As the decade lengthened, JSOC’s mission set grew. The combination of the command’s sizable budget, demonstrated capability, and carefully cultivated aura of secrecy meant “JSOC was asked to solve problems nobody else could solve,” said a retired special ops officer. The attitude of those in the very few rungs in the chain of command above JSOC seemed to be, “if it’s really hard and it’s really important let’s ask JSOC to do it,” said Mike Hall, who was the command’s senior enlisted adviser from May 2000 to December 2001, having previously spent four years as the Ranger Regiment’s command sergeant major. This applied even to missions for which the Marines or Special Forces or an infantry division might have been better suited. “Some of the things we were asked to do, maybe we weren’t best for … but it sort of fell to JSOC because it was the no-fail, risk-averse environment from DoD,” said Hall, who added that by sending the military’s “very, very best” on a mission, Pentagon leaders were attempting to insulate themselves from criticism if the mission failed.
JSOC also retained its traditional 0300 mission to conduct counterterrorism operations abroad. Each JSOC unit was on a readiness cycle that kept one element prepared to be “wheels up” four hours after being alerted. In Delta, the unit on standby was called the “Aztec squadron,” in Team 6 it was “the Trident” assault team, and in TF 160 it was the “Bullet package.” Together they were called “the alert force.”1
But in addition to being prepared to conduct what a retired special ops officer called the “standard reactive” 0300 mission set, which included hostage rescue and responding to a plane hijacking or the takeover of a U.S. embassy, JSOC continued to play a part in plans for much larger combat operations. Since its inception, “JSOC had always been the nation’s strategic raiding force,” said the retired special ops officer, citing Grenada and Panama as examples. In September 1994, it appeared that the National Command Authority would order JSOC to repeat those exploits as the U.S. military prepared to invade Haiti to oust the junta that had deposed Aristide in 1991. A JSOC task force that included virtually all of Team 6 plus a Ranger contingent was ensconced on the aircraft carrier America ready to launch. Operators from Delta’s Operational Support Troop had already infiltrated Haiti undercover and reconnoitered locations critical to the invasion. They took videos of the sites, which were then briefed back in extraordinary detail to the small elements preparing for their missions.2 But at the last moment, under heavy pressure from a U.S. delegation that included former president Jimmy Carter, retired General Colin Powell, and Senator Sam Nunn, the junta’s leaders decided to step down.
Although Team 6 was JSOC’s main assault force, Delta operators had done the advance undercover work on land because their SEAL counterparts lacked such a capability. Within a decade JSOC units would be competing to conduct low-vis missions, but in the mid-1990s what the SEALs called “clan [short for clandestine] stuff” was not a Team 6 priority. That hadn’t always been the case, however. In advance of the Panama invasion, Rick Woolard, the Team 6 commander, realized he had no good intelligence on one of his unit’s likely targets—a favorite beach house of Noriega’s at Río Hato. So Woolard cobbled together a few Spanish-speaking Latino operators who might be able to snoop around Panama without drawing attention. In what a senior Team 6 officer later described as a “totally unauthorized” mission, Woolard sent two of the operators to Panama undercover, along with a female supply petty officer, who posed as the romantic partner of one of the SEALs. The mission was a bust—the team couldn’t find out anything useful about the beach house and Woolard recalled them—but the Team 6 commander saw the value of such a unit and kept the group of about half a dozen operators together. “They had brown skin so we called them the ‘Brown Boys’ and that eventually became Brown Cell,” said a Team 6 officer.
The cell trained for deep reconnaissance and undercover operations, and endured through the rest of Woolard’s tenure and that of his successor, Ron Yeaw. But by the time Captain Tom Moser took command of Team 6 in 1992, the attention paid to Brown Cell had become a source of discontent within the assault troops. Moser shut it down. The petty officer who was Team 6’s first undercover female operative left the unit and the Navy in 1993 and joined Delta, which had heavily recruited her for its own small band of women operators. She spent several years there before returning to the Navy and retiring.3
Although JSOC was created to conduct the counterterrorism—or 0300—mission set that revolved largely around hostage rescue scenarios, from the mid-1990s until 2001, two very different missions dominated the command’s world.4 One of these was the hunt for Balkan war criminals, known in the command as PIFWCs (pronounced “pifwicks”): persons indicted for war crimes. Most were Bosnian Serbs accused of committing atrocities against Bosnia’s Muslims.
