As Tropical Storm Higos blew in from the Pacific, Stephen Stanek, a covert CIA operative, faced a decision. It was time to either cancel the operation he was running or go forward with it. The storm was barreling through the Philippines but was then projected to veer north and miss their area of operation.
Stanek’s
partner for the operation, a younger man named Michael Perich, had recently
graduated from the Merchant Marine Academy. A football player at the academy,
Perich was now at the beginning of his career in paramilitary operations and
had just recently been trained as a scuba diver.
Two
other men were aboard their 40-foot vessel, Jamie McCormick and Daniel Meeks,
both in supporting roles. Stanek, a retired Navy ordnance disposal diver, was
highly experienced but had only recently attained his license to be a ship
captain, according to those who knew him.
The crew
had spent the last several days sailing up the coast of the Philippines after
departing Malaysia in what was to be the maiden voyage of their ship, which was
secretly owned by the CIA’s Maritime Branch.
Their
cover story for the 2008 mission was that a client in Japan had bought the
vessel, and the crew had been hired to transport it there from Malaysia. They
had paperwork and documentation to back up the story if questioned.
Their
actual target was a small piece of land to the north of Luzon, the Philippines’
largest island. The CIA believed the Chinese military was occupying this small
island in an area that has been hotly disputed. The U.S. in recent years has
closely watched China’s military moves in the South China Sea, particularly as
Beijing has built up artificial islands on reefs and atolls that were once
barely visible at low tide in order to extend its territorial claims.
Stanek
and Perich planned to dive on the island using commercial scuba gear that would
be deniable in the event they were captured, whether by the Chinese or anyone
else. There were to be no U.S. government fingerprints on any of their
activities. Deployed from the small ship, the two divers would emplace a “pod”
disguised as a rock and stuffed with classified technology just beneath the
surface of the waves. It would then passively monitor electronic signals of
Chinese naval ships.
Once
they returned to their ship, the crew would head for Japan, where they would
cool their heels for a few weeks before returning and retrieving the device.
Stanek
would have closely examined the onboard weather radar system in those final
moments before making his decision. According to his Navy service records as
well as friends and teammates, Stanek was a patriot and a mentor, the kind of
sailor admired by his peers for his hard work and can-do attitude.
But he
was also under pressure to make it work. The mission wasn’t just about placing
a device on one island, it was a proof of concept that would demonstrate the
continued relevance of the CIA’s Maritime Branch.
The
mission came as Maritime Branch was struggling to prove its reason for
existence. Several U.S. Navy programs also made use of “covered” maritime
assets, meaning ships that hid behind commercial cover. The CIA’s Maritime
Branch was essentially in competition with the Navy, and this mission would
help prove its worth.
It’s
impossible to know how much that played into Stanek’s decision, but gambling
that the storm would change course as meteorologists predicted, he decided to
go forward with the covert operation.
The
maritime company that officially employed Stanek and the other crew members
sits at the end of a quiet road in Panama City, Fla. It is surrounded by a
barbed wire fence and plastic slats to prevent anyone from seeing inside.
Incorporated in 1983, the company claims on paper to buy and sell boats, yet it
never seems to have any in its marina.
Local
residents say they have no idea what the company does, and phone calls to its
office were not returned.
The
company is, in fact, a commercial cover for the CIA’s Maritime Branch,
according to a former CIA employee. “We build these companies from whole cloth,
from the ground up,” the former CIA employee told Yahoo News, which is not
identifying its name, since it is still used in ongoing covert operations.
Maritime
Branch is one of the CIA’s paramilitary components. Nestled within the agency’s
organizational structure is the Special Activities Division, today known as the
Special Activities Center, which includes Special Operations Group (SOG), which
conducts paramilitary operations, and Covert Influence Group (CIG), which
specializes in disinformation and propaganda operations.
SOG has
three paramilitary branches. Air Branch covertly maintains fleets of
helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft all over the world, including the
CIA-operated, Russian-made helicopters that ran logistics and delivered troops
in Afghanistan during and after the 2001 invasion. Ground Branch functions as
the CIA’s version of Special Forces but operates under the agency’s covert
action authorities; it often works in tandem with operations officers (the
agency’s spies) and, at times, the U.S. military. Once filled with former
Marines, today Ground Branch is home to many former Delta Force operators.
Maritime
Branch covertly operates sea vessels in South America, West Africa and a few
other locations. They can be used to extract CIA officers or their assets if called
upon. “Maritime Branch was trying to become relevant again in SOG and SAD,” a
former CIA officer said, “because mostly it was just a place for former SEALs
to hang out with between Ground Branch tours.”
On Sept.
28, 2008, Stanek made the call to push forward with the operation. The storm
was predicted to take a sharp turn away from them, even though they were
currently in its trajectory. It was a calculated risk.
The
40-foot ship seemed small in open waters, and it must have seemed even smaller
when the unthinkable happened. Higos did not change its trajectory but instead
barreled down on the four men. At that point it didn’t matter which direction
they attempted to turn, they were going to get broadsided by the storm
regardless.
