DEADLY FORTY SEAL TERROR FATE – ToI – 3.5.11

Navy Commandos were training for a month

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

    The highly trained Navy Seals carried out the mission to kill Osama bin Laden early on Monday morning. Some reports suggested that there were at least forty of them and they left Ghazi air base in Pakistan in three MH-60 helicopters. Their destination was the garrison town of Abbottabad and it was a team equipped with intelligence gatherers and navigators with hyperspectral imagers.
    The operation lasted 40 minutes and, according to a few reports, 22 people were either
killed or captured. Osama bin Laden suffered bullet wounds on the left side of his face. One of the helicopters experienced mechanical failure and was destroyed by US forces. The Seals did not suffer any casualty. They had been training in Afghanistan for this specific operation for the past one month.
    This was the Seal Team Six, known for its strategic exploits. Its official name is Naval Special Warfare Development Group – a name which not many are familiar with. They are better known at their home base Dam Neck in Virginia as just DevGru.
    The Abbottabad target was known to the intelligence collectors since August last year. Long before President Obama gave the final go ahead on April 29, the Seal Team Six knew about the mission. They had chosen a similar one-acre compound at Camp Alpha in an isolated part of the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Trials were carried out from the beginning of April.
    Seal Team Six is a part of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), primarily carrying out covert operations of great strategic significance. The JSOC is a powerful collection of special mission units and task forces. All these units including the Seal Team Six report to the President and operate globally. Given the classified nature of some of these Presidential directives, their missions are more often than not covert and occasionally even clandestine.
    And the Seal Team Six may have some reputation but there are other JSOC groups which are never really heard of unless, of course, an operation goes horribly wrong. It is a known fact that scores of JSOC men died in Pakistan over the past several years but their deaths have been announced in a way to create the impression that they were killed in Afghanistan.
    Given that the operation was kept completely secret and nobody knew what was going on till the time gunfire erupted in the compound of the walled Abbottabad house means two other JSOC units had taken maximum precautions. These are the Technical Application Programs Office and the Aviation Technology Evaluation Group. It is now universally accepted that since 9/11, the JSOC units have become the most effective in dealing with terror.
    On Monday morning itself, CIA director Leon Panetta thanked the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for their help in this particular operation. It appears that NSA somehow realized without Pakistani authorities getting to know that there was no phone or net service in the compound. It is now clear that the Seal Team Six had foreknowledge of what the compound was exactly like long before the helicopters landed.