Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (13 page)

Following the Gritz affair, the future of ISA hung by a thread. The few friends it had in the Pentagon played for time and promised reforms. The team was hung out to dry while the reforms, promulgated in July 1983, were codified in a dense thirteen-page Charter of U.S. Army Intelligence Support Activity. The ISA was brought firmly under the control of the Pentagon and, obliquely, the DIA, CIA, and NSC. The text identified the Activity as “a Field Operating Agency of Headquarters, Department of the Army, under the operational control of the ACSI” (Assistant Chief of Staff, Intelligence, General Odom, the only person who could authorize, in the future, ISA expenditure exceeding a modest $10,000).

Furthermore, ISA activities, “especially those involving U.S. persons, will be pursued in a responsible manner that is consistent with the Constitution and respectful of the principles upon which the United States was founded.” This was more than rhetoric. It reflected the view of President Carter and CIA director Stansfield Turner to “conduct intelligence operations within Constitutional limits.” Potentially, the most crippling clause in the charter insisted that the ISA would undertake activities “only when other intelligence or operational support elements and resources are unavailable or inappropriate to accomplish the tasking.”

In spite of all, the Activity lived to fight another day, under another president, though, in spite of hawkish pronouncements from President Reagan and his Secretary of State, George P. Shultz, little changed. The early eighties were not good for America, or President Reagan’s reputation as a hawk. In April 1983, Hizbollah terrorists bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, wiping out an eight-man CIA team there along with fifty-five others. The following October, a U.S. Marine barracks near Beirut airport was attacked by a suicide bomber driving a massive truck bomb. The bomb flattened the three-story reinforced concrete building, killing another 241 Americans, most of them Marines. The survivors of a U.S. peacekeeping force were withdrawn.

Might these attacks have been anticipated? Bill Cowan, a retired Marine and Special Forces lieutenant colonel, was a member of a small ISA team trawling the back streets of Beirut for intelligence after the embassy attack.
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From the outset, Cowan detected a lack of commitment for action in Washington. “It took five weeks for the co-ordination process and the Pentagon to finally allow us to get on airplanes and go…. So, we sent a small team into Beirut whose primary purpose was to ascertain the intelligence situation. Was there sufficient intelligence being acquired? How was it being acquired? Was it moving around? Were the right people seeing it?”
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With the CIA’s team wiped out, the ISA proposed a more focused intelligence-gathering operation that would protect the U.S. peacekeepers in Beirut. Here is Cowan again: “We sent back a report to the Secretary of Defense…that if there were not something done to improve the intelligence-gathering, sharing of information in Beirut, that in fact, a military presence was at risk. Well, nothing was done…. We ran into bureaucratic stonewalling about making any changes. No changes whatsoever from our recommendations were implemented until after the bombing of the Marine compound. At that point, every recommendation was implemented, but it cost 241 servicemen to get there.”
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The ISA team returned to Beirut a second time after the Marine deaths “because the President had said we were going to retaliate and the Secretary of Defense wanted us to go over and see about retaliating.” Though the CIA team in Beirut had been eliminated, Washington was still receiving information—probably courtesy of Mossad—to identify the ringleaders and their locations. “We took that information, got on the ground and tried to verify what we could…. We had a number of targets that we had no problem identifying,” said Cowan. “We had a list of people provided by the CIA and that’s because the CIA had good information on people that were involved in the bombing. We were not looking specifically for those people inasmuch as we were looking for where they were located. What houses were they living in? What buildings were they frequenting?…The CIA really had a handle on the folks. We were looking to have a handle on the locations.” The surveillance targets also included two Syrian anti-aircraft positions (probably in the Bekaa Valley, from which Hizbollah operated) “nowhere close to any place where somebody who was not party to the military action could not have been hit…. They were in Lebanese territory…. In terms of the rest of the terrorists, the people we were after, the buildings they ran it out of, were clearly identifiable. A precision bombing in any one of those would have created some collateral damage.”
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Cowan skirted around the possibility that a policy of retaliation combined with close-in targeting of a terrorist’s base might amount to assassination. He reminded his interviewer, “We had an executive order [from several presidents] at that point banning assassination…. Assassination is where you specifically target that one person, and you focus on taking him, and only him, out. And that was never where we were looking.” With his soldier’s eye, he was identifying an enemy position, confirming intelligence supplied from elsewhere.

