Copyright © 2008 by William Boykin
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
FaithWords
Hachette Book Group USA
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New York, NY 10017
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First eBook Edition: July 2008
ISBN: 978-0-446-53758-2
Contents
Air Assault: Washington, D.C., 2003
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Flag Burners And War Heroes: 1948–1970
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
A Helluva Ride: 1971–1977
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
A Medal And A Body Bag: Fort Bragg, 1978
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Surprise, Speed, And Violence Of Action: Fort Bragg, 1978
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Welcome To World War III: Iran Hostage Crisis, 1979–1980
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Tea For Terrorists: Sudan, 1983
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
.50 Caliber Miracle: Grenada, 1983
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Merry Christmas, Noriega: Panama, 1989–1990
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Drug Lords And False Prophets: Colombia and Waco, 1992–1993
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Battle Of The Black Sea: Mogadishu, Somalia, 1993
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
War Criminals: Washington, D.C. and the Balkans, 1995–1999
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Crucible: Washington, D.C., 2003–2004
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Notes
Bibliography
About the Authors
To my family: Mom, April, Randy, Aaron, Grant, and Mimi. And to my best pal, Ashley.
I love you all.
Special Forces Creed
I am an American Special Forces soldier. A professional!
I will do all that my nation requires of me.
I am a volunteer, knowing well the hazards of my profession. I serve with the memory of those who have gone before me: Roger’s Rangers, Francis Marion, Mosby’s Rangers, the first Special Service Forces and Ranger Battalions of World War II, the Airborne Ranger Companies of Korea.
I pledge to uphold the honor and integrity of all I am—in all I do.
I am a professional soldier. I will teach and fight wherever my nation requires. I will strive always, to excel in every art and artifice of war.
I know that I will be called upon to perform tasks in isolation, far from familiar faces and voices, with the help and guidance of my God.
I will keep my mind and body clean, alert and strong, for this is my debt to those who depend upon me.
I will not fail those with whom I serve.
I will not bring shame upon myself or the forces.
I will maintain myself, my arms, and my equipment in an immaculate state as befits a Special Forces soldier.
I will never surrender though I be the last. If I am taken, I pray that I may have the strength to spit upon my enemy. My goal is to succeed in any mission—and live to succeed again.
I am a member of my nation’s chosen soldiery. God grant that I may not be found wanting, that I will not fail this sacred trust.
“De Opresso Liber.”
Air Assault
Washington, D.C. 2003
1
WASHINGTON, D.C., IS A FICKLE BEAST—especially in February. In that month, the world’s most powerful city can wrap itself in sheets of ice and dare folks to step outside. Or it can flirt a little, enticing with a false glimpse of spring. During the first week of February 2003, temperatures spiked into the fifties and I saw bureaucrats braving the Beltway in shirtsleeves when I arrived from Fort Bragg for an interview with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
I was a two-star Army general at the time—commander of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg—and the Army had nominated me for a third star. Here’s the way that works: Up through their second star, military officers advance in rank through promotion boards. But for any stars after that, the defense secretary has to submit a nomination to the President. Then the President has to endorse the nomination. Then the Senate has to confirm. That’s one more hoop than a Supreme Court justice has to jump through.
And Rumsfeld added another hoop: anyone nominated for a third star had to come in and interview with him personally.
Which was why I made the trip to D.C. Rumsfeld was still in the media’s good graces then, which meant he was in America’s good graces. (The former, I would soon learn the hard way, is finely calibrated with the latter.) The Secretary had just overseen the U.S. military’s crushing defeat of the Taliban, the group U.S. intelligence identified as the primary backer of Osama Bin Laden’s September 11 attack. Now for some months, his atten
tion had been tuned to a new target: Iraq. As Saddam Hussein pretended to cooperate with weapons inspections ordered by the United Nations Security Council, Rumsfeld, a former fighter pilot who served in Congress and under three presidents, sparred with the press over the Bush administration’s case for war. In the midst of all that, I walked into the Pentagon, just a routine item on the defense secretary’s daily calendar.
