Spring 2009 found Team 6 newly in charge of JSOC’s operations in the Horn of Africa and Yemen. Events off the Somali coast soon gave the unit an opportunity to prove its worth to a new president in a high-profile mission with no margin for error.
On April 8, 2009, four teenage Somali pirates boarded and seized the Maersk Alabama, a 155-meter container ship that was traversing the Indian Ocean a little more than 300 miles from Somalia. The twenty-man crew was well trained in how to respond to pirate attacks and most hid from the pirates, even managing to temporarily capture the ringleader, Abduwali Muse. But the pirates reneged on a deal to trade Muse for the ship’s American captain, Richard Phillips, and instead all four pirates took Phillips hostage and sailed off in the Maersk Alabama’s large, covered orange lifeboat.1
Piracy had been on the rise in the waters off Somalia since the turn of the century, a result of the anarchy plaguing that country and the demise of its fishing business. In 2008 Somali pirates attacked 111 ships, seizing forty-two.2
JSOC had not been oblivious to the issue. Around late 2004 McChrystal had asked TF Brown to examine whether it would be feasible to use Little Birds to attack Somali pirates. From late 2004 to late 2005 TF Brown planned against that mission, coming up with a concept that would have had Little Birds operating off a cargo ship. “You could put Little Birds on any cargo ship … and no one would have known at night,” said a TF Brown source. “Had we done that at night under [night vision] goggles over the water, they would not have known what hit them.” The pilots were keen on the concept, so long as it didn’t involve “getting stuck on a ship for six months or a year, sitting there waiting to just go shoot boats,” he said. But nothing came of the plans, in the face of stiff resistance from Colonels Andy Milani and Kevin Mangum, who commanded the 160th from 2003 to 2005 and 2005 to 2008 respectively.3
It might have stayed that way, had the pirates chosen another ship to attack on the morning of April 8, 2009. But their capture—albeit brief—of the Maersk Alabama marked the first successful pirate attack on a U.S.-flagged ship since the early nineteenth century. Once they took an American hostage on the open water, the next stage in the drama was almost inevitable. JSOC got the call, and, since it was a maritime scenario, that meant a mission for Team 6.
Plans were soon afoot to deploy Team 6’s Red Squadron, which had the Trident alert mission, to a ship off the Somali coast.4 In the meantime, early on April 9, the Bainbridge, a U.S. Navy guided missile destroyer, arrived on the scene and began shadowing the lifeboat containing Phillips and his four captors. It was soon joined by the Halyburton, a U.S. Navy frigate. In a desire to get operators into position as soon as possible, while waiting for the White House to decide whether to order the alert package to deploy, JSOC ordered a handful of Team 6 operators from Team Nairobi to fly to Djibouti, pick up some parachutes, and then jump in to the Indian Ocean beside the Bainbridge.5 They arrived on the night of April 8.6 A little more than twenty-four hours later, in the early hours of April 10, Phillips attempted to escape by jumping into the water, only for the pirates in the lifeboat to catch up with him.7
Meanwhile, in and around Dam Neck, Virginia, beepers started going off April 10. Team 6 had been in existence for almost three decades, but the alert standard was still the same. Each operator who got the word had to be ready to launch in four hours. Most of Red Squadron descended on Oceana Naval Air Station, where two J-alert birds, which were now C-17s, not the C-141s of the 1980s and 1990s, were waiting. The SEALs loaded two high-speed assault craft on each plane, and took off for the Indian Ocean. The operation to rescue Phillips now had a name: Lightning Dawn.8
After an almost twenty-hour flight, with two aerial refuelings, the planes’ back ramps opened, the sunlight streamed in, and the four assault craft flew out, followed by about fifty Team 6 personnel. Those fifty jumping into the Indian Ocean included most of Red Squadron, a few intelligence and communications guys, plus the assault craft boat drivers. (The high-speed boats and crewmen were primarily there in case the pirates managed to get Phillips to land, forcing the SEALs to go ashore to rescue him.) The need to bring the intelligence and communications personnel, for whom military freefall jumping was not usually a job requirement, meant three operators had to tandem jump with them, meaning the inexperienced personnel were strapped to the SEALs under one parachute. For at least one