Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad

BLACK OPS

BLACK OPS

THE RISE OF SPECIAL FORCES IN THE C.I.A., THE S.A.S., AND MOSSAD

TONY GERAGHTY

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: The President’s Dilemma

Chapter 2: Delta, Desert One, and “The Activity”

Chapter 3: Blood, Oil, and Dollars

Chapter 4: Cloak-and-Dagger Dons the Green Beret

Chapter 5: Plausibly Deniable (And Other Ways Into Trouble)

Chapter 6: Joseph’s Coat of Many Disruptive Patterns

Chapter 7: Big Boys’ Games, Big Boys’ Rules

Epilogue: A Nimble, Precise Strategy

Endnotes

PREFACE

T
he structure of this history of Special Operations Forces reflects an attempt to impose coherence on an idiosyncratic culture. A historical overview in the Introduction describes the various origins of modern Special Forces, notably the British influence on America’s emerging SF teams during and after the Second World War. The major part of the narrative that follows is largely an American story. If it were a fairy tale, it would be Cinderella as told by the Brothers Grimm, with black edges, explaining how Cinderella became the Princess in response to the changing face of armed conflict. The role of the British SAS and Israel’s multifarious SF teams including Isayeret Matkal, Zionism’s SAS, round off the story toward the end of the book.

In practice, the chapters may be read in some other order, to suit the reader’s taste, for describing Special Forces operations in any context is like trying to herd cats. Differing themes—raids, rescues, rearguard actions, psyops, spectacular failures, and occasional victories—coil around one another with little regard for a clearly defined chronology that begins “Once upon a time….” Nevertheless, I have tried.

Who dares, writes.

—Tony Geraghty, Herefordshire, England, 2009

INTRODUCTION

A
t around 1600 hrs on 24 March 1985, Major Arthur D. (“Nick”) Nicholson, Jr., a U.S. Army intelligence officer, became the last professional, regular soldier to die in the “bloodless” conflict known as the Cold War, an affair that was anything but bloodless on surrogate battlegrounds around much of Africa and Asia. What made Nicholson’s case unique was that his death occurred on the well-prepared battlefield of postwar Germany, where massive tank and artillery divisions confronted one another for forty years, preparing for a nuclear Armageddon.

The manner of Nicholson’s death and its political consequences are a textbook illustration of the inherent instability of Special Forces operations as well as their intrinsic importance. Uncertainty about the outcome, indeed, is a staple element of SF warfare, in which the most important decisions are usually taken on the hoof, without a fallback position if the worst happens.

Nicholson was no cowboy. Aged 37, happily married with a nine-year-old daughter, he held a degree in philosophy and a master’s in Soviet studies. He spoke fluent Russian. After service in Korea he had worked in military intelligence on friendly territory in Frankfurt and Munich. At the time of his death he had made more than a hundred trips into hostile Communist East Germany.

He was one of a 14-strong espionage team implausibly identified—perhaps “moustached” or “barbouzed” would be more appropriate—as a military liaison mission to the Group of Soviet Forces, Germany. The organization, following an earlier, larger U.K. group known as Brixmis, emerged from the ashes of 1945. Its ostensible purpose in life was diplomatic, representing the wartime allies at commemorations of what the Russians styled “The Great Patriotic War” in spite of their earlier alliance with Hitler and shared invasion of Poland in 1939. There were also mundane, bread-and-butter matters such as the treatment of deserters from East to West or sometimes in the other direction.

In practice, both British and U.S. missions, often traveling off-road in specially equipped vehicles, stalked the Red Army on maneuvers, logged the movement of Soviet supplies, and, occasionally, pulled off an espionage coup. On May Day 1981, for example, Captain Hugh McLeod, a British officer, insinuated himself into Russia’s latest tank (a T-64) using a forged turret key and spent an hour photographing and drawing diagrams of the interior. (The key was the work of British intelligence based on a photograph of the tank turret taken at a Red Army Day parade in Moscow.) The Soviet regiment that owned this beast was preoccupied with serious drinking on this, its public holiday. At one point in his exploration, McLeod dropped his distinctive British army flashlight. It clattered deep into the tank’s interior. Haunted by the thought that the flashlight would be discovered during a routine maintenance check in Omsk, he spent another nightmarish half-hour recovering the device as his sergeant impatiently kept watch. As McLeod emerged, the sergeant wiped his boot marks from the hull of the T-64.

Some of the missions’ research methods were not for the squeamish. As each phase of an exercise ended, the Russians, being provident, peasant folk, converted secret instructions into toilet paper. The missions, suitably protected, came along afterward, dug up the debris, and carried it back to West Berlin, where one wing of their headquarters (formerly part of the 1936 Hitler Olympics building, memorable for Jesse Owens’s victories) was used to sanitize the documents. The system, known to the British as Tamarisk operations, yielded vital intelligence.
¹
The trick was later reinvented by the Vietcong.

