Secret Warriors: Inside the Covert Military Operations of the Reagan Era

262 Pages·1988·48.9 MB·English

by  Steven Emerson

THE
INSIDE
COVERT MILITARY
OPERATIONS OF
THE REAGAN ERA
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An award-winning investigative journalist tells the
explosive inside story of the covert "black" opera-
tions conducted—by the military during the Reagan
Administration missions so secret they have
never been revealed until now.
They were known as the "crazies in the base-
ment." They had mottoes such as "Death waits in
the dark." They infiltrated the home of the leader
of Panama, flew espionage planes over El Salvador,
spied on Soviet officials in Europe, drew up secret
plans to invade Nicaragua, tracked terrorist killers
in Lebanon, trained guerrillas in Honduras, set
up dummy companies and money-laundering bank
accounts in the United States, conducted missions
in Laos, South Korea, Grenada, West Germany,
Saudi Arabia and anywhere else they thought
necessary. And when men in the White House
went searching for a way to implement a scheme
for selling arms and diverting the proceeds, they
found a network ready and waiting.
No news story dominated the h—eadlines of 1987
more than the Iran-contra affair but as it turns
out, what went on in the basement ofthe Pentagon
was just as remarkable as what went on in the
basement of the White House.
Based on Steven Emerson's exclusive access to
unpublished documents and hundreds of inter-
views with intelligence agents and officials from
the Pentagon, CIA, NSC, NSA, White House, Jus-
tice Department and State Department, Secret War-
riors is the story of how the Pentagon, disgusted
at the failure of the 1980 Iran hostage rescue at-
tempt, decided it could no longer trust the
capabilities of the CIA and instead set up a "min-
iature CIA" within its own walls.
With names like Delta, Yellow Fruit, Seaspray,
Task Force 160, Quick Reaction Team, the Intelli-
gence Support Activity and the Special Operations
Division, its clandestine units fanned out around
the globe, gathering intelligence and conducting
undercoveroperations, often without Congress ever
knowing.
Secret Warriors reveals htm some COVetl units got
carried away working secretly for the CIA, with the
ultimate result of an extraordinar) set ofclassified
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SECRET WARRIORS
ALSO BY STEVEN EMERSON
The American House ofSaud: The Secret Petrodollar Connection
SECRET
WARRIORS
Inside the Covert
Military Operations
of the Reagan Era
STEVEN EMERSON
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK
TO MY MOTHER,
ELAINE EMERSON PLASKOVV
CODMAN SQUARE-
MAY
jflgfc
G. P. Putnam's Sons
Publishers Since 1838
200 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Copyright © 1988 by Steven Emerson
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Emerson, Steven.
Secret warriors : inside the covert m—ilitary operations ofthe
Reagan era / Steven Emerson. 1st American ed.
p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
ISBN 0-399-13360-7
— — —
1. United States Armed Forces History 20th cent—ury. 2. Special
operations (Military science) 3. United States Foreign
relations—1981- 4. United States—History, Military—20th century.
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UA23.E55 1988 88-2419 CIP
-356M6—dcl9
Prin1ted2in3th4e Un5ite6d S7tat8es9ofAmerica
10
CONTENTS
Prologue: The Pentagon's CIA 7
1 Iran Rescue: Death and Rebirth 12
2 Spooks and Soldiers 27
3 The Army's Special Operators 38
4 Helicopter to Lebanon 53
5 Kidnapping in Italy 58
6 Going "Black" 71
7 Bungling in Laos 77
8 Four Miles over Central America 85
9 Fun in Baltimore 98
10 The Quick Reaction Team 101
11 Target: Noriega 107
12 Bugging the Soviets 114
13 The NSC-CIA-Contra Connection 121
14 "Crazies in the Basement" 130
15 The Old Players Return 143
16 Prelude to North 148
17 Yellow Fruit's Demise 155
18 The Secret Courts-Martial 167
19 Our Men in Beirut 183
20 Hijackings and Capture 200
6 Contents
21 The Enterprise Takes Over 216
22 North's Secret Notebooks 225
Epilogue 235
Glossary 239
Note to Readers 241
Acknowledgments 245
Index 246
—
PROLOGUE:
THE PENTAGON'S CIA
April 25, 1980: The rescue attempt to free the hostages in Iran
lay in shambles on the floor ofthe desert. An accidental collision had
produced a giant inferno. Eight soldiers were dead, five others severely
burned and seven aircraft destroyed. It was a total disaster.
When America learned ofthe failure, it was shocked and dismayed. The
whole world was stunned. Recent hostage rescue attempts by Israel, West
