Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  Dressed in scroungy clothes, unshaven, and with long hair, they drove through the gate at Charleston, breezed past the pass office, and spent the next several days wandering throughout the installation, even penetrating the supposedly most secure nuclear storage areas and going aboard nuclear-powered submarines. During the entire visit, they were never challenged.

  To staff the new Red Cell organization, Marcinko leaned heavily on his contacts in the SEAL community, especially on SEAL Team Six. Gormly later insisted that Marcinko had not “raided” his command and that he had cooperated in providing men for the new organization, but the loss of members of Team Six certainly added to the turmoil.

  It was obvious to Lyons and Marcinko that Red Cell, whose job was to expose problem areas, would be greeted with less than enthusiasm in many parts of the navy. To help smooth the path, they brought in Bill Hamilton, the same officer who had been charged with setting up the SEAL organization back in 1961. Shortly after that assignment, Hamilton had, as far as many of his navy friends were concerned, simply disappeared. In fact, he had signed on at the Central Intelligence Agency as head of its maritime department.

  In late 1979, he had returned to the navy and had held several assignments in the ordnance and operational security areas. Hamilton, by then a captain, was familiar with many of the admirals then in major commands, and he was named head of OP-06D, with Marcinko as his deputy. Marcinko ran the operational side while Hamilton paved the way by explaining the program to his admiral friends and getting their cooperation.

  The plan was, over a period of several years, to make mock terrorist attacks on about fifty bases—some 10 percent of the total—at a cost of about $125,000 apiece. The hope was that this would not only improve security at those bases but expose enough areas of weakness to protect the entire navy from terrorist attack.

  Advance warning was given of each of these “terrorist” assaults, which would not be the case with a real attack. Those expected to be involved were briefed beforehand and given the opportunity not to take part. Even though this was all playacting, Marcinko himself could be pretty terrifying, and the exercises were frighteningly realistic.

  Because of the sensitive nature of what they were doing, Capt. George Vercessi, a navy public affairs officer, was detailed to Red Cell, and he went along for the exercises.

  “There were always a lot of rumors because he and his colleagues were coming to do the exercise,” Vercessi recalls. “He would say things to shock or get your attention. He’d go into a briefing and say, ‘We won’t break any skin. We won’t draw any blood. No broken teeth. Everything else is mine.’ He would tell the women, ‘We’re not going to pull the skirt over your head and tie your hands behind your back.’ He wanted to get attention. He enjoyed twisting tails. I used to tell him, ‘Dick, be a little less emphatic. These things get magnified.’”

  The exercises often terrorized unindoctrinated participants. Middle-grade petty officers, used to a sedentary office life, were forced to do jumping jacks and push-ups. One security officer was kidnapped from his home and held hostage in a motel room. He later complained in a lawsuit that he had suffered a cracked rib and that his head had been held in the toilet while it was flushed. Often, those taken hostage by the team told Vercessi they began to believe they were victims of real terrorists and that they had been told it was an exercise just to trick them.

  The SEALs assigned to Red Cell continued to do all of the things they had done as SEALs: shoot, work with explosives, jump out of airplanes, swim. When they were asked why it was necessary for them to be armed, even though they were involved in training exercises, two explanations were given. One was that they would soon return to a SEAL team and that they had to retain all their skills.

  Another explanation was that some of the members of the team, and perhaps Marcinko himself, thought of Red Cell as a new Team Six. And because it was ready to hand, it, instead of Team Six, might be called on to deal with a real-world crisis. Lyons insists this was never his intention or that of other top navy officials. But one of the enlisted men who had served in Team Six and then in Red Cell gave this explanation later in a court case: “The concept was to possibly form another unit similar to SEAL Team Six, doing exciting things during the last twelve months of my career.… All the while we were trying to form a formal OP-06D like SEAL Team Six, having equipment for each man, having X number of men to respond to whatever happened around the world.”

  Hamilton says Marcinko never told him that was his goal, but it seemed very clear to him.

