Combat Swimmer

by Robert A. Gormly

  A Navy captain who identified himself as the commanding officer of the U.S. Naval Air Facility at Sigonella arrived and said we ought to turn over the criminals to the Italians. I said no way; we were conferring with an Egyptian ambassador, and I expected the situation would be resolved soon. He said in return that we were on the Italian side of the base and that he found out what we were doing when the Italians told him. I began to wonder just what coordinating the people in Washington had done. (We later learned our government had tried to coordinate with the Italians, but that by the time they reached Premier Bettino Craxi, we were on the ground.)

  My general came up and told me he was going to take the ambassador and a three-star Italian general (not the one I’d pissed off) someplace quieter to negotiate. “Hold down the fort, Bob. Don’t let the Italians on the plane.”

  I said, “Aye, aye, sir,” and they drove off.

  As soon as he was gone, my radio operator told me we’d just received an order from someone over the SATCOM to assault the plane immediately, capture the bad guys, and depart on our C-141s. I took the receiver and explained the situation: we were surrounded by a large number of angry, heavily armed Italians. They had blocked our planes with vehicles and surrounded our position. Did he really want me to start a battle with them? I heard, “Wait—out.”

  Earlier, I’d sent my executive officer, Commander Tom Moser, to keep a lid on things at the airplane stairs. As soon as I’d signed off, Tom came on: “Hey, boss, you’d better get over here. The Italians are about to assault my position.”

  I went. Tom, Chief Petty Officer Rich Peters, and a couple of our troops were blocking the base of the stairs. An angry Italian officer was there as well. He told me he was taking his men aboard the plane. I told him no one was going on the plane until our bosses had reached some sort of agreement. We spent a few tense moments eyeballing each other, and he blinked. He agreed not to push the issue. Good thing, too, because my guys were beginning to get pretty irritated themselves. It was starting to get hot all around.

  Back at my command post, I received a SATCOM transmission from the National Military Command Center, where the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense carry out the president’s orders and otherwise manage crises. They asked for an order of battle. I told them I had eighty-three men with me. As near as I could tell, the Italians had about sixteen hundred troops around the airplane. “But,” I pointed out, “it’s dark and I can’t count heads.” The person on the other end thanked me and asked if I thought I could keep the 737 on the ground. I said, “No problem—the 737 isn’t going anywhere.”

  I knew this because earlier I’d sent Bob “Bobby Lew” Lewis, the man who’d taken the chain saw to the trees around the governor general’s mansion during Urgent Fury, to the front of the 737 with a truck our Sigonella assault team had borrowed. I told him to take two men and make sure the plane stayed put. Bobby Lew said, “Don’t sweat it, Skipper,” and what Bobby Lew said went.

  Then the situation got even more tense. Bo called on the MX-300 to say that Italians with automatic weapons had surrounded his position to the left rear of the plane. I told him to have his guys face out and stay put. With Italian armored vehicles approaching from the apron in front of the 737, I suddenly heard a loud “bang.” Amidst a burst of adrenaline I thought, “Shot fired.” Bobby Lew came right up on the radio and said not to worry—one of the armored cars needed a tune-up. When he saw me confronting the Italian at the stairs he’d moved forward underneath the plane; when he went back to his vehicle, he found the ignition key broken off in the lock. Master Chief Billy Acklin told Bobby Lew that was okay, we weren’t sending him out for beer anytime soon.

  Everyone’s nerves were tight as drumheads. The Italians were furious. In retrospect I don’t blame them but at the time I didn’t have much sympathy for their damaged feelings.

  I called the commanding general’s communicator on the SATCOM and asked how things were going. Lieutenant Colonel Dick Malvesti, from the operations division, told me it looked as if things were going well. They weren’t yelling and they had just sent out for coffee. Dick said he would stay on the radio and let me know as soon as they decided something. One of the coolest officers around, Dick had been in our Army counterpart unit for years before moving to the Joint Headquarters staff. He knew what he was doing, and I trusted his judgment.

  More Italians kept arriving at the plane. If shooting started, it was going to get interesting. I wasn’t too worried, because we had enough firepower to force a standoff, but I knew we’d take casualties. Over the radio, I kept checking with my team leaders, who all reported that they were doing fine. Randy had refused a request by some Italian police to board and look around our C-141.

  After a while I lost track of time. I remember looking at my watch and seeing we’d been in Sigonella about five hours. It seemed a lot longer than that.

  Finally, Dick Malvesti called to say an agreement had been reached: we would turn over the hijackers to the Italians, who had agreed to prosecute them under Italian law. I told him I wasn’t letting the Italians on the plane until the CG got back.

  By the time the commanding general returned, the Italians had heard the news too; they were joking among themselves, and the atmosphere had lightened. The general told me to let the Italians board the plane but to keep my guys in place until the criminals were in the police vehicles.

  I stood at the stairs as the criminals were led off the plane in handcuffs and driven away. The Italian general with whom I’d had words came up and shook my hand, assuring me they would be dealt with quickly and severely.

  The CG told me he figured things had worked out as well as possible under the circumstances. Now it was time to get my guys out of there. We took off without incident at about 0930 on October 10.

