Angry Planet - Get a look inside the secretive world of U.S. Special Ops

Episode Date: October 28, 2015

America’s Special Operations Forces have become instrumental in the war against radical Islam. But few in America know their story or how they operate. Sean Naylor wants to change that. His new book, Relentless Strike: The Secret History of American Special Operations Command, gives readers a window into this secretive world. Naylor talks to us on this week’s War CollegeSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. Experiences like this that led General Pete Schuemaker to compare J-Soc during this period to a brand new Ferrari that was being kept in the garage out of concern that If it was taken out to race, the fender might get dented. Joint Special Operations Command is set up to be the United States ultimate problem solver,

from rescuing hostages to capturing bad guys. Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 are part of it, but not the whole story. This week on War College, we get an inside view of the secretive organization. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories, behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. I'm Jason Fields, Reuters Opinion Editor. And I'm Matthew Golt with War is Boring. Today, we're talking with veteran war reporter Sean Naler. He began his career writing for Army Times. He's written several books and is a contributing editor at Foreign Policy. His new book is Relentless Strike, the secret history of Joint Special Operations Command.

A recent review of the book goes so far as to accuse, John, of exposing valuable secrets that should have remained hidden. For a journalist, that's kind of a rave. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you guys for having me. I appreciate it. So could you just start off by simply telling us what the Joint Special Operations Command is? Joint Special Operations Command, or J-Soc, as it's more commonly known, is the command that runs the United States' most sensitive special operations missions.

Examples include the missions that captured Saddam Hussein, rescued Captain Phillips from pirates off of Somalia, and killed Osama bin Laden. But as I explain in the book, those events are the ones that come to the public's attention. They are just the tip of the J-Soc iceberg that has been created over the last 30 years. Take us through a little bit of that beginning history, Sean. When did the Pentagon create J-Soc and why did it create J-Soc? The Pentagon created J-Soc in late 1980 in response to the failed mission to rescue the U.S. hostages in Iran. That mission was conducted by an ad hoc task force comprised of units unused to working together with a similarly ad hoc headquarters running the show.

And its failure was a huge blow to American Transcure. prestige. And so to minimize the risks of a repeat, the Pentagon decided it needed a permanent counter-terrorist joint task force to run such missions from then on. And it established J-SOC as that force. Which special mission units are we talking about the J-Soc controls? The two best-known special mission units under J-Soc's control are the Army's Delta Force, which was established in the late 1970s, a couple of years before J-Soc, and the Navy's SEAL Team 6, which was created almost simultaneously with J-Soc. Now, now, both of these units focus primarily on direct action, that is, missions that involve capturing or killing enemies and or rescuing

hostages. But as I detail in Relentless Strike, over the years their role as intelligence gatherers has also grown, and each of those units now has a squire. dedicated to low visibility missions and intelligence gathering. But JASOC includes several other special mission units in addition to those two very well-known ones. The other ones include the Air Force's 24th Special Tactics Squadron, which coordinates airstrikes and provides pararescue medical personnel. Another Air Force unit that conducts what is called covered air, basically an undercover unit with civilian-style aircraft.

aircraft and perhaps the most interesting of all, a unit that's gone by various names over the years, including since 2003 Task Force Orange as a nickname, and that's an army unit that conducts human and signals intelligence gathering. And, you know, I have a chapter, you know, for instance, in my book dedicated to some of the very daring undercover work that Task Force Orange operative did in Syria at the height of the Iraq War. Well, can you tell us a little bit about what they did? They infiltrated Syria, I believe, prior to the onset of hostilities with Iraq, as part of a plan to try to get operatives in as many countries around Iraq as possible.

Once the fight in Iraq became a fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq, that program of infiltrating US operatives into, JASOC operatives into, into Syria, was used to conduct espionage against the foreign fighters that were flowing through Syria and swelling the ranks of Abu Musab al-Zarkawi's al-Qaeda in Iraq organization. So I mean, some of the stories I relate in my book, you know, include, you know, actually breaking into al-Qaeda, foreign fighter, safe houses in Syria with lockpick kits and copying all the data there and, you know, really old-school espionage stuff with disguises and secret recording devices on their persons and so forth and so on.

Stuff that sounds like a Mission Impossible movie, almost. Yes, maybe, probably with fewer explosions. At least if things were going right. So can I just ask, I know it's going backwards a little bit, but J-Soc and the Special Operations Command, because there is a separate Special Operations Command, is that right? There is, U.S. Special Operations Command, but it did not come into existence until about 1987. So when J-S.C. was created, there was no four-star headquarters that had oversight. of all US Special Operations Forces the way that there is now with US Special Operations Command.

