NYTimes-The Secret History of SEAL Team 6_ Quiet Killings and Blurred Lines

http://nyti.ms/1QznW4F

ASIA PACIFIC

The unit best known for killing

Osama bin Laden has been

converted into a global

manhunting machine with limited

outside oversight.

By MARK MAZZETTI, NICHOLASKULISH, CHRISTOPHER DREW,SERGE F. KOVALESKI, SEAN D.NAYLOR and JOHN ISMAY

JUNE 6, 2015

They have plotted deadly missions from secret bases in the badlands of Somalia.

The Secret History of SEAL Team 6: Quiet Killings and Blurred Lines... http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/world/asia/the-secret-history-of-s...

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In Afghanistan, they have engaged in combat so intimate that they have emergedsoaked in blood that was not their own. On clandestine raids in the dead of thenight, their weapons of choice have ranged from customized carbines to primevaltomahawks.

Around the world, they have run spying stations disguised as commercialboats, posed as civilian employees of front companies and operated undercover atembassies as male-female pairs, tracking those the United States wants to kill orcapture.

Those operations are part of the hidden history of the Navys SEAL Team 6,one of the nations most mythologized, most secretive and least scrutinizedmilitary organizations. Once a small group reserved for specialized but raremissions, the unit best known for killing Osama bin Laden has been transformedby more than a decade of combat into a global manhunting machine.

That role reflects Americas new way of war, in which conflict is distinguishednot by battlefield wins and losses, but by the relentless killing of suspectedmilitants.

Almost everything about SEAL Team 6, a classified Special Operations unit,is shrouded in secrecy the Pentagon does not even publicly acknowledge thatname though some of its exploits have emerged in largely admiring accounts inrecent years. But an examination of Team 6s evolution, drawn from dozens ofinterviews with current and former team members, other military officials andreviews of government documents, reveals a far more complex, provocative tale.

While fighting grinding wars of attrition in Afghanistan and Iraq, Team 6performed missions elsewhere that blurred the traditional lines between soldierand spy. The teams sniper unit was remade to carry out clandestine intelligenceoperations, and the SEALs joined Central Intelligence Agency operatives in aninitiative called the Omega Program, which offered greater latitude in huntingadversaries.

Team 6 has successfully carried out thousands of dangerous raids thatmilitary leaders credit with weakening militant networks, but its activities havealso spurred recurring concerns about excessive killing and civilian deaths.

Afghan villagers and a British commander accused SEALs of indiscriminatelykilling men in one hamlet; in 2009, team members joined C.I.A. and Afghanparamilitary forces in a raid that left a group of youths dead and inflamedtensions between Afghan and NATO officials. Even an American hostage freed ina dramatic rescue has questioned why the SEALs killed all his captors.


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When suspicions have been raised about misconduct, outside oversight hasbeen limited. Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees SEAL Team 6missions, conducted its own inquiries into more than a half-dozen episodes, butseldom referred them to Navy investigators. JSOC investigates JSOC, and thatspart of the problem, said one former senior military officer experienced inspecial operations, who like many others interviewed for this article spoke on thecondition of anonymity because Team 6s activities are classified.

Even the militarys civilian overseers do not regularly examine the unitsoperations. This is an area where Congress notoriously doesnt want to know toomuch, said Harold Koh, the State Departments former top legal adviser, whoprovided guidance to the Obama administration on clandestine war.

Waves of money have sluiced through SEAL Team 6 since 2001, allowing itto significantly expand its ranks reaching roughly 300 assault troops, calledoperators, and 1,500 support personnel to meet new demands. But some teammembers question whether the relentless pace of operations has eroded the unitselite culture and worn down Team 6 on combat missions of little importance. Thegroup was sent to Afghanistan to hunt Qaeda leaders, but instead spent yearsconducting close-in battle against mid- to low-level Taliban and other enemyfighters. Team 6 members, one former operator said, served as utility infielderswith guns.

The cost was high: More members of the unit have died over the past 14years than in all its previous history. Repeated assaults, parachute jumps, ruggedclimbs and blasts from explosives have left many battered, physically andmentally.

War is not this pretty thing that the United States has come to believe it tobe, said Britt Slabinski, a retired senior enlisted member of Team 6 and veteranof combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its emotional, one human being killinganother human being for extended periods of time. Its going to bring out theworst in you. Its also going to bring out the best in you.