Cowan and others returned to the Pentagon with “a rather substantial report.” It must be assumed that others on the ISA team remained on station, to be certain that the terrorist targets were at home if and when a bomb struck them. Yet when Cowan arrived with a report that described “the options we could do—not just in terms of striking back, but other rather good intelligence operations that we could have activated, we were met with anger. We were not welcomed. We had people who absolutely berated us for even suggesting that we retaliate. We were surprised, to say the least.” The report “was put away in a back drawer very, very quickly. There was absolutely no follow-up to anything we recommended.”

From this, Cowan learned a hard lesson about the reality of realpolitik. “Every time somebody has struck at us, we’ve threatened, we’ve stood up, we’ve pounded our chest, we’ve blown out fire out of our mouths, smoke out of our ears, and then within a couple of weeks we’ve sat back down and gone back to business as usual. So we’ve sent a message over the years that we weren’t quite serious….” Cowan was speaking from the heart, eighteen years after the deaths of his fellow Marines in Beirut. Believing the lesson of that disaster had still not been taken on board, he finally unburdened himself, courtesy of public service broadcasting, soon after 9/11/01.

The years following the 1983 Charter were a time of dogged effort by the Activity, taking operations that went to the wire only to be halted at the last moment. The unit focused on two war zones: Central America (El Salvador and Nicaragua) and Lebanon. There was success in El Salvador in 1985 where four members of ISA’s signals intelligence (SIGINT), flying from Honduras, intercepted hostile—and unencrypted—militia messages. The Activity’s efforts to assist the rescue of the latest crop of American hostages, held this time by Hizbollah in Lebanon and constantly moved from one location to another, presented an intelligence-gathering challenge which the team met with the help of the right-wing Christian Phalange movement and, one may surmise, its Israeli ally.

During the Reagan years, a total of fourteen American hostages were snatched in Beirut alone. In March 1984 they included Bill Buckley, the ageing CIA veteran sent to rebuild the intelligence network wiped out by the bomb that destroyed the U.S. embassy. The loss of Buckley was a personal blow to CIA Director William Casey and President Reagan. Casey had persuaded Buckley, a known Agency spy, to enter the dragon’s lair. Casey later received a tape recording—played to Reagan—containing the piercing screams of Buckley, under torture before he died, probably of heart failure. Buckley also left a long “confession,” inevitably compromising his network. Seven other hostages remained alive. The CIA set up a Hostage Location Task Force which seems to have monitored the labyrinth of Lebanese politics, but little else.

Yet in spite of the Activity’s success in identifying the location of most of the hostages, somewhere within the Washington machine the brakes were regularly put on a Special Forces rescue. This might have had something to do with the fact that the Reagan administration had a cunning plan of its own. This was to do a deal with Hizbollah’s Iranian backers, then at war with Iraq, by selling the Iranians 504 TOW wire-guided anti-tank missiles (and later, several thousand Hawk anti-aircraft missiles) in exchange for hostages. The point man in this operation, serving the National Security Council, was a charismatic Marine colonel called Oliver North. North’s embroidery on the scheme was to divert funds generated by the Iranian deal to fund a covert, surrogate war waged against the Nicaraguan government by right-wing Contra guerrillas. Funds for this clandestine war had been denied in Congress by the Boland Amendment. In spite of that, supported by plausibly deniable assets including a retired SAS major and ageing ex-CIA veterans, the Contras’ unsuccessful Nicaraguan campaign continued.

