From that night on, the audit team really was there to help us. Dennis instructed his team to study us, identify our problems, and find a way to fix them. Then he told his people to tell us how to explain our anomalies in “bean counterese,” so later audit teams would understand our unique situation. What wound up taking them six weeks was turning over every stone and tidying it so we would never have problems with auditors again.
Dennis gave me the final report, which cited the problems his team had already given us the tools to repair. However, its major finding, one the report itself called “a show-stopper,” was that we weren’t being properly supported in the present system and the Navy was at risk because of it. Dennis made a recommendation that I heartily endorsed because I’d been pushing it for two years: Six should be taken out of the present oversight system and placed in a special one designed to handle such oddball things as we were doing. Until then, he recommended that we continue as we had been. He told me to carefully document every deviation we had to make for operational reasons and to state why explicitly in “Memoranda for the Record.” He recommended that I sign the more contentious memoranda but that my supply officer could handle routine deviations.
The NIS investigation continued through all of this. In fact, two NIS agents were in Dennis’s party when he started his audit. They left after two weeks, but in July they were back in force. I later found out someone in the hierarchy at NIS had said that they finally had the goods on SEAL Six, and Gormly was involved up to his ears.
At any rate, the NIS came and we cooperated. They wanted copies of all documents we had made since the command was formed. I explained that 90 percent of what they wanted was classified and closely controlled. We kept only one copy of many of the documents. The head agent said he’d be responsible for their security and promised to ensure that my administrative people could record every document they copied. I told him to go ahead. It seemed to me this NIS team was on a fishing expedition in waters that had been well fished before.
I knew we’d done nothing illegal as a command. The head agent took great pains to tell me they were looking for evidence of Marcinko crimes, and that neither I nor any others in Six were now under investigation. These words rang hollow when I learned from my guys that one of the first things they asked for was a copy of all my travel claims.
I was at a special warfare conference in Washington when Tom Moser paged my beeper. I called back to find him laughing. He told me the NIS had boxed up all the papers they wanted and had about three U-Haul trucks loaded and ready to go. He had looked out his window and seen five agents with Uzi submachine guns standing by the trucks. Tom found the head agent and had asked him what the hell was going on.
“We know your guys,” the agent replied. “We’re not taking any chances on the trucks getting hijacked on the road.”
“Are you serious?” Tom asked.
“Serious as a heart attack,” responded the agent.
I couldn’t believe it. My old shipmate and boss Rear Admiral Irish Flynn, who was now in charge of the NIS, was at the conference. I found him and asked what the hell was going on. He said the agent on the scene was overreacting, and he’d speak to him about it. Throughout, I had kept an open mind about how Irish was running the investigation; out of respect for his position as a SEAL running NIS, I never called him to find out how it was going. But there was no reason for what his guys had just done.
The investigation continued. About 0900 on July 16, 1986, the head lawyer (judge advocate general) on Vice Admiral McCauley’s staff called to tell me to have my XO, Commander Tom Moser, report to his office at 1300. Around 1100 I was due to see Captain Ron Bell, who had taken over Naval Special Warfare Group Two and was now my administrative commander. I gave Tom the word to go and drove over to meet with Ron Bell. Ron told me someone had accused Tom of telling my people not to cooperate with NIS.
Tom was a most scrupulous officer, and I knew he would never have done anything like that. As soon as I got to my vehicle, I got on the radio and called Six to warn Tom he was about to be blindsided. We agreed to meet at a shopping center on his way to the JAG’s office.
When I told him what I’d learned, Tom thought for a minute and said one of our guys, about to be questioned by the NIS, had come to him one day and asked if he had to take a lie-detector test. Tom had told him he should see a lawyer if he was concerned. Apparently, when offered a lie-detector test by the NIS, the man translated this into “The XO said I should see a lawyer first.”