Team 6 and its Army counterpart, Delta Force, have delivered intrepidperformances that have drawn the nations two most recent presidents to deploythem to an expanding list of far-off trouble spots. They include Syria and Iraq,now under threat from the Islamic State, and Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen,mired in continuing chaos.

Like the C.I.A.s campaign of drone strikes, Special Operations missions offerpolicy makers an alternative to costly wars of occupation. But the bulwark of


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secrecy around Team 6 makes it impossible to fully assess its record and theconsequences of its actions, including civilian casualties or the deep resentmentinside the countries where its members operate. The missions have becomeembedded in American combat with little public discussion or debate.

Former Senator Bob Kerrey, a Nebraska Democrat and a member of theSEALs during the Vietnam War, cautioned that Team 6 and other SpecialOperations forces had been overused. They have become sort of a 1-800 numberanytime somebody wants something done, he said. But relying on them so much,he added, is inevitable whenever American leaders are faced with one of thosesituations where the choice you have is between a horrible choice and a badchoice, one of those cases where you have no option.

While declining to comment specifically on SEAL Team 6, the United StatesSpecial Operations Command said that since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, its forceshave been involved in tens of thousands of missions and operations in multiplegeographic theaters, and consistently uphold the highest standards required ofthe U.S. Armed Forces.

The command said its operators are trained to operate in complex andfast-moving environments and it trusts them to conduct themselvesappropriately. All allegations of misconduct are taken seriously, the statementsaid, adding: Substantiated findings are dealt with by military or lawenforcement authorities.

The units advocates express no doubts about the value of such invisiblewarriors. If you want these forces to do things that occasionally bend the rules ofinternational law, said James G. Stavridis, a retired admiral and former SupremeAllied Commander at NATO, referring to going into undeclared war zones, youcertainly dont want that out in public. Team 6, he added, should continue tooperate in the shadows.

But others warn of the seduction of an endless campaign of secret missions,far from public view. If youre unacknowledged on the battlefield, said WilliamC. Banks, an expert on national security law at Syracuse University, youre notaccountable.

During a chaotic battle in March 2002 on the Takur Ghar mountaintop close


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to the Pakistan border, Petty Officer First Class Neil C. Roberts, an assaultspecialist in SEAL Team 6, fell from a helicopter onto terrain held by Qaedaforces.

Enemy fighters killed him before American troops were able to get there,mutilating his body in the snow.

It was SEAL Team 6s first major battle in Afghanistan, and he was the firstmember to die. The manner in which he was killed sent shudders through thetight-knit community. Americas new war would be up close and ugly. At times,the troops carried out the grisliest of tasks: cutting off fingers or small patches ofscalp for DNA analysis from militants they had just killed.

After the March 2002 campaign, most of Osama bin Ladens fighters fledinto Pakistan, and Team 6 would rarely fight another sustained, pitched battleagainst the terrorist network in Afghanistan. The enemy they had been sent totake on had largely disappeared.

At the time, the team was prohibited from hunting Taliban fighters and alsoblocked from chasing any Qaeda operatives into Pakistan, out of concern aboutalienating the Pakistani government. Mostly confined to the Bagram Air Baseoutside Kabul, the SEALs were frustrated. The C.I.A., though, was under nosimilar restrictions, and Team 6 members eventually began working with the spyagency and operated under its broader combat authorities, according to formermilitary and intelligence officials.

The missions, part of the Omega Program, allowed the SEALs to conductdeniable operations against the Taliban and other militants in Pakistan. Omegawas modeled after the Vietnam-era Phoenix Program, when C.I.A. officers andSpecial Operations troops conducted interrogations and assassinations to try todismantle the Vietcongs guerrilla networks in South Vietnam.

But an extensive campaign of lethal operations in Pakistan was consideredtoo risky, the officials said, so the Omega Program primarily focused on usingAfghan Pashtuns to run spying missions into the Pakistani tribal areas, as well asworking with C.I.A.-trained Afghan militias during night raids in Afghanistan. AC.I.A. spokesman declined to comment for this article.

The escalating conflict in Iraq was drawing most of the Pentagons attentionand required a steady buildup of troops, including deployments by SEAL Team 6members. With the relatively small American military footprint in Afghanistan,Taliban forces began to regroup. Alarmed, Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, whowas leading Joint Special Operations Command, in 2006 ordered the SEALs and


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other troops to take on a more expansive task in Afghanistan: Beat back theTaliban.