  After we were gone, the Italians loaded the criminals back aboard the Egyptian 737 and used it to transport their prisoners to Rome. After the four criminals were off-loaded in Rome, the 737 took off with Abu Abbas and his assistant still on board—so the Italians had apparently cut their own deal with the Palestinians.

  The Craxi government fell because we had violated Italian sovereignty and gotten away with it. In fact our actions at Sigonella remained a festering sore in Italian pride for some years. Later, I could understand how they felt. Suppose the Italians landed unannounced at one of our airfields and held our forces at gunpoint. We’d be pissed too.

  As soon as we’d gotten back to our base, just after dark on October 10, Vice Admiral Scott McCauley called me congratulating us for a job well done. I also received many calls from people in Washington to the same effect, and the following week the commanding general got an appreciative message from President Reagan. I agreed with these assessments—a few days after we got back. We were all disappointed at not having a chance to take the ship, and I’d really wanted to get the bad guys at Sigonella.

  I sent Bo to New York City to attend an FBI debriefing of the American passengers from the Achille Lauro. When Bo returned, he told me our plan would have worked, “big-time.” We had deduced correctly where all the bad guys were on the ship, a key feature in such an operation. I’m convinced we would have resolved the situation quickly had we had the chance to take down the ship.

  During our own debriefing, a few days after we returned, the CG and I agreed that if we had assaulted the 737 as soon as we hit the ground, we might have gotten away with it. But we might also have caused an international incident like we’d never seen before. Given the cards we were dealt, I think matters worked out for the best. Both of us were really proud of the fire discipline and maturity my guys showed. SEAL Team Six was awarded the Joint Meritorious Unit Award (JMUA), and I got some of my key people individual awards for their superb actions at Sigonella.

  What we did in Sigonella was unprecedented. Without clearing the operation with the Italian government, we landed two C-141s with combat troops. Then we held the Italian police and military at bay for abo
ut ten hours. We were still feeling the repercussions in 1990. While I was working in the Pentagon we were negotiating with the Italian Defense Ministry to allow us to set up a Naval Special Warfare unit at a base in Italy. The Italian military was all for it, but as soon as the proposal reached the Defense Ministry it slowed, and after about five months we learned that it had been refused. A book about the Achille Lauro incident had hit the streets about the time our request hit the Defense Ministry. Public pressure was so strong that the government felt they couldn’t approve setting up a special operations unit on Italian soil.

  To me, the most significant aspect of our action was that it showed the world that the United States of America was willing to take extraordinary steps to apprehend and prosecute international criminals. Forcing down a plane belonging to a friendly government and violating the sovereignty of another, even more traditional, ally are drastic measures. We put teeth in President Reagan’s message to criminals that they could run but they could not hide.

  As for the Italian prosecution, I was satisfied with the results: all four criminals got prison time. Given the events surrounding some trials that took place in America around then, I’m not sure we’d have even gotten convictions.

  My big regret was that the Italians allowed Abu Abbas to leave. He was well known to Western intelligence as the mastermind behind a number of terrorist incidents. Since he had appeared on the scene, I think we can correctly assume he had some role in the planning of the Achille Lauro hijacking as well. What the terrorists were trying to accomplish is not clear. The fact that they attempted to take the ship into Syrian waters led some experts to believe that the operation was not sanctioned by the PLO, and so they intended to get off in Syria. Another, more plausible explanation is that they were planning to pick up more compatriots and explosives, after which they would sail into an Israeli port and do as much damage as they could. I don’t know. Certainly they didn’t have enough men to sustain themselves very long; there were too many passengers for four men to control twenty-four hours a day. (No doubt they felt they couldn’t safely smuggle more than four men on board the Achille Lauro.) Whatever their reasons, by seizing the ship and holding it for nearly three days, the criminals drew the attention many such fanatics crave. Clearly, they responded to PLO orders, and one can reasonably assume they were not acting on their own.

  The Achille Lauro operation showed me the command had matured. The men showed extraordinary discipline and professionalism under very tense and politically sensitive conditions. By mid-1985, I knew we were the best in the world at what we did.

  22

  AUDITS AND INVESTIGATIONS: THE MARCINKO LEGACY

  In early 1986, the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) started an investigation that would last four years and sully the reputation of SEAL Team Six. The ostensible subject of the investigation was Dick Marcinko, but many others were drawn into the vortex.

  I had known Dick for many years, and until after I relieved him at Six I had always considered him a friend. Throughout my command of Six he was on the OPNAV staff, meaning he worked for the Chief of Naval Operations. There, he attempted to discredit me among senior Navy officers in the Pentagon. He said that morale was suffering in Six under my leadership. I didn’t like that, but I considered it part of the service politics one encounters at the upper echelons of the Navy, and no one in my chain of command believed him. However, in trying to get at me, he also questioned the professionalism of the people in the command, and the command’s ability to carry out its mission. He denigrated the men of SEAL Team Six in order to further his goal of getting me out of command. Attacking me was one thing; attacking the command was another. I lost all respect for him as a naval officer and a SEAL.

