by Oliver North
Once inside the main building they were met by a wiry man in a dark-blue plaid wool shirt, jeans, and chukka boots. His dark brown eyes, longish dark hair, and beard made him a dead ringer for a member of Hizballah—“the army of God.”
“Good morning,” the make-believe terrorist said, holding out his hand, “I'm Captain Joshua Weiskopf, U.S. Army.” Then he took a swing at Coombs, barely missing his jaw. Coombs instinctively pulled back and grabbed the man's wrist, grinning at the bearded man who had offered this bizarre greeting. The bearded one laughed. “Bart, looks to me like you're hanging around with bad company,” he told Coombs.
Coombs also laughed, shook his head, and said, “I don't mind hanging around with them, I just don't want to be hung with them. How did you land this gig, Josh?”
“Well,” the grinning beard replied, “after you got hurt on that jump, I guess the big brass at ‘Wally World’ figured they needed some adult leadership, so they put me in charge of this lash-up. Which one of you is Bart's boss?”
Newman smiled and said, “I guess that would be me. Major Peter Newman, Marines.”
“Well, I guess that makes you my boss, too, but I'll give you some free advice, Major. Look out for that one.” He pointed a finger at the grinning Coombs. “He's a wild one.”
Introductions out of the way, Captain Weiskopf motioned for the men to follow him. “Come on, let me introduce you to the finest group of operators I've ever met.”
The bearded Delta Force captain walked them into the rear of what was clearly a pilot's ready room. There were fifty seats in five rows of ten—actual commercial airliner passenger seats, complete with tray tables, bolted to the green tile-covered floor.
Newman counted the backs of thirty-six heads in the occupied seats, their tray tables opened with some of the occupants making notes on yellow legal tablets. At the front of the classroom, an instructor clad in a red-and-black plaid lumber shirt, jeans, and chukka boots was holding forth on the topic he had written on the green chalkboard behind him: “Surveillance Techniques in Urban Areas.”
“He's the CIA's expert on how to conduct surveillance without being observed,” Weiskopf whispered to Newman. The instructor noticed the visitors in the back of the room but continued with a PowerPoint presentation that included a digital display of the Washington, D.C., area. As the four men standing quietly in the back of the room watched, the image on the screen shifted and an aerial photo appeared on the screen of the area around Newman's home on Creswell Drive. He strained to listen.
“… and here's where you made your mistake,” the CIA instructor continued, using the cursor on the PowerPoint display to highlight the photo of Newman's neighborhood. “You were too close to the subject's vehicle when he made the turn off Sleepy Hollow onto Carolyn. There was no other vehicular traffic in the neighborhood, and when he made the turn off Carolyn onto Creswell, you followed right into a culde-sac. You should have stopped at Sleepy Hollow … or at least should have driven past Creswell when he turned off Carolyn. The vehicle you were in was inconsistent with others in the neighborhood, and he probably noticed it immediately. Now if there had been a countersurveil-lance operation, you'd have alerted the subject. At that point your only option would have been to take out the subject to avoid compromising the entire mission.”
Newman nodded his head in agreement with the instructor's assessment—even though he was “the subject” who would have been “taken out.” Newman also reflected on the fact that he had seen the team that had followed him home from the White House the day before, but he hadn't detected those who had been following them.
Before he could dwell on that unsettling thought, Weiskopf tapped him on the shoulder and nodded his head toward the door they had entered a few minutes before. The four men quietly exited and walked down the hallway to a small conference room where the bearded captain had established his office.
Once inside, Weiskopf said, “If it's all right with you, sir, we'll let him finish, and then after they have a ten-minute break, we'll make introductions. Meanwhile let me fill you in on what we've got here. Coffee?”
Newman, McDade, Robertson, and Coombs took mugs of hot, black coffee to their seats around a government-issue gray steel table. Weiskopf began, “On 10 November … the Marine Corps' birthday, right, Major Newman?”
Newman nodded and Captain Weiskopf continued. “On 10 November, I was ordered by SOCOM to set up a special billeting area down at Fort Bragg for a new task-organized, thirty-eight-man, joint U.S.—U.K. counterterrorism unit. At the time, I was working in the JSOC S-3 Detachment at Bragg, waiting for a slot to open up in one of the Delta squadrons. I had been with your brother Jim in Mogadishu, Major Newman, and would have been with him the day he was killed except that I had been wounded the week before and had been medevaced to Germany. Sorry for your loss, sir.”
Newman nodded, with a new respect for this very intense and businesslike bearded captain. Weiskopf continued. “Anyway, they sent me …”
Newman interrupted. “They?”
