Then, Ace left to become CINCPACFLT, and the thick, protective wall that had been protecting my back and flanks was gone.
Ace’s former executive assistant. Phil Dur, tried to tell me, but I wouldn’t listen. I hadn’t been back from Naples more than a week when I ran into Phil as I was sailing the corridors outside OP-06, trying to find something or other. I hadn’t seen him in a while—at least since Ace had left for Pearl Harbor.
I liked Phil. A big, moon-faced guy who moved like a Polack pulling tackle from Penn State, he’d worked hard and loyally for Ace. He slammed me on the shoulder and asked how things were going. I gave him a two-minute dump on our op in Naples that had him in stitches. The fact that we’d kidnapped Admiral Mott twice in twelve hours brought a roar to his throat.
Then he drew me aside. “Dick, do yourself a favor.”
“Sure.”
“Get out of town.”
“What—”
He flicked a thumb toward the OP-06 doorway. “They don’t want you around anymore. You’re an embarrassment. You give them grief. Admirals write letters of complaint, and the new guy takes them seriously. Ace could cover your ass. Now—it ain’t gonna happen.”
“I’m a big boy, Phil.”
“They’re gonna get you. They’re beginning to put an investigation together—initiated by your old ’pals’ from the West Coast.”
“That’s a load of crap. Besides, I’ve got nothing to hide. I can take anything they throw at me.”
He backed me up against the corridor wall. “You could be the biggest man on the whole frigging campus, and it won’t mean a goddamn thing. Believe me, Dick, they’re gonna hang you out to dry. ”
“Bullshit.”
“It took a long time for you to get your four stripes. Want to keep ’em? Get the hell out of town.”
But I knew better. “Screw ’em all,” I told him. “I’m staying.”
Strike three.
Chapter 23
I SHOULD HAVE TAKEN PHIL DUR’S ADVICE. BECAUSE, WHILE Red Cell blithely played Peck’s Bad Boys all over the world, NIS, under “Irish” Flynn, was stealthily organizing its own guerrilla attack—on me, and on SEAL Team Six.
NIS code-named its operation Iron Eagle. The investigation first became public when John B. Mason, one of Six’s plank owners, was indicted on thirty-seven counts of filing false travel claims and making false statements. (In September 1987, Mason finally pleaded guilty to four counts of falsifying vouchers, and stealing $3,800 in scuba-diving equipment in 1983 and 1984.) Additionally, two enlisted men, both of whom came to SEAL Team Six after I’d left, were court-martialed for filing false claims and vouchers.
Bob Gormly. who was CO of Six when the two courtmartialed sailors committed their crimes, was promoted. I was the one NIS investigated.
Ultimately, Iron Eagle became a witch-hunt that took up six hundred man-years of NIS’s time. According to the GAO—the General Accounting Office—one hundred manyears costs the Navy roughly $$$10 million. So the Navy spent somewhere in the region of $60 million to investigate me—and came up with nothing.
Well, not quite nothing.
If it was NIS’s intention to ruin my career, the operation was a complete success.
Doom on you, Sharkman.
—On April 3, 1986, I was summarily dismissed from Red Cell. The new OP-06B (this is Navy speak for the mouth-filling title Director, Politico-Military Policy and Current Plans Division, Office of the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policy and Operations), Rear Admiral Roger Bacon, ordered me to “report to the Commandant of the Washington Naval District by 1600 today. You are under investigation.” As instructed, I reported to the Washington Navy Yard. The CSO—Chief of Staff Officer—“welcomed” me aboard, then curtly dismissed me “until further notice.” I spent the next six months sitting in my studio apartment in Old Town waiting for that further notice. The time wasn’t a total loss: I caught up on my reading. I also got back into the habit of polishing both the tops and the soles of my shoes. Once a geek, always a geek.
—On July 22, 1986, after only twenty-five days in office, the newly appointed secretary of the navy, James Webb, somehow found the time to read my entire file, after which he administratively removed me from the promotion list to captain. Webb’s legal adviser was a captain named Rudy—the same Rudy who had argued against my promotion when, as a commander, he was VCNO Ron Hays’s legal adviser eighteen months previously.
