Transcription
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NARRATOR: They operate in the shadows.
STEVEN HARTOV: The Army public affairs officials do not talk about them by name.
NARRATOR: Men trained to kill.
MARC AMBINDER: You just didn't hear about those missions because they were operated extremely discreetly.
NARRATOR: Without leaving a trace.
MARK ZAID: These teams never have anyone coming to rescue them if they are ever captured. Let's go! Let's go! Move! Move!
NARRATOR: But who are these secret forces?
PAUL SPRINGER: They might very well win the Congressional Medal of Honor, but you won't know why.
NARRATOR: And what are their covert methods? They operate outside the code of military justice.
MICHAEL SMITH: They don't talk about that unit, which is why we don't really know what its current name is.
NARRATOR: There are those who believe in the existence of a book, a book that contains the most highly guarded secrets of the United States of America, a book whose very existence is known to only a select few. But if such a book exists, what would it contain? Secret missions? Secret technology? Secret agendas? Does there really exist "America's Book of Secrets?"
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October 5, 2013-- two counter-terrorism offenses are launched simultaneously in Africa. In southern Somalia, a team of US Navy SEALs hunts for a terrorist leader known as Ikrima, a man responsible for massacring 67 people at a Kenyan mall one month earlier. But during a fierce gun battle, Ikrima escapes.
Meanwhile, 3,000 miles Northwest in Tripoli, Libya, a band of masked men drives through the city streets trying to locate Abu Anas Al-Libi, an al-Qaeda leader indicted for taking part in the bombings of two United States embassies. Al-Libi is returning, according to his wife, from prayers close to his home when suddenly a bunch of cars surround him. Bunch of masked men with guns get out. They yell at him in his own language to get into their car. Wife is all watching this. And he does, and he disappears. And he's taken presumably somewhere far away outside the country.
NARRATOR: The Navy SEALs quickly acknowledge their failed attempt to detain Ikrima in Somalia but take no credit for capturing Al-Libi in Libya. But just who was the mysterious group of soldiers that successfully pulled off a brazen kidnapping right out in the open?
There really are only a handful of organizations in the entire world that can snatch somebody off a street like that. Delta Force is is one. Delta Force is the popular name for an Army special missions unit that goes by the cover term of the combat application group, essentially the most highly trained, highly sophisticated, incredibly smart group of men usually knowing two or more languages capable of performing the most sensitive, most dangerous missions that an Army can be called upon to perform. Technically, they're not allowed to admit that Delta Force exists.
NARRATOR: Anonymous military sources later confirm that Delta Force was the unit behind the kidnapping. The incident marks one of the few times that the United States has admitted using secret forces in the global war on terror. According to insider reports, Delta Force like the Navy SEALs is a top tier military unit designed to be ready for action at any time. And like the SEALs, Delta Force is purposely designed to be so undercover they're practically invisible. These are military members who are often designed to blend in so they don't have to necessarily wear uniforms. They're oftentimes in civilian clothes.
PAUL SPRINGER: So they might very well win the Congressional Medal of Honor, but you won't know why. They won't tell you why. And you take it on faith that, in fact, they did something very heroic.
NARRATOR: Many believe Delta Force is one of the most prestigious and clandestine units in all the armed forces. And while the maneuvers of the Navy's SEAL Team 6 have made headlines around the world, the missions Delta Force perform are just as deadly but even more covert.
MARC AMBINDER: Everyone is familiar with the exploits of SEAL Team 6 and the capture of Osama bin Laden. But what was Delta Force doing during the War on Terror? Well, they were actually doing quite a bit. They were doing enormous number of counterterrorism raids in Africa. Delta Force had the responsibility for everything the US needed to do in South America. Delta Force was operating in Beirut. You just didn't hear about those missions because they were operated extremely discreetly and usually successfully.
MARK ZAID: They could be involved in assassinations of terrorists, of renditions of capture, of seizing or rescuing hostages.
NARRATOR: Special teams like the Navy SEALs and Delta Force appear to operate as a first strike against terrorist groups trying to take them down before they can hatch their deadly plots. While their missions remain top secret, Delta Force is suspected of participating in Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Objective Medford-- a raid that saved foreign workers in Ramadi. But why do these missions really need to be so hidden and with absolutely no public oversight even after they've been completed?
