ZERO DARK DIRTY
U.S navy SEAL 'Team 6' killed Osama bin Laden, but is this secretive unit also killing innocents?
They have plotted deadly missions from secret bases in the badlands of Somalia. In Afghanistan, they have engaged in combat so intimate that they have emerged soaked in blood that was not their own. On clandestine raids in the dead of the night, their weapons of choice have ranged from customized carbines to primeval tomahawks.
Around the world, they have run spying stations disguised as commercial boats, posed as civilian employees of front companies and operated undercover at embassies as male-female pairs, tracking those the United States wants to kill or capture.
Those operations are part of the hidden history of the U.S. navy’s SEAL Team 6, one of the country’s most mythologized, most secretive and least scrutinized military organizations. Once a small group reserved for specialized but rare missions, the unit best known for killing Osama bin Laden has been transformed by more than a decade of combat into a global manhunting machine.
That role reflects America’s new way of war, in which conflict is distinguished not by battlefield wins and losses, but by the relentless killing of suspected militants.
Almost everything about SEAL Team 6, a classified Special Operations unit, is shrouded in secrecy — the Pentagon does not even publicly acknowledge that name — though some of its exploits have emerged in largely admiring accounts in recent years. But an examination of Team 6’s evolution, drawn from dozens of interviews with current and former team members, other military officials and reviews of government documents, reveals a far more complex, provocative tale.
While fighting grinding wars of attrition in Afghanistan and Iraq, Team 6 performed missions elsewhere that blurred the traditional lines between soldier and spy. The team’s sniper unit was remade to carry out clandestine intelligence operations, and the SEALs joined CIA operatives in an initiative called the Omega Program, which offered greater latitude in hunting adversaries.
Team 6 has successfully carried out thousands of dangerous raids that military leaders credit with weakening militant networks, but its activities have also spurred recurring concerns about excessive killing and civilian deaths.
Afghan villagers and a British commander accused SEALs of indiscriminately killing men in one hamlet; in 2009, team members joined CIA and Afghan paramilitary forces in a raid that left a group of youths dead and inflamed tensions between Afghan and NATO officials. Even a U.S. hostage freed in a dramatic rescue has questioned why the SEALs killed all his captors.
When suspicions have been raised about misconduct, outside oversight has been limited. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which oversees SEAL Team 6 missions, conducted its own inquiries into more than a half-dozen episodes, but seldom referred them to Navy investigators. “JSOC investigates JSOC, and that’s part of the problem,” said one former senior military officer experienced in special operations, who like many others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because Team 6’s activities are classified.
Waves of money have sluiced through SEAL Team 6 since 2001, allowing it to significantly expand its ranks — reaching roughly 300 assault troops, called operators, and 1,500 support personnel. But some team members question whether the relentless pace of operations has eroded the unit’s elite culture and worn down Team 6 on combat missions of little importance. The group was sent to Afghanistan to hunt Al Qaeda leaders, but instead spent years conducting close-in battle against mid- to low-level Taliban and other enemy fighters. Team 6 members, one former operator said, served as “utility infielders with guns.”
The cost was high: More members of the unit have died over the past 14 years than in all its previous history.
“War is not this pretty thing that the United States has come to believe it to be,” said Britt Slabinski, a retired senior enlisted member of Team 6 and veteran of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. “It’s emotional, one human being killing another human being for extended periods of time. It’s going to bring out the worst in you. It’s also going to bring out the best in you.”
Former Sen. Bob Kerrey, a member of the SEALs during the Vietnam War, cautioned that Team 6 and other Special Operations forces had been overused. “They have become sort of a 1-800 number anytime somebody wants something done,” he said. But relying on them so much, he added, is inevitable whenever U.S. leaders are faced with “one of those situations where the choice you have is between a horrible choice and a bad choice, one of those cases where you have no option.”
FIGHTING UP CLOSE
During a chaotic battle in March 2002 on the Takur Ghar mountaintop close to the Pakistan border, Petty Officer 1st Class Neil Roberts, an assault specialist in SEAL Team 6, fell from a helicopter onto terrain held by Al Qaeda forces.
Enemy fighters killed him before U.S. troops were able to get there, mutilating his body in the snow.
