Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (27 page)

Once established in Angola, the British contingent set about massacring civilians for sport, or to test their weapons on human targets, before turning on one another. (One of their intended victims was the author, the subject of an assassination contract.) Even by the standards of mercenaries in Africa, it was a macabre story which ended with a show trial in Luanda, a firing squad for captured leaders, and prolonged imprisonment for the surviving grunts.

A few had tried to fight their well-armed, professional Cuban enemy who, after the Bay of Pigs, were giving the West another bloody nose. One mercenary recalled: “Men literally threw themselves at tanks though we had no real equipment to knock them out. The only way was to get on the turret, open the hatch, and drop a grenade inside. Unfortunately, the T54 hatch locks from the inside.” The same man tried to incinerate the tank crews, “but we did not have enough petrol.”

And yet, at the start of the campaign, the view from Washington was that everything was going just fine. On 11 November 1975, as the FNLA advanced on the capital Luanda, a celebration was under way at the CIA’s Langley headquarters. The Angola task force office was decorated with crepe paper, as if for Christmas, the wine and cheese delicately laid out. Stockwell reported: “People came from all over the building, from the Portuguese Task Force, the French Desk and the Special Operations Group to drink to the program’s continued success. Then the Cubans’ 122-mm rockets began to land in the Quifangondo valley, not like single claps of thunder but in salvoes, twenty at a time.” The devastation was witnessed by CIA case officers from a nearby ridge as the FNLA men “fled in panic, abandoning weapons, vehicles and wounded comrades.”
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The Angolan civil war outlasted the Cold War by a decade. The government that was still standing in Luanda was the MPLA, characterized by Colby as the bad guys. Having survived, the MPLA hired a team of South African mercenaries to secure the country’s oil assets. It was symptomatic of a movement by governments toward the private market for black operations and intelligence-gathering.

The use of the British firm KMS in Nicaragua (where a devastating bomb attack on an army barracks in the capital Managua was attributed by Colonel Oliver North to a former SAS major, David Walker, a link he denies) and in Afghanistan, where KMS operators trained the mujahideen, was merely the tip of a covert warfare iceberg. It did not, of course, do much for open government or the American tradition. The majority report from a Congressional Committee Investigating the Iran Contra plot, issued on 18 November 1987, quoted a long-dead Supreme Court judge, Louis Brandeis: “Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites every man to become a law unto himself, it invites anarchy.” The committee added: “The Iran-Contra affair resulted from a failure to heed this message.”

During the presidency of George W. Bush, the market in officially licensed privatized warfare, far from diminishing, grew at the expense of the very agencies that were charged with covert operations as special forces soldiers quit to join the private sector. The failure of the CIA and British SIS to establish the facts about Saddam Hussein’s non-functioning weapons of mass destruction, or to anticipate the threat of Islamist terrorism on the streets of New York and London, were symptoms of their weakness. Intelligence (and the covert operations that often flowed from it) was “just another form of politics.” It was also to become a marketable commodity.

A purge of CIA veterans that began with the appointment of Porter Goss produced a crisis through which, by 2005, half the CIA’s workforce—operators and analysts alike—had five years’ experience or less. Their experience had now moved to private corporations that the Agency was obliged to hire. As the writer Tim Weiner points out: “Corporate clones of the CIA started sprouting all over the suburbs of Washington and beyond. Patriotism for profit became a $50-billion-a-year business by some estimates—a sum about the size of the American intelligence budget itself.”

As the West became bogged down in the ill-comprehended global war against Islamist terrorism, the CIA and Special Forces were obliged by force of circumstance to share their expertise and personnel. But in that process, diplomatically as well as militarily, it was the culture of Special Forces, personified by General Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan, that dominated the agenda. In the increasingly shared culture of private and public covert warfare, the first victim was public accountability. This was good for clandestine operations but, given the history of plausible deniability, inevitably treated with suspicion by a skeptical public.

