Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (2 page)

The genesis of Special Forces is long and complex, often rooted in guerrilla warfare and terrorism. It is a world of moral and ethical ambiguity. It is also, in many respects, an Anglo-American story. In spite of differences of scale—Uncle Sam’s resources vastly outweigh John Bull’s—British innovation has consistently provided a template that the U.S. refined and developed. The first U.S. Army Ranger battalion was activated in Northern Ireland in June 1942
⁴
and trained by British Commandos in Scotland.
⁵

The modern history of SF warfare has its origins in the Irish War of Independence, a war the British lost but from which they learned a useful lesson. Between 1916, when Irish patriots were executed by firing squads in squalid circumstances, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, native resistance was led by Michael Collins, a postal worker and a born guerrilla. From 1919 to 1921 his killers, known as The Squad and dressed as civilians, emasculated the British intelligence apparatus thanks to a program of selective assassination. The victims included Catholics serving with the Royal Irish Constabulary (1,087 killed and wounded), the cream of Dublin Special Branch, the head of police intelligence and Resident Magistrate Bell, travelling by tram in the Irish capital when his killers tapped his shoulder and ordered him off, with the words: “Your time has come.” Collins’s most potent weapon was the leakage of information to the IRA from spies within the British apparatus such as Edward Broy, a double agent who smuggled out carbons of his colleagues’ Special Branch reports (as did Zionists working for the British Mandate in Palestine). One by one, the lights went out in rural police stations and the IRA took over civil administration to outgovern the British.

The pattern was to be followed in many places, notably Vietnam and Afghanistan. During the first half of 1961, Vietminh terrorists and guerrillas assassinated more than 500 local government officials, kidnapped more than 1,000 and killed almost 1,500 of the local armed forces.
⁶
In Afghanistan in 2009, the Taliban intimidated thousands and replaced government institutions with its own, to outgovern Kabul.

In Ireland, the British responded with their own assassination squads and militas known as the Black And Tans to carry out random atrocities, striking out blindly against much of the civilian population in a reprisal campaign. A previously equivocal population, often agnostic about Irish republicanism, responded as do most people to the experience of collective punishment. They fought back. They became the political and cultural sea within which the piranhas of the IRA could swim with impunity. As a result, in 1921 Collins went to London to sign the treaty that recognized his republic (twenty-six counties out of thirty-two) as an independent country.

It was the first time in modern history that an indigenous guerrilla army had defeated a major occupying power. The war of the flea was back, inspiring Indian and Zionist resistance to British rule. For example, Robert Briscoe, the only Jew to serve with the Irish Volunteers in 1916 and subsequently Lord Mayor of Dublin, assisted pioneers of the Zionist terrorist movement Irgun Zvai Leumi, triggering a process that finally levered the British out of Palestine. Yitzhak Shamir, Israel’s seventh prime minister, used the nom de guerre “Michael” in honour of the Irish rebel leader, Michael Collins. Of a later generation, Chaim Herzog, a Belfast-born, Dublin-educated barrister and British intelligence officer, became a Haganah leader when Britain withdrew from Palestine. Later he was President Herzog, his country’s head of state.

The Irish techniques of resistance had very deep roots. Since the defeat of King James II on the Boyne in 1690, irregular warfare was the Irish way, brutal and up-close, in which farm implements were used as tools of decapitation. The process is deodorized by nationalist historians as “the physical force tradition.” Collins’s historic success in liberating Ireland did not inhibit some of his own warriors from assassinating him when he failed to secure the six northern counties of Ireland, regardless of the fact that Ulster was a hornets’ nest of embattled Orangemen who had settled in that country before, for example, the state of Massachusetts was formally established. The Irish War resumed in Northern Ireland in 1969 and splutters on still.

Two British officers serving in Dublin took a dispassionately professional interest in Collins’s campaign and latched onto its possible application elsewhere, for Britain still had an empire to defend. There was J. F. C. (Joe) Holland DFC, a former Royal Flying Corps pilot who flew Lawrence of Arabia and raided Sofia in his stringbag flying machine during the First World War. Holland was a brilliant, irascible man whose impatience was reflected by his habits of chain smoking and book-throwing. Another veteran of the Irish War was Colin McVean Gubbins, artilleryman and Western Front survivor who served with the British mission in Russia in 1919—learning from the Bolshevik revolution—followed by three years in Ireland. Gubbins was a small, dark, intense man. Those who knew him sensed a coiled, concentrated energy beneath the soft, courteous voice. His deadly courtesy reminded some of Churchill’s declaration of war on Japan in 1941. This concluded: “I have the honour to be, with high consideration, Sir, Your obedient servant.” Challenged to justify such fulsome language, Churchill replied: “When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.”
⁷