The December 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that marked the end of the Bosnian war stipulated that war criminals would stand trial at a tribunal in The Hague. The challenge was finding and then nabbing them. With Bosnia divided into American, British, and French sectors, this entailed a complicated command and control setup in which an American-led intelligence-gathering task force was supposed to locate the hostages, before special operations forces—the nationality of whom depended on which country’s sector of Bosnia the hostages were located in—were deployed to find them. If the mission was in the U.S. sector, then a JSOC task force would get the job.
The task force’s first venture, Operation Tango, aimed to capture Simo Drljaca and Milan Kovacevic, two Serbian warlords accused of horrible war crimes in the town of Prijedor. Team 6 elements flew into the NATO base in Tuzla, Bosnia, on a C-17 transport. To hide from Serbian spies, they deplaned inside shipping containers that were taken inside a hangar, where the operators jumped out. After conducting surveillance of the pair’s daily routines, the task force sprang into action on July 10, 1997. A combined force of Team 6 and British SAS operators killed Drljaca at a fishing retreat at a remote lake after he reportedly resisted arrest by shooting and wounding an SAS man. Simultaneously, 100 miles away, a Team 6 element posing as Red Cross personnel arrived at the hospital clinic where Kovacevic worked, talked their way past the receptionist, entered his office, and subdued him. The operators placed Kovacevic in a wheelchair, took him out a back entrance, and loaded him into a waiting truck.
Shortly after Operation Tango, the United States placed Jerry Boykin, now a brigadier general and fresh from a stint as deputy chief of the CIA’s Special Activities Division (which included Ground Branch), in charge of the intelligence-gathering task force, whose overall mission to seize the PIFWCs was called Operation Amber Star. In theory, Boykin reported directly to Army General Wes Clark, the head of U.S. European Command and NATO’s supreme military commander, but in practice he cleared everything through Army General Eric Shinseki, the NATO commander in Bosnia, before briefing Clark. From the moment they landed in Bosnia, the JSOC elements fell under Shinseki, who demanded reams of supporting intelligence before approving a mission. “It was a delicate and confusing situation,” said a senior task force officer. Technically headquartered at European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, the task force (also called Amber Star) had two “command and control centers” in the Bosnian cities of Tuzla and Sarajevo as well as “a series of satellite centers scattered across the Balkans from which we could run our intel collection activities,” according to Boykin. The task force focused on a list of a “dirty dozen” individuals. By March 1998, it had rolled up seven.5
The task force did not let up and was still grabbing war criminals in April 2001, when a group of at least six reconnaissance personnel (two from Team 6 and at least four from Delta’s Operational Support Troop, including one woman) in two vehicles captured Dragan Obrenovic, a former officer in the Yugoslav army wanted for his involvement in the 1995 massacre of prisoners at Srebrenica.6 “Some of the PIFWC snatches were kind of legendary,” said a Delta source who served multiple tours in Bosnia, noting that the missions helped the unit develop new tactics, techniques, and procedures. Many operations involved intercepting and seizing someone traveling in a moving vehicle, often with bodyguards. The task force would surreptitiously attach a tracking beacon to the target’s car. Delta was already experimenting with technologies that used an electromagnetic pulse to shut a car’s battery down remotely. The unit also used a catapult net system that would ensnare car and driver alike. Once the car had been immobilized, operators would smash the window with a sledgehammer, pull their target through the window, and make off with him, shooting any bodyguards who posed a threat, while an outer security perimeter kept anyone who might interfere at bay. The operators had a name for these snatches: habeas grab-ass.7
Amber Star was the logical follow-on from the hunt for Pablo Escobar. The operators refined their man-hunting techniques, with an emphasis on low-vis operations. “It was a pretty steep learning curve,” a Team 6 operator said. But the operators soon learned that to blend in they had to dress and act exactly like the locals. That might mean washing their hair less often, wearing locally bought clothes, smoking local cigarettes (even the special mission units’ health-conscious athlete-warriors learned to smoke constantly when out on a mission), and doing close-target reconnaissance in locally purchased vehicles complete with the right license plates for whichever town they were in. Doing that sort of drive-by reconnaissance of a target’s home might require the operators to drive from one safe house to another, where they’d swap vehicles before driving to a third location to pick up the “covered” vehicle they would use on the mission. “It takes a lot of discipline to do it right,” the Team 6 operator said. “We were just starting to get it correct. It’s a lot of stuff the Agency had figured out for years.”