communications tech, this meant his first parachute jump of any kind was a freefall jump into the Indian Ocean on a combat mission. Captain Scott Moore, Team 6’s commander, also jumped in to handle the interactions with Rear Admiral (lower half) Michelle Howard, who was commanding Combined Task Force 151, a multinational force assembled to combat piracy in the Indian Ocean. Howard’s flagship was the Boxer, an amphibious assault flattop sitting over the horizon from the Bainbridge and the pirates. It was into the patch of sea beside the Boxer that the Team 6 contingent jumped. Moore and the Red Squadron commander stayed on the Boxer, while the squadron’s executive officer, a lieutenant commander named Walt, took an assault team and some snipers to the Bainbridge.9
Once on the destroyer, the operators considered the challenge before them. They had, of course, trained for hostage rescue missions at sea, but usually with the idea that the hostages would be on a cruise ship taken over by terrorists, requiring Team 6 to use its trademark “underway” techniques to board the moving ship. “This was a much different problem,” said a Team 6 source. “It was a single floating room.… It would have been easier for us to clear the Maersk Alabama than the Maersk Alabama lifeboat, because there’s so many ways that you can board the Maersk Alabama with the element of surprise and never be seen, and there’s so many ways that you can move on that ship without them ever seeing you, and then you can be on them in the bridge in a second.” The lifeboat’s enclosed design meant it lacked gunwales for boarders to grab on to. “It was like a space capsule,” the source said. Moore asked a couple of Red Squadron’s senior master chiefs for their thoughts on how to tackle it. “No one had any answers,” the source said. “Okay,” Moore told them. “We just need to let the situation develop safely.” As long as the pirates weren’t threatening to kill Phillips immediately, there was time to figure something out, the SEALs thought.
One option that the operators considered and rejected as too risky was swimming up to the lifeboat in the dark and killing the pirates. However, the SEALs did disguise themselves as regular sailors taking food to the lifeboat in order to get a closer look at the pirates and the layout of the small craft. Whether or not the pirates noticed the SEALs’ full beards—which had become a tradition for operators headed to Afghanistan, where Red Squadron was due to deploy in a couple of weeks—is a matter of conjecture.
By now the pirates were getting very jumpy. They had run out of khat, the mild narcotic plant to which many Somali men are addicted and which helps prevent seasickness. And the U.S. Navy had surrounded them, preventing their efforts to reach Somalia, even though they were drifting in that direction.10
On the morning of April 12 the SEALs persuaded Muse, the pirates’ leader, to come aboard the Bainbridge, ostensibly to help with negotiations and to get medical treatment for a cut on his hand he had suffered in a fight with a crewman during the initial hijacking. But in Phillips’s opinion, Muse had decided to abandon his colleagues. “I think the Leader got off that boat because he saw bad shit coming down the pike,” he later wrote in an account of his ordeal.11
Meanwhile, the lifeboat was floating toward the twelve-nautical-mile line marking Somalia’s territorial waters. No one on the Boxer could tell Moore what the legal ramifications would be if the lifeboat crossed that invisible line. So in order to prevent that eventuality, the SEALs persuaded the pirates to allow the Bainbridge to attach a line to the lifeboat and tow the small craft, under the rationale that it would ensure a smoother ride for the three pirates (plus Phillips) left on the lifeboat. What it also allowed the Bainbridge to do was surreptitiously pull the lifeboat ever closer.
But McRaven, the JSOC commander, had his own ideas about how to solve the problem. From Afghanistan, he had told the White House his men were going to ram the lifeboat, according to Team 6 sources. “Our high-speed assault craft are still on the Boxer,” recalled a SEAL. “We’re using the ship’s RHIB [rigid hull inflatable boat] from the Bainbridge. He’s telling them he’s going to launch it to ram the boat.”
The operators viewed McRaven’s actions as micromanagement. In their view, ramming the boat was “an Israeli tactic” that would have the disadvantage of knocking the SEALs off balance. Moore’s goal was to get the pirates to give up peacefully. But figuring out what was going on in their heads was no easy task, once they exhausted their supply of khat. At that point, “they’re getting really weird,” recalled a Team 6 source.
