The TWA 847 and Achille Lauro crises were just two of at least eight “real-world” JSOC deployments in the three years following Grenada.1 The possibility of invading Suriname arose again in late 1986, when the U.S. and Dutch governments planned a joint operation aimed at arresting Bouterse. The plan came to light in 2010 when Ruud Lubbers, prime minister of the Netherlands at the time of the planned invasion, disclosed it to a Dutch newspaper. The report said the United States was prepared to support the operation with ships, planes, and helicopters, but made no mention of U.S. troops on the ground. In fact, JSOC had a major role. The command had earmarked the Rangers for the airfield seizure mission, which had become their specialty. Delta was going to launch its attack from a Navy helicopter carrier and had conducted a couple of rehearsals for the operation, including at least one at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. However, Lubbers called off the invasion after becoming uncomfortable with the prominent Dutch role.2
The furious pace of training and operations continued into 1987, when Stiner changed command with Army Major General Gary Luck, who spent two years in Special Forces from 1963 to 1965, including time in Vietnam, but who had had no special operations assignments since then.3 JSOC and its units trained all over the United States and the rest of the world, from the vast desert tracts of the American Southwest to the claustrophobic confines of metropolitan skyscrapers and Central American jungles.
With the command so busy, the Pentagon gradually expanded the size of its formations. Delta added a third “sabre” squadron of operators—C Squadron—and moved into a lavishly equipped new headquarters at Bragg’s Range 19 complex in 1987.4 The unit now had about 200 operators and 300 support personnel,5 but a ruthless assessment and selection process meant it always had trouble keeping its squadrons filled.
In 1989 Delta expanded further when Seaspray became the unit’s aviation squadron and was renamed E, or Echo, Squadron. Earlier in the decade, then JSOC commander Dick Scholtes had considered making a play to get the brand-new unit assigned directly under JSOC but decided against doing so “before they were fully qualified,” a senior JSOC official from the period said. (By coincidence, Scholtes’s son later served in the unit.)6
But Delta’s absorption of the covert aviation element didn’t mean Delta stopped working with TF 160. The two aviation units had very different capabilities and mission sets. “Echo Squadron’s a much smaller capability [than the 160th],” said an officer familiar with both organizations. While the 160th was a purely military organization and made no effort to be clandestine, Echo Squadron provided a capability to support JSOC and the intelligence community with undercover pilots and civilian-looking aircraft that came with a full cover themselves, but which could be armed. Although now officially part of Delta, to avoid any public links to its higher headquarters the squadron remained at Fort Eustis. It continued to support all JSOC’s special mission units and, on occasion, the CIA.7 “This is a niche unit for very highly specialized missions,” said an officer familiar with E Squadron.
SEAL Team 6 was also growing quickly. In 1987 the unit boasted about 225 personnel, of whom no more than half were SEALs. The unit’s three assault teams—Blue, Gold, and Red—provided its cutting edge. Team 6 had also formalized its selection process, replacing the alcohol-soaked interviews of the Marcinko era with a six-month selection and training course. A fourth team, Green, ran the course, which roughly half the candidates failed to complete. A fifth team, Gray, operated the unit’s boats. (Gray Team was originally manned by Navy construction battalion men—Seabees—but by the end of the decade SEALs were replacing them.) Within three years the unit’s strength had grown to about 550 personnel. In 1989 Team 6 also adopted a new cover name, replacing “Marine Environmental Services Facility,” or MARESFAC, with “Naval Special Warfare Development Group,” often shortened to DevGroup or DevGru. In doing so the unit followed the usual rule of thumb in such matters: the blander the name, the more interesting the unit. (Delta would later go by “Combat Applications Group.”) Events many years hence would make both SEAL Team 6 and DevGru almost household words in some quarters, but at the time the unit was only interested in burrowing deeper into obscurity.8 “MARESFAC was getting kind of worn and it didn’t seem like it really fit our mission very much anymore and it was too hard to maintain, so we changed it to something we thought nobody would ever have heard of and would give us a lower profile,” said a senior Team 6 officer, chuckling. “It’s funny in retrospect, but it made absolute perfect sense at the time.”