MARK ZAID: They have to operate in intense secrecy. Because if their identities become known, they and their families may be subject to danger by our enemies. If members of SEAL Team Six, who was part of the raid that led to the death of bin Laden, if their identities are known, well, members of al-Qaeda may design an attempt to go after them and their families.
NARRATOR: Could a terrorist like Ikrima in southern Somalia or one of his many followers already be plotting revenge, perhaps even making a list of retaliation against the forces that tried to capture him? Some believe that list would include another secret unit, one that carry American forces to northern Africa. They're called the Night Stalkers.
The Night Stalkers is the name of the US Army's Special Operations aviation regiment. They are probably the best Special Operations type pilots in the world. And they fly secret, clandestine, long-range, very difficult missions. Essentially, the Night Stalkers will deliver Delta Force, SEALs, other special operators to clandestine top secret missions under very difficult conditions.
MARK ZAID: They were involved with Grenada, with Panama, with Operation Desert Storm, and most recently with the raid on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan.
STEVEN HARTOV: The Army public affairs officials do not talk about them by name. You might only hear about them by accident.
NARRATOR: Believed to have been founded in 1981, the Night Stalkers received their name specifically because their operations were kept so secret.
STEVEN HARTOV: They were functioning only at night, training only at night. And a lot of their equipment had to be hid from overflights of Russian satellites so even the equipment only came out at night. So they operated from dusk to dawn and not during the day. And they started calling themselves the Night Stalkers. Let's go! Let's go! Move! Move!
NARRATOR: May 2, 2011-- the Night Stalkers carry the Navy's secret SEAL Team 6 to Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The stalkers have been training for this mission for months. But as they tried to land their choppers, something goes terribly wrong. What happened in the raid that was the most unexpected was that one of the Blackhawks crashed.
NARRATOR: What the Night Stalkers did next was extraordinary. They set their disabled chopper on fire. 3, 2.
NARRATOR: And blew it up. But why? Could there have been a strategic or even secret reason? Some suspect the Night Stalkers were trying to hide evidence of a top secret Blackhawk craft. What made that particular helicopter in the bin Laden raid or the pair of them secret was that they had been turned into stealth helicopters using technology that's much like the F-117 stealth fighter-- radar technology, night vision technology, mapping and navigation technology. So they had to destroy everything and as much as they could.
MARC AMBINDER: Had that helicopter not crashed during the bin Laden raid, it's quite possible that we would've never known that it was one of the two most highly sensitive secret helicopters that the military had built. Pakistan took custody of the helicopter. And the US government believes that Pakistan shared it with a very, very, very eager Chinese government, which wanted to see the latest in US stealth technology.
NARRATOR: But while an enemy gaining access to a piece of top secret technology could result in a national security breach, what if one of the nameless soldiers had been injured or captured? Would the mission be so secret that no one could even get in to rescue them?
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Abbottabad, Pakistan, May 2, 2011-- after the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound exposes the involvement of a top secret Blackhawk chopper, many begin to ask questions about the flying Army known as the Night Stalkers. But given the covert nature of their activities, just how far would the US government go in order to keep the actions and even the identities of its secret soldiers strictly under wraps?
Under certain circumstances, those personnel may be operating without uniforms. And under certain circumstances, the United States government may be put in an embarrassing position should members of special forces be captured or killed.
MARK ZAID: The secret armies that the US government has like the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, if they are ever captured by the enemy, it may be that their mission requires that the US government disavow any knowledge of these individuals. Because to acknowledge the captured member of this team which is now operating in a foreign territory-- that could create the possibility of war. So these members of these teams may never have anyone coming to rescue them if they are ever captured.
NARRATOR: But if soldiers with no identities are fighting America's most secret battles, who do they ultimately answer to? According to some reports, the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, and Night Stalkers are all secret armies quietly taking orders from the Joint Special Operations Command or JSOC.