It was SEAL Team 6’s first major battle in Afghanistan, and he was the first member to die. The manner in which he was killed sent shudders through the tight-knit community. America’s new war would be up close and ugly. At times, the troops carried out the grisliest of tasks: cutting off fingers or small patches of scalp for DNA analysis from militants they had just killed.
After the March 2002 campaign, most of Osama bin Laden’s fighters fled into Pakistan, and Team 6 would rarely fight another sustained, pitched battle against the terrorist network in Afghanistan. The enemy they had been sent to take on had largely disappeared.
At the time, the team was prohibited from hunting Taliban fighters and also blocked from chasing any Al Qaeda operatives into Pakistan, out of concern about alienating the Pakistani government. Mostly confined to the Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, the SEALs were frustrated. The CIA, though, was under no similar restrictions, and Team 6 members eventually began working with the spy agency and operated under its broader combat authorities, according to former military and intelligence officials.
The missions, part of the Omega Program, allowed the SEALs to conduct “deniable operations” against the Taliban and other militants in Pakistan.
But an extensive campaign of lethal operations in Pakistan was considered too risky, the officials said, so the Omega Program primarily focused on using Afghan Pashtuns to run spying missions into the Pakistani tribal areas, as well as working with CIA-trained Afghan militias during night raids in Afghanistan. A CIA spokesman declined to comment for this article.
The escalating conflict in Iraq was drawing most of the Pentagon’s attention and required a steady buildup of troops, including deployments by SEAL Team 6 members. With the relatively small U.S. military footprint in Afghanistan, Taliban forces began to regroup. Alarmed, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was leading Joint Special Operations Command, in 2006 ordered the SEALs and other troops to take on a more expansive task in Afghanistan: beat back the Taliban.
That order led to years of nightly raids or fights by Team 6, which was designated the lead Special Operations force during some of the most violent years in what became America’s longest war. A secret unit that was created to carry out the nation’s riskiest operations would instead be engaged in dangerous but increasingly routine combat.
A former Team 6 member, an officer, was dismissive of some of the operations. “By 2010, guys were going after street thugs,” he said. “The most highly trained force in the world, chasing after street thugs.”
THE HISTORY AND CULTURE
SEAL Team 6’s fenced-off headquarters at the Dam Neck Annex of the Oceana Naval Air Station, just south of Virginia Beach, Va., houses a secretive military within the military. Far removed from the public eye, the base is home not just to the team’s 300 enlisted operators (they disdain the term “commandos”), their officers and commanders, but also to its pilots, Seabee builders, bomb disposal technicians, engineers, medical crews and an intelligence unit equipped with sophisticated surveillance and global tracking technology.
The navy SEALs — the acronym stands for Sea, Air, Land forces — evolved from the frogmen of the Second World War. Team 6 arose decades later, born out of the failed 1980 mission to rescue 53 U.S. hostages seized in the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Poor planning and bad weather forced commanders to abort the mission, and eight servicemen died when two aircraft collided over the Iranian desert.
The navy then asked Cmdr. Richard Marcinko, a hard-charging Vietnam veteran, to build a SEAL unit that could respond quickly to terrorist crises. The name itself was an attempt at Cold War disinformation: Only two SEAL teams existed at the time, but Marcinko called the unit SEAL Team 6 hoping that Soviet analysts would overestimate the size of the force.
He flouted rules and fostered a maverick image for the unit. (Years after leaving the command, he was convicted of military contract fraud.) In his autobiography, Rogue Warrior, Marcinko describes drinking together as important to SEAL Team 6’s solidarity; his recruiting interviews often amounted to boozy chats in a bar.
Inside Team 6, there were initially two assault groups, called Blue and Gold, after the Navy colours. Blue used the Jolly Roger pirate flag as its insignia and early on earned the nickname “the Bad Boys in Blue,” for racking up drunken driving arrests, abusing narcotics and crashing rental cars on training exercises with near impunity.
Young officers sometimes were run out of Team 6 for trying to clean up what they perceived as a culture of recklessness. Adm. William McRaven, who rose to head the Special Operations Command and oversaw the bin Laden raid, was pushed out of Team 6 and assigned to another SEAL team during the Marcinko era after complaining of difficulties in keeping his troops in line.
