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

by Orr Kelly

  The proposal was reported to the office of the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington by secure phone. The go-ahead never came. The SEALs thought that was just as well.

  A few years later, in 1986, an even more ambitious plan was developed for an attack on Libyan terrorist training facilities.

  The assignment was given to SDV Team TWO in Little Creek.

  The USS Cavala, an attack submarine converted for use by the SEALs, was operating in the Pacific. She was brought around to Puerto Rico and the SEALs began their training there. The Cavala was equipped to carry only one SDV, and that meant only half a dozen SEALs could be put ashore. The newly reconditioned USS John Marshall, a large converted ballistic-missile submarine capable of carrying two SDVs, was alongside but not ready to be used.

  In the midst of the training, it suddenly dawned on those in charge that the time for a scheduled change in command of the SDV team was fast approaching. They faced two alternatives: delay the changeover or put up with the inevitable disruption caused by bringing in a new commanding officer to complete the training and supervise the operation. The decision was made that delaying the changeover would cause more operational security problems than it was worth. The change of command went ahead on schedule.

  The SEALs involved considered the operation doable. But there was one major worry. This would require not only entering Libyan waters but landing and operating there. If a SEAL were caught, would he be treated as a prisoner of war? Or would he be treated as a spy and executed?

  Officials of the Reagan administration, acutely aware that the long hostage crisis in Iran might have cost President Carter the White House, were determined to avoid any situation in which Americans might be held by a hostile power. They decided not to use the SEALs. Instead, air force F-111 bombers flying from England and navy bombers flying from the USS America and USS Coral Sea hit targets in Benghazi and Tripoli on 14 April 1986.

  CHAPTER

  34

  Shadowing the Achilla Lauro

  Lieutenant Brian Lippe is a veteran SEAL, with experience on both coasts and in almost every kind of SEAL assignment. In an interview in Coronado, he reflected on his experiences as an SDV operator and recalled what happened when a cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, was seized by terrorists on 7 October 1985.

  Have you spent a lot of time in SDVs?

  I’ve been in both the Mark 8 and the Mark 9. Mostly as navigator.

  Did you like operating in SDVs?

  Some things I liked. But I thought it was pretty dangerous and was happy to have survived it. It’s a lot harder than other things we do, to me the hardest thing we do. You can’t do a mission that doesn’t take about thirty-six hours from start to finish. There is a lot of prep time and cleanup time. It wears you out.

  What did you like about SDVs?

  I liked the notion I could sink an aircraft carrier. Just myself and one other guy could really do some pretty serious damage to a fairly large asset. I really enjoyed the missions like that.

  You can put enough explosives together to sink an aircraft carrier. We have done exercises where we have “sunk” ships in training. It’s just a matter of putting a mine and a timer on a ship.

  Our charges are set up to do a couple of things. One of them is it just blows all the water out from under the ship. And the ship basically breaks its own keel by its own weight, That’s how you can get away with that big amount of damage. You’d need a lot of demolitions, more than you could carry, to blow up a big ship itself.

  Have you done any actual real-life missions in the SDV?

  Almost. At the time of the Achille Lauro incident in 1985, I was assistant commander of the 7th Platoon of SDV Team TWO. We were in the Mediterranean and we pulled into the port in Genoa to switch ships from the USS Pensacola onto the USS Hoist so we could run our SDV training missions. The Hoist is a diving salvage ship.

  We didn’t pay any attention at the time, but the Achille Lauro was at the next dock, right next to us. That’s where the hijackers got on board.

  We went off to do some SDV diving ops and some demolition work, just to keep our skills up.

  After that we were supposed to rendezvous several weeks later in Venice with the Pensacola. A week or so after the Achille Lauro was next to us, the terrorist incident occurred. We were within four or five hours of the ship.

  There was a period where they went dead in the water, just turned off the engines. We thought we had an opportunity to go in with the SDV and either do some ship boarding or disable that ship, make it so they couldn’t get it under way.

  We were really excited about getting to go in there with the SDV. It was a perfect mission for the SDV. We could have had some SEALs—four SEALs—come right out of the SDV and they wouldn’t know it at night.

