Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (7 page)

The first of these crises began June 14, 1985, when two Lebanese Shi'ite terrorists hijacked Trans World Airlines Flight 847 carrying 153 passengers and crew en route from Athens to Rome and forced the pilots to fly to Beirut, where they refueled and began a two-day pattern of shuttling between the Lebanese capital and Algiers, releasing most of the hostages before stopping permanently in Beirut June 16 with forty American men as their remaining captives. On the second stop in Beirut, on the morning of June 14, the hijackers viciously beat Robert Stethem, one of six U.S. Navy divers on the flight, before killing him with a shot to the head and dumping his body on the tarmac. The terrorists also took nineteen American prisoners off the plane and held them in Beirut while about a dozen more well-armed hijackers came aboard, including Imad Mugniyah, Hezbollah's youthful “enforcer,” who would remain a major player in Middle East terrorism for more than two decades.

Meanwhile, the JSOC and Delta compounds were a blur of activity. A report on the television that Delta kept tuned to CNN at all times alerted the unit's watch officer to the crisis, who in turn contacted individual unit members at home via beeper, using a numeric code to tell them to prepare for a rapid deployment. Similar processes were under way at Dam Neck and Fort Campbell with Team 6 and TF 160, respectively. At JSOC headquarters, where officers first learned of the hijacking from BBC and Reuters reports, not from Washington, staff pulled up profiles of the Algiers and Beirut airports from the command's database. The various headquarters also put into practice a new telephone routine intended to keep everyone with a need to know up to speed on events. “When all this hijacking shit started, they built this system where once a plane's hijacked, phones ring everywhere that there are people that are supposed to be involved, and you can never hang up—somebody's got to stay on that phone,” said a JSOC staff officer from the period.

Early that morning, the Joint Chiefs told Stiner to put a task force together and draw up a rescue plan. At Bragg, Dam Neck, and Campbell, troops were ready to go, but, not for the first or last time, the Air Force's Military Assistance Command had no planes or crews immediately available to deploy them. The Pentagon also wanted to wait to see where TWA 847 ended up before deploying the task force. That meant JSOC missed the best opportunity to rescue the hostages: when the plane was on the ground for the first time at Algiers, with only two lightly armed hijackers. By the time the Air Force was able to provide airlift and the Reagan administration had made a decision to launch the task force, the hijackers had killed Stethem. The task force flew overnight and landed on the morning of June 15 at Naval Air Station Sigonella on the Italian island of Sicily. Stiner planned to use the joint Italian-U.S. facility as an intermediate staging base and quickly set up an operations center inside a hangar. A pair of MC-130 Combat Talons (Air Force special operations variants of the venerable Hercules turboprop transport plane) flew in from England. A TWA Boeing 727 identical to that used by Flight 847 also arrived. Delta regularly trained on airliners awaiting destruction at an aircraft boneyard at North Carolina's Laurinburg-Maxton Airport, but the opportunity to rehearse the planned takedown using an exact replica of the hijacked airliner was priceless. TWA's loan of the 727 meant the operators could also use it as a Trojan horse to bring them unnoticed into either Algiers or Beirut. (If it came to that, the plan was for the Delta operators to land in “their” 727, put it nose-to-nose with the hijacked plane, free the hostages, “turn the other one around and fly off,” said a Delta operator.)

The night of the 15th offered another opportunity for a rescue mission, although it would be a tougher challenge now that the terrorists had been reinforced. A couple of operators had infiltrated Algiers to keep watch over the target and report back to Sigonella over satellite radio. “They were in the bushes, they could walk up, put their hands on the fence and look at everything that was going on at the airfield and then go back in the bushes and talk to us,” said a JSOC staffer. A JSOC officer in Sigonella was on the hangar roof—the only place the task force's satellite communications worked—talking to a general in the White House Situation Room. The JSOC officer told the general the task force was ready to launch the mission, but the White House needed to give the okay within the next hour and forty-five minutes or they would run out of the darkness deemed essential to the plan. The opportunity for JSOC to conduct its first set-piece counterterrorism operation beckoned. “This was the closest we'd ever come to being told we could do it,” said a JSOC staffer. “We were getting excited.” The Algerian government was steadfastly opposed to a military rescue, however. To the utter frustration of the operators and staff gathered in the hangar on Sicily, the White House never gave the okay. The next morning the hijackers ordered the plane flown back to their home base of Beirut, where they took the hostages off the plane, eventually distributing them around Hezbollah safe houses in southern Beirut.

