Delta Force (21 page)

TWENTY-SEVEN

FALL OF
'78 and on into the winter and the next year, Delta went back to basics. We reexamined our shooting program in view of improving it. We'd made mistakes, but we'd gotten smarter and we were profiting from them. Delta used a lot of ammunition—perhaps 30,000 rounds of .45 ammunition a week. The guys used handguns on the range in the morning and submachine guns in the afternoon. Our shooting improved.

The snipers began to concentrate on skills. We broke down the skill, tore it apart, and reassembled it. The snipers began to handload their own rounds. This took each man three hours a day. They became a little more careful about how many rounds they threw down range and more prudent about where they put them. Proficiency increased.

Our hardware had been upgraded when we began equipping our shooters with those 40XB heavy-barreled sniper rifles Remington was building especially for Delta. These rifles would shoot less than half a minute of angle at 100 yards. That's almost like putting bullet holes on top of bullet holes.

One day I was out on the range with Boris's sniper team. He was shooting one of the new rifles mounted with a 12x Redfield scope, and his scores were very high. He rolled over to look up at me. He was smiling.

“Boss, you've taken away all my excuses. I've got the best rifle, the best scope, I'm loading my own ammunition. I've got no more crutches to lean on. The ball's in my court. The only thing I gotta do now is work harder.”

That was the kind of attitude you found in Delta. The troops were talking to each other and to their officers.

Innovation became commonplace. We developed small powerful lights which could be affixed to submachine guns for use at night to spot targets. Body armor was identified and improved on. Morale was very high even if the average workday was long. People came in at first light and left long after the sun had gone down.

Counterterrorism was at this time low on the public's recognition scale in the United States. Our country was not directly threatened, so terrorism didn't hold a high priority in the thinking of our intelligence community. The Army attaché in Nigeria, let's say, had as his number one priority Communist activities in the country. His second priority was probably analyzing the capabilities of the Nigerian Army and the political affiliations of its key officers. And, so it would go, with an interest in terrorist activities somewhere down around sixth or seventh on his list. The CIA and the State Department began to try to change those priorities. Intelligence sources were crucial to Delta's role in combating terrorism.

Delta's communications division was putting together a state-of-the-art package. Several million dollars were spent on it. It had to be lightweight, portable, durable, secure, and cover a wide spectrum. Plans were made to patch into ships and relay through them. The thrust of the package was small, man-portable satellite communications. For a small unit Delta had a sophisticated and well-tailored package.

Earlier in Delta's development we had gone to the FBI, the CIA, and the Secret Service to ask advice and gather knowledge. Now, some of them were coming to us. Joint Staff officers, mostly colonels and lieutenant colonels, began coming down to the Stockade to look over the unit's capabilities. One officer told me, “Many people in Washington believe that with Delta General Meyer has his very own Tinker Toy. Each morning he winds it up and watches it run around the room.” Jealousy was nothing new, and it certainly wasn't going away. In a way, Delta was flattered by it.

With nothing but training and more training there was the
fear that Delta could end up being a firehouse unit—damn good at sliding down the pole and jumping onto the truck with no fires to fight. When a fire would come no one could guess. But that it would come someday no one doubted. In the meantime, Delta had to get its operators on the street, out doing things. Some of them needed to be given a free hand, to get out of the country and observe how the rest of the world lived. They needed opportunities to make mistakes. For example, how did an operator go by train from Bonn to Munich; or in France, on a bus, how did he get from Clermont-Ferrand to Nantes by way of Limoges and LaRoche-sur-Yon?

We asked the State Department if we could carry the diplomatic mail for a while, which would give us a chance to look over a number of our embassy buildings and determine their hardness. Some folks in the Army and State got cold feet. “Oh, my God, Beckwith's going to get us involved in international intrigue.” The fact I carried a Colt .45 made General Renick, who worked under General Meyer, uncomfortable. He volunteered to interface with State or DOD for us. I didn't want him speaking for me. “I'm not speaking for you,” he replied, “I'm speaking for the Army.” Renick saw me as an unguided missile.

Eventually, after the first of the year, 1979, Delta began to do some advanced training activities in Europe. An operator would land in West Germany and be met by a contact who had been arranged for from the 10th Special Forces Group. Receiving instructions to proceed to London, he would be tasked to collect all the information he could about the British Museum where, in this scenario, terrorists were holding several American tourists hostage. The operator would be expected to complete his mission in a prescribed amount of time, but this was never enough to completely succeed in doing everything he had been ordered to do. Performing under this kind of stress we had a better idea of what an operator could or could not do. Back at Bragg, the operator would be debriefed and his actions critiqued.