  We’d have these telescoping poles of some type and climb aboard that way. Unless a guy happened to be right there, we’d probably be able to do that mission. Or we could just wrap some cables around the propeller so they couldn’t get under way and let one of the other SEAL teams come in from the air, board the ship, and take it over.

  We did our own planning and were steaming toward the ship. All I can tell you is that we were considered but our plan was not chosen.

  I’ve had both coasts, boat, SDV, and SEAL experience but nothing seems to happen when it’s my time to go do something. Which is probably okay.

  After the hijackers killed Leon Klinghoffer, an American passenger, they forced the ship to sail to Egypt. They were placed aboard a plane by the Egyptians but the plane was intercepted over the Mediterranean by U.S. warplanes and forced to land in Italy. Members of SEAL Team SIX, the hostage-rescue experts, were at the airport, where they had been standing by for a possible effort to board the ship at sea and rescue the passengers. When Italian authorities took custody of the hijackers instead of turning them over to the Americans, the SEALs became involved in a standoff with the Italian military that almost led to bloodshed. The Americans finally backed off. The Italians took the hijackers into custody, but they were soon released and permitted to leave the country.

  CHAPTER

  35

  A World-Class Swim

  When then-Comdr. Rick Woolard became commander of SEAL Team TWO in 1982, one of his top priorities was to upgrade the team’s ability to carry out complex combat swimmer attacks. Woolard tells what happened:

  When I came on SEAL Team TWO, they were unable to conduct a good ship attack that involved anything more than a straight line compass swim against a stationary ship target. We—SEAL Team TWO—had embarrassed ourselves in a Flintlock exercise in 1981 with both the Germans and the Dutch.

  The caliber of our combat swimming was so low we were unable during this Flintlock exercise to complete our combat swimmer operations. I was there monitoring it and I was really embarrassed. Right around the same time I checked into SEAL Team TWO as commander, a really lucky thing happened. For the first time in about ten years we had an exchange with the French. We had been sending SEALs to Toulon who had gone through their course in Commando Hiver. They had never sent a one of their officers here.

  They sent a wonderful man, François d’Avout—an aristocratic Frenchman, a great teacher. He was very patient but with high standards. This is what I needed to get my guys to learn how to conduct proper swim attacks. I kept him running combat swimming courses from the time he arrived till the time he left with a few short but enjoyable forays into free fall parachuting and winter warfare.

  We ran a very tough course. I didn’t pick the old and bold. I picked the young, hard-charging guys who were E-4s and E-5s that had the force of personality and the leadership characteristics, the enthusiasm and capability—the guys who had the best reputation among the younger men in the team—to go through this course.

  I sent these smart enlisted men through the course. Then they taught the rest of SEAL Team TWO how to do it. The entire standard of combat swimming changed to the point where we were able to do with absolute certainty a missi
on such as we did down in Panama. [During the U.S. invasion of Panama in December 1989, four swimmers from SEAL Team TWO attached explosives to a Panamanian patrol boat and blew it out of the water.]

  In a 1983 Flintlock exercise I sent a platoon over under a lieutenant named Joe Maguire who is currently the CO of SEAL Team TWO and his platoon conducted, in Flintlock 83, an operation with the same [German] Kampf swimmers with which SEAL Team TWO had embarrassed itself two years before.

  The operation went like this: four SEALs, four Kampf swimmers were dropped into the ocean, the Baltic. They conducted a rendezvous with a German coastal submarine. It locked them in through the torpedo tubes. On the second night, the SEALs and the Kampf swimmers, all eight of them, locked out of the submarine, again through the torpedo tubes, about two miles off a German naval base called Olpenitz.

  The swimmers’ mission was to penetrate the harbor, which itself was about a mile deep in an eastwest orientation. These guys were coming in from the east. There was a net or boom across the narrow part of the harbor entrance. The SEALs were tasked to penetrate the harbor, work their way in, blow up a couple of patrol boats, and then get back out and rendezvous with a German fishing boat.