JSOC is the cover command for the special missions units in these standing joint task forces that do some of the most sensitive and difficult and in some ways most kinetic work of the US military. The secret Army is JSOC.
NARRATOR: Although insiders have revealed very little about JSOC-- ALL: Oh, yeah! 2, 2, 4!
NARRATOR: --some say that after the 9/11 attacks, the White House grew the command from fewer than 2,000 troops to as many as 25,000. And JSOC has secretly destroyed more terrorist training camps than the rest of the United States forces combined.
Historically, it took a nation state to attack a nation state. It took vast armies. It took navies. But with what's called asymmetrical warfare, a very small group of people can launch an attack against a very large nation. So the Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC, may deploy the kind of resource that's necessary to have a targeted response to what is a limited threat when it comes to the size of the operation.
NARRATOR: In 2008, President George W. Bush approved a secret border authorizing special ops forces to conduct clandestine military strikes in Pakistan without the public's knowledge and requiring the utmost level of covertness. In fact, JSOC operates with such confidentiality, their missions are kept hidden from virtually all other entities of the government. But why?
MARC AMBINDER: One of the big reasons for secrecy is that these secret missions, for the most part, are not necessarily legal under international law from our standpoint.
NARRATOR: But just how could an organization like JSOC even gather information about Pakistani targets without exposing the entire operation? Many suspect it was through the most top secret unit within JSOC called the Activity.
MICHAEL SMITH: The government doesn't talk about the Activity. It doesn't acknowledge their presence. They are perhaps the most secretive of all those organizations within the Joint Special Operations Command, which is why we don't really know what its current name is. The best way to think of what the Activity is is kind of a mini CIA within the joint Special Operations Command. Their goal is to prepare the battlefield, gather intelligence ahead of the Special Operations raid. Sometimes, weeks and months on end, they'll establish themselves in a city. And they'll just listen, and they'll track targets. There are linguists, communications experts, pilots. And their goal is to make sure that SEAL Team 6, Delta Force, other units have absolutely the best real-time intelligence picture.
NARRATOR: But while the goal of this so-called Activity is to simply gather information on high value targets, these men are also well-trained killer commandos.
MICHAEL SMITH: They all have to be Special Operations trained. They all have to be very fit. They all have to be able to do every aspect of Special Operations just as any Special Operations soldier would have to do.
NARRATOR: So exactly what do these elite undercover soldiers go through to gather intelligence for other tier 1 units? According to some reports, it's a lengthy process known as taking down a mountain-- a strategy first developed by the Activity when they first apprehended Colombian drug runner Pablo Escobar in 1993. Since then, officials won't acknowledge when the strategy has been used. But according to anonymous sources, the most recently acknowledged case of the Activity taking down the mountain was the capture of Saddam Hussein during Operation Red Dawn in December 2003.
You've got a very secretive network protecting him, hiding him, moving on from place to place. But once you've got into one, then you can start tracking. You start at the bottom of a mountain. Then you grab the lower level guys. And you find information from him that gives you information about other guys. And you get to the people at the top who know where Saddam Hussein is. And that's precisely how they did it.
NARRATOR: Based on their previous track record of search and capture, most experts agree that the Activity has been successful with their covert missions. But these offensives cost money. Tracking suspects, setting up spy cells, and having access to the highest level of equipment must be paid for somehow. So just how does a secret unit like the Activity receive funding for its clandestine assignments?
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As America enters a new era of unconventional warfare, secret armies such as Delta Force, the Night Stalkers, and the aptly named Intelligence Support Activity become more and more vital to national security. By definition, these top secret forces require the best in trained manpower and high-tech weaponry. But how can these operations be funded if no one can even admit knowing about them? Some say the answer is simple-- America's black budgets.
Black budgets are simply budgets for secret operations that are not made public. These budgets are overseen by Congress. And these budgets are used for very advanced weapons systems, very advanced surveillance systems.
MARC AMBINDER: There's no question that even with some congressional oversight, it's much harder to hold these programs accountable and people who operate them accountable simply because they operate in-- in shadows.
