Marcinko built an iron curtain around his new kingdom. Sequestering himself on the new base, he went so far as to tell the operators of SEAL Team Six not to associate with their brethren across town. The “find new playmates” rule didn’t make him many friends among his former colleagues, and “the secret mission” of Six was the worst kept secret in the SEALs. But that’s just the way Marcinko wanted it—he was building brand recognition.
The mission of Six was easily guessed at—maritime and coastal targets all over the world—but not much else about the command was general knowledge. SEAL Team Six, like Delta, was on a constant war footing. Within a very short period the entire Team would be ready to deploy and fight anywhere in the world. SEAL Team Six was, and is, on the highest alert level of any unit in the U.S. military.
In creating SEAL Team Six, Marcinko made enemies on all sides. Other teams resented Six’s unlimited budget and the brain drain of their best operators. Not that Six had to spend much on recruitment. Marcinko made sure, however, to keep his bread buttered with Admiral Hayward, chief of Naval Operations, and for a while that made him, and Team Six, untouchable.
On June 2, 1982, Admiral Hayward did as all four-star admirals and chiefs of Naval Operations must do: he retired. Marcinko had lost his top cover, and the knives came out.
With no allies left in the SEAL community, Marcinko was rotated out of command and replaced by Captain Bob Gormly, an experienced, capable officer. In taking over SEAL Six, Gormly faced an uphill battle. Marcinko had thrown a tantrum when his two-year command slot was not extended. In an act that endeared him to no one, Marcinko split for Europe on the day Bob Gormly assumed command. Skipping the change of command ceremony was an unforgivable breach of Naval etiquette and put the final nail in the coffin of Dick Marcinko’s reputation. Even his die-hard stalwarts were put off. SEAL Team Six, like its creator, was acquiring a reputation as the cantankerous diva of Naval Special Warfare.
There were whispers at the other Teams that Six was “All show, no go.” Single-handedly, Bob Gormly set out to make Six live up to its operational mandate. Tall, taciturn Bob Gormly had grown up in Virginia Beach. His first association with the Teams was with a couple of surfers he met riding the waves at Rudee Inlet. Gormly thought they might be military. They didn’t seem to work normal hours. They were pretty good on their boards, they obviously loved the ocean, and eventually Gormly asked one of them what they did.
“We’re in the Navy,” came back the standard reply.
“What part of the Navy?” he asked.
“The Atlantic part…”
This went on for a couple of weeks, until, at last, someone gave the kid the right answer. They were members of the UDT, the Underwater Demolition Teams. When Bob asked what they did, one of the surfers said, “We’re the guys who jump into the water to rescue space capsules.”
Gormly was hooked.
After college, he tried out for BUD/S and made it. Before transferring to Six, Gormly had a long and storied career in Naval Special Warfare. He had conducted beach recons during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and led a team of swimmer scouts during America’s brief invasion of the Dominican Republic. He made several tours in Vietnam, earned a chest full of medals and a reputation as a no-nonsense professional.
In a lot of ways, Bob Gormly was the antithesis of Dick Marcinko. It was Bob Gormly more than any other officer who made Team Six what it is today. Team Six under Marcinko had been a faux meritocracy married to a sycophantic sort of personality cult. Marcinko had come up through the ranks, a Mustang, and although he was the captain of the team, he had scant respect for other commissioned officers. Starting in the days of Mob Six, Marcinko had kept alive a spirit of devotion to himself—but he did so by deliberately undercutting the other officers in the Team. He was in the habit of replacing his assault group commanders without warning, and firing them immediately if they conflicted with his senior chief petty officers or himself. Although this system prided itself on collegiality, it brokered no dissent. There was one tactical opinion, and that was Marcinko’s. This “you’re the boss” arrangement prompted devotion, but it also brought out the worst of deadly “group think,” a sort of collective megalomania, where a Team begins to think that they are too good to fail.