Okay, so special operations, so which actually is in control then? Well, so Joint Special Operations Command is the command that is sometimes referred to as the National Mission Force, and when the US government wants something accomplished is in a particular part of the world that it will give that mission, if suitable to J-Soc. US Special Operations Command, for most of its existence, was a sort of a, what's called a Title X headquarters, which means that it was in charge of sort of training and equipping forces, but it wasn't an operational headquarters. Once a J-Soc force was set up. to the Middle East, for instance, it would come under US Central Command.

Socom is the administrative headquarters for J-Soc, but it's not the one that's running the missions. Okay, all right, thanks. That helps a lot, actually. So during the first 20 years that it's been around, how often do they get to run missions? I mean, how often do these missions actually take place? J-Soc ran quite a few missions or conducted quite a few missions in its first 20 years, but they weren't the sort of missions for which J-Soc was originally conceived. While J-Soc personnel advised other countries' special operations forces, you know, who were conducting hostage rescues in places like Sudan, Thailand, and even Kurosau,

the closest J-Soc got to doing its own missions of that type was in 1980s. when the command twice deployed task forces to the Mediterranean prepared to rescue the hostages on TWA flight 847, which had been hijacked by Shia terrorists and eventually flown to Beirut, as well as the Achille Loro, which was a cruise liner hijacked by Palestinian terrorists and sailed around the eastern Mediterranean. But on each occasion, the White House never gave the green light for action, you know, and it was experiences like this that that, that, that, led General Pete Schumacher, who commanded J-Soc in the mid-1990s, to compare J-Soc during this period to a brand new Ferrari that was being kept in the garage out of concern that if it was taken out to race, the fender might get dented. That's the story of why J-Soc didn't conduct the sort of missions that hit, that it was originally created to conduct the sort of the classic hostage rescue missions that, you know,

that seemed to be sort of all the rage in the late 70s. But they did conduct quite a few real-world missions to include spearheading the invasions of both Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989, several manhunting operations, including the hunt for Pablo Escobar in which they worked very closely with Colombian. You know, Pablo Escobar being a Colombian cocaine kingpin in the early 1990s, and they worked very closely with Colombian security forces there. The hunt, unsuccessful hunt, at the time for Mohamed Farah IDD, the Somali warlord, which ended in the October 1993 Battle of Mogadishu memorialized in the book and the movie Black

as well as in the aftermath of the Dayton Peace Accords in the mid-90s, J-Soc was given the mission of hunting down, Balkan War criminals to be put on trial at the hate. And they were actually very successful with that, if I understand right. Yes, yes, they were. There were quite a number of successful snatches and or in one or two cases, kills in that period in the Balkans. and they involved some fairly out-of-the-box methods as well, including, you know, in at least one case, I believe, a catapult net that was fired at a moving car to ensnare it

and immobilize it so that operators could then emerge from the hedgerows and smash the windows in and drag their target out. Do they have a lot of things like that? I mean, that does sound like something I've never heard of before. Yeah, they probably had a few. I mean, I know that they were experimenting with ways to remotely sort of interfere with cars by that period. So, you know, I one suspects that for all the sort of juicy detail that's in my book, I would imagine that the stuff that these days might be the most cutting edges, you know, is probably retained in just a few minds at 440. Bragg and Down Neck, Virginia. All right, so they go through these first kind of 20 years, and then September 11th happens.

What kind of position was J-Soc in at that time, and then how were they used in the first few months after September 11th? On September the 11th, 2001, J-Soc was actually about to start one of what had become its sort of massive quarterly exercises, which were called Joint Readiness Exercises, or J-Sodewksizes, or JRXs. And this one had JASOC Task Force headquartered at a military airfield in Taser, Hungary, with small elements scattered all across Europe. And the focus of the exercise, as with most such JASOC exercises by then, was counter-proliferation. J-Soc had in the 1980s been handed the mission of counter-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. And this,

This exercise was sort of a loose nuke exercise. But the exercise also exemplified what many insiders felt had become a problem, which was that JSOC had become wedded to this operational template in which a big headquarters and many hundreds of personnel had to be airlifted on dozens of transport aircraft to conduct any mission that JSOC was given. And in the critic sides, this robbed JSOC of its ability to respond nimbly, let alone clandestinely.