Delta began an exchange program with the SAS. From a sergeant they sent, we learned quite a bit about booby traps.
He'd spent time in Belfast. Then, too, GSG-9 looked us over, and we them. So, too, the French Groupe d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN), and the Israelis. Delta became a part of the free world's counterterrorist community. We learned and we taught. Over and over we discussed new ideas and skills for the three basic terrorist situations—barricade, open air, airplane takeover. Tactics for breaking into planes, buses, cars, trains, subway trains, elevator shafts, office and apartment buildings, rooms of every size, shape, and location were discussed, rehearsed, critiqued, rehearsed again.

Delta had a think-tank session in the Stockade once a week. Ideas flowed from the group. My door was open to anyone who wanted to talk to me. All I asked was that they put their idea on paper first. That cleaned out a lot of the bullshit. Many good ideas also came in this way. Sometimes the men asked to change a certain policy. Writing didn't mean it would happen, but their idea was considered. Everybody knew they could be heard. And they were motivated.

Major Buckshot would sometimes come up to me late in the day, maybe around 1700 hours, and say something like: “Boss, we got this new guy and he's all shot in the ass with your ideas briefing. He's got a list a mile long and there ain't one of them that's worth a damn. But, I don't want to turn him off. I've got some of the guys working with him. So, if he screws up and stops you in the hall and tells you about his ideas, keep it alive and stroke him. We might get something from him yet.”

Delta was moving and, like the speakers in a stereo system, we vibrated. There were good ideas, there were poor ideas, some were insupportable, unrealistic, others were brilliant.

“Hey, Boss, got a good idea. I want to go out and check out this driving school on the West Coast.”

“You know, sir, we got all these civilian radios here. They cost a lot of money. I hate to ask, because I don't know how to do it, but we gotta get a guy to school to learn how to maintain them ourselves. How do I get to the manufacturer and ask them for help?”

Fast Eddie would want to go back to Norfolk. “Time I went back to the Navy, Boss, and got more targets.” “I'm afraid to send you, Sergeant. You're liable to come back with a cruiser.”

We made mistakes. People came back saying, “Sir, that was a dry hole. It isn't worth farting with anymore.”

We constantly tried to improve our breaching technique. Explosives will take a door down, but depending on the technician they will also blow out your eardrums. What we wanted to do was get into a room without drawing blood from our ears. Logan Fitch said, “I've been researching explosives, done all my homework. I think I've found a civilian vendor on the West Coast who makes a lead sheath type of explosive. It looks good. I'd like to go out there and get some to test.”

“Don't let the door hit you in the ass.”

He and Fast Eddie went to the vendor, got all the specs, bought some of the sheaths and had them shipped back to Bragg. We found in our tests that the device was extraordinarily efficient for what we wanted it to do. Delta wouldn't have found it if one officer hadn't been interested enough in the problem to spend his time solving it. Our foreign friends visited and saw its effectiveness. They came back and bought American.

As contemplated earlier, A Squadron was divided into two smaller Squadrons—A and B. Buckshot gave up his job as CO of A Squadron and spent his whole time on the vitally important task of developing and coordinating all selection activities and training courses. The new A Squadron was given to a former armor officer, Major Coyote (pseudonym), and B Squadron went to an ex-infantry officer, Major Fitch. Each squadron acquired a separate personality reflecting that of its commander. One unit tended to act methodically, the other more quickly.

Squadron strengths grew and new faces appeared throughout Delta. Personalities emerged from the ranks and were recognized and nurtured. No one wanted to drive a square peg into a round hole. Someone asked one of the operators,
“What's the difference about being in Delta as opposed to your old unit?”

“Sir,” he replied, “in the 82nd Airborne I was better than any guy in my company. Over here I gotta hustle just to keep up.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

HERMAN THE GERMAN
showed the Delta troop commander a telegram ordering the unit to fly immediately to Quebec: “Whether Delta will actually be used has yet to be ascertained, but you are to proceed, pre-position, and prepare your troop for any eventuality. An aircraft is waiting for you at Leesburg. Weapons, flak vests, ammunition, individual kits have been sent up from Bragg and are being loaded. Move out.” A guy's adrenaline had to begin to pump. At the airport, Major Coyote received a thorough briefing.

“American hostages have been taken in Canada by a band of terrorists. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police SWAT is en route and available, but the government in Ottawa has asked the American government for assistance. An American hostage has been shot and killed. Please load your unit on board as quickly as possible. You are needed at once.”

In Leesburg, when the Delta troop boarded the waiting aircraft, they found on board Canadian-made candy wrappers and magazines. It was late in the afternoon. The aircraft immediately took off and headed north.

What Delta had wanted to do was find out, in a real situation, whether its operators would really pull a trigger. It's a difficult thing to do. Will a man kill another man? At the moment they could have taken out, at the Munich airport, the Black September terrorists who were moving the Israeli Olympic athletes, the German snipers froze. The opportunity was there, but they froze. Was it buck fever? Or something else?

