by Robin Moore
But even as the USS Mount Whitney was steaming to rendezvous with the 82nd Airborne, President Clinton was pursuing a final diplomatic move to oust Cedras and his military junta. He had sent former President Jimmy Carter, Senator Sam Nunn, and General Colin Powell to make a last attempt to negotiate with General Cedras a peaceful entry into Haiti. They were negotiating in the capital as the operation was moving into the execution phase.
Two nights before the invasion, 16-17 September, Navy SEALs and Special Boat Units had launched their craft from USS Nashville and they were out in the waters around Cap-Haitien, the northernmost port in Haiti, conducting a pre-invasion reconnaissance of the coastline, collecting intelligence and hydrographic data on potential landing sites originally scheduled for the 19th. The SEALs conducted their missions despite the large number of Haitians present on the beach and in small vessels. The water was thick with native traffic, and strewn with garbage, and the SEALs heard Haitians beating drums on the shore. The ensuing landings on the morning of 21 September proceeded flawlessly and verified the accuracy of the SEALs’ work.
As the countdown for the 82nd Airborne drop and beginning of hostilities approached, General Shelton was in constant communication with Admiral Miller, while Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Shalikashvili was in the White House, leaving the Oval Office at frequent intervals to brief Admiral Miller and to speak on the secure phone direct to Gen. Shelton on the command ship. President Clinton was talking to Jimmy Carter on another secure phone as the former President negotiated with Cedras in Haiti. Carter reported he was getting very close to an agreement for a peaceful entry.
On the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower the troops of the 10th Mountain Division, of which Shelton had been the chief of staff in 1986, were prepared to be ferried ashore in 55 helicopters as soon as the 82nd Airborne had secured the airport.
On USS America General Shelton had placed his Special Operations Forces, Green Berets, and other unconventional fighters ready to board another sixty choppers which would land them in pre-selected sites around Haiti.
On the nearby island of Great Inagua, the 82nd Airborne’s helicopter air assault squadron, in which one of the pilots was General Shelton’s son, prepared to take off as part of the invasion.
It is also interesting to note that the current Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Johnson, was in August and September 1994, General Shelton’s Navy Component Commander during the Haiti Operation and Commander of the Second Fleet. In fact, his flag ship was the USS Mount Whitney when Shelton became the Joint Task Force Commander in August ’94.
Had Cedras known the size and virtuosity of the forces about to hit his army he would not have delayed until the final minutes to capitulate and allow the Americans to land peacefully. Rather than put himself and the entire Haitian military establishment in jeopardy of being destroyed in one overwhelming operation, he would have conceded immediately instead of waiting until the last minute to surrender.
When Jimmy Carter called President Clinton from the President’s Palace in Port-au-Prince to report that Cedras had at the final moment capitulated, the engines of 300 Air Force planes had started up without a single failure. Everything was clicking like clockwork in accordance with the plan.
Literally moments before the invasion was to start Gen. Cedras and former President Carter agreed on an American peaceful entry and Cedras promised to leave Haiti permanently when President Aristide was restored to power. Shelton was notified from the White House to call off the invasion and prepare for an orderly, peaceful entrance to Haiti.
The 82nd Airborne paratroopers were about to stand up, hook up, and shuffle toward the door. The ground special operations “sneaky Petes,” who had infiltrated Haiti on the days before, had their signal lights ready to be turned skyward, marking the Drop Zone within the airport perimeter, when General Shelton personally gave the order to the 82nd Airborne to turn around and fly back to Fort Bragg.
General Shelton could easily share the intense emotion, the anger and frustration in the airplanes as the paratroopers he had planned to lead and who had been preparing for this mission for weeks, were ordered back to home base. Shelton’s son, the helicopter pilot, was angered because he thought his father had made the turnaround decision. He, like so many of the warriors with minds set on attacking, did not realize it had been a national decision, made by President Clinton.
