COPING WITH MODERN CONFLICT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000302170009-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 27, 2012
• Sequence Number: 9
• Publication Date: April 21, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanzed Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/27 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000302170009-3
BOSTON GLOBE MAGAZINE
pok 21 April, 1985
modern conflict
FIVE YEARS AFTER THE FAILED RESCUE MISSION
IN IRAN, IS THE US MILITARY ESTABLISHMENT
ANY BETTER PREPARED?
Wable house in Newton. Each night he sets his alarm for just
before the hour he wants to be up, whether that is 6, 7, or 8.
That way he is awake enough to hear the radio news as it comes on the
hour.
He remembers that on April 25, 1980, the news made him cringe.
The buds on the trees outside his window and the street still dusty
from winter seemed part of another, motionless world. A hoarse-
voiced Jimmy Carter was on the air. A rescue had been attempted in
Iran for the 53 Americans who had been held hostage in Tehran since
November 4, 1979. It had been called off by the President.
Davis, like many Americans, had felt the same, sickening sensation
once before, when he was much younger, at the time of the Cuban
missile crisis. Gradually, over the
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BY J. FRANCIS GLADSTONE
Jill Davis is a 43-year-old stockbroker who lives in a comfort-
news filtered out. The rescue attempt was, it turned
out, very different from the Cuban crisis. It did not
take the United States to the cliff edge of nuclear war.
There were no major reprisals.
In political terms, the failed rescue mission was a
humiliation. Carter's apology to the Iranians, in which
he said in his exhausted way that no harm was meant
against Iranians individually or against Iran as a nation,
was not one of America's finer moments. Yet the sight
of Iranian militants peeling back the plastic bags from
the bodies of dead American servicemen, of one mili-
tant poking a knife into a charred skull, was a reminder
of the madness the United States was dealing with.
Five years have gone by, a lot of water under a lot
of bridges. Jimmy Carter is in Plains, Georgia, the Aya-
tollah Ruhollah Khomeini is entrenched in a war of at-
trition with Iraq, and the former hostages are ordinary
Americans living their lives under a very different Ad-
ministration. But while politics and people's lives have
changed, at a military level there are still unanswered
questions about why seemingly weaker enemies appear
to be able to humiliate the United States. When we
J. FRANCIS GLADSTONE IS A WRITER AND FILM PRODUCER. HE
RECENTLY PRODUCED BIG WAR. SMALL WAR, A FRONTLINE -
rwir'inerwravy /VS' US ARMY'S ARTUTY TO DEAL MTN "
next hours, . days, and weeks,- the
think Of recent events in Vietnam, Iran, and Lebanon,
they may seem disparate, but there is a theme: The
military might have done things better or differently.
And in questioning the actions of our government and
military, one needs to understand the position of a lit-
tle-publicized group known as the Special Forces, or
commandos, within the military establishment
Commandos have become important elements in
the armed services of several nations. In the United
States, commandos, also known as the Special Oper-
ations Forces, are highly trained individuals who gener-
ally work-behind the lines in small, secret missions like
the Iranian hostage rescue effort. Their work may be
part of a larger war, or it may be in noncombat situa-
tions such as undercover efforts seeking to curb terror-
ism. The Special Operations- Forces, for example, re-
portedly were present at the Los Angeles Olympics.
Last month, the Washington Post reported that US
military and Central Intelligence Agency personnel are
training antiterroriarratilerriZieign-governments, as
part of the Reagan Administration's stepped-up policy
of combating terrorism around the world. The
program, according to government sources, is designed _
to increase allied governments' abilities to thwart hos-
Carlin
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hijackings. and other terrorist
activities. The training has been
conducted in about a dozen
countries, the sources said.
The Special Forces are
slightly different from comman-
dos. They are -trained to work
in foreign environments, assist-
ing Third World nations that
are US allies in countering in-
surgencies. But because these
insurgencies are often fought
by guerrillas ? such as the
nonuniformed troops of the
Viet Gong ? Special Forces
soldiers need many guerrilla-
type, behind-the-lines, comman-
do skills. (Because there are
more similarities than differ-
ences between commandos and
the Special Forces, for the pur-
poses of this article the term
Special Forces will refer to both
groups.)
Members of the Special
Forces are well aware of their
lack of proper support within
the military. Recently, someone
who served with the Special
Forces in Vietnam (also known
as the Green Berets) remarked
very apologetically, 'A lot of
people think we just kill babies. -
They think there is no moral as-
pect to good soldiering."
