Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (12 page)

Yet the suspicion that the CIA had somehow let down the Pentagon’s rescue team festered for more than twenty years. The pain was finally revealed in 2003 by Carney himself. He asserted: “Eighteen years after the rescue attempt some of us learned that the CIA had received a covert communication that detailed some of the most important information we needed: the exact location of three hostages [in addition to those held at the embassy compound] being held in the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The CIA claimed that it had stumbled only by providence on detailed information on almost all the other hostages who were being held in the American embassy compound when a Pakistani cook who had been working in the embassy happened to be on the last leg of a flight from Tehran to Frankfurt and found himself seated next to a CIA officer. The CIA apparently fabricated the Pakistani cook story in order to protect its own sources inside the embassy and gave up its information only after it was absolutely certain that the rescue mission could be launched.”
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The British author Michael Smith suggests: “The Agency had someone in Tehran all along, a very good source supplying his bosses at CIA headquarters in Langley with top-grade intelligence. But it held back the wealth of intelligence he was providing until the very last minute because it feared that the existence of their agent and his sub-agents would leak out, putting its only source of information at risk.”
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One CIA expert working the streets of Tehran when the Shah fell was the veteran Howard Hart, whose unfashionable warnings to Langley of what was to come were put under the blotter. Hart, it is claimed, advised the Desert One team, whose effort, according to Anthony Quainton, Washington’s chief counter-terrorism co-ordinator from 1978 to 1981, “relied heavily on the CIA.” Unnoticed by the Agency’s critics was the CIA’s separate success in conjuring six Americans out of the Canadian embassy in Tehran, where they had taken refuge during the siege. Tony Mendez, a CIA technical operations officer expert in providing disguises, invented a film crew called Studio Six.

Collateral cover for its existence went deep. The CIA opened a Los Angeles Office for the fictitious company. It advertised its upcoming sci-fi movie
Argo
in the theatrical media and sent its Canadian film crew to Iran, with the blessings of the revolutionary government, to do location shots. Led by a genuine CBC cameraman, Dennis Packer, and equipped with Canadian passports, the six American hostages, freshly disguised and absorbed by the “film crew,” left Iran unscathed. The Agency, employing elaborate deception, achieved what Special Forces, with all their expertise and firepower, could not. That said, it was easier to smuggle six men out of Iran than fifty-three. Mendez received the CIA’s Intelligence Star from President Carter soon after the operation.

After the failure of Desert One, the Iranians dispersed their hostages to a variety of locations, rendering a follow-up operation impossible. William J. Daugherty, a Marine veteran on his first CIA tour, was compromised by documents uncovered in a search of the embassy. He was in solitary confinement for nine months, with barely enough room to move, a skeletal figure when the Iranian government released him with the other fifty-two hostages the day after Carter ceased to be president.

For Eagle Claw to have had a chance of success, the bravery of a few individuals on the ground in advance of the operation led by the retired Major Richard Meadows was clearly insufficient. The gap was to be filled in the future by a dedicated, expert team of Special Forces people capable of providing real-time intelligence in a variety of scenarios including hostage rescue. It was to be filled in January 1981 by the Pentagon’s creation of an ultra-secret surveillance organization known as the Intelligence Support Activity or, more simply, “The Activity.”

“Our Own CIA, But Like Topsy”

Eight months after Desert One, in December 1980, Lieutenant General Philip Gast, USAF, Director for Operations for the Joint Chiefs, sent a top-secret memorandum to the Director of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. Subject: Intelligence Capability. A redacted version of the document asserts: “A review of the intelligence collected during the past year to support Iranian contingency planning revealed a serious and persistent information deficiency. This revolves around the need of military planners to have accurate and timely situation-oriented and environmental data such as…[words redacted].”
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The “intelligence collected during the past year” reflected plans for a proposed second attempt to save some of the Tehran hostages, codenamed Honey Badger. The ingredient missing from intelligence identified by General Gast was the sort of ground truth that only human agents, inside enemy walls, could provide. Under President Carter and Stansfield Turner, pursuing the Holy Grail of an ethical foreign policy, the CIA had favored electronic systems over the sometimes uncontrolled violence exercised by deniable agents in Central America. They took the view that he who dines with the Devil must have a very long, technological spoon. So as many as 2,800 intelligence officers, mostly paramilitary specialists, were ditched by the CIA in 1977, in a purge known as “the Halloween Massacre.” As a secret DOD history of ISA, drafted in 1983, observed, “the ill-fated attempt in April, 1980 to secure by military force the release of…Americans held hostage in Tehran revealed institutional shortfalls in U.S. national intelligence and special operations capabilities. At the time of the initial rescue attempt, there existed nowhere in the national capability an organization to provide this vital support.”
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And as General Gast’s memorandum drily noted: “Although technical systems can and did provide some of the information needed, the nature of the required data puts the burden of collection on reliable human observers…. The current Department of Defense/Service HUMINT structure is not organized to satisfy these requirements….”

