War Stories: Operation Iraqi Freedom

by Oliver North

  Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was the first. He lied to Ronald Reagan, and then tried to facilitate the terrorists’ escape.

  Abbas, the head of the Palestine Liberation Front, had orchestrated the hijacking of the ship and the cold-blooded murder of Leon Klinghoffer. A sixty-nine-year-old invalid, Klinghoffer was shot while he sat in his wheelchair; his body was then dumped overboard. The Egyptians allowed the ship to sail into Alexandria harbor, where officials dispatched by Mubarak took the terrorists off the ship and hid them while arranging for an EgyptAir DC-9 to secretly fly them out of the country.

  President Reagan called Mubarak and told him, “I understand the terrorists are in Egypt. I want them.”

  Mubarak denied they were still there and claimed that he was sorry and that he didn’t know that they killed anyone. Meanwhile, the terrorists were secretly moved to the airport for a flight to Tunis, Tunisia, where Yasser Arafat was quietly preparing a hero’s welcome.

  With help from the Israeli intelligence services, we confirmed information we had received about the EgyptAir escape aircraft with the terrorists aboard. The plane was then intercepted over the Mediterranean Sea by F-14s from the 6th Fleet and escorted to the NATO base at Sigonella, Sicily.

  When the EgyptAir commercial airliner touched down at Sigonella, it was immediately surrounded by a Special Operations unit led by Brig. Gen. Carl Steiner, who boldly opened the aircraft door, faced down the armed guard and terrorists, and took them into custody. As the SEALs prepared to escort the four terrorists to a waiting USAF C-141, they were themselves surrounded by Italian police. To avoid a “friendly fire” incident with our Italian “allies,” Steiner was ordered to turn the Palestinian terrorists over to the police.

  Once again, President Reagan was on the phone—this time with Italy’s Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, who promised that all four would be tried for hijacking and murder. Craxi lied.

  The three “trigger-men” were detained, but Abbas, dressed in the uniform of an airline pilot, was secretly put aboard a Yugoslav airliner and flown to Yugoslavia. From there the PLF terror chieftain flew to Tunisia to meet his old buddy Arafat. A few months later, fearing that the Israelis might be closing in on Abbas, Arafat arranged for him to move to Damascus and from there to Baghdad.

  President George W. Bush had named Abbas in a speech last fall as part of his argument for removing Saddam Hussein from power. “Iraq has . . . provided safe haven to Abu Abbas,” he said, then added, “And we know that Iraq is continuing to finance terror and gives assistance to groups that use terrorism to undermine Middle East peace.”

  The PLF faction led by Abbas has been a conduit for the money Saddam provided to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers—it’s widely believed that millions of dollars have been provided for this purpose.

  In response to the news from FOX News Channel about Abbas’s capture, we hook up our satellite transceiver but learn little more other than CENTCOM’s refusal to comment on whether Abbas would be detained in Iraq, at some American base, or in another country. Nor would anyone comment on whether Abbas would be tried in the United States for the Achille Lauro hijacking and its aftermath.

  Later in the day, when someone at the network realizes that I was involved in the initial capture of Abbas, I am asked to recall the event. After nearly two decades, I can still hear President Ronald Reagan’s words when he told the nation what had happened: “You can run, but you can’t hide.”

  OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #37

  With RCT-5 and HMM-268

  Samarra, Iraq

  Wednesday, 16 April 2003

  1800 Hours Local

  We spend the night of the fifteenth and all the next day in the bombed-out shell of a Republican Guard headquarters of some kind. Col. Joe Dunford has brought his Alpha Command Group up and co-located it here with Sam Mundy’s CP. And as if he knew what was coming, Lt. Col. Jerry Driscoll flew in here this morning with a section of CH-46s. It seems as though everyone here is aware that the mission is about to change dramatically for all of us. Dunford and Driscoll both have said that they expect the Marines to be pulled back down, south of Baghdad, at any moment.