In 1938—the year Hitler seized part of Czechoslovakia with the boast, “Thus we begin our march into the great German future!”—Holland began another sort of quest. He was put in charge of a U.K. War Office research team studying guerrilla warfare, known as Military Intelligence (Research), or MI/R. A few months later, Gubbins joined him, from a quasi-diplomatic posting in the Sudetenland. Holland, says the SOE historian M. R. D. Foot, “thought that the army needed, to act in front of it and on its flanks in fluid battles, small teams of dedicated soldiers: extra-brave, extra-enterprising men, who could raid spots vital for the enemy and cause damage and dislocation quite out of proportion to their own small numbers.”

The Czech crisis prompted the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Lord Gort, to approve covert operations—including sabotage—against Nazis in that country months before Britain’s formal declaration of war on Germany in September 1939. Gubbins was busy writing field service manuals entitled
The Art of Guerrilla Warfare, The Partisan Leader’s Handbook,
and
How To Use High Explosives
, works for which there were no precedents in the gentlemanly English culture of war studies. These slender documents were basic statements of principle for guerrillas, later summarized by the Special Air Service in Borneo as a policy of “shoot-and-scoot.”

In parallel, the British Secret Intelligence Service, in April 1938, set up its own guerrilla warfare department, known as Section D, headed by yet another chain-smoking military engineer, Laurence Grand, to consider the use of sabotage. The catalyst, again, seems to have been the Nazi occupation of Sudetenland (initially endorsed at Munich in 1936 by British appeasers of Hitler including Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain). It would be four years before members of the Czech resistance, trained by the U.K., retaliated with the ambush and assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Butcher of Prague, an event that provoked the Lidice atrocity.

The war triggered by Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, Churchill’s emergence as Prime Minister, and the Anglo-French defeat in France in 1940 put the planners of MI/R and Section D under enormous pressure to find a means to hit back, preferably by stirring up resistance in Occupied Europe. Thereby, Churchill hoped to reduce the chances of a successful German invasion of Britain. The result, in July 1940, was amalgamation of MI/R and Section D to create a hell-raising team known as Special Operations Executive, commanded by Gubbins. Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare and SOE’s political master, argued: “We have got to organize movements in enemy-occupied territory comparable to the Sinn Fein movement in Ireland, to the Chinese guerrillas now operating against Japan.” Dalton did not mince his words about the methods to be employed: “Industrial and military sabotage, labor agitation and strikes, continuous propaganda, terrorist acts against traitors and German leaders, boycotts and riots.”

In parallel with such notions, following Russia’s invasion of Finland in November 1939, brave spirits from the Scots Guards and other British regiments took practical steps to go to another war. They learned to ski. But after Finland was overrun, they went instead to Norway to confront the Wehrmacht in a campaign that had little success. It produced one useful by-product: commando expertise and training in Scotland where many Special Forces, were trained.

Later historians did not agree about Britain’s espousal of guerrilla warfare. John Keegan, for example, argued: “Our response to the scourge of terrorism is compromised by what we did through SOE…. Means besmirch ends. SOE besmirched Britain.” M. R. D. Foot, the SOE historian, disagreed. He suggested: “The Irish [thanks to the example set by Collins and followed by SOE] can thus claim that their resistance provided an originating impulse for resistance to tyrannies worse than any they had to endure themselves. And Irish resistance, as Collins led it, showed the rest of the world an economical way to fight wars, the only sane way they can be fought in the age of the nuclear bomb.” That still holds good. At the sunset of the nation state, asymmetric warfare is where it is at, though few conventional soldiers warm to that idea.

In June 1940, following the savage experience of the British retreat from Dunkirk after Hitler’s invasion of France, yet another secret formation was raised to run an IRA-style campaign of resistance against a German army occupying Britain. The generic name for those involved was “stay-behind” forces and the concept they embodied was to have an impact on American involvement in European security long after the war ended. The British stay-behind cells were named, with deliberate official vagueness, “GHQ [for ‘General Headquarters’] Auxiliary Units.” These, in turn, were divided between Operational Patrols—murder squads in civilian clothes—and Special Duty operators who were to run intelligence and communications. The operational patrols were drawn from a cross-section of apparently average, peaceful citizens in largely rural areas. They included local worthies such as doctors and ministers of the church as well as gamekeepers and farmers. They accepted that if their resistance campaign were endangered by their neighbors, then they would be obliged to murder the neighbors to preserve operational security. The oath they took was confirmation of a basic human instinct, to kill another human being if the terms are right. The Special Duties operators included a number of women specially trained to use clandestine radios.