CHAPTER 6

JOSEPH’S COAT OF MANY DISRUPTIVE PATTERNS

A
merica, Ireland, and Israel share a secret. This that in every case, their successful resistance to British rule depended, initially, on irregular military forces. Revolutionary America had its Minutemen and less accomplished state militias. Ireland had Sinn Fein and the IRA. Zionists working to undermine the British Mandate in Palestine had Haganah. The military traditions that followed independence were strongly influenced by the idea that special forces operations, as they later became known, were the military norm, the template for defense. By contrast, most European models, following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, invested the state with a monopoly of lethal force, a deal requiring regular, standing armies. Conventional warriors regarded Special Forces with suspicion. So did their political masters. In Ireland and America, many former guerrillas moved smoothly enough into the conventional fold, adopted formal dress, and took the salute at public events, but the sons of Zion never quite gave up the champagne taste of clandestine warfare. Like Don John of Austria, they were never quite legit, except in Israel. In Israel, military SF and intelligence units proliferate. At the latest count, there were around thirty of them.

Alongside the remarkable but real evolution of Israel’s Special Forces—the external intelligence service Mossad, its military cousin Aman, and domestic espionage service the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet)—pervasive myths were cultivated and administered like a magic potion to successive generations of Israelis. In 2009,
Time
magazine interviewed Jewish settlers on the Palestinian West Bank, where Zionist migration had increased from 138,000 in 1995 to nearly 300,000 within fourteen years. One typical family, from Woodmere, New York, “believe Arabs arrived in the area only in the 1970s.”
¹⁸⁶
Other great minds made the same mistake. Even as Colonel T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) was leading his Arab Revolt against the Turks, Arthur Balfour, the British prime minister who committed his country to support for a Jewish homeland in 1917, professed he “did not know there were Arabs in that country” [Palestine].
¹⁸⁷
In those days, Jewish resistance to Turkish rule in Palestine led to the formation of
Netzah Yisrael Lo Yeshaker
(or NILI), an espionage team that made common cause with Britain until one of NILI’s carrier pigeons was intercepted, with disastrous results for its human controllers as well as the pigeon.

The true story of Mossad and Israel’s special military agencies, though often embellished by enthusiastic myth-makers (and what is a myth other than a poetic extrapolation of truth?), does not need—to quote Churchill—a bodyguard of lies. In Israel as in Ireland, a sense of destiny backed by attachment to the sanctified earth (personified by fundamentalist Irish republicans as “Cathleen ni Houlihan”) helps to mold martyrs. So does the brutal reality of diaspora. The extraordinary story of Bricha—the secret escape line for survivors of the Holocaust after 1945, from Eastern Europe into the American sector of Occupied Germany, with U.S. complicity—contains all these elements and more. In a new Exodus, Bricha engineered the migration of 250,000 European Jews to Palestine, 170,000 of them Poles.
¹⁸⁸

America was rewarded for its support with an invaluable intelligence by-product: ground truth about conditions behind the Iron Curtain that could only come from those who had experienced it. As Black and Morris noted, “Military installations, factories and railways behind the Iron Curtain were of no interest to Israel. For the CIA the product was priceless.”
¹⁸⁹
It included Soviet identity cards, handed over to the CIA for use in secret operations inside Russia. In May 1951, with a little help from James Jesus Angleton, this harvest led to a formal U.S./Israel agreement on Intelligence co-operation.

There are other elements that shape a unique Israeli culture and its defense forces. Unlike most developed countries, Israel retains the draft, compulsory military service for virtually all citizens of fighting age, something that binds the nation organically to its army. Then there is The Book, religious doctrine perceived as divine revelation. In Israel’s case, divinely inspired holy text is a potent element to unite a diaspora of the disinherited, spread across centuries and continents, though—even after more than 2,000 years—it can still generate confusion about what territory actually constitutes Israel. Among Zionists, God’s guidance about this matter is to be found in Genesis 15:18: “…the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘Unto thy seed I have given this land, from the river of Egypt [the Nile] unto the greater river, the river Euphrates’” [in modern Iraq.] There is also the book of Numbers, one of the five works that form the Torah. “The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: ‘Send men that they may spy out the land of Canaan, which I give to the children of Israel; of every tribe of their fathers shall you send a man, every one a prince among them.’” (The resonant phrase
Every Spy a Prince
was adopted by an American journalist and an Israeli scholar as the title of a “warts-and-all” history of Israeli intelligence operations in 1991.)

