Top Highlights

• regard by the obsessive secrecy that permeated and surrounded the command. It was a principal factor behind the shambolic performance in Grenada, because many senior conventional force commanders were not even aware of JSOC’s existence, let alone knew how best to employ its units. “It was so, so top secret that it was extremely difficult to do our ...
• was a Saturday morning, but the staffers returned to the Pentagon and got hold of the latest Keyhole pictures. The staffers compared the new pictures with the originals in Boykin’s hands, noted the differences—“where they could see people on the roof of a building or
• where a guard post had been established”—and then traced those differences onto a new piece of paper sized to the exact dimensions of the original satellite photos and faxed that image to Boykin’s team, who used it as an overlay for their imagery. “It was very rudimentary, but it was effective,” said a Delta officer.
• Delta operators also delighted in confounding JSOC exercise planners by figuring out ways to penetrate the facilities that didn’t involve drilling and blasting. “We’d have the rest of the troop or squadron scour this place for access points and most of the time it was a simple fix,” said an operator. “One time we used a high-lift jack, lifted the d...
• six minutes. The JSOC folks are like, ‘That’s a six-hour door!’” On another occasion, during a joint readiness exercise at an old Russian nuclear weapons storage depot in Poland, the heavy breachers had barely gotten their drills and explosives unpacked when operators found an air shaft and fast-roped down it into the facility to open the door from...