Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (10 page)

Dr. Edward N. Luttwak, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, suggested: “When a bureaucratized and engineering-oriented establishment attempts commando operations, it is always ‘unlucky.’ The action starts with the information that was received on May 9 1970: American POWs in Ap Loy and Son Tay. Had this information gone to a commando organization—consisting of, say, thirty or forty officers who have spent five or six years doing only commando work—their own self-contained planning group would have said, ‘Right. This is where they are. What’s the most prosaic vehicle that will get us there?’ Then they would have gone in to take the POWs out.

“When a bureaucratized establishment receives the same information, it sets up a planning committee. When the planning committee advises how to…get the POWs out, the establishment sets up a feasibility planning group or an assessment group. This is followed by an evaluation group, and so on. Then, after six months or so” [and around seventy rehearsals] “all concerned are finally ready for the operation, which has been planned and prepared as a very small-scale D-Day. Then they go in, and they discover that the POWs are not there any more. Son Tay was a crushing failure of the planning system. The Israeli raid at Entebbe was planned and executed in five days.”
⁵⁶
Other participants saw Son Tay—“the first operation of its type ever undertaken by the United States, a long-range penetration by helicopter, deep into enemy territory…”—as “an outstanding success” from the tactical standpoint. Retired officers present at the symposium, some of whom were part of the Son Tay team, objected vigorously to Luttwak’s thesis.

In January 1973, Nixon halted all U.S. combat operations in South Vietnam. Peace agreements with the various powers involved soon followed and MACV, along with its cutting edge, the Studies and Observation Group, was formally consigned to history, though the latter would be reborn, in time, as the CIA’s Special Operations Group.

South Vietnam should have been safe. On paper it outgunned and outnumbered its northern adversary by two to one. Its air force had 1,400 aircraft. Its army had been fastidiously trained by U.S. Special Forces but—with a few honorable exceptions—it always showed a reluctance to fight. Its officers had a talent for retreat. So when the communists attacked with artillery and tanks in March 1975, it retreated. The retreat became a panic and panic engendered a rout to the sea. Under incessant shelling, civilians took their chance in trying to swim out to overloaded vessels as they weighed anchor. By the end of the month, 100,000 South Vietnamese soldiers joined the grateful dead at Da Nang and surrendered the city. There was courageous, if isolated, resistance by the Xuan Loc garrison some forty miles to the east of Saigon for two weeks in April. By the end of the month, the South Vietnam capital was surrounded by 100,000 enemy, who now enjoyed a three-to-one advantage.

Inside the city, martial law was declared, but it did nothing to dampen the panic as senior officials fought with dogsbodies to claim a place on evacuation helicopters. The testament to the failure of American policy in Vietnam was the image of the last helicopter to claw its way to survival from the roof of the U.S. embassy on 30 April, accompanied by surreal music—Bing Crosby singing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas”—that was the coded signal to leave. Henry Kissinger, an architect of the Cambodian bombing campaign, wrote the campaign’s obituary in a secret memorandum to President Ford: “In terms of military tactics, we cannot help draw the conclusion that our armed forces are not suited to this kind of war. Even the Special Forces who had been designed for it could not prevail.”
⁵⁷

The war cost 60,000 U.S. dead or missing. Around three million Vietnamese also lost their lives. The conflict left America with a political hangover, expressed as “No More Vietnams!” or at best, “a very cautious approach that borders on a ‘never again’ approach.”
⁵⁸
That is, until 9/11 pierced the carapace of America’s self-belief. The successes of U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam, like the better side of Julius Caesar, was oft interred with their bones. Green Beret veterans, given half a chance, will remind us: “At their peak, less than 2,300 U.S. Special Forces soldiers skilfully controlled and led about 69,000 indigenous fighters, denying their use to the enemy, and precluding what otherwise would have been classified as genocide if control had slipped to the other side. There would have been no other alternative but to wage an anti-logistical, primarily air campaign against them as these peoples supported the enemy. That in and of itself was a most successful special operation: control and denial of a remote population to the opposition.”
⁵⁹

It is a bleak equation, yet one that matches M. R. D. Foot’s argument that irregular warfare is the only sane way wars can be fought in a nuclear age or, for that matter, as an alternative to strategic air power to murder civilians. In spite of that, Vietnam impacted adversely on the evolution of U.S. Special Forces for decades afterward. Denigrated by conventional soldiers as “unprofessional” and by others as wild men, out of control and acting “unilaterally,” U.S. Special Forces were all but eradicated during the 1970s.
⁶⁰