McRaven wanted the Bainbridge to stop towing the lifeboat, but gave Moore “emergency assault authority,” meaning that if there appeared to be an immediate threat to Phillips’s life, the Team 6 commander had the authority to act. But while Moore and McRaven were discussing what steps to take next, Walt had taken the initiative and positioned snipers on the destroyer’s fantail, ready to take out all three pirates on the lifeboat should the opportunity present itself. That chance came soon. The tension, lack of khat, and sleep deprivation were affecting the three remaining pirates. Phillips was acting belligerently with them. A pirate fired an AK round off the front of the lifeboat. But as the pirates argued with each other and Phillips that night, they finally exposed themselves simultaneously to the snipers on the Bainbridge. Walt called Moore. “They’re losing it,” he said. “We got the third shot.” “Cleared hot,” Moore replied. “But don’t fuck it up.”12
Half a dozen shots rang out in the space of a couple of seconds and all three pirates dropped dead or dying to the floor. One squeezed off a single harmless AK round as his last act alive. Huddled on the lifeboat floor, Phillips was safe, a fact confirmed by two operators who slid down the rope to get onto the lifeboat as quickly as possible.13 The snipers had performed perfectly, even though killing the pirates was not the SEALs’ most desired outcome. “Our team tried everything in our power to get those fuckers to give up,” said a Team 6 source. “We weren’t looking to fucking plug ’em.”
Walt waited to get Phillips onto the Bainbridge before passing the good news to the Boxer. In the meantime McRaven called again to order the SEALs to stop towing the lifeboat. Instead, Moore was able to tell him that the pirates were dead and Phillips was on the Bainbridge. It was a remarkable success. But it took a while before either JSOC or the Obama administration decided to shower the SEALs with plaudits.14 “We were not instantly heroes,” said a Team 6 source. “It took about twelve hours for … JSOC and the administration to realize that the Americans that know about this are like, ‘Wow, these are the greatest guys ever!’”
The rescue of Phillips was at the time the most high-profile mission Team 6 had ever undertaken. It was also the first occasion on which the United States’ new president, Barack Obama, had had to rely on JSOC. When word of the success reached the White House, Obama called McRaven in Afghanistan. “Great job,” he told the admiral.15 It would not be the last time the president had cause to congratulate him.
* * *
Five months later Team 6 was back on a destroyer sailing off the Somali coast. This time their target was Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, the senior East African Al Qaeda leader JSOC had been hunting for years and had missed with a cruise missile strike in March 2008.
For several months a combination of human and signals intelligence had allowed JSOC to track Nabhan around the clock. The Al Qaeda figure had become lazy with his security arrangements. “There was a sense that he had gotten very loose and arrogant, using his phone as often as he could,” said a military intelligence official. “[He] set a lot of patterns—always traveled certain roads.” The analysts had refined Nabhan’s pattern of life to the point that they could forecast where and when he would be traveling through Somalia, along what roads, and in what vehicle. With Nabhan’s movements so predictable, JSOC began to work on plans to kill or capture him, while at the same time engaging in an arduous process to get White House approval for the mission, just as it had for the previous year’s failed strike. The prospect of U.S. special operators fighting it out with Al Qaeda militants on the ground in Somalia made policymakers even more risk averse than usual. Several Obama administration national security officials had been in government at the time of the October 1993 Mogadishu battle in which eighteen U.S. soldiers died, almost all from JSOC’s task force. “Any time you say ‘Somalia [and] task force,’ instantly 1993 gets thrown up in [your] face,” said an officer who helped plan the Nabhan mission. But JSOC had assembled its arguments well. Its analysts expected Nabhan to drive along southern Somalia’s coast road soon, and they divided the route they expected him to take into red, yellow, and green sections, depending on the risk to civilians of any strike in those areas. They determined that there was an excellent opportunity to strike Nabhan as he drove through an isolated area.16
In the second week of September, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen chaired an early evening secure video-teleconference of about forty officials in which McRaven gave a highly classified PowerPoint briefing that detailed three different options for getting Nabhan. The first was a missile strike, delivered either from an aircraft or a Navy ship. This option carried the least risk, but also the least potential reward, as there would be no way to exploit the site for intelligence afterward, and Nabhan would be dead, and therefore unavailable for interrogation. The second option was also a lethal strike, but carried out by two Task Force Brown AH-6 Little Bird attack helicopters, with a small force of less than a dozen Team 6 operators following up on a pair of MH-6 Little Bird lift helicopters to exploit the site and collect Nabhan’s body, or at least some DNA extracted from it, to confirm his identity. The third option was a helicopter vehicle interdiction, like the second, but with the aim of capturing Nabhan rather than killing him. This was the highest-risk option. All the forces required for each option were already in position. The SEALs and the Little Birds and crews had flown out to the region almost four weeks previously and were on two destroyers, one of which was the Bainbridge, sitting off the coast of Somalia just out of sight of land.
