For two weeks, from 0600 until 2000 hours every day, the Azeris would be run through an exhausting, concentrated tactical team-building course that would give them the rudiments of SpecWar—everything from dynamic entry and CQC, to tracking, setting ambushes, and basic EOD work with improvised explosive devices. They’d learn maritime operations, airborne assault, and survival skills. And while they were learning, we’d be watching. That way, when we got back to Washington, Rotten Randy would be able to put together an operations manual about how the Azeri special forces worked. So that if we ever had to operate against ’em, we’d know how they waged war. That, friends, is what the JCET program is REALLY about.
And while the training was going on, Avi and I, with the help of Boomerang, Duck Foot, Gator, and Nod, would v-e-r-y quietly set up two separate covert strikes. One in Iran, and the other in Armenia.
How would we do that? By taking a lesson from my own experience. We would use the Azeri training as cover for our own very covert, and deadly, operations.
Now, the truth can finally be told about how I was able to run more than two dozen successful covert counterterrorist ops when I commanded the infamous Red Cell at the behest of legendary Admiral James “Ace” Lyons.
Red Cell’s mission, on paper at least, was to conduct FXs—field exercises—at naval installations worldwide. The exercises were designed to raise the Navy’s overall consciousness about terrorist infiltration and hostage-taking techniques. Red Cell operators, most of whom were in fact experienced shooters from SEAL Team Six, would surveil Navy installations. Then they would conduct mock terrorist attacks, exploiting the weaknesses they’d discovered, and illustrating for the on-site security personnel how those weaknesses could be modified and the targets hardened, making life for any real tangos much more difficult and costly.
In truth, however, Admiral “Ace” Lyons had designed Red Cell as a cover op. Oh, we ran our FXs all right—my men terrorized dozens of one-, two-, three-, and four-star admirals with lots of scrambled eggs on their hat brims (not to mention lots of shit for their brains). And I’m proud to say that we taught an entire generation of sailors how to become sensitized to terrorism and guard against it.
But that wasn’t our real mission. Our real mission was to kill terrorists. And so, virtually every time we conducted an exercise, both here in the United States and abroad, I would disappear for a short time and lead a small nucleus of shooters in a well-coordinated and totally covert hit against real tangos. If we’d ever fucked up, it would have meant the end of Ace’s career (mine was already in the toilet). But Ace didn’t care. To him, ridding the world of a few dozen world-class bad guys was worth the risk of a court-martial.
You want examples. Okay. When we tested the security at the Groton, Connecticut, nuclear sub base, my real target was a certain sailor who was selling secrets about our sub cruise schedules to the Soviets. According to the New London, Connecticut, newspapers, he fell into the water, hit his head, and drowned, poor guy. Sure he did. I was delighted: we pulled off such a clean hit that the Sovs never realized I’d neutralized one of their best sources. I was less concerned about leaving a mess in the Philippines, where Red Cell spent three weeks at Subic Bay. In fact (and on videotape!), we actually took an aircraft carrier out of action by proving that terrorists could ram its unguarded flank with a speedboat filled with high explosives, rendering it unseaworthy. Another of my Red Cell units took two hundred officers and men prisoners at the base’s O-Club. We kidnapped dependents at the McDonald’s. We “blew up” a radio tower and shut down all the base communications networks for eight hours.
And while all that confusion was taking place, much of it simultaneously and a lot of it covered by the local press, three of my best operators and I dropped out of sight for twelve hours and made our way into the slums of Manila. There, operating in mufti, and sans any backup, we tracked down the five leaders of the Alex Boncayao Brigade, the main assassination squad for the New People’s Army, which is the military wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines.
Three months previously, a sparrow team33 from the ABB had murdered U.S. Army Colonel Jim Rowe. I’d known Jim since Christ was a mess cook. He was a real hero, a combat-seasoned Warrior; a man committed to the ideals of democracy and freedom. Jim was one of very few Americans who’d actually escaped from a VC prison camp during the Vietnam War. He could have retired. He didn’t. Instead, he volunteered for duty in the Philippines. His reward? Two hitmen from the ABB assassinated him as he left his job one day.