The next morning the 10th Mountain Division was peacefully ferried into the Port-au-Prince Airport by the helicopters from the USS Eisenhower. General Shelton followed right behind them from USS Mount Whitney to meet with Ambassador Swing and others who had been left behind by the negotiating team of former President Carter, Gen. Powell, and Sen. Nunn. General Shelton was duly proud of the great men and women under his command who that day went from being a camouflage-painted invasion force to entering Haiti with different rules of engagement and the attitude of a peace-keeping operation.
Shelton gave considerable thought to what uniform he should be wearing when he entered Port-au-Prince. He had already decided to keep the troops in full battle gear, which would send a clear signal to the police and soldiers under General Cedras’ command. We’re here to be nice guys if you’ll let us, but if you’re not—well we’re here to take care of business. You will allow the legitimate government of Haiti to come back one way or the other. We can do this easily or you can make it hard on yourselves.
“I decided that when I went to see Cedras I would go in unarmed, with my beret on, to show I wasn’t coming as a fighter or an invasion guide,” General Shelton remembered. Former President Carter had briefed Gen. Shelton by telephone out on the Mount Whitney and told him the deal he thought he had struck. Shelton went immediately to Cedras’ headquarters the next morning. “I must admit, although I portrayed being unarmed and unafraid, I had four Navy SEALs that went everywhere I went,” he confessed. “They were rock hard and really sharp shooters well prepared to fight.”
Shelton vividly recalls his first visit to Cedras’ headquarters. “He had armed soldiers all over the place. I went upstairs to where his office was. He knew I was coming.”
Cedras and his staff and Shelton with U.S. Ambassador Swing and U.S. Embassy representatives, the four SEALs standing behind them, faced each other. Cedras was a tall man, but Shelton, at six feet five, was taller and even more imposing. They shook hands and sat down, Cedras and his team on one side of the table, the Americans on the other.
General Shelton told Cedras that he was there to restore the legitimate government and the duly-elected president, Bertrand Aristide to Haiti. His instructions were to try and do it in an atmosphere of cooperation and coordination. Cedras acknowledged Shelton’s opening with a curt nod, taking copious notes. He appeared to understand English although a French interpreter was present.
“Now let me define how I see that,” General Shelton continued. “You’re going to cooperate with me. When I tell you to do something, you’ll do it. But the second you stop doing what I tell you to do, you’ll no longer get any coordination. We in fact will just do it. And if you resist you’ll pay a severe penalty. Do you understand that?”
Cedras looked up from his notes and said, “I understand.”
Shelton knew that Cedras kept his heavy weapons, artillery, mortars, his mounted machine-guns and B150 rocket launchers at Camp d’Application, outside of Port-au-Prince. To test his opponent Shelton stated, “My men and I will be at Camp d’Application tomorrow morning. I want you to have whoever is in charge of the camp meet me and my officers there and to turn over all of that ordnance to us. Do you understand that?”
This was the real moment of truth, Shelton thought. If Cedras gave up all his heavy weapons, his military capability was finished. He would have had it. The Haitian general hesitated, taking more notes. Then he looked up and with an abrupt nod said, “Okay.”
General Shelton breathed a sigh of relief. From then on he merely implemented the plan he and his staff had developed
since the mission had so abruptly and mercifully changed.
No time was wasted positioning green beret A teams in twenty different locations throughout the country making the American presence securely felt. The Marines landed in Cap-Haitien according to plan and secured the northern section of Haiti. The entire joint operation was fine testimony to a well-trained team. As Secretary of Defense William Perry put it to General Shelton later on, “The only reason you could do what you did was because you had a Super Bowl team that could respond to an audible at the line of scrimmage.” A great analogy, Shelton thought. It really was a well-trained Joint Task Force (JTF) with some skilled leaders.
