Exclusive: Survivors clinging to capsized boat didn’t radio for backup, admiral overseeing double-tap strike tells lawmakers

By Katie Bo Lillis, Natasha Bertrand, Haley Britzky, CNN

(CNN) — The two men killed as they floated holding onto their capsized boat in a secondary strike against a suspected drug vessel in early September did not appear to have radio or other communications devices, the top military official overseeing the strike told lawmakers on Thursday, according to three sources with direct knowledge of his congressional briefings.

As far back as September, defense officials have been quietly pushing back on criticism that killing the two survivors amounted to a war crime by arguing, in part, that they were legitimate targets because they appeared to be radioing for help or backup — reinforcements that, if they had received it, could have theoretically allowed them to continue to traffic the drugs aboard their sinking ship.

Defense officials made that claim in at least one briefing in September for congressional staff, according to a source familiar with the session, and several media outlets cited officials repeating that justification in the last week.

But Thursday, Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley acknowledged that the two survivors of the military’s initial strike were in no position to make a distress call in his briefings to lawmakers. Bradley was in charge of Joint Special Operations Command at the time of the strike and was the top military officer directing the attack.

The initial hit on the vessel, believed to be carrying cocaine, killed nine people immediately and split the boat in half, capsizing it and sending a massive smoke plume into the sky, the sources who viewed the video as part of the briefings said. Part of the surveillance video was a zoomed-in, higher-definition view of the two survivors clinging to a still-floating, capsized portion, they said.

For a little under an hour — 41 minutes, according to a separate US official — Bradley and the rest of the US military command center discussed what to do as they watched the men struggle to overturn what was left of their boat, the sources said.

Ultimately, Bradley told lawmakers, he ordered a second strike to destroy the remains of the vessel, killing the two survivors, on the grounds that it appeared that part of the vessel remained afloat because it still held cocaine, according to one of the sources. The survivors could hypothetically have floated to safety, been rescued, and carried on with trafficking the drugs, the logic went.

The other source with direct knowledge of the briefing called that rationale “f**king insane.”

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, and Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, who were also briefed, the military used a total of four missiles to sink the boat: two missiles in the initial strike, according to Coons, and two in the second strike.

It was the most detailed account of the September 2 strike to date — yet it came no closer to creating a consensus view.

It is considered a war crime to kill shipwrecked people, which the Pentagon’s law of war manual defines as people “in need of assistance and care” who “must refrain from any hostile act.” Although most Republicans have signaled support for President Donald Trump’s broader military campaign in the Caribbean, the secondary strike on September 2 has drawn bipartisan scrutiny — including, most consequentially, a vow from the Senate Armed Services Committee to conduct oversight.

But after Thursday’s round-robin of closed-door briefings by Bradley, what had been poised to be the most significant congressional scrutiny of the campaign to date appeared to fracture along party lines.

Interpretations of the video differed wildly: Cotton said he “saw two survivors trying to flip a boat, loaded with drugs bound for the United States, back over so they could stay in the fight.” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut, called it “one of the most troubling things” he has seen as a lawmaker.

“Any American who sees the video that I saw will see the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors — bad guys, bad guys, but attacking shipwrecked sailors,” Himes said. “Yes, they were carrying drugs. They were not in the position to continue their mission in any way.”

Himes later told CNN’s Jake Tapper that, “The end result was two individuals without any weaponry, without any tools of any kind, clinging to a wrecked boat … the decision was taken to kill them and that is in fact what happened. And that was pretty hard to watch.”

Shifting story

The apparent abandonment of defense officials’ claims of a distress call as evidence of continued hostile intent — and thus, the validity of the secondary strike — is only the latest in a series of shifting accounts from the Trump administration since reports first emerged in the press over the weekend.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his spokespeople initially railed against reporting of the second strike, with Hegseth calling it “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting.” Just days later, however, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the second strike occurred and said Bradley was the one who ordered it.

Hegseth’s role in the secondary strike — including the precise orders he gave Bradley — continues to be a point of scrutiny.

Himes and other lawmakers said Thursday that the admiral told them that Hegseth did not issue an order to “kill them all,” as the Washington Post initially reported.

Lawmakers were told on Thursday that Hegseth had made clear before the mission began that the strikes should be lethal, but that he was not made aware of the survivors until after they had been killed, one of the sources with direct knowledge said.

During a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Hegseth said that he observed the initial strike on the boat but then left to attend other meetings and learned about the second strike hours later.

Republican lawmakers largely stood by Hegseth after Thursday’s briefing.

“I feel confident and have no further questions of Hegseth,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford of Arkansas told CNN.

But the precise language of Hegseth’s orders surrounding the September 2 strike — or the more than 20 others that the military has carried out — remain unclear, as has the broader legal justification for the campaign.

Since the September 2 strike, the US military has carried out more than 20 additional strikes on boats it has deemed to be manned by “narco-terrorists,” killing at least 87 people in a campaign that a broad range of outside legal experts have argued is likely unlawful.

“The underlying judgment that frames this entire operation is that if there is a boat with narcotics and people that are affiliated with a narcotics trafficking organization, that that’s a legitimate target,” Coons told reporters on Thursday. “I’ve still got questions about that.”

CNN’s Allison Main, Manu Raju, Ellis Kim, Morgan Rimmer, Annie Grayer

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