“Sorry … SOCOM, at McDill down in Tampa—they sent one of those ‘Eyes Only/Special Handling’ cables giving me the task of organizing this new unit and assigning me as the CO. They assigned British SAS Captain Bruno Macklin as XO, and gave me Sergeant Major Dan Gabbard, a Marine out of SOCOM, as the unit's sergeant major. He's the only non-Delta guy in this lash-up. I saw you counting heads in the ready room, Major Newman … he's the one who's missing. He's over at main side with the Andrews Base Ops people right now arranging for us to go out the back gate here so that we don't have to keep using the main gate. This crowd looks strange to begin with, and I don't want to attract any more attention than we have already.”
“What do you mean, ‘more attention’? Has there been any?”
“Well, yesterday … while we were running surveillance drills all over Washington … I'm told you picked up one of them tailing you. The base public affairs officer asked if she could send over a photo team and a reporter so that they could put a story in the base newspaper about how Andrews Air Force Base and Air Force One were now being protected by a ‘special detachment of undercover Air Force security specialists.’ It took me a half hour to get rid of her; I finally told her that all this was so secret that she might find herself transferred to Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota if she breathed a word of it.”
“Anyway,” Weiskopf continued, “SOCOM assigned, by name and by billet, every one of the personnel you see in that ready room. In all, twenty-seven Americans and eleven Brits. Gabbard, Macklin, and I are the command group, and the other thirty-five are organized into five seven-man teams. Everybody reported aboard at Bragg by the seventeenth. We spent the next eleven days getting used to working together—range time, PT, parachute jumps, the shooting house, weapons training, demo, night ops—the usual. I brought them up here on the twenty-eighth for some of the stuff that the agency does—like that class in there—and was told that you guys will be bringing us some special equipment tomorrow.
“I can tell you this, Major, these men are the best-trained troopers in the world. They are all experienced volunteers, mature men who have proven themselves as top performers and leaders in other units before they screened for Delta or the Navy SEALs. It's the same for the British Special Air Services. Every one of them has been in combat in some part of the world or another and, in many cases, multiple times. I know most of them personally, and you can put your life in their hands.”
Newman was impressed—with the captain, with what he had accomplished, and with what he had said about the tough, hard, lean, and gutsy young men in the room down the hall. Except for the unconventional, unmilitary-like attire, haircuts, and beards, they were just like the Recon Marines he'd spent his best days leading.
But for this work they weren't supposed to look like U.S. servicemen. Each team would have to be able to blend in with the indigenous population in whatever part of the world they worked.
It was also clear to Newman that t
his whole organization had been in the planning stages for a considerable length of time.
“You've done one fine job, Captain,” said Newman. “How long do you think it will be before your teams will be ready to deploy? Nobody wants these guys to go out before they're able to work well with one another. Teamwork on these missions is going to be essential.”
“Well, that depends on how we're going to operate. I was told coming up here that effective Saturday, 2 December, we become the International Sanctions Enforcement Group, and I can tell you that there has been no small amount of grumbling about whether they have to wear UN insignia and that sort of thing.”
“Don't worry about that. Nobody is going to have to wear a blue beanie,” Newman said with more conviction than he felt. “But getting back to my question—if we have to send the teams out independently, how long 'til they're ready?”
Weiskopf paused before answering and then said, “ISET Alpha—the Asia and the Pacific team—could easily pass for native Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, or Pacific Islanders, depending on how they were dressed. It turns out that they not only look the part, but every one of them can speak several Asian dialects.”
Newman only nodded, still waiting for an answer, so the Army captain continued, “The same is true of ISET Bravo—the group assigned to Africa. As you'll see, they are all very dark-skinned with distinctive African features.”
Newman resolved to look at this particular team extra carefully, for they were the obvious choice for going with him into Somalia after his brother's killers.
“The entire group of men in ISET Charlie—the team assigned to enforce UN sanctions in Eastern Europe and the Balkans—look Slavic. In fact, one guy is from Chicago and speaks Polish, and another hails from Milwaukee and is fluent in Czech. Two of the Brits are actually Scots.” At this, McDade smiled for the first time since coming into the building.
“The members of ISET Delta certainly look like they were all from somewhere south of the Rio Grande, and indeed, most of them have Spanish surnames. But the team leader, who looks like he should be named Gonzalez, is actually named Wilson.” All four of them chuckled at the way the American melting pot made life so interesting.
“The men of ISET Echo—the team assigned to the Middle East, Persian Gulf, and Southwest Asia—could blend in at an OPEC meeting or a Mujahedeen tent camp. In fact, the only ones of this entire group who appear to be Anglo-Saxons are the members of the command group—those of us who won't be going ‘on the ground’ if an operation ever gets launched.”
The three officers from the White House were clearly impressed. But Newman noted to himself that Captain Weiskopf still hadn't answered his question, so he asked it again, slowly and with measured emphasis. “When will they be ready to go?”
Captain Weiskopf, looking very uncomfortable, said, “Look, these guys have all been on tough missions before—but they went with lots of backup. I think I could take these guys anywhere we have to go tomorrow and get the job done. But I'm not comfortable in just putting a seven-man ISET down in some faraway place without an Extract Plan, a Quick React Force, and some designated sanctuaries where they can at least get to some friendlies if things go sour.”
