Mission Compromised

by Oliver North

  Less than two weeks after he sent that letter, forty-two days after he and his comrades arrived in Somalia, Jim Newman and seventeen of his fellow Delta Force operators, Rangers, and airmen were dead and seventy-three others were wounded. The next communication that Peter Newman read about his brother was the stark Mailgram that his parents had received on October 5, the day after a ritual visit by an Army colonel and a military chaplain to their home along the Hudson River in upstate New York. The Mailgram left them with more questions than answers:

  DEAR BRIGADIER GEN. AND MRS. NEWMAN:

  THIS CONFIRMS PERSONAL NOTIFICATION MADE TO YOU BY A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SECRETARY OF THE ARMY THAT YOUR SON, CAPTAIN JAMES B. NEWMAN, DIED AT MOGADISHU SOMALIA ON 3 OCTOBER 1993. ANY QUESTIONS YOU MAY HAVE SHOULD BE DIRECTED TO YOUR CASUALTY ASSISTANCE OFFICER. PLEASE ACCEPT MY DEEPEST SYMPATHY IN YOUR BEREAVEMENT.

  SINCERELY,

  WILLIAM E. WILKES, COLONEL, U.S. ARMY

  Peter Newman didn't have to turn to the casualty assistance officer for answers to his questions, for he knew much more about his brother's death than the terse official Army notification had revealed. At Headquarters Marine Corps—“HQMC” to Marines—Newman had been responsible for briefing the Marines' senior officers on all issues regarding “Special Operations,” the euphemism to describe activities conducted by units like Marine Force Reconnaissance, the Navy SEALs, and the supersecret Delta Force.

  The military's Special Operations units are comprised of highly trained warriors, all volunteers, handpicked to do the most difficult and dangerous tasks in the U.S. armed forces. They are the ones called upon to conduct deep reconnaissance, collect covert intelligence, rescue hostages, operate “behind the lines,” “take out” terrorists, and succeed in real-life “impossible” missions.

  Newman's job at the HQMC had required that he pore over highly classified after-action reports and back-channel cables between the commanders of these units and their home bases, extract “lessons learned,” and incorporate them into Marine Corps doctrine. Many of the reports he had sent in from the field years before, when he had commanded the Second Force Reconnaissance Company, were still in the locked files of his office at HQMC.

  Now, thirteen months after his brother's horrible death, here he was sitting in the White House Situation Room while his new boss prattled on over the phone. Newman could still vividly recall how he had learned the terrible news.

  At 6:55 A.M. on Sunday, October 3, 1993, the Marine Headquarters Command Center duty officer had called Newman at his home in Falls Church. Newman was already up, and as was his practice when his wife was out of town, he'd already been out for an early morning three-mile run in the crisp, early autumn dawn.

  “Major Newman? Warrant Officer Davidson, here at the command center. Sorry to bother you on the weekend, but NMCC has advised us that a hostile-fire event is going down in Mogadishu. There's a lot of secure traffic coming across, and CMC is going to want a brief on this in the morning.”

  “Roger that, Gunner. I'll be there in about forty minutes.” Newman knew that's how long it would take him to shower, change into his uniform, and drive to the Navy Annex, the official name for the five-story World War II—era, faded yellow brick row of warehouses that the Marines called HQMC.

  Rachel was due into Dulles that afternoon, inbound on a flight from London, so Newman left a note for her before heading into town. He turned his radio to 1500 AM, Washington's all-news station. There was a report on rumors of a coup being plotted against Boris Yeltsin in Moscow, a story about the President's travel itinerary for a trip to the West Coast, and a sports piece hyping Monday evening's Washington Redskins game in Miami. There was nothing at all in the newscast about events happening a third of the way around the world in Somalia.

  It was shortly before 7:45 A.M. when Newman arrived at the HQMC security gate, and it was immediately obvious to him that he wasn't the only one to have gotten a call from the command center. On a Sunday morning in peacetime the headquarters parking lot should be nearly empty. Instead, several dozen cars were parked inside the fence surrounding the building. He noticed that his boss, Lieutenant General George Grisham, the deputy chief of staff for Operations and Plans, was already there. Clearly, something big affecting the U.S. military was happening. Newman recognized the feeling that was growing in his gut. It wasn't hunger from not eating breakfast. It was dread.