Cedras never gave up trying to see if he could get away with not complying with General Shelton’s orders. However, at every turn he found he was completely out of his league. One night in Cap-Haitien, a Marine lieutenant and his eight-man squad were patrolling outside of the city when they were taken under fire by a group of Haitian soldiers. When the firefight was over, ten Haitians were dead and not one American was wounded. Cedras flew up at six A.M. the next morning to look at the bodies. This was a shock to him—nothing had happened to the Americans and he had lost ten.
Cedras still maintained garrisons, and had a particularly strong one at Cap-Haitien where the commander had the temerity to defy an American order to stop patrolling. Shelton then deployed a company of Rangers off the USS America and in their Blackhawk helicopters they landed on the garrison, seized it, lined up the Haitian troops and stripped them of all their weapons and equipment. The next morning Shelton went to Cedras’ headquarters. Cedras asked what had happened out at the site the previous night.
“You know what happened and if any of your men disobey another order from us, I will line up and strip every soldier, policeman, and civilian in every garrison and other site you have in this country. You will cease to exist as an institution. Do you understand?”
Cedras looked up from his copious note-taking. “I understand.” There wasn’t another incident the entire time Shelton was in Haiti.
To further drive his point home an AC 130 helicopter gun ship constantly circled overhead wherever Cedras happened to be, like his own personal storm cloud. The Gatling-type guns on the aircraft had the capability of pouring fire down from the sky, obliterating everything on the ground. The “specter” gun ship, sometimes called Spooky or Puff the Magic Dragon in Vietnam, had an unnerving effect on Cedras. He asked Shelton why the gun ship kept circling overhead wherever he happened to be in Haiti.
“General, you’d better hope you never have to find out,” Shelton replied.
General Shelton’s final mission in Haiti was to see General Cedras off to permanent exile in Panama and to return President Aristide to the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince. He then returned to his command of Fort Bragg and the XVIII Airborne Corps.
From November of 1994 to February 1996 General Shelton tended his command in his home state of North Carolina with the time to deepen friendships between the civilian and military establishments.
On the subject of terrorism within the United States and our allied nations, General Shelton is probably the most knowledgeable military mind in America. In February of 1996 he became USCINCSOC in Tampa, Florida, or to decode military terminology, United States Commander in Chief Special Operations Command. This is a joint command of army, navy, and air force special operations.
The concept of the green berets, Rangers, Navy SEALs special boat units, and Air commandos under one commander came as a result of a tragic lesson learned from President Carter’s effort to go into Teheran and free the American hostages held by the Islamic terrorists who had taken over the American Embassy in Iran.
With the various elements under separate command structures and locations, the helicopters, green berets, assault troops, and naval elements could not function as a single joint cohesive special operations force to successfully carry out their mission. The tragic failure of the Iranian hostage rescue mission made the concept of a single commander of a joint SOF mission imperative.
Operation Left Hook, one of the largest air assaults in history, marked the final days of Desert Storm and the disastrous culmination of Saddam Hussein’s “Mother of All Battles” in January 1991.
As Assistant Division Commander of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) in the Gulf War against Iraq, then Brigadier General Shelton was a key planner and commander of the operation which drove the Iraqi army out of Kuwait and back to Baghdad. The general’s memory of flying over U.S. forces as they streaked across the desert after Iraq’s elite division, cutting off their retreat to Basra, the port city on the way back to Baghdad, remain vivid.
Assault and attack helicopters filled the air, and hundreds of rooster tails of sand plumed out of the desert in the wake of the armored vehicles careening after the Iraqis at 40 miles an hour. A huge American garrison flag, one that would dwarf the size of the banner that opened the movie Patton, billowed out behind a ten ton supply truck following the tanks.
Looking down from his command helicopter, General Shelton will never forget the stirring battle formation closing in on the invading Iraqis now turned to flight across the desert. “God, Saddam,” he thought, “I hope you know what you’re in for, because here comes the United States Army at its best, and we’re coming at you, Babe!”
