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

former Italian allies. Later, by devious means, the OSS became the CIA and former Fascists signed up to join the anti-Communist secret army known as Gladio funded by untraceable dollars siphoned from the Marshall Aid budget.
    The political scenery changed rapidly elsewhere. Between 1946 and 1951 Britain smuggled 127 German scientists and engineers to Australia, including thirty-one Nazi Party members and six SS officers. These experts included the chief of the Messerschmitt aircraft team and a nuclear physicist working on Hitler’s proposed atomic bomb. 13 Immediately after the Third Reich fell in 1945 the Gestapo war criminal Klaus Barbie—a torturer responsible for the deaths of 4,000 French patriots—worked for British and American intelligence services in Germany even as an SAS War Crimes Investigation Team known as “Secret Hunters” scoured Germany to track such people down. Secret Hunters, pursuing Germans who had butchered their wartime colleagues, made the “mistake,” if mistake it was, of fighting yesterday’s war against Hitler rather than today’s new war against Stalin. They were appointed on 15 May 1945 by Lieutenant Colonel Brian Franks, whose soldiers of 2 SAS had been executed in Occupied France.
    The Hunters stayed in business until January 1947, by which time the British Socialist government believed it had consigned the SAS brigade and Special Operations Executive, with its 2,000 agents, to history. Officially disbanded in 1946, SOE was able to transfer 280 of its operators to the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) on 15 January that year. At first, they were part of a Special Operations Branch running agents and guerrillas into the Balkans and Russia. Many of them were betrayed by the British spymaster Kim Philby. Philby was also a KGB colonel, a senior SIS officer, and one of the Cambridge University spy ring. In a twist worthy of a le Carré novel, both Philby and one of the SIS agent-runners, Mark Arnold-Foster, a Royal Navy SF veteran, were doubling as journalists for the same London newspaper (the Observer ) for some time, each still deeply entangled in the spying game. After Russia exploded its first nuclear weapon in 1949 and gradually deployed viable warheads, direct action, SOE-style, was regarded as too risky, though spying flourished.
    In the United States, a similar process was happening. President Harry Truman, a Democrat, did not like the willful, freebooting style of the OSS leader Bill Donovan. The OSS was disbanded, only to re-emerge as a shiny, new Central Intelligence Agency employing many of the same people. Like the wartime SAS, it seems to have mutated in a series of steps. With its formal dissolution in October 1945 its identity was preserved by an entity known as the Strategic Services Unit until a year later, when the SSU became the Central Intelligence Group under Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers and Admiral William Leahy. In 1948 the CIG was absorbed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA’s Special Operations Division then took on the mantle of the OSS, from early operations in Tibet in 1956 and Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War by way of Angola in the seventies, to the ongoing Afghanistan conflict.
    In time, significant differences emerged between the fighting style of OSS and SOE on one hand, and the modern CIA on the other. Postwar Special Forces teams are usually just that: close-knit teams that sometimes act as the executive arm of the intelligence agencies. Frontline CIA and SIS personnel regularly function undercover as individuals in a hostile environment, a job requiring enormous emotional and intellectual stamina. As field officers they work at a distance from their controlling bureaucracies and sometimes, unsurprisingly, become alienated from it. One of these was John Stockwell, Angola case officer from 1974 to 2002, whose reflections on Agency incompetence at that time reflect pain (for Stockwell was an idealist who loved Africa) as well as anger. He