Dick Rogers introduced us to Reno, Sessions, and Sessions’s deputy, a man who was starched, pressed, and pomaded to within an inch of his life.
Bureaucrat, I thought. Capital B.
Reno had invited Web Hubbell, Clinton’s large and jowly deputy attorney general. He sat off a bit from the group, looking on from under the windows.
Along with Pete and me and the tear gas expert, Dick Rogers had also invited Danny Colson, the first commander of the FBI’s hostage rescue team, who was known as a big SWAT guy.
The tear gas expert went first, explaining that the deployment of CS causes some people to panic—the children likely would, he noted—but that others would take measures to try to cope with the discomfort. The CS would induce a burning sensation in the eyes, tearing, and severe irritation of the skin and mucous membranes. Recovery would be fairly rapid, though, and the agent didn’t cause permanent injury.
Janet Reno turned to me. “Have you had any experience with CS?”
“Yes, quite a bit,” I said. “The fact is, CS is pretty bad, but people can usually find ways to work through it.”
Next, Dick and Danny laid out their plan—the CEV, the CS insertion, the plan to arrest the Branch Davidians as they surrendered. The plan was to pump the tear gas into the far left and far right sides of the building in hopes of forcing people to exit near the center-front. Reno took it all in, friendly and clearly in the listening mode. She did ask a couple of tactical questions, such as how the FBI was organized to receive those who gave themselves up. As she spoke, I thought I detected a tremor in one of her hands.
Sessions, on the other hand, was very formal with all of us, even with Rogers and Colson, his own men. He didn’t ask too many questions, but he asked good ones. Why, for example, did the FBI feel compelled to launch this assault now? Why not wait the Branch Davidians out?
Dick Rogers gave three good answers. “First, we have evidence that the children are being abused. Second, the people in there can hold out indefinitely, which exacerbates the problems with child abuse.” Finally, he noted that his agents had been deployed at Waco for nearly two months. “They have perishable skills they have to maintain. If we don’t go now, we’ll need to withdraw and go into a period of retraining.”
Reno turned to Pete and me. “What do you guys think of this plan?”
Pete’s answer was very direct: “Listen, this is a law enforcement operation, not a military operation. We can’t grade your paper.”
Delta was confident in the HRT, Pete went on. “But we don’t do law enforcement, and we are not able to give you a judgment.”
Reno looked at me. “Would you like to add anything, Colonel?”
“Well, I can tell you that if this was a military operation, we would hit the place from every side, all at once, and it would all be over in seconds,” I said. “Our tactics would be very different. That’s why it’s so difficult for us to evaluate a law enforcement concept.”
From beneath the window, Web Hubbell swiveled his huge, round head in my direction. It reminded me of the turret on a tank.
“I’ve only got one question,” he said. “Is this legal?”
I thought, This guy’s the deputy attorney general and he’s asking me if this is legal?
“Sir,” I said, “that’s a determination you’re going to have to make.”
Of course, the following year, Hubbell, a Clinton buddy from Arkansas, would plead guilty to mail fraud and tax evasion and admit to stealing almost $400,000 from his clients and partners in Little Rock’s Rose Law Firm. So I guess the question of whether something was legal was a relative thing for him.
Reno stood, indicating that she’d heard all she needed to. “Okay, thank you very much for coming up. I need to talk to the president, and we’ll let you know what decision he makes.”
10
BACK AT BRAGG, I typed up a memo documenting the details of the meeting. Classifying it Secret, I sent it to Bill Garrison and Carl Stiner. Then on April 19, I was in my office preparing to depart for training in Kuwait when CNN broke the news that the FBI raid on the Branch Davidian compound had begun. Some of what I was seeing was replays and some was live footage. The FBI deployed one hundred-seventy men, plus the CEVs, each equipped with a long boom for punching through the building roof and inserting the CS. As news cameras panned back and forth across the scene, I could see four Bradley APCs and an M1A1 Abrams tank. I later found out that Dick Rogers directed the operation from inside the tank.