As in Colombia, the command worked closely with the CIA, whose job it was to find the PIFWCs, with JSOC brought in to capture the individuals once they’d been located. That division of labor led to frustration at JSOC headquarters. “We thought the Agency was fucked up and we were on a wild-goose chase 90 percent of the time in the Balkans,” a retired special ops officer said. Nonetheless, the two organizations forged close relationships in the Balkans that would stand each in good stead after September 11. It was not unusual for Delta officers and CIA case officers to work side by side in an “R and S” (reconnaissance and surveillance) base with Army of Northern Virginia personnel and signals intelligence experts from the National Security Agency.8 (The Army of Northern Virginia operatives were responsible for “infrastructure”—renting safe houses, buying cars, handling money, running sources.)
The personal connections that were forged in the Balkans between the special mission units and the CIA’s Special Activities Division would prove crucial in the next decade. “The real bond between the CIA and Delta started in Bosnia, where [we were] face-to-face, working a real-world mission, getting to know each other, realizing once again that neither organization can do what they want to do without the other,” said a Delta source. “That’s the genesis of the whole relationship.”
But no such bonds yet existed between the JSOC and CIA headquarters, however, according to Hank Crumpton, who was in charge of global operations for the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center in the two years prior to September 11.9 “Shockingly, in that period I basically had no interaction with JSOC,” Crumpton said. “I had requested it, I had wanted it, I had needed their support, their resources, their air capability to get my teams into Afghanistan [in September 1999].… And there was just really zero interest from DoD or the special ops command.”
Although the U.S. news media barely registered JSOC’s PIFWC missions,10 the Clinton administration closely monitored them. The president himself authorized the January 22, 1998, mission in which Team 6 operators snatched Goran Jelisic, the so-called “Serb Adolf,” outside his house in Bosnia’s Serbian enclave, for instance, and was woken at 5:30 A.M. and told of its success.11 But this level of political attention was accompanied by a requirement to keep friendly casualties low to nonexistent in the operations, which were usually “urban raids in dense population centers,” said a senior special ops officer familiar with the task force. That in turn meant “your planning has to go into infinite amounts of detail.”
It also led to an extraordinarily risk-averse environment in which JSOC commander Army Major General Bryan “Doug” Brown, who led the command from 1998 to 2000, and his successor, Major General Dell Dailey, a former 160th commander, felt compelled to deploy hundreds of personnel plus the JOC for each snatch mission. “So for picking up an old man who’s walking between the bread store and his house, JSOC has to fly over, set up, and run the operation,” commented a Delta source bitterly. By 2001, “everyone kind of acknowledged that you don’t need to bring a squadron over to do a job that four people can do,” said another Delta operator. However, Mike Hall, Dailey’s senior enlisted adviser, said the general flew over to oversee operations not because he didn’t trust the operators, but to act as a buffer between the operators and senior leaders in Washington uncomfortable with the thought of a lieutenant colonel running a national-level mission. “If he wasn’t there as a two-star to deal with the bureaucracy, then those guys would have zero chance of executing that operation,” Hall said.
Bosnia also gave JSOC’s lesser known elements a chance to come into their own. Delta’s Operational Support Troop, which did a lot of the unit’s deep reconnaissance and undercover work, was heavily involved. The urban settings allowed the troop to take advantage of one of its secret weapons: its small number of female operators, who combined with male counterparts to form “guy-girl teams” that masqueraded as romantic couples while reconnoitering targets.12
The women occupied an almost unique role in the U.S. military. In early 1982, at the request of Delta commander Colonel Rod Paschall, Army Secretary John Marsh authorized Delta to use female operators in direct combat roles. (They were banned from such jobs in the rest of the Army.) But that early experiment failed. Although four women graduated from a “modified” assessment and selection course, Delta’s men were not yet ready for coed operations. “It didn’t work out and they all kind of drifted away and the unit soon reverted to being an all-male preserve,” said a Delta officer. However, mindful of the advantages mixed-sex couples enjoy on reconnaissance missions, where they are presumed to evoke less suspicion than “singleton” men or male duos, under Schoomaker’s command, Delta tried again in 1990 and this time stuck with the program, despite continuing disapproval on the part of some male operators.13 The difference this time was that the unit put more thought into the women’s assessment and selection process, a Delta officer said. “It wasn’t just about whether they could run a hundred miles,” he said. “It was very physical, don’t misunderstand me, but it was also a lot more emphasis on the psychological testing, so it worked out a lot better.”