  Newman bounded up two flights of stairs to what everyone else in the world would have called the third floor. But not the Marines. In keeping with the tradition of the naval service, the ground floor was known as “zero deck,” the second floor was first deck, the third floor was known as the second deck, and so on.

  Most of the “heavies,” or the general officers, had their offices on the second deck, as did the commandant, the top Marine. Because the corps was so very small, they all knew Newman, and even though the assignment was highly classified, they also knew he had a brother serving with Delta who had been dispatched with Task Force Ranger to Mogadishu. Newman went immediately to the command center and presented his ID card to the sentry, a Marine corporal.

  After checking the ID card against a list of names on a clipboard and making sure that the photo on the card matched the officer standing in front of him, the corporal hit a button beneath the counter. There was a buzzing sound as the electronic lock on the door opened and Newman stepped into the command center.

  Inside, he was greeted by a quiet hum of activity and a dozen people—five more than the usual contingent of watch officers, noncommissioned officers, and communicators. Two technicians were bent over one of the secure video receivers. The screen was mostly a mass of visual static, but occasionally it would shimmer with the aerial view of a sunbaked city and its streets and buildings. Even from the intermittent images, Newman knew what he was seeing: the city of Mogadishu from several thousand feet in the air, captured by high-powered video cameras mounted on a Navy EP-3 Orion surveillance aircraft. The images flickering on the screen were beamed from the plane flying at ten thousand feet over eastern Africa, up to a satellite, and back down to U.S. military commanders and intelligence centers at the airport in Mogadishu, and to intelligence and command centers in Florida, North Carolina, Washington, and other sensitive military installations.

  As Newman leaned over the monitor in hopes that the adjustments made by the two techs would bring up a steady picture, his boss hung up one of the secure phones—the direct link to the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon.

  “Pete, I'm glad you're here,” said General Grisham. “I'm not going to beat around the bush. About two hours ago your brother's Delta team was sent into the Black Sea in Mog to snatch a couple of Aidid's thugs. His D-boys got to their objective and took the target subjects into custody, but two Black Hawks have gone down and now ninety-nine Delta operators and Rangers are stranded in a really bad part of town.”

  “Bad part of town” was putting it mildly. The Marines, first sent to Somalia in 1992 and then pulled out in May of 1993, had irreverently started calling the area around Mogadishu's Bakara Market the “Black Sea.” It was a stronghold for Mohammed Farrah Aidid and his Habr Gidr clan, and the place where he recruited thousands of young fighters for his so-called Somali National Alliance. The “Black Sea” handle stuck, and it was now commonplace to refer to the neighborhood by its racially tinged nickname. It was not the place for a gunfight.

  Newman listened as General Grisham continued. “I've reminded the Joint Staff that in addition to help from the Tenth Mountain Division Quick Reaction Force, they also have a Marine Expeditionary Unit with tanks, light armored vehicles, helos, gunships, and Harriers aboard the amphibious ready group offshore. It's almost 1600 hours out there now. They think that they will be able to get everyone out before dark, but I'm not so sure.”

  Newman wasn't so sure either. He had been to Mogadishu twice with his Force Recon Teams—but that was before the new commander in chief had rolled into town with his team of “nati
on builders.” Since then, things had gone from bad to worse in Somalia, and now, of all things, the UN was in charge!

  The general looked down at his notes, then back at Newman. “The chairman has called for a planners' meeting in the Tank at 1300. I want you and Colonel Weeks to work up some options for us, and let's see if we can help them figure a way to get your brother out of this mess without getting him or any more Americans hurt.”

  The next twenty-four hours were the worst that Peter Newman had known in all his thirty-seven years. He'd been shot at and hit more than once during his fifteen years in the Marines. Yet, even when things had been critical in combat, he felt like he was always able to do something to alter the outcome, no matter how dire the circumstances. But now he was in an intolerable situation: stuck in a high-tech command center in Washington, but unable to command anything. The room was full of electronic gadgets that allowed him to monitor events as they occurred; yet he was helpless—relegated to playing the role of a long-distance, impotent witness to a personal horror. For only the third time in his life, he thought to himself, If I knew how to pray, I would.