At first, the operation unfolded just as Dick had laid it out. But at around 2 p.m. Texas time, the wheels started to come off. On the television screen, I could see smoke, and listened as reporters noted multiple fires breaking out on the Branch Davidian property. As I watched, flames engulfed the compound and eighty people burned up inside.
The outcome shocked me. I knew there were risks, but I didn’t think the FBI’s op would go that poorly. I knew instantly that the incident would erupt into a huge scandal with Dick and his men directly in the crosshairs of Congress.
I did not realize, however, that I would wind up there, too.
It only took three or four days before Congress called Janet Reno on the carpet. I knew she was going to testify, so I turned on C-SPAN to watch. Reno told the panel that before authorizing FBI’s assault, she consulted with both the current and former commanders of Delta Force, Colonel Jerry Boykin and Colonel Pete Schoomaker.
And she left it at that. She did not go on to say that Pete and I declined to give our opinion on the plan she authorized, nor that we stated we would have conducted a very different operation. And so her testimony left the impression that we concurred with the plan.
Some folks call that a “lie of omission.” Where I come from, they just call it a lie.
The next year, 1994, Congress hauled me in to testify. I gave them the details of our meeting with Reno and Sessions, and they had my memo on the meeting. My testimony brushed away any doubts in Congress: Delta had not rendered a judgment on the FBI’s plan.
Still, the conspiracy mongers crawled out of the woodwork, concocting nutball theories: Delta murdered the Branch Davidians . . . Ten Delta operators were driving Bradleys at Waco . . . President Clinton ordered a Delta attack on Waco then covered it up. Even reputable news organizations repeated a CIA agent’s false story that Delta deployed to Waco “ready for war.”
Then some media took the partial story of our meeting with Reno, the CIA agent’s bogus story, and the truth that we did have three observers there, and cobbled together more crap about government conspiracies.
Because Delta is a secretive organization, some people assume it also considers itself above the law. Not true. Delta’s stealth nature is by design. It enables it to perform its mission, not violate the Constitution. Before Congress and the Branch Davidians’ families, Pete and I told the truth about Delta’s involvement at Waco. Conspiracy theories may sell newspapers and magazines, but they also ruin the reputations of good men trying to do good work. Secret doesn’t always mean dark.
Battle Of The Black Sea
Mogadishu, Somalia 1993
1
FOUR MONTHS AFTER THE BRANCH DAVIDIAN compound went up in flames, a Boeing 737 spit me out at a rundown airport on the ragged edge of Mogadishu, Somalia. After months of watching Mohamed Farrah Aidid starve and murder his own people, President Clinton finally ordered in Task Force Ranger to capture the warlord and bring him to justice. Now, I stood on the smoldering tarmac near a shark-laced slice of the Indian Ocean, part of an advance team that included General Bill Garrison; Lieutenant Colonel Dave McKnight, commander of the 3rd Ranger Battalion; Delta surgeon Rob Marsh, and a team of communicators and logisticians.
A blanket overcast imprisoned the white Somali sun, holding the wet East African heat to the ground like the lid on a cauldron. A stench, something between rotting fish and burning trash, assaulted my senses.
The UN had taken over Mogadishu’s commercial airport, but warring clans had long be
fore reduced it nearly to rubble. Decrepit Russian transport aircraft leftover from the 1960s sat rusting on the tarmac. Jeeps buzzed across the airfield, darting between the relic planes. Their drivers laid on their horns, shouting in Arabic and broken English.
I looked toward what had once been the control tower and terminal and saw that part of the roof was missing. The hangar next to it was shot full of holes, and even from a distance I could see junk piled high and pigeons roosting in the rafters. That’s where we would be setting up the JOC.
Tent cities stretched away from the tarmac down to a crushed shale beach, and nearly to the water’s edge. These were support elements for UN participants who brought military forces to Mogadishu. I could see the flags of twenty nations, hanging limp on poles poking up into the humid air. Beyond the tents and a whole village of portable toilets, a fence and guarded gate separated the airfield from a street. On the other side lay Mogadishu proper, where, I knew, thousands of living skeletons came from all over Somalia in search of food.
