‘Go. Go. Go. Get in at the rear.’ The voice was screaming in my ear. The eight call signs rose to their feet as one and then we were sweeping in through the splintered door. All feelings of doubt and fear had now disappeared. I was blasted. The adrenalin was bursting through my bloodstream. Fearsome! I got a fearsome rush, the best one of my life. I had the heavy body armour on, with high velocity plates front and back. During training, it weighs a ton. Now it felt like a T-shirt. Search and destroy!
However, with Red Team 2’s leader still entangled in his rope, and Oan getting ever closer, the team needed to buy time. As such, they threw stun grenades and CS gas canisters into the embassy, rather than enter as had been planned. This only made matters worse. The grenades landed on newspapers, which had been covered in lighter fuel, and started a fire, which began to burn the team leader as he hung suspended in mid-air.
Red Team 2 frantically cut him loose but not before he’d suffered serious burns. While their leader could play no further part in the operation, they finally entered the embassy, which was thick with fire, smoke and gas. Before them, in the smoke, was one of the terrorists. However, as one of the team raised his MP5 to shoot he found it had jammed. The terrorist stared in disbelief. He had thought he was a goner.
At this, he made a run for it, with the soldier giving chase, grabbing his 9mm Browning from the holster strapped to his thigh as he did so. But suddenly the chase became far more urgent. The soldier realised that the terrorist was holding a grenade and was heading directly for a room full of hostages. Taking aim, his vision blurred by smoke, he knew he had just one chance to get this right, otherwise the hostages would all die. The years of training in the ‘Killing House’ all came to the fore as, with a steady hand, he squeezed the trigger, watching as seconds later the terrorist’s head snapped back and his body collapsed to the floor. He had killed him with just seconds to spare. Yet there was to be no respite. Moments later gunshots rang out from the telex room. Three terrorists had begun firing on the hostages, killing one and wounding others.
Red Team immediately rushed for the room. As they entered, a terrorist charged at them with a grenade in his hand. He was instantly shot in the head. This gave the signal to the surviving terrorists that they were outnumbered and outmanoeuvred by the best in the business. Yet they still refused to surrender, instead trying to hide and blend in with the hostages. The soldiers began searching each hostage, when someone made a quick move to their pocket. Without stopping to think, one of Red Team shot him dead. For a moment, they feared they had accidentally killed a nervous hostage. But, when they turned the body over, they found the man had a grenade in his hand. It was a sobering moment.
With the telex room apparently secure, with the terrorists there dead and the hostages safe, the team then cleared room after room, shooting off locks, kicking in doors, and throwing in stun grenades. However, a tremendous explosion suddenly reverberated through the embassy. Red Team was unperturbed. They knew this was just the plastic explosives Blue Team 3 had placed against the window of the rear second and upper floors in order to gain entry.
As one member of Blue Team recalled to Crawford:
Then we were in. We threw in some grenades and then quickly followed. There was a thundering bang and a blinding flash as the stun grenades went off. Designed to disorientate any hostiles who were in the room, they were a godsend. No one in here, good. I looked around, the stun grenades had set light to the curtains, not so good. No time to stop and put out the fire. Keep moving. We swept the room, then heard shouts coming from another office. We hurried towards the noise, and burst in to see one of the terrorists struggling with the copper who had been on duty when the embassy had been seized: PC Lock.
On seeing the SAS men coming through the back of the building, Lock had rugby-tackled Oan to the ground. The SAS stormed into the office and shouted for Lock to move out of the way. As he did so, they opened fire on Oan, hitting him in the head and chest, killing him instantly.