Stiner moved the entire task force to the British Royal Air Force base at Akrotiri in Cyprus. By now the task force was almost 400 strong, including two Delta squadrons, about fifty Team 6 operators, plus elements of TF 160 and ISA (deployed on the authority of the DIA) and other military and intelligence personnel. (Seaspray helicopters and crews also deployed to Europe during the crisis.) The entire force was in one enormous hangar. The near-constant presence overhead of two Soviet reconnaissance satellites meant the operators could only train outside at night or during two one-hour periods of daylight.

Aided by information from a four-man team that had infiltrated Beirut via Black Hawk, as well as the Delta operators attached to the embassy security detail, JSOC drew up a series of elaborate rescue plans involving air assaults and AC-130 gunships, but the intelligence on the hostages' location was never solid enough to act on. (This lack of what JSOC referred to as “actionable intelligence” would remain a constant challenge for the command, particularly in Lebanon.) While the JSOC task force cooled its collective heels in Cyprus, the diplomats went to work. Sixteen days after the crisis began, Hezbollah released the hostages. In exchange, but never publicly acknowledged as such by the Reagan administration, Israel released 700 Lebanese Shi'ite prisoners it had been holding.

The TWA 847 hijacking had been another wrenching humiliation for the United States and an exercise in bitter frustration for JSOC. The terrorists had stayed one step ahead of the Americans throughout. They had realized that the keys to preventing a rescue attempt were to never remain in one place too long while on the plane, and to separate the hostages into small groups once off the jet.

At JSOC, there was aggravation that the operators had not gotten to Sigonella quickly enough to launch the first time the plane landed at Algiers, and had not been approved to launch after the jet returned there for a twenty-four-hour period. That frustration was exacerbated by information they received from debriefing hostages after their release. “When we take an airplane down, 80 percent of the holes to get into that airplane are in the first-class section,” said a JSOC staff officer. “What they [the terrorists] had done is they had taken all the passengers and put them back in coach. And all the bad guys were up [in first class] sitting around bullshitting.… So it would have been like shooting ducks if they had just let us go that fucking night.”

Upon his return to the United States, Stiner visited the Pentagon and spoke directly to the Joint Chiefs in the Tank. The JSOC commander did not mince his words. “We ought to be able to understand that the terrorists understand better than we do the timing of the decision-making process here in Washington and the time required for launching and getting to where they have perpetrated their action—and that they are operating within that cycle,” he told the assembled brass. “Consequently we are always chasing our tail—and we always will be unless we do something about this situation. We are the most powerful nation in the world and if we cannot give this mission the appropriate priority—with dedicated lift assets—then we ought to get out of this business and quit wasting the taxpayers' money.”

It was a tense, critical moment in JSOC's history. Stiner was gambling that Vessey and at least a couple of other chiefs would support him. He was right. Within several months, the Air Force placed multiple double-crewed C-141 Starlifters at Charleston Air Force Base, South Carolina, on the same alert status as the special mission units. JSOC finally had its J-alert birds.
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In September, Stiner and a JSOC task force were back in the eastern Mediterranean, this time preparing for a shot at the Holy Grail of 1980s counterterrorist missions, a rescue of the U.S. hostages that Hezbollah was holding in Lebanon. The United States had received intelligence that the Shi'ite group might be about to release its American prisoners. Stiner was ordered to prepare to pick them up and return them to the United States covertly, but to be ready for a rescue mission in case things went badly. As it turned out, Hezbollah freed only one hostage, the Reverend Benjamin Weir. At midnight September 14 a car traveling Beirut's deserted streets slowed near the American University. Weir emerged in a tracksuit and was met by a Delta operator who took him to a spot on the coast before sending a coded message. Soon a helicopter appeared speeding across the sea, picked the pair up, and flew them to a waiting aircraft carrier over the horizon.

