Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces sic-3 Read online

  It was already early afternoon when Stiner called the J-3 again to inform him that, except for the airlift, the Task Force was ready to go and to please emphasize this to Admiral Crowe.

  "We have to take the ship down during darkness," Stiner told the J-3, "which means it's imperative that we get at least as far as Sigonella come daylight tomorrow" — Tuesday, October 8. "This will give us options we would not otherwise have."

  Though this was Admiral Crowe's first crisis since becoming the Chairman, his Assistant, Vice Admiral Arthur "Art" Moreau had done that job for a couple of years. He knew the ropes, had worked previous crises, had personal relationships with several key allies, and could make things happen quickly.

  Special operations forces had been back and forth through Sigonella so many times during 1985, reacting to terrorist incidents and setting up planning and liaison for the future, that Stiner had stationed a permanent liaison team and SATCOM there as an extension of the U.S. commander's operations center. This team was Stiner's eyes and cars throughout the Mediterranean, and it operated twenty-four hours a day, collecting operational and intelligence information and coordinating JSOTF's requirements for passing through Sigonella.

  Sigonella was a vital base as far as JSOTF operations were concerned, and the commander of the U.S. side, Navy Captain Bill Spearman, knew how to make things happen. Spearman always took care of JSOTF's needs, no matter what they were, but also had very good relations with his Italian counterparts (though on one occasion, as luck would have it, Stiner and Spearman had worked out plans, should the need ever arise, for Spearman to take control of the airport control tower from the Italians, who normally ran it…. The plan actually had to be put into effect later that week).

  Sometime during midafternoon, word finally came from Washington approving the launch of Stiner's liaison teams. They all departed in civilian clothes, traveling by commercial air.

  Colonel "Dave" headed the team that would set up at the Embassy in Rome. Another team flew to Stuttgart, Germany, home of the U.S. European Command (USEUCOM). Another team went to Gacta, Italy, Vice Admiral Frank Kelso's Sixth Fleet Headquarters. And one went to the Military Airlift Command at Scott Air Force Base in St. Louis, Missouri.

  During the afternoon, Stiner had a conference call with the commanders of his task force to coordinate their actions. Each command had already exchanged liaison officers, which was normal operating procedure — and it was the same people each time.

  Every hour or so, he talked to Washington, pressing for airlift and the decision to launch…. Time was passing!

  Meanwhile, additional intelligence began to trickle in, but the actual whereabouts of the Achille Lauro was unknown, though reconnaissance planes from the USS Saratoga were looking for it.

  At long last, at about 1700 hours, Stiner was informed that approval had finally been given to launch the Task Force. The airplanes would be arriving shortly. Everyone moved quickly to their departure airfields and prepared for outloading. All the required equipment (helicopters, special boats, etc.) had already been made ready, and now it was just a matter of loading, which would not take very long once the planes arrived.

  Soon after that, a call came to Stiner from a member of the National Security Council staff, wanting to know why they were taking so long to get under way.

  "We've been ready most of the day, Stiner told him. "Maybe you can help by calling the Pentagon to speed up our airlift."

  The airlift arrived at about midnight — twelve to fourteen hours after Stiner had hoped to be in the air. During the loading, special hatch-mount antennas were installed on the airplanes, both for plane-to-plane communications en route and for communications with any major commands that might be involved with the operation. The airplanes were also quickly configured inside with working tables and communications modules, for operational planning.

  On Stiner's plane, in addition to the battle staff of colonels, lieutenant colonels, and majors engaged in operational, intelligence, air operations, and the like, there were Air Force combat controllers and communicators, about twenty operators/shooters, and the medical-surgical suite (an operating table had been set up on the tailgate). Major Dr. Darrel Porr, the task force's chief medical officer, had procured state-of-the-art medical equipment from all over the world, and had assembled a stable of specialist surgeons who could, if necessary, perform emergency surgery on the tailgate of the plane.