NARRATOR: March 5, 2014-- President Barack Obama proposes a $495 billion defense budget for 2015, almost half a billion less than a year before. But on close examination, there is one category that shows a meteoric rise-- the clandestine black budgets. Some will no doubt say that the spending reductions are too big. Others will say that they're too small.
NARRATOR: But with allocations so large and with so little accountability, many in Congress argue there is virtually no way to measure whether goals are being met either financially or tactically. A unit that technically doesn't even exist-- you can get away with a lot more. And in this condition lies some of the big difficulties that people have with America's secret armies. It's basically the government telling us it's none of your business. Just give us the money and shut up.
NARRATOR: But why are America's black budgets so secret? Is it really to safeguard national security? Or is it to hide the government's reckless overspending from the public?
ERICH MULLER: Oversight-- there is no oversight. It's secret upon secret wrapped in an enigma and some fortune cookie BS. This black budget spending has gone on unquestioned since World War II. It's been nonstop. I think it's time we start asking some questions.
NARRATOR: But to begin asking questions about potential abuses embedded in the black budget, where would one even start to look? There are those who believe the answer is simple and hiding in plain sight.
MARC AMBINDER: When you look at the line item on the budget, it simply says classified programs. It doesn't spell out what the programs are for, who's operating them. The budgets are secret because the units are secret. What they do is secret. The technology is secret. The procurement is secret.
NARRATOR: Given the top secret nature of the government's covert military operations and its huge cost, just who or what has oversight? Is it the President of the United States, the commander in chief? Shockingly, the answer may be no.
US presidents cannot and must not know all of the black budget operations that go on in this country. They're not able to. And then you have plausible deniability. This is absolutely essential for any president. We've got all of these illegal, yeah, sure, unconstitutional activities or shady activities. The president's got to be able to say that he doesn't know about them. And he's got be able to do in a way that's believable. And if he knows about it, it's going to be a little harder to do that.
PAUL SPRINGER: The goals of black budget activities are things that if disclosed to the American public would compromise the safety and the missions of the individuals involved. Black budget activities are absolutely necessary for the safety and security of our nation.
NARRATOR: But if the United States government can fund massive military programs with virtually no oversight from the American public, could there be a danger of those forces getting out of control, especially if those forces aren't even human?
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In the 2004 feature film "I Robot," the fictional company United States Robotics creates anthropomorphic robots to act as America's armed forces. While the scenario seems fantastical, some experts believe that this future vision, an army made up entirely of robots, is closer than we think. In fact, it could already be happening.
PETER SINGER: Robotics is one of those things that like flying machines back in the day was once science fiction. And now it's normal in war.
RONALD KESSLER: Robots are being developed to attack, detonate explosives, to conduct surveillance, to do anything that a soldier might do but much more safely.
NARRATOR: The armed forces development of robotic technologies falls under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA. In recent years, DARPA has held an annual robotics challenge-- a competition for universities and private companies to create semiautonomous ground robots. One of the most successful robots to come out of the challenge is ATLAS-- a 6 foot 2, 330-pound robot that resembles the Terminator. DARPA claims the robot will only be used for disaster relief and that there are no plans to arm the machine in the future.
ATLAS is a robot that is capable of using human tools. ATLAS could have weapons attached to it in some fashion. However, it would not be a practical utilization of the ATLAS technology.
NARRATOR: But despite DARPA's assurances, some wonder if ATLAS and other robots like it could make future wars almost entirely mechanical.
ERICH MULLER: They have these things look like "Star Wars" AT-AT walkers, these tanks with legs. They have those. They have all these secret programs. Robotic hunter killers are happening right now. They're keeping it secret, but in the next five or 10 years, humans will have to tell them to kill. This is why all these kids are playing video games all the time. They're getting them ready to be good little soldiers to control the robots. This is already happening.
NARRATOR: Will it really be possible to take humans soldiers out of the frontlines of the battlefield, changing warfare as we know it?
PETER SINGER: Robotics allows you to carry out acts of force without sending people into harm's way. One soldier put it to me, we don't have to write a condolence letter to someone's mother. That's powerful. But it also means that the politicians look at those operations differently. And they're more likely to authorize operations and not think about some of the consequences as they would when there's human going in harm's way.