To the operators' frustration, however, there was to be no rescue of the other hostages. Shortly before deploying to the Mediterranean, JSOC had run a major rehearsal for a hostage rescue mission into Lebanon at Nevada's Nellis Air Force Range, which was home to Groom Lake, often referred to as “Area 51.” JSOC often used the secret facility to replicate foreign military radar arrays, which it would then use to test its ability to penetrate them. Intelligence indicated Hezbollah was holding the hostages in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, so JSOC “got the whole lay-down of all the radars in that area and we went out to Area 51,” said a JSOC staff officer. The operational concept had TF 160 helicopters launching at night from a carrier or another location in the area and flying below Syrian air defense radar into the Bekaa. “We put some trailers out there with ‘hostages' in them and the Rangers and Delta were going to go in and rescue those ‘hostages,'” the staffer said. In the event, a radar sweep caught the briefest of glimpses of the assault force, when a single helicopter climbed slightly too high. By the time the radar came around again, the aircraft had dropped out of sight. But with the exception of a JSOC visitor, no one in the radar control room had noticed. “We got in and got the guys and got them out and those radars never picked us up,” the JSOC staffer said.

The exercise results delighted Stiner. Skeptics had told JSOC there was no way for a hostage rescue force to infiltrate the Bekaa. He believed the exercise proved them wrong. “He went to Washington and told them, ‘We have that capability if you need us to do it,'” said the JSOC staffer. But infiltrating the Bekaa was only half the challenge. The other half, as always, was determining the hostages' exact location in the first place. There was intense debate over the intelligence community's ability to do this, even with the help of Delta operators who went into Lebanon undercover in late 1985. According to Stiner, the best chance to rescue the hostages came a few months after Weir's release, when the intelligence community believed it had identified a building in West Beirut to which Hezbollah had moved the hostages. JSOC found a similar building “in the western United States” and modified its interior to match that of the Beirut structure. The command rehearsed the rescue, but two weeks prior to the planned D-day, Hezbollah discovered and rolled up the agent network that had located the hostages. The mission was canceled. “There was never again sufficient credible intelligence to support a rescue attempt,” Stiner wrote.

In 1986, ISA, which moved into new headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, in August of that year, developed another network of agents that provided allegedly detailed and accurate intelligence on the hostages' location. In June of that year JSOC conducted a hostage rescue exercise code-named Quiz Icing. But the command remained leery of any intelligence that it did not generate itself. With no intelligence it deemed actionable, JSOC remained on the sidelines.
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Four months after their TWA 847 frustration, JSOC's operators experienced déjà vu when Middle Eastern hijackers again struck a Mediterranean target packed with Americans. But this time the terrorists were from the Palestinian Liberation Organization's Palestinian Liberation Front, and their target was the
Achille Lauro,
an Italian cruise ship with ninety-seven passengers, including eighteen Americans, and 344 crew members on board. Stiner was returning from a run the morning of October 7 when his intelligence officer met him at the gate to the JSOC compound and told him of the hijacking.

JSOC was now on its way to becoming a colossus. The JOC had become a state-of-the-art affair, incorporating secure communications to JSOC's subordinate units and all U.S. major commands, computer workstations for the staff, terminals connected to major news organizations, and an intelligence center manned by watch officers around the clock. The task force Stiner quickly assembled was a custom-designed amalgam of elite forces that had few if any equals in the world. It was also rather large.

Unlike the TWA hijacking, the
Achille Lauro
presented JSOC with a maritime target. This time SEAL Team 6 would have the lead role. Stiner told Dam Neck to alert assault and sniper teams plus special boat detachments. As usual, TF 160's standard alert package was part of the task force. At the time, the package included ten Black Hawks, six AH-6s, and four MH-6s. The task force also contained an Air Force special tactics element from Det 4 NAFCOS (Detachment 4, Numbered Air Force Combat Operations Staff—the renamed Det 1 MACOS), roughly a squadron's worth of Delta operators and Stiner's command group, which included the usual cells devoted to operations and plans, intelligence, communications, and medicine.