Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (3 page)

There was another, less public, American inheritance from Britain. In the spring of 1942, the U.K.’s Combined Operations chief Lord Louis Mountbatten (assassinated by the IRA in 1979) brought the attention of U.S. General George C. Marshall to an Arctic warfare program that matured to include an American tracked vehicle named the Weasel. “General Marshall concluded that an elite force recruited in Canada and the United States would be the best military organization for conducting raids and strikes; he selected an American, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Tryon Frederick, to assemble, organize, train and command the U.S.-Canadian 1st Special Service Force. Made up of three regiments of two battalions each, the unit became a separate branch of the service (as did Special Operations Command much later) with the crossed arrows of the Indian Scouts…as its insignia. The men were trained in demolitions, rock-climbing, amphibious assaults and ski techniques and were given basic airborne instruction. They fought under Allied command with great bravery and considerable success in the Aleutians, North Africa, Italy and Southern France. The 1st Special Service Force got its nickname, ‘the Devil’s Brigade,’ during the Italian campaign from a passage in the captured diary of a dead German officer who had written: ‘The black devils are all around us every time we come into line and we never hear them.’”

If the Second World War witnessed an unparalleled evolution of irregular and special forces, the bonds formed during that conflict were complicated by changing loyalties as Hitler’s defeat came within sight. On 5 June 1941, what British Communists perceived to be an internecine blood feud between capitalist powers—a conflict of no consequence to the British working class—was miraculously transformed into The Great Patriotic War as a result of Hitler’s invasion of Soviet Russia. British Communists, suddenly discovering a voice, called for “a Second Front, now!” to relieve Russia.

Until then, Britain had stood alone in defying Hitler. But now, with western Europe under the Nazi jackboot, Britain’s only ally was Moscow. Churchill immediately promised Moscow “whatever help we can,” though the U.K. was itself under U-boat siege and food in Britain was strictly rationed. Until then, Communist Russia had kept faith with the Nazis, with whom Stalin shared a non-aggression pact while the German blitzkrieg overran the West and the Red Army invaded Poland. The U.S., gripped by isolationism and anti-British sentiment personified by Joseph Kennedy (the most hostile U.S. ambassador ever dispatched to London), could not enter the fight, officially, until Japan’s day of infamy and its destruction of America’s Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

In spite of the Bolshevik scare that permeated the U.K. Establishment for decades after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, emerging British Special Forces (often regarded with fear and loathing by the Foreign Office and the Secret Intelligence Service) were prepared pragmatically to work with Communist partisans when that offered the best chance of victory over the Nazis. In the Malayan jungle, British officers such as Spencer Chapman found a valuable ally against the Japanese in the Communist guerrilla Chin Peng, who was awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) before he was hunted by the SAS in the postwar jungle as a terrorist. In French Indochina Lucien E. Conein, an American OSS officer, supported Ho Chi Minh. In Yugoslavia, Fitzroy Maclean, personally briefed by Churchill, was instructed to support the Communist Tito rather than a Yugoslav monarch. But, it was rumored, he was careful not to accept the first parachute his controllers offered him on his journey into Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia.

A sound Tory, Maclean had doubts about supporting the Communist partisans in Yugoslavia, with obvious implications for what would happen in that country after the war. Churchill asked Maclean: “Do you intend to make Yugoslavia your home after the war?” Maclean said he did not. “Neither do I,” snapped Churchill. “And that being so, the less you and I worry about the form of government they set up, the better. That is for them to decide. What interests us is, which of them is doing the most harm to the Germans.”
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But in March 1946, when the war was won, Churchill—ever the pragmatist, so long as his side won—saw things differently, with a speech at Fulton, Missouri, recording the fact that a new Cold War had begun with the descent of an iron curtain across Europe from Stettin to Trieste. In truth he had been uneasy about his Soviet ally for some time. As the last shot was fired in 1945, he ordered General Montgomery “to be careful in collecting German arms, to stack them so that they could easily be issued again to the German soldiers whom we should have to work with if the Soviet advance [westward] continued.” Others had the same idea. As Professor Richard Aldrich observed, “many components of Special Operations Executive marched out of the Second World War into the Cold War without breaking step.” But if the old right wing of SOE had a postwar agenda, so did the West’s wartime allies, including Mao Tse-Tung, Chin Peng OBE, and Zionists such as Chaim Herzog. They dreamed of independence and the day when the beaten men would come into their own.