More than thirty years after U.S. Special Forces pulled out of Vietnam, that war continues to divide historians. Gordon Goldstein’s
Lessons in Disaster
argued that President Johnson was “pressed by the military into escalating an unwinnable conflict,” while Lewis Sorley’s
A Better War
proposed that “antiwar feelings and pressure from Congress forced Richard Nixon to reject a counter-insurgency strategy that could have succeeded.”
⁶¹

The asymmetric conflicts of Vietnam and Afghanistan were hardly understood by many professional, conventional soldiers whose careers had conditioned them for careful, orderly, and prolonged preparation for textbook warfare as in the Gulf, 1990, in which Operation Desert Shield was orchestrated as if the impending carnage were a Mahler symphony to be concluded triumphantly in the home key. Asymmetric warfare belongs on another planet. It is a conflict of ideas in which the battleground is anywhere and everywhere, with no firm criteria for victory or even, perhaps, a defined end to hostilities. It is a process that mutates according to its own rules, like a cancer. The only people who understand it are the lateral thinkers on the front line. They are not often to be found in the Pentagon or the Ministry of Defence.

In Vietnam, following a rigged election in 1967 that maintained a military junta in power, U.S. forces were perceived by most civilians as puppet-masters of an illegitimate, unwanted government. Political legitimacy was the missing ingredient to success in that campaign. The more military force was used to prop up the old, corrupt regime, the more credibility Hanoi enjoyed in characterizing America as an alien, neo-colonial power to which ordinary people owed no loyalty. Rufus Phillips, the dean among U.S. diplomats in Saigon (where he was the boss of Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan), notices similarities between then and now. Writing in advance of the return to office of Hamid Karzai, he endorsed the view that in Vietnam, the electoral fraud of 1967 proved to be “the most destructive and destabilizing factor of all.” As they might have said in French-managed Indochina, plus ça change; plus c’est la même chose.

CHAPTER 2

DELTA, DESERT ONE, AND “THE ACTIVITY”

I
n 1962 a burly Green Beret captain, Charlie A. Beckwith, formerly an all-state football player from Atlanta, was in the Malayan jungle feeling seriously unwell. He was no stranger to the hazards of jungle warfare. He had been an Airborne soldier for seven years and had two years’ service with Special Forces in South Vietnam and Laos as a “military adviser.” The local leeches, bloated on his blood, and only removable from the most intimate parts of his body with a burning cigarette applied by a buddy, were nothing special. He’d had dengue fever and a touch of malaria in Laos. But this sickness was unlike anything else he had known. To make matters worse, he was not even serving in his own army. With another Green Beret, a Sergeant Rozniak, Beckwith was on attachment to the British Special Air Service Regiment as part of an exchange program through which the Brits sent their brightest and best to Fort Bragg.

The connection had been made several years before by Colonel I. A. (“Boppy”) Edwards of 7th Special Forces Group and a British legend named Colonel John Woodhouse. During the 1960s, the transatlantic exchange program involved three of the principal players subsequently caught up in the tragic failure of Desert One. As well as Beckwith, the SAS trained Dick Meadows, who operated in civilian clothes in Tehran on a DIA contract and Jerry King, Chief of Staff to the general commanding the doomed attempt to rescue fifty-three American diplomat-hostages. All that was over the horizon when Beckwith virtually collapsed in Malaya.

Special Forces are hard men. In Afghanistan in 2009, a medevac team from 55th Expeditionary Rescue Squadron USAF was astonished by the fortitude of a British SBS soldier who had been shot through the face. He declined an offer of morphine and, as one of the rescue team noted, “calmly picked pieces of bone and teeth from his own wound.” In Malaya, the SAS commander John Woodhouse, dealing with one of his soldiers who had accidentally fired his weapon—in official language, an “accidental discharge”—gave the man a hand grenade to carry for the rest of the day. The firing pin had been extracted. To relax his grip for even a second would mean the victim’s certain death. In Turkey in 2009, a similar experiment resulted in the death of a recruit. In such company, Beckwith felt impelled not to let America down. He staggered on. In fact, in their rough fashion, the twenty-odd men of Three Troop, A Squadron, 22 SAS, had taken to their American guest. His nickname, “Chargin’ Charlie,” meant something. As one of his troop once told the author: “He’d rather march through a tree than go round it.” The SAS were teaching him stealth.

His team was now into its ninth day of living close to nature in a green twilight beneath a canopy of trees that excluded direct light, an apparently welcoming place that was full of hidden danger. In the jungle it is standard practice before lying under a tree to shake it, lest the tree fall and kill you as you sleep. Venomous snakes and a variety of hairy, poisonous six-and eight-legged creatures await the unwary. Some humans actually like it in there. Paddy B, an SAS veteran of the parallel campaigns in Borneo and the arid Radfan Mountains of Aden in the 1960s, when asked which environment he preferred, replied, in his Cork brogue: “Sure I’d say there, Mr. Geraghty, I like the jungle best. There’s no shortage of water in the jungle and a man can get as much sleep as he needs. I’d call that a gracious living.”