North luminously described Casey’s scheme, cooked up with a shyster Iranian middleman and riding on Israeli logistics, outside the U.S. Constitution and its chain of command, as “a neat idea.” President Reagan shared his enthusiasm. As a congressional inquiry concluded, in spite of Boland “the President felt strongly about the contras, and he ordered his staff, in the words of his national security adviser, to find a way to keep the contras ‘body and soul together.’ Thus began the story of how the staff of a White House advisory body, the N.S.C. [National Security Council], became an operational entity that secretly ran the contra assistance effort, and later the Iran initiative. The action officer placed in charge of both operations was Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North.”
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Some hostages were released. By July 1986 the number in captivity was just four. There was a problem. It was that the Casey/North formula had generated a hostage-takers’ market. Colonel Cowan, in his radio interview, ironically explained: “That policy was a great deal for the Iranians: ‘We’ll give you two hostages and we’ll go pick up two more.’ It’s an endless source of money. I’d be happy to run an operation like that. You keep paying me for something, I’ll make sure I’ve got plenty of it.” The arms-for-hostages scam was “Unbelievable. I think people in the State Department, clearly people at the CIA, certainly people at the Department of Defense who understand terrorism and counterterrorist operations were aghast at the whole thing. It was…absolutely amateurish.”

North’s Contra campaign in Nicaragua unraveled spectacularly on 5 October 1986 when a cargo plane was shot down by a conscript soldier who got lucky with his shoulder-fired missile. The aircraft was carrying arms to the rebels. The only survivor, who parachuted to safety, revealed the involvement of an American military adviser in El Salvador. His trial generated useful propaganda for the Nicaraguan government. Less than a month later, the Lebanese newspaper
Al-Shiraa
revealed the arms-for-hostages trade, still continuing. By then, Iran had acquired 1,500 missiles. Three hostages had been released and three new ones snatched by Hizbollah in what Secretary of State George Shultz described as “a hostage bazaar.”

The ISA finally abandoned its reconnaissance/planning mission to rescue the Beirut hostages, codenamed Project ROUND BOTTLE, almost a year later in October 1987. The unit’s report for that year bleakly noted: “Project ROUND BOTTLE was terminated without evaluation of information…even though the DCINST [Deputy Chief of Staff, Intelligence] personally requested same.”
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Meanwhile the ISA was obliged to prove itself yet again in a series of exercises. In 1986, simulating a hostage rescue operation, it provided HUMINT and SIGINT intelligence and acted as pathfinder for the counter-terrorist strike team, probably from Delta. According to the Activity’s 1986 Historical Report, the job involved “locating, surveying, reporting and operating landing zones [for helicopters] and drop zones [for parachutists].” “ISA executed their mission primarily through tradecraft means,” that is, in civilian dress and maximum deception. “ISA’s success was very impressive and well received.”
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ISA soldiers also conducted twenty-nine airborne operations in FY 86. Airborne operations consisted of static-line [low-level parachute drops] and HALO [high altitude freefall drops, using oxygen from above 12,500 feet down to low opening at around 3,000 feet]. These were night jumps, with a full load of combat equipment, carried in rucksacks mounted below the parachute pack, a highly dangerous process even if, as is likely, these jumps were not live operations but exercises. It is normal SF practice to go into freefall at night from high altitude. If the parachutist loses grip of his stable, face-to-earth posture at terminal velocity, as his canopy opens, the result can be fatal as the canopy snags on his boots (a “horseshoe” malfunction), collapsing the canopy instead of allowing it to rise cleanly from the backpack to “breathe.” The presence of a 100-pound rucksack, if it shifts, can make it very hard to maintain stability in freefall.

There were other difficulties at ground level. “A major problem occurred in that eight personnel were surveilled and later apprehended by State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) personnel, who thought they were involved in drug smuggling-type operations.” The matter was resolved when two senior officers “were dispatched from headquarters to the exercise area.” The forces of law and order were usually more obliging. “In January and February 1986, two…personnel were dispatched to Miami to talk to U.S. Customs Services and the Drug Enforcement Administration about concealment devices and techniques currently being used [by smugglers] and to obtain their views on how to do it better. These trips came to the personal attention of the Secretary of the Army who was advised of the results, which were primarily, we would have to do each on a case by case basis, depending on what, where and when it was needed.”
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