Neither the Russians nor their East German clients accepted that the West was playing within the rules of cricket, or baseball, or Ivan’s equivalent code of ethics. Mission vehicles, identified by U.S. and U.K. symbols “accidentally” camouflaged by good German mud, were regularly driven off the road by heavy Soviet trucks causing injury and death, events that were officially designated as accidents. The Russians often declared a formerly open exercise area out of bounds, regardless of their own published advice, and arrested mission teams for 24 hours or more. Mission vehicles, unless they were locked, were ransacked. At other times they were pursued at breakneck speed by the East German secret police, the Stasi. Some Western crews, in turn, took steps to ensure that Stasi vehicles crashed during such encounters, particularly after dark. One of the mission’s favorite tricks was to disconnect brake-stop lights on their vehicles, enhancing the likelihood of a Stasi road crash. If this was not a hot war, it got uncomfortably warm at times. In the surreal world of diplomacy, the mission crews, nursing their bruises, were sometimes hosted by their Russian adversaries at parties where the toasts were to Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, and the same film—
The Sound of Music
—was screened yet again.

Four years after Hugh McLeod’s illegal entry into a T-64, Nicholson went hunting the next generation of Moscow’s armor, the 46-ton T-80. A classified official U.S. Army report makes the unlikely claim that Nicholson, with his driver, Staff Sergeant Jesse Schatz, was merely following fresh tank tracks in a training area known as Ludwigslust 475 without anything special in mind. The team approached the target—a shed where tanks were laagered—cautiously. Satisfied that all was well, Nicholson moved stealthily forward on foot, avoiding dried twigs or any other trap, to take photographs of training aids posted on a board alongside the shed. It was now late afternoon in the woods of Ludwigslust, but the light was good enough for Nicholson’s Nikon L35 autofocus camera…and for the iron gunsight on an AK-47 brought to bear on the Americans by a young Soviet sergeant identified as Aleksandr Ryabtsev in a watch tower a mere 75 meters away.

Schatz, Nicholson’s lookout, standing on the driver’s seat, head and shoulders above the open sun roof, spotted Ryabtsev and shouted to his officer, “Sir! Get in the car!” Too late. The first round missed Schatz’s head by inches. He “felt the whizzing of a bullet passing close to his head.” Nicholson ran toward their jeep, a Mercedes Geländewagen. Schatz, back in the driver’s seat, revved the engine and reversed toward Nicholson, unlocking the passenger door as he did so for the officer to make a getaway. Again, too late. A second shot brought Nicholson down. “As Schatz rolled his window down, Major Nicholson looked up at him and said, ‘Jesse, I’ve been shot’.” Another bullet hit Nicholson. “He then dropped his head into the dirt and twitched convulsively.”

What followed was a sinister reminder of the lingering deaths of East Germans who were unwise enough to try to escape to West Berlin across the shooting gallery that separated the two parts of the city at that time. Schatz, carrying a first aid bag, exited the vehicle to aid his stricken officer. By now, Ryabtsev had closed to within a few feet and waved Schatz away. As Schatz hesitated, Ryabtsev brought his rifle up to his shoulder, pointed it at Schatz’s head and curled his finger round the trigger. Schatz retreated. Nicholson died some time later from multiple abdominal wounds.

A diplomatic rumpus ensued, but there were larger stakes involved for Washington and Moscow than the killing—described by the Pentagon as murder—of a single Special Forces officer. A new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was steering his country toward a rapprochement with the West. A few months after Nicholson’s death, Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan met in Geneva and established a working relationship. One commentator suggested: “The Reagan administration’s response to this crime has been to treat it like a traffic accident covered by no-fault insurance.” When Reagan himself was baited by a reporter about the incident, he replied: “Lack of outrage? You can’t print what I am thinking.”

Yet Nicholson’s death was not an empty sacrifice in a boys’ own game of cowboys and Indians. Special Forces operations are supremely about strategic impact achieved by a small elite, or they are nothing. As the Cold War finally spluttered to its close, a veteran of the U.K.’s Brixmis mission revealed: “Preserving the peace in Europe in the 20th century was sometimes a damned close-run thing. It happened sometimes that all our nine Indicators of Hostilities”—intelligence measures by which the West would predict a pre-emptive Soviet attack—“read positive. We checked the situation on the ground, looked down their gun barrels, made sure there could be no surprise attack, no war by accident. That was our major contribution.”
²
It was, essentially, a victory so low-profile, so discreet as to be invisible, but nonetheless real. In that, it resembled many successful non-violent Green Beret operations in Vietnam. It prevented Armageddon more than once, thanks to the magical substance provided by SF teams known to the intelligence community as “ground truth.”