The events of April 24 and
April 25, 1980, the
events of Desert One,
are a good illustration of what
can happen when standards of
soldiering are not high. Desert
One was the name given to a
secret hideout in the Dasht-e-
Kavir (Salt Desert), about 400
miles southwest of Tehran,
more than 1000 miles north of
the Gulf of Oman. There, in
darkness, at 10 p.m. on April
24, two Iranian generals, 12
Farsi-speaking drivers, and 118
US commandos were dropped
on the ghostly salt flats by huge
US Air Force C130 transport
planes. The Air Force had cho-
sen the location from an earlier
reconnaissance because the de-
sert was firm enough to support
the huge planes. The disadvan-
tage of Desert One was that al-
though it was 40 miles from any
habitation, the area was tran-
sected by 2 Toad.
Within minutes after the ar-
rival of the Americans, a bus
appeared. Such eventualities
had been planned for, according
to Colonel Charlie Beckwith,
the combat-toughened leader of
the Army commando group,
which was called Delta Force.
The ancient bus was stopped,
its tires were shot, and its pas-
sengers were put under guard.
Then a gasoline tanker truck
came by. It failed to stop on
command, was fired on by an
antitank weapon, and burst into
flames.
The plan called for a rendez-
vous with Marine helicopters
and then for using those heli-
copters to take the commandos
forward to Tehran. But of the
eight helicopters sent from the
USS Nimitz, only six arrived at
Desert One, and they were late,
having been held up by a severe
dust storm. Six was the mini-
mum number of helicopters re-
quired to take the commandos
in ? and then bring them and
the hostages out.
Flying helicopters low in
darkness is difficult, even when
pilots have extensive training
and night-vision aids and when
there are no dust storms. Tim-
ing was important: The plan's
success depended on flying the
helicopters in darkness to a site
outside Tehran, picking up the
hostages, and. then returning
before the morning light. When
the six helicopters were late,
the margins were being lost.
Then it was discovered that an-
other helicopter was defective.
Time was running out, but five
helicopters were not enough to
complete the rescue. Messages
went from Beckwith through
senior military authorities right
to President Carter. Carter ac-
cepted Beckwith's recommen-
dation to abort the mission.
Then, as one of the helicop-
ters was taking off, it banked
and hit a fuel-loaded C130,
which burst into flames that
swept 300 feet high. Eight men
lost their lives, and four others
were severely burned. The oth-
er helicopters were abandoned.
(An air strike was called in to
destroy them, but that strike
was never carried out.) Mem-
bers of the mission returned to
a remote base in Egypt, where
just the day before they had
sung "God Bless America," and
one of them had read the story
of David and Goliath from the
Bible.
In reporting these events in
his book, Delta Force, Beckwith
seems to have missed the irony
of that reading. In the first book
of Samuel, David slays Goliath,
which is surely just what the
Iranian militants did to the
United States. But then this is a
story of many ironies. Accord-
ing to Free at Last!, a book by
Doyle McManus about the hos-
tages' ordeal, the Pentagon had
estimated that 15 of the 53
hostages might be killed in the
rescue attempt, and up to 30
commandos could die. If offi-
cials acknowledged that such
casualties were possible, why
weren't more precautions tak-
en?
Should the rescue attempt
never have taken place? The
central question it raises is
whether, for all America's mili-
tary might, the right hand knew
what the left was doing. Did the
planners behind the scenes in
Washington really understand
the difficulties of getting into
Tehran? Did Beckwith really
understand the minds of the
planners?
Several senior Army offi-
cers interviewed hint as much,
saying Beckwith "blinked" in
the desert that night. But that's
unfair. Beckwith had strict or-
ders to abort the raid if fewer
than six helicopters were avail-
able. There is much evidence
that in his military career,
Beckwith has shown consistent
bravery under extreme duress,
and all the reports on the raid
show that the planning of his
part was meticulous. The prob-
lem seems to be that Beck-
with's was only one part.
fter the raid, retired ad-
miral James L. Holloway
produced a detailed and
critical report. That report does
teamed
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not single out individuals; quite
the opposite. What it describes
in the planning of the raid is a
situation of extreme complex-
ity. All four services were in-
volved: The Army supplied the
Special Forces; the Navy sup-
plied the Nimitz; the Marines
supplied the helicopters; and
the Air Force chose the site of
Desert One and supplied the
planes. Each branch had its own
intelligence service. The CIA
was also involved as liaison at
various levels, as were other se-
cret agencies. Yet in the early
planning stages, when Beckwith
tried to find out about locks on
the embassy under siege, he
was faced with great difficul-
ties. If anyone in Washington
knew the answer, that person
was not dose enough to Beck-
with. He had one chain of com-
mand; the CIA and Army Intel-
ligence had others. Beckwith
eventually got the answer by
recording and analyzing net-
work news footage of the mili-
tants at the embassy gates.