But fortunately (if there can be a fortunate aspect of this incident), his murder took place when George Bush was president. George Herbert Walker Bush may have looked like a WASP banker. But believe me, the man had balls of U-235. The day he was told that Jim had been murdered, he personally called Ace Lyons and told him, “Ace, this cannot stand. You deal with it.”
So, Ace ordered me to set up an FX at Subic Bay. My prep time was ninety days—barely enough to develop the kind of tactical intel necessary to pull off a hit in absolute stealth.34 We carried all our equipment in specially built Red Cell Conex boxes, which had secret compartments that allowed us to carry sanitized weapons, ordnance, and other specialized killing equipment.
My intel—and great intel it was, too—was developed by my old shipmate Tony Mercaldi, who was one of maybe three people in the world who knew what Red Cell was really about. And Tony always came through.
He certainly did in Manila. It took him sixty-eight days of working without creating a single ripple to do it, but he was finally able to identify the safe house where the ABB leadership met once a month. We hit it. And yeah, we killed them all. Messily. With what the Hollywood writer-assholes call “extreme prejudice.” Then we decapitated the corpses and left the tangos propped up against the wall, holding their own heads in their lifeless hands as a sign to their comrades that we Yankees were serious fuckin’ dudes. Then we hauled our butts back to Subic, in plenty of time for me to get a new asshole reamed by the pussy-ass can’t-cunt sit-down-to-make-wee-wee four-star who thought my Red Cell “tangos” had played too rough with his poor sailors. If he’d only known.
Here and now, I would run a similar game in Azerbaijan. Since my stealth arrival had been blown, I’d use the JCET mission to provide cover for us. And Araz’s troops would be our unwitting camouflage. We’d schedule our JCET exercises in the border areas we would be using to stage our real-world hits. The Azeris would proposition equipment for their training—and we’d use much of it ourselves. Sure, it would be complicated. And if Araz was as smart as I believed him to be, he might get a little suspicious. But he wouldn’t be able to prove anything and neither would anyone else.
Of course, the schedule I was designing meant precious little sleep for me and my band of shoot-and-looters. But then, you don’t become a SEAL for the light schedule and the ease of operations.
Bright and early, I detailed Boomerang, Randy Michaels, Nod, Half Pint, Pick, Mustang, and Goober to meet with Araz and begin preliminary work with his troops. While they did that, I sent Rodent, Gator, Butch, Nigel, Digger, Timex, Duck Foot, and Hammer to recce the city. I wanted to see who was following whom. My boys were good street operators. And because I allow ’em to look like your everyday dirt-bag, they looked no different from the thousands of expatriate Brits and Americans, Frenchies, Italians, Norwegians, and Turks who’d come here to work the oil fields and make a bundle of tax-free cash. And me? I used my first twenty-four hours to gather intel in the Iranian/Russkie alliance.
I didn’t have to worry about the Armenian angle. Avi already had the goods on everything going on in that AO.35
How come? It’s because the Israelis are tight with the Turks as well as the Azeris. Turkish pilots train in Israel. So do elite Turkish troops. And as you probably know (if you don’t, you should pay more attention in your geography classes), Yerevan, the Armenian capital city, is no more than twenty kliks from the Turkish border and just about sixty miles due north of the place t
he Turks call Büyükagri Dagi, and we call Mount Ararat, where Noah’s Ark is supposed to have landed after the Flood. That area, close both to Armenia and Iran, is where the Israelis have established half a dozen listening posts, where they suck TECHINT, SIGINT, and ELINT36 out of the air. Moreover, using small, virtually undetectable sixth-generation Kevlar-skinned UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) outfitted with FLIR (Forward-Looking InfraRed) and high-resolution television lenses, they regularly reconnoiter a two-hundred-mile radial arc that stretches from the Armenian enclave of Mountainous Karabakh, to the Iranian city of Khoy.
See, unlike us, the Israelis don’t give a shit about violating Armenian or Iranian sovereignty. They need information—and they are willing to do what they have to do to get it. Without good intelligence, they could be overrun; their country destroyed before they could react. And so, they operate proactively in their own national interest. In fact, they sometimes piss us off mightily, because from time to time, the Israeli national interest has nothing whatsoever to do with the United States’ national interest, and the United States comes up holding the short end of the stick. We tend to think of the other guy in situations like that. The Israelis don’t. If it comes to a question of us or them, they will take them—and I can’t blame ’em. In fact, we could learn a few lessons about acting like WARRIORS, instead of pussies, from the Israelis if you ask me.