The CIA
had a beacon on the ship that tracked the boat right into the center of the
storm until it disappeared, a former SAD member told Yahoo News.
U.S.
military personnel in the region remained oblivious to the CIA’s failed covert
operation and had no part in any recovery efforts. The CIA coordinated with the
Japanese Self-Defense Forces to have their ships make some sweeps to find the
missing personnel. Nothing was ever found, “not even a floating life jacket,” a
former CIA officer recalled.
One of
Stanek’s old dive buddies from the Navy was at a bar in Panama City with
friends when they got a call about his death. “We all knew better than to ask
questions,” the former Navy diver said.
Stateside,
the families of the deceased, who didn’t even know their husbands and sons had
been working for the CIA, had to be informed about what had happened.
Internally, the CIA officers blamed the mission failure and deaths of four of
their men on Bob Kandra, the SAD chief at the time.
“There
was a lot of pressure to do ops,” a former CIA operations officer explained.
“They just didn’t have to die. They did a mission that you didn’t have to do,
and Bob was such a bad leader. A lot of officers blame Kandra for the shit that
happened in the Pacific.”
His
blemishes and mistakes were glossed over because he was senior intelligence
staff when he ran the Special Activities Division, according to the former
operations officer.
Kandra
had a reputation for poor leadership dating back to his days in Iraq, when he
had T-shirts made that read, “I got laid in Baghdad.” That intensified after he
was elevated to the CIA’s senior management ranks, known as special
intelligence service, or SIS, according to two former agency employees. “He was
protected by the SIS mafia,” said a former SAD officer.
“Kandra
was a continuous screw-up, but once they make you a SIS they don’t flush you,”
the former CIA officer agreed.
Kandra
did not respond to messages sent through email and social media to accounts
publicly linked to him, and Yahoo News was unable to reach him through a phone
number listed under his name. The CIA declined to comment about the mission or
allegations about Kandra’s performance.
However,
the covert operation maintained its cover, even in the aftermath of a
catastrophic failure. Death certificates were quietly issued with a lawyer
hired by the CIA’s Panama City cover company filing the paperwork.
A few
months after the men’s deaths, the CIA flew their families to the Washington,
D.C., area and put them up in a hotel in Tyson’s Corner, Va. The CIA didn’t
want them going around the city by themselves and potentially revealing why
they were there. Once they were checked in, CIA employees met with them in a
private room, and for the first time they were told that their loved ones had
died during a secret CIA mission.
However,
the explanations were less than satisfying for some of the relatives.
Perich’s
grandmother was crying and desperate for hope that Michael could still be
alive, according to a CIA officer who was present. She wanted to believe that
maybe the Chinese government had kidnapped them, though it was clear they had
died in the storm. “They had questions no one could answer,” the former CIA
officer said of their desire to know what exactly had transpired in the middle
of the storm.
The next
day, the families visited CIA headquarters at Langley, Va., and met Director
Michael Hayden and members of Maritime Branch. There was also a ceremony at the
memorial wall, a slab of white marble with stars chiseled into it, each
representing a CIA officer or proprietary contract employee who died in the
line of duty since the agency’s inception. Of the 135 stars on the wall, many
are now named in the display book beneath it. Others remain anonymous, the
details of the CIA employees’ deaths classified to this day.
In 2008,
six anonymous stars were added to the wall. Four of them belong to Stephen
Stanek, Michael Perich, Jamie McCormick and Daniel Meeks. The surviving family
members declined to speak to the press when contacted by Yahoo News. A
spokeswoman for the CIA declined to comment, citing the classified nature of
the agency’s operations.
More
than a decade after the operation, many in the CIA felt that Kandra, who has
since retired, was never held to account for the deaths. Eventually he was
removed from SAD and sent to a low-pressure job in Vienna, Austria. But he was
pulled from that station as well over what one former CIA operations officer
described as Kandra’s “chaos as a leadership style.”
In the
meantime, a new Cold War has continued to play out in the South China Sea. In
2016, the Chinese Navy plucked an American-made undersea drone out of the ocean
that appeared to have been monitoring one of their ships 50 miles off the coast
of the Philippines. This may indicate that, much like the CIA’s drone program
over Pakistan, and elsewhere, the undersea espionage taking place in the South
China Sea has been automated, conducted with robots that limit the risk to
human life.
The
Pentagon asked for the drone back, claiming it was an unclassified system used
to gather oceanographic data. The Chinese obliged and turned it over to the
U.S. Navy in international waters four days later. Even if that particular
mission ended in capture by the Chinese, no one died.
***More:
https://news.yahoo.com/the-cia-sent-a-team-of-four-operators-on-a-spy-mission-targeting-china-none-came-back-090041816.html
***Correction:
A previous version of this article incorrectly identified Tropical Storm Higos
as a hurricane.