In the Pentagon, there was
continuous communication
among planners. But in day-to-
day terms, those who would ac-
tually do the work on the
ground were separated by
about 2000 miles: The helicop-
ter pilots were trained in the
Arizona desert, and Beckwith's
commandos were trained most-
ly in the South.
Edward Luttwak, a military
analyst working in Washington
who has written widely on the
Israeli army and who wrote a
book on the Pentagon called A
Question of Military Reform,
thinks that this kind of separa-
tion ? of high-level planners
from soldiers, of commandos
from pilots ? was at the root
of the rescue mission's prob-
lem. And, he says, this is still
part of the US approach to
what he calls the "commando
business."
"The essence of the com-
mando business," he says, "is
simplicity."
In both England and Israel,
Luttwak points out, Special
Forces-type experience is a plus
in an officer's career. In Israel,
he notes, every senior army
commander has had commando
experience, and the same is
true in the British army. But in
the US Army, the opposite is
the case. To many, the Special
Forces lack prestige.
According to Luttwak, the
core of the problem in 1980 and
today is that the United States
employs "tough-guy types" to
do the work on the ground, but
the work is elaborately planned
for them by people in the Pen-
tagon who have no experience
in the commando business. The
result is a discrepancy between
planning theory and the ability
to carry it out.
"How could the number of
helicopters have been so
small?" one source in the Brit-
ish Special Forces asks, in talk-
ing about the US hostage res-
cue mission. "All the resources
of the US were there, yet no-
body realized that dust storms
were a possibility and that heli-
copters are fragile. Why not
send 20 helicopters, and send
them back if not needed?"
Sending more helicopters, the
source adds, wouldn't have in-
creased the risk of detection.
Says Luttwak, "It is almost
as if we plan for failure." He
does not mean this maliciously;
his implication is that in plan-
ning the 1980 raid, inexperi-
enced people in the Pentagon
figured out on paper what
would work, doing so through
elaborate chains of command,
and reached a critical mass by
which no individual knew exact-
ly what was happening. No one
person, therefore, could say
"no."
Centinued
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General Edward C. Mey-
er has a different expla-
nation. Meyer under-
stands well the workings of the
Pentagon; within the military,
he has probably done more than
anyone to try to make his col-
leagues understand that in the
current terrorist- and insur-
gent-ridden world, the United
States must be ready for con-
flicts other than nuclear war.
Yet in a recent interview,
Meyer, now retired as Army
chief of staff, dismissed the fail-
ure of the raid at Desert One as
"kismet." In other words, he
was saying, all those involved
knew the raid would be danger-
ous and the risk would be great.
He is not alone in seeing the
Desert One fiasco as an isolated
military failure. Commando op-
erations are by definition dan-
gerous, and in wars with many
such operations, there have
been many failures. But that
doesn't address the question of
how so many planners in the
Pentagon could have taken so
long to create such an elaborate
plan that went so totally wrong
from the start. It's possible to
imagine the much-heralded Is-
raeli raid on Entebbe failing,
but it's hard to imagine that
failure stemming from a' lack of
Umted h-es$, Intenuthona.
Colonel Beckwith: His part of
the mission was well planned.
helicopters.
Although he warns against
reading too much into the De-
sert One failure, Meyer says
that in trying to reform the
Army in the late 1970s, he had
gotten "tank treads all across"
his chest. In those days, the
Army was so mechanized and
the belief in mechanization was
so complete that it was almost
impossible to persuade anyone
that nonmechanical skills were
crucial in modern war. The
problem, then, was not that the
United States did not have
enough helicopters for Beck-
with's raid; it had thousands.
The problem was that no one
had the foresight to see that
more than eight might be nec-
essary.
oday, Charlie Beckwith
has a security business in
Austin, Texas, called
S.A.S. of Texas (after the Brit-
ish Special Air Services, with
which he trained). He is every
bit the John Wayne-looking
Green Beret, a big man, big
shouldered and big featured. He
seems out of place in his office,
chewing tobacco and spitting
into an old coffee can in the
sterile but comfortable neon-lit
surroundings. But he is a mod-
est man, a man trained to han-
dle danger, a commander who
has taken the risk of leading
men into an ambush, and who
knows what failure feels like.
