Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the Butcher of Fallujah -and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091) Read online

  And once again investigators were faced with a situation that bore the marks of Al-Isawi—the particular construction of the bomb as well as the gunfire aimed at Marines that had come from civilian homes, according to the testimony of a Marine lieutenant. This was classic Al-Isawi, who thought nothing of firing at and murdering Americans from schools, hospitals, and mosques.

  Winter 2006—Commander SEAL Team 7:

  We now know more about this maniac than any other target, except where the hell he is, and what he looks like. ... The one thing we really know is, he’s smart, he’s an expert in bomb making, and he has excellent INTEL. ... He also has an unusual grasp of military ops, and this suggests he may have served somewhere. His men show up in unexpected places, all over the goddamned desert, and that means he knows a lot about map-reading in difficult terrain, as well as communications, weapons and high explosive. This is no goat-herding Bedouin tribesman. This is a serious operator. And ... the suits in Washington want results.

  We got two more missions tonight. Both based on new Intelligence. One in the city, one somewhere out in the desert. I don’t like the sound of either of ’em much. So be darned careful. ... Even if Isawi doesn’t show up, there’s a couple of other al-Qaeda guys we really want to locate. That’s all.

  All of these operations were and still are strictly classified by the US Navy. They are as significant today in Iraq and Afghanistan as they were in 2005. For that reason they are incomplete so that no material confidential to US military intelligence should be made public, not even to an American audience, because to do so achieves nothing but to alert the enemies of US armed forces.

  Iraq has always been an extremely “leaky” spot in which to conduct any form of warfare. For instance, even the fighter pilots flying off US aircraft carriers in the Gulf and headed for the forbidden air space above the US-imposed No-Fly Zone were often astounded at how regularly Saddam Hussein’s rocket men, hidden in the desert, were absolutely aware of US flight-wing arrival times in Iraqi airspace.

  It’s a country where no one could be trusted. No one living there understood who was al-Qaeda and who was a mere tribesman. Some Iraqis used every subversive trick in the book, with their hot cell phones, utter lack of loyalty, and propensity to sell information to the Americans for money and to the terrorists out of fear—Al-Isawi’s speciality.

  Confronted by advancing US troops, insurgents knew how to get rid of their weapons faster than any stage magician. Men who had, moments before, been blazing away with the AK-47s were suddenly unarmed, hands held high, appearing utterly bewildered as to why they had come under suspicion.

  They knew the US Rules of Engagement (ROEs) better than the American themselves. And they really knew the one about not firing on the enemy until fired upon. They knew exactly when to stop, often stranding advancing American troops in some kind of no man’s land in which Americans might get shot but were not permitted to open fire. As the months went by, Al-Isawi became a global authority on the US section of urban guerrilla warfare.

  To the American soldiers it often seemed they must wait for someone to take a bullet in the head before they were legally permitted to fire.

  The year 2006 wore on, and the insurgent attacks on US forces continued. Wave after wave of Navy SEALs crossed the ocean from Coronado and Virginia Beach, joining vast legions of US Marines in the fight to bring Iraq under control.

  And night after night small groups of these Special Forces ventured out into the dark of the desert in search of the “bad guys,” the SEALs’ all-compassing term for the furtive al-Qaeda killers whose mission remained unaltered: to drive the forces of the West out of the Middle East forever.

  The road was hard, but the Americans were winning. Slowly they hunted down the al-Qaeda leaders, grabbing, manhandling, and terrifying Osama bin Laden’s field commanders. But they were pursuing an elusive tribe, military intelligence was often sketchy, and sometimes days went by without a significant success.

  Early in June 2006, however, Jordanian intelligence made a breakthrough. They alerted the Iraqi authorities that they had some kind of a fix on al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq. And the scene swiftly shifted to the city of Baqouda, capital of the Diyala Governate, situated thirty-one miles northeast of Baghdad and home to almost a half-million people.