By the early 2000s OST had about half a dozen female operators, according to an experienced unit operator. The women “were every bit as capable” as its men, he added. “They were there for the same reasons the guys were—they wanted to serve their country and do missions.” But he acknowledged his view was far from unanimous in Delta. “I didn’t have the issues [with the women] that a lot of guys had,” he said.
Delta’s Echo Squadron also played a major role in Bosnia, albeit one hidden in plain sight. The covered air squadron was still a small organization in the 1990s with only about fifteen pilots, but its capabilities had grown since its Seaspray days. One technological development in particular had major tactical and operational consequences: the Wescam ball, which had already made an appearance in Mogadishu in 1993. A gyro-stabilized camera in a spherical mounting fixed to the underside of an aircraft, the ball could track a target and, using “basic line-of-sight digital radio secure technology,” transmit live video of whatever it tracked back to the JOC, according to a Delta source. It quickly became JSOC’s eye in the sky. The camera included a forward-looking infrared lens, a regular infrared lens, and a telescopic lens.
Echo fixed the Wescam balls to turboprop planes made by Schweizer, a firm that specialized in gliders and quiet reconnaissance aircraft. The Echo pilots would climb to altitude, then cut the engine and use the plane’s long wingspan to descend in circles, before drifting away, flying out of the area, returning to altitude and repeating the process. “You couldn’t hear a thing,” said a Team 6 operator. The Wescam ball would be transmitting live down to operators riding in the back of a nondescript van. “We had little video screens watching the Wescam ball track cars and stuff right into our ambushes,” said the Delta source. “They were at the forefront of all that technology that today is in Predators and everything else.”
But Echo’s value went far beyond the Wescam ball. The squadron had three basic missions: “sensor”—visual reconnaissance and surveillance missions involving high-tech gear like the Wescam ball; “shooter”—using civilian-style helicopters as attack aircraft; and “transport”—moving special mission unit operators and other sensitive personnel covertly. (The “sensor” mission originally included signals intelligence, but in 1987 the unit lost that part of the mission to the ISA, which also had a covered aviation element.)
The unit’s pilots trained on a wide variety of rotary and small fixed wing aircraft, with a particular emphasis on the Soviet-designed Mi-8s and Mi-17s that allowed them to operate covertly in the many parts of the world where those airframes are ubiquitous. Sometimes Echo would rent helicopters abroad and convert them. At other times they’d steal them. Either way, the shooter or sensor packages would be secretly shipped to the U.S. embassy via diplomatic “pouches” (in reality, large boxes or crates), then Echo would marry up the airframes and the military gear out of sight in a remote airfield hangar. While Echo always operated undercover, that cover was often official: flying routine missions for a U.S. embassy, or, in regions where there were large U.S. military deployments, conventional military aircraft reconfigured to accommodate special mission equipment invisible to the casual observer. The squadron flew regular “signature missions” to different parts of the world where it might have to fly real-world missions someday, in order to condition those countries’ security forces to the sight of the aircraft. Then if an actual mission required the unit’s presence (and it wasn’t already there), its arrival wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows.
Of its three mission types, “shooter” was the one Echo executed least often. “We don’t prefer arming” the helicopters, said a retired special operations officer, adding that ambassadors were unlikely to approve such missions.
Echo rarely if ever participated in JSOC’s big quarterly exercises, now called joint readiness exercises, for fear of burning its cover, but it trained with Delta and Team 6 in more secluded settings on everything from jungle operations in Guyana with the former to cruise ship takedowns with the latter. The squadron also trained with the CIA’s Special Activities Division. Indeed, that division’s Air Branch was largely made up of former E Squadron pilots. The unit became so proficient that, according to a Delta source, by the late 1990s JSOC leaders became jealous of Delta’s ownership of Echo and wanted the squadron to report directly to the joint command. Several cover and code names (Latent Arrow, for example) were associated with Echo and its special access programs, but by the end of the 1990s it was known in the wider military—when it was known at all—as Flight Concepts Division. On September 11, 2001, most Flight Concepts “assets” were still in the Balkans.14
* * *
Most JSOC operations in the Balkans were designed to be low-vis (at least before the JOC staffers flew in all wearing special ops patches on their uniforms), but in 2000 the command came close to executing an operation there that more closely resembled the Grenada and Panama invasions than it did the clandestine and covert work in the Middle East or Colombia. That operation was Aurora Lightning, the code name for the invasion of the tiny country of Montenegro.