  For the rest of Sunday and on into the predawn hours of Monday, Newman spent nearly every minute in the HQMC command center, piecing together bits of message traffic, fragments of desperate radio calls, and occasional pictures on the secure video link. By the time General Grisham had returned from his meeting at the Pentagon, it was dark in Mogadishu, and the intermittent signals received on the secure video link were no longer in color. Instead, the infrared, heat-sensitive cameras mounted on the EP-3 surveillance planes sent video pictures that showed up on the monitors as an eerie, green monochrome. Yet, because of its resolution and clarity, thousands of Somali guerrillas and civilians could be seen moving around the tiny perimeter in the heart of a hostile African city where Jim Newman and ninety-eight other Americans were slowly being cut to pieces by Somali machine guns, AK-47s, and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). It vaguely occurred to Newman that William Travis and his 182 Texans hadn't been this outnumbered at the Alamo.

  General Grisham called Newman aside and said quietly, “This is a real mess, and it's gonna take a lot of prayer to get those boys outta there. Even though the White House sent the D-boys and Rangers in to get Aidid, they are now saying that the UN needs to find a political solution!” Then he added, “I wish that the guys who think they're running this war knew what end is up. From the beginning, the troops in Mog have had no decent intel, and every time the orders are cut, they get conflicting signals. Now that we've got a bunch of troops on the ground in big trouble, nobody over at the White House seems to know what to do. All they seem to know is what they don't want us to do—and that's send in a whole lot more Americans to rescue the Rangers and Delta. When I suggested that we land the MEU sitting offshore, the chairman called over to the White House, and the National Security Advisor told him to let the UN work it out. They're smoking something other than tobacco at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue if they think the UN can get their act together in time to save these guys in the Black Sea!”

  After delivering this appalling assessment, the general turned to Newman and the senior watch officer, Warrant Officer Bill Sturdevan, and said, “I'll be down in my office. Let me know if there are any developments.” Newman went back to his lonely vigil, monitoring the satellite communications and incoming cables, and hoping that his brother would come out of this alive.

  Shortly before dawn in Mogadishu, a rescue force of Rangers, Delta Force specialists, Tenth Mountain Division soldiers, Malaysians, and Pakistanis punched through the three miles from the airport to the surrounded Rangers and Delta Force operators dying in the “Black Sea.” But by then, though his brother didn't know it, Captain James Newman, dehydrated, bloody from wounds received during nearly eight hours of battle, hoarse from shouting above the din of nonstop gunfire, was dead. He had been killed instantly by the earsplitting, flesh-searing burst of a rocket-propelled grenade. As the blast of the RPG snuffed out his life, James Bedford Newman was trying to protect one of the grievously wounded crewmen from the first of the two downed Black Hawk helicopters.

  At the Marine command center, the watch officers and duty section shifts had changed three times by early Monday. But other than taking time out to refill a large mug with coffee and the inevitable call of nature that it produced, Newman stayed glued to a communications console in the corner of the room. In addition to all the secure communications gear, the center had several standard television sets tuned to normal cable and network broadcasts, which stayed on, muted in the background, throughout the long day and night.

  But until early Monday morning there had been no mention of the horrible battle underway in Mogadishu.

  And even the first news broadcasts simply said that “several American soldiers” had been killed and others wounded in an “exchange of gunfire” in Somalia. There were no names or units and no footage, only a map on the screen so Americans wouldn't have to consult an atlas while they prepared breakfast.

  At the Pentagon and other military command centers in the U.S., casualty reports had been coming in throughout the night—with estimated numbers of killed and wounded but no names. Then, just before Monday's sunrise in Washington, the National Security Agency alerted all U.S. military commands that a European TV crew was sending video to their network in Paris on a United Nations press uplink. The message simply stated, “The video purports to depict U.S. casualties.” No one, certainly not Peter Newman, was prepared for what was on the video.