The world’s largest office building, the Pentagon is built in five concentric rings. More than seventeen miles of corridors wind through the place, and I truly believe a person could wander for days and never find the office he was looking for. As I made my way to the inner sanctum, the powerful “E Ring” where the Secretary has his office, I remembered my first time there twenty-five years before. I had arrived just days after Iranian terrorists loyal to the radical cleric Ayatollah Khomeini seized the American embassy in Tehran. I was a young captain then, one of the first three officers to make the cut for America’s brand-new, highly secret counterterrorism unit, Delta Force. I could recall hunkering down for days in a cipher-locked secret room off the E Ring, helping plan Delta’s first mission—rescuing American hostages from Iran. I had done a Pentagon tour since then, but those tense, smoky sessions spent calculating against impossible odds were what flashed through my mind as I headed for Secretary Rumsfeld’s office.
His senior military aide, Lieutenant General John Craddock, showed me into a large, dark-paneled executive space with a sweeping view of the Potomac and the Capitol complex beyond. Rumsfeld kept a large mahogany desk in his office, backed by a matching credenza. But there was no chair behind the desk. That’s because he never sat down while he worked. Instead, he did correspondence and paperwork behind an elegant chart table, standing up.
“General Boykin!” said Rumsfeld, striding toward me in his customary fleece vest. He always took off his jacket in his office, but thought the air conditioning chilly and usually wore a fleece vest over his shirt and tie. “Thank you for coming in. Here, have a seat.”
He and I sat at a small circular conference table, opposite the stretch conference table on the other side of the room. General Craddock sat down on a sofa nearby.
Rumsfeld flipped through my service record, which, because of my career in Special Operations and intelligence, was classified. “You have a very interesting record here,” he said. “Spent a lot of years in Delta Force.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “About thirteen.” I had been a founding member of Delta Force, and later its commanding officer.
“You’ve spent most of your career in Special Operations?”
“Yes, sir. I did spend some time on the staff of the Joint Chiefs and some over at CIA, but most of my career has been in Special Ops.”
With Delta, I oversaw both the rescue of CIA operative Kurt Muse from a Panamanian prison and the capture of Manuel Noriega, the brutal dictator who put him there. In Colombia, I helped hunt down the drug lord Pablo Escobar, a cruel and filthy-rich thug who terrorized a nation, personally ordering the deaths of more than a thousand people. The Secretary noted that I had also hunted war criminals in Bosnia, helped rescue hostage missionaries in Sudan, and tracked kidnappers in El Salvador. Among other things.
“You have two purple hearts,” Rumsfeld said. “Where’d you get those?”
“Grenada, 1983, and Mogadishu, Somalia, 1993.”
“You know, I still don’t understand that, how Mogadishu was considered a failure,” he said. “When you consider the statistics, it appears to me that we won that battle.”
“Well, that’s always been an issue with me,” I told the Secretary. I felt fairly certain Rumsfeld knew that the popular version of the events—both the book, Black Hawk Down, and the movie made from it—omitted my role as mission commander. “We killed or wounded eleven hundred, but lost eighteen and had seventy-six wounded. It’s an example of how you can win a battle and lose a war because of politics.”
“Yes, I agree with you,” Rumsfeld said, smiling grimly. “We’re dealing with some of that right now.”
Exactly thirty minutes after it began, my interview was politely terminated by the Secretary. I walked out of his office and didn’t hear another word about our meeting for weeks. I was excited about the reason for the timing of my promotion. The chief of staff of the Army, General Rick Shinseki, had offered me a plum assignment as deputy commander of the Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Virginia. Not only was it an opportunity to work directly with soldiers again, it was in the Tidewater region of Virginia, where my brother and sister and their kids lived. My wife, Ashley, and I had long wanted to buy a home in Virginia, with space for nieces, nephews, and grandchildren. The TRADOC assignment seemed like the ideal twilight tour—a low-key but productive way to wind up what would by then be a thirty-five-year Army career. I immediately said yes.
Then, in late February at a military convention in Fort Lauderdale, Army vice chief of staff General Jack Keene walked up and put his hand on my shoulder. “Jerry, Secretary Rumsfeld told me he was very impressed with your interview. You did well.”
I was pleased. All the pieces appeared to be falling into place: it looked as if I’d be promoted to lieutenant general, serve my final Army tour in a command that would leave an important legacy for future troops, and retire to a house in the country. Perfect.
Or so it seemed at the time.
2
A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER, as the defense department built up for operations in Iraq, the Pentagon called. “Secretary Rumsfeld would like to see you again,” his military assistant told me over the phone.
