to the interior of the ship. Since the oil smugglers operated close to Iraqi-friendly shores, they only had to delay their attackers until they could make a run for a safe haven.
Stopping these tankers became a breaking-and-entering drill—could the SEALs get inside and take control of the ship before these armored tankers could turn and make a dash for friendly territorial waters? And, of course, there were restrictions on the SEALs trying to make these entries, among them a prohibition against using explosive breaching charges. (A breaching charge is a small explosive charge that blows open a locked door or hatch.) The SEALs who had to play the game thought the rules were silly; given a free hand, t
hey would have put an end to Saddam’s tanker-smuggling operation in short order. But explosive entries were out. As it was, thanks in part to the Yarrow Entry, they eventually won—and still played by the rules.
Close Quarters Defense, or CQD, became a favored technique for measured force projection in the early and mid-1990s, and was adopted for SEAL training by the Naval Special Warfare Center in 1996. Prior to CQD, there had been a number of hand-to-hand techniques and martial disciplines used by SEALs, but none were wholly satisfactory. The SEALs needed a skill set that was versatile and effective and could be mastered in a reasonably short period of time. Given all that SEALs must learn and do, they really don’t have the time for extensive training in martial arts; they needed tools that are combat focused and efficient. This skill set also had to be adaptable to heavily armed men working as a team in a dynamic environment and in a range of operational environments—aboard ship, in buildings, in caves, and in open country. And, finally, it had to be suitable in a threat environment that could range from compliant noncombatants to armed opposition—individually or in a crowd. The answer became CQD.
Close Quarters Defense is a blend of martial artistry, commando-style fighting, and the spiritual demands of a warrior. The word defense in the name is misleading; in reality, it is more of an offensive skill. CQD skills are a system of team-based moves, strikes, bars, or holds, and the tactical communications necessary to manage different levels of violence and force projection. CQD is a “behind-the-gun” tactic, in that the practitioner maintains the ability to use his weapon.