Ryan Zinke, a former Team 6 officer and now a Republican congressman from Montana, recalled an episode after a team training mission aboard a cruise liner in preparation for potential hostage rescues at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelo-
na, Spain. Zinke escorted an admiral to a bar in the ship’s lower level. “When we opened the door, it reminded me of Pirates
of the Caribbean,” Zinke said, recalling that the admiral was appalled by the operators’ long hair, beards and earrings. “My Navy?” the admiral asked him. “These guys are in my Navy?”
That was the beginning of what Zinke referred to as “the great bloodletting,” when the Navy purged Team 6’s leadership to professionalize the force. Current and former Team 6 operators said the culture is different today. Members now tend to be better educated, more athletic, older and more mature — though some are still known for pushing limits.
Team 6’s role in the 2011 bin Laden raid spawned a cottage industry of books and documentaries, leaving tight-lipped Delta Force troops rolling their eyes. Members of Team 6 are expected to honour a code of silence about their missions, and many current and former members fume that two of their own spoke out about their role in the Al Qaeda leader’s death. The men, Matt Bissonnette, author of two bestsellers about his tenure at SEAL Team 6, and Robert O’Neill, who said in a television special that he had killed bin Laden, are under investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service over accusations that they revealed classified information.
Others have been quietly kicked out for drug use or quit over conflicts of interest involving military contractors or side jobs. The navy reprimanded 11 current and former operators in 2012 for disclosing Team 6 tactics or handing over classified training films to help promote a computer game, Medal of Honor: Warfighter.
LATITUDE TO KILL
Early on in the Afghan war, SEAL Team 6 was assigned to protect the Afghan leader Hamid Karzai; one of the Americans was grazed in the head during an assassination attempt on the future president. But in the years that followed, Karzai became a bitter critic of the U.S. Special Operations troops, complaining that they routinely killed civilians in raids. He viewed the activities of Team 6 and other units as a boon for Taliban recruiting and eventually tried to block night raids entirely. Team 6 members would use weapons with suppressors to quietly kill enemies as they slept, an act that they defend as no different from dropping a bomb on an enemy barracks. “I snuck into people’s houses while they were sleeping,” Bissonnette says in his book No Hero, written under the pseudonym Mark Owen. “If I caught them with a gun, I killed them, just like all the guys in the command.”
The rules boiled down to this, a former noncommissioned officer said: “If in your assessment you feel threatened, in a split second, then you’re going to kill somebody.” He described how one SEAL sniper killed three unarmed people, including a small girl, in separate episodes in Afghanistan and told his superiors that he felt they had posed a threat. Legally, that was sufficient. “But that doesn’t fly” in Team 6, the noncommissioned officer said. “You actually have to be threatened.” He added that the sniper was forced out of Team 6.
Near the end of an Afghan deployment by Team 6’s Blue Squadron, which concluded in early 2008, elders complained to the British general whose forces controlled Helmand province. He immediately called Capt. Scott Moore, commander of SEAL Team 6, saying that two elders had reported that the SEALs killed civilians in a village, according to a former Team 6 senior member. When Moore asked what had happened, the squadron commander, Peter Vasely, denied that operators had killed any noncombatants. He said they had killed all the men they encountered because they all had guns, according to the former Team 6 member and a military official. Vasely, who now oversees the regular SEAL teams based on the East Coast, declined to comment through a spokesman.
Moore asked JSOC to investigate the episode. About that time, the command received reports that dozens of witnesses in a village were alleging that U.S. forces had engaged in summary executions.
Another former senior Team 6 member contended later that Slabinski, Blue Squadron’s command master chief, gave permission guidance that every male at the target be killed. Slabinski denied that, saying there was no policy to leave all men dead. “I didn’t ever convey that to the guys,” he said in an interview.
JSOC cleared the squadron of any wrongdoing in the operation, according to two former Team 6 members. It is not clear how many Afghans were killed in the raid or exactly where it happened.
But the killings prompted a high-level discussion about how, in a country where many men carried guns, Team 6 could “guarantee that we’re only going after the real bad guys,” one of the former senior team leaders said.
