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A top-secret U.S. Army Special Operations unit has been running covert missions all over the world, from leading death squads to the hideout of drug baron Pablo Escobar to assassinating key al Qaeda members, including Iraqi leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and, in one of their greatest missions, capturing Saddam Hussein. 'The Activity,” as it became known to insiders, has achieved near-mythical status, even among the world's Special Operations elite. Hidden from the politicians and the government bean counters, The Activity has been carrying out deniable operations, preparing the way for Delta and SEAL Team Six.
Now journalist Michael Smith gets inside this clandestine military team to expose their explosive history and secrets. Smith has spoken to many former members of the Activity and reveals the incredible truth behind the world's most secret Special Operations organization, a unit that is at the forefront of the War on Terror.
- Sales Rank: #762835 in Books
- Published on: 2008-03-04
- Released on: 2008-03-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.20" h x 1.07" w x 6.22" l, .96 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 368 pages
Review
“[An] extensively researched and crisply written exposé….An important primer for anyone hoping to understand the successes and failures of U.S. intelligence in the last 25 years.” --Publishers Weekly
"Well written and authoritatively sourced, Killer Elite is the first detailed account of a Special Operations unit that Smith regards as America's most effective."--Sunday Telegraph
About the Author
Michael Smith writes on defense for the Sunday Times of London. A former member of the British Army’s Intelligence Corps, Smith covered the wars in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq and has broken a number of important stories. He is the award-winning author of numerous bestselling books, including The Emperor's Code, a true story of code-breaking during World War II.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
Sitting in the forward operations center in a filthy Egyptian Air Force hangar at the Wadi Qina air base, 300 miles south of Cairo, Colonel Jerry King was powerless to prevent the debacle at Desert One. As chief of staff to Major General James “Hammer” Vaught, the man in charge of the Delta Force attempt to rescue 53 American hostages held captive in Tehran, King could only listen with mounting anger to the frantic satellite radio messages coming out of Iran in the early hours of 25 April 1980. Not that anyone out there at the Desert One staging post, 250 miles southeast of the Iranian capital in the Dasht-e-Kavir desert, could do any better. Even Chargin’ Charlie Beckwith, the former Green Beret colonel who set up Delta and was leading Operation Eagle Claw on the ground, couldn’t prevent what was by any measure “a total goat-fuck” that left eight US servicemen dead.
The operation had been called off after three of the eight US Navy helicopters taking part in the mission developed technical problems that left the joint task force with too few to get both the hostages and the rescue team out. One was abandoned in the desert after an indicator light warned a rotor blade might snap, a second had to pull out of the mission when its gyroscope malfunctioned and the third was declared unserviceable after landing at Desert One. After some argument among the task force commanders over whether or not to go ahead, the mission was called off. It was then that a helicopter and one of the C130s collided, killing the eight US servicemen.
There was a whole bunch of reasons why they died and why the task force failed in its mission—the interservice rivalry that meant every one of the four armed services wanted some involvement in the mission regardless of the fact that they had never worked together before, and all used different operating procedures; the decision to fly the helicopters off an aircraft carrier rather than in from a neighboring country; the navy’s poor maintenance of its helicopters; and the strange decision not to have air force pilots with experience of special ops fly all the aircraft, a move that would have at least ensured the mission got beyond Desert One.
But even if it had, there was another major problem that could have led to the mission failing at its most dangerous point, inside Tehran itself, and afterward Jerry King, a straight-talking veteran of Army Special Forces operations along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, was not slow to make his views known. The CIA had fucked up big time. It had claimed, falsely as it later turned out, to have no one in Tehran who could help Delta prepare for what was always going to be a tricky task. King’s disparaging view of the Agency’s contribution was shared by virtually everyone else involved in Eagle Claw, not least the task force commander General Vaught. “Intelligence from all sources was inadequate from the start and never became responsive,” he said. “The CIA did not, would not or could not provide sufficient agents to go in country and get the information we needed.”1
whatever the reasons for the failure of Eagle Claw, it certainly wasn’t a lack of detailed planning. Preparations for the raid had begun six months earlier on 4 November 1979, the very day a mob of Iranian Revolutionary Guards and militant students, supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini, forced their way into the US embassy in Tehran and seized the hostages. Jerry King, who was then chief of unconventional warfare for special operations in the Joint Chiefs of Staff operations directorate, was called in by Air Force General David C Jones, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, together with the chief of current operations, Brigadier General Johnson. “We were told about the embassy seizure and I was ordered to develop some military options by the following morning,” King recalled. “I was forbidden to inform or involve anyone else, including my immediate superior.”
