Red Menace, Black Ops, Green Light
The Special Forces 'suicide' mission to insert behind enemy lines with backpack nuclear weapons
The men in black
On a warm, clear night in 1983, an Army two-and-a-half-ton truck pulled into a hangar on Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina, and dropped its tailgate. One by one, about a dozen Green Berets from 7th Special Forces Group jumped down.
At the same time, an MC-130 Combat Talon, the special operations version of the venerable Hercules turboprop aircraft, taxied over to the hangar. The plane’s ramp lowered and two men in black flight suits with no patches or other insignia disembarked. They began to give the Green Berets a mission brief as other trucks pulled up loaded with freefall parachutes and other equipment, including live ammunition.
“This is a classified operation,” one of the briefers announced to the Special Forces A-team. “From this point forward, we have command and control.”
Neither of the men in black ever identified themselves or which branch of the U.S. government they worked for.
Then three vehicles filled with security personnel pulled up. One of the vehicles also contained a box. Inside was a device with which the Special Forces men were very familiar, as they had trained on an inert version of it for countless hours, with regular, rigorous inspections conducted to evaluate their competency and reliability in its use. The device that was unpacked and turned over to the team was a Special Atomic Demolition Munition or SADM (pronounced SAY-dum), a small nuclear weapon that contained a fissile core detonated with a dual-primed conventional explosive. The design of the device was not dissimilar to that of the original implosion atomic bomb developed at Los Alamos by J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team during World War II. The difference was this one was miniaturized to the point that it fit inside a rucksack.
Unlike the training device with which the team usually worked, this device had no “Inert” stickers or any other indication that it was anything but a live nuclear weapon. The mysterious men in the black flight suits told the Special Forces A-team, which in this case was known as a Green Light team because it specialized in infiltrating, emplacing, and detonating the SADM, to rig the device for an airborne insertion. But the team still hadn’t received a full operations order.
After preparing their parachutes, rucksacks and the SADM for a freefall jump behind enemy lines, the Green Light team loaded onto the MC-130 with the two men in black. Shortly afterward, they were airborne with no idea of where they were headed. Only when they were three hours into the flight did the men in operational control inform them of their target, according to one member of the team. It was a dam, a dam the team had analyzed and trained to strike many times. A dam in a hostile country.
They were about to jump into Cuba with a low-yield nuclear bomb.