  “When Marcinko lost the SEAL Team Six command, he saw this as another opportunity to build another SEAL Team Six, if you will, another elite organization. Which was unrealistic on his part. That’s why he recruited all the prime, key guys out of SEAL Team Six to come up, telling them they were off and running in a new organization that was supersecret and super this and that. He never talked to me about it. I could feel that was what he was trying to do. That isn’t the way the navy traditionally does things. You don’t have an organization sitting in the office of the CNO that’s going to be deployed to fight Arabs in the Persian Gulf. That’s contrary to everything.”

  Apparently the closest that anyone in Red Cell got to a real-world operation was when Adm. James Watkins, while he was CNO, tapped Marcinko to accompany him as his bodyguard on a trip to the Persian Gulf area.

  While Marcinko was involved with Red Cell, his name came up for consideration for promotion to captain, and he was selected. This decision was to have a profound effect on Marcinko’s life and on SEAL Team Six.

  A number of officers read that Marcinko had been selected for promotion and were astounded. One retired officer thought for a long time and then decided to do something about it. He wrote a long letter, six or seven pages, and sent it off to President Reagan at the White House.

  “I was concerned about the impact [of the promotion] on the other SEALs,” he says. “If I hadn’t written, there is no way I could live with myself. I was astounded no one else had done it. All I was after was that he not be promoted. He is not fit to command people.”

  By the time the letter to the president found its way from the White House down through the navy bureaucracy, the Naval Investigative Service already had an investigation underway. And while the letter dealt with alleged improprieties, not with criminal activity, the investigation focused on possible criminal offenses by members of SEAL Team Six.

  The investigation had apparently been triggered by another SEAL who had contacted the office of the inspector general of the navy, directly detailing what he thought were criminal offenses. He says,

  When I saw his name on the captains’ list, I knew that his record went before the board with a punitive letter of reprimand in it. Active punitive reprimand. I’m sure he got it pulled. I had just seen the stuff they were doing, completely illegally, doing with their eyes wide open, having been warned by me that it was illegal. Marcinko would say “up yours,” just keep on doing illegal and unethical things. I just made a conscious decision that, if I had anything to do with it, Dick Marcinko should not be a captain.

  I wrote a letter to the inspector general of the navy, cited chapter and verse of where some documentation was, of what I was talking about.

  Before sending his letter, the officer “dillydallied around for weeks.”

  “I tried to talk to my conscience. I knew I had deep grudges against Marcinko. I knew it would be unethical to nail him just because he was vulnerable. But I decided, if this is the kind of guy we’re going to nominate as captain, that’s the wrong cotton-pickin’ signal to send to junior officers. He screwed up several junior officers, both those who tried to imitate him and those who tried to play straight and narrow.”

  Eventually, this officer set the letter aside and made a phone call instead. He was subsequently interviewed three times by an agent of the Naval Investigative Service and provided lengthy statements about his allegations.

  Whether because of these statem
ents, or because of information provided by others, by the spring of 1986 the probe of SEAL Team Six had become a full-fledged investigation of the possible misuse of public funds. It even had its own code name: Iron Eagle.

  Heading the investigation was Clifford R. Simmen, one of the investigative service’s crack investigators. He had served in Vietnam as an army Ranger and had earned a Bronze Star. He had a good deal of empathy for the SEALs. Agents with specialized knowledge were drafted from the Hawaiian Islands, Camp LeJeune, Norfolk, even the Philippines.

  At one point, they hired a truck, backed it up to the door at Team Six headquarters, and carted away the team records. About fifty boxes of them. It was an extraordinary scene: a government agency raiding, in effect, one of the navy’s most secret and most vital military units. Gormly watched glumly. He cooperated fully with the agents, but he did not face an easy task in keeping his team operating at top efficiency. The investigators made copies of documents he needed, but they took the originals.