With all the rooms cleared, and Oan dead, the SAS assembled a line on the main staircase, where they roughly manhandled the hostages down the stairs and out of the back as quickly as possible. It seemed they had succeeded. However, one of the ‘hostages’ suddenly pulled out a grenade and reached for the pin. Pete Winner, in Gregory Fremont-Barnes’s book Who Dares Wins: The SAS and the Iranian Embassy Siege 1980, records what happened next:
He drew level with me. Then I saw it – a Russian fragmentation grenade. I could see the detonator cap protruding from his hand. I moved my hands to the MP5 and slipped the safety-catch to ‘automatic’. Through the smoke and gloom I could see call signs at the bottom of the stairs in the hallway. Shit! I can’t fire. They are in my line of sight, the bullets will go straight through the terrorist and into my mates. I’ve got to immobilize the bastard.
Instinctively, I raised the MP5 above my head and in one swift sharp movement brought the stock of the weapon down on the back of his neck. I hit him as hard as I could. His head snapped backward and for one fleeting second I caught sight of his tortured, hate-filled face. He collapsed forward and rolled down the remaining few steps, hitting the carpet in the hallway, a sagging, crumpled heap. The sound of two magazines being emptied into him was deafening. As he twitched and vomited his life away, his hand opened and the grenade rolled out. In that split second, my mind was so crystal clear with adrenalin it zoomed straight in on the grenade pin and lever. I stared at the mechanism for what seemed like an eternity, and what I saw flooded the very core of me with relief and elation. The pin was still located in the lever. It was all over; everything was going to be ok.
It had all taken seventeen minutes. At the start of the siege, there had been twenty-six hostages. Two had been killed by the terrorists while five had been released before the assault, leaving nineteen to be successfully rescued. All were now safe and well, if not a little shaken.
If they weren’t well known before the raid, the SAS were now acknowledged as one of the world’s finest elite special forces, a moniker they continue to enjoy to this day. Yet the events of 9/11 would soon change the world of anti-terrorism for ever. As the world teetered on the brink of all-out war in the days that followed, the United States looked to invade Afghanistan with just a handful of men. It was a mission that would go down in legend . . .
24
THE GREEN BERETS
AD 2001
The world changed for ever on Tuesday, 11 September 2001, when terrorists hijacked four planes, crashing two into the World Trade Center’s twin towers and one into the Pentagon. The fourth hijacked plane was believed to be en route to the White House, before passengers thwarted the terrorists and brought it down near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Almost 3,000 civilians were killed and more than 6,000 injured in the deadliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. Within hours, Osama bin Laden, on behalf of the terrorist organisation al-Qaeda, had claimed responsibility. Incensed, the American people demanded immediate retribution. However, getting to bin Laden was not easy. Intelligence suggested he was being protected by the hard-line Taliban government in Afghanistan, and despite repeated demands by President Bush to give him up, they refused. All eyes now turned to the military.
It was initially suggested that America could invade Afghanistan with 60,000 troops. However, such a massive migration could take six months. Moreover, while there was usually a contingency plan for invading a country, when it came to Afghanistan no such plan existed. Up-to-date intelligence on the country, or the Taliban, was also hard to come by. With all this in mind, it was clear that a traditional military invasion was going to prove very difficult, and costly. Indeed, the US military had already seen the mess the Soviet Union had gotten itself into when invading Afghanistan in the 1980s and they didn’t want to make the same mistake.
Nonetheless, a solution soon presented itself. The CIA was at least aware that an Afghan rebel group called the Northern Alliance had been attempting to overthrow the Taliban ever since it had taken
power in 1996. This armed force was already on the ground and knew the landscape far better than the US military. If the United States could somehow build alliances with their commanders, through offers of support or bribes, the Afghan armies might be of significant assistance. Not only could the Northern Alliance do much of the fighting, it could also provide crucial intelligence about key Taliban locations, which could then be bombed from the sky with laser precision. Moreover, they might even be able to help find Osama bin Laden.
Indeed, should bin Laden be found, orders were to kill rather than capture. Cofer Black, director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC), had made this explicitly clear: ‘I don’t want bin Laden and his thugs captured. I want them dead . . . I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden’s head shipped in a box of dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the President.’