Thanks to the evolution of Special Forces, the Second World War was one in which indigenous underground resistance movements also came of age. Their activities, like those of Commando raiding forces, started as little more than pinpricks which boosted morale, a drumbeat of hope, similar to the BBC’s repeated Morse signal beating out dot-dot-dot-dash—the letter V, for Victory—on the radio. As time passed, and the chronic problem of resupplying guerrillas surrounded by highly efficient opponents was overcome, the Resistance took on a strategic importance, cutting enemy supplies before and after D-Day in France and undermining Japanese logistics in Burma and the Philippines.

There can be no doubt about the strategic impact of the SAS during the Western Desert War, or that of the American Detachment 101 in Burma. David Stirling, Paddy Mayne, and Jock Lewes, founding fathers of the SAS in 1942, led raids that destroyed around 300 to 400 German aircraft on the ground. By the end of the war in the Far East, Detachment 101 was a guerrilla army of 10,000 locals aided in the field by 120 Americans. It had killed or wounded around 15,000 Japanese, rescued 425 allied airmen, and wrought havoc on the coherence of the Japanese war machine in Burma.

In the Japanese-occupied Philippines, 1941–1944, Pentagon historians have concluded, “support to and in some cases leadership of irregular resistance to Japanese forces [by OSS] was an unqualified success. It stands as a premier example of what military planners today call operational preparation of the environment.” An archipelago spread over 7,100 islands was impossible to control. Philippine resistance “collected and transmitted intelligence on adversary order of battle, conducted hit-and-run raids against Japanese forces and provided de facto government services in a number of villages.” Like the British in Ireland prior to 1921, the Japanese resorted to “reprisals against villagers for attacks; imprisonment, torture or execution of suspected guerrillas, seizure of crops and livestock, turning the population against them.”

Like Detachment 101, by 1944 the British General Wingate’s Chindits were operating in divisional strength. In western Europe, German efforts to resupply defenses in Normandy were constantly sabotaged by the Maquis and SAS. The SAS historian Philip Warner reckoned that in France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany, 2,000 SAS soldiers killed or captured 7,733 enemy and captured 4,784, not including an entire division of 18,000 that surrendered to the SAS. Around 700 motor vehicles had been captured or destroyed, as were seven trains, 29 locomotives, and 89 individual trucks. Another 33 trains were derailed. Railway lines were cut 164 times.

In spite of these successes, Special Forces emerging from the Second World War were damned with faint praise, or none. When victory was won in Europe, a Foreign Office mandarin carped: “I know that the SOE have done good work in the past but I am confident that their time for useful work is over. Their contacts can only be dangerous.” The ruler’s fear of an untamed Praetorian Guard is a historical cliché. In 1831 the French packed the Foreign Legion off to North Africa “to remove from France those officers and soldiers, French or foreign, who were felt to be awkward, excitable or frankly dangerous to the new monarchy” of Louis-Philippe. Others among the top brass were ungenerous about the impact of Special Forces. Field Marshal Bill Slim, commanding the 14th Army in Burma, concluded in his memoir,
Defeat Into Victory
, “Such formations, trained, equipped and mentally adjusted for one kind of operation only, were wasteful. They did not give, militarily, a worthwhile return for the resources in men, material and time that they had absorbed.” At the same time, Slim acknowledged that in future, there would be a place for small units behind enemy lines to kill or kidnap individuals and “inspire resistance movements.” Inspiration requires only limited resources. Serious resupply by clandestine means requires commitment by high command, in the face of objections from more regular formations. Slim was not the only skeptic. The official British history of the war concluded that Orde Wingate’s Chindits, operating far beyond the front line in Burma, had achieved nothing much more than proof that large numbers of men could be supplied by air.