Despite the group’s initial reluctance to countenance a mission in which there was any possibility of putting U.S. boots on the ground—“Somalia, helicopters, capture. I just don’t like the sound of this,” said Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator during the meeting—the upshot of the meeting was that the president was presented with a kill option and a capture option. However, the officials did not really see the capture option as viable, because the Obama administration had yet to figure out a policy for dealing with terrorists captured by U.S. forces outside Afghanistan and Iraq. If the United States wanted to remove Nabhan from the battlefield, it would have to kill him. JSOC had done its preparatory work well. At the cabinet level, the reaction of the Obama administration’s senior national security leaders was, “This is clean,” according to a source privy to the discussions. Obama signed off on the lethal strike that night.17
The next day, September 14, Nabhan set out with three colleagues to make the 300-mile trip from Merka to Kismayo in southern Somalia, just as JSOC’s analysts had predicted. JSOC’s plan had evolved since McRaven’s PowerPoint briefing. It now involved Task Force Silver, the covered Air Force unit, flying a civilian-style propeller aircraft made by the Spanish firm CASA along Nabhan’s route and firing a Griffin missile at his car. Designed to minimize the risk of collateral damage while neutralizing the intended target, the Griffin could be used as a rocket-powered missile or a guided bomb and had only been in production since 2008. But at the last moment, with the plane in the air, clouds rolled in and foiled the plan. “They could not see the car and therefore could not use the Griffin,” said a Team 6 source. The backup plan of using Little Birds and SEALs from Team 6’s Gold Squadron was now the last, best option, much to the operators’ delight. “They were praying for clouds,” the Team 6 source said. The helicopters launched from the destroyer, which was just over the horizon, and flew fast and low in the broad daylight toward the Somali shore. They aimed to intercept Nabhan’s vehicle outside the town of Baraawe, about fifteen miles inland.
The AH-6s took the lead, with the MH-6s following about a mile behind, so as to give the gunships time to shoot, turn around, and either shoot again or confirm the vehicle had been stopped. As staff in multiple operations centers around the world followed Nabhan’s vehicle on video feeds from a Predator drone and a U-28A manned ISR aircraft, the AH-6 flight lead, Chief Warrant Officer 4 Jay Rathbun, finally got the vehicle in view as it motored along the road through the Somali brush. The four men it held, including Nabhan in the backseat, would have had little if any warning of the danger as the Little Birds closed on them. “It’s tough to see them,” said a Task Force Brown source. “They’re like little gnats, and then you’ve only got a matter of seconds.”
On his first pass, Rathbun had trouble lining up a good shot, but declined to say “alibi,” the code word that would pass the target to his Dash-2. “As the flight lead, you’re in a once-in-a-lifetime mission, the chances of you saying ‘alibi’ are just about zero,” said a Little Bird pilot familiar with the mission. “So the guy lived probably another fifteen seconds, because that’s how long it took to get that aircraft round and take a shot.” Rathbun brought his helicopter around to face Nabhan’s vehicle before diving in and firing minigun rounds that stopped the vehicle and killed those inside, blowing some of them apart.
Rathbun chose to fire the 7.62mm minigun, rather than the 30mm chain gun or rockets, in order to preserve the bodies as much as possible and to minimize damage to any materials of intelligence value in the car. “If you hit it with rockets or 30[mm] then you’re going to destroy it,” the Little Bird pilot said. “It’s going to be hard to piece together, frankly, who’s who. And if you catch the car on fire, that’s the worst case, because then it’s real hard to get the DNA.”