With a population of 620,000, Montenegro was very much the junior partner with the much larger Serbia in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the rump state that remained after the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Montenegro was led by Western-leaning Milo Dukanovic, whose government Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic repeatedly tried to undermine.
With critical elections pending in Montenegro in September 2000, the Clinton administration—apparently concerned that Serbian forces would take over Montenegro or at least depose and detain Dukanovic—ordered JSOC to plan for a major operation to safeguard Montenegro and its leader. Planning began in 1999. Late that year, under the code name Knocking Door, the command held a large rehearsal at Fort Campbell that included a “big, big airfield seizure that replicated the airfield” in Montenegro, said a mission planner. “It was a big package to go in there,” so big that the operators took to calling the exercise “Knockers Galore,” he said. “It wasn’t going to be a permissive [uncontested] environment. It was semi-permissive at best, which is why we were going with so many guns.” Under the guise of preparing for the “Y2K” computer bug, JSOC used an EC-130J Commando Solo aircraft to take over the frequencies of radio stations near Fort Campbell and broadcast a test message. The actual operation was to involve the Commando Solo seizing control of Montenegro’s airwaves and broadcasting U.S.-controlled information over them. The plan was to “put the [Montenegrin] president in a van and have him broadcast up to Commando Solo, which would then broadcast out to the nation ‘I am safe, blah blah blah,’” said a JSOC staff officer.
TF Brown’s contribution included eight Little Birds and four Direct Action Penetrators, or DAPs (pronounced “dapps”), which were Black Hawks that functioned as attack helicopters, rather than troop carriers. The “Smokey and the Bandit” truck-mounted capability would be used to get some of the Little Birds into the fight. There were also plans to fly at least one Abrams tank into Montenegro. Fort Campbell was home to the massive 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and numerous smaller formations, but they had no say in what happened. “We came in and took over,” said the JSOC staff officer. “All training on the ranges was canceled, everything; units were thrown off [training areas] so that JSOC units had free run of the entire base.”
The plan evolved through summer 2000. At one stage it involved Team 6 assaulting at least five coastal defense cruise missile sites, before it was scaled back to an operation designed mainly to spirit Dukanovic and his family to safety. JSOC prepared multiple options. The preferred course of action was for Echo Squadron to fly the family out. Under that scenario, responsibility for safeguarding them would fall to Delta, which already had OST operators on the ground in Montenegro. Should that option fall through, Team 6 was prepared to pick up Dukanovic on the beach. On September 21, 2000, the Saipan, a helicopter-carrying U.S. Navy flattop, arrived in the Adriatic Sea off Montenegro to support Aurora Lightning. Shortly after the ship arrived on station, out of sight of land, Team 6’s Red Team parachuted from three C-141s in mid-afternoon into the ocean close to the Saipan with six 40-foot, high-speed assault craft. Those “military cigarette boats,” as a Team 6 officer called them, could race through choppy seas at up to 60 knots per hour. “We sunk our parachutes,” said a SEAL. “No one ever knew about it.” Meanwhile several Air Force Special Operations MH-53 Pave Low helicopters flew to the Saipan to provide assault aircraft, should they be needed.
But the internal frictions that so often plagued JSOC reared their head again. Dailey, the new JSOC commander, was in Tuzla with a Delta squadron and TF Brown. After talking with Schoomaker, by now the SOCOM commander, Dailey announced that the Delta squadron and TF Brown would fly to the Saipan and become the lead force for Aurora Lightning, with the SEALs relegated to a backup role. The JSOC commander then flew out to the Saipan with Delta commander Colonel Jim Schwitters, to be greeted by Team 6 operators quietly seething at being passed over yet again. But complications arose when TF Brown’s munitions turned out not to meet the Navy’s strict safety requirements, meaning the 160th helicopters couldn’t land on the Saipan. In the end, it was all for naught. The elections went off without incident and what might have been JSOC’s largest combat operation of the Clinton era faded away, leaving nary a shred of public evidence it had ever been considered.15
There was at least one long-term consequence of the late decision to favor Delta over Team 6. Dailey had told the SEALs that Delta was getting the mission in part because the Army unit’s OST operators were already on the ground working undercover. Lesson learned, shortly thereafter Team 6 resurrected its Brown Cell concept for a subunit that specialized in clandestine activity. The new organization began as “a baby team,” one operator recalled, but would grow to play an increasingly important role in the years ahead.16