Less than a minute passed at the bottom of the 737 ladder as all these impressions flooded over me and gelled into a single thought.
This has got to be the worst place I’ve ever been.
I had seen poorer places. In El Salvador, I had watched ragged, legless beggars scoot around on carts; in Sudan, I had been with the Dinkas, a desperately poor people who raised scrawny cattle and owned nothing. And I had seen more decrepit paces: Trash heaped in the streets of Honduras, the rubble that once was Beirut, and in Khartoum, a dead donkey burning. But I had never seen hopelessness like this. A palpable oppression hovered over the rubble, the tent cities, and the low, smoky skyline. Whatever it was, it seemed to press in on me physically, as though jealous to give up territory.
As I waited for Garrison and the others to deplane, I flashed back to a conversation he and I had earlier that summer on a training range at Eglin AFB under a sweltering Florida sun. Standing with his arms folded across his chest and the trademark unlit stogie jutting from his mouth, he watched as elements of Delta, the Rangers, and the 160th SOAR finished up an exercise in preparation for what was then a possible deployment to Mogadishu.
“My spies in the Pentagon tell me Powell’s not too shot in the ass with this thing,” Garrison said.
Translation: Joints Chiefs chairman Colin Powell was not enthusiastic about our going into Somalia to hunt Mohamed Farrah Aidid.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Thinks it’s mission creep,” Garrison said. The term meant taking on new missions that were not part of the original concept.
Powell had a point. The 10th Mountain Division had been in Mogadishu since December 1992 to deliver humanitarian aid to Somalia, a country torn by civil war and drought. An estimated half million refugees had already fled to other parts of Africa. Hundreds of thousands more remained behind. U.S. forces landed in concert with nineteen other UN countries as part of Operation Restore Hope, a mission to provide secure distribution of food and relief supplies. In addition, U.S. and UN negotiators arranged peace talks between more than a dozen warring factions, including Aidid and his Habr Gidr clan. Tensions escalated as UN nations charged that Aidid was hindering peace talks. Then in June 1993, Habr Gidr militia ambushed and killed twenty-four Pakistani peacekeepers. A week later the UN issued a warrant for Aidid’s arrest. Enter Task Force Ranger.
America was moving from a humanitarian mission to a direct combat role. So in that sense, Powell was right: Mogadishu was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-don’t enterprise. Human rights groups love to criticize the United States for not stepping in to squash genocidal conflicts in other nations. But when we do step in, they love to complain about how we’re doing it wrong.
I respected Powell. He was an intelligent strategist, very astute. He understood Washington and the political scene better than any general officer I ever saw. And while he did serve the president, he was also his own man, someone who would provide the administration with his best military advice whether or not it was what they wanted to hear.
But standing there with Garrison, I wondered why Powell had not fought harder to make Task Force Ranger the “overwhelming force” that was a well known centerpiece of his war fighting philosophy. Instead, we would execute our operations with a force of only 450. Even at that, we’d have to peel off some combat troops for force protection—to stay back and guard our base of operations against the Sammies, as we came to call hostile Somalis. The Pentagon also denied us a Spectre gunship (saying it was too “provocative”), as well as a fleet of APCs.
Now, here we were.
I suspected our incursion into Mogadishu would not be a short-term mission. We had chased Noriega in Panama, and cornered him quickly—but in a country where we controlled the environment. In Colombia, though, a country where we didn’t control the environment, Jack Alvarez and his team had been locked in the hunt for Pablo Escobar for over a year now—even though we had the support of the government there, our presence remained largely unknown. Mogadishu would be different in all those respects: Task Force Ranger would be operating in a country where racial differences would make it impossible for our elements to move freely in the streets, collecting human intelligence. We would be fighting with a force smaller than what our commander, Garrison, thought sufficient to do the job. And we would be operating from the knife edge of a hostile territory occupied by warring factions, and where most of the population was armed.