It is one of the fundamental strengths of the SEAL Teams that individual operators contribute to the execution of the mission, and to the planning cycle as well. People are in the SEAL Teams because they’re good at what they do. Gormly brought the Team back together, welding both officers and enlisted operators into a cohesive combat-ready unit. It was Bob Gormly who led SEAL Team Six into the command’s baptism of fire.
SEAL Team Six was originally set up with three operational entities, two operational teams, and a training cadre. In theory, one team would be deployed, one team would be in training, and one team would be on stand down, or what came to be called “schools/deployment.” By the time of the Grenada Operation, the terrorism business was booming. It was soon found necessary to expand the assault teams to three (and later four) operational units, and a full-time training unit, called Green Team.
Though they were trained, manned, and equipped identically, each assault element at SEAL Team Six has a unique and distinct character and ethos. For purposes of command and control, the assault elements are color coded, but are most often referred to by their nicknames. One crew is the Pirates, the Bones Men, and wear a patch featuring the Jolly Roger. A second crew is nicknamed after the trident-tailed lion they wear as a recognition patch. The third operational team has gone by the call sign Apache, or Arapahoe, and are subsequently known as the Red Men.
SEAL Team Six has the jack, and it shows. The gear issued to its operators is the top of the line, and the best of everything. Every operator has a cage, his own personal space, warehouse, and dominion. There are few pieces of equipment held in common—everything is issued to, and signed for, by individual operators. Each operator’s cage looks like an Aladdin’s cave of spec ops gear, an astonishing amount of stuff: Scuba gear, parachutes, climbing harnesses, crampons and ropes, carabiners, lock picks, survival kits, Nomex flight suits, custom wetsuits, and dozens of different combat uniforms. Each operator maintains his own personal arsenal.
For special operations, most shooters prefer some variant of the M-4 carbine, though SCAR rifles and customized M-14 sniping variants are not unknown. The M-4 is the workhorse of the SEALs. It is a modular system that allows operators to “dial in” their weapon for mission-specific tasks. An ingenious rail system allows shooters to place laser illuminators, rifle scopes, flashlights, and holographic sights as necessary for long-range desert patrol or close-quarters combat. A deadly 40 mm grenade launcher can be snapped onto the weapon—making it a piece of pocket artillery firing lethal and sublethal munitions out to eight hundred yards.
Most SEALs also keep at least one tricked-out Kalashnikov AK-47. Favored for its go-anywhere ruggedness and jam-proof reliability, the AK is also the weapon used most often by terrorists. SEALs will often “one up” the bad guys, fitting the venerable AK with modular rails, so that it may carry the high-tech lasers and holographic sites that the SEALs prefer. These are placed in low-profile mounts so the AK retains its characteristic “bad guy” shape. The surprise comes when the SEALs open fire. The laser designators and holographic weapon sites extend the AK’s effective range by several hundred yards—a critical distance in a firefight.
As an “all-star” outfit, individual operators are given a lot of leeway as to the weapons they carry. For close-in, silenced work, the MP5 machine pistol, the SD, is still a favorite. A variant of the MP5 machine pistol, the SD has a built-in silencer and fires subsonic, hollow-point ammunition. For longer ranges, some prefer the Heckler & Koch G3 assault rifle, a behemoth of a long gun that fires 7.62 mm ammo out to beyond eight hundred yards. Also common are highly modified M-60 machine guns and SAWs (squad automatic weapons), often carried with feed trays and backpack-mounted ammunition systems that allow an opera
tor to carry as many as one thousand rounds. Pistols are another discretionary item. In the armory one can still find the occasional stainless steel Smith & Wesson model 686 .357 magnum (for water work), and a variety of Glock, Ruger, Beretta, and SIG Sauer pistols. For concealed carry, every operator is issued a blue-steel Walther PPK, just like James Bond.
All of this equipment, and more, is issued to students arriving to try out for Green Team. How long they hold on to it is up to them. Green Team is a year-long ordeal, every bit as physically and mentally demanding as BUD/S. There are SEAL Team Six operators who tell you that they thought it was tougher than BUD/S—much tougher.