After the car had been stopped, the MH-6s arrived carrying between six and eight Team 6 operators on their pods. At least one SEAL shot at the car, firing a burst from his M240 machine gun while seated on an MH-6 pod, but there was nobody left to kill. JSOC’s number one enemy in the Horn of Africa was dead. It had been well worth the wait for the men on the helicopters. However, the Team 6 source said, much of the credit belonged to the analysts who were able to predict Nabhan’s route with such accuracy: “Those intel folks really won the day.”
The analysts got their reward. After making sure all four vehicle occupants were dead, which didn’t take long—“They were picking [body] parts out of the trees,” the Team 6 source said—the operators turned to their next tasks: collecting DNA from the corpses and scooping up anything of intelligence value. This was a major advantage of Rathbun firing the minigun instead of rockets. “Had a rocket gone into that thing, everything would have been damaged,” said a Team 6 source. Instead, although the minigun rounds had done brutal work to the car and the people inside, a camera was the only sensitive item in the vehicle not to survive the attack unscathed. The SEALs retrieved a trove of valuable information, according to a military intelligence source: “Two laptops, a multitude of disks and then … I want to say three phones, but each one had multiple SIM cards,” in addition to two “push-to-talk communications devices … like walkie-talkies.” The SEALs took all four bodies, or what remained of them, out of the car, put them on the aircraft, and flew them back to the ship, where, after Nabhan’s corpse had been positively identified, they were buried at sea.18
Other than the intelligence value the United States derived from the mission, and the death of Nabhan, the significance of the mission was that it demonstrated to officials both inside and outside JSOC that the command retained the ability to conduct lethal clandestine operations with a small U.S. footprint. This was a relief to some in JSOC, who were growing concerned that so many years spent operating out of large, well-equipped bases in Iraq and Afghanistan had blunted the command’s ability to conduct missions in more austere environments. The Nabhan strike allowed JSOC “to get back to the roots of the organization,” said an officer who helped plan it.
But the strike had little long-term effect on the war against Al Qaeda and al-Shabaab, said an intelligence officer. “It really had no impact on al-Shabaab’s operations, other than they knew that we would be willing to do it,” he said.
* * *
Operation Lightning Dawn, the rescue of Richard Phillips from the clutches of Somali pirates, would spawn a hit movie starring Tom Hanks. But nobody wanted to make a movie about Team 6’s next major hostage rescue mission at sea, even though, according to multiple sources in the unit, what transpired was a direct result of the Phillips mission.
The incident began on February 18, 2011, when nineteen pirates, all but one of whom were Somalis, captured the SY Quest, a yacht that four middle-aged Americans—two men and two women—were sailing around the world. As the pirates sailed the yacht toward northern Somalia, the U.S. Navy sent four ships to intercept it: the aircraft carrier Enterprise, the guided missile cruiser Leyte Gulf, and the guided missile destroyers Sterett and Bulkeley. The ships caught up with the yacht February 19.19
Meanwhile, JSOC had dispatched a Gold Squadron contingent under Commander John Rudella to handle the crisis. The operation was called Manor Press. Although the ratio of pirates to hostages was far from ideal, the SEALs realized that only five or six pirates—the ringleaders—had guns. The operators were confident they could handle them. “The boys had a plan to take out the top guys ready to go,” said a SEAL officer.
Rudella asked for “emergency assault authority,” which McRaven had given Moore during Lightning Dawn. But this time the JSOC commander, who was at Fort Bragg, wanted to keep a tighter rein on the SEALs than he had managed during the earlier crisis, and declined Rudella’s request, according to Team 6 sources. In particular, he refused to let them try the sort of tricks that Red Squadron had used on the pirates who took Phillips hostage, they said. “He had felt that [Team 6] had manipulated him during the Captain Phillips rescue,” said a senior Team 6 source. “From the time that the guys got on station, McRaven said, ‘Hey, you manipulated me during Lightning Dawn, it’s not going to happen again,’” said another Team 6 source. “And he made every call, every single call, during [Manor Press].” McRaven told Rudella that if fired upon, his SEALs were not to fire back.