  There were six or eight different compass legs they had to effect, compass course changes they effected underwater.

  That was a world-class combat swimmer op. If we had been able to do something like that in wartime, that would be a major, major commando operation.

  The German base at Olpenitz is situated on a flat headland jutting into the Baltic, or as the Germans call it, the East Sea, near Kopeln, a picturesque fishing town that rises from the harbor to a small hill dominated by a brick church of the type common to northern Germany. The naval base lies where the German coast extends almost due north toward the Danish border, in a strategic position astride the passages from the Baltic into the North Sea. The base surrounds its own separate small harbor, whose entrance is protected at the seaward side by two stone and concrete breakwaters. The land borders are defended by high, wire fences.

  Master Chief Charles “Chuck” Williams was one of the young hard-chargers who went through d’Avout’s course and later participated in the simulated attack on Olpenitz. He recalls d’Avout as a tough task master in this account of their training:

  I can remember in Puerto Rico doing dive training. There was a severe thunderstorm came in, a squall front. Everybody was happy. We don’t have to dive tonight.

  Mr. d’Avout comes in. “What is going on? Why aren’t you guys ready to go diving?”

  We said, “There’s a big storm.”

  And he goes, “If you have been struck by lightning, zen you have made zee bad peek.” [When a swimmer surfaces for a moment to get his bearings or check his target, that is called a peek.]

  He didn’t cancel dives for anything!

  Williams was slated to swim for the U.S. in the 1980 Olympics in Moscow until the U.S. and sixty-five other nations withdrew to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the 1983 exercise, he teamed up with his platoon leader, Lt. Joseph Maguire. Maguire, now commander of SEAL Team TWO, and Williams, a master chief in charge of swimming training for the team, tell about that “world-class swim.”

  Williams: To get to the submarine, we linked up with a Combat Talon MC-130 and did an equipment airdrop in a deserted portion of the Baltic Sea.

  Maguire: There were four American swimmers and four German swimmers. It was a joint—a combined—op.

  Williams: We did a low-level airdrop into the Baltic. At night.

  Maguire: We flew in at water level and as soon as it came within the window, the plane just jumped on up, the green light went, and we went on the green light. As soon as all eight guys were out of the aircraft, he dove back down to the surface. He popped up for a minute or so.

  Williams: It was between eight hundred and one thousand feet that we went out. We jumped with a static line and our Draegers [underwater breathing rigs]. We jumped with equipment on our legs. You put your reserve parachute up front and equipment on your thighs. After that, we linked up all eight swimmers in a swimmer pool. We had a long wait, about a four-hour wait. The German U-boat was late getting to us. It was four to five hours waiting on the sub. The fog rolled in. You couldn’t see more than about fifty yards. There’s nobody out here but us and if the sub doesn’t show up, we’re going to have a long wait.

  Maguire: What we did was, we banged our weights against the bottles [On the breathing apparatus]. That is a good frequency for the sonar on the submarine. So he was able to come in on that and found us pretty well. The first thing I noticed was, about twenty yards off from us, the periscope came up. And then came down. Just to let us know he was there. So we swam on over and the submarine was submerged. And then we—what was his name, Uve—went down. He gave tap signals to the submarine. It was bona fides so they would know it was the right guys coming in. You don’t leave anything to chance.

  Williams: It was a German U-boat and a German did the signaling to let them know we were the right guys and we want to come in. Now.

  Maguire: They opened the torpedo tubes. There’s eight torpedo tubes. And they emptied two of them, to put four swimmers in each torpedo tube. We put two Americans and two Germans in one tube, two Americans and two Germans in the other. The first guy backs in, then the second guy comes in so the two are head to head. So that if you break your rig during the lock in, you can buddy breathe off the Draeger. And then the other guy backs in and he lays his legs over yours and then he’s head to head with his buddy. And he comes all the way in. Because with the shutters for the torpedo tube, we don’t want the last guy to be exposed. So the fourth guy in is going to come in and then he is going to curl up in the fetal position until they have shut the doors. Just to make sure he doesn’t get caught there and lose his foot. The two swimmers who are head to head can communicate with each other. The German can communicate with you by tap signals on your legs.