“At BUD/S it’s a question of survival,” one Team Six operator summed up. “You get up in the morning and you try to survive until breakfast. But Green Team isn’t just a matter of obeying orders and hanging on. You’re competing against the best SEALs in the business. Green Team is a race, and the prize is a slot on the operational team.”
A few months after Gormly assumed command, in October 1983, a coup d’état occurred on the Caribbean island of Grenada. Its circumstances were highly suspicious. On Grenada, hundreds of Cuban “construction workers” had been sent to the island to complete work on an international airport. American satellites revealed that the runway had been completed in reasonable time, but the Cubans stayed on, using bulldozers to push dirt back and forth over the pavement. Ominously, the Cubans began receiving ever-increasing shipments of “equipment” that were transferred from the docks, at night, and assembled in closed hangars. The Cuban engineers were in fact Special Forces soldiers, and the equipment turned out to be armored vehicles, antiaircraft guns, and surface-to-air missiles.
Hudson Austin, a Grenadian army officer with communist leanings, had the island’s president, Maurice Bishop, assassinated. He also kidnapped the island governor-general, Sir Peter Schoon. When the Grenadian people started to protest, Austin ordered a twenty-four-hour-a-day, shoot-on-sight curfew. It was then that the Cubans played their hand. The armored vehicles and antiaircraft guns were driven to key places on the island. This was a Cuban show all the way.
There were about a thousand U.S. medical students on Grenada, attending the University of St. George. The Cubans surrounded the university and ordered the Americans into their dorm rooms. Fearing a repeat of the Iranian hostage drama, President Ronald Reagan ordered an invasion.
Operation Urgent Fury was a turning point for Naval Special Warfare.
Team Six had spectacular successes but it also had tragedy; before the opening of hostilities, four SEALs were lost conducting an at-sea rendezvous. The loss was made bitter because of its futility. It was a needless accident caused by complicity.
Once on the ground in Grenada, SEAL Six more than proved its mettle. Led by Bob Gormly, operational elements of SEAL Team Six rescued Governor-General Scoon, and took out the radio transmitter of Radio Free Grenada—two epic special operations that proved to JSOC and to Washington that SEAL Six could deliver.
Postinvasion analysis showed that the intelligence about the island had been woefully inaccurate. CIA officers provided one SEAL assault element with a tourist brochure with a target location circled in ballpoint pen. Assessments of the fighting capabilities of the Cuban engineers, too, had been dangerously underestimated. U.S. ground forces found themselves facing state-of-the-art Soviet-designed, Cuban-manned antiaircraft weapons. Combat-hardened Cuban forces drove armored vehicles that were able to shoot down helicopters and surround inserted SEAL Teams. It was a rude awakening.
On Grenada, the CIA continued to disappoint. When a SEAL element, led by Commander Donald Campbell, took over the studios of Radio Free Grenada, his mission plan stated that a CIA guide would lead a Marine company to the transmitter to secure it by 0900 hours.
The CIA never showed. The Marines were willing, but had no maps—the CIA was supposed to provide those as well. Campbell and his team of Red Men held the radio station for more than ten hours—beating off repeated attacks by Cuban infantry backed up by armored vehicles. Campbell’s SEALs, finally running out of ammunition, set explosive charges, blew up the station, and fled into the jungle.
Campbell and three of his team were wounded, and their satellite radio had been shot to pieces. They went to two prearranged pickup positions, only to find that the CIA, again, had forgotten to show. Disgusted, hunted by Cuban armor and infantry, Donald Campbell played the only card he had left. As night fell, he ordered his men to jump off a cliff into the water. Though wounded himself, Donald Campbell dragged another more seriously wounded member of his team out into the Atlantic, and led his team on a five-mile swim to an American destroyer.
From that moment forward, SEAL Team Six would never again put a mission into the field based on CIA-provided information. Though relations at the top remained cordial, on the operator level, the CIA became a joke.
But the weekend wasn’t even over. Across the world, another SEAL Team was about to get a very unpleasant surprise … and this, too, because local CIA case officers hadn’t seen the ball since kickoff. While the combined task force of SEALs, Delta, U.S. Marines, and Army Rangers were mopping up in Grenada, a new enemy reared its head.