Nonetheless, the Team 6 snipers set themselves up on one of the ships following the sailboat, much as the Red Squadron snipers had done during Lightning Dawn.20 “They have already figured out who the real bad guys are, who’s there really to kill somebody and who’s along because they’ve got to get some money and they have khat and whatever,” said the senior Team 6 source. The pirates were all within view of the snipers. “They weren’t down belowdecks,” the source said. “They were sitting there in the back of the sailboat, underneath the awning.” However, the orders prevented the snipers from taking action. “Under no circumstances were they allowed to fire,” he said.
The Navy brought two pirates on board the Sterett for negotiations. But when one of the ships approached the yacht it unnerved the pirates. On the morning of February 22, a pirate fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the Sterett. It missed the ship, which was about 600 meters away, but it was a sign that the pirates’ mood had turned ugly. Shortly thereafter, some of the pirates shot the four hostages to death, thinking that the Navy would leave them alone if they killed the Americans.
“They gunned them down as the snipers are watching through their scopes,” a Team 6 operator said. The Team 6 force immediately launched a boarding party. The SEALs dove off their high-speed assault craft onto the yacht and rolled into a standing position ready to shoot. But for the hostages, it was too late. All four Americans were dead or mortally wounded. So were two pirates, having died at the hands of their comrades. A third pirate was “playing possum” in the tangle of bodies, then jumped up and attacked one of the SEALs, who wrestled with him briefly before killing him with a combat knife. After another pirate in the cabin was shot by an operator, the remaining pirates surrendered.
The failure left a bitter taste for some of the SEALs. “They weren’t allowed to do anything,” the operator said. “They had plans that they could have done, things that they could have tried to stop that boat.… The snipers … were crushed. They knew who the bad guys were. They should have taken the shots, but they obeyed orders. They were crushed.”
Some Team 6 operators blamed McRaven for the failure. “He micromanaged it,” said one, accusing McRaven of disregarding one of the special mission units’ key strengths: “Delta and SEAL Team 6 solve tactical problems.” But a retired officer who worked for McRaven for several years said micromanagement wasn’t the admiral’s style. “One man’s micromanagement is another man’s attention to detail,” he added.
* * *
Less than two months later, Team 6 scored a major success in the same waters without having to fire a shot.
U.S. intelligence had been closely tracking Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a Somali in his mid-twenties who was the senior liaison between al-Shabaab and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which was Al Qaeda’s Yemen offshoot. The February 2006 prison breakout of some of its most ardent and experienced members had rejuvenated AQAP. It had become the most active Al Qaeda branch, demonstrating an ambition to strike U.S. targets—particularly commercial airliners—far from Yemen. As a result, JSOC had increased its presence in Yemen and the U.S. government was keen to get its hands on Warsame. JSOC’s planners knew either they or the CIA could kill Warsame in Yemen with a drone strike (each organization had its own drones flying over Yemen—the CIA’s from southern Saudi Arabia, JSOC’s from Djibouti). The JSOC staff also considered capturing or killing him in Somalia. (Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh had made it clear putting U.S. boots on the ground in Yemen for a capture operation was out of the question.) But Warsame was a potentially invaluable source of intelligence and JSOC wanted to grab him alive. In mid-April 2011 Warsame unwittingly presented JSOC with an opportunity to do just that, when he made arrangements to travel on a small boat from Yemen to Puntland, the semiautonomous region of northeastern Somalia. Not only was the United States listening to Warsame’s cell phone, however. According to author Daniel Klaidman, “Using local spies, JSOC had been able to penetrate his network and manipulate the timing and logistics of his movements,” meaning that somehow JSOC had arranged for Warsame to be traveling with just one associate and no guards.
On the evening of April 19, 2011, a troop of around twenty-five operators and support personnel from Team 6’s Silver Squadron, dressed as regular Navy sailors rather than special mission unit operators, climbed into their rigid hull inflatable boats. Using a traditional wooden ship common to the region to screen themselves until the last possible moment, they boarded the fishing skiff on which Warsame was traveling through the Gulf of Aden. Taken by surprise, Warsame and his companion surrendered with minimal fuss. The mission marked the United States’ “first at-sea counterterrorism mission,” according to a senior Team 6 source.