The short history quoted above takes the story on. “As the second [rescue] effort matured, a formal force to conduct this intelligence operation,
a combination of intelligence collection and operational support to a striking force
[author’s italics], emerged in the form of the Field Operations Group (FOG). FOG was prepared and in place to support a second rescue attempt when the hostages were released.” How many hostages might have been sprung, in view of the fact that the Iranians had now spread their captives over many locations, is not addressed. The document continues: “FOG did not, however, disappear with the disbandment of the Iranian rescue force. Bridging a crucial gap in national capabilities to execute nationally directed missions, FOG’s capability was institutionalized in a DoD special unit to establish a worldwide, immediately responsive capability similar to that developed over a one year period in the Tehran crisis. FOG was redesignated as the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA) in March 1981.”

What emerged was an instrument of tactical intelligence, the view, let us say, from somewhere close to the action, from under the bed, rather than strategically, from the street outside. The Pentagon’s solution—inserting its own eyes, ears, and wallets beyond the front line—required “selected personnel who were trained to fill critical intelligence and operational units.” Unlike FOG, which was yet another ad hoc collection of Special Forces veterans, the new, permanent entity was to run both human agents and—ironically, in view of Stansfield Turner’s early conversion to electronics so as to keep the administration’s hands clean—SIGINT (signals intelligence), but obtained from low, slow-flying aircraft.

Both FOG and its successor, the ISA, were commanded during the formative years by Colonel Jerry King. King was rigorous in his choice of volunteers. As an official “brief history” recognized, “training of operative personnel is among the most intensive in the Army and includes Assessment & Selection: a rigorous program to place the candidate in a sufficient number of different physically and mentally stressful situations to…form the basis for a selection decision by the Commander.”
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After Selection, a core training course, believed to involve CIA facilities, taught the successful volunteers the arts of professional espionage.

ISA’s role was to support America’s elite of elites among Special Forces as they confronted a new style of warfare, global counter-terrorism. After earlier irregular warfare scandals accompanied by the abuse of human rights, the last thing the Pentagon needed was yet another feral SF unit operating without accountability to higher authority. To reduce the risk, it was made answerable to the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Lieutenant General William E. Odom. Odom was an austere Russian expert who had penetrated much of Soviet Russia undetected during the Cold War. As Zbigniew Brzezinski’s military adviser—a hawk’s hawk—Odom was known as “Zbig’s Super-Hawk,” later taking control of the electronic eavesdropping service, the National Security Agency.

The ISA’s first commander, Jerry King, was a hardened Special Forces veteran who had led cross-border forays from South Vietnam into North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. King was an abrasive action man who did not suffer fools, or nervous military bureaucrats, lightly. He and Odom clashed regularly about his methods. King selected individuals on the basis of their resilience, endurance, specialist knowledge, and ability to act on their own initiative. His physical selection tests, like those of the SAS and Delta, pushed volunteers beyond their apparent limits. They were also expected to learn the infiltration skills of all Special Forces soldiers including high-altitude parachuting and underwater diving. Yet their forte was not combat but concealment and electronic intelligence-gathering, often by tapping telephones or scanning the radio wavebands of a potential enemy at close quarters, detecting low-level, localized signals that even the National Security Agency or its British cousin GCHQ could not reach.

It was this sort of magic that enabled them to identify the Italian “people’s prison” near Padua in which General James Lee Dozier, America’s senior man at NATO’s southern command, had been held captive by members of the Italian Red Brigades for forty-two days. An Italian anti-terrorist squad raided the apartment on 28 January 1982, rescued the general, and arrested Dozier’s captors without firing a shot. The role of ISA in Dozier’s salvation was concealed for years afterward. Diplomacy required that this be seen as an exclusively domestic, Italian triumph. The ISI went on to run similarly successful operations in El Salvador, penetrating, from the air, the operational security of left-wing guerrillas and right-wing death squads. This campaign ran successfully for three years.