Right, yeah, not very stealthy if it takes a whole squadron to get you there. If you have to fly C5 after C5 or C17 after C17 big transport aircraft anywhere, it's very difficult to keep that secret from the locals. Someone's going to notice. Yeah. Someone's really going to notice. The initial plans on how to use J-Soc in Afghanistan in the immediate way of 9-11, sort of seemed to confirm the sort of critics' view that J-Soc had become this sort of

unwieldy, top-heavy organization. You know, the J-Sop commander at the time, Major General Del Daly, wanted to use J-Socq to make a statement rather than to sort of to hunt down and kill the most senior al-Qaeda and Taliban figures, although it should be said that he was probably coming under some pressure from his military and civilian chain of command to. in this regard. So JSOC actually spent a number of weeks planning a raid on a fertilizer plant in northern Afghanistan that some sort of very thin, dubious intelligence reports had suggested might be a chemical or biological weapons facility. And the idea was that Delta Force were going to assault this facility. But when the lead Delta Force planner in J-Sox's planning team,

proposed a very stealthy raid, daily the J-Soc commander got angry and indicated that, you know, what he actually wanted was a big televised production. Now, in the end, that the raid didn't happen as J-Soc found out that it could, it was initially looking at targets in northern Afghanistan because it thought it was going to have to fly out of Central Asia into Afghanistan to do the raids, but once it found that it could base itself on the island of Messera off of Oman and use an aircraft carrier to launch raids into the Taliban's heartland in southern Afghanistan, the targets in northern Afghanistan just faded in importance, which was probably just as well because the fertilizer factory turned out later to be just that.

I guess we saved ourselves a little bit of embarrassment there. Is Joint Special Operations Command likely to be participating in a fight against Islamic State? If so, what kind of roles would you think it would have? Yes, it already is participating in that fight and has been actually for some time. JASOC has a task force operating out of Iraqi Kurdistan, basically working with the CIA to target Islamic State leadership. So when you hear about a drone strike taking out a senior Islamic State figure, there's a good chance that a J-Soc targeting folder was at the root of that, and J-SOMC has its own

drones that are conducting those missions. JASOC has also been involved in multiple raids into Islamic State-held territory, including the July 2014 raid that just missed James Foley and the other U.S. and the other U.S. And as I detail in my book, in fact, that that raid was notable in part because J-S. used the same modern. or roughly of stealth black hawk helicopter that it used in the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, you know, one of which famously crash landed at the compound. Right, in which they then at least made an effort to destroy so that the secrets wouldn't be made available to the Pakistanis, right? That's right, but unfortunately, whatever they use, probably film like grenades to destroy

the airframe left the tail boom intact. So there's one thing that you mentioned really early on when we're talking about the various constituents, the fit under J-Soc. I'm just really curious about the stealth aircraft. You said it was part of the Air Force, and how do they operate? I mean, do they look like commercial liners or? Yeah, and I just want to be clear on the terminology. So the stealth helicopters that I was talking about are the ones with stealthy characteristics, but they're military helicopters, sort of like a stealth fighter.

Same idea. The covered aircraft, I believe, is what you're referring to. The Air Force and in fact the Army in Delta Force both have covered aircraft capabilities. Task Force Orange also has covered aircraft. So you've got a minimum of three seconds. sets of aircraft as I'm counting. The Air Force unit includes larger aircraft that can sort of fly a force somewhere but it looks like it's just another sort of regular civilian sort of cargo plane. Delta Force unit which is Delta's E squadron or

Echo Squadron is mostly helicopters and they do a a variety of tasks, but mostly they move folks from A to B undercover, or they can be weaponized in a foreign country. And, you know, so you fly in a civilian helicopter, basically add weapons to it at a remote airfield somewhere in, you know, Central America or somewhere else. And then you've got an attack helicopter. And then Task Force Orange, the sort of intelligence unit, uses a fleet of aircraft to carry its signals intelligence gear. And so, you know, they can also be made to appear quite benign. Back to your book while you were doing the research for it. What was the most surprising thing you discovered?