  While most of the organized fighting has stopped, there are still pockets of resistance in the major cities of Iraq, particularly Mosul and Baghdad. Most of the snipings and ambushes seem to be the work of irregulars, the fedayeen, some of the tens of thousands of criminals Saddam released from the prisons just before the start of the war, and, of course, remnants of the regime. These sporadic incidents are being readily put down and the nights are becoming more peaceful.

  An interesting and touching moment occurs this morning as Driscoll’s helicopters land in a farmer’s field. As soon as the engines shut down, the farmer walks out to the helicopter. I expect a complaint for scaring his animals or damaging his crops. But instead I see that the farmer is carrying fresh chicken eggs—one for each crew member.

  Gunnery Sgt. Pennington tries to decline, knowing that these eggs might well be all the farmer has. Pennington tries to offer the old man some of the humanitarian rations the Red Dragons carry. But the elderly farmer is adamant and insists that the Marines take the eggs. And so for the first time since leaving Kuwait, we have an omelet, and we eat it while the old man, sitting on his haunches, eats the rice from the U.S. ration package. The smile on his face transcends any language barriers.

  After that shared breakfast, Jerry Driscoll and I walk over to the RCT-5 CP so that the pilots, crew chiefs, and corpsmen from the two helicopters can properly initiate Griff as an honorary Red Dragon air crewman. The ritual involves duct-taping Griff to a litter, carrying him to where a set of clippers can be plugged in, and then shaving his head. The mission is accomplished in less than five minutes to the tune of the Marine Hymn—intended to mask the sound of Griff’s screams.

  While Jenkins is getting his much-needed “trim,” Dunford, Driscoll, Mundy, and I are sharing some of Gunny Cheramie’s good coffee. We had just gotten around the potential pleasures of a shower, clean clothing, and porcelain toilets when I get a call on my Iridium from the FOX News Channel foreign desk.

  “How far is Camp Pennsylvania from where you are?” asks the duty officer in New York.

  “About five hundred miles,” I reply. “It’s in Kuwait. I’m just south of Tikrit. Why?” I ask with a twinge of uncertainty.

  “Well, that’s where the 4th Infantry Division is forming up,” he answers. “Someone at the Pentagon has asked for you to be embedded with them as they move into Iraq.”

  “Yeah, well, tell ’em I smell real bad and maybe they’ll take someone else,” I say, hoping that maybe Greg Kelly or Rick Leventhal might have been cleaned up by now.

  “Can’t,” he replies. “They asked for you by name. Besides, the other teams are on the way home.”

  “Well, that’s a stunner” is all I can say, knowing that this isn’t going to go down well with Griff, who has a new baby at home. “How long?” I ask, hoping for an answer of a few days.

  “Couple of weeks,” he says and then hastily adds, “There is some thought that they might find Saddam.”

  “Okay,” I say, “a couple of weeks—but if I’m not home for my daughter’s wedding in June, you might as well leave me here, because I’ll be safer in Baghdad than in my own kitchen.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  YOU’RE IN THE ARMY NOW

  OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #38

  With 3rd Battalion, 66th Armored Regiment

  4th Infantry Division, U.S. Army

  80 km south of Baghdad, Iraq

  Saturday, 19 April 2003

  0700 Hours Local

  It’s the road trip from hell. Or maybe this is hell. Griff and I are stuffed into the back seats of two Humvees headed slowly north across the southern desert—part of an enormous 4th Infantry Division convoy, crawling at less than fifteen kilometers per hour deep into Iraq. It’s one hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the shade and—you guessed it—there’s no shade. Th
e dust kicked up by hundreds of vehicles swirls around us like a self-generated sandstorm. Grit coats everything and it cakes on our clothing where the sweat soaks through. My backside has been numb for at least a day. All feeling has left my feet. I am contemplating cruel forms of torture to inflict on the crazed sadists who work at the FOX News Channel foreign desk. Then I remember—I volunteered.

  Early on the morning of April 17, Jerry Driscoll and his wingman flew Griff and me all the way back to Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait—a distance of more than five hundred miles—so that we could “marry up” with our new unit. We headed immediately for the MAG-39 billeting area and threw our filthy clothing into new washing machines and our bodies into the new showers. Both had been installed by the Seabees while we were in Iraq. It was the first real cleansing either of us had in twenty-nine days and it may well be the best shower I’ve ever taken.