Tom came back late in the afternoon, and he was mad. Hearing his side of the story, the JAG had told Tom that if that was all there was to it, Tom had done nothing wrong. The incident told me that NIS was getting desperate for results.
That night Ron Bell called me at home and said he had to see me the next day. In view of Tom’s session with the NIS agent, I asked whether I should bring a lawyer. Ron said, “No, just come on over tomorrow.”
When I got there, he was looking very uncomfortable, but he got right to the point. Someone had told the NIS that I’d allowed my men to bring back an airplane load of illegal weapons from the Grenada operation. That someone told NIS I even had three AK-47s of my own from the haul. I looked at Ron and said, “That’s a bunch of bullshit.” I had explicitly forbidden my teams to bring back any weapons.
But I know SEALs, and a few weeks after we had returned from Grenada, I had put out the word that there was a one-week grace period during which anyone who’d brought back illegal weapons could turn them into our ordnance department, no questions asked. Four weapons had turned up. I had sent a message to the Joint Headquarters asking that we be allowed to put the weapons in our inventory and use them for training, and the CG gave permission. I told Ron the weapons had been inventoried weekly thereafter and they were still in our armory.
“Okay, okay,” Ron said. He then asked if I had told my disbursing officer to make sure the troops got every dime of Temporary Additional Duty (TAD) money they rated and if I had told him to bend over backward to see that they were well compensated. TAD money is provided to military personnel for their care and feeding when they’re away from their home base on official duty. Apparently, NIS had questioned the validity of some of the travel claims my men had submitted.
I said, “Yes to the first part of the question, and no to the second.” As I explained to Ron, my guys didn’t eat regular meals when they were on the road training because they worked long hours and ate when they could. They couldn’t fill out travel forms showing three meals a day because they just didn’t eat on that schedule. Right after I took command, I told the disbursing officer (a chief petty officer) that I wanted him to look carefully at each travel claim and bring any funny-looking ones to the XO or me.
I asked Ron, “Do you have any idea who’s making these off-the-wall accusations?”
He asked me if I knew a certain ex-chief petty officer. I did. He had worked for me at Six as the administrative officer, having been there when I took over from Marcinko. I “civilianized” the job and hired him for it after he retired from the Navy. He was a personality problem, but I put up with him until, in September 1985, I learned from one of our OPSEC agents that the man was calling Marcinko regularly to tell him what was going on in the command. The XO found this was true—the guy was feeding command-confidential information to Marcinko. I fired him on the spot. Now it seemed he’d found an avenue for revenge. Had Marcinko put him up to it?
Ron was relieved by my answers, and I told him I’d be happy to go see Admiral McCauley and tell him the same, face-to-face. Ron said that wouldn’t be necessary; McCauley, he said, was convinced there was nothing behind all the aspersions being thrown at me, but he was getting pressure from someone above him to relieve me “for cause”—that is, in military terms, to fire me. Relief for cause terminates the officer’s career.
When I left Ron’s office, my anxieties hadn’t been allayed. I was now sure that the NIS was getting desperate to hang someone. They were thra
shing the weeds, having uncovered so little that they couldn’t justify all the money they’d spent. They wanted a Navy captain’s head, and I was the only one around.
The other shoe dropped later, when Becky and I returned from a short vacation after I left command of SEAL Team Six. One of the administrative people from Six came to my house and gave me a letter from the Chief of Naval Personnel. He knew what was in the letter and apologized for having to be the messenger. Inside the envelope was a modification to my orders to relieve Ron as Commander, Naval Special Warfare Group Two. Instead I was ordered to the Naval Amphibious Base to await the outcome of the investigation. It looked as if my next command tour was in jeopardy.
In 1985, Dick Marcinko had nearly convinced Vice Admiral Ace Lyons, OP-06, that I ought to leave Six. I had put in an official request for a one-year extension that winter (normally I’d have been moved on to another job in July 1985). The request sailed through the chain of command and ended up on Lyons’s desk. Dick Marcinko was in another section of OP-06, running the Red Cell. When he learned of the letter, he started politicking to get me out. He had not been able to control me, and he still saw himself as the “hot runner” in the SEAL community. With me out of command at Six, he’d be in a more powerful position to run the entire program.