  Less than five minutes after NSA's alert notification, the intercepted signal came up on one of the command center's secure video links. The audio portion was unintelligible, but the video was unmistakable and grotesque: the bodies of two American soldiers were shown being dragged down dusty streets and mutilated by mobs of jeering Somalis. In the two-minute-forty-second-long videotape, the cameras captured the unforgettable images of enraged crowds jabbing the corpses with AK-47s, beating the bloody bodies with sticks, kicking them, all the while chanting and screaming. Some were laughing crazily.

  The entire command center duty section gathered in front of the monitor and watched in horrified silence, utterly sickened. Master Sergeant John Murphy, a tough veteran infantryman who wore a Silver Star and a Purple Heart from Vietnam along with a Bronze Star from combat in the Gulf War, sat at one of the consoles and said, “Oh, dear God—how can this be happening? We were sent there to help those people!” Newman felt bile rising in his throat as his near-empty stomach reacted in revulsion to the images on the screen, his heart racing with adrenaline as he peered at the bodies, telling himself that neither looked like his brother.

  When the transmission was over, Staff Sergeant Janet Howard, the only woman on this watch, had tears flowing down her face. Her husband, a gunnery sergeant, was assigned to the MEU aboard the Navy Amphibious Ready Group lying off Mogadishu. “They won't let those pictures be broadcast here, will they?” she asked no one in particular.

  “Top.” Murphy looked up and with burning cynicism born of too many years in uniform replied, “That videotape will be on every network by tonight's evening news.” But he was wrong. Every network had the tape by noon and repeated it ad nauseum for days.

  Just before noon the first confirmed names of the casualties came in on a classified message from the Joint Special Operations Command. When the message popped up on the screens in the center, there was a sudden hush as though all the air had escaped from the room. Everyone knew why Major Peter Newman had been there day and night for almost thirty hours.

  The message was preceded by the ominous admonition:

  CONFIDENTIAL

  CASUALTY REPORT - NOT FOR RELEASE TO PUBLIC AFFAIRS.

  And immediately below:

  WARNING: UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES MAY SPECIAL

  MISSION PERSONNEL BE IDENTIFIED BY UNIT.

  ALL PERSONNEL SHALL BE DESIGNATED AS

  “RANGERS” IN NOK NOTIFICATIONS AND ANY

  SUBSEQUEN
T PAO RELEASES.

  Finally, just above the list of names:

  THIS CAS REP IS ACCURATE BUT INCOMPLETE.

  His heart racing, Newman scanned down the alphabetical list to be used for notifying next of kin of those who were killed in action. His emotions were both hopeful and fearful. And then his eyes stopped, and he read the horrible words: NEWMAN, JAMES B., CAPT. U.S. ARMY, KIA. NOTIFY NOK.

  Peter Newman had been in the Marines too long to hope that this was some kind of error. He stared in shock at the screen for a moment and then, without a word to the others in the command center, got up from the communications console, and with his jaws clenched, bolted for the men's head down the hall. He held himself in check until the door swung closed behind him. First his stomach ejected what little it had in it. Then came the tears.

  When he regained his composure, he went down the hallway to his office, ran an electric razor over his face, and walked down the corridor to General Grisham's office. He was ushered in without fanfare. That kind of word spread quickly in the Corps, the “Band of Brothers.”

  “Pete, I'm sorry about Jim. He was a good soldier,” said the general. His face was a mask of sorrow and sadness.

  “Yes sir, he was, and a great brother too. I think I'd better take a day or two of leave and go up to New York and see my folks. I'd like to be there when the casualty assistance officer makes his call. My mom is going to take this awfully hard.” Newman's voice, despite his efforts to control it, cracked as he spoke those last words.

  “Go ahead, son. Have Staff Sergeant Winsat take care of the paperwork. Please give your parents my sincere regrets.”

  Newman went back to his office. While he waited for Winsat, who was the Ops & Plans administration chief, to bring down the leave papers, he called TWA Operations, Rachel's employer, at National Airport to see if they could help him make reservations for the next available flight to Albany, New York. He had no trouble getting a seat on such short notice. One of the advantages of marrying an airline crewmember was the courtesy extended to employees—even of a different airline—when there was a legitimate emergency. The death of a brother certainly qualified as such a priority.