Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) Read online

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  For Duncan and Hannah Naylor

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I began this project sure in the knowledge that researching and writing a book about a secret organization that controlled other secret organizations was going to be a challenge, and so it proved.

  U.S. Special Operations Command—Joint Special Operations Command’s administrative higher headquarters—declined to assist in the project, other than to answer the occasional question. Several people who figure prominently in the events described in this book declined requests to be interviewed. Relentless Strike, the first full-length history of JSOC, is therefore built on two foundations.

  The first of these consists of interviews I did arrange with scores of sources, most of whom spoke “on background,” meaning I could only identify them in a generic way, as in “a senior SEAL Team 6 source,” rather than by name. The fact that many of my sources held several different positions during the period covered by the book complicated matters further when it came to attribution. In most cases, I used an attribution (for instance, “Delta operator”) that applied to the position the source held during the events being discussed. This meant that sometimes the same individual might be referred to by different attributions in different chapters. However, a small number of individuals insisted that I refer to them by the same phrase (for instance, “retired special operations officer”) throughout the book.

  The second foundation upon which the book rests consists of published works by other writers. No book about JSOC could or should be written in a literary vacuum. As the endnotes indicate, this book stands on the shoulders of scores of others that have touched on the command in whole or in part. Several deserve specific mention. The first of these is Steven Emerson’s Secret Warriors, which I found to be the most useful single volume about the covert operations of the 1980s. (At the outset I intended for my book to concentrate on JSOC’s post–September 11 history, but I soon realized that an extensive discussion of the first two decades of the command’s existence would be necessary in order to provide readers with the context necessary to frame the events that occurred later.) For the chapters dealing with the creation of JSOC’s fearsome industrial-scale killing machine in Iraq, I relied heavily on three books: Task Force Black, by Mark Urban, which, while focusing on British special operations forces, contained a wealth of information about the overall JSOC campaign; The Endgame, by Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, a masterful narrative of America’s war in Iraq, laced with telling details about the role played by JSOC; and My Share of the Task, by retired General Stanley McChrystal, who commanded JSOC during those critical years. The latter was one of several first-person accounts upon which I leaned for particular chapters. Others include Kill bin Laden, by Dalton Fury (the nom de plume of Delta officer Tom Greer), about the failure to get Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, and No Easy Day, by Mark Owen (the pen name of SEAL Team 6 operator Matt Bissonnette) with Kevin Maurer, about the May 2011 mission that killed Osama bin Laden.

  To the individuals at the heart of each of these foundations—the sources who agreed to be interviewed by me, and the authors whose work preceded mine—I am profoundly grateful.

  PROLOGUE

  As Marwan al-Shehhi turned United Airlines Flight 175 northeast above Trenton, New Jersey,1 and pointed the hijacked Boeing 767 toward Manhattan and the already burning World Trade Center, the commander of the United States’ premier counterterrorist force was concluding a visit to the U.S. embassy in Budapest.2

  It was mid-afternoon in the Hungarian capital on September 11, 2001, and Army Major General Dell Dailey, head of Joint Special Operations Command, had just briefed senior embassy officials on a major—but highly classified—training exercise code-named Jackal Cave his organization was running across Europe.3

  Jackal Cave was a “joint readiness exercise,” or JRX, one of several that JSOC (“jay-sock”) conducted each year. Like most JRXs, it was nested in an even larger “Ellipse” exercise run by one of the U.S. military’s four-star regional commands, in this case European Command.4 Some JSOC personnel viewed the JRXs as essential opportunities to rehearse critical capabilities. Others thought they were counterproductive wastes of time designed mainly to support JSOC’s budget, which had been steadily growing for two decades.

  Born from the wreckage of 1980’s Operation Eagle Claw, the United States’ failed attempt to rescue its hostages in Iran, JSOC was created that same year to give the United States a standing headquarters that could run similar operations in the future. But although its power, size, and influence had increased significantly since then, on September 11, 2001, the command remained a fringe presence on the U.S. military scene, with a narrowly circumscribed set of responsibilities that included short-term counterterrorist missions, operations to secure weapons of mass destruction, and very little else.

  The exercise JSOC was running that damp, overcast afternoon in Hungary5 typified the command’s niche role at the turn of the century. The notional enemy was a hybrid force that combined elements of international organized crime and terrorism and was trafficking in weapons of mass destruction, or “loose nukes.”6 JSOC’s forward headquarters for the exercise was split between Taszár,7 a military airfield 150 kilometers southwest of Budapest, and Tuzla, Bosnia,8 the latter a holdover from the command’s recent history hunting Balkan war criminals. Bolstering the JSOC force were Hungarian military elements, as well as personnel from the U.S. Army’s 10th Special Forces Group, with which JSOC had become close after years of operating together in the Balkans.9