  Williams: The tube is twenty-one inches in diameter and seven meters long, a little over twenty-one feet. The last guy in our tube was the German officer, Uve. But first, he made sure all the guys were in the other tube, all four. He came over to our tube. The two Americans were in. The other German was already there waiting. And then he gives the tap signal. “Everybody is clear. Close the shutter doors.”

  Maguire: We’re locking in at eleven meters [about thirty-five feet], which is pretty deep for oxygen. When they close the torpedo shutter, you’re at eleven meters depth. Which already puts you on the extreme O2 table. [In the Draeger breathing apparatus, the swimmers breathe pure oxygen. The carbon dioxide they exhale passes through a lime canister that cleanses it and returns pure oxygen. But breathing pure oxygen below a certain depth can cause convulsions and even death.]

  Williams: Once he’s given the signal that everyone is in, they shut the shutter doors. There’s about a thirty-minute wait. It took about thirty minutes for them to drain the tube, bring the pressure from eleven meters up to zero. [This equalizes the pressure in the tube with that in the submarine.]

  Maguire: That [change in pressure] was instantaneous. That’s what the slam was.

  Williams: The pressure change was instantaneous but the duration of the whole evolution took thirty minutes so you were lying there in the tube for thirty minutes waiting to be taken out. It seemed like things took forever when you were inside there. They were supposed to give tap signals when they were doing things. But for some reason, the Germans in the U-boat didn’t understand the tap signals or when they were supposed to give them. So you were laying there waiting for something to happen but the signals didn’t come.

  Maguire: This is not for everybody.

  Williams: You go from eleven meters to the surface pressure. It happens so fast. In a second. So you can imagine if you’re breathing compressed gas at eleven meters and you go to zero or even past zero in a split second, everything is expanding.

  Maguire: It was like a quarter-pound or half-pound block
[of explosive] going off in the chamber. It literally picked you up and rattled you.

  What was happening in those thirty minutes?

  Maguire: They’ve got to drain it. The torpedo tube is designed for a machine—for a torpedo. The human factor is not a consideration. Stealth and quieting is also a part of their thing. The draining process is quiet.

  Williams: Water was still in there when we came to the surface and then they drained it. I remember, in rehearsal, I wasn’t expecting that. I took the head strap off of my mouthpiece so we could buddy breathe if we had to in an emergency. And I was just laying there waiting for the signal to take the pressure from eleven meters to zero. And when it happened, everything expanded so fast, my mouthpiece flew out of my mouth. And the first thing I thought of was, I have to put my rig on because there is still water in here. I’m laying there going, “That was interesting!”

  Maguire: The way it is supposed to work is: The tap signals were, “We’re about to depressurize. Are you guys ready?” He’ll squeeze me. I’ll kick the guy behind me. The guy at the end of the torpedo tube will signal, “We’re ready to go.” You took your straps off and the two of you were ready to buddy breathe but what you did is you breathed your breathing bag down to a pancake, purged all of the O2out of your lungs and signaled, “We’re ready to go.” You take the faintest breaths and your breathing bag just about has nothing in it. When you go from eleven meters to the surface instantaneously, your breathing bag goes whoosh and your lungs go whoosh. The expansion shot his mouthpiece on out. The reason he didn’t flood his rig is the bag expansion had so much O2 still coming out he could put his mouthpiece back in and the rig was not taking on water yet. It’s something you have to know what you’re doing and you have to be very comfortable in the water.

  Then I ask, “Are you okay?” with a squeeze. He says, “I’m okay,” [weary sound]. Then they open up the torpedo hatch and they have to carry you out. You’re up about five feet. So they take you out and they stand you up. You were first, right? They took Chuck out and I kind of shimmy to the front. I remember being carried out at the same time the other American swimmer, this guy Ron Pierce, was being carried out from the other tube. And I remember the look in his eyes like, “Wow! This is a fun ride!” I had to have a little talk with the boys [the sub crew] and say, if at all possible, just give us a little stop along the way. Give us even a half a second. It is important to us.