The military held Warsame on the Boxer and interrogated him for more than two months before the Obama administration opted to try him in civilian court in New York. As with the Nabhan strike, the mission yielded an intelligence bounty: a laptop, two USB thumb drives, a hard drive, and a memory card. Things got even better for the CIA and JSOC analysts once Warsame began cooperating with his interrogators.21 “That was a huge one because he was carrying back all kinds of material to take to al-Shabaab from AQAP—huge, huge takeaway,” said a senior SEAL officer.
Playing a possible role in the operation was JSOC’s own spy-ship-cum-staging-base that the command had operated off Somalia from the winter of 2010–2011. Commanded by a regular Navy officer and known as an afloat forward staging base (the same phrase used for the much larger flattops from which JSOC task forces sometimes operated), the ship fell under Task Force 484, JSOC’s task force in the Horn of Africa and Yemen. The ship was leased from the Edison Chouest Offshore firm, and looked like a commercial or scientific craft, but could accommodate operators, SEAL boats, and at least one helicopter. The ship focused mostly on collecting signals intelligence.22 “We would rely on submarines mostly to pop up there and do sigint collection for us, but we needed a full-time platform,” said a Team 6 source. “We couldn’t get a Navy ship so we rented and repurposed a civilian ship.… It was loaded in terms of all the latest up-to-date sigint equipment.” The signals intelligence gear was largely manned by experts from Team 6’s White Squadron, which provided signals intelligence support personnel—cryptologists (“crippies”) and technical surveillance (TS) troops. (Although it had a squadron designation, White Squadron was commanded by a lieutenant commander, an officer a rank below the commanders who led the other squadrons.)
The ship also came in handy whenever Team 6 needed to conduct an OTB (“over-the-beach”) mission in Yemen or Somalia. “What we keep on that thing [are] our boats, our mechanics, a lot of our support dudes, and then the force will jump in,” said another Team 6 source. “Sometimes they’ll jump boats in … but usually it’s out there so all you have to do is jump in the force.”
By the time Team 6 captured Warsame, Yemen had become a major focus of U.S. counterterrorism efforts. With JSOC’s operations in the country—code-named Copper Dune—now under Team 6’s command, the task force there enjoyed some success responding to the threat of suicide bombers in Sana’a by using Marine AV-8B Harriers to strike the suicide bombers’ safe house north of the capital, and a combination of Harriers and submarine-launched cruise missiles to target AQAP camps in fall 2009. However, Yemeni president Saleh’s calculus that his people could tolerate air strikes but not American boots on the ground meant that JSOC’s presence in Yemen remained modest. JSOC’s numbers rose slowly before being capped at about fifty personnel by Ambassador Gerald Feierstein, who ran the Sana’a embassy from 2010 to 2013. Known collectively as Team Sana’a, the JSOC element had nonetheless grown too large to remain in the embassy proper and moved into new quarters close by. The team was commanded by a Team 6 troop commander, an officer holding the rank of lieutenant commander. His military chain of command ran through Task Force 484, which from 2009 was the name for the Team 6–led task force in the Horn and Yemen, but he also answered to the CIA chief of station in Sana’a, who, in the 2009–2010 timeframe, was JSOC’s old friend Spider.
Team 6’s Black Squadron, its advance force operations unit, provided most of the JSOC personnel, with some support from regular assault teams. Delta’s Echo Squadron also had a contingent there with four Mi-17 helicopters painted in Yemeni military colors. They were there to fly Yemeni forces on counterterrorism missions, but when Saleh permitted them to fly, which wasn’t often, it was mostly for training, not combat operations. In an effort to persuade Saleh that JSOC could conduct effective, stealthy missions in Yemen itself, Team 6 ran a demonstration in which operators flew in from Djibouti and conducted a high-altitude, low-opening parachute jump into the desert. The exercise went smoothly, but Saleh remained unmoved.