  In truth the Jordanians were only a couple of gunshots in front of US Navy intelligence, who were simultaneously on the trail of one of al-Zarqawi’s main lieutenants as well as his principal spiritual adviser, Sheik Abdul Rahman. They had him in the area of the old Silk Road way station of Baqouda but were still finalizing the finer details.

  Heavy-handed US interrogation of al-Qaeda prisoners actually cracked the case wide open for the intelligence agents. Someone finally betrayed al-Zarqawi, and as early as late April, US Joint Task Force 145 was stealthily headed toward a terrorist safe house in a remote area five miles north of Baqouda.

  They kept it under tight surveillance alongside Iraqi security forces, which were the first ground troops to arrive. Finally al-Zarqawi showed up for an obvious high-level meeting of the local mass murderers. And US intelligence finally had a bead on one of the worst killers in Iraq since Saddam Hussein was dethroned—Al-Isawi’s boss, no less.

  The United States wanted no mistakes, and in the late afternoon of June 8 they whistled up a couple of USAF F-16C Fighting Falcons, which identified the house and came screaming in from the north. The lead jet unleashed two five hundred–pound bombs—one of them a laser-guided GBU-12—Lockheed Martin’s deadly accurate, finned hunter-killer, PAVEWAY II, made in Pennsylvania and unstoppable once launched. The other was a GBU-38—Boeing’s Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) pinpoint targeted, satellite-guided destroyer, utilized here to avoid extensive outer damage.

  The GBU-12 blasted the safe house to high heaven, killing everyone in it, al-Zarqawi, Abdul Rahman, and five others, two male and three female, including one of al-Zarqawi’s wives and their child.

  There was a huge sense of relief in Iraqi government circles, particularly as there had been a marked increase in violent atrocities in the city of Baqouba in recent days. One of them, which culminated in seventeen severed heads being found in fruit boxes, brought forward in intelligence circles the name of the fiendish Al-Isawi once more.

  But then there was another mass murder, when masked Sunni gunmen suddenly killed twenty-one Shi’ites, including twelve students pulled from a minibus and shot. That was pure al-Zarqawi, again demonstrating the precise sectarian tendencies bin Laden detested. No one thought the killing would stop after al-Zarqawi’s lair was vaporized; Islamist fanatics would swiftly move forward to replace their brethren. But some thought the quality of terrorist commander might decline. The Americans had killed or captured so many of al-Qaeda’s top men; surely it would have some effect.

  For now, however, the clinical brilliance involved in the total demise of the top al-Qaeda commander in Iraq inspired a grim sense of relief in all the clandestine SEAL bases both east and west of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

  Like al-Qaeda, the SEAL Teams constantly required new, young American blood—tough, dedicated men whose sense of idealism and duty matched or surpassed their Islamic counterparts.

  That very summer two such recruits were making their separate ways toward the training cauldron of Coronado, home of the fabled BUD/S course, that baptism of ruthless indoctrination designed to answer just one singular question: Are you tough enough for us even to consider making you a Navy SEAL?

  Every applicant with ambitions to wear the Trident must tolerate that six-month endurance test on the shores of the cold Pacific in order to even try. And the ancient proverb “Many are called, but few are chosen” understates the rigor of this test. On average, fewer than 12 out of 160-plus men finally make it through. In comparison, Harvard Law School has a higher acceptance rate than the US Navy SEALs.

  Matthew Vernon McCabe, a small-town boy with modest high school grades, coming from the outer suburbs of Toled
o, Ohio, was the first of the two. The second was Jonathan Keefe, Virginia State swim champion from an even smaller town, near Yorktown. Neither had achieved anything close to their academic potential as students, but both of them had been bound and determined to become Navy SEALs since an unusually young age.

  Matt understood perhaps best the iron-clad boundaries of the “Many are called...” proverb, as it was first written in his namesake’s gospel. For him, a career in the Navy SEALs was beyond all realms of possibility.

  He came from a broken home in Perrysburg, Ohio. His parents’ divorce when he was thirteen had the effect of loosening his parental guidelines, first living with his mother and sister, then moving to stay with his father, Martin McCabe, a second-generation proprietor of a prosperous auto body shop who was sometimes inclined to indulge his son.