This is one key to understanding the Special Forces phenomenon. Another is the unusual chain-of-command, from the grunt on the ground, via satellite in modern times or by Morse before then, to a strategic headquarters perhaps thousands of miles away, rather than a local commander. Not surprisingly, local commanders—outside the information loop but caught up in the nausea if things go wrong—do not like that arrangement. It is the curse of the cuckold: responsibility without power. They also do not care for the seemingly ragged rank structure of SF soldiers, to say nothing of their necessary lack of personal hygiene. “You can’t be British soldiers,” a returning SAS desert patrol was told during the Second World War. “You have beards!” The modern SAS carefully bags up its own ordure to be carried away, so as to leave no trace of its presence. Yet another protocol problem is the delicate matter of links between the Special Forces teams in the field and intelligence agencies of various sorts, some of which—running deniable operations—are themselves cut-outs for departments of state.

Another difference lies in the psychology of the self-selecting minority of soldiers who volunteer for special operations, an instrument worth more than any secret weapon or new gizmo. Most soldiers—particularly conscripts—do not shoot to kill. Special Forces soldiers do. Most soldiers do not expect to die young. SF soldiers are agnostic about personal survival. They live with a contract poetically expressed by Alan Seeger, a young American who served with the French Foreign Legion until his slow, painful end on the Western Front in 1916: “I have a rendezvous with death.” Many, having survived the battle, take their own lives.

The British SAS dispenses with the pathos, though not the mysticism. One of its regimental jokes suggests: “Death is just nature’s way of telling you that you failed Selection,” that is, their endurance test. In February 1979 one of the regiment’s heroes, Major Mike Kealy DSO, did indeed die of exposure in the moonscape wilderness of the Welsh Brecon Beacons in an attempt to prove that he could still pass the test of selection. It is no coincidence that the SAS has adopted James Elroy Flecker’s lines from “The Golden Journey to Samarkand” as its mantra:

We are the Pilglrims, master; we shall go

Always a little further: it may be

Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow,

Across that angry or that glimmering sea.

Sir Fitzroy Maclean, one of the regiment’s most talented pirates, quoted an American scientist-philosopher, Rossiter Worthington Raymond, at a memorial service for the SAS founder, David Stirling: “Death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.” From Orde Wingate, the fundamentalist Christian-Zionist who created the jungle Chindits, to Spencer Chapman, whose mantra “the jungle is neutral” barely explained his extraordinary survival, many of the most successful Special Forces operators were personalities imbued with a mysticism that usually resulted from adventures alone in remote parts of the world long before they became warriors.

At such times, unsurprisingly, most of them came to terms with their own mortality and remained curiously untouched—perhaps unawakened is a better word—by the mundane concerns of normal life, including job security and marriage. They could never be your average soldier-ant and rarely good husbands. They are, by nature,
ubermensch
, willful beings not cut out to be part of the lumpenproletariat. Today, in a world governed by insurance, litigation, and risk avoidance, such men and women are an anachronism. They are, as one put it, “a bunch of misfits who happen to fit together.” They are also increasingly hard to find, yet more than ever in demand by Western governments.

An American authority points out: “It has often been argued that any good infantryman will make a good Special Forces soldier. This is simply not true…. Not everyone is suited to operations in hostile areas, or prepared for long periods of duty with predominantly indigenous forces and without artillery, helicopter or fighter air support. Not every good infantryman can perform well in a counterterrorist unit.”
³

There is another crucial difference between the Anglo-American Special Forces community and their more numerous comrades in regular, orthodox formations. Conventional armies serving democratic governments fastidiously stand aside from the political process. Special forces, by contrast, are profoundly political, a fact reflected by the emerging U.S. doctrine of Unconventional Warfare which suggests that in some targeted states, SF teams, working through surrogates, should take over the political process behind the scenes, combining Machiavellian velvet revolution with firepower. The SAS has had much experience of manipulating tribal politics around the world—for example, in Oman’s “War of the Families” (1970–1976). So, too, did American Special Forces operators playing puppetmasters to the Hmong tribes in Laos and the Montagnards in Vietnam (1961–1975).

Finally, there is the similarity between terrorists, who occupy the territory of the mind rather than geographical space until final victory is won on the ground, and Special Forces, whose agenda is pretty well the same. Both practice what is described at the beginning of the 21st century as “asymmetric warfare,” or, more simply, flea v. elephant. By the time President Obama took office, military elephants were becoming intolerably costly, even for America, as well as irrelevant. The change was no better illustrated than through the innovation of unmanned drones, striking targets in Pakistan but “flown” by pilots sitting in Nevada, while Air Force chiefs clung to the image of Biggles (or even Snoopy) in his latest toy, the F-22 fighter. The unit cost of the F-22, at $350 million, was twelve times the price of the humble but effective drone, the Raptor.