  At about 0100 on October 8, the aircraft began lifting off for Sigonella. Since the Achille Lauro still had not been located, Stiner's plan was to stop there briefly and drop off a small team of SEALs and a pair of Little Bird gunships. This was a precautionary measure, in case they were needed later. They were.

  Then he planned to continue quickly on to a military base on Cyprus, which was strategically located in the eastern part of the Mediterranean and within helicopter range of most potential targets. The Task Force was familiar with this base, and had used it several times before. But using it came with conditions. Because of Soviet Intelligence Satellite (SATRAN) passes, JSOTF aircraft had to arrive during darkness, get all their equipment off-loaded and into hangars, and get their transport planes out of there before daylight. They'd be dispersed to other bases in the region, but close enough to react if the teams had to move quickly.

  As they flew over the Atlantic, Stiner took time to process the latest intelligence information. A picture was taking shape about the challenge they faced: There were four heavily armed terrorists, ninety-seven passengers of several nationalities (some of whom were U.S. citizens), and a ship's crew of 344. The ship's location was still unknown. It had gone into "radio silence" immediately following the hijacking, headed north, and was presumed to be somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean.

  There was nothing more to be done now. The plans were in place, and would be updated as soon as any more information came in. Once they hit the ground, his units would start to put the plans into effect, but for now it was a rare moment of peace.

  As the plane vibrated around him, Stiner's thoughts drifted back to what had brought him to this time and place, to all the training and missions that had come before, to the hot and often desolate places he had been. And he thought of the men who had come before him, who had created the kind of warfare in which he was now engaged.

  Commando raids, deep reconnaissance, sabotage, guerrilla bands — these had all existed as long as men had clashed violently with other men. But what was now called "unconventional warfare" had not become officially recognized as a proper activity for "real" soldiers until World War II.

  During World War II, they wrote the book on special warfare….

  II

  PIONEERS

  0200. August 11, 1944. Central France.

  A lone, low-flying British Stirling bomber winged over the German-occupied Department of Correze, south of the Loire in the Massif Central. It had taken off three hours earlier from a base in England and joined the bomber stream of Stirlings and Halifaxes destined for Germany. Over France it had faked an abort and looped out of the stream, turning west toward England, all the while descending. When it was low enough to become invisible to German radar, it had made another turn, this time to the southeast.

  This particular Stirling was not fitted out with bombs. Packed tight within its narrow fuselage were a ten-man French SAS reconnaissance team, parachute-equipped cargo pods, and a three-man OSS Jedburgh team, code-named "Team James." The SAS troops were commanded by a Captain Wauthier. Team James consisted of an American lieutenant, Jack Singlaub; an American technical sergeant, Tony Dennau; and a French army lieutenant, whose nom de guerre was Dominique Leb.

  Singlaub, the team commander, was a Californian who had come to the OSS out of the 515th Parachute Infantry Regiment, at Fort Benning, Ceorgia (he was also demolition-qualified, having trained for it after he'd broken an ankle and needed something useful to do).

  Dennau was a Sinatra-sized ball of fire from Green Bay, Wisconsin, who actually enjoyed jum
ping out of airplanes in the dark and then hiking through hostile countryside. He was the radio operator, but was also a terrific shot.

  The Frenchman was a Breton aristocrat whose real name was Jacques Le Bel de Penguilly. Since Nazi reprisals against Free French officers' families were common, Maquis officers often concealed their true identities. Jacques (Dominique) was a necessary part of the team. His French was of course more fluent than the Americans', but even more important, he had a far better sense than Singlaub of the intricacies of the French political scene. The Free French were fiercely divided into contending factions, all hoping to lead the nation after the war — with Monarchists on the far right, Communists on the far left, and the followers of General de Gaulle in the center. With the notable exception of the Communists, the factions kept their differences out of the struggle with the Nazis. The Communists, no less than the others, wanted to kick the Nazis out, but they were as much interested in achieving an end state after the war that favored their cause. They cooperated when it suited them. Jacques was a Gaullist.