—On May 20, 1986, I underwent a 17-hour interrogation by NIS. The transcript was immediately classified, and I was denied access to it. It was not the only document I wasn’t allowed to see. NIS ultimately pulled sixty-four cartons of records from SEAL Team Six, which filled three safes full of classified materials; filing cabinets were crammed with thousands of receipts, vouchers, notes, memos, and memorabilia. I was allowed to see none of it. Secrecy, however, didn’t deter NIS sources from leaking stories within the SpecWar community about the “evidence” that was piling up against me.
NIS took the pistol I’d been presented—months after I left the CO slot at Six—by my former SEAL Team Six teammates , as well as one of two sterling-silver belt buckles they’d designed and had cast for Paul and me. Despite the fact that all the men interviewed by NIS swore under oath that they had each contributed $20 toward the gifts and they were not purchased with government funds, NIS still has my pistol and buckle. They confiscated Paul’s buckle, too, although we can’t figure out why.
—In September 1987, SECNAV James Webb forced Ace Lyons into retirement. Webb’s predecessor, John Lehman, described Ace’s firing from the CINCPACFLT slot as “the revenge of the nerds.”
—I retired from the Navy with the rank of commander on February 1, 1989, after thirty years, three months, and seventeen days of active duty. Despite being under investigation for more than two years, I was never charged by NIS with any impropriety.
—In July 1989,I was “invited” to take part in a grand jury hearing relating to the alleged overcharging on specialized grenades used by SEAL Team Six, Delta, and other elite units, by an Arizona company in which a former SEAL, John Mason, had a financial interest. Mason was serving five years probation after he had pleaded guilty in September 1987 to falsifying travel vouchers and stealing $3,800 worth of scubadiving equipment in 1983 and 1984, while he’d been at SEAL Team Six. Mason had been given probation instead of a jail sentence on the condition that he cooperate in other investigations—notably the one against me. After the hearing, the U.S. Attorney in Alexandria, Virginia, decided to press conspiracy charges against me.
—In September 1989,I was instructed by Bob Gormly (he and I had served together during my first Vietnam tour in 1967 when he was a lieutenant and I was an ensign; then, in 1974, when we were both lieutenant commanders, I had succeeded him as CO of SEAL Team Two. In 1983, he was a captain and I was a commander, and he succeeded me as CO of SEAL Team Six. Still a captain, Bob headed the Plans and Policy branch of Navy SpecWar) about what I could and could not say regarding my Navy career. Many of my previously unclassified fitreps were now arbitrarily classified by the Navy. It was crucial to my defense that I be able to explain what I’d done as a staffer at OP-06, and as CO of SEAL Team Six. But the Navy ruled that most of my activities between 1977 and 1985 could not be described.
—After I was muzzled by the Navy, my case went to trial. In November 1989,I was tried on three counts of conspiracy. John Mason, now a convicted felon who wanted badly to make a deal with the government, was the prosecution’s main witness against me. I was acquitted of one charge, with a hung jury on the other two counts.
—A second trial was held January 16-24, 1990. I was acquitted on one of the two remaining counts and convicted on the final count of conspiracy—but not before the judge broke the hung jury by giving it new and specific instructions that led it to convict me.
—I was sentenced on March 9,1990, to twenty-one months in prison and a $10,000 fine.
—On the morning of April 16, 19
90, the Monday after Easter, I surrendered myself at the Petersburg, Virginia, Federal Correctional Institution. It was as tough a thing as I’ve ever had to do. Not because I feared prison—God knows I can take care of myself, and heaven help the man who lays a hand on me—but because I knew I’d been railroaded. I was furious with the system for what it had done to me, and with myself for being incapable of making things turn out better.
I didn’t check in alone, incidentally: my old friend Mr. Murphy came along for the ride. As it was Easter Monday and many of the staff had taken the day off, I was not sent to the camp right away, but held in the maximum-security prison across the street for a day and a half until I could be signed in. Since I hadn’t been properly processed, I was given food—but no utensils. I didn’t mind eating pasta that way (after all, in my Geek days I’d sucked it through my nose), but the oatmeal presented a certain extraordinary challenge.