  The whole SEAL community was astounded, especially when they considered that the head of the Naval Investigative Service was a SEAL: Cathal (“Irish”) Flynn, newly frocked as a rear admiral. Two conspiracy theories evolved. One was that Flynn was using his high office to “get” Marcinko. The other was that, as a new admiral, Flynn wouldn’t dare to throw a large percentage of his investigators into a vendetta against a fellow SEAL unless he had been told to do so by top navy officials or perhaps even the White House.

  Neither theory holds up. Flynn was acquainted with Marcinko but didn’t know him well. He admired what he had heard of Marcinko’s combat record in Vietnam. He didn’t have any motive to “get” him. And while the investigation may have seemed excessive to many SEALs, it involved, at its peak, only about 20 agents and clerks, fewer than two percent of the agency’s force of 1,050 agents. Simmen says he reported regularly to Flynn on the progress of the probe but felt no pressure to push harder or to let up. “He never once tried to influence the investigation,” Simmen says.

  By May 1986, the agents had compiled a file of documents that suggested possible wrongdoing. But they had found no smoking gun. They decided to call Marcinko in for questioning.

  Shortly after eight o’clock on the morning of 15 May 1986, Simmen, Marcinko, and another agent, Mark Fallon, crowded into a tiny interrogation room in the NIS’s regional fraud office in Building 200 at the Washington Navy Yard. It was not an unfamiliar situation for Marcinko. He had been through escape and evasion training. He had been taught by the navy how to handle himself with interrogators who could torture or even kill him, not merely ask him questions.

  The questioning went on all day and then, with a couple of hours off for dinner, continued until three o’clock the next morning. Marcinko began the session confrontationally but frequently brought humor into the conversation. He never, at any time, gave any visible sign that he was under pressure. But the agents sensed the pressure. They could smell it on him.

  At the end of the session, Marcinko typed a twenty-two-page statement. It was loaded with classified information about events in his own career and the activities of SEAL Team Six.

  The matter might have ended there. The agents were not sure a case could be made against Marcinko. And some of the allegations had been resolved in his favor.

  Many in the SEAL community knew of the letter of reprimand contained in his personnel file. They suspected it had been improperly removed from the file before it went before the promotion board. Weyers, who was responsible for the punitive letter, remained puzzled years later.

  “Even with a bad fitness report as a CO, he still got picked out for captain. If the report was taken out of the file, how did it get taken out? You have to have fitness reports covering every period. If you have a day missing, you have to have a letter saying why that day is missing. He still made captain. That is almost impossible to do, but he did it. I’m not sure how.”

  Marcinko says: “My record went to the 0-6 board [the board responsible for recommending promotion to grade of 0-6, or captain] complete. It was pulled during the board, and some words in the fitreps [fitness reports] were removed by the VCNO, my commanding officer, by proper legal administrative procedures. I only used the book.”

  Lyons recalls that Marcinko appealed to the Board for the Correction of Naval Records and also wrote a formal request to the CNO. Lyons had a lawyer on his staff go over the appeal in great detail and then endorsed it and sent it to the vice CNO, who agreed to pull out the unfavorable report.

  “It was done totally above board. No corners were cut. It was done in accordance with set procedures,” Lyons says.

  During the period when he was under consideration for promotion, it was no secret to Marcinko that many SEAL officers did not think he should become a captain. An incident that occurred at that time demonstrates the lengths Marcinko was willing to go to to protect his chances for promotion, and also demonstrates the extent to which he deserves his reputation as a tough guy.

  While at SEAL Team Six, Marcinko injured his leg. “At the time of the injury,” he says, “I had one of my corpsmen look at it. I was busy overseas. Upon return, I felt I could manage rather than turn myself in at Portsmouth Hospital. Enough [people in the] USN were pissed off at me and I was afraid they’d use the injury as an excuse to relieve me for ‘medical reasons.’ I still had lots of work to do.”