The Navy unit’s reputation had improved significantly after Marcinko handed off command to Captain Bob Gormly in July 1983. Within a year of Gormly taking over, the SEALs defeated Delta in a competitive shoot-off with rifles and handguns at Camp Mackall, North Carolina. “SEAL Team 6 took the handgun [and] the long gun—in every phase, they won it,” said a senior JSOC official. “It set Delta back on their heels.… It was a wonderful thing … because SEAL Team 6 showed a new standard. As a result Delta had to start honing their skills to try to match that competition.”
While Delta and Team 6 changed their cover names frequently in an effort to stay out of the limelight, perhaps no JSOC unit changed its real name as frequently as the Air Force unit that began as BRAND X in 1977. In 1987 it changed names for the third and fourth times, switching from Det 4 NAFCOS to 1724th Combat Control Squadron and then to 124th Special Tactics Squadron. By now the squadron combined combat controllers—airmen who coordinated air support for special operations forces—and pararescue jumpers (PJs), medical experts who specialized in personnel recovery (such as rescuing pilots shot down behind enemy lines). Like Delta, it had a hard time finding enough qualified personnel to fill its authorized spaces. A 1989 study validated a requirement for 220 personnel, but the unit only had fifty on hand.9
Together with Team 6 and Delta, the 124th was one of JSOC’s three core special mission units. Also known as SMUs (pronounced “smoos”) or “Tier 1” units, these were the formations that were assigned to JSOC and reported directly to the JSOC commander. A few years after JSOC’s establishment, the Air Force also created a fixed wing covered air special mission unit that owned large civilian-style jets that flew around the world on covert missions for the command. Units that had a “habitual” relationship with JSOC, such as TF 160, the Rangers, and certain Special Forces companies that specialized in counterterrorism, were “Tier 2” units whose support the command had to formally request on a case-by-case basis, even though that support was virtually guaranteed. “Tier 3” units were any other military elements (special operations and non–special operations) that JSOC used from time to time. The 0300 (“oh-three-hundred”) contingency plan, the basic plan for JSOC’s original counterterrorism mission, directed the tiering of the units. But financial politics also played a role. JSOC preferred for the Army to pay for Tier 2 units like the Rangers and TF 160, while equipping the Tier 1 units almost entirely via U.S. Special Operations Command Major Force Program-11, a congressionally mandated fund that allowed SOCOM, under which JSOC now fell, to pay for special operations–specific gear, as if it were its own service.10
The Army also expanded the Rangers significantly. In 1984 the service activated the 3rd Ranger Battalion at Fort Benning, Georgia, and established the 75th Ranger Regiment headquarters, also at Benning, to command the battalions.11 Once Delta had three squadrons, each Ranger battalion paired up with a squadron and developed a routine training and deployment relationship.12 (Team 6 elements eventually developed similar relationships with the Rangers, but not until many years later.)13
However, none of these organizations experienced the growing pains that TF 160 did. As was the case with Delta and Team 6, TF 160 was a new and unique organization, developing tactics and techniques literally on the fly. In particular, TF 160 was the first helicopter unit to routinely train in darkness using night vision goggles. But the night sky is an unforgiving environment for pilots flying ground-hugging “nap of the earth” flight profiles at more than 100 miles per hour. TF 160 (which officially became the 160th Aviation Battalion in October 1981, but which most JSOC personnel continued to call TF 160) was proud of its night-flying and night-fighting prowess. The unit’s nickname was “The Night Stalkers.” An early unit motto proclaimed “Death waits in the dark.” But during the first years of the unit’s existence the 160th crashed helicopter after helicopter striving to overcome the challenges of operating in darkness. In one grisly seven-month period in 1983, the battalion lost sixteen men and four helicopters.14
The unit also spent several years trying to hide in plain sight. Its cover was that it was part of the 101st Airborne Division, but its personnel all kept the same “relaxed grooming standards” enjoyed by Team 6, Delta, Seaspray, and other covert units: long hair, mustaches, and civilian clothes as often as not. But the training mishaps, combined with misbehavior by some 160th personnel on a 1984 mission in Colombia, brought all this to an end. Stiner delivered the news to the 160th personally. “Stiner came up and said, ‘This is not working well with you guys being a covert unit and we’re going to declare you as a special operations task force,’” recalled a 160th officer who was there. Thus, in 1986 the unit became the 160th Special Operations Aviation Group (Airborne), a name it kept until 1990, when the word “Regiment” replaced “Group.”