But the sweet smell of success was overlaid by a less palatable odor in Washington as a result of the ISA’s involvement in a freelance operation proposed by James “Bo” Gritz, a retired Special Forces lieutenant colonel with an obsession about rescuing American prisoners of war, if any there were, still captive in Vietnam in 1981, six years after the war ended. Gritz and others campaigning on the MIA (“Missing In Action”) issue stirred a profound sentiment in yellow-ribbon mid-America. Gritz claimed that he was asked to stand down his proposed operation so as to give a clear run to ISA, to achieve the same object. A former ISA officer quoted by the author Michael Smith “said the discussions were all designed by the Activity to find out where Gritz’s agents were and whether they might produce valid and useful intelligence on the POWs issue…. He [Gritz] was provided with one camera…and a broken polygraph machine” rather than the $40,000 Gritz claimed to have received. The reason for supplying a polygraph machine that did not work is not explained.

The Activity’s double bluff did not impress General Odom, the senior staff officer to whom Jerry King was answerable. King wanted to continue to play Gritz along so as to identify and take over Gritz’s intelligence sources. Odom overruled him and stopped the game. The outcome was an inquiry by the Pentagon’s Inspector General, which landed on the desk of Frank C. Carlucci, Deputy Secretary of Defense. As a result, on 26 May 1982 Carlucci sent a memorandum to Richard Stilwell, Deputy Under-Secretary for Policy. More in sorrow than in anger, Carlucci found the report on ISA “disturbing in the extreme.” He continued:

“We seem to have created our own CIA, but like Topsy, uncoordinated and uncontrolled. Unquestionably ISA contains much talent and probably even more dedication. There may also be a need, but that is less clear. But we should have learned the lesson of the 70’s on control over…[words redacted]. Accountability is the essence and we have created an organization that is unaccountable.

“Action will be taken to terminate all ISA operations within 30 days; or effect transfer thereof to other competent organizations. If it is desired to continue ISA in some form, the following will be submitted for my approval not later than 15 June:

1. A concept plan.
   
2. A list of requirements.
   
3. A command structure, indicating to whom it is accountable and how.
   
4. A list of controls to be established, particularly over…[words redacted]
   
5. A fiscal management and accountability plan.
   
6. A program for working with appropriate committees of Congress.
   
7. A funding plan, fully coordinated with the Comptroller.
   
8. The concurrence of the DCI [Director Central Intelligence] and the General Counsel for all of the above.”
   

Carlucci’s concern about financial control probably reflected references in the IG’s report to “ill-advised” acquisitions, including a hot air balloon and a Rolls Royce limousine. The ISA did not assist its own case by claiming that the hot-air balloon, no longer wanted by another part of the army, would be of use in basic parachute training along the lines of the British system of teaching jump novices. The British have always used sealed helium-gas (“barrage”) balloons, tethered to the ground by a cable and winched to a jump height of 800 feet. On the order: “800 feet, four to jump!” the trainees and their instructor have a chillingly silent ascent followed by an adrenaline-filled drop on the end of a static line during which, in the absence of an aircraft slipstream, the student is surprised to see his boots rise slowly in front of his nose, before sinking back to where they belong. It is a safe, well-tried system that had been in use for decades when the ISA discovered, naïvely, that a hot-air balloon “didn’t work out, too unstable and difficult to maintain a predetermined altitude.” What about the Rolls? The Drug Enforcement Agency had seized it from smugglers. The ISA thought “it might be useful in the event of a counter-terrorist operation in an unfriendly country…disguised as the car of a prominent politician…to transport Delta troops surreptitiously to the scene of the anti-terrorist operation.” The opinion of Delta, a unit dedicated to the low-profile approach, is not recorded but it is clear that aside from 5th Avenue, Knightsbridge, or the Champs d’Elysee, there are few places in the world where an advance by Rolls Royce limousine would qualify as covert. Israeli Special Forces tried the limousine trick at Entebbe. It did not go undetected for long.