That order led to years of nightly raids or fights by Team 6, which wasdesignated the lead Special Operations force during some of the most violentyears in what became Americas longest war. A secret unit that was created tocarry out the nations riskiest operations would instead be engaged in dangerousbut increasingly routine combat.

The surge in operations started during that summer when Team 6 operatorsand Army Rangers began to hunt down midlevel Taliban figures in hopes offinding leaders of the group in Kandahar Province, the Taliban heartland. TheSEALs used techniques developed with Delta Force in kill-and-capture campaignsin Iraq. The logic behind the manhunts was that intelligence gathered from amilitant safe house, along with that collected by the C.I.A. and the NationalSecurity Agency, could lead to a bomb makers workshop and eventually to thedoor of an insurgent commander.

Special Operations troops struck a seemingly endless succession of targets.No figures are publicly available that break out the number of raids that Team 6carried out in Afghanistan or their toll. Military officials say that no shots werefired on most raids. But between 2006 and 2008, Team 6 operators said, therewere intense periods in which for weeks at a time their unit logged 10 to 15 killson many nights, and sometimes up to 25.

The accelerated pace caused guys to become fierce, said a former Team 6officer. These killing fests had become routine.

Special Operations commanders say the raids helped unravel Talibannetworks. But some Team 6 members came to doubt that they were making muchof a difference. One former senior enlisted SEAL member, pressed for detailsabout one mission, said, It became so many of these targets, it was just anothername.

Whether they were facilitators, Taliban subcommanders, Talibancommanders, financiers, it no longer became important, he added.

Another former Team 6 member, an officer, was even more dismissive ofsome 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 unit pushed to make its operations faster, quieter and deadlier, andbenefited from a ballooning budget and from advances in technology since 2001.Team 6s bland cover name the Naval Special Warfare Development Group


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is a nod to its official mission of developing new equipment and tactics for thebroader SEAL organization, which also includes nine unclassified teams.

The SEALs armorers customized a new German-made rifle and equippednearly every weapon with suppressors, which reduce gunshot sounds and muzzleflashes. Infrared lasers enabling the SEALs to shoot more accurately at nightbecame standard issue, as did thermal optics to detect body heat. The SEALs wereequipped with a new generation of grenade a thermobaric model that isparticularly effective in making buildings collapse. They often operated in largergroups than they had traditionally done. More SEALs carrying deadlier weaponsmeant that fewer enemies escaped alive.

Some Team 6 assault troops also used tomahawks crafted by Daniel Winkler,a knife maker in North Carolina who forged blades for the film The Last of theMohicans. During one period, members of Team 6s Red Squadron its logoshows crossed tomahawks below the face of a Native American warrior received a Winkler hatchet after their first year in the squadron, according to twomembers. In an interview, Mr. Winkler declined to discuss which SEAL units hadreceived his tomahawks, but did say many were paid for by private donors.

The weapons were not just wall ornaments. Several former Team 6 memberssaid that some men carried the hatchets on missions, and at least one killed anenemy fighter with the weapon. Dom Raso, a former Team 6 member who left theNavy in 2012, said that hatchets were used for breaching, getting into doors,manipulating small locks, hand-to-hand combat and other things. He added thathatchet and blade kills occurred during his time with the SEALs.

Whatever tool you need to protect yourself and your brothers, whether it is ablade or a gun, you are going to use, said Mr. Raso, who has worked with Mr.Winkler in producing a blade.

Many SEAL operators rejected any use of tomahawks saying they were toobulky to take into combat and not as effective as firearms even as theyacknowledged the messiness of warfare.

Its a dirty business, said one former senior enlisted Team 6 member.Whats the difference between shooting them as I was told and pulling out aknife and stabbing them or hatcheting them?


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SEAL Team 6s fenced-off headquarters at the Dam Neck Annex of theOceana Naval Air Station, just south of Virginia Beach, houses a secretive militarywithin the military. Far removed from the public eye, the base is home not just tothe teams 300 enlisted operators (they disdain the term commandos), theirofficers and commanders, but also to its pilots, Seabee builders, bomb disposaltechnicians, engineers, medical crews and an intelligence unit equipped withsophisticated surveillance and global tracking technology.

The Navy SEALs the acronym stands for Sea, Air, Land forces evolvedfrom the frogmen of World War II. Team 6 arose decades later, born out of thefailed 1980 mission to rescue 53 American hostages seized in the takeover of theUnited States Embassy in Tehran. Poor planning and bad weather forcedcommanders to abort the mission, and eight servicemen died when two aircraftcollided over the Iranian desert.