  Two hours later we emerged with clean bodies garbed in clean clothing, ready to join the Army. Not knowing where HMM-268 would be when we returned from covering the 4th ID, we made a quick round of “goodbyes,” “see-you-laters,” and “be carefuls” with the Marines before an Army SUV came by to pick us up.

  The trip to Camp Pennsylvania—the TAA for the 4th ID up along the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border—takes less than an hour. We arrive in time for noon chow in the mess tent. After eating our first non-MRE meal in nearly a month, Griff and I go with our new hosts, the 66th Armored Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, to load our gear aboard the vehicles that will be taking us back into Iraq. About a mile from the tents of the base camp, an enormous three-hundred vehicle convoy is formed up in four long columns of trucks, fuelers, Humvees, and scores of heavy equipment transporters.

  Heavy equipment transporters are huge tractor-trailer rigs that have M-1 tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, and M-113 APCs chained to their low-riding flatbeds. The Army calls them HETs, but in the Marines a HET is a “human exploitation team” that helps collect and interpret intelligence. In the Army, a HET is a rig that is twice as big as any eighteen-wheeler on an interstate highway in the United States. They are used to reduce wear and tear on armored vehicles by hauling heavy equipment from a staging area to a site nearer the battle zone, where the armored vehicles are off-loaded and deployed for combat. The closest thing to these behemoths in the Marines are the tractor-trailers the engineers use to haul bulldozers and bridging equipment.

  Maj. Douglas Cox, the convoy commander with whom we’ll be riding, is surprised that the U.S. Marine Corps doesn’t have any HETs until I explain that the Marines have to haul all their tools of war around on amphibious ships. One of his lieutenants listening to our conversation inquires skeptically, “Then how did the Marines get their tanks, LAVs, and AAVs all the way up to Tikrit?”

  “They drove,” I answer.

  “All the way?” he asks, incredulous.

  “All the way from the ships that off-loaded them,” I reply, trying not to sound too smug.

  The young officer simply shakes his head, knowing that such a journey, even without battle damage, is terribly hard on the equipment. And he’s right.

  But then I realize that the trip we’re about to start isn’t going to be a picnic either. Sitting on the hood of Maj. Cox’s Humvee, I program my GPS for the route we’re going to follow: across the border at Safwan, a left turn up Route 8 to Route 1, around Ad Diwaniyah to pick up Route 8 again, and through Baghdad to a TAA that V Corps has established for the 4th ID at a Republican Guard installation just north of the capital. There, the armor will be off-loaded from the HETs and 4th ID will move tactically to their assigned area of operations north of Samarra.

  We’ll be rolling right through the battlefields that the 1st Marine Division and the 3rd ID fought over for nearly a month on their way north to Tikrit. On my map it looks to be about five hundred miles. That’s a full day’s driving on interstate highways in the States. But back home there’s a gas station at practically every interchange and we don’t have sandstorms, ambushes by roving bands of fedayeen, or 299 other vehicles traveling with us when we pile the family into our SUV and head to the beach. I tell Major Cox that I don’t envy his task. He shrugs and says with a smile, “They’re good soldiers and they’ve been waiting a long time for this.”

  That’s certainly true—on both counts. These are among the best troops in the U.S. Army. Nearly every vehicle in the 4th ID is equipped with a “Blue Force Tracker”—an encrypted, GPS-based, satellite-linked computer system that displays the location of friendly and enemy units on a plasma screen.

  This capability alone offers an extraordinary advantage to 4th ID field commanders in responding to calls for reinforcements, resupply, cas-evacs, and fire support in the midst of a gunfight. Every trooper in the division has been trained to use and maintain this gear. And because they are so good, the original war plan for Iraq called for the 4th ID to accomplish one of the most difficult missions in the campaign: offload in Turkey, race east across the country to the Iraqi border, and charge south to Baghdad through some of the toughest terrain in all southwest Asia. At least that was the initial plan for these good soldiers—as Cox accurately described them.