He describes himself as a doer,
not a thinker. Beckwith was
one of a tiny handful of officers
in the US Army in the 1970s
whO foresaw the need for some
kind of antiterrorist commando
capability.
Until General Meyer came
to power, Beckwith had very
few allies. After Vietnam, the
Army almost totally disbanded
its Special Forces capability. In
doing so, it may have been turn-
ing its back on the very ap-
Continued
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proacr; that Trugn: nave neltoec
it unaerstanc -intensity-
war, winch encompasses the
Vietnam War, the lran raid. and
Lebanon. situations in winch
the United States was not fac-
ing all-out war on a single front.
Special Forces personnel
have been trained not to rely
too heavily on machines, but on
stealth, skill, bravery, and cun-
rung: The Special Forces can
never win a war, but their?ideas
can make an army think differ-
ently about the human element,
as opposed to the mechanical
one. They understand better
the limitations of military pow-
er because they work so close
to the ground.
John F. Kennedy stated this
idea clearly in 1962, when he
addressed the graduating class
at West Point. "There is an-
other type of war," he said,
"new in its intensity, ancient in
its origins ? war by guerrillas,
subversives, insurgents ... war
by ambush instead of by combat
... seeking victory by eroding
and exhausting the enemy in-
stead of engaging him. It re-
quires," he continued, "a whol-
ly different kind of military
training."
This rang especially true for
General William P. Yarborough,
commander of the Green Be-
in Kennedy's time. With
considerable understatement,
Yarborough later wrote in the
foreword to a history of the
Green Berets, "These words
did not prod the armed forces
into changing their conventional
warfare orientation in any sig-
nificant way."
Part of this may be because
of a general misunderstanding
of who Special Forces soldiers
are and what they do. John Ber-
ry, a Nebraska lawyer who was
an Army counsel in Vietnam
and who was familiar, with the
Special Forces,_ tells a story
that sheds some light. The reg-
ular Army, he says, called the
Special Forces ."snake eaters"
because of their ability to sur-
vive in the jungle. Once, Berry
says, a group of Korean .Special
Forces was called in to give a
demonstration of kung fu-type
combat for US Special Forces.
According to the story, the Ko-
reans, thinking that this was
what the US people wanted to
see, produced some snakes and
?
began to eat tnern. Tne ' snake-
eater'. image was reunorced
tnen, and it nas been reinforced
ever since. Army publicity for
the Special Forces now seems
to mimic the kind of blackened-
face, tough-guy image that ap-
pears on the cover of Soldier of
Fortunc magazine; in reality,
Special Forces personnel,
knowing the human element of
war so well, living in the jungle
without artillery cover, are of-
ten more sensitive than other
soldiers.
Of course: the other types,
the almost delinquent killer-
types, the soldiers of fortune,
do exist in the Special Forces.
Anyone doing that kind of work
must be tough. But it was be-
cause the Special Forces sol-
diers presented an alternative
way of fighting "another type
of war" that Kennedy gave
them the emblematic green be-
ret ? just when the Army was
trying to disband them.
Brian Jenkins, an author-
ity on international ter-
rorism with the Rand
Corporation in Santa Monica,
California, speaks of the Special
Forces with some authority. He
was one of the Special Forces
trainers who were with the
Montagnards, the mountain
tribespeople who were being
trained to fight the Viet Gong
communists in the 1960s. The
efforts did not succeed, Jenkins
acknowledges, but, he says,
"When the Army came in, it
just did its thing. The Army had
its doctrine for fighting in Eu-
rope, and it simply thought- it
could apply it."
When asked what the Army
learned in Vietnam, he says,
'Probably how to drive tanks
through a rice paddy." He is
not simply being sarcastic; Jen-
kins is one of the first to admit
that the Special Forces cannot
win a war. But, he points out,
the Special Forces were ne-
glected in Vietnam,' pushed
aside. After General William
Westmoreland left, General
Creighton Abrams took over as
commanding general in Viet-
nam. He was a man with an
overt dislike of the Special
Forces, an old tank commander
with experience dating back to
World War lila Europe. After
Vietnam 'wasover, Abrams re-
vivec the Army ("ermanv,
but ne also al: but disoanok tne
US Spec:a: Forces capability.
The explanation for this
may be at least partly psycho-
logical. Vietnam was a "dirty
war." Because the Army as-
signed the Special Forces to
Vietnam and because some
groups sought refuge from the
Army with the CIA, in the
minds of many, the Special
Forces were identified with this
"dirty war." It is almost as if
the Army, by rejecting the Spe-
cial Forces, .was trying to
cleanse itself of the Vietnam ex-
perience.