The Navy then asked Cmdr. Richard Marcinko, a hard-charging Vietnamveteran, to build a SEAL unit that could respond quickly to terrorist crises. Thename itself was an attempt at Cold War disinformation: Only two SEAL teamsexisted at the time, but Commander Marcinko called the unit SEAL Team 6hoping that Soviet analysts would overestimate the size of the force.

He flouted rules and fostered a maverick image for the unit. (Years afterleaving the command, he was convicted of military contract fraud.) In hisautobiography, Rogue Warrior, Commander Marcinko describes drinkingtogether as important to SEAL Team 6s solidarity; his recruiting interviews oftenamounted to boozy chats in a bar.

Inside Team 6, there were initially two assault groups, called Blue and Gold,after the Navy colors. Blue used the Jolly Roger pirate flag as its insignia andearly on earned the nickname the Bad Boys in Blue, for racking up drunkendriving arrests, abusing narcotics and crashing rental cars on training exerciseswith near impunity.

Young officers sometimes were run out of Team 6 for trying to clean up whatthey perceived as a culture of recklessness. Adm. William H. McRaven, who roseto head the Special Operations Command and oversaw the Bin Laden raid, waspushed out of Team 6 and assigned to another SEAL team during the Marcinkoera after complaining of difficulties in keeping his troops in line.

Ryan Zinke, a former Team 6 officer and now a Republican congressmanfrom Montana, recalled an episode after a team training mission aboard a cruiseliner in preparation for potential hostage rescues at the 1992 Summer Olympics


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in Barcelona, Spain. Mr. Zinke escorted an admiral to a bar in the ships lowerlevel. When we opened the door, it reminded me of Pirates of the Caribbean,Mr. Zinke said, recalling that the admiral was appalled by the operators longhair, beards and earrings. My Navy? the admiral asked him. These guys are inmy Navy?

That was the beginning of what Mr. Zinke referred to as the greatbloodletting, when the Navy purged Team 6s leadership to professionalize theforce. Current and former Team 6 operators said the culture was different today.Members now tend to be better educated, more athletic, older and more mature though some are still known for pushing limits.

I got kicked out of the Boy Scouts, said one former officer. Most Team 6SEALs, he added, were like me.

Delta Force members, who have a reputation for going by the book, oftenstart out as regular infantry, then move up through the Armys Ranger units andSpecial Forces teams before joining Delta. But SEAL Team 6 is more isolatedfrom the rest of the Navy, with many of its men entering the brutal SEAL trainingpipeline from outside the military.

After several years on regular SEAL teams the even-numbered ones basedin Virginia Beach, the odd-numbered ones in San Diego, and a unit in Hawaiidedicated to mini-submarines SEALs can try out for Team 6. Many are eager toget to the most elite unit, but about half of them wash out.

Officers rotate through Team 6, sometimes returning for several tours, butthe enlisted SEALs typically stay far longer, giving them outsize influence. A lotof the enlisted guys think that they really run the show, said one former seniormember. Thats part of the Marcinko style.

And they tend to swagger, critics and defenders say. While the other SEALteams (called white or vanilla SEALs within the military) perform similartasks, Team 6 pursues the highest value targets and takes on hostage rescues incombat zones. It also works more with the C.I.A. and does more clandestinemissions outside war zones. Only Team 6 trains to chase after nuclear weaponsthat fall into the wrong hands.

Team 6s role in the 2011 Bin Laden raid spawned a cottage industry of booksand documentaries, leaving tight-lipped Delta Force troops rolling their eyes.Members of Team 6 are expected to honor a code of silence about their missions,and many current and former members fume that two of their own spoke outabout their role in the Qaeda leaders death. The men, Matt Bissonnette, author of


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two best sellers about his tenure at SEAL Team 6, and Robert ONeill, who said ina television special that he had killed Bin Laden, are under investigation by theNaval Criminal Investigative Service over accusations that they revealed classifiedinformation.

Others have been quietly kicked out for drug use or quit over conflicts ofinterest involving military contractors or side jobs. The Navy reprimanded 11current and former operators in 2012 for disclosing Team 6 tactics or handingover classified training films to help promote a computer game, Medal of Honor:Warfighter.