  Singlaub was jammed against the Stirling's forward bulkhead, bent under the weight of his parachute. Though Dominique and Dennau were close by (similarly hunchbacked), there was no conversation. The roar of the engines and the wail of the slipstream made talk impossible. They all wore British camouflage smocks and para-helmets. On his chest, Singlaub carried a musette bag containing codebooks and 100,000 French francs. A leg bag held extra ammunition and grenades. He was armed with a Spanish 9mm Llama pistol, a weapon chosen because of the relative availability of 9mm ammunition in occupied Europe.

  The engines changed tone and the aircraft slowed.

  Aft, the tough, highly trained SAS troops gathered around a rectangular hole in the aircraft's rear deck — the jump hatch, or Joe hole, as it was called. Soon, they were dropping through the hole, one by one. Then a crew member pushed their cargo pods after them.

  The Jeds were next.

  They proceeded aft toward the dark, howling rectangle.

  "About three minutes," the RAF dispatcher shouted into Singlaub's ear.

  They hooked up their static lines. Then each man checked the snap-clips of his teammates on the deck ring, and double-checked his own. Looking down through the hole, Singlaub could just barely make out the dark masses of forests and the lighter blotches of fields. No lights were visible, and few roads.

  Three orange signal flares lit the night below, the Maquis drop-zone signal. Meanwhile, Singlaub knew, a Maquis controller was flashing a preset code letter to the pilot. If the code letter was correct, they'd be dropping through the hole before they started another breath.

  "Go!" the dispatcher shouted, smacking Singlaub's helmet. And the young lieutenant went feet first into the dark, 800 feet above the countryside, ankles and knees together, hands tight against the wool of his trousers. He hurtled through the dark for a moment, then the chute opened with the familiar whomping sound he knew so well. (Unlike American chutes, which burst open the moment the static line went tight and could easily malfunction, British chutes didn't deploy until the suspension lines went taut — a much safer system. On the other hand, American paratroopers carried a small reserve chute on their chest; Brits did not. If their chutes failed, that was it.)

  Singlaub checked his canopy, noting two more canopies above him — Dominique and Dennau. Behind them, four smaller canopies also opened: their cargo pods.

  He had trained long and hard for that moment.

  It had begun on an October morning in 1943 in Washington, D.C., in an office in the Munitions Building. IIe'd gotten there after answering a call for Foreign-language-speaking volunteers who were eager for hazardous duty behind enemy lines (he spoke fair French). The outfit issuing the call was the OSS — Office of Strategic Services — about which Singlaub knew very little, except that it was involved in secret intelligence and sabotage operations overseas and was commanded by the legendary General "Wild Bill" Donovan. That seemed pretty good to Singlaub.

  A grueling interview determined that he might have what the OSS needed, and he was ordered to show up in the headquarters parking lot the next morning for transportation to the Congressional Country Club. The name was not a joke. At one time, congressmen had actually gone there to drink and play golf, but the war had turned it into an OSS training camp. It still retained its congressional luxuries however: crystal chandeliers, leather chairs, oil paintings in expensive frames, good china.

  In fact, training at the Congressional Country Club did not seem discordant to the average OSS volunteer. Before Franklin Roosevelt had picked him to run his new intelligence organization, Donovan had been a Wall Street lawyer with the kind of blue-blood, Ivy League connections that were common at the time. It was only natural that he had built his OSS out of the same privileged, clubby extended family. Most senior officers came from Ivy League — dominated professions, as did many who were present for the orientation with Jack Singlaub that October morning. To his immense relief, however, it wasn't only the social elite he saw there. Also present were hardened-looking airborne lieutenants like Singlaub who'd come out of OCS or ROTC, as he had (the war had cut his college career short).