Partly because of what hap-
pened in Iran, partly because of
its ambitions for the Third
World, the Reagan Administra-
tion ? like Kennedy's Adminis-
tration ? has set about trying
to revive the Special Forces.
The current Administration has
appointed Noel Koch, who has
some background in military
and intelligence affairs, as As-
sistant Secretary of Defense for
International Security Affairs, a
euphemism for counterterror-
ism. Koch has a deep sense of
how important it is that the
United States not be humiliat-
ed, but he has also said that
Army intransigence on promot-
ing an alternative to regular
front-line forces is a st=blin
block to developing the Special
Forces. In a recent interview,
however, he took pains not to
seem at odds with the Army.
The prejudice, he feels, is born
out of old habit, not any particu-
lar malice.
Certainly there are more
Special Forces personnel now.
(Luttwak, the analyst, notes
that the increasing numbers
raise another question, about fi-
nancing. He is skeptical about
the availability and allocation of
money, pointing out that much
of it has gone for elaborate
equipment such as a submarine
for the Navy Seals.) But if the
United States does have more
Special Forces personnel, they
have not been used well. -
For example, instead of
sending soldiers with . counter-
terrorist training into Lebanon,
the United States sent the Ma-
rines. In Lebanon, the problem
was not a lack of helicopters. In
October *1983, the Marine sen-
try guarding a post in front of
(fAintlitlec
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neaocuarler DUI1C,14 ir beir;.:
wa- TRY n-operr armec anc wa tnererort nor
rn t:. sto:, the bomber Wnose attack resuite6 in
tn oeattis of 24'1 men.
A cotnnussioh established to study the bomb-
cnairet: by retired acimira: Robert L. J. Long.
talKed about the United States inability to deal
with this kind of conflict, ln the case of Lebanon.
the planning seemed to have been ad hoc: The
Mannes were there, in the Mediterranean, so
thev. were sent. And when they were dead, no
one was quite sure who was responsible ? the
Mediterranean fleet. General Bernard Rogers of
NATO. or the joint command in Florida responsi-
ble for the Rapid Deployment Force. Once again,
Americans paid a high price.
if the low prestige of the Special Forces is a
theme of this story, so is the "can do," proud
attitude of the Pentagon. From the time of Viet-
nam to the present, no senior military official has
resigned either because he saw failure coming or
because he took responsibility for it.
These days, the Special Forces have been
centralized in Fayetteville, North Carolina
(also known as Fayett-Nam), where Fort
Bragg is located, a grim Army post amid pine
barrens that suggests clandestine operations.
One comes away with powerful impressions.
The officers and men in the "A" teams seem
better informed on world politics than many peo-
ple in the Army. They seem to understand the
limitations of US military power. They under-
stand that what they require needs long study ?
foreign languages, for example ? and great sac-
rifice. Unlike the carefree heroes in James Bond-
type stories, Special Forces members find that
clandestine work puts great pressure on their
personal lives. Divorce runs high. These people
also talk about career sacrifice; the Army, they
say, will not take them seriously. The public af-
fairs officer at Fayetteville, a colonel looking for-
ward to retirement who did not admit to having a
Special Forces background, seemed at pains to
show the macho, "snake-eater" image ? the
one the Army has always given the Special
Forces.
However, in assessing the value of the Spe-
cial Forces, one should look not so much at a
group of individuals as at an idea exemplified by
the best of them. If the United States does have
to use might, the Special Forces mentality is
more likely to understand the limitations of force
and its ethical dimension than the regular armed
forces' "can do" mentality. Pushing the Special
Forces into a corner had no effect on people be-
ing killed in Vietnam, the Iranian desert, or Leba-
non. On the other hand, Americans have heard a
lot of "can do" talk
Ed King, a colonel who was one of the few
officers to resign from the Army over Vietnam,
sees the dynamic in the Pentagon as the competi-
tion among the armed forces for money. "It is
not that they are mercenary," he says, "but that
the driving force for promotion is money. The
way to power in the Pentagon is to control exotic
weapons systems which command the most mon-
ey."
Ideas, apparently, count for little. Have
Americans forgotten something? Have Americans
forgotten that this country was partly created by
George Washington's irregulars, the first US
Special Forces? Like the Viet Gong, they, were
nonuniformed and could melt into the populace.
Like the US Army in Vietnam, the British blun-.
dered around with their heavy, largely drafted
army, a long way from home. And they lost. ?
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