Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad Read Online Free PDF Page A

World War were damned with faint praise, or none. When victory was won in Europe, a Foreign Office mandarin carped: “I know that the SOE have done good work in the past but I am confident that their time for useful work is over. Their contacts can only be dangerous.” The ruler’s fear of an untamed Praetorian Guard is a historical cliché. In 1831 the French packed the Foreign Legion off to North Africa “to remove from France those officers and soldiers, French or foreign, who were felt to be awkward, excitable or frankly dangerous to the new monarchy” of Louis-Philippe. Others among the top brass were ungenerous about the impact of Special Forces. Field Marshal Bill Slim, commanding the 14th Army in Burma, concluded in his memoir, Defeat Into Victory , “Such formations, trained, equipped and mentally adjusted for one kind of operation only, were wasteful. They did not give, militarily, a worthwhile return for the resources in men, material and time that they had absorbed.” At the same time, Slim acknowledged that in future, there would be a place for small units behind enemy lines to kill or kidnap individuals and “inspire resistance movements.” Inspiration requires only limited resources. Serious resupply by clandestine means requires commitment by high command, in the face of objections from more regular formations. Slim was not the only skeptic. The official British history of the war concluded that Orde Wingate’s Chindits, operating far beyond the front line in Burma, had achieved nothing much more than proof that large numbers of men could be supplied by air.
    Britain’s Special Forces godfathers are still criticized by some historians. The writer Max Hastings comments: “These exotic elite groups ill served the wider interests of the British Army, chronically short of good infantrymen for the big battlefields. Thanks to Churchill, too many of Britain’s bravest soldiers spent the war conducting irregular and self-indulgent activities of questionable strategic value.” 11 As the war approached its bloody end, Special Forces received muted applause in messages sent indirectly to the men in the field, many still active behind the lines. Eisenhower described Donovan as “The Last Hero.” In 1944, the future president also sent this message to an SAS brigadier: “I wish to send my congratulations to all ranks of the Special Air Service Brigade on the contribution which they have made to the success of the Allied Expeditionary Force. The ruthlessness with which the enemy have attacked Special Air Service troops has been an indication of the injury you were able to cause to the German armed forces both by your own efforts and by the information which you gave of German disposition and movements. Many Special Air Service troops are still behind enemy lines; others are being reformed for new tasks. To all of them I say, ‘Well done and good luck!’”
    Montgomery, in a radio message to troops behind the lines, shortly before the ill-fated Arnhem operation, relayed via Lieutenant General “Boy” Browning, said: “The operations you have carried out have had more effect in hastening the disintegration of the German 7th and 5th Armies than any other single effort in the army…which no other troops in the world could have done…. The strain has been great because operating as you do entails the most constant vigilance and cunning which no other troops are called upon to display…. To say you have done your job well is to put it mildly….” 12
    The political compass, marking a decisive change of wartime loyalties, started to shift first in Italy in 1944 when Team X-2, an element of OSS led by the paranoid James Angleton, made common cause with Prince Valerio Borghese, whose men had “hanged [anti-Fascist] partisans from lampposts all over Italy” during the Mussolini years. Initially, Angleton’s target was a German stay-behind unit in Rome, whose men were summarily rounded up and shot by their