It seemed that the US needed to build relationships with two Northern Alliance warlords in particular, Atta Mohammad Noor, and General Rashid Dostum. However, although Noor and Dostum hated the Taliban, they had often been at war with each other. Furthermore, neither was said to be particularly trustworthy. ‘We knew nothing about these guys,’ Lieutenant General John F. Mulholland said of this. ‘All of these guys have blood on their hands. None of these guys are clean actors.’ Earning their trust, and persuading them to join forces with the United States, was not going to be easy.
It was determined that CIA operatives would initially be sent into Afghanistan to meet with Noor and Dostum as the first point of contact. Yet it was soon clear that there was only one force that could be depended on to take on the brunt of this top-secret operation: the United States Army Special Forces, aka the Green Berets.
In 1952, with the Cold War heating up, Colonel Aaron Bank had looked to create an army unit that could operate clandestinely in foreign countries hostile to the United States, drawing particular inspiration from the escapades of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Jedburgh teams. During the Second World War, the OSS was renowned for its sabotage missions against German infrastructure targets, earning the nickname the ‘Devil’s Brigade’, due to its ability to sneak into German positions and slit the enemy’s throat. Meanwhile, the Jedburghs were trained to infiltrate occupied countries and train resistance and guerrilla fighters. With this as his inspiration, Bank proceeded to form the 10th Special Forces Group. After adopting their distinctive headgear, this group would be for ever known as the Green Berets.
With the Berets’ headquarters at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, candidates were normally expected to have served a number of years in the army, and also to have completed Airborne (parachute) School before being accepted into the Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS) course. This was merely a warm-up course designed to separate the weak from the strong. Right from the start the question was posed: How badly do you want this?
Tests on the twenty-four-day SFAS programme featured timed land navigation exercises (including a 47-mile individual navigation course, with candidates carrying over 100lbs in their packs, to be completed within a 72-hour time period), route marches, obstacle courses and other gruelling physical tests. Situational awareness reaction exercises were also a key part of SFAS, which were designed to test how a candidate could think on his feet, adapt to new situations, relate to others and operate as part of a team.
According to historian Dick Couch, out of the 3,000 soldiers who applied for SFAS each year, only 600 made the grade. Those who did so now passed on to the second stage of selection – the Special Forces Qualification Course. Known as the Q Course, this usually took successful candidates around a year to complete, with them having to pass five fixed phases of training, which included:
1. A seven-week orientation course that gave candidates a thorough understanding of the history, traditions, roles and planning processes of the Green Berets.
2. Learning foreign languages for between eighteen and twenty-five weeks, such as Russian or Arabic.
3. Mastering small units’ tactics such as building clearance, close-quarters battle (CBQ), raiding, ambushing, reconnaissance, patrolling and advanced marksmanship. Candidates also undertook SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) – a three-week training course designed to equip them with the necessary skills to survive in the wilderness and evade capture by enemy forces. This included a five-day resistance-to-interrogation module known as the Resistance Training Laboratory.
4. Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) training, whereby each soldier was trained in one of the core areas – weapons, engineering, medical and communication.
5. Robin Sage: a fully immersive five-week-long field exercise in which prospective Green Berets had to parachute or helicopter into the fictional country of ‘Pineland’ where they were to find and recruit ‘guerrillas’ and lead a successful liberation of the country. The task usually involved establishing contact with the leader and explaining how an alliance could benefit the rebels. The guerrilla leader (a role-playing member of the Special Forces) would invariably bluff, bully and threaten the young captain, while trying to extract all the supplies and hardware they could, ceding as little as possible in return. In effect, it was a test of psychological gamesmanship.
Those who successfully completed the Q Course claimed the prize of their iconic headgear at a formal mess ceremony before being assigned to their Special Forces Group (SFG). Each such group had a particular regional focus; in the case of the 5th Special Forces Group, for instance, it was the Middle East, Persian Gulf, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa. And it was for this reason that, in October 2001, all eyes turned to the 5th to avenge 9/11.