  One exercise aim was to validate a concept called advance force operations (AFO), which was also the name of a newly established staff cell in JSOC headquarters.10 AFO’s origins lay in the Operational Support Troop of the Army’s Delta Force,11 one of several secret “special mission units” JSOC controlled. (Another such unit, the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, was reconnoitering the Croatian port of Dubrovnik, from where the “enemy” was trying to ship the nuclear material out on a boat.)12 The AFO cell ran the sort of missions highlighted by this JRX: deep reconnaissance, often undercover, to prepare the way for possible “direct action”—kill or capture—missions by larger forces. To conduct these missions, the cell could pull operators from any unit that fell under JSOC.13

  In Jackal Cave, the AFO undercover work was largely the responsibility of the Operational Support Troop, or OST, which had pioneered this concept in JSOC. The OST operators’ role was to find the targeted individuals, allowing a larger—but still “low-vis[ibility]”—force to arrive in civilian vans wielding suppressed weapons and capture or kill them.14 The aim in such a raid was to “get in and get out without draw
ing too much attention [so as to] be able to provide plausible deniability to the local government,” said a Delta source.

  “We were tracking ‘terrorists,’” said a JSOC staff officer. “It was really a big tracking exercise, and then [we’d] bring an assault element in to take the target down.”

  That assault element was Delta’s A Squadron, one of the unit’s three ground squadrons. The squadron and a small Delta headquarters element had flown in the previous day from Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina, on two massive Air Force C-17 Globemaster III transport aircraft. The planes were still on the tarmac at Taszár, where JSOC had placed its joint operations center, or JOC (pronounced “jock”).15 (JSOC’s permanent headquarters was at Pope, adjacent to Delta’s home post of Fort Bragg.)16 Other exercise participants took different routes to Hungary. The JOC personnel flew over in their own aircraft—two C-141 Starlifters referred to as J1 and J2 or, collectively, as the “J-alert birds”—while the OST operators at the heart of this low-vis exercise had taken commercial flights and used cover identities and false passports to infiltrate Europe. Some had also moved into position using the Air Force’s “covered air” unit. That unit, known within JSOC as Task Force Silver, operated a variety of civilian airframes, from small propeller-driven planes to Boeing 727s, always hiding the military nature of its missions.17

  By the afternoon of September 11, the exercise had barely begun. Like most JRXs, it was designed to meet the training needs of as many JSOC elements as possible. This necessarily required an elaborate scenario with many moving parts. When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, another C-17 had just touched down at Taszár, bearing four Little Bird helicopters belonging to the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, an Army unit established, like JSOC, in the wake of Eagle Claw. Two of the regiment’s MH-47E Chinooks had already arrived on a hulking Air Force C-5 Galaxy transport, which at 75 meters was almost 50 percent longer than even the C-17. The plane with the Little Birds taxied to a remote part of the airfield so those on board could follow Dailey’s order to not offload the tiny attack and assault helicopters—there to support the Delta mission—anywhere they could be seen by non-JSOC personnel. The rest of the 160th’s contribution to the exercise—principally a force of MH-60K Black Hawks and MH-60L Direct Action Penetrators (Black Hawks configured as attack helicopters, rather than as lift, or “assault,” aircraft) led by Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Mangum, commander of the regiment’s 1st Battalion—was staging out of Naval Station Rota in southern Spain. From Rota, the 160th crews were to fly Team 6 to assault a ship in the Mediterranean.18

  The JSOC and Delta personnel at Taszár were meanwhile just settling into their temporary quarters at the end of a taxiway at the Cold War–era airfield in the Hungarian countryside. While the Delta squadron was as usual housed in a pair of large tents—a yellow and white “circus tent” apparatus that housed the squadron’s operations center and a more conventional “fest tent” in which the operators stored their gear and slept19—the headquarters elements took over an old Russian building that was an improvement over the tents JSOC usually used. Each unit and each JSOC staff section was assigned an office to use as an operations center or liaison cell. The JOC itself was in a larger room at the end of the corridor.20 While the JSOC staffers wore their combat uniforms, the Delta operators at the airfield worked in T-shirts and athletic shorts or other civilian gear.

  Some OST operators and one or two Delta staffers were already out and about, working in civilian clothes as they tracked “terrorists” through downtown Budapest.21 Using small satellite radios, these urban reconnaissance experts sent back digital photographs of roofs, doors, windows, and other potential breach points in target buildings, allowing assault troop operators back in Taszár to figure out the exact amount and type of explosive charge required in each case.22

  Operatives from the Defense Humint Service, the Defense Department’s clandestine spy network, had traveled from other European countries and the United States to portray the terrorists. This was not unusual. OST and other JSOC elements that did clandestine work often used Defense Humint (short for human intelligence) operatives as both participants and mentors in exercises that involved low-vis tradecraft.23

  The briefing over, Dailey and his senior enlisted adviser, Army Command Sergeant Major Mike Hall, were walking out of the conference room chatting with Major Jim Reese, a Delta officer who’d been pulled up to be AFO’s operations officer. Eager to fetch something for Dailey, Reese jogged down the corridor to the room that served as AFO’s operations center. “Hey boss, look at this,” Air Force Staff Sergeant Sam Stanley told Reese as the Army officer walked in, indicating the pictures of the fires raging in the World Trade Center’s twin towers on the television the tiny AFO staff always kept tuned to CNN or Fox News. His original errand forgotten, Reese took a moment to absorb the significance of what he was watching, then turned and ran back after his boss just as the red desk phone reserved for classified conversations began ringing.