—
Germany and England had been dazzlingly successful what was wrong
with the United States? Profoundly embarrassed, the Pentagon swore that
it would never again let itselfbe caught unprepared. In particular, it was
furious at the CIA for what it considered the Agency's unforgivable failure
to provide critical intelligence and paramilitary support.
So the Pentagon decided to do something about it.
In the space ofless than a year, it set up the beginnings ofwhat became,
in effect, its own supersecret mini-CIA in the basement of the Pentagon
and elsewhere: a collection ofintelligence units and capabilities similar to
the CIA whose tasks would be to conduct counterterrorist missions and
carry out covert operations throughout the world.
These units were to be hidden "black" operations. The public was not
—
to know. Congress was to know only what it absolutely had to and even
then, not everything. The units had names like Delta, Yellow Fruit, Sea-
spray, Quick Reaction Team, Task Force 160, Intelligence SupportActivity
and Special Operations Division.
Through them the Pentagon soon became the sponsor and center ofthe
nation's most sensitive covert operations. It staged clandestine missions in
Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Italy, Iraq, Laos, Israel, Lebanon, Pan-
ama, West Germany,—Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. It set up an intricate
labyrinth of "cutouts" front companies, proprietaries and individuals
—
SECRET WARRIORS
8
to conceal the actions, identities and movements of the units, with the
Army taking the lead in setting up the fronts and conducting operations.
The Army discovered it could accomplish what it wanted with much
greater efficiency, but soon the Reagan Administration realized that the
creation ofthese units served another purpose as well: They could be used
to circumvent the legislative requirement that all covert operations by the
CIA had to be reported to Congress. For the most part, the law did not
apply to the Pentagon's version ofcovert operations. This wasn'tthe CIA
it was the military. It could do what it wanted.
Orso some officers thought. In 1983 the Army suddenly shut down many
of its intelligence operations following allegations of improprieties in one
of its most sensitive projects, called Yellow Fruit. Investigators for the
Army and Justice Department soon discovered that the Army leadership
did not even know Yellow Fruit had been created, and charged that a
"secret Army" within the Army had been developed by a group of elite
intelligence officers with close ties to the CIA.
The massive investigation tookthreeyears, andinvestigators interviewed
hundreds ofmilitary officers and agents and pored over hundreds ofthou-
— —
sands of documents. For a while but only for a while the military's
covert operations came to a screeching halt.
Itwas during the investigation that I firstheard ofthe exis—tence ofYellow
Fruit, and shortly thereaftera series ofsecretc—ourts-martial the first such
secret military prosecutions in twenty years began. The episode fasci-
nated me: The Army and Justice Department had decided to prosecute
several of the Army's most prized officers who had been in charge of the
most sensitive clandestine projects in the U.S. government. The officers
vehemently denied any wrongdoing. What was the true story here? Just
what were these projects I was hearing about?
I began to interview many ofthe key figures associated with the trials,
and senior Pentagon officials in charge of "special operations." Special
operations are unconventional military operations involving surprise or
deception designed to support missions related to counterterrorism, hos-
tage rescue, psychological warfare, unusual means ofintelligence collection
orcountering guerrillawarfare. Perhaps because the material was so highly
classified, and perhaps because the stakes of the trials were so high, the
interviews produced startlingly irreconcilable accounts ofwhat really hap-
pened. I had no idea who was telling the truth.
In late 1986, ironically, the pieces ofthe puzzle began to come together
as the result of an even more intriguing series of events. First, Eugene
Hasenfus's plane was shot down over Nicaragua; then a Lebanese news-
paper disclosed details of secret American arms sales to Iran in exchange
for hostages being held in Lebanon; and then, on November 25, Attorney
General Edwin Meese stunned the country with the news that money
generated by the Iran arms sales had been recycled to the contras fighting
the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.