One must say to oneself, “If I'm really going to be a professional in this business and I have to pull a trigger, how sure am I that I will?” Selected personnel had worked out a scenario that we believed would reveal that moment. Major Altman (pseudonym), who we called Herman the German, was very good on scenario development. He'd run exercises all over the southeastern United States. The scenarios were complicated, and designed to test the men's resolve, ingenuity, patience, and daring. But Herman the German's scenarios could not tell us if a man would, when necessary, kill. We had struggled with this for a long time.

Approaching New York, the air controller traffic was piped into the plane's cabin.

“Mac three three five nine-er seven, New York Center. We show you clear to Quebec via direct Hancock, direct Plattsburg. High-level five sixty. Company requests you do not contact Montreal Center for security reasons.” The unbelievers in the troop became believers. “Jesus Christ, we're going!”

In late summer of '79 we had finally hit upon a scheme we thought could work. Major Coyote and First Troop, fifteen or sixteen operators, had been sent on one of Herman's stock scenarios—Charlotte to Raleigh to Richmond to Washington, D.C. It had been a typical mission, one the men had been on before—tasks to be performed without sufficient time, RVs to be made, information gathered, sketches drawn. All of it had been normal, and in Washington First Troop had rendezvoused before returning to Bragg—end of scenario. “Got time to have a beer, sir?”

After Herman the German had broken the news about the hostages, maps were distributed to First Troop, and a plan to take the farmhouse where the hostages were being held was discussed. Busy in the plane's cabin, at last light, the Delta unit did not notice the imperceptible change in course that took the plane south, not north. Its destination, of course, was not Quebec, Canada, but a rural part of North Carolina which we called Camp Smokey. Months earlier, in an out-of-the-way area, on some government land, a small farmhouse had been located and prepared for the scenario. Hidden in a hardwood
forest—that happened to resemble the woods of northern Quebec—the house was totally rebuilt. A basement had been dug, the building reinforced by sandbags, rigging hung to support life-size mannequins, remote-controlled television cameras installed. Few within Delta knew of this exercise. My daddy had told me the way to keep a secret is don't tell nobody. Dick Potter used to get mad as hell at me when I'd go off and he couldn't find me.

When the plane landed near midnight at a small airport, the men were met by role-players. They were taken by a van bearing Quebec license plates to a nearby building. Inside they were briefed by people who had been carefully rehearsed in their roles. There was a Mountie captain, a political representative from the Government in Ottawa, an assistant attaché representing the U.S. Embassy, a senior law enforcement officer of the Province, and some other officials. All these men spoke with Canadian accents; you know the way the Canadians make the “aou” sound for o. Nothing had been overlooked. Delta's First Troop, for all it knew, was in Canada.

The briefing explained there were three terrorists, two males and a female, who had taken hostages, of whom two, at least, were American. The Canadians were not sure they could handle this operation. Telephones rang, some people carrying papers chased after other people, doors opened and closed, everyone was jumping around. There was a sense of excitement and expectation. First Troop was asked to formulate a plan to rescue the hostages.

On closed circuit television, from another building, I monitored the entire performance. In the background I could see some of our operators whispering to each other, “Are they shitting us? The fucker's real.”

Major Coyote asked his questions, and Delta got on with it. For them, in their minds, this was real. The months of training were over. “Stop asking so many damn questions. Please get on with your plans! We're running out of time.” “Why isn't Colonel Beckwith here?” “He's en route.”

It was really good. This drama went on for nearly three hours. The house was reconnoitered, the terrorists were seen
moving around outside the house, intelligence was gathered, and the Delta plan came together: negotiations have failed; the terrorists already have killed a hostage; no alternative is left. The house must be taken by force of arms. A message arrived from the American Embassy giving Delta authority to take the building down. The Canadians were anxious that it be done quickly and effectively. The message traffic looked very official. The troop was taken to the vicinity of the house.

Two terrorist actors who were standing on the porch of the farmhouse, before the Delta snipers could get in position, turned and went into the house. Once inside they climbed down to a prepared dugout basement, locked the trapdoor, and were replaced upstairs by moving mannequins.

The grainy television pictures I was looking at showed the farmhouse.

Major Coyote deployed his operators through the woods, the snipers got on station. A deer surprised by one operator crashed off through the dense scrub. The men began loading their weapons. A final authority was given. First Troop rushed the house. There was firing. It was all over in eight seconds.

The evaluators were interested in how many bullet holes there were in the terrorist and hostage mannequins. We isolated First Troop afterward for three days to allow them to come off this traumatic high and to allow them to sort out their emotions and the events leading to the attack. Back at Bragg we debriefed them. At that time it was explained—the artifice we had used and why we had done it. Eventually they accepted our reasoning, but at first they were very upset. They'd done something none of them had ever done before. When it happened, in their minds they were shooting for real. People were dying. One of the men said, “Boss, don't you ever play with my mind like that again.”

The terrorists all had bullet holes in them. There were no bullet holes in any of the hostages.