  Dailey and Hall were on their way to collect their IDs at the embassy’s security desk when Reese caught up with them. “Hey sir, you need to see this,” he told the general.24 Alerted to the urgency in Reese’s eyes, Dailey walked quickly back to AFO’s operations center and fixed his gaze on the television screen for a few seconds before taking the red phone. On the line was his boss, Air Force General Charlie Holland, head of U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. Holland told Dailey to forget about the exercise and get back to Fort Bragg as fast as possible. Dailey got the message. After hanging up, he turned to Reese and Lieutenant Colonel Scotty Miller, the Delta officer running AFO, and told them he was canceling the exercise immediately and returning to Bragg, and that they were to do the same. “Get home any way you can,” he said.25

  JSOC was going to war.

  PART I

  THE FERRARI IN THE GARAGE

  1

  A Phoenix Rises

  It was a late summer afternoon in 1980, and America’s most powerful men in uniform filed into “the Tank,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s soundproofed conference room in the Pentagon, for a briefing that would mark a turning point in U.S. military history.

  Already in the room, waiting patiently beside his flip chart stand, was Army Lieutenant Colonel Keith Nightingale, whose briefing the generals and admirals were there to attend. Nightingale was a staff officer for a top secret task force, and his charts and viewgraphs consisted largely of schematics, budget minutiae, and the other dry details involved in the establishment of a new organization.1 But together they represented an attempt to conjure a phoenix from the ashes of bitter defeat.

  America’s mood that summer was grim. On April 24 the United States had launched Operation Eagle Claw, a bold attempt to rescue the fifty-two U.S. hostages held by Iranian revolutionaries in Tehran. The effort had been an ignominious disaster. With the assault force already deep inside Iran at a remote staging area called Desert One, President Jimmy Carter had aborted the mission at the commander’s request because only five of the original eight helicopters critical to the mission were still in flying condition. Then, as the force was preparing to return to its base on the Omani island of Masirah, and perhaps try again twenty-four hours later, catastrophe struck. A helicopter crashed into a plane full of fuel and Delta Force soldiers. Eight servicemen and all hopes of merely postponing the rescue attempt until the next night died in the resulting fireball. By the time the force had made it home, pictures of the charred bodies and burned-out airframes at Desert One were all over the world’s newscasts. The United States was humiliated.2

  Most Americans, including many in the Carter administration, had despaired of rescuing the hostages in the wake of the Desert One fiasco. But the men at the heart of Eagle Claw had not given up; nor had their president. Within seventy-two hours of the catastrophe, Carter told Army Major General Jim Vaught, the task force commander, to be prepared to launch again within ten days, in the in extrem
is case that the hostages’ lives appeared in immediate danger. Such a swift turnaround had not been necessary, and the men spent the summer preparing for a second attempt, armed with the knowledge of what had gone wrong previously. In the process, they were hoping to help the United States regain not only its self-respect, but also its faith in the U.S. military and, in particular, its long-neglected special operations forces.

  The new effort was code-named Snowbird. Separated from their families, who knew next to nothing about where their husbands and fathers were, the men gave serious thought to what had to be different this time around. Some of these things were tactical details, but others were larger concepts. Eagle Claw had been a pickup game, with each armed service claiming a role: the Army provided Delta Force and the Rangers as the ground rescue force; the Air Force contributed MC-130 Combat Talon transports, AC-130 Spectre gunships, and a small ground element called BRAND X; the Navy proffered an aircraft carrier from which the eight Navy RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters launched; the Marine Corps, keen not to be excluded, provided the helicopter pilots. These forces were not used to working together. The headquarters that ran the operation was a similarly ad hoc organization commanded by Vaught.

  The Eagle Claw veterans knew all that had to change, none more so than Colonel “Chargin’” Charlie Beckwith, the hard-bitten Delta commander. In the run-up to Eagle Claw, Beckwith had opposed the creation of any headquarters that might interfere with the direct line to the White House he desired for Delta. But after the trauma of Desert One, his resistance softened. Like others in Delta, he realized that having no specialized headquarters above the unit left it at the mercy of ad hoc arrangements in which it would have no say, for instance, in who provided its air support. Within a few weeks of returning, a group of senior Delta figures had sketched a design for what Beckwith called “a tier-type organization”—a command that encompassed all the units required for special operations missions of strategic importance, in which failure was not an option. In mid-May, Beckwith’s main bureaucratic supporter, Army Chief of Staff General Edward “Shy” Meyer, ordered him to bring his proposed design for such a headquarters to Washington.3