The 160th refined its training methods, the crash rate declined, and the unit’s reputation soared as it repeatedly demonstrated it could meet its standard of hitting an objective anywhere in the world “plus or minus thirty seconds” of the assigned time. Meanwhile, the 160th added a second and then a third battalion. But the battalions were not identical. The 1st Battalion had all the Little Birds. It also retained the TF 160 responsibility to provide JSOC with an immediate response force, called the “Silver Bullet” or the “Bullet package.” As if to further muddy the nomenclature waters, that portion of a JSOC task force provided by the 160th, which often included nothing more than the Bullet package, was sometimes called TF 1/160 because it was based around the 160th’s 1st Battalion. (However, the Chinooks in the package always came from 2nd Battalion.) The 1st Battalion commander even had a different reporting chain. The other battalions reported to the 160th commander (a colonel) and then to U.S. Army Special Operations Command (after its establishment in December 1989), but 1st Battalion’s chain of command ran from the 160th commander to the JSOC commander.15
The Night Stalkers had the key role in two of the more interesting missions of the late 1980s—actions that showcased their lethality and versatility. In August 1987 the 160th deployed a small task force of two MH-6 and four AH-6 Little Birds to the Persian Gulf in Operation Prime Chance, which aimed to protect shipping—especially Kuwaiti oil tankers reflagged as American vessels—from Iranian mining efforts. Flying off converted oil servicing barges, the Little Birds’ major actions occurred on the nights of September 21 and October 8, when they successfully attacked an Iranian mine-laying vessel and three small Iranian patrol boats respectively. Perhaps cowed by the losses they’d taken in these battles, the Iranians chose not to tempt the pilots of the 160th into combat again, but the Little Birds remained in the Gulf until June 1988.16
That same month, the 160th conducted Operation Mount Hope III, a mission to retrieve a Soviet-made Hind attack helicopter abandoned by Libyan armed forces at the Ouadi Doum desert air base in northern Chad. The aircraft was a very recent model and the United States was keen to get its hands on it, so much so that it kept watch over the stranded machine via satellite. Chad’s government was willing to let the United States take it, but due to a maintenance problem the helicopter was not flyable. After what an official history described as “other U.S. government organizations” (usually a euphemism for the CIA) failed to recover the helicopter, JSOC was tasked with the mission. The command turned to the 160th, which rehearsed the mission by flying between White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, and Fort Bliss, Texas, before deploying seventy-three personnel and two Chinooks to the Chadian capital, N’Djamena. On the night of June 11 the Chinooks flew 500 miles to Ouadi Doum, sling-loaded the Hind under one of them, and returned through a towering sandstorm to N’Djamena. All three helicopters were immediately loaded on a C-5, which took off soon afterward. The operation was a complete success and conducted under such tight secrecy that many in the 160th remained unaware of it years later.17
* * *
Eighteen months after the Chad mission, JSOC executed by far its largest and most ambitious operation up to that point when it took the lead role in Operation Just Cause, the U.S. invasion of Panama. This was to be the operation that finally gave JSOC a chance to show what it could do. It was when all the resources expended on the secretive command paid off.
Tensions between the United States and Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, which had been building since summer 1987, heightened after Noriega ignored the results of May 7, 1989, elections and had his forces beat up the winners. U.S. intelligence also knew Noriega was heavily involved in shipping cocaine into the United States. When Panamanian Defense Forces personnel killed a U.S. Marine officer and physically abused a Navy lieutenant and his wife in mid-December, President George Bush gave the order to depose Noriega, setting in motion an operation that had been long in the planning.18
As with Grenada more than six years previously, JSOC again found itself fronting the invasion of a small tropical country. But that’s where the similarities ended. Just Cause was everything that Urgent Fury was not. In the intervening years, JSOC had become a larger, more experienced, and more robust organization, more at ease with the notion that the Pentagon might tap its unique, highly resourced units to do more than respond to hijackings and other terrorist incidents. The National Command Authority (the president and the defense secretary) was again directing JSOC to spearhead the invasion of a nation-state, but this time JSOC was comfortable with that mission.