With multiple deployments over the last 13 years, few of the units membersare unscathed. About three dozen operators and support personnel have died oncombat missions, according to a former senior team member. They include 15Gold Squadron members and two bomb specialists who were killed in 2011 whena helicopter with the call sign Extortion 17 was shot down in Afghanistan, themost devastating day in Team 6 history.

Blasts from explosions used to breach compounds on raids, repeated assaultsand the battering from riding on high-speed assault boats in sea rescues ortraining have taken a toll. Some men have sustained traumatic brain injuries.Your body is trashed, said one recently retired operator. Your brain is trashed.

SEALs are a lot like N.F.L. guys: They never want to say I am taking myselfout of the lineup, said Dr. John Hart, medical science director at the Center forBrainHealth at the University of Texas at Dallas, which has treated many SEALpatients. If they send guys back in who already have the effects of a concussion,they are constantly adding a dose of a hit to an existing brain condition. The brainneeds sufficient time to heal.

Early on in the Afghan war, SEAL Team 6 was assigned to protect the Afghanleader Hamid Karzai; one of the Americans was grazed in the head during anassassination attempt on the future president. But in the years that followed, Mr.Karzai became a bitter critic of the United States Special Operations troops,complaining that they routinely killed civilians in raids. He viewed the activitiesof Team 6 and other units as a boon for Taliban recruiting and eventually tried toblock night raids entirely.


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Most missions were not lethal. Several Team 6 members said they herdedwomen and children together and knocked men out of the way, with a push or agun muzzle, to search homes. They frequently took prisoners; a number ofdetainees had broken noses after SEALs punched them in struggles to subduethem, one officer said.

The Team 6 members often operate under the watchful eyes of theircommanders officers at overseas operations centers and at Dam Neck canroutinely view live surveillance feeds of raids provided by drones high above but are also given wide latitude. While Special Operations troops functionedunder the same rules of engagement as other military personnel in Afghanistan,Team 6 members routinely performed their missions at night, makinglife-or-death decisions in dark rooms with few witnesses and beyond the view of acamera.

Operators would use weapons with suppressors to quietly kill enemies asthey slept, an act that they defend as no different from dropping a bomb on anenemy barracks. I snuck into peoples houses while they were sleeping, Mr.Bissonnette says in his book No Hero, written under the pseudonym MarkOwen. If I caught them with a gun, I killed them, just like all the guys in thecommand.

And their decisions tend to be certain. Noting that they shoot to kill, a formernoncommissioned officer added that the operators fire security rounds intothose who are down to ensure that they are dead. (In a 2011 mission on a hijackedyacht off the coast of Africa, one Team 6 member slashed a pirate with a knife andleft 91 wounds, according to a medical examiner, after the man and otherattackers killed four American hostages. Operators are trained to slice and diceevery major artery, said one former SEAL.)

The rules boiled down to this, the noncommissioned officer said: If in yourassessment you feel threatened, in a split second, then youre going to killsomebody. He described how one SEAL sniper killed three unarmed people,including a small girl, in separate episodes in Afghanistan and told his superiorsthat he felt they had posed a threat. Legally, that was sufficient. But that doesntfly in Team 6, the noncommissioned officer said. You actually have to bethreatened. He added that the sniper was forced out of Team 6.

A half-dozen former officers and enlisted troops who were interviewed saidthey knew of civilian deaths caused by Team 6. Mr. Slabinski, a former seniorenlisted member of SEAL Team 6, said he witnessed Team 6 members mistakenly


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kill civilians probably four or five times during his deployments.Several former officers said they routinely questioned Team 6 operators

when their suspicions were raised about unwarranted killings, but they usuallyfound no clear evidence of wrongdoing. There was no incentive to dig deep onthat, said a former senior Special Operations officer.

Do I think bad things went on? another former top officer asked. Do Ithink there was more killing than should have been done? Sure.

I think the natural inclination was, if its a threat, kill it, and later on yourealize, Oh, maybe I overassessed the threat, he said. Do I think that guysintentionally killed people that didnt deserve it? I have a hard time believingthat.

Civilian deaths are an inevitable part of every war but in conflicts with noclear battle lines and where enemy fighters are often indistinguishable fromnoncombatants, some military law experts say, the traditional rules of war havebecome outdated and new Geneva Convention protocols are necessary. But othersbristle at the notion, saying that the longstanding, unambiguous rules of behaviorshould govern murky, modern combat.

