Free Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad by Tony Geraghty Page A

prompted a major re-examination of the role of Special Forces in the U.S. A fundamental flaw was the ad hoc nature of its order of battle. It was a cherry-picking, mix-and-match process, conditioned by the availability of air and intelligence assets. It was not organic. Following the Holloway inquiry, another level of bureaucracy was added: a counterterrorist joint task force and an advisory panel. On the sidelines, battalions of experts offered their sometimes-conflicting advice.
    In March 1983, the National Strategy Information Center, the National Security Studies Program at Georgetown University, and the National Defense University sponsored a two-day symposium on the role of Special Operations in U.S. strategy for the 1980s. Dr. Edward N. Luttwak, for example, suggested that the Eagle Claw rescue plan was “clearly designed by people without a clue as to the realities of war.” It is worth noting that in his own book, first published in 1983, Beckwith blamed “political considerations” in Washington for delaying the mission from mid-January, when Delta was ready, when “the weather favored us,” until April, the season of sandstorms and dust. “National resolve is weakened by many forces,” he wrote. “The longer the crisis is allowed to run, the more such forces come into play. The longer a government waits to respond to a terrorist incident, the harder is the rescue by military means.” His solution, a counsel of perfection, was “predictive intelligence,” with contingency plans to cover a crisis before it happened.
    The structural changes in U.S. preparedness were still being worked through when President Barack Obama took office in 2009, but in the shorter term, useful reforms were introduced. In 1982, the Army consolidated its Special Operations Forces (known as ARSOF) in a Special Operations Command. On 1 January 1984, following the Hizbollah bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut with the loss of 237 men, the Pentagon created a Joint Special Operations Agency without any command authority over any SF element [see Special Operations Command.com online]. After years of debate in Congress, President Ronald Reagan signed off the establishment of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) on 13 April 1987, almost exactly seven years after Delta set off for Desert One. The CIA’s Special Activities Division (known as SAD) continued, meanwhile, to run its own high-risk, plausibly deniable operations involving subversion and unconventional warfare using surrogates. The sub-group concerned was inherited from the MAC/SOG era in Vietnam and was now known as the Special Operations Group.
    Beckwith had been ordered not to trust the State Department because it could not keep secrets. Who could? As the Holloway Commission Report made plain: “intelligence drove the operation from the outset,” but “certain elements of the Intelligence Community seemed slow in harnessing themselves initially for the tasks at hand.” Could it be that this criticism was aimed at the Central Intelligence Agency, whose role is never mentioned in the unclassified version of Holloway? Since the Agency provided Meadows with his bogus Irish passport, it clearly gave some support to Eagle Claw. A month before the mission was launched, “a CIA Twin Otter had flown into…Desert One. A USAF Combat Controller had rode [ sic ] around the landing area on a light dirt bike and planted landing lights to help guide the force in. That insertion went well….” 68
    Yet the suspicion that the CIA had somehow let down the Pentagon’s rescue team festered for more than twenty years. The pain was finally revealed in 2003 by Carney himself. He asserted: “Eighteen years after the rescue attempt some of us learned that the CIA had received a covert communication that detailed some of the most important information we needed: the exact location of three hostages [in addition to those held at the embassy compound] being held in the Iranian Ministry of