At its Fort Campbell headquarters in Kentucky, Colonel John Mulholland gathered his men together in their team room and delivered the words they had been waiting to hear: ‘Gentlemen, you have been selected to infiltrate Afghanistan.’ Subsequently split up into teams of twelve, known as Operational Detachments-A (ODAs), each ODA would have two qualified commanders, a captain, a warrant officer and a pair of each specialty: operations and intelligence; weapons; engineer; medic; and communications. If required, this would enable the team to split into two units of six and retain the full complement of skills in each.
ODA 595, led by Mark Nutsch, would be the first team sent in to join forces with General Dostum, while soon after Dean Nosorog would head up ODA 534 to meet with Noor.
Both Nutsch and Nosorog had made tremendous sacrifices to be on the mission. Just days prior to 9/11, 32-year-old Nutsch had been promoted to a staff position at 5th Group headquarters. Wanting to do his duty, and not miss out on the mission of a lifetime, he had asked Lieutenant Colonel Bowers to be returned to his team. Nosorog, meanwhile, had actually been on honeymoon when the World Trade Center had been attacked. On seeing the news, he had immediately booked the first flight to Kentucky to be ready to go wherever he was required. Now both men were putting their lives on the line, with the hopes of their country weighing heavily on their shoulders.
On the night of 18 October, Captain Nutsch and his twelve-man team were ferried over the Hindu Kush mountain range, a 16,000ft-high mass of rock and permanent snow, by an MH-47E Chinook helicopter. For now, these twelve men represented the entire American fighting force aiming to take on an entire country, as well as capture the world’s most wanted man: Osama bin Laden.
There had already been three previous attempts to get the team into Afghanistan but poor weather, and Taliban resistance, had seen them all aborted. The chopper now flew with all its lights off, and without heating, so as to avoid the attention of any heat-seeking missiles. The heavy snow and winds made the journey through the dark mountains extremely hazardous.
Already bitterly cold, Nutsch and his team were well aware they were likely to die on this operation; indeed, many were scared they’d be shot out of the sky by Taliban anti-aircraft missiles before they had even set foot in Afghanistan. For Nutsch, the best-case scenario was taking down the Taliban over the course of the nex
t year or two. He was certain this wouldn’t be a quick affair. Striking up a relationship with Dostum, and getting intelligence from him, would be tough enough, while the cold Afghan winter was fast approaching, which would make large parts of the barren country inhospitable until the snow thawed in spring. Nutsch was therefore prepared for the long haul.
However, while their job was to build a relationship with General Dostum and his army, some of the team were apprehensive. Some spoke Russian, and a sprinkling of Arabic, but such had been the dearth of intelligence available on Afghanistan, and Dostum, that many of the team felt unprepared. To fill in the gaps, they had devoured any books or magazine articles that were available on the country. A favourite was The Bear Went Over the Mountain, which detailed the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, something they would have to learn lessons from if they were to have any success this time around.
In the mid-1980s, I actually came very close to flying to Afghanistan to help them fight the Soviet invaders. I saw it that my grandfather had fought for the empire, my dad had fought the Nazis, and I wanted to fight the Marxist threat. In Germany with the Scots Greys, I had spent years waiting for the armed might of the Soviet Union to attack, but this never materialised. So, for a chance of real action against the Soviets, I fancied joining the mujahideen guerrillas in their armed jihad. However, such an ambition was soon to be thwarted. Firstly, some research led me to reading that the Afghan authorities weren’t much better than their Soviet invaders. According to Amnesty International, 27,000 Afghan civilians had been executed by the Kabul government before the Soviet invasion, and after it hundreds of thousands had been killed in bombing raids or massacres. I certainly didn’t want to have that uneasy feeling I once had in Dhofar, whereby I wasn’t sure I was fighting for the right side. Thankfully, a job offer to act as public relations officer for Occidental Petroleum in the UK saw me forget about jihad in the mountains and instead prepare for the nine-to-five London rat race. In hindsight, that is definitely one of the better decisions I have made.
The Elite Page 30