Emphasizing these lines and rules becomes even more important whenyoure fighting a lawless, remorseless enemy, said Geoffrey S. Corn, the formersenior law of war expert for the Armys Office of the Judge Advocate General andnow a professor at South Texas College of Law. That is when the instinct forrevenge is going to be strong. And war is not about revenge.

Near the end of an Afghan deployment by Team 6s Blue Squadron, whichconcluded in early 2008, elders complained to the British general whose forcescontrolled Helmand Province. He immediately called Capt. Scott Moore,commander of SEAL Team 6, saying that two elders had reported that the SEALskilled civilians in a village, according to a former Team 6 senior member.

Captain Moore confronted those leading the mission, which was intended tocapture or kill a Taliban figure code-named Objective Pantera.

When Captain Moore asked what had happened, the squadron commander,Peter G. Vasely, denied that operators had killed any noncombatants. He saidthey had killed all the men they encountered because they all had guns, accordingto the former Team 6 member and a military official. Captain Vasely, who nowoversees the regular SEAL teams based on the East Coast, declined to commentthrough a spokesman.

Captain Moore asked the Joint Special Operations Command to investigate


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the episode. About that time, the command received reports that dozens ofwitnesses in a village were alleging that American forces had engaged in summaryexecutions.

Another former senior Team 6 member contended later that Mr. Slabinski,Blue Squadrons command master chief, gave pre-mission guidance that everymale at the target be killed. Mr. Slabinski denied that, saying there was no policyto leave all men dead. I didnt ever convey that to the guys, he said in aninterview.

He said that around the time of that raid he had been disturbed afterwitnessing one of the younger operators slashing at the throat of a dead Talibanfighter. It appeared he was mutilating a body, Mr. Slabinski said, adding that hequickly yelled, Stop what youre doing!

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service later concluded the operator mighthave been cutting off gear from the dead fighters chest. But Team 6 leaders saidthey were worried that some operators were getting out of control, and the oneinvolved in the episode was sent back to the United States. Mr. Slabinski,suspecting that his men had not been following the rules of engagement properly,gathered them for what he called a very stern speech.

If any of you feel a need to do any retribution, you should call me, herecalled telling them. Theres no one that could authorize that other than me.He said his message was intended to convey that permission would never comebecause such conduct was inappropriate. But he conceded that perhaps some ofhis men may have misunderstood.

JSOC cleared the squadron of any wrongdoing in the Pantera operation,according to two former Team 6 members. It is not clear how many Afghans werekilled in the raid or exactly where it happened, though a former officer said hebelieved it was just south of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province.

But the killings prompted a high-level discussion about how, in a countrywhere many men carried guns, Team 6 could guarantee that were only goingafter the real bad guys, one of the former senior team leaders said.

In other inquiries, which were usually handled by JSOC, not Navyinvestigators, no one faced any charges. Typically, men were sent home whenconcerns arose; three, for example, were sent back to Dam Neck after roughingup a detainee during an interrogation, one former officer said, as were some teammembers involved in questionable killings.

More than a year later, another mission spurred strong protests from


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Afghans. Just after midnight on Dec. 27, 2009, dozens of American and Afghantroops landed in helicopters several miles from the small village of Ghazi Khan inKunar Province, and hiked to the village in darkness. By the time they left, 10residents had been killed.

What happened that night is still in dispute. The purpose of the mission wasto capture or kill a senior Taliban operative, but it was quickly apparent that noTaliban leaders were present at the target. The mission had been based on faultyintelligence, a problem that bedeviled United States military operations even afteryears in Afghanistan. A former governor of the province investigated, and accusedthe Americans of killing unarmed schoolboys.

The United Nations mission in Afghanistan issued a statement saying that aninitial investigation had concluded that eight of those killed were studentsenrolled in local schools.

American military spokesmen initially said that those who died were part ofan insurgent cell that had been building improvised explosive devices. Eventually,they backed off that claim. But some American military officials still insist that allof the youths had guns and were tied to the Taliban. One NATO statement saidthat the people who carried out the raid were nonmilitary in nature, seemingly areference to the C.I.A., which was in charge of the operation.

But Team 6 members had also participated in that mission. As part of thecovert Omega Program, they joined an assault force that included C.I.A.paramilitary officers and Afghan troops trained by the spy agency.

By then, the program that had begun at the dawn of the Afghan war hadchanged. Forays into Pakistan were limited because it was difficult to operatethere without being noticed by Pakistani soldiers and spies, so missions weremostly confined to the Afghan side of the border.

