JFK (11 page)

This early covert operation was considered successful, and in 1948 the National Security Council issued a new directive to cover “clandestine paramilitary operations, as well as political and economic warfare.” This new directive gave birth to a new covert action unit that replaced the “special procedures group.” In deference to the language of the law, if not the intent, this new unit—the most covert of all sections—was named the Office of Policy Coordination.

As quoted earlier, “The deepest cover story of the CIA is that it is an intelligence organization.” The OPC was headed by Frank Wisner, formerly the OSS station chief in Romania. Frank Wisner and Allen Dulles, then with the OSS in Switzerland, were among the first U. S. officials to begin contact in 1944 with selected Nazis and Nazi sympathizers—with a “Blowback” (“exfiltration” of former Nazis with desired technological skills) operation known as the “Deep Water” (code name only) project—for their eventual evacuation to the United States.

Of course, the ostensible reason given in most instances for this unusual action was that these Nazis were scientists and technical experts whose skills would be useful in the United States and that it was necessary to keep them out of the hands of the Soviets. As we know today, this was hardly the truth. It was Wisner who had arranged a transfer of a large number of prisoners of war from the Balkans via Turkey and Cairo in the fall of 1944. Among this large group—mostly American flight crew members who had been shot down during heavy bombing attacks over the Ploesti oil fields of Romania—were a number of pro-Nazi intelligence specialists who were fleeing the Balkans, scattering before the approach of the Russian army.

In his new position with the OPC, Wisner was able to control a large group of Eastern European agents in a massive network of spies. At the same time, he could protect them and their U.S. contacts against hostile, anti-Nazi, and Soviet capture—possibly even assassination. The OPC was a little-known, most unusual organization, especially within the U.S. government, where such deeply covert activity had never taken place before.

As initially created, the OPC was totally separate from the CIA’s intelligence collection (another function not specifically authorized by law) and analysis sections. The OPC’s chief had been nominated by the secretary of state and approved by the secretary of defense. The funds for this office were concealed, as were much of the CIA funds, in the larger budget of the Department of Defense. Policy guidance and specific operational instructions for the OPC bypassed the director of central intelligence completely and came directly from State and Defense. In other words, the OPC was all but autonomous.

It is in this example of the OPC that we discover most clearly how the new invisible army was brought into the government and created in secrecy. There was no law that authorized such an organization or the wide range of covert functions it was created to perform. When it began, the director of central intelligence, if asked, could have denied that he had anything to do with it, and no one would have thought—or dared—to ask the secretaries of state or defense if they had become involved in covert operations or to ask them about an organization they could claim they did not know even existed. As we see, this most covert office was buried as deep within the bureaucracy as possible, and its many lines to agents and secret operations were untraceable.

Despite all this secrecy, however, the OPC grew from about three hundred personnel in 1949 to nearly six thousand contract employees by 1952. A large part of this sudden growth was due to the additional demands for covert action and other special operations that grew out of the Korean War and related activities. One of the first things Gen. Walter B. Smith did, when he returned from Moscow and became director of central intelligence, was to take over OPC completely and sever its connections with State and Defense—except for the concealment of funds in Defense and for the rather considerable support that was always provided by military units for these clandestine activities around the world.

This brings up another important characteristic of the invisible army. While the CIA administered the operations of this fast-growing organization, with its six thousand employees, it could always rely upon the military for additional personnel, transport, overseas bases, weapons, aircraft, ships, and all the other things the Department of Defense had in abundance. One of the most important items provided regularly by Defense was “military cover.” OPC and other CIA personnel were concealed in military units and provided with military cover whenever possible, especially within the far-flung bases of the military around the world—even in Antarctica.

The covert or invisible operational methods developed by the CIA and the military during the 1950s are still being used today despite the apparent demise of the Cold War, in such covert activities as those going on in Central America and Africa, and even in such highly specialized activities as the preparation of “assassination manuals” of the type that was written by the CIA and discovered in Nicaragua in 1984. That manual was only a later version of one developed by the CIA in the 1950s. Today all of this clandestine activity amounts to big business, and the distinction between the CIA and the military is hard to discern, since they always work together.
³

THE WORLDWIDE INVISIBLE WAR waged by the Soviet KGB and the American Central Intelligence Agency over the past fifty years, and under the cover that these war-making organizations were in fact intelligence organizations, was being fought with novel tactics. Not only was this type of underground warfare secret, but so were its methods. Discerning readers were not surprised, then, to discover on an inside page of the
New York Times
on July 25, 1985, a tiny two-inch article, datelined Zaragoza, Spain, describing one of these Cold War battles, being fought with these secret tactics.