  There’s also great validity to the major’s comment that the men have been waiting a long time for this. The 4th ID, based at Fort Hood, Texas, was one of the first units alerted for Operation Iraqi Freedom. As early as November 2002, the division’s operations and logistics officers had completed their war plans and started moving equipment to Galveston and other ports for shipment to the theater of operations. More than twenty commercial oceangoing vessels were contracted to move the 4th ID’s combat gear from Texas to the NATO port facility at Iskendurun, Turkey. According to the plan, as soon as the ships arrived the division’s troops, carrying only their personal weapons and gear, would be flown to the big NATO air base at Incirlik, Turkey. Then they’d bus to the port, offload the ships, and be on their way to the Iraqi border.

  By working around the clock, seven days a week (even through the Christmas holidays), everything the 4th ID would need was mounted out and on its way to Turkey by the second week of January. But then the unthinkable happened: Ankara said no to U.S. plans for moving forces through Turkey. And so, with their gear still at sea and no equipment left on which to train, the soldiers of the 4th ID were told to wait.

  At CENTCOM, Turkey’s denial of access sent the war planners scrambling for alternatives on how to pressure Baghdad from the north. Without some kind of credible threat from that direction, Saddam would be free to move nearly all his forces south to confront coalition units invading from Kuwait.

  Gen. Franks intended all along to use Special Forces teams as Scud hunters in the western desert and to rally the Kurdish enclaves in Iraq’s northwestern mountains. But those lightly armed units wouldn’t be enough of a threat to Baghdad to make Saddam leave six of his best combat divisions north of Tikrit.

  Although the international press had reported widely on Turkey’s refusal to allow transit rights to U.S. forces, Gen. Franks decided to use the 4th ID in much the same way as Eisenhower had used Patton to deceive Hitler as to where the allies intended to land on the coast of France during World War II.

  In May and June of 1944, while the rest of the allies prepared to land at Normandy, George Patton was ordered to set up bogus headquarters units along the English coast between Margate and Brighton, convincing the German general staff that the allies would take the shortest route across the English Channel and land at Calais. The ruse worked and the Germans held dozens of armored divisions near Calais that could have devastated the allied landings had they been closer to Normandy on June 6, 1944.

  In the days before launching Operation Iraqi Freedom, Gen. Franks used the 4th ID the same way. Instead of immediately ordering the ships from Texas through the Suez Canal when the Turks rejected the U.S. request for transit, Gen. Franks kept the vessels at anchor off Iskendurun and insisted that the Pentagon continue the pretense of trying to change Ankara’s decision. It
worked. Saddam held his northern divisions in place until it was too late for them to counter the 3rd ID and the 1st Marine Division attacks from the south. Only then did Gen. Franks order the 4th ID ships to proceed through the Suez Canal, around the Arabian Peninsula, and into the Persian Gulf.

  By the time the 4th ID troops finally loaded up on planes en route to Kuwait, Saddam’s regime was finished. And though the patience of the soldiers from Ft. Hood was worn thin by constant alerts, canceled leaves, and interminable waiting, their delay in getting into the fight had been an important factor in abbreviating the war’s duration.

  Now these very frustrated soldiers are finally heading north—just as the Marines we rode with for a month get ready to head south. Though some of these soldiers talk about being “too late for the action,” the older officers and NCOs know better. At a brief stop for refueling—a sergeant first class who fought in the first Gulf War admonished one of his young troopers, “Don’t think that all the shooting is over. The toughest part of this war is still ahead.”

  OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #39

  With 3rd Battalion, 66th Armored Regiment

  4th Infantry Division, U.S. Army

  10 km north of Tikrit, Iraq

  Easter Sunday, 20 April 2003

  2300 Hours Local

  At dawn on Easter Sunday we arrive at the 4th ID TAA, just north of Baghdad. Six days ago, riding with Sam Mundy and the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, we breezed right by this Republican Guard training center en route to Samarra. Just north of here we passed through the lines of the 3rd ID, which had captured this facility on April 11, the day after Baghdad fell.