Britain’s Special Forces godfathers are still criticized by some historians. The writer Max Hastings comments: “These exotic elite groups ill served the wider interests of the British Army, chronically short of good infantrymen for the big battlefields. Thanks to Churchill, too many of Britain’s bravest soldiers spent the war conducting irregular and self-indulgent activities of questionable strategic value.”
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As the war approached its bloody end, Special Forces received muted applause in messages sent indirectly to the men in the field, many still active behind the lines. Eisenhower described Donovan as “The Last Hero.” In 1944, the future president also sent this message to an SAS brigadier: “I wish to send my congratulations to all ranks of the Special Air Service Brigade on the contribution which they have made to the success of the Allied Expeditionary Force. The ruthlessness with which the enemy have attacked Special Air Service troops has been an indication of the injury you were able to cause to the German armed forces both by your own efforts and by the information which you gave of German disposition and movements. Many Special Air Service troops are still behind enemy lines; others are being reformed for new tasks. To all of them I say, ‘Well done and good luck!’”

Montgomery, in a radio message to troops behind the lines, shortly before the ill-fated Arnhem operation, relayed via Lieutenant General “Boy” Browning, said: “The operations you have carried out have had more effect in hastening the disintegration of the German 7th and 5th Armies than any other single effort in the army…which no other troops in the world could have done…. The strain has been great because operating as you do entails the most constant vigilance and cunning which no other troops are called upon to display…. To say you have done your job well is to put it mildly….”
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The political compass, marking a decisive change of wartime loyalties, started to shift first in Italy in 1944 when Team X-2, an element of OSS led by the paranoid James Angleton, made common cause with Prince Valerio Borghese, whose men had “hanged [anti-Fascist] partisans from lampposts all over Italy” during the Mussolini years. Initially, Angleton’s target was a German stay-behind unit in Rome, whose men were summarily rounded up and shot by their former Italian allies. Later, by devious means, the OSS became the CIA and former Fascists signed up to join the anti-Communist secret army known as Gladio funded by untraceable dollars siphoned from the Marshall Aid budget.

The political scenery changed rapidly elsewhere. Between 1946 and 1951 Britain smuggled 127 German scientists and engineers to Australia, including thirty-one Nazi Party members and six SS officers. These experts included the chief of the Messerschmitt aircraft team and a nuclear physicist working on Hitler’s proposed atomic bomb.
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Immediately after the Third Reich fell in 1945 the Gestapo war criminal Klaus Barbie—a torturer responsible for the deaths of 4,000 French patriots—worked for British and American intelligence services in Germany even as an SAS War Crimes Investigation Team known as “Secret Hunters” scoured Germany to track such people down. Secret Hunters, pursuing Germans who had butchered their wartime colleagues, made the “mistake,” if mistake it was, of fighting yesterday’s war against Hitler rather than today’s new war against Stalin. They were appointed on 15 May 1945 by Lieutenant Colonel Brian Franks, whose soldiers of 2 SAS had been executed in Occupied France.

The Hunters stayed in business until January 1947, by which time the British Socialist government believed it had consigned the SAS brigade and Special Operations Executive, with its 2,000 agents, to history. Officially disbanded in 1946, SOE was able to transfer 280 of its operators to the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) on 15 January that year. At first, they were part of a Special Operations Branch running agents and guerrillas into the Balkans and Russia. Many of them were betrayed by the British spymaster Kim Philby. Philby was also a KGB colonel, a senior SIS officer, and one of the Cambridge University spy ring. In a twist worthy of a le Carré novel, both Philby and one of the SIS agent-runners, Mark Arnold-Foster, a Royal Navy SF veteran, were doubling as journalists for the same London newspaper (the
Observer
) for some time, each still deeply entangled in the spying game. After Russia exploded its first nuclear weapon in 1949 and gradually deployed viable warheads, direct action, SOE-style, was regarded as too risky, though spying flourished.

In the United States, a similar process was happening. President Harry Truman, a Democrat, did not like the willful, freebooting style of the OSS leader Bill Donovan. The OSS was disbanded, only to re-emerge as a shiny, new Central Intelligence Agency employing many of the same people. Like the wartime SAS, it seems to have mutated in a series of steps. With its formal dissolution in October 1945 its identity was preserved by an entity known as the Strategic Services Unit until a year later, when the SSU became the Central Intelligence Group under Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers and Admiral William Leahy. In 1948 the CIG was absorbed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA’s Special Operations Division then took on the mantle of the OSS, from early operations in Tibet in 1956 and Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War by way of Angola in the seventies, to the ongoing Afghanistan conflict.