ALEX JONES: The elite have always lusted after having a military that will follow any order. Robots on the ground, on the surface of the sea, under the water, and in the air will follow those orders.
NARRATOR: The ATLAS robot is still in its developmental stage and needs a human being to program it and make sure it carries out its orders. But could there someday be an army of ATLAS robots able to think for themselves?
PETER SINGER: The US military has gone from having literally a handful of drones when we went into Afghanistan, none of them armed, to we now have more than 8,000 unmanned aerial systems in the inventory. Current generation, they can do things like take off and land on their own, fly mission waypoints on their own, make sense of what they're seeing on their own. They're not the Terminator. They're not making their own decisions. But they're certainly not remotely piloted in the way we traditionally think of it. The rise of the machines, a literal Skynet, is a real threat. We already have autonomous drones that the United States and England have launched that are picking their own targets, deciding who to kill.
NARRATOR: The ATLAS robot and manned drones reveal how soldiers can carry out their orders from central command stations instead of on an overseas battlefield. But as America's military operations become more and more high tech, there are many who worry that the enemy may no longer be targeting us from behind the barrel of a gun, but sitting at a desk armed with only a keyboard.
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Fort Meade, Maryland, 23 miles North of the White House. Described by some as its own secret city, this military installation houses the National Security Agency and the United States Cyber Command. Many suspect the cyber war is being carried out here behind closed doors and that it may be a major threat in the not-so-distant future.
PETER SINGER: Fort Meade is the home of the US's cyber operations and intelligence gathering. What stands out about the importance of Fort Meade is illustrated by its scale. There's over 57,000 military and civilian workers there, which means there's more people working at Fort Meade than there are in the Pentagon itself.
SAMY KAMKAR: Cyber warfare is definitely the future of warfare. There's definitely a lot of governments trying to build up their essentially cyber armies. They're trying to create hackers in hacker labs. We hear anonymous stories from anonymous hackers that are improving hacking and learning how to break into other countries and other nation's systems.
NARRATOR: June 2010, Minsk, Belarus-- a small malware detection firm called VirusBlokAda discovers a strange virus on a client server.
PAUL SPRINGER: The Belarusian cybersecurity firm detected it as a different form of virus.
NARRATOR: Strangely, the virus or malware is unlike any the firm has ever seen. They share the shocking find with the cybersecurity community, hoping to locate its origins and figure out how to stop it from spreading. But what the cyber community unveils next is even more surprising. The secret malware dubbed Stuxnet was first used in 2007 to attack Iran's nuclear program.
PETER SINGER: Stuxnet was a digital weapon designed to sabotage Iranian nuclear research by damaging what the centrifuges were working on. It was made of zeros and ones. So it was both something but nothing.
NARRATOR: Experts say the Stuxnet virus was able to physically stop Iranian nuclear centrifuges from spinning. For the first time in the history of cyber warfare, a computer virus was able to spy on and actually alter a SCADA or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System in real time.
PETER SINGER: Stuxnet was a game changer. It was a weapon that was like any other weapon in history, whether it was the first stone that someone picked up or spear or a bullet. It caused kinetic change. It caused physical damage.
NARRATOR: It wasn't until 2012 that anonymous sources in the Obama administration took credit for the secret attack from five years earlier. By many accounts, this secret army of hackers at US Cyber Command is only growing larger and larger. In fact, the Pentagon has asked Congress for $4.7 billion, almost $1 billion more than the 2013 allocation for increased cyber space operations.
Just as we've started to use the internet for everything from our commerce to our communication to our social relationships, the same thing is happening in conflict. If the internet is the future for humanity, it's definitely the future for war.
NARRATOR: Since the discovery of Stuxnet, a number of other malware emerged, including ones named Duqu and the Flame.
PETER SINGER: Instead of causing physical damage, they stole information from the computers that their targets were using. So they did things like recorded the key strokes of what people were typing. They weren't just downloading information. They were tracking what was going on.