The next day, the troops and helos began to arrive from Fort Bragg. Since the 160th brought the only chaplain, I pressed him into service. We gathered everyone in the hangar—Rangers, Delta, SEALs, aviators, some “P.J.s,” or parajumpers, Air Force medics whose specialty was parachuting into combat zones to tend the wounded.
Garrison and I addressed the troops briefly then the chaplain read Scripture and led us all in a prayer. Maintaining our tradition, we then sang God Bless America, and launched operations on an adrenaline high.
2
WE HAD BEEN IN-COUNTRY only for a few days when Aidid gave us the warlord version of the finger. After cleaning the pigeon crap out of the tumble-down terminal, we had set up our joint operations center in there. The JOC was equipped with three video screens for monitoring live battle feeds from the West-Cam Ball, a camera mounted on an OH-58 helo. The logisticians established sleeping and messing areas in the hangar next door. Garrison, meanwhile, moved into a small trailer provided by contractors, just big enough for his cot and a couple of chairs. One evening, he and I, along with Dave McKnight, gathered in there to talk about the next day’s operations.
An older officer, Dave was a Special Forces expert and Vietnam vet who had transitioned into intelligence work. During the first Gulf war, he worked with CIA, and developed a deep understanding of both fields. Lean and ruddy, Dave burned through three packs of cigarettes a day, smoking them nearly end to end. Despite the atrocities he had seen in the darkest, most violent parts of the world, or maybe because of them, he always found a way to crack the tension with some nutty war story about jungle rot in ‘Nam or farting all night in a two-man tent. Dave was always serious when it counted. When it didn’t, he was spinning a tale.
“Intel is still sketchy,” Garrison said from his seat on the cot. “First the Sammies tell us they saw Aidid in such and such a house, then they say they didn’t. Makes it hard to hit him.”
“The informants are scared,” I said. I was going to add that Aidid’s men had been known to literally cut out the tongues of traitors, when I heard a muffled thud from the direction of the airfield.
Dave and I locked eyes and said in unison: “Mortars!”
Instinctively, we hit the floor then both leapt to our feet and practically climbed over each other trying to get outside to see what was going on.
Another mortar round crashed into the tarmac, the concussion spraying concrete skyward. I couldn’t see the falling rubble, but I could hear it showering down on the Black Hawks and Little Birds.
“Go, go, go!”
I shouted.
Dave darted for cover beside an empty Conex and I followed, running low, my sidearm banging against my hip. The Somali night was coal-black, empty even of starlight. We flattened ourselves against the outer wall of the container and waited. The sulfur smell of spent ordnance hit me. I could hear the pounding of running feet and Ranger squad leaders barking out commands to their troops, “Stay down! Take cover!”
Then, silence.
The insidious thing about mortars is that you can’t hear them coming. There is no whistle of incoming. There is no tracer fire or any telltale red glare as with small-arms fire or rockets. In a mortar attack, you know you’re being shot at, but you can’t tell when the next round will fall. Or whether it will fall on you.
The ground shook as another mortar slammed down. Orange light flashed at our 10 o’clock, and a hail of tile shards rained down on the pavement.
“I think that one landed right on the JOC,” I told McKnight irritably. The JOC was no palace, but it was all we had.
We huddled against the side of the Conex for another three or four minutes waiting for the attack to end. I don’t think you ever get to the point where things like that don’t scare you. I think you get to the point where they don’t scare you as much. This time though I was too pissed off to be scared. Here we were taking fire and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it. Even if we had known where the Sammies were shooting from, we couldn’t fire back. Aidid and his men were smart—or evil, I couldn’t decide which. We knew from intel they’d pick a sandlot teaming with ten thousand refugees and start shooting from right in the middle of it. And they knew enough about Americans to know we wouldn’t fire back into a defenseless crowd.
Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent Page 23