The man he proposed to relieve me in the summer of 1985 was Commander Gary Stubblefield, a great officer and one of our best operators. He was finishing a demanding operational assignment and moving him into Six made sense but for two problems. First, the commanding general of the Joint Headquarters, my administrative boss Captain Ron Bell, Vice Admiral McCauley, and other admirals in my chain of command wanted me to stay for another year so I could finish some things I’d started. Second, Gary was not a captain. Finally, after the CG sent a personal message asking Lyons why I shouldn’t stay another year, my extension was approved.
Normally, commanding officers of SEAL teams served two-year tours and moved on. Six was different, though. Our rapid-deployment mission demanded that Six be kept in a much higher condition of readiness than any of the other SEAL teams. Both my operational and administrative commanders thought a three-year tour would provide better continuity at the top of Six, which, in their minds, equaled better readiness. Also, they wanted me to stay on to complete changes in procedures that I’d instituted to counter the Marcinko mind-set. Whatever the case, I wanted to stay and my bosses wanted me to stay.
And stay I did, until July 1986. Then I turned over the command to an old friend and headed out to take command of Special Warfare Group Two. But the turmoil continued.
About ten days before I was to relieve Ron, another bizarre thing happened. I got a call from one of my former Six officers, who was working at the Pentagon pushing our issues through the bureaucracy. He had heard Captain Ted Grabowsky, head of the SEAL resource office on the CNO’s staff, telling another OPNAV officer that the Gormly-Bell turnover wasn’t going to happen. And, though Gormly and Bell didn’t know it yet, he (Grabowsky) was going to be jerked out of OPNAV to relieve Bell, and Gormly was going to jail.
“Thanks for the heads-up, but we’re turning over on schedule,” I told my former officer. If there was to be a “night of the long knives,” they’d better hustle.
Then I called Ron.
He just laughed. “I must have forgotten to send Ted an invitation to the ceremony.”
Ted and I had worked together on many different occasions over the years. He was a good SEAL staff officer, but I figured he’d misheard the latest Gormly rumor circulating in Washington and was assuming a lot more than he should have.
I’d already danced this dance. In March 1986 Captain Paul Moses of the Navy Personnel Office had called to ask if I’d like to relieve Ron.
“Sure,” I said.
“I’ll get your orders cut,” he replied.
I thought nothing more about it until Irish phoned about a month later. Would I like to relieve Captain Larry Bailey, who had served with me on my first tour in Vietnam, as commanding officer of the Naval Special Warfare Center in Coronado? I’d stay in the job for one year and then take charge of Special Warfare Group Two.
When Irish was done I said, “Sounds like a plan to me, Irish, but you’d better call Paul Moses because I already have orders in hand to relieve Ron.”
Irish was quiet for a few seconds. “I’ll get back to you.”
Soon after that conversation, I received a heads-up from a friend in Washington. It seems Irish had been seeing admirals at the Personnel Office, trying to change my orders to relieve Ron. Irish was the only SEAL admiral at that time, and he felt a responsibility to assign SEAL officers—particularly senior SEAL officers. Apparently he wanted to put Ted in the job because Ted had selected for major command (Naval Special Warfare Groups One and Two were major commands) a year before me. I saw the logic of this, but the decision was out of my hands.
A few days later I got another call from Paul Moses, who told me not to listen to rumors. It was his job to decide where I went, and if there were any changes he’d be the one to let me know. I never heard any more from Irish on the subject.
A humorous aside. Two months after I relieved Ron, my secretary buzzed me on the intercom and said some captain wanted to speak to him. I told her to put him through. It was Captain Paul Moses, calling Ron to find out what had happened to me. When I answered, Paul asked, “What are you doing there? I thought you were still assigned to the base.”