Before Beckwith fell sick, his patrol had already taken one casualty and had found it necessary to make a clearing with high explosive to enable a helicopter to take the injured man out. As a result, in a race against time, they had lost thirty-six hours and now had to chance compromise and exposure to CTs (Communist Terrorists) by snatching the only possible shortcut if they were to reach their rendezvous with another SAS patrol on schedule. The shortcut was the river. So they built rafts and traveled swiftly, without apparent trouble, to the RV.

It was at this point that Beckwith became ill. He did not know it yet, but he had contracted leptospirosis, also known as Weil’s Disease, a deadly infection if an open wound, or sore, comes into contact with water carrying the urine of animals also suffering from the condition. (The author first learned about this hazard when he returned from a run through part of the Jungle Warfare School at Kota Tingi, in Johore Baru, barefoot). Chargin’ Charlie, moving through dense rain forest, had picked up many minor cuts, then entered the river to launch the raft. It was his bad luck that his patch of water hosted leptospirosis.

He was hospitalized in the nick of time and after repeated doses of penicillin and thanks to his own will to live, he started to recover. After ten days, he could walk a few steps, unaided. The U.S. government sent a doctor from the Philippines to remove him to an American hospital. Beckwith told the man, in less than polite terms, to go to hell. His twelve-month attachment to the Brits had not yet run its course. Word got back to his SAS troop. They approved. He wrote later: “For once, I’ve done something right.”
⁶²
While he was recuperating, Beckwith had a bright idea. This was that the unorthodox methods of the SAS including deep penetration of contested territory by stealth, guerrilla warfare turned against guerrillas, was something America could usefully absorb into its own military doctrine. “The American Army not only needed a Special Forces capability, but an SAS one; not only a force of teachers [of native surrogates], but a force of doers.”

His moment of enlightenment had an interesting precedent. In Cairo in 1941 the founder of the SAS, David Stirling, was hospitalized following a parachuting accident. For the time being, Stirling was paralyzed from the waist down. He passed the time scribbling a proposal for a tiny team to hit targets behind Rommel’s lines in the Western Desert. It would replace a major commando outfit, now disbanded after a disastrous start, called Layforce. Stirling later explained: “The main thesis…was to plead that many objectives envisaged for Layforce…could be tackled by a unit less than one-twentieth the size of the 1,600-man establishment of Layforce…. The minuscule demand on the sources of the Middle East Command and the project’s high potential reward decided the Commander-in-Chief to authorize me to go ahead. Thus was born the Special Air Service.”

It would be fifteen years before a conservative U.S. military establishment understood Beckwith’s message. This was that in spite of the separate skills and shared bravery of other Special Forces teams—Rangers, SEALs, Marines and autonomous Green Berets—there was a hole in America’s military preparedness. That was the threat of international, global terrorism. Britain knew about it thanks to the support given to the IRA by the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi and the car bombs that shredded much of London as well as Belfast. Italy knew, thanks to the assassins of the Red Brigades. Germany and Israel had learned a bitter lesson through the Munich Massacre at the 1972 Olympics. In 1977, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were finally persuaded to endorse, in principle, the creation of a unit modeled on the British SAS, to prepare for a global war on terrorism. They were influenced by the latest terrorist outrage. A team of Palestinians, supported by German anarchists, had seized a Lufthansa airliner and taken it to Mogadishu. The siege there ended when a German anti-terrorist team, led by two SAS men, Major Alastair Morrison and Sergeant Barry Davies, blasted their way onto the aircraft and rescued the hostages.

During the years between Beckwith’s first proposal, drafted on his hospital bed, and the JCS decision to endorse it, Beckwith had founded and led a special reconnaissance team in Vietnam which he called “Delta Project B-52.” His formula combined deep jungle penetration by a tiny, elite force on SAS lines, with America’s air power to take on the elusive warriors of the Vietcong and the regular North Vietnamese Army. In January 1966, a heavy caliber .50 bullet bored through Beckwith’s body as he was about to land by helicopter in a jungle fortress besieged by hundreds of enemy. Defying a medical diagnosis of imminent death, he walked out of the hospital four months later to resume his career as a Special Forces adviser.

Following the JCS decision, Beckwith needed two years to bring his Delta Force up to SAS standards. He still had to overcome the mindset of existing U.S. Special Forces commanders, working by the book and wedded to the 260-page Field Manual 31-21,
Guerrilla Warfare and Special Forces Operations
. First published in 1961, FM 31-21 reflected the tactics of the Second World War. It defined Unconventional Warfare as “interrelated…guerrilla warfare, evasion and escape, and subversion against hostile states (resistance)…. Operations conducted in enemy or enemy controlled territory by predominately [
sic
] indigenous personnel usually supported and directed in varying degrees by an external source.”