Over time, General McChrystal, who became the top American commanderin Afghanistan, responded to Mr. Karzais complaints about civilian deaths bytightening the rules on night raids and scaling back the pace of special operations.

After years of refining techniques to sneak up on enemy compounds, Team 6members were often required to call out before attacking a site, akin to a sheriffannouncing through a bullhorn, Come out with your hands up.

Mr. Slabinski said that civilian casualties occurred most often during thecall out operations, which were meant to mitigate exactly such losses. Enemycombatants, he said, would sometimes send out family members and then shootfrom behind them, or give civilians flashlights and tell them to point out


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American positions.Mr. ONeill, the former Team 6 member, agreed that the rules could be

frustrating. What we found was, the more latitude for collateral damage thatthey gave us, the more effective we were because were not going to takeadvantage of it but we know were not going to be second-guessed, he said in aninterview. When there were more rules, it did get more difficult.

Years ago, before the Afghan night raids and the wartime deployments, SEALTeam 6 trained constantly to rescue hostages dangerous, difficult missions theynever got a chance to perform before 2001. Since then, the unit has attempted atleast 10 rescues, which have been among its most celebrated successes andbitterest failures.

Operators say that in rescues considered no-fail missions they have tomove faster and expose themselves to greater risk than on any other type ofoperation 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 operatorshelped retrieve Pfc. Jessica Lynch, who had been injured, captured and held in ahospital, during the early days of the Iraq war.

Six years later, Team 6 members jumped out of cargo planes into the IndianOcean with their specially designed assault boats in advance of the mission torescue Richard Phillips, the captain of the Maersk Alabama, a container shiphijacked by Somali pirates. The operators, captured in a video shown by Mr.ONeill, parachuted with swim fins strapped over their boots after releasing fourboats small, fast and equipped with stealth features to evade radar that wereeach suspended by a canopy of multiple parachutes. SEAL snipers eventuallykilled three of the pirates.

In 2012, operators sky-dived into Somalia to free an American aid worker,Jessica Buchanan, and her Danish colleague, Poul Hagen Thisted. JSOCconsiders its performance as the standard for such missions. The SEALs used afree-fall parachuting technique called HAHO, for high altitude-high opening, inwhich they jump from a high altitude and steer their way on the wind for manymiles to cross a border secretly, an exercise so risky that over the years several


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men died while in training.Ms. Buchanan recalled that four of the kidnappers were within 15 feet of her

when the Team 6 members approached under cover of darkness. They shot andkilled all nine captors while rescuing the aid workers. Until they identifiedthemselves, I did not believe a rescue was possible, Ms. Buchanan said in aninterview.

In October 2010, one Team 6 member erred during an attempt to rescueLinda Norgrove, a 36-year old British aid worker being held by the Taliban.Disaster struck in the first two minutes, after operators jumped from helicoptersin the mountains of Kunar Province and slid down 90 feet of braided rope to asteep slope, according to two senior military officials.

As they sprinted in the dark toward the Taliban compound, the newestmember of the team was confused, he later told investigators. His gun hadjammed. Thinking a million miles a minute, he said, he threw a grenade at whathe believed were a pair of fighters hiding in a ditch.

But after an exchange of gunfire that killed several Taliban captors, theSEALs found the hostage wearing dark clothing and a head scarf dead in theditch. Initially, the operator who threw the grenade and another unit memberreported that Ms. Norgrove was killed by an explosive suicide vest. That storyquickly fell apart. Surveillance video shows that she died almost instantly fromfragmentation wounds to her head and back caused by the grenade blast, theinvestigative report noted.

A joint inquiry by the American and British governments concluded that theoperator who had thrown the grenade had violated procedures for hostagerescues. He was forced out of Team 6, although permitted to remain in anotherSEAL unit.

A rescue operation two years later succeeded in releasing an Americanphysician, though at great cost. One night in December 2012, a group of Team 6operators wearing night-vision goggles burst into a compound in Afghanistanwhere Taliban militants were holding Dr. Dilip Joseph, who had been workingwith an aid organization. The first operator to enter was felled by a shot to thehead, and the other Americans responded with brutal efficiency, killing all five ofthe captors.

But Dr. Joseph and military officials offer sharply different accounts of howthe raid unfolded. The physician said in an interview that a 19-year-old namedWallakah was the sole kidnapper to survive the initial assault. He had been


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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 whohad shot the Team 6 operator.