The notion that, in the right circumstances, every man is a prince-in-waiting matches perfectly the Special Forces philosophy of SAS founder David Stirling: “We believe, as did the ancient Greeks who originated the word ‘aristocracy,’ that every man with the right attitude and talents, regardless of birth and riches, has a capacity in his own lifetime of reaching that status in its true sense…. All ranks in the SAS are of ‘one company,’ in which a sense of class is both alien and ludicrous.”

Canaan encompasses contemporary Israel, much of Lebanon, Gaza, and the Palestinian territories. This is not the so-called Greater Israel comprising the State of Israel and the Palestine of Mandate times. Nor is it the UN’s nostrum for partition in 1947; nor the Israel enlarged by the 1967 Six Day War, doubling Israeli-controlled territory to incorporate the Golan Heights, Sinai and the Gaza strip, Jerusalem, and the West Bank. As a result of that feat of arms, materially helped by freelance British and French mercenaries in the Yemen civil war, the UN sought “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict” in exchange for Arab recognition of Israel’s right to exist.

If there are biblical ambiguities about Israel’s geography, there are bigger questions about the authenticity of a universal Jewish identity, raised significantly by Shlomo Sand, a teacher of contemporary history at Tel Aviv University, who challenges the veracity of one of his country’s creation myths, that there was a golden age before the Romans evicted Jews from their country after the fall of the temple in the year 70
C
.
E
. He does not believe that the Jews occupied the land of Canaan in the era of David and Solomon; or even that there was a diaspora. He argues that there was, instead, a diffusion of Judaic culture by merchants and missionaries far beyond Jerusalem, long before the fall of the temple.
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As the English historian Max Hastings commented, reviewing Sand’s work: “The legend of the ancient exile and modern return stands at the heart of Israel’s self belief.”
¹⁹¹
For the foreseeable future this will have no impact on the special fervor of Israel’s armed forces, particularly its most dedicated warriors, the Special Forces. As the Irish know, what matters is not the fact behind the ancient legend, but its current vitality, refreshed by new suffering.

There is one other characteristic of Israel’s Special Forces that makes them unique. This is a religious mission to save and protect Jews wherever they are endangered, whether by military intervention beyond Israel, such as at Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976, or in the 1985 exodus of Falashas from Sudan, or by changing the demography of Palestine through the Jewish right of return. Predating the Holocaust, from the 1930s onward, tens of thousands of Jews were imported, often in defiance of local, British-administered laws and later, to take over land previously occupied by Arabs. The process continued into the 21st century. From the resulting backlash, three forms of resistance emerged. There was first the secular, political Palestinian response personified by Yassir Arafat’s Fatah organization after the 1967 defeat; the international terrorism of warlords such as Abu Nidal and Imad Mughniya; and finally Islamist fundamentalism, often perverting Muslim doctrine, embodied by Osama bin Laden. Had the Arab states adjoining Palestine in 1947 accepted the UN-brokered deal—to partition the country into separate Jewish and Arab entities joined in an economic union—the outcome might have been different, though the guerrilla wars on both sides created a less than optimistic climate. (The British Field Marshal Montgomery did not expect the new state of Israel to survive more than three weeks.) Twenty-four hours after Israel came into existence, the armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon attacked from three points of the compass. Against all the odds, Israel survived to fight another day, and another. If this seemed like a miracle to some, it was perceived as a sign of god by dedicated Zionists.