The authors admit “the doctrine set forth in this manual is structured around a general war situation [in which] special forces organize guerrilla forces to support conventional military operations under the direction of a theater commander….” The world had moved on by the 1970s, to one in which, to cite a 19th century Anarchist phrase, “propaganda by deed” was dramatically magnified by the evolution of worldwide television news. It was a world in which the hierarchy of big military formations could be outsmarted by nimble irregular cells. Beckwith, learning from the SAS, wanted to fight fire with fire. His new, superbly trained Delta force was not conceived as a large-scale raiding force. Events dictated otherwise.

On 4 November 1979, following the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, the return to Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini from exile in Paris, and the Shah’s grant of sanctuary in America, a student demonstration directed against the U.S. embassy in Tehran got out of hand. The most venturesome demonstrators, armed with martial arts nunchaku sticks, a croquet mallet, and a broken wooden board, climbed the embassy gate and, to their surprise, encountered little opposition from within other than a token volley of riot gas cartridges fired by Marine guards wearing shiny dress shoes.

The Marines’ Rules of Engagement did not permit shooting into a crowd of civilian demonstrators led by women who claimed they intended nothing more serious than a sit-in. Initially, the Iranian government promised to do what it could do to arrange a peaceful outcome. The deception was complete as the embassy was surrendered without a shot. It was a misplaced, naïvely Quaker defense. While they had the chance, the embassy’s CIA team of four burned classified documents. The siege became a circus of political humiliation that lasted 444 days and fatally undermined the Carter presidency.

America boiled with anger during the siege and expected a military response as well as the safe return of fifty-three embassy staff held hostage. These were barely compatible objectives. In total secrecy, a rescue task force was built around Delta and an ad hoc collection of Air Force and Marine pilots, plus a sprinkling of CIA and Pentagon secret agents at large in Iran. Responsibility was divided between Delta, which would run the ground rescue and evacuation, and the air element, handling movements in, around, and out of Iran. By the time the team was assembled under the codename “Operation Eagle Claw” in April 1980, it had grown to 120 men. It was also, according to some observers, saddled with a top-heavy bureaucracy including four separate commanders on the ground. The rescue scenario was complex. It proposed inserting the Delta rescue team on an apparently isolated hard runway codenamed Desert One by three C-130 aircraft 200 miles from the target; a laying-up position fifty miles from Tehran, to which 118 members of Delta plus six drivers and six translators would move in darkness by eight Navy Sea Stallion helicopters, normally used for minesweeping, flown from the carrier
Nimitz
and piloted by Marine Chinook pilots who had little experience of night flying under radar and little chance to adapt to the machines they were to fly.

Another trio of C-130s would act as fuel tankers for the helicopters at Desert One. A two-man Pentagon team, covertly inserted ahead of the main mission, would provide trucks for road movement on the second night into Tehran. The Delta assault team would make a
coup de main
strike on the embassy compound as a Ranger company held the perimeter. The hostages would be carried to a stadium where they would be picked up by helicopter and flown to another airfield seized by Rangers. There, Starlifter transports would be waiting to fly the hostages to safety.

The mission was in trouble from the start. In bleak, terse language the Holloway Report tells us how it started to go wrong: “On the evening of 24 April, after 51/2 months of planning and training under very tight OPSEC [operational security], eight RH-53 helicopters took off from the aircraft carrier
Nimitz
and began a journey of nearly 600 nautical miles at night and low altitude to a preselected refueling site, Desert One, in the desert. The C-130 element with the ground rescue forces was also in the execution phase on a different track and time schedule to Desert One. Approximately two hours after takeoff, the crew of Helicopter No. 6 received cockpit indications of an impending rotor blade failure; landed; verified the malfunction (an automatic abort situation); and abandoned their aircraft. The crew was picked [up] by another helicopter, which then continued the mission individually.

“Approximately one hour thereafter, the helicopter formation unexpectedly encountered a dust cloud of unknown size and density. The helicopters broke out of the first area of suspended dust but, within an hour, entered a second, larger and denser area. While attempting to navigate through this second area with severely degraded visibility, a second helicopter (No. 5) experienced a failure of several critical navigation and flight instruments. Due to progressively deteriorating flight conditions that made safe flight extremely questionable, the helicopter pilot determined that it would be unwise to continue. He aborted the mission, reversed course, and recovered on
Nimitz
. Eventually six of the original eight helicopters arrived at the refueling site in intervals between approximately 50 minutes and 85 minutes later than planned.