But this wasn’t the time for one of my sermons about how the politicians and the bureaucrats make messy pudding out of national policy. It was time to get some intel on the Iranian tangos. And let me tell you, I owe my pals Pepperman and Mercaldi big time. You already know that the FA37 tangos we’d waxed on the oil rig had been based at the old CIA listening post at Astara.
Well, Pepperman risked his job and faxed me some interesting imagery. From the look of things, there had been a Spetsnaz Alpha Group training mission on site. How could I tell? I could tell because they’d set up the obstacle course, the kill houses, and the sniping ranges in the very same pattern I’d seen during the Cold War when I pored over satellite imagery of Spetsnaz training facilities in the Soviet Union. Just to be certain, I secure-faxed the images back to Tony Merc at DIA.
Merc called me on the secure phone not sixty seconds after the fax had been transmitted. “Holy shit,” quoth he, “why the fuck hasn’t anybody sent this stuff over here before?”
A good question. Why hadn’t this significant development become apparent to our army of qualified analysts at Langley, Fort Meade, and Bolling Air Force Base? The answer is that those analysts were never given the imagery in the first place. The administration’s orders were that satellite imagery was to be concentrated on monitoring the tense situation in India and Pakistan (where they have not a single HUMINT source), keeping tabs on the North Korean nuclear program (ditto), watching drug growers in South America (ditto, because the CIA has been forbidden to utilize agents who may have committed any crimes), and using our 2.3-million-bucks-a-day-to-keep-’em-in-orbit surveillance devices to help keep the peace in Northern fucking Ireland, where the political situation has, of late, turned into the proverbial goatfuck.
Now, you know and I know that using a multi-billion-dollar Lacrosse satellite to monitor the situation in Northern Ireland is a total waste of money. We’d be better off if the CIA had half a dozen agents in IRA splinter groups and Protestant paramilitaries. But that might mean recruiting someone who has, at one point in their lives, done something naughty. And the zero-defect CIA wants only the purest of the pure as agents these days. Maybe they could recruit a bunch of two-year-olds. But BJB wants to show his Brit pals how “committed” we are to the Good Friday peace agreement. And so we spent twelve billion dollars last year flying a bird over Belfast. Then there’s the pair of Keyhole-13s we have sitting twenty-two thousand miles above Colombia and Peru. Guess what—the twelve billion bucks they cost us don’t mean that we allow one gram less of cocaine into the United States.
“Those birds are nothing but political priorities,” is how Pepperman put it. “The administration cut our budget by forty percent over the past six years. Now we’re being told we gotta give ’em only what they ask for an’ no more, or we get cut back some more. It’s like they don’ wanna know nuthin’ about nuthin’.”
Kinda makes you want to puke, doesn’t it? So far as I am concerned, it’s almost as if our intelligence-gathering agencies are being misdirected on purpose. It’s almost as if our foreign policy is being directed by agents of our adversaries.
Which is not out of the question. You already know about all those Chinese campaign donations to Clinton and Gore. You already know that Chinese military officials were given access to the White House and its secrets. You already know that hundreds of thousands of dollars were donated to the 1996 Clinton/Gore campaign by quiet emissaries of the Colombian drug cartels. You don’t? Then you should start reading the newspapers. Because there’s more: agents of other foreign countries, from Thailand to Lebanon, realized early on that they could buy access and influence to the highest levels of the United States government simply by putting large amounts of what’s known in politics as “soft money” into organizations that then channeled the funds into Clinton/Gore coffers. Shit, many of my friends in the intelligence community believe that the whole Monica Lewinsky mess was brought about to distract the country from the real damage being done, i.e., the subversion, the leaks of TECHINT, and other traitorous acts allowed by this administration.
So I had good reason to believe that attention was being drawn away from this area of the world on purpose. Could I prove it? Not yet—but if you know me, you know that I will ultimately ferret out the traitors, then kill ’em.
