Jeremy Scahill - Dirty Wars

Behind the scenes, the White House and Pentagon reviewed what had gone wrong with the mission. It was determined that a unified, fully capable special operations all-star team was needed for such operations, one that would have its own aircraft, soldiers, SEALs and intelligence. Soon after Eagle Claw failed, the Pentagon established the Joint Test Directorate to begin preparing for another rescue operation, code-named Operation Honey Badger. The mission never launched, but a secret program would begin drawing up plans for a special ops team that would have full-spectrum capabilities to ensure that disasters like Eagle Claw would never happen again. Thus, in 1980, JSOC was officially formed, though the White House and the military would not publicly acknowledge its existence. JSOC was unique among all military and intelligence assets in that it reported directly to the president and was intended to be his small, private army. At least that was how the force was viewed in theory.

Colonel Walter Patrick Lang spent much of his military career in dark ops. Early in his army service, he helped coordinate the operation that led to the capture and killing of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. He was a member of the Studies and Observation Group, SOG, which ran the targeted killing campaign for the United States during the Vietnam War, and eventually became the head of the secret Defense Intelligence Agency global human intelligence program. He was posted in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and other hot spots around the globe. Lang also started the Arabic-language program at the West Point Military Academy. Throughout his career, he watched closely as the United States created this new special ops capability. The principal role of the “vanilla” Special Forces, like the Green Berets, was “training and leading indigenous forces, usually irregular forces against either regular forces or guerrilla forces. That’s what they do, so they’re attuned to foreigners. They seek to find people who are empathic, who work well with foreigners. Who like to sit around and eat with their right hand out of a common bowl bits of stringy old goat. And listen to somebody’s gramma talk about the baloney, fictional ancestry of the tribe. They like to do that.” Lang likened Green Berets to “armed anthropologists.” JSOC, he said, was envisioned as “a counterterrorist commando outfit modeled on the British SAS [Special Air Service]. And the SAS does not do ‘let’s get happy with the natives’ stuff. They don’t do that. They’re commandos, they kill the natives. These people are not very well educated about the larger picture of the effect that [their operations] have on the position of the United States in the world.”

In the beginning, JSOC was a bit like an afterthought within the military bureaucracy. It did not have its own budget and was largely used as a force multiplier for hot conflicts under the command of the conventional military’s Areas of Responsibility, the Pentagon’s global system for organizing which forces oversee operations in specific regions. Delta Force had formed in the 1970s as a result of a series of terrorist attacks that spurred calls for the United States to expand the capacity of its unconventional warriors and special operations forces. “A lot of the military officers who had been brought up through this kind of, ‘Charlie-Beckwith-counterterrorism-commando’ thing, these are technicians of war, basically,” Lang told me.

After the disaster of Eagle Claw in Iran, JSOC would be created as a highly compartmentalized organization with Special Mission Units (SMU) that would train and prepare for what were called “F3” operations: Find, Fix, Finish. In plain English, that meant tracking a target, fixing his location and finishing him off. The now world-famous Navy SEAL Team 6 that killed Osama bin Laden was created to support and conduct these missions. Its founding commander, Richard Marcinko, had served on the task force, known as the Terrorist Action Team, that planned Eagle Claw. Originally called Mobility 6, this elite unit of seventy-five Navy SEALs would develop into the leading counterterrorist unit available to the US government. Its name was itself propaganda. At the time of Team 6’s founding, there were only two other SEAL teams, but Marcinko wanted the Soviets to think there were other teams of which they were unaware.

In the beginning, there were growing pains within JSOC, given that it was drawing its forces from a variety of elite units, including Delta Force, the SEALs and the 75th Army Rangers, that all believed in their own superiority. JSOC trained for operating in denied areas, conducting small-scale kinetic operations or direct actions, that is, lethal ops. A temporary military intelligence unit called the FOG, Field Operations Group, was formed. It would later become the in-house intelligence wing of JSOC and be known as “the Activity.” Among its early highlights was providing signals intelligence for an operation to free Brigadier General James Dozier, who had been kidnapped by the Marxist Red Brigades in December 1981 from his home in Verona, Italy. Dozier was the only US flag officer to have ever been kidnapped. The Activity traced his location after several weeks of hunting, leading to a successful rescue operation by Italian antiterror forces.

Headquartered at Pope Air Force Base and Fort Bragg in North Carolina, JSOC would eventually command the army’s Delta Force and 75th Ranger Regiment and SEAL Team 6, which was renamed the Naval Warfare Development Group, DEVGRU. Its air assets were drawn from the elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the “Night Stalkers,” as well as from the air force’s 24th Special Tactics Squadron. JSOC’s founders conceived of it as an antiterrorist force. But for much of its early history, it would be used for other types of missions. These teams would be deployed in secret and attach themselves to allied military forces or paramilitaries seeking to bring down governments perceived as hostile to US interests. At times the lines between training and combat were blurred, particularly in the dirty wars in Latin America in the 1980s. JSOC was used in Grenada in 1983 when President Reagan ordered a US invasion and throughout the 1980s in Honduras, where the United States was coordinating support for the Contras in Nicaragua and battling a guerrilla insurgency inside of Honduras. During his first term, President Reagan seemed eager to label terrorism a national security threat to be tackled by targeted kinetic force. Around the time of the 1983 Beirut bombing, Reagan publicly espoused “swift and effective retribution” against terrorists and signed a classified National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) and a subsequent secret finding authorizing “the use of sabotage, killing, [and] preemptive retaliatory strikes” against terrorist groups. The NSDD and the finding referred to a plan to form lethal CIA “action teams,” but they reportedly authorized cooperation with JSOC forces.

JSOC operators liaised with foreign military forces throughout Latin America and the Middle East to combat hostage takers. They were also involved in the operation that led to the killing of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar in Medellín in 1993. Such operations led to the rise of a force of American fighters with a unique set of skills in counterinsurgency warfare. By the end stages of the Cold War, JSOC operators had become the most elite, seasoned combat veterans in the US military arsenal. In the 1990s, they went on to play central, but secret, roles in the wars in the Balkans, Somalia, Chechnya, Iran, Syria and throughout Africa and Asia. In the former Yugoslavia, JSOC helped lead the hunt for accused war criminals, though it failed to capture its two main targets, Bosnian Serb leaders Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic. Under a secret presidential directive issued by President Clinton, JSOC was authorized to operate on US soil in counterterror operations and to confront any WMD threats, circumventing the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the military from conducting law enforcement domestically.