  “Guess that’s what kids do,” Matt says now. “Head for the area where life will be easiest. Looking back I understand better that my mom was a wonderful lady and laid down standards for me and my sister which could not be changed. She was absolutely certain of her own moral guidelines. And to this day she’s always been there for both of us. Hell, my mom worked three jobs to hold the family together after Dad left.”

  Matt was a gifted, athletic midfielder on his high school soccer team, well on his way to his full five-foot, eleven-inch, 180-pound fighting weight. But the truth was that he was bored sideways by soccer before his sixteenth birthday and wholeheartedly entered another kind of world when his father, from out of the blue, presented him with a second-hand Ford Mustang GT convertible to mark his opening step into manhood.

  Generally speaking Matt was happier driving around rural Ohio in his Mustang, accompanied by a veritable platoon of the best-looking girls Perrysburg had to offer, than being kicked and barged into by various schoolboy meatheads whose principal ambitions lay in the pursuit of a round ball.

  In any event, his older sister, Megan, a student at Ohio State and a future New York fashion model, had already introduced him to a more sophisticated way of life. So he announced his retirement from the game in order to concentrate his energies on a form of Buckeye dolce vita.

  “I have to say it,” he later recalled, “my dad, a thoroughgoing good guy at heart, let me get away with a few things. My potential college grades were rubbish, and I never took a blind bit of notice of anything my teachers tried to teach me.

  “My dad rarely gave me a hard time for anything I did or didn’t do. He was kind of proud of me, which put me on the pig’s back, and I was loving every hour of it, especially the nights.”

  And yet there was a ferocious contradiction in Matt’s character. At heart, deep in a place no one really saw, he was a hardworking kid, and with his truly moderate high school grades, he went to work locally to make up for his misspent youth, working long shifts as a counter-hand and short-order cook at a pizza chain, with the old Mustang parked out back, all set to go.

  “I always worked,” he says. “But the longer and harder I did so, the clearer my position became. I’d only been going for seventeen or eighteen years, having a great time, but well on my way, I thought, to a momentous screwup ... summa cum laude in partying. Those 2.3 and 2.4 grades from Perrysburg High haunt me to this day. I shoulda been straight As. No bullshit. But only I knew that, and I’m not proud.”

  That was not the only secret the young McCabe harbored, the other being that he somehow understood the long and historic connection his little town had with the US Navy. Situated right up there in the top left-hand corner of the state, Perrysburg was an early nineteenth-century shipbuilding center, right on the wide Maumee River, which flows into Lake Erie just a dozen miles to the north.

  Perrysburg is in fact named for one of America’s greatest naval battle commanders, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, who not only supervised the construction of the US Fleet along the Maumee but also fought the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812.

  In overall command of the US Fleet in the 240-mile-long lake, Commodore Perry faced the British head on, but in the opening exchanges he took a very severe shellacking, with his flagship, named after the immortal Captain Lawrence, almost sinking. The British commander demanded Perry strike his colors and surrender.

  But Commodore Perry refused, and in the teeth of the battle and under withering gunfire, he ordered his men to row him to one of his other ships, where he personally fired the salvo that began the rout of the Royal Navy’s Task Force. Following the strategy of Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar, he drove forward, in the lee of the wind, and split the British line, pounding them until they surrendered. Altogether the commodore fought nine naval actions on that lake and won them all, and a grateful nation awarded him with both the Congressional Gold Medal and the thanks of Congress.

  Still known as the “Hero of Lake Erie,” Commodore Perry had a decisive hand in the ultimate US victory in that war. An entire class of modern US frigates was named after him—and there’s twenty-four still serving: the heavily gunned anti-aircraft and ASW ships, Oliver Hazard Perry–class, renowned escorts to the US Navy’s largest aircraft carriers.

  Today a mighty bronze statue of the commodore stands in downtown Perrysburg. Though not many people noticed the young Matt taking a few long looks at it while he was not really bothering with his schoolwork.