This bizarre incident occurred in Spain. Similar events, using the same tactics, take place somewhere in the world almost daily, despite the apparent demise of the Cold War. They have one unique characteristic, seldom if ever seen in regular warfare, that sets them apart. Incidents such as this one, reported by the
Times
, serve to incite warfare rather than to bring it to an end. To give the age-old concept new meaning, “They make war. . . out of practically nothing. ”

The methods used in Spain are almost precisely those used by the CIA in, among other cases, the Philippines in the early 1950s and Indochina from 1945 to 1965. These will be discussed in later chapters. It is important to note that tens of thousands of foreign “paramilitary” and Special Forces troops have been trained at various U. S. military bases under CIA supervision and sponsorship. Some of this training is highly specialized, using advanced weapons and war-related matériel. Some of it takes place at American universities and even in manufacturing plants, where advanced equipment for this type of warfare is being made.

Then there are the paramilitary forces of other nations that have been trained in the Soviet Union. Today these graduates, by the tens of thousands, are the leaders of the “elite” forces of many countries and the professionals used to breed a world of international terrorists. For the most part, they are not individuals or members of some small group, but participants in a most sophisticated, worldwide complex of organizations. The Spanish example is a perfect case study in describing the methods and tactics of such units. (For illustrative purposes, examples of operations in other countries will be merged with the Spanish example to portray more comprehensively the potential of these tactics.)

The Spanish army’s Special Forces troops had been ordered to “stage a mock invasion of a town and to make it [look and feel] as realistic as possible.” The army was ordered to create a battle that would appear to support evidence of insurgency. This is one of the secret methods of the secret war. These special armed forces are used as agitators. It is as though the fire department were being used to start fires, the police department employed to steal and kill, and doctors ordered to make people sick, to destroy their brains, to poison them. Such clandestine operations are designed to make war—even when they have to play both sides at the same time.

First of all, as stated so accurately in Leonard Lewin’s
Report From Iron Mountain,
¹
“allegiance [to the State] requires a cause; a cause requires an enemy,” and “. . . the presumed power of the enemy sufficient to warrant an individual sense of allegiance to a society must be proportionate to the size and complexity of the society ”

Therefore, on a global scale, the Cold War required the USSR and the United States to have been enemies by need and by definition. Ever since the Bravo detonation of the hydrogen bomb, the world’s political, economic, and military system has had to be bipolar. Those without massive weapons and the means to deliver them could not possibly take part effectively in such global warfare.

It has been politically necessary for each major power to have an enemy, even though both major powers knew that they no longer had any way to benefit from a traditional “all-out” war. Neither one could control its own destiny or its own society without the “threat” of the other. On a lesser scale, as we shall see in the Spanish example, the existence of “insurgents” lent validity to the charge of a “Communist-supported” insurgency, even though the scope of the “conflict”—that is, the “mock invasion of the town”—was purely local.

All leaders of all nations know that, as stated in
Report From Iron Mountain,
“The organization of a society for the possibility of war is its principal political stabilizer. It is ironic that this primary function of warfare has been generally recognized by historians only where it has been expressly acknowledged—in the pirate societies of the great conquerors. ”

That is the historical perspective. It has been the primary reason for the necessary prosecution of the Cold War—“necessary,” that is, in the minds of those who are unable to see, or who choose not to see, that there are other reasons than conflict for the existence of Earth and man.

The Spanish application of this tactic of the secret war is interesting and threatens us all. In this case, the two army officers had been ordered to attack a town, with regular Spanish troops (albeit some of them disguised as natives), and to make it look and feel realistic. As undercover warriors, they were trained to do this. (No doubt, some were trained in the United States, where many of the weapons, activities, and techniques mentioned below are used in training.) Under other conditions at other times, these same trained men might have been told to hijack a civilian aircraft; they might have been told to set up a mock car-bombing; they might have been told to run a mock hostage operation. There is no difference. The only military objective of these battles, and of this type of global conflict, is to create the appearance of war itself.

Now, the Spanish, for reasons of their own, had decided to teach this town a lesson. To initiate this campaign, a psychological-warfare propaganda team arrived in town. They put up posters, made inflammatory speeches in the village square, and showed propaganda films on the walls of buildings at night to stir up the village, warning of the existence and approach of a band of “terrorist-trained insurgents.” That night, as the movies were being shown before the assembled villagers, a firefight kit, prearranged to explode in sequence to resemble a true skirmish, was detonated on a nearby hillside. Flares and rockets filled the sky. A helicopter gunship or two joined the mock battle scenario. By the time this Special Forces PsyWar team left that town, the whole region had been alarmed by the presence of these “insurgents.” The stage was set for the “mock invasion of the town,” as ordered.

A few nights later, these two Spanish army officers (was the CIA involved?) divided their regular force into two groups: (a) the pseudoinsurgents and (b) the loyal regular forces. The “insurgents” took off their uniforms and donned native garb, the uniform of the “Peoples’ Insurgents.” Then they faded into the darkness and began to attack the town. First there was sporadic gunfire. Then some buildings went up in flames. Several big explosions occurred, and a bridge was blown up. The “insurgents” attacked the town as the villagers fled into the night. There was more gunfire, more burning and explosions. The “terrorists” looted the town and fired into the woods where the townspeople were hiding.