  The welcoming colonel made instantly clear what they'd be facing:

  "You've been brought here," he said, "to evaluate your suitability for combat duty with resistance groups in enemy-occupied areas…. I'm talking about guerrilla warfare, espionage, and sabotage. Obviously, no one doubts your courage, but we have to make certain you possess the qualities needed for a type of operation never before attempted on the scale we envision.

  "Guerrillas move fast, operating mainly at night, then disperse into the countryside and reassemble miles away. The skills required of a guerrilla leader will be the same as those shown by the best backwoods fighters and Indian scouts." Singlaub brightened when he heard this. He had always loved outdoor sports — hunting, fishing, camping — more than the regimentation of playground and team sports. All during high school and college, he had spent whatever time he could trekking the High Sierras. He was happy in the woods and the wilderness.

  "We aren't looking for individual heroes," the colonel concluded, "although your courage will certainly be tested in the coming weeks. We want mature officers who can train foreign resistance troops, quickly and efficiently, then lead them aggressively. If we are not completely satisfied with your potential, you will be assigned to normal duties."

  Over the next weeks, Singlaub and his companions learned, and were tested on, the basic skills of guerrilla warfare — how to move stealthily at night (over grassy fields that had once been manicured fairways); how to take out targets like railway switches, power transformers, sentry posts, and bridges. But most important, they were tested on how well they could handle what they'd be up against psychologically. Behind the lines they'd be on their own. How well would they hold up? How well could they handle the inevitable crises and screwups? How well would they handle men who were incompetent or overaggressive or nuts?

  To that end, ringers from the training staff were inserted into teams in order to screw things up. How well the team handled this subordinate was often more important to their final evaluation than how well they placed demo charges on a railway trestle.

  Once they had successfully passed over these hurdles, the OSS candidates were sent to what was called Area B-1. This had once upon a time been a boys' camp in western Maryland, and later FDR's weekend retreat, Shangri-la. After the war it became the presidential retreat now called Camp David.

  Here the training emphasized tradecraft, and especially hand-to-hand combat.

  For that they had probably the best instructor in the world, the British Major William Fairbairn, the inventor of the world-famous Fairbairn double-edged fighting knife (the commandos' close-in weapon of choice) and the developer of the hand-to-hand training course for the commandos. Fairbairn's philosophy was simple: You trained for months with a wide variety of Allied and enemy weapons until you handled any of the
m as instinctively as a major-league ballplayer swung a bat.

  And so from early morning until late at night, that's what they did — not to mention the morning runs, the labyrinthine and dangerous obstacle courses, the nighttime crawls through cold, rain-soaked woods to plant demo charges, or the hours practicing encryption and clandestine radio procedures.

  In December, Singlaub sailed for England on the Queen Elizabeth. There, his training continued, now under the auspices of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE, the umbrella organization that managed all the British unconventional warfare groups). The SOE ran clandestine training sites around the world, as well as squadrons of airdrop and reconnaissance aircraft, speedboats, and Submarines; and it maintained enough forgers and mapmakers to keep several companies of James Bonds busy. SOE espionage and sabotage teams had worked in occupied Europe for some time, but now OSS liaison teams had been placed in France and had joined the covert effort. Soon, OSS teams would be given a much larger role.

  The training in England was no less grueling than that in Virginia and Maryland. Initially, the focus was on parachute training and live-fire exercises; but there was also increasing emphasis on real-life situations the teams might run into — clandestine tradecraft and living cover stories. Men who failed these tests were sent back to regular units.

  After a time, three-man teams were formed — an American or British officer, a French counterpart, and an enlisted radio operator. These teams were to be air-dropped into occupied France, where they would help organize, train, and lead Maquis resistance units in support of the Allied invasion. It was hoped that by then Maquis troops would number in the tens of thousands, and that the occupying Nazi army would find itself attacked on two fronts — Americans, Brits, and Canadians driving west from Normandy, and Maquisards making life hard for the Germans in their rear areas.