When I crossed the street to Camp Swampy, with its fivestory dorm, outside gym, and six-tenths-of-a-mile cinder track, things improved. I’ve been in worse places. The chow’s about the same grade as the O Club at Little Creek. My fellow campers, a mixture of white-collar criminals, dope dealers, and snitches, most of whom have no idea who I am and what I’ve done, remind me of some of the folks at the Pentagon. No one bothers me—guards included (they’re known colloquially as hacks, which stands for Horse’s Ass Carrying Keys)—and I keep mostly to myself.
Life is certainly passable. There’s CNN on the cable TV, and HBO, too. I’ve read more than sixty books since coming here. I work out two or three times a day. My weight has dropped from 235 to 195; my waist from 36 to 31; I press 500 pounds on the bench and crunch 190 on the gut machine. I make a whopping sixty-six cents an hour at my prison job—gardening, landscaping, and doing maintenance chores at the prison’s UNICOR factory, which makes everything from electrical cable for the military to desks for government offices. Half my salary goes to pay off my fine. I sit in my third-floor living space, which I share with a biker/dope-dealer named Jesse, as I compose these words.
I’ve also had a lot of time in these months to think about the past—and the future. One of the most gratifying aspects of my incarceration has been the mail. I’ve received scores of letters from the SEALs and Frogmen with whom I served. Ev Barrett, now retired and living in Florida, scribbled me a couple of notes, telling me to keep my blankety-blanking nose clean, and that he was thinking of me. Patches Watson sends constant bulletins from the UDT/SEAL Museum in Ft. Pierce, Florida, where he is now assistant curator. Even Paul Henley, who hates writing anything, managed to post a couple of letters my way. Dozens of the SEALs I picked for Sixsome of whom are still there, others who have retired or gone on to other assignments—have written, telling me to keep the faith, passing on a bit of gossip, or reminding me they’re thinking of me whenever they have a cold one. The mail from the guys at Six is all the more significant because some of them were warned that contacting me could mean the loss of their security clearances or their jobs at Six, and they wrote anyway.
Fact is, sitting here on the inside, it would be easy to turn inward and become bitter, to say “What the fuck—” all the time, and curse the world. But those cards and letters have pumped me up, kept me going, given me strength. I’d always preached about unit integrity. Here, behind bars, those words came back to me at mail call, and I knew I’d achieved something great.
The SEALs I selected and trained, after all, are my real legacy. And despite the Navy’s attempts to eradicate much of what I designed, that legacy lives on. Sure—things have changed. Six is much more conventional than it was in my day. It’s a huge command now—more than three times the size it was when I ran it—and it is as cumbersome to move as Delta Force. Red Cell is still in existence. But the emphasis has been shifted from “show me” to “tell me.” They don’t do as many live exercises—and when they do ’em, the scenarios are geared to allow the base commanders to win more times than they lose.
But the men I selected and trained are passing on what I taught them to a new generation of SEALs. Some of the kids I picked for junior-junior cannon fodder are now senior-senior chiefs, lieutenant commanders, and commanders. And, like guerrillas, they’re working quietly, within the system, to build SpecWar units the way I taught them to do. They keep me apprised of their progress. And they learned to do it my way. When my SEALs develop their ops plans today, they don’t plan Mustins—they plan Marcinkos.
As to what’s ahead, I’d always joked about taking SEAL Team Six commercial. “You Call, I Haul.” KATN,Inc.—Kick Ass Take Names, Incorporated.
It’s not so farfetched. The U.S. government has guidelines that ordain assassination unacceptable as national policy. It has rules, which say that hostile targets, such as chemical-war plants, nuclear facilities and weapons, can only be hit during bona fide military strikes. But what happens when a superpower such as the United States is faced with a Muammar Qaddafi, a Manuel Noriega, or a Saddam Hussein?