The pact between Israel and the diaspora was not a one-way deal. According to one former case officer (a
katsa
) and later critic of Mossad, loyal Jews, wherever they are to be found, in whatever job or profession, are part of the
sayanim
, a secret international army offering safe houses, arms, intelligence, and whatever else is required by Mossad and its agents.
¹⁹²
This might be an exaggeration. If it is not, it calls into question the reliability of many Jews in the eyes of their host governments, making them objects of suspicion as were Roman Catholics in post-Reformation England. The case of Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew employed by U.S. Navy intelligence, sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 for passing secrets to Mossad, makes the
sayanim
issue a legitimate topic for public discussion, but that should come with the caveat that generations of anti-semites have fed on a “world Jewish conspiracy.” That said, it is historical fact that hundreds of Jews who served with the British army in the war against Hitler used their knowledge and contacts within British forces to betray their former comrades-in-arms when Hitler was defeated.

Dedicated Zionists would not perceive this as betrayal, but as a regrettable necessity resulting from their religious duty to the greater priority of patriotism. As Pollard’s first wife, Anne, memorably put it: “We did what we were expected to do, and what our moral obligation was as Jews, what our moral obligation was as human beings, and I have no regrets about that.”
¹⁹³
Most warfare, particularly within the world of intelligence and special operations, is morally dubious. As Isser Be’eri, the first head of Haganah’s intelligence service, told his court martial: “The moment an intelligence service begins to act according to law, it will cease to be an intelligence service.”
¹⁹⁴

The use by Western intelligence of former Nazis (Gehlen et al.) in postwar Europe and beyond could also be seen as a betrayal of the ideals that underpinned the Second World War. The ambiguities of the postwar world of intelligence and Special Forces were to be found in the friendships of people such as James Jesus Angleton, the OSS/CIA officer, with former Italian Fascists as well as with David Ben-Gurion; or between Maurice Oldfield of MI5 (the U.K.’s internal security service) and Teddy Kollek, a Mossad liaison officer; or Otto Skorzeny, the Nazi commando who liberated Mussolini, and Mossad agents running a “false flag” operation. In spite of that, the clandestine campaign of Haganah in pre-independence Palestine is seen by some romantics as a golden age of Jewish resistance, aided by worthy
goyim
in a process that retrieved Jewish dignity from the ashes of the Holocaust.

The British Mandate was a poisoned chalice handed down by the League of Nations, timed to expire after twenty-five years, on 24 May 1948. For years before the deadline, Jewish underground forces led by Haganah and its intelligence bureau anticipated a war for survival. By 1947, Zionist intelligence was running sixty British and Jewish agents (many of them working for U.K. agencies) and eighty Arabs. A British army captain gave Haganah a list of 5,000 of its members who were to be arrested, in exchange for a love nest where he could be with his Jewish mistress.

The moral authority of the Jewish resistance movement was not enhanced by the activities of two splinter groups, the Irgun Svai Leumi and the Lehi, known to the British as The Stern Gang, after its leader Avraham Stern, who did not “disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.”
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With the British withdrawal, Israel’s declaration of statehood, and the Arab armies’ attacks in 1948, Haganah became the basis of the emerging Israel Defense Force while its intelligence agency was reorganized as the Army’s intelligence arm, Aman. In a further reorganization Mossad was formed in 1951 to coordinate the competing teams of internal security (Shin Bet), the military intelligence wing Aman, and the Political Department of Israel’s Foreign Office as part of the Prime Minister’s office. The reform was bitterly opposed by the existing intelligence freemasonry, many of whom resigned en masse in a “spies revolt” similar to the British officers’ Curragh Mutiny in 1914.

From a few dozen case officers, Mossad grew to 1,200 by the early 1990s, augmented, according to Ostrovsky, by many thousands of Jewish-Zionist
syanim
sleepers outside Israel. The astonishing scale and scope of Mossad operations around the world—particularly “direct action” missions by Mossad’s Metsada combatants and its sub-unit Kidon (Bayonet) team, responsible for assassination and kidnap—suggests a much higher force level even when allowance is made for augmentation of Kidon hit teams by the Special Forces.