  Finally, seventeen months later, he saw a doctor at Bethesda Naval Hospital, who diagnosed the problem as a broken leg. He told him the navy did not, at the time, have a specialist in sports medicine. He recommended contacting the doctor who tends the Washington Redskins professional football team, but warned that the navy would not pay for the procedure. Marcinko, who always seemed to be short of cash, borrowed the money for the operation from an enlisted man and checked into the hospital.

  “I did not want to explain how or why I had been walking around (jumping/diving/shooting) for seventeen months without medical attention,” Marcinko says.

  While the investigators naturally focused their attention on Marcinko, the founder and former commander of SEAL Team Six and the subject of the original charges, they also spent hundreds of hours analyzing the records they had seized. And as they did so, they became more and more interested in John Mason, a hospital corpsman and weapons expert who had been one of the original Mob Six and a plank owner of SEAL Team Six. A good-looking blond-haired man who was one of the best shooters in the navy, Mason had become a close friend of Marcinko’s, despite the disparity in rank.

  The team relied on him when it put on secret demonstrations of its skills for top navy and government officials. Once, demonstrating the powerful .50-cal. sniper rifle used by the SEALs, he fired at a metal disk that made a satisfying clang when hit. Unexpectedly the disk broke free of the line from which it was suspended and went whistling through the air over the heads of the dignitaries. Mason, cool under pressure, calmly treated the accident as part of the program and continued smoothly with his lecture.

  But there was also a disturbing dark side to Mason’s character. On one occasion, when he was sent to represent the navy in a national shooting championship, he scored lower than he had expected. Instead of merely accepting the fact that he had had a bad day, he obtained a blank score card, filled in a better score, forged the judge’s name, and replaced the original card. He was caught when the judge happened to notice the scores on Mason’s card were not the ones she had recorded.

  The investigators began to see what they thought was a similar pattern in the records of SEAL Team Six. They met several times with Mason and he denied any wrongdoing. Then in June 1986, about a month after the marathon session with Marcinko, Simmen and Agent Ralph J. Blincoe went to Mason’s home, sat him down and started laying out travel claims they had sorted out of the team’s files.

  “He was using false receipts he had had printed at print shops on his travel claims to substantiate reimbursements,” Simmen says. “That’s when we realized this was not a wi
tch-hunt, realized we were getting to the meat of the allegations.”

  They confronted him with a stack of receipts from Mariner’s Rest, supposedly a yacht anchored at Water Street in Washington, D.C. The documents indicated a number of members of the team, including, on at least one occasion, Marcinko, had been reimbursed for lodging after submitting receipts from Mariner’s Rest. But the agents had checked carefully. There was no such address or yacht. The receipts had simply been ordered from a printing house. The agents concluded that the team members stayed with friends or at cheaper hotels and were then reimbursed for their lodging at the higher rate.

  Most embarrassing for Mason were the documents showing that he had submitted false receipts for travel and schooling totalling several thousand dollars and then used the funds to buy a going-away gift for Marcinko when he left SEAL Team Six. First, he bought a Smith & Wesson Model 56 .357-cal. pistol, with ivory handles made from the heart of the elephant’s tusk. Then he had Marcinko’s image scrimshawed into the ivory. Finally, he ordered a custom-made walnut case for the weapon. Simmen, who saw the gun when the government seized it, termed it “beautiful.”

  Mason also purchased two hundred bronze belt buckles, and two sterling silver buckles for Marcinko and one other team leader. The one hundred serialized buckles for the original plank owners each had Marcinko’s signature engraved on the back. Each buckle carried the SEAL insignia and the Roman numeral VI embossed on the front. The investigators were fascinated by the thought of members of one of the navy’s most secret units identifying themselves with fancy belt buckles. They were also intrigued by the fact that a collection had been taken up for the buckles and the gift for Marcinko. They never did find out where that money went.

  As Mason was confronted with one document after another, he gradually provided details of the scheme in which he had been involved. Even as he confirmed the agents’ suspicions, he seemed to be trying to protect Marcinko. By the end of the session, Mason had signed a detailed confession. “John Mason was the key to the kingdom,” Simmen says.