Unusual, I thought. I hadn’t heard of any three-star nominee being called back for a second interview. But Rumsfeld was the boss, so I was off again to Washington.
“I want to talk more about your time at CIA,” he said after we’d settled into his office in mid-March, two days after the U.S. launched operations in Iraq. I had worked for the CIA from November 1995 until June 1997, and I briefed Rumsfeld on my responsibilities there. Then he told me a story.
The rest of the federal government was rich in spy agencies—the CIA; the National Security Agency; the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; the State Department’s Intelligence and Research; and other outfits totalling fifteen agencies in all. But the military intelligence problem became clear to Rumsfeld, he said, when he wanted to send Army Special Forces into Afghanistan to link up with the Northern Alliance to fight against the Taliban.
“My staff told me that the only way to do it was to send them in with CIA,” Rumsfeld told me. “I said, ‘Why do I have to put military people in harm’s way under the authority of George Tenet?’ ” Tenet was still Director of Central Intelligence at the time.
He didn’t have to, Rumsfeld’s advisors said, except that he really had no choice. Military intel had never established the kind of liaison with the Northern Alliance that CIA had. And it had been doing it for years. In other words, CIA had its spooks deployed all over the globe, building relationships with key factions that might become strategically important in future conflicts. After 9/11, the Northern Alliance became strategically important, and CIA was the only game in town.
“I don’t want that to happen in the future,” Rumsfeld told me. “To prevent it, I’m forming a new undersecretary for intelligence and I’m nominating Steve Cambone for the position. I want you to go down and talk to him.”
Rumsfeld meant right then, so I did.
Steve Cambone was one of those PhDs who is brilliant, sometimes abrasive, and usually right. Earlier in his career, he worked at Los Alamos Laboratories. But by the time I walked down the E Ring corridor to see him that day, he had been on Rumsfeld’s team in one capacity or another for about seven years and was his most trusted staff officer. A visionary, Cambone was a rare breed in the defense department: a person who was able to say no to things that didn’t make sense to him. He was fiercely loyal to Rumsfeld, but one of the few people who could actually influence him even when he didn’t want to be
influenced.
When we sat down in his office, Cambone asked me about my background, and I gave him the twenty-five-cent biographical sketch. Then, without any kind of run-up or drum roll, he said, “We’re trying to put together a team here that will help this department in the area of intelligence. I’d like to know if you’d be willing to be part of that team.”
The next thing I knew, Cambone offered me the position of deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence.
Believe it or not, my heart sank. I could see the TRADOC dream tour crumbling away. It was clear Cambone and Rumsfeld had already talked about me, and I was professional enough to know that I needed to serve where I was asked to serve.
“Yes, sir,” I told Cambone. “I’m willing.”
It was the only right answer. Had I known that by fall my answer would lead directly to the greatest trial of my life, I might have given him a different one.
3
THE OFFICE WAS STILL GETTING ORGANIZED when I arrived in July. I was back on the E Ring, this time in an office of my own. But on a corridor housing more brass than the Queen Mary, my three stars didn’t rate fancy accommodations. I had what they call a “breadbox” office. Temporary, they said, a tiny room just big enough to hold a desk, two chairs, and a bookcase. I had a nice view, though, with a window facing the Potomac.
That’s where I was when my phone chirped on October 14, 2003. My secretary, Sandy, was on the line. “General, Aram Roston from NBC News is on the phone for you.”
For more than three decades, I managed to keep a low media profile. Even during the Black Hawk Down uproar—the book, the movie, and all that—I tried hard to steer clear of reporters and writers, preferring to let the facts speak for themselves. Unfortunately, I learned that doesn’t always happen. As much as anything, that got me wondering what Roston wanted.
“General Boykin, I’m Aram Roston from NBC,” he said when I picked up the phone.
“Hi, Mr. Roston. What can I do for you?” I said.
“I’d like to talk to you about high-value targets.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“It’s your responsibility to track these people down,” he said.
CIA and NSA would be surprised to hear that, I thought.
“You’re getting into a classified area here,” I told him. “It’s really not something I can talk about. But so that you know, chasing HVTs is not my primary task.” What I didn’t say was that the undersecretary for intelligence neither collected nor analyzed intelligence. We were a policy organization.
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