The task force also had a few personnel undercover performing advance force operations. These included “a couple of … Delta shooters that became Arabic speakers, and they were sensational,” said a JSOC source. They and the occasional Team 6 AFO operator worked with female operators from Delta’s G Squadron performing low-visibility urban reconnaissance in Sana’a and Aden, much of it focused on collecting signals intelligence from cell-phone networks and Internet cafés.23
Into this intelligence stream flowed the information gained from JSOC’s April 2011 capture of Warsame. From the U.S. perspective, a benefit of getting Warsame was the detailed intelligence on the movements, security measures, and pattern of life of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and Islamic cleric who had become a major player in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and thus a high-priority target for the United States. Awlaki’s citizenship resulted in much debate in the Obama administration and the wider foreign policy community about the appropriateness and legality of targeting him, but Obama had few qualms. Indeed, the president was particularly focused on Awlaki, pressuring his national security team to find and fix the charismatic terrorist.24
JSOC had a golden opportunity to kill Awlaki on May 5, 2011, just three days after the Abbottabad raid. Awlaki and at least one companion were driving through a rural part of Shabwah, southeast of Sana’a. Unbeknownst to them, JSOC was tracking them and had lined up three different types of aircraft ready to take a shot. First up was an MC-130W Dragon Spear, a special operations refueling version of the C-130 Hercules retrofitted with a weapons package. The Dragon Spear fired a Griffin missile at Awlaki’s truck, but missed due to a problem with its targeting pod. It was out of the fight. As the vehicle raced to evade the barrage, a Marine Corps Harrier jet took its turn, but just nicked the vehicle’s rear fender. Those monitoring the Predator feed in Sana’a, Fort Bragg, and the Pentagon watched in amazement as the truck emerged from the fireball and continued across the desert. Short on fuel, the Harrier had to depart. JSOC still had a Predator in the sky. Such drones had eviscerated Al Qaeda’s midlevel leadership in Pakistan’s tribal areas. But Awlaki was not so easily killed. He had called for help and two brothers who were colleagues in AQAP sped to rendezvous with Awlaki under some trees in a small valley. There, unseen by the JSOC staff watching the video feed, they switched vehicles with Awlaki and his driver, then the two vehicles departed in different directions. The drone followed Awlaki’s original vehicle, now with the brothers inside, and destroyed it, killing them. Awlaki escaped.25
By the time the next chance to target Awlaki—Objective Troy—arrived at the end of September, the CIA had taken charge of the drone program in Yemen. The opportunity came about when Awlaki made the mistake of remaining in one place for two weeks, far longer than normal. Combined with human intelligence from at least one Yemeni source and the usual array of signals intelligence assets, this allowed the combined CIA-JSOC team to find and fix the cleric in Al Jawf province, northeast of Sana’a.26 This time the United States was determined not to let Awlaki slip through their fingers. The Agency flew several Reaper drones from a base in Saudi Arabia. (The MQ-9 Reaper was a larger and more heavily armed version of the Predator.) Circling above the compound to which Awlaki had been tracked, they provided a comforting level of redundancy for the CIA planners.
The plan was for the drones to strike Awlaki while he was driving far from any noncombatants. A force comprised of operators from Team 6’s Red Squadron; one Delta operator; CIA Ground Branch operatives; and Yemeni counterterrorism personnel was to land in an Echo Squadron Mi-17 to exploit the site as soon as the drones struck. On September 30, as Awlaki and his colleagues finished breakfast in a small mud house and walked outside to climb into their vehicles and drive away, the CIA was sure it finally had its man. Its confidence stemmed from an extraordinary combination of human and technical intelligence: the Agency had gained access to Awlaki’s vehicle and equipped it with a hidden video camera that was transmitting live, so the CIA’s watchers actually saw Awlaki getting in the backseat. While this sort of work can be done by having U.S. or local operatives sneaking up to the car and installing the gear when nobody’s watching, that wasn’t how the CIA accomplished their feat in the case of Awlaki. “The easiest way … is to have a source who brings you the car, which is what the Agency would prefer … and they did have a source very close to Awlaki,” said a JSOC source. “You can do the install inside your comfortable garage and then give the car back to the source and he’s gone.”
With 100 percent confidence that they had their target in their sights, the Agency’s decision makers got impatient and gave the order to strike before the vehicles had gone very far. The drones fired a dozen Hellfire missiles at Awlaki, destroying his vehicle and killing him and several colleagues, including another American, Samir Khan, the editor of AQAP’s online magazine, Inspire. But the CIA had “fired about forty-five minutes early,” meaning the exploitation team had no chance to land to gain intelligence from the site before locals overran it, said a JSOC source. The helicopter carrying the JSOC and Agency personnel turned around in midflight.27