  But at age eighteen Matt made what he described as the first mature decision of his entire life: he decided to rip one of the opening pages out of the commodore’s playbook and join the US Navy. And he kept his thoughts to himself. He did not have the slightest intention of rising to command a warship in battle.

  Matt, retired soccer midfielder, secretly wanted to become a US Navy SEAL. Nothing else. And he never told anyone.

  Jonathan Keefe’s long devotion to the US Navy SEALs began when he was in fifth grade. This was partially because he was born and spent his early years way south into the Virginia Peninsula, where the Atlantic rollers hit the Chesapeake Bay and where America’s mightiest warships are both built and stabled in the gigantic Norfolk Naval Yards.

  It’s impossible not to have at least a passing interest in the US military if you happen to be from those warm, gusting ocean-side lands, which also stand to the north of the wide Hampton Roads, the busiest warship highway on earth.

  All around there are signs of the world’s only superpower in action—the Langley Air Force Base, the NASA Langley Research Center, the vast shipbuilding yards of Newport News, where they build the colossal fortress at sea, the Nimitz-class aircraft carriers.

  Young Jon was brought up watching warships shouldering their way out into the Atlantic and coming home from distant lands. The folklore of the US Navy was instilled deep within him. The Stars and Stripes was always prominent on the flagpole in front of the classy ranch-style house in which they lived, in the overwhelmingly middle-class Virginia country town of Tabb.

  Patriotism was not taught in the household of Tom and Dawn Keefe; rather, it was engraved on their hearts from birth. A financial professional, Tom Keefe worked just a few miles away at Newport News Shipbuilding Company, where he was controller and treasurer of its industrial subsidiary, NNI, specialists in constructing and repairing nuclear power stations.

  NNI was full of ex-US naval officers, several of whom were buddies with Tom Keefe, the man who controlled the budgets. One of them, a former commanding officer of the Sturgeon-class nuclear attack submarine USS Lapon, was Captain Chester “Whitey” Mack, who once silently shadowed a brand-new Yankee-class Russian ballistic missile boat for her entire patrol, an astounding forty-seven days!

  Cruising right inside the Yankee’s baffles, dead astern, he never got caught and hoovered up enough priceless electronic information to fill a wing of Bancroft Hall at Annapolis. After that the six-foot, six-inch Whitey became a legend in the Atlantic submarine service and later joined NNI in Newport News, where they talk about him still. USS Lapon was, after all, built there, five miles from where the Keefe family lived.

  Because he grew up in th
at community, it was little surprise that Jon knew the sights and sounds of US warships before he could recite the alphabet. His father was never in the US military, but, with his strict adherence to rules, sense of order, and punctuality, he would have made a superb naval officer.

  The great pride of Tom Keefe’s life was being associated with an engineering corporation that built every last one of the US Navy’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and one half of all of its nuclear attack submarines.

  But curiously, his mother, Dawn, was the one who led Jon to the SEALs. She’d been a second-grade school teacher before her sons, Tommy and Jon, were born, and she returned to the profession when the boys were very young. A gifted and natural storyteller, she constantly read to her sons, and when she recounted them an adventure involving a group of men called the SEALs, her youngest was hooked. He was so captivated—and at such a young age—that he actually wrote his fifth-grade career project on the US Navy SEALs.

  “I still remember it,” he says. “There were a lot of stories, but the ones I always liked most were about those daredevils from Virginia Beach, just twenty-seven miles to the south of the village of Tabb. I made Mom take us down there just so I could see where they lived and worked. Never caught sight of one, though.”

  And when he was thirteen Jon persuaded his parents to allow him to go to San Diego, California, with a friend to enroll in the US Marines’ renowned ten-day “Devil Pups” mini-boot camp youth program on the seventeen-mile Pacific coastal sprawl of Camp Pendleton. This is the major West Coast base of the Marine Corps, the prime amphibious training grounds for Assault Craft Unit 5 and home to One Marine Expeditionary Force, masters of the sea-to-shore attack.