RESCUE MISSIONS
Years ago, before the Afghan night raids and the wartime deployments, SEAL Team 6 trained constantly to rescue hostages — dangerous, difficult missions they never got a chance to perform before 2001. Since then, the unit has attempted at least 10 rescues, which have been among its most celebrated successes and bitterest failures.
Operators say that in rescues — considered “no-fail” missions — they have to move faster and expose themselves to greater risk than on any other type of operation so that they can protect hostages from being shot or otherwise harmed. The SEALs often end up killing most of the captors.
The first high-profile rescue came in 2003, when SEAL Team 6 operators helped retrieve Pfc. Jessica Lynch, who had been injured, captured and held in a hospital, during the early days of the Iraq War.
Six years later, Team 6 members jumped out of cargo planes into the Indian Ocean with their specially designed assault boats in advance of the mission to rescue Richard Phillips, captain of the Maersk Alabama, a container ship hijacked by Somali pirates. SEAL snipers eventually killed three of the pirates.
A rescue operation in 2012 succeeded in releasing a U.S. physician, though at great cost. One night in December 2012, a group of Team 6 operators wearing night-vision goggles burst into a compound in Afghanistan where Taliban militants were holding Dr. Dilip Joseph, who had been working with an aid organization. The first operator to enter was felled by a shot to the head, and the other Americans responded with brutal efficiency, killing all five of the captors.
But Joseph and military officials offer different accounts of how the raid unfolded. The physician said in an interview that a 19-year-old named Wallakah was the sole kidnapper to survive the initial assault. He had been subdued by the SEAL operators and sat on the ground, hands around his knees, his head down, the doctor remembered. Wallakah, he believed, was the one who had shot the Team 6 operator.
Minutes later, while waiting to board a helicopter to freedom, Joseph said, one of his SEAL rescuers guided him back into the house, where he saw in the moonlight that Wallakah was lying in a pool of blood, dead. “I remember those things as clear as day,” the doctor said.
Military officials, speaking only on background about the classified operation, contended that all of the captors were quickly killed after the SEAL team entered and Wallakah had never been taken prisoner. They also said Joseph had seemed disoriented at the time and never re-entered the house.
Two years later, Joseph remains grateful for his rescue. But he still wonders what happened with Wallakah.
“It took me weeks to come to terms with the efficiency of the rescue,” Joseph said. “It was so surgical.”
A GLOBAL SPYING FORCE
Beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan, members of Team 6’s Black Squadron were scattered around the world on spying missions. Originally Team 6’s sniper unit, Black Squadron was reconfigured after the Sept. 11 attacks to conduct “advance force operations,” military jargon for intelligence gathering and other clandestine activities in preparation for a Special Operations mission.
It was a particularly popular concept at the Pentagon under former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. By the middle of last decade, McChrystal had designated Team 6 to take on an expanded role in global intelligence-gathering missions, and Black Squadron operatives deployed to U.S. embassies from sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America to the Middle East.
SEAL Team 6 used diplomatic pouches, the regular shipments of classified documents and other material to U.S. diplomatic posts, to get weapons to Black Squadron operators stationed overseas, said a former member. In Afghanistan, Black Squadron operators wore tribal dress and sneaked into villages to plant cameras and listening devices and interview residents in the days or weeks before night raids, according to several former Team 6 members.
The unit sets up front companies to provide cover for Black Squadron operators in the Middle East, and runs floating spying stations disguised as commercial boats off the coasts of Somalia and Yemen.
Black Squadron members, working from the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, were central to the hunt for Anwar al Awlaki, the radical cleric and U.S. citizen who had become affiliated with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He was killed in 2011 by a CIA drone.
Black Squadron now has more than 100 members, its growth coinciding with the expansion of perceived threats around the world. It also reflects the shift among U.S. policymakers. Anxious about using shadow warriors in the years after the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” debacle in Mogadishu, Somalia, government officials today are willing to send units like SEAL Team 6 to conflicts, whether the United States chooses to acknowledge its role or not.
“When I was in, we were always chasing wars,” said Zinke, the congressman and former Team 6 member. “These guys found them.”