Or have you been involved in this reporting on this for such a long time that none of it was particularly surprising to you? No, there were a few things that I was sort of surprised at or sort of really impressed by. One was the missions that we've already talked about into Syria, the undercover espionage missions. Another was, this is actually, I believe, a CIA accomplishment. But J-Soc and CIA were both involved in the hunt for, Alalaki, the Yemeni American preacher who was killed, who was killed, who was part of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and he was killed in a... I think he was the publisher of Inspire as well, yeah, which is English-language publication intended

to lure Westerners to join the jihad, I think. And I was told by somebody involved in that that, that the CIA, actually had managed to install a camera in the car that Alaki was riding in that was transmitting moving pictures in real time, you know, sort of basically installed in the dashboard or something looking backwards and was able to transmit pictures in real time that proved that Alaki was actually riding in the vehicle that allowed the CIA, I believe at that time, to pull the trigger on the drone as it were and kill him. I think there was also the fact that SEAL Team 6 for years trained for and kept a unit on standby in Afghanistan for a mission to conduct a free fall parachute jump into the Pakistani tribal areas if actionable intelligence on bin Laden's whereabouts was ever obtained.

So that was the actual Plan A for a long time was Like a halo jump Yeah, it would have been probably a hay-ho jump So high altitude, high opening So in other words you jump out of the plane You know maybe 25,000 feet Maybe just a plane flying along the Afghanistan side of the border And then you use your

sort of free fall parachute to steer yourself to a very, you know, riding on the wind, as it were, to a very precise location. And, you know, SEAL Team 6 trained for this so often that they could put, you know, dozens of, dozens of operators down at the same point, maybe 20 or 30 kilometers from where they jumped out of the plank. Impressive as that is, it also proves out that we really had no idea where Bidlonon was. That's correct, although he wasn't always in Abu Dhabad, obviously. Even when he was detected in Abadabad and the planning was underway for the mission that became Operation Neptune's spear,

a mission to kill him in Abadabat. Some in Team 6 felt more comfortable doing the free-fall mission to get him, even though it would probably have required flying some distance into Pakistan before the operators jumped out of the plane. Then they were with the stealth helicopter approach, which was what J-Soc commander Bill McRaven eventually opted for. There's one aspect of your book that I'm kind of interested in. I hadn't really thought about it too much until I read a review in Foreign Policy,

which you actually write for, right? Yes, yeah, I'm a contributing editor at Foreign Policy, yes. And previously was a staff writer there. The headline on the piece was, Nailor's book is very good, but I've got some issues with the people who blabbed. And I'm sure you remember the article. And it just brings up, the point of the article seems to be, not just to praise your book, but to say that, you know, now all of the good tricks are out of the bag. you know, this will actually compromise the effectiveness of J-Soc.

And I wondered if that was something, whether or not it's true, I wonder if that was something that at all concerned you while you were doing the work on the book. It certainly did. You know, I obviously had to trust my sources in many cases who are, if anything, far more invested in keeping information that would be of real value to an enemy of the United States secret, and especially, you know, because they'd grown up in in J-Soc and in the special mission units. And, you know, I sort

of had to trust that if somebody with many years of experience is telling me something that he or she has come to the conclusion that this is not actually dangerous. Bear in mind that My book covers 30 plus years of history, 34 years of history. So much of the action and many of the techniques that are being described are years old. Just because something was cutting edge in 2005 or 2008 doesn't mean it's cutting edge in late 2015. So, I mean, that would be one obvious point that I would make. And I actually kept a number of names, for instance, out of the book at People's Recreport. So I think that the J-Soc story is very important.

It's been the U.S. military's main effort in the war on terror. And sort of keeping it hidden from the U.S. public would be like keeping secret the accomplishments of Patton's Third Army in Europe during World War II. And the American people funded J-Soc at considerable, albeit classified expense. They've filled it with their sons and daughters. it is waging war in their name. And others disagree, and I respect their views, but I think the American public has every right to know the history of this command and its extraordinary people.

Well, thank you very much. I think that's the perfect note to end on. So, Sean Naler, it's terrific to speak with you today. We really appreciate your time. And just also, I figure it can't hurt to mention the name of your book again. It's also going to be posted along with Linkin. to everything else. Relentless Strike, the secret history of joint special operations command.

And is that available now? Oh, yes. It is available now. It's very good. Okay, so, and then, last but not least, I just want to beg our listeners to, if you like this, please subscribe to the podcast and comments on iTunes or SoundCloud are very much appreciated. Your ratings for good or for ill can help decide the fate of this podcast. So, once again, thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you, Sean. Next time on War College.

It's tempting to think that anything that moved us along and got us closer to our current reality is progress, but we have nothing to compare it to. We took the fork in the road and anything that got us to that fork in the road is positive, but what if the fork in the road that we're on isn't as good as the fork in the road we could have been on.