In Beirut.
GOING SOLO
ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 23, 1983, a four-ton Mercedes truck passed through a Lebanese Army checkpoint and into the parking lot of the Beirut International Airport. It turned a circle, gathering speed, then crashed through a steel fence. The truck bulldozed its way through the sandbagged bunker at the entrance of the headquarters. Tires squealing on lobby tiles, it plowed on, dragging Marine sentries on its bumper as it rushed into the open center courtyard of the building.
Then it detonated—killing 243 American Marines who had been sent to Lebanon as part of a multinational peacekeeping force. The bomb that took out the Marine Battalion Landing Team headquarters in Beirut was the largest non-nuclear explosion in the history of warfare. Great portions of the building were turned to powder. Across town, twenty-eight seconds later, a second, identical, truck bomb was detonated outside the headquarters of the French Foreign Legion detachment. This bomb killed sixty French paratroopers and wounded fifty more. Until 9/11, the Beirut bombings were the most deadly acts of terrorism ever committed against the United States.
A simple bronze statue in Jacksonville, North Carolina, was erected to honor those killed in the Beirut Marine Barracks bombing. Under the figure of a Marine standing in combat uniform are four words: “They Came in Peace.” The statue, like the incident itself, has been mostly forgotten.
In Washington, D.C., the forgetting was much more purposeful. The Beirut station of the CIA had no idea that anyone was planning to bomb the Marines that October. To the SEALs on the ground in Beirut, the CIA in country had proven itself a nonplayer. But there was an American intelligence agency that was gathering information in Lebanon. The only problem was, they weren’t sharing.
Early in October 1983, the National Security Agency intercepted radio traffic between Tehran and the Iranian embassy in Damascus. Though not decoded until weeks after the attacks, these messages proved that two massive, sophisticated truck bombs were ordered by the Iranian government. The VBIEDs (vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices) were built by technicians of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and transported through the Bekaa Valley with the complicity of the Syrian army.
The date chosen for the attack was a Sunday morning, October 23, 1983—six years to the day since the United States granted political asylum to the shah of Iran. All of this could have been known, in advance, by the NSA—had they translated a backlog of intercepted message traffic. The failure of the National Security Agency to provide actionable intelligence to the Marines in Beirut was the single most negligent and catastrophic failure of U.S. intelligence since Pearl Harbor. The NSA would fail again, even more horrendously, on 9/11. But that was two decades in the future.
After the Beirut bombing, the NSA launched one of the most shameful and cynical cover-
ups in American history. Even before the last Marine body had been pulled from the wreckage, the NSA began to stonewall.
As the Marine Corps, and then Congress, conducted hearings on the military disaster, NSA director Lincoln D. Faurer failed to disclose certain NSA intercepts. This cynical move ensured that blame for the attack would fall on the few Marine officers who survived the blast. The NSA, abetted by the CIA, went so far as to create “battle damage assessments” that blamed the two highly sophisticated truck bombs on a Beirut street gang called Amal. The fix was in.
Colonel Tim Geraghty, the Marine commander in Lebanon, then a likely candidate for general, had his career ended by the issuing of a “nonpunitive letter of caution,” blaming him, incredibly, for failing to anticipate the bombing. His executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Gerlicht, had been made a quadriplegic by the blast. He had his career-killing letter handed to him in the Bethesda Naval Hospital.
The CIA and NSA made sure that the Marine officers at the airport took the rap. There’s no other example in American military history of more cold-blooded or ruthless interagency politics. Lincoln Faurer lived to see the Marine officers sent into early retirement and disgrace, while he managed to hold on to his job and get promoted to four-star general.
Transcripts of the Tehran–Damascus messages were only released in 2003, after repeated Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed by Colonel Geraghty, the commander of the Marine forces in Beirut. For the two decades following the Beirut attack, the National Security Agency would continuously fail to issue timely, predictive, or even relevant intelligence to decision-makers and military commanders. JSOC watched all of this and learned.
SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden Page 5