Army Major General Wayne Downing, an infantry officer who’d headed the Ranger Regiment, assumed command of JSOC from Gary Luck shortly before the invasion. Together with Carl Stiner, who now led XVIII Airborne Corps and commanded the invasion task force, Luck had overseen the planning for the operation, which would put Downing, as JSOC commander, in charge of a 4,400-strong joint special operations task force19 that included “white” (i.e., unclassified) special ops units not usually attached to the command, such as a 7th Special Forces Group battalion and SEAL Team 4. But at the heart of Downing’s task force were the Rangers, TF 160, and JSOC’s “black” special mission units, including about half of Delta’s operators.20
At 12:45 A.M. December 20, H-hour for the invasion, four Little Birds landed one by one on the roof of Modelo Prison in downtown Panama City. It was the start of Acid Gambit, the code name for Delta’s most dramatic mission of the invasion, the daring rescue of Kurt Muse, a forty-year-old CIA operative. It was also the mission that kicked off Just Cause. Operators jumped off, blew open a door on the rooftop, and flew down the stairs toward Muse’s cell. Another operator, Pete Jacobs, rappelled down the outside wall until he was looking into Muse’s cell windows, ready to shoot the guard Noriega had ordered to kill his American captive if the United States attempted a rescue. Inside, the operators encountered three guards. The first surrendered and lived. The other two made the mistake of resisting, and paid for it with their lives.
The operators grabbed Muse and stuffed him in the back of a Little Bird, but the overloaded MH-6 lost power taking off from the prison roof, clipped a low-hanging wire, and crash-landed in the street. The pilots took off again, but the helicopter was immediately shot down. All on board survived the crash, but were now trapped by the battle. After a nervous fifteen minutes with the fight for the capital raging around Muse and his rescuers, a U.S. Army M113 armored personnel carrier made its way to them and they escaped. Several operators were wounded in the rescue, but Muse was unharmed and eternally grateful. It was Delta’s first successful hostage rescue since the 1983 Sudan mission, and the first ever in which it was the main ground force.21
The rest of the JSOC task force, which was based in a hangar at Howard Air Force Base, about ten miles southwest of Panama City, was engaged in equally tough fighting. TF 160 lost two pilots and three helicopters. The plethora of aircraft aloft meant the combat controllers were called on to prove their worth, at one point coordinating the fires and movement of 171 different special operations aircraft in the sky. The Rangers saw heavy combat in airborne operations to seize Río Hato Airfield and Torrijos-Tocumen Airport, about sixty miles southwest and fifteen miles east of Panama City respectively. The Río Hato operation was particularly hazardous. The fifteen C-130s carrying the Rangers came in at a height of 500 feet. Panamanian forces raked the aircraft with automatic weapons fire, hitting some Rangers before they had a chance to jump and others during the twelve-second parachute descent. Meanwhile there was fierce hand-to-hand fighting in the terminal building at Torrijos-Tocumen. The Rangers eventually prevailed at each location, but at the cost of five of their brethren killed in action.22
A third airfield mission, to put Noriega’s personal plane at Paitilla Airport in downtown Panama City out of action, was the one JSOC mission during Just Cause that would later be second-guessed. Although basically an airfield seizure with a twist, and therefore a classic Ranger mission, Downing assigned it to SEAL Team 4. For reasons that remain unclear even many years later, the SEALs chose to assault across flat ground, which left them silhouetted and relatively easy targets for the Panamanian forces guarding the plane. Communications problems meant they couldn’t call in covering fire from the AC-130 gunship overhead. The SEALs ultimately succeeded in destroying the plane, but at a cost of four SEALs killed and eight wounded.23 The “tactical blunder” at Paitilla was Team 4’s responsibility, but it left a lasting stain on the reputation of the entire Naval Special Warfare community, including a Team 6 still trying to escape the taint of the Marcinko era, according one of the Team’s officers. “I came in a decade after Marcinko and I completely felt that we had the Marcinko stink on us,” he said. In the eyes of some at JSOC, the unit was guilty by association when it came to what happened at Paitilla. “That labeled us as inept at land warfare,” the officer said.