The Israelis have the ability to launch preemptive SpecWar strikes against specific targets, as they did when a combined Mossad-Israeli Army commando unit assassinated the PLO’s number two terrorist, Abu Jihad, at his home in Tunis in April 1988. Other nations, including France and Great Britain, also have hit targets—both human and otherwise—covertly. The Soviets have an active campaign of clandestine operations. The United States, however, has always been reluctant to wage similar shadow wars against its enemies.
One way for the U.S. to strike back and still retain plausible deniability would be to subcontract its covert hits. So, instead of launching a complicated, costly, major military operation against Muammar Qaddafi, for example, let Demo Dick’s KATN,Inc. do the job instead. Just call 1-800-SEAL R US.
Think about it: I have friends, now retired from SEAL Team Six, who can fly anything from a Cessna to a 737 to an HH-53H. I have my own intelligence network. I can get hold of specialized equipment. All of those elements are easily recreated outside the military framework. Personnel is no problem either: the hardest chore would be selecting the few who’d make my final cut.
KATN could do the job lean and mean. Two platoons at the most. Four boat crews. Fourteen pairs of swim buddies. Helping each other according to Barren’s Law. Infiltrated two by two, or four by four, via sea or air or land. As in SEAL. Living off the land. Going in the back door, just like Ilo-Ilo Island. Developing intelligence, just like SEAL Team Six. Watching the patterns, just like Red Cell.
Then, when we’re ready, we hop and pop. We shoot and loot. We slip out the back door. If we’re caught? Too bad—we knew the risks. We’re cannon fodder—expendable assets. And the government still has plausible deniability. You want one or two of Qaddafi’s chemical plants blown up? You need Manuel Noriega snatched? You want to vaporize the Iraqi nuclear facilities in Baghdad?
Well, Mr. President, Mr. SECDEF, Mr. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mr. CNO—you call, I haul. Oh—half the fee up front, please.
It’s not so farfetched. Believe me.
Over Christmas of 1990, I was given a five-day furlough from prison. I spent it at my studio apartment in Old Town, visiting with friends I hadn’t seen in months, cooking copious amounts of spicy food, savoring my first sirloin steak in eight months, enjoying the freedom of keeping my own totally unsupervised schedule, and delighting in the holiday spirit.
On Christmas Eve, I had a visitor. I’ll call him Tony Mercaldi. Tony works for one of the shadowy agencies that don’t list telephone numbers in any of the government directories. He is one of those people spy novelists write about but never get to meet. I’ve known him for some years and can vouch for the fact that he’s good at what he does.
Merc is a large man, but deceptively so. If you looked twice at him—which you wouldn’t be prone to do—he’d appear unremarkably ordinary. Brown hair, not too long, not too short; a round face that blends in; a physique that says nothing about the man. This is exactly what makes him so effective. People don’t
remember him when he operates.
I took Tony’s coat, poured him a drink, grabbed a Diet Pepsi for me—we’re not allowed any booze on furlough—and we settled onto my couch.
He toasted me. “Merry Christmas, Demo.”
“Thanks. It’s nice to be out for a few days.”
“I’ll bet.”
We talked awhile, gossiping about old friends and laughing about things we’d done together in the past. It was good to see him.
Then, Tony got serious. He turned the volume on my FM radio up until it became uncomfortable and moved closer to me. “How’d you like a permanent vacation from Petersburg?”
“Only if there’s lots of pussy involved.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. Besides—I don’t know, Merc, I’m making good money and I’m learning a trade. By spring I’ll be a hell of a gardener.”
He laughed. “You already have a trade.”
“Which one?”
“Breaking into key installations. As I recall, you made quite a nuisance of yourself.”
“Ah, that trade.”
“That trade.” His voice got lower. “We’ve got a problem, Dick. You follow the news. You know what’s happening in Iraq. There’s gonna be a war—and people are gonna get killed.”
“So?”
“How’d you feel about helping out?”
“Depends,” I said.
“On what?”
“On the conditions. And on the problem.”
“The problem is, we’ve identified a number of potential targets in the Baghdad area that need to be verified and eliminated—”
“Eliminated?”
“Either they get brought out—which seems impractical to me, but you know how screwed up the guys who draft options get—or they get destroyed where they live.”
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