equator, where the sun drops in a hurry. As the jumpmaster remembered it years later, “It was pitch-black outside. We couldn’t see a thing. I grabbed a flashlight off the air crewman and tried to stick it on the boat…. We had no lights rigged anywhere. We were told it was going to be a daylight drop.”
Secrecy. That was the controlling force in the planning and execution of Operation Urgent Fury, the October 1983 invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada. When the SEALs commander had suggested, in the early planning stages, that it might be simplest to fly his men and their Boston Whalers directly to the
President Reagan’s national security team and his chief military advisers meant to keep this operation under wraps until the last possible moment. Reagan had stuck to his announced public schedule, making many of the crucial decisions about Urgent Fury from the Eisenhower Cottage at Augusta National during a presidential golf weekend. Less than twenty-four hours before the operation began, key planning officers gave up valuable hours to attend an annual military ball. Not going to the dance, commanders reckoned, would be a big red flag that something was up. At least one member of the Air Force planning team suspected that nobody had requested pre-invasion intelligence on Grenada from the National Security Agency, which monitored international phone calls and radio traffic (“probably the richest source of intelligence” on the island). Planners feared that operatives at the NSA, the most secretive agency in government, would leak. And apparently nobody in the chain of command had asked the Defense Mapping Agency for detailed tactical maps of Grenada, which is why planning teams were occasionally working with maps dating from 1895, and commanders on the ground ended up depending on fold- out tourist maps like “Grenada: The Isle of Spice.”
President Reagan did not even risk alerting British prime minister Margaret Thatcher of the operation until after Urgent Fury was under way, despite the compelling fact that Grenada was a member of the British Commonwealth. And the American press corps? They were getting nowhere near Operation Urgent Fury. No provisions were made to attach pool reporters to the mission, a remarkable break from traditional US policy. And Reagan officials did more than simply evade the press. On the eve of the invasion, when asked point-blank to confirm an NBC reporter’s question about an impending military action in Grenada, Deputy National Security Adviser John Poindexter flat-out lied. “Preposterous,” he said.
Team Reagan also made the executive decision that it would be imprudent to bring Congress into the loop too early. Somebody on the intelligence committee was sure to leak if informed, the president and his closest advisers believed, and that would jeopardize the entire mission. As far as the White House was concerned, there was simply too much at stake. Secrecy!
As soon as the Boston Whalers went out the rear door of the lead C-130, eight SEALs followed into the unexpected darkness… and into a squall. Clear skies forecast notwithstanding, windswept rain pelted the jumpers, and they hit the water a lot faster than they had expected. A few later estimated that instead of their planned 1,200-foot drop, they’d gone out of the planes at a dangerously low height of about six hundred feet. The first eight SEALs hit the water so hard that fins and equipment pouches sheared off. The swells were as high as ten feet, and the wind on the water so stiff that the parachutes would not deflate.
“It… started dragging me through the water, almost from wave to wave, dragging me facedown, swallowing water rapidly,” one SEAL said later. “I reached up and grabbed the lines of the parachute and started dragging them in, trying to collapse the parachute…. I had a lot of lines all around me…. But I had time to get to my knife and start cutting lines and got enough of them cut so it didn’t start dragging me again.”
The second team of eight had been flung out of its C-130 well away from the assigned drop point, and the scattered men had trouble finding the Boston Whalers on the dark and stormy seas. After a long scramble through the dangerous waters, a few managed to get into one of the boats, but the other SEALs finally gave up and swam toward the lights of the
When they got back early the next morning, the four missing comrades were still lost at sea. The men never would be found, and were likely pulled underwater by their parachutes. The death of four friends did not deter Team Six. They called back to base to request the drop of another Boston Whaler. They’d try again when the sun fell later that evening.
When word reached the Pentagon planners that the SEALs failed to reach land as scheduled—and that they were determined to try again later that evening—the Joint Chiefs suggested a prudent twenty-four-hour delay in the operation, but a State Department liaison surprised the military brass by shooting down that idea. The coalition of Caribbean states that had agreed to back the US overthrow of the Grenadian government, he admitted, was already coming apart at the seams. It might not hold together for another twenty-four hours. If the US military was going to effect this coup, they had to go at the appointed hour. “Besides,” the State Department aide told the military chieftains, “how could the world’s strongest military power need any more time against what is probably the world’s weakest?”
The avowed reason for the urgency of Urgent Fury—planned from scratch in about seventy-two hours—was that American citizens were in grave danger on the island of Grenada. And they had to be rescued in a flash. An intramural scrap inside the island’s Marxist-Leninist government had left the prime minister and a number of his supporters dead and sent his number two and rival into hiding. Power had devolved to a military council and a somewhat rattled general who announced a four-day curfew enforced by armed soldiers. “No one is to leave their house,” the general said. “Anyone violating this curfew will be shot on sight.”
The Reagan administration’s diplomat in the region, the ambassador to Barbados, was a former Nebraska highway commissioner with no experience in foreign affairs. He’d been so offended by the Communists in Grenada that he forbade anybody from his diplomatic team from visiting the island or having contact with its leaders. The advantage of this strategy: it sure looked tough. The disadvantage: it ensured that America had no active Grenadian contacts, no one in-country, no way to make real-time observations on this island we were so concerned with. As best the Reagan national security team could determine (lacking actual on-the-ground information), law and order had completely broken down, leaving more than five hundred US students attending the American-owned and -operated St. George’s University School of Medicine cowering in their rooms, potential hostages. The administration’s draft decision memorandum, written in the main by a Marine lieutenant colonel named Oliver North, called first and foremost for “ensuring the safety of American citizens on Grenada,” but also for standing up a new democratic (aka pro-American) government in Grenada and ridding the island of the biggest Bolsheviks in the
By October 1983, the time of the invasion, Reagan had been beating the presidential tom-toms about the Central America peril for more than two years, and he was growing ever more frustrated that he had been unable to get Congress to fall in step. When the House Intelligence Committee chairman learned from press reports in November 1982 that Reagan’s ambassador in Honduras was secretly training rebels to overthrow the popular but Marxist-leaning government in Nicaragua, he pointedly introduced legislation (which passed) that specifically prohibited the Department of Defense or the CIA from allocating any of their approved budgets to assist and foment a coup in Nicaragua. The usually unflappable Reagan was visibly angered by what he thought was congressional interference. “The Sandinistas have openly proclaimed Communism in their country and their