  In early February 1986, I heard an investigation had been started in which Dick Marcinko was a “party” (i.e., under suspicion). Soon two NIS agents visited me and asked me questions about Dick, many concerning issues for which he had already been investigated while he was in command. I pointed them toward the investigation reports, on file at headquarters. The agents also asked me about some actions other members of the command had taken before my time—I had no comment on those—and agents talked to many of my Team.

  I forgot about the investigation until a few months later when two more agents showed up and asked me about some special ordnance items that had been procured for SEAL Team Six two years earlier by Marcinko while he was at OPNAV. I told them the items had been procured for Dick’s OPNAV office, not for SEAL Six. I had arrived at work one day in the spring of 1984 to find a message from Joint Headquarters asking us to validate a requisition that had been submitted to a procurement agency in SEAL Six’s name. I’d heard nothing of the request and wasn’t familiar with the list of items. Yet, knowing how things went, I told my executive officer to check with our ordnance department; they didn’t know anything about the requisition either. I thought some of the items looked interesting, but there was no way I could agree to the vast numbers being procured. Nor had any of the items, to any of my people’s knowledge, undergone any type of testing.

  Soon, I received a call from Dick asking why I hadn’t validated the list. At first I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then I realized he had written it, and I told him that though we’d be happy to see small quantities of some items we weren’t interested in the whole kit and caboodle. He started yelling that I didn’t know what I was doing and that the Team needed all the items on the list, et cetera, et cetera. When I asked him about the large quantities of these experimental items, he said that most of them were for the “Red Cell” he was putting together under the auspices of OPNAV.

  Red Cell, an organization that tested the security of naval installations, reported directly to the deputy chief of Naval Operations for Plans and Operations, at that time Vice Admiral Ace Lyons. Eight or ten former members of SEAL Team Six had transferred there. Dick had gotten Lyons to agree to the idea but so far no money had been allocated to equip and run Red Cell because it had not been authorized by the CNO. I thought such security testing was a good idea, given the worldwide terrorist threat, and I also figured running Red Cell would give Dick an outlet for his energy. Since they had no money, I let him borrow some SEAL Team Six equipment to get started.

  I told Marcinko to say in the procurement document that the ordnance items were for Red Cell and leave SEAL Team Six out of it. He mumbled something about not being able to do that (which was because no one had yet authorized Red Cell). I told him he didn’t determine what Six needed—I did—and after we’d exchanged appropriate pleasantries, I hung up. A few minutes later Dick’s boss, Captain Bill Hamilton, called to apologize for Dick’s outburst. Of course I accepted the apology, but I didn’t change my mind about the ordnance items.

  In July 1984, my new ordnance chief told me we were about to receive some new, experimental ordnance items from OPNAV. What did I want to do with them? Turned out these were the same items that Dick and I had discussed. Apparently he had found a way to buy them. I told the chief to have them sent to our training facility in Nevada and subject them to some rudimentary safety tests. It wasn’t unusual for us to do this, because we were given broad latitude to test and develop special items for our use. Also, we could use some of the items if they proved safe and effective.

  Some time later, the chief told me the few items they had tested proved unsafe, having failed the standard military “bullet test”: a high-powered round had been fired into the items, and they had exploded. We couldn’t dispose of them by turning them in to an ordnance facility, because they had been procured outside the system and no ordnance facility would accept them. I told him to have our explosive ordnance disposal-qualified SEALs destroy them.

  Soon afterward, the command was subjected to a series of audits by all levels of the chain, up to and including the auditor general of the Navy. I would have been the first to admit that we did things outside the usual procedures, but we were forced to in order to maintain our readiness because
the system moved too slowly to keep up with our changing environment.

  My guidance to the members of the command always was to get the job done but not to do anything illegal or irregular without my approval. I was the one responsible. During my three years in command of Six no one ever came to me with anything illegal. I often authorized the breaking of military regulations, but I always wrote a “Memorandum for the Record” explaining why. We kept those memos on file and showed them to every audit team that came by. Though they usually blanched when they saw what I had authorized, never was I told I shouldn’t have acted as I did given the circumstances at the time.

  Each investigation and audit team came to Six convinced they’d find the smoking gun that would prove Six a bunch of crooks whose only purpose in life was to milk the system for all it could get. Each group left the Team wondering what the fuss was all about. I just wanted to be left alone to get my job done.

  That wasn’t to be. In late February 1986, a team from the Navy auditor general’s office came in, with fire in their eyes just like all the other audit teams we’d seen. They told me they’d be there for about two weeks, but they stayed for six.

  Two weeks into the audit, I called an emergency load-out drill and invited the head auditor, Dennis Friend, to stay with me as the troops went through their paces. The drill culminated with a simulated launch. I recalled the alert assault team and had them do a shooting exercise. Throughout, Dennis asked why we did certain things, and I explained as well as I could. He asked, too, whether this drill was for his benefit, and I answered honestly, “I do these all the time.” As the night went on, I could tell he was gaining an appreciation for what we did and why we didn’t always follow regulations designed for the peacetime Navy. At the end I asked him what he thought, and he said he’d had no idea about the scope of my responsibility.