As well as an underground army to function in the event of Nazi occupation, Britain’s battered morale needed a tonic, the healthy stimulus and satisfaction of striking back rather than cowering on a small island waiting for the worst to happen. Churchill gave it just that. An orchestra of Special Forces teams was invented to conduct what General Sir John (“Shan”) Hackett (a paratrooper and survivor of the epic Arnhem battle) romantically described as “the British way of war.” It was, he suggested, a style exemplified in the desert during the First World War by T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”). As Hackett saw it, “The British way in war is not that of continental nations, whose natural tendency is generally towards massive frontal action. It lies more in looking for the open flank and then making use of it, often by distant action and deep penetration. The British method lies predominantly in the oblique approach….” Hackett attributed this style to the fact that the British created an empire through command of the sea. “Wherever there was blue water, there was an open flank….” In warfare, the desert, jebel, and jungle have much in common with the ocean.

America could lay claim to a similar inheritance. In the Revolutionary War against the British, Francis Marion (“the Swamp Fox”) was one of many irregular warriors who harassed the Redcoats from the flanks. Sgt. Ezra Lee piloted the first submarine—
The American Turtle
—in an attack on the Royal Navy’s HMS
Eagle
in New York harbor within weeks of the Declaration of Independence. Some of these lone rangers drew the short straw. In 1780, one of Washington’s generals, Benedict Arnold V, deserted in a fit of pique to join the British, who made him a brigadier. John Champ, an Irish-born First Sergeant of Cavalry, was commissioned by General Washington to pretend to follow Arnold’s example and switch sides. The real purpose of Champ’s “defection” was to kidnap Arnold at gunpoint and bring him before American justice. Champ joined the British in New York, but his plan to snatch Arnold at gunpoint failed when Arnold changed his program, unexpectedly. Champ returned to his own lines, to be treated as if his desertion were genuine. The dirt clung to him for the rest of his life.

The groups that emerged from Churchill’s initiative included the Special Operations Executive (commanded by Churchill to “set Europe ablaze”); the Long Range Desert Group, a deep reconnaissance team; the Special Air Service, a raiding regiment that became the godfather of America’s Delta Force; the Special Boat Service; Lovat Scouts; Wingate’s jungle commando, known as the Chindits, Laycock’s Commandos in the Mediterranean, the Jewish-manned Special Interrogation Group (dressed in German uniforms), Popski’s Private Army, the Small Scale Raiding Force, Force 133, Force 136, Force 266, Rose Force, Ferret Force, Gideon Force and the Norwegian Independent Companies, among others.

Their progress was followed with interest from neutral America by Colonel (later Major General) Bill Donovan. In 1940 and 1941, Donovan made discreet trips to London, then under intensive aerial attack by the Luftwaffe, to assess British resilience. After meeting Churchill and the U.K.’s intelligence mandarins, he was persuaded that the U.S. needed a unified intelligence service similar to Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. He was also impressed by the old lion’s adoption of unconventional warfare. In 1942, back in uniform as an army colonel, he created the Office of Strategic Services, modeled on the U.K.’s Special Operations Executive. Donovan’s vision was even larger than Churchill’s. He hoped to create “a new instrument of war” that combined psychological warfare, intelligence penetration, and propaganda—“the arrow of initial penetration”—with commando raids in support of conventional operations.
⁸
One of the most successful OSS teams was Detachment 101, operating in Burma with local Kachin warriors and initially led by British planters who knew the country. It was later described as “the only real military unit in the OSS.”
⁹
Donovan had to ram support for the force through the opposition of conventional commanders. Other operational OSS groups were sent to the Pacific, Corsica, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, and France, usually in a reconnaissance role. The OSS also helped train Mao’s Red Army and the Vietminh in French Indochina as allies against Japan. Like the training of mujahideen guerrillas in Afghanistan, it led to historical “blowback.” By the time President Truman closed it down, OSS employed around 40,000 people (4,500 women), including desk analysts, psyops warriors, and spies, as well as guerrillas. Its functions and hundreds of its operators were inherited by the CIA. After the war, both CIA and postwar SIS inherited the OSS initiative known as Gladio, a right-wing underground force operating in much of western Europe.