SAMY KAMKAR: Those servers also had the ability to control those computers and at any time also kill the Flame virus in case the Flame virus had been found. And at one point, the authors did send a kill command to all the computers which had the Flame virus. Cyber war is a game with really low barriers to entry. So besides, for example, the US, there's over 100 different nations out there that have some kind of cyber military operations.
JOHN ASHCROFT: If a nation state sponsors a cyber attack against the United States government and its cyber network, I would expect retaliation. Our liberty and freedom and the nature and character of our culture is at stake.
NARRATOR: Is it possible there is a secret war being waged over the internet? And if so, does the heightened diplomacy of international law require the use of an entirely different secret army, one that the United States can use to deny any accountability while secretly executing America's international agenda?
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Moyock, North Carolina, March 19, 2005-- King Abdullah of Jordan and his brothers visit the private security company Blackwater and its founder Erik Prince. At the day's end, Blackwater executives present the King and his entourage with some special gifts-- a Remington shotgun, a modified Bushmaster AR-15 rifle, and three Glock pistols. The gesture lands Blackwater in hot water with a federal charge of improper gift giving. But the security company has a shocking defense against the allegations. They were simply acting under the direction of the CIA.
These private armies can and do get away with many things our ordinary military cannot. I think this is one of the reasons why governments and corporations like to employ these private armies because they can evade rules of diplomacy and international law. In truth, Congress and the executive branch use them as plausible deniability to carry out arms shipments to Jordan and Sudan and other countries. Whereas Iran-Contra was completely illegal and caused investigations because they used the Marine Corps for the transfers, now they just use the contractors. And it creates another level of secrecy for shadow government to operate outside of oversight.
NARRATOR: In 2013, the Justice Department ultimately dropped charges against Blackwater for giving arms to Jordan. But this isn't the first time a mercenary group has been under fire. In 2008, CIA director Michael Hayden admitted to Congress that secret contractors employed by the CIA engaged in the waterboarding of terrorist suspects. And in 2009, it was revealed that Blackwater helped arm and deploy CIA predator drones to attack targets in Pakistan.
MICHAEL RIVERO: They operate outside the code of military justice. And they commit atrocities which harm the image of the United States internationally. But I think most of these private armies are being deployed not in defense of the United States of America but in furtherance of American corporate interests-- the desire to go into a country and force them to organize and operate their economy in a way that benefits the American corporations, to sell their resources only for the US dollar.
NARRATOR: When troop withdrawal in Iraq began in June 2009, some believed contractor-run private armies like Blackwater now named AcadeI would need to find other ways to expand their business model. And one of the area's mercenary armies have expanded most is in the patrol of the high seas.
October 2013, Southeast India-- the Indian Coast Guard intercepts the Seaman Guard Ohio, a US mercenary ship owned by the private security contractor AdvanFort.
PAUL SPRINGER: That particular corporation offers individual vessels that will serve as escorts to prohibit or to deter pirate attacks.
JOHN ASHCROFT: I can anticipate that a shipping company might want to have a strategy for how they would resist piracy. Most of the people involved in these institutions that are privately contracted for security purposes-- most of these people are people with vast experience and training usually retired from the military at one point or another.
[gunshots]
NARRATOR: Because the crew is armed but not part of any recognized military, they are imprisoned. Some now wonder are private mercenaries replacing the role of traditional armed forces but taking additional risk?
The cost of hiring a private military firm to secure a cargo vessel tends to be quite a bit smaller than the cost associated with rescuing a vessel once it has been captured by a pirate force. Many corporations have been forced to pay to get their employees back from pirate forces.
NARRATOR: The crew of the Seaman Guard Ohio was ultimately released after two months. But should Americans worry that private secret armies like their government counterparts may not be operating within the law?
MARC AMBINDER: My view is this. There is no harm in being paranoid. In fact, paranoia in general is a good thing because it keeps the government on its toes. Americans are right to be both concerned about the secret army and also proud what the secret army does.
NARRATOR: Clandestine soldiers, covert control centers, top secret technology-- America's so-called secret armies operate in the shadows, ready to strike at any time. But should we be concerned not about their training or our preparedness for combat, but about the nature of their mysterious missions and just who or what is pulling the strings?