“I understand,” said Newman. “But that may turn out to be necessary. As I understand things right now, the people we work for don't yet have a clue as to where or when we're going to be used. When I go back to the White House tonight, I'll tell our boss that I need to go up to New York and talk to the people at the UN who are calling the shots. Until then, unless Harrod asks, I would recommend that you don't say one way or the other as to whether the entire ISEG is going to deploy or whether the ISETs are going in-country individually.”
The Army captain looked long and hard at Newman, then his three colleagues from the White House nodded heads in agreement. Captain Weiskopf said, “OK, if that's the way you want it, but I'd like to get this settled as soon as possible.”
The four men got up from the table and walked back down the hall to the ready room. It was 10:15 hours. Thirty-seven men—all but one assigned to the UN's International Sanctions Enforcement Group—were filtering back in from their briefing and into their seats as Weiskopf walked to the front of the room with Newman, McDade, Robertson, and Coombs behind him.
Newman looked them over as they moved to their seats and thought, Talk about racial profiling! Isn't this the administration that wants everyone to take sensitivity training so that we're more ‘tolerant’ of one another? Man, it's no wonder ol' Jabba the Hutt didn't want Congress to know about this outfit.
Special Projects Office
________________________________________
Old Executive Office Building
Washington, D.C.
Wednesday, 30 November 1994
1905 Hours, Local
In Washington's heavy rush-hour traffic, it took Newman, McDade, Robertson, and Coombs more than an hour to make the trip from Andrews back to the White House for their meeting with Harrod. By the time they had completed the day with Joshua Weiskopf and his thirty-seven ISEG operators, Newman had developed the outline of a plan for training, deploying, supporting, and communicating with the force, and he told them that he aimed to have it approved at the White House before the unit returned to Fort Bragg.
Prior to departing Andrews, Newman told Weiskopf and the others how he planned to structure his tiny headquarters: Coombs, who had been part of Delta before his exile to the White House, would be his operations and training boss—the S-3 for this outfit. Robertson, the Air Force officer, would manage all logistics and transportation requirements—the S-4 for the ISEG—because, Newman reasoned, the USAF would have to be the ones to move the unit to wherever it was going to be used. And he put McDade, the frustrated Navy SEAL, in charge of intelligence and communications—combining the S-2 and S-5 functions.
Five minutes after the four officers arrived at their office in the OEOB and gathered around Newman's round conference table, there was a furious banging on the thick wooden door at the entrance to their office suite. They looked at one another and shrugged. McDade, who was closest to the door, got up and opened it to the full wrath of Jabba the Hutt.
“Where have you guys been?!” the National Security Advisor shouted. He was wearing a tuxedo, and to the four physically fit military officers, their boss looked like an obese penguin on the verge of what doctors would call a major cardiac event.
Behind the red-faced penguin, standing in the ornate, marble-tiled hallway, were half a dozen young men and one young woman, all wearing dark-blue coveralls. Three of them were leaning against four-wheeled steel carts like those used by baggage handlers at airports. The carts were stacked high with cardboard boxes and what appeared to be a mobile electronics shop.
“These people are from WHCA, and this is your communications equipment. I told you yesterday to be back here at seven. Where have you been?” Harrod demanded.
All four of the military men looked at their watches simultaneously. It was not yet ten minutes after the hour. “Sorry, sir,” Newman said, stepping between the penguin and McDade, “we just got back from Andrews.”
“Don't call me ‘sir.’ I don't care where you just got back from! I'm late for a dinner the President is giving for the diplomatic corps, and I'm tired of waiting around for people who can't tell time.”
When no one said anything in response, Harrod turned to the blue-clad WHCA techs and practically screamed, “Don't just stand there; get to work! Do you think I want to hang around with you people all night?”
The technicians began to unload the equipment and carry the components into the suite: computer terminals, a secure fax machine, encryption equipment, secure phones, and radio repeaters. Some of it went into Newman's office, and the rest went up the circular staircase to where Coombs, McDade, and Robertson officed.
“While they install this equipment, the four of you come over to the Situation Room so we can talk,” said the National Security Advisor in a tone that prov
ed he could calm down as quickly as his mercurial temper could be set off.
Harrod led the way to the elevator, out the ground floor door, and across West Executive Avenue into the West Wing. The four officers followed the penguin like his chicks. He didn't speak again until they were inside the Situation Room conference space. “Sit down. I want a full report on what you saw at Andrews today, your assessment on how ready this unit is, and what you think about their ability to carry out the UN mandate.”
For the next hour, the man who had been in such a hurry to join the black-tie diplomatic party going on upstairs in the White House sat and alternately listened and interrupted the four military men with questions. Newman related how he planned to organize his office, the responsibilities he'd given to his three colleagues, and told Harrod about the additional training he planned for the ISEG.