Minutes later, while waiting to board a helicopter to freedom, Dr. Josephsaid, one of his SEAL rescuers guided him back into the house, where he saw inthe moonlight that Wallakah was lying in a pool of blood, dead. I rememberthose things as clear as day, the doctor said.

Military officials, speaking only on background about the classifiedoperation, contended that all of the captors were quickly killed after the SEALteam entered and Wallakah had never been taken prisoner. They also said thatDr. Joseph had seemed disoriented at the time and never re-entered the house,and questioned whether he could have seen what was happening on the darknight.

Two years later, Dr. Joseph remains grateful for his rescue and the sacrificemade by Petty Officer Nicolas D. Checque, the team member killed on themission. But he still wonders what happened with Wallakah.

It took me weeks to come to terms with the efficiency of the rescue, Dr.Joseph said. It was so surgical.

From a string of firebases along the Afghan border, Team 6 regularly sentAfghan locals into the tribal areas of Pakistan to collect intelligence. The teamtransformed the large, brightly painted jingle trucks popular in the region intomobile spying stations, hiding sophisticated eavesdropping equipment in theback of the trucks and using Pashtuns to drive them over the border.

Outside the mountains of Pakistan, the team also ventured into the countryssouthwest desert, including the volatile Baluchistan region. One mission nearlyended in disaster when militants fired a rocket-propelled grenade from adoorway, causing the roof of their compound to collapse and a Team 6 sniperatop it to fall through onto a small group of fighters. A fellow American snipernearby quickly killed them, one former operator recounted.

Beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan, members of Team 6s Black Squadronwere scattered around the world on spying missions. Originally Team 6s sniperunit, Black Squadron was reconfigured after the Sept. 11 attacks to conduct


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advance force operations, military jargon for intelligence gathering and otherclandestine activities in preparation for a Special Operations mission.

It was a particularly popular concept at the Pentagon under former DefenseSecretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. By the middle of last decade, General McChrystalhad designated Team 6 to take on an expanded role in global intelligence-gathering missions, and Black Squadron operatives deployed to Americanembassies from sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America to the Middle East.

SEAL Team 6 used diplomatic pouches, the regular shipments of classifieddocuments and other material to American diplomatic posts, to get weapons toBlack Squadron operators stationed overseas, said a former member. InAfghanistan, Black Squadron operators wore tribal dress and sneaked intovillages to plant cameras and listening devices and interview residents in the daysor weeks before night raids, according to several former Team 6 members.

The unit sets up front companies to provide cover for Black Squadronoperators in the Middle East, and runs floating spying stations disguised ascommercial boats off the coasts of Somalia and Yemen. Black Squadronmembers, working from the American Embassy in Sana, the Yemeni capital, werecentral to the hunt for Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric and American citizenwho had become affiliated with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He was killedin 2011 by a C.I.A. drone.

One former member of Black Squadron said that in Somalia and Yemen,operators were not allowed to pull the trigger unless the highest-value targetswere in their sights. Outside Iraq and Afghanistan we were not throwing anynets, the former member said. It was totally different.

Black Squadron has something the rest of SEAL Team 6 does not: femaleoperatives. Women in the Navy are admitted to Black Squadron and sent overseasto gather intelligence, usually working in embassies with male counterparts. Oneformer SEAL Team 6 officer said that male and female members of BlackSquadron would often work together in pairs. It is called profile softening,making the couple appear less suspicious to hostile intelligence services ormilitant groups.

Black Squadron now has more than 100 members, its growth coinciding withthe expansion of perceived threats around the world. It also reflects the shiftamong American policy makers. Anxious about using shadow warriors in theyears after the 1993 Black Hawk Down debacle in Mogadishu, Somalia,government officials today are willing to send units like SEAL Team 6 to conflicts,


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whether the United States chooses to acknowledge its role or not.When I was in, we were always chasing wars, said Mr. Zinke, the

congressman and former Team 6 member. These guys found them.Matthew Rosenberg and Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting. Research wascontributed by Kitty Bennett, Alain Delaqurire, Susan Campbell Beachy andWilliam M. Arkin.

A version of this article appears in print on June 7, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with theheadline: The Secret History of SEAL Team 6.

2015 The New York Times Company


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Documents

NYTimes-The Secret History of SEAL Team 6_ Quiet Killings and Blurred Lines