Most of the fighting was over within twenty-four hours, but mopping up continued for several days. For JSOC, the key mission that remained was a harbinger of the operations that would define the command in the years ahead. That mission was to find Noriega, who had gone to ground during the invasion’s first hours, evading Delta and Team 6 elements tasked with his capture. This led to what Stiner later described as “one of the most intensive manhunts in history,” with Delta searching in Panama City and SEAL Team 6, led by Captain Rick Woolard, operating in western Panama and Colón on the Atlantic coast. To give his forces agile, responsive mobility, Downing used a small armor force made up of 82nd Airborne Division Sheridan light tanks, Marine light armored vehicles, and Army M113 armored personnel carriers. This was a first for many operators, but it would by no means be the last time in JSOC’s history that conventional armor units were “sliced” to the special mission units. Delta conducted forty-two raids in seventy-two hours, going after Noriega’s associates and dismantling his “Dignity Battalions,” the gangs of armed thugs the dictator had established to strengthen his grip on the population. Operators kicked in the doors of safe house after safe house, immediately interrogated any Noriega cronies they found, and then launched new missions based on that intelligence.
These nonstop operations set a precedent for future missions in Afghanistan and especially Iraq. Although nobody in 1989 was talking about Noriega’s “network,” that’s exactly what JSOC was attacking. But the Noriega manhunt also taught the command how difficult it can be to find someone who is on his own turf and doesn’t want to be found. Despite the raids, Noriega stayed one step ahead of the task force until December 24, when he took refuge in the papal nunciature—the Vatican’s embassy in Panama. Delta quickly surrounded the location, establishing a sniper nest in a luxury high-rise apartment that turned out to belong to boxer Roberto Durán.
After high-level negotiations between Washington and the Vatican,24 Noriega surrendered on January 3, 1990, and was put on a Combat Talon for his flight to trial (on drug smuggling charges) and captivity in the United States. His signature red underwear, which he believed protected him from harm, ended up in a display case in Delta’s compound at Bragg.25
For JSOC, Operation Just Cause was a major success and represented a remarkable turnaround from Grenada. “Panama was really where they stepped up to the plate,” said a Special Forces general who did not serve in JSOC. There were several reasons why Just Cause was such an improvement over Urgent Fury. JSOC (and the rest of the U.S. forces) enjoyed some obvious advantages this time around. The tension with Noriega had been building for more than a year, so they had a long time to refine their plans. For instance, Delta built a three-quarter-scale replica of the Modelo prison at Hurlburt Field, Florida, and rehearsed Muse’s rescue many times.26 The 12,000 U.S. troops permanently stationed in installations across Panama gave the invading forces a greater understanding of the country and much better intelligence than was available to those who invaded Grenada. In addition, many JSOC troops actually infiltrated Panama quietly in the weeks preceding the operation.27
But JSOC and the Pentagon had also applied the lessons of Urgent Fury. There was no last-minute dickering by service chiefs to gain a bigger share of the operation. The chain of command was tight and the head of the operation, Stiner, understood JSOC’s requirements intimately, as he had recently commanded the organization. The initial assault happened at night, maximizing the advantage conveyed by JSOC’s ability to fight in the darkness. In almost all cases, units were assigned missions appropriate for them. For all those reasons, and with the exception of the Paitilla fiasco, Panama was the finest hour of JSOC’s first decade.
There was one other way in which Just Cause set a precedent for future JSOC operations. It marked the major operational debut of the command’s use of color-themed task forces as code names for its units. Thus Delta became “Task Force Green,” Team 6 “Task Force Blue,” TF 160 “Task Force Brown,” and the Rangers “Task Force Red.”28 Some of the other color codes changed hands—the non–SEAL Team 6 Naval Special Warfare elements were “Task Force White” in Panama, but that moniker was soon given to the 24th Special Tactics Squadron (the new name for the 124th STS), for instance, and others were added. But the system endured formally or informally for another two decades, with special ops insiders often referring to Delta as “Green” or Team 6 as “Blue” in casual conversation. With the special mission units frequently changing their “official” cover names, the color codes just made things easier. JSOC headquarters soon acquired its own name in this system, taking the color the military uses to refer to anything multiservice or “joint”—“Task Force Purple.”