But first things first. I’d scheduled a meeting with the RSO for 1000 hours to discuss the general situation, and get his read on the local players.
At 0730, said RSO called and cancelled the meet. He was apologetic. He was sheepish. I knew from the way he danced around the subject that he’d been ordered not to see me.
So, to make absolutely sure I’d read the situation correctly, I suggested we meet for a quiet, private drink at the Filarmoni Club, a seafood joint on the corner of Milari Gashai Prospekt (that’s the Russkie word for avenue) and Nizami Street, after he got off from work.
There was a long, and very awkward pause, which I allowed to go on, and on, and on, at his end of the line. Then he said, “I’m real sorry, Captain, no can do.” There was another pause equally as painful. Finally, he sort of whispered: “Look, Dick, it’s just impossible. We can’t do any business. That’s just the way it has to be. Sorry.” And he hung up.
Message received. Loud and clear. And so, it was time for Plan B. I made contact with Ashley Evans on the secure cell phone, by working through Tony Mercaldi, who just loved playing “telephone” at zero dark hundred Washington time, and asked for a meeting, ASAP.
By 0820, we’d made our arrangements. For obvious reasons, we both needed to keep our rendezvous private. And so, after checking for static surveillance outside her flat and finding none, Ashley had suggested I come over to the apartment she occupied on the fourth floor of what Merc described as a five-story rococo, 1920s apartment house on Evendiyev Street, about a fifteen-minute walk south and east of the embassy compound on upper Azadiyg Avenue, and a twenty-minute ride through Baku traffic from the Grand Europe Hotel, where I was staying.
But I knew my trip to Ashley’s would take a lot longer than twenty minutes. Before we could meet I’d have to deal with whoever the fuck was surveilling me.
Surveilling? You bet. You already know my room is bugged. And my guys had already alerted me to the fact that there were surveillance teams, counter-surveillance teams, and counter-countersurveillance teams outside the Grand Europe Hotel. A CNN producer was lurking in the lobby. A Washington Post reporter was sniffing around. The word was obviously out. I had two questions. First, who’d leaked information about JCET to the press, and second, who was doing the watching: Russkies, Iranians, spies from Ambassador
Madison’s office—or all of the above.
I slipped on my HK P7-M13, adjusted the inside waistband holster to just where I wanted it, and dropped two extra thirteen-round mags into the left-hand back pocket of my jeans. Then I pulled on my photographer’s vest,38 took my cellular phone and a few other goodies, and decided to find out.
First, let me give you a little geography lesson. The city of Baku sits on the southern rim of the Apsheronskiy Peninsula, which juts out into the Caspian. The peninsula itself looks like a short arm, and Baku’s downtown is in the armpit position, which is appropriate enough, given the constant stink of petroleum, sweat, and dirt in the always dusty air. The city itself is an eclectic mix of architecture. There’s old Azerbaijan: the mosques, and the sorts of two-, three-, and four-story houses with louvered windows and marble floors that are common from Damascus to Kabul. There are scores of ornate palaces and hotels from the days of the 1920s’ oil boom, most of which have deteriorated over the years. There are the boxy relics of the Soviet Union: massive, ugly fortresslike apartment blocs and office complexes. And there are the spanking new glass-and-steel towers of the post-Soviet era, evidence of the new capitalism that has made millionaires of the hundreds of Azeris who know how to get things done—what the late and unlamented Roscoe Grogan would call expediting—in this rapidly metamorphosing society.
I came out of the hotel, pressed a five-dollar bill into the doorman’s hand, elbowed a proper businessman in a three-piece striped seersucker suit, straw boater, and two-toned shoes out of the way, and jumped into his waiting taxi. “Hyatt, pazhalstuh.”
The driver swiveled, looked me over, rubbed his left forefinger back and forth over a thick, handlebar mustache in which the remnants of a recent meal could be discerned, then grunted, “Da.” Then we both went to work. He eased his old Peugeot station wagon into gear, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, and sputtered down the driveway, while I scanned the area for hostiles. And it didn’t take long to find ’em. A Mercedes coupe with two round-faced, heavy-set men inside pulled away from the curb on the opposite side of the road, U-turned, and swung into the knotty traffic flow half a dozen cars behind us.
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