And sure enough, Saddam took heed of the vastly superior forces crushing his own army and killing thousands of his troops. The Iraqi leader withdrew his best officers from the fray back to Baghdad to preserve them, leaving his soldiers behind. As General Shelton recalls, “it was no longer a real fight. The Iraqi soldiers were dying needlessly. It just wasn’t right.” Each time a battalion surrendered wholesale there would only be four or five inexperienced junior officers left.
General Shelton agreed with the decision by President Bush not to pursue the Iraqis back to Baghdad and complete the destruction of Saddam and his entire army. But as he ruefully observed, “Hindsight is twenty-twenty perfect. Saddam has continued to renege and violate the UN Resolutions and we would prefer now that Iraq had different leadership, as would the entire Arab world.
“But,” General Shelton went on, “Saddam has such a tight grip on his people now that it would be extremely difficult short of a ground force [to dislodge him] and we’re certainly not contemplating using ground forces against him right now.”
General Shelton’s last task before becoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was to distill all his experience in planning future operations and to formulate a 21st Century military philosophy for Special Operations. His first-hand experience defeating Iraq on its home desert territory, so to speak, and entering Haiti and driving out an entrenched military dictator has given the world an absolutely correct perception. Those operations have shown that it is impossible to defeat the United States in any kind of direct military activity.
SOF 2020, the long-range vision developed at SOCOM under General Shelton, laid out how Special Operations Forces and its Command will operate in the years ahead and how SOCOM would meet the changing threats in the world. SOF 2020 is patterned after Joint Vision 2010 which attempts to foresee the more immediate future and threats to U.S. security.
SOF 2020 and Joint Vision 2010 foresee almost identical threats. America must be prepared to contend with escalating acts of terrorism.
What America did to the Iraqi army in the few days during the ground phase of the Gulf War has taught aggressors around the world about the technological superiority of the U.S. As a result our enemies know they cannot take on America head-to-head, or in any kind of traditional battle. Saddam proved that future opponents can only expect immediate and devastating losses in any “Mother of All Battles.”
But, the enemies of democracy tell themselves, there’s got to be a way to get at America and do severe damage. The answer, asymmetric terrorism, is their key to disrupting and destroying segments of continental U.S. and thus threatening its world power potential.
America’s cr
itical infrastructure may be targeted from many devious directions—from oblique positions rather than head on. This is one of the threats that we can expect from our enemies in the future. General Shelton points out that some initiatives may be to flood the market with drugs. An offensive could include the use of cyber warfare attacks on our computer networks, or the use of crime rings to disrupt our legal structure, bombing our far-flung embassies as in Tanzania and Kenya—anything but going toe to toe with the U.S. using conventional forces as the Iraqis did in the Gulf.
A most terrifying type of asymmetric warfare is the use of biological and chemical weapons against us. However, General Shelton says reassuringly, “We have some very unique capabilities in our Special Operations Forces arsenal to deal with specific types of threat in weapons of mass destruction. I think that the entire United States, to include all of our conventional forces, are going to have to pay more attention to the potential of our adversaries using chemical and biological weapons against us. We have got to become the world leader in the ability to defend against these weapons of mass destruction.”
The Chairman took a bold step in this direction on 20 August 1998 when, in retaliation for bombing the United States embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam, a U.S. attack was launched against Sudan simultaneously with a bombing of the world-wide terrorist infrastructure led by Saudi multimillionaire Osama bin Laden from his Afghanistan terrorist training camps.
Cruise missiles destroyed the Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum. “This facility,” General Shelton announced, “is involved in the production of chemical weapons agents. [Terrorist leader] bin Laden has extensive ties to the Sudanese government which controls this chemical facility.” Considering that bin Laden is reported to have offered his terrorists $10,000 for each American killed in the embassy bombings, and presumably future attacks like the bombing of an American-owned nightclub in South Africa, anything the free world can do to destroy production of deadly chemical and biological weapons cannot be considered off limits.