I said, “Ron and I turned over on McCauley’s instructions two months ago. The admiral said he’d square it with you guys.”
No response from Paul.
I went on. “What I’m doing here, Paul, is commanding Group Two.”
He laughed. “I never got the word.” He had called the amphibious base CO to find out how I was doing. The base CO told him to call the group. Paul wished me luck and hung up.
The investigation, code-named Iron Eagle, kept up after I left Six and took over Special Warfare Group Two. I think the Navy inspector general (IG) still believed I was part of the problem when it came time to resolve an incident involving Red Cell. Like many senior Navy officials, the IG had a hard time distinguishing between Red Cell and SEAL Team Six. No doubt Marcinko’s repeated attempts to commingle the two contributed to that misunderstanding. The Red Cell investigation seemed entwined with Iron Eagle, but the common thread was not the two commands; it was Marcinko.
Under Dick Marcinko’s leadership, Red Cell had been testing security at naval facilities worldwide, throwing everything but the kitchen sink at them, going far beyond what the bases might expect from terrorists. That was fine, because by the time they left a base, it had been thoroughly wrung out. Trouble surfaced when team members roughed up the civilian base-security officer at the Seal Beach, California, Naval Ammunition Depot.
A few months later I got word that I would be responsible for adjudicating charges against two former members of Red Cell for their alleged actions at Seal Beach. I received a copy of the investigation report and a copy of a videotape made during the incident. Red Cell normally took elaborate videos of all aspects of each exercise and used them to instruct the facility being tested.
The investigation said Marcinko had ordered his men to capture the security officer at his house and make him a “hostage.” Such hostage-taking was a normal part of each exercise, so the order wasn’t unusual. The problem, according to the investigative report, was that Marcinko had told his people to work the security officer over a bit, apparently because he had been causing Marcinko problems in the exercise. The security officer felt they went too far, so he filed a complaint. Yet just after the incident, the report said (and a video sequence verified) the security officer was sitting in the postexercise debriefing, laughing with his captors about what they’d done to him. The report also had statements from “hostages” who’d been taken in previous exercises, attesting to how they had been treated. The descriptions of their treatment sounded just like what had been done to the Seal Beach s
ecurity officer.
My staff lawyer and I went through the investigation and video with a fine-tooth comb. We could see clearly what they had done to the guy, and I will admit they treated him a little roughly—as if he’d been a fellow SEAL. But from what my lawyer and I could determine, they didn’t treat him worse than previous hostages.
That, to us, was an important point. It meant that a norm had been established in previous exercises and ostensibly approved by the oversight officer, Rear Admiral Paul Butcher. Also, from the video it was clear to both of us that one of the men charged, a corpsman, had tried to tone down the action. The other man charged had been on the periphery of the action. The two men dealing out most of the blows weren’t the ones I’d been asked to punish.
My lawyer and I independently came to the same conclusion. The men weren’t guilty of doing anything wrong. In fact, one of them had tried to soften the situation. We couldn’t figure out why these two were being charged. Both of them had worked for me at Six and they were outstanding SEALs. As far as I could see, the only thing they were guilty of was poor judgment for going to work for Marcinko again. I told my lawyer to ask the judge advocate general if he could find out what was going on, and what the Navy planned for Marcinko.
Similar charges had been made against Lieutenant Duke Leonard, the assault team leader who’d rescued the governor general during Urgent Fury. Duke left Six in 1984 and went to work for Marcinko at Red Cell. He was at Seal Beach, but not in charge.
It turns out the Navy IG wanted me to hammer the people with the expectation they would testify against Marcinko in exchange for lighter sentences. In other words, they were using a typical investigation method: start at the bottom and hope the juniors will help hang the seniors. I told my lawyer there was no way I was going to ruin the careers of two fine SEALs in an attempt to get Marcinko.
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