Jones eventually backed down slightly to allow King to bring in two of his special operations colleagues so there were at least navy and air force representatives involved in his special planning cell, which was set up in the Pentagon’s Eighth Corridor close to the River entrance. Those three men were to become the nucleus of the task force commanded by Jim Vaught, who was described by John T Carney, one of the US Air Force special operations officers brought in to set up the Desert One forward operating base, as “a tall, lean, scraggly, quiet, gravely voiced but soft-spoken infantryman.”2 The unit Vaught and King picked to execute the actual rescue mission was the newly formed Special Forces Operational Detachment—Delta, the counterterrorist force that Beckwith had just recently set up, modeling it on the British Special Air Service (SAS), to provide the US with a counterterrorist team. Delta was based in the Stockade, an old military prison at the Army Special Forces headquarters at Fort Bragg, Fayetteville, North Carolina. Beckwith and King were both veterans of special ops in Vietnam and had learned a lot about their trade serving alongside members of the SAS. “I had an SAS sergeant assigned to me at Fort Bragg in the early sixties,” King recalled. It was part of the exchange mission that provided the inspiration for Delta. The sergeant and an SAS officer were sent to Fort Bragg while Charlie Beckwith and a Green Beret sergeant went to the SAS base at Bradbury Lines, Hereford, in England. For Jerry King, time spent with the highly experienced SAS sergeant was deeply rewarding. “I was wet behind the ears,” King said. “He taught me how to walk.”
Born in Canton, North Carolina, in 1937, Jerry King was an army brat, brought up at military bases in Germany, Korea and the Philippines. His stepfather was a career noncommissioned officer in the US Army. King enlisted into the army’s airborne infantry and after swift promotion through the ranks was picked out as a potential officer. The rookie lieutenant’s first posting was as a platoon commander in Germany. “Facing the Fulda Gap and the possibility of a Soviet thrust, I began to realize that my survival was dramatically enhanced when I had more control over my unit’s actions,” he said. “The arrogance of the young but a belief reinforced over time.”
As a direct result of that conviction, Jerry King developed a hard-nosed attitude that would win him a great deal of respect, and quite a few enemies, in his chosen field of special operations. At 6 foot 2 inches and weighing in at just under 196 pounds, King was a born winner. There might be others who were fitter, but very few could outlast him. Whether it was swimming underwater in preparation for covert approaches on targets or running marathons, he had the kind of mentality that meant he wouldn’t give in. He joined the 77th Special Forces Group (Airborne) at Fort Bragg and was sent to Laos at the head of one of the White Star mobile training teams, which were training local forces to counter North Vietnam’s use of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the Viet Cong supply route that ran through Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam. King subsequently led a Special Forces detachment in Vietnam and helped to set up the training program for the Studies and Observations Group (SOG), the euphemistically named special operations command which, between January 1965 and March 1973, mounted several thousand highly success-
ful cross-border reconnaissance missions into Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam. At 28, King was deemed “too old” for the gruelling missions but on a couple of occasions he managed to bypass the naysayers and went across the border anyway.3
He had known Charlie Beckwith when they were both young lieutenants and was not the Delta commander’s greatest fan, but that didn’t affect his judgment that Delta was “the obvious choice for the entry force.” The first suggestion was that the raid to rescue the hostages should be mounted from eastern Turkey, which seemed a sensible option, allowing total flexibility in the type of aircraft used on the rescue mission and a safe base just across the border from Iran. But inexplicably General Jones ruled out the use of Turkey and two other friendly Middle East countries. “What I considered a purely political and unreasonable decision by the Chairman forced us to look for an alternative launch platform,” King recalled. “Carriers were the only feasible option available.”4
Eventually it was decided that the MC130 Combat Talon aircraft carrying the Delta personnel and a small security force of US Rangers would take off from Wadi Qina, making a brief stopover at the British air base on the island of Masirah, off Oman, while the helicopters that were to carry the Delta teams into a hide site close to Tehran and exfiltrate them, along with the hostages, would launch from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in the Gulf of Oman. That last decision created a whole raft of problems that would ultimately lead to the failure of the mission.
“The choice of a carrier as a launch platform virtually dictated the type of aircraft,” King said. They would be US Navy RH53 Sea Stallions, normally used for mine-clearing operations but big enough to carry the hostages and the Delta rescue team out of Iran to safety. It didn’t take long for King to realize that the navy pilots who flew the aircraft were simply not good enough. “I recommended we bring in air force pilots who flew the same helicopter with considerable long flight experience, including one who had participated in the Son Tay raid.” But the senior officer he had to ask for authorization to replace the navy pilots was a US Marine general and the interservice rivalry that would bedevil the Eagle Claw mission took over. “Bef...
Most helpful customer reviews
40 of 42 people found the following review helpful.
Great glimpse into a covert world!
By John Farrar
The book, Killer Elite, by Michael Smith is not only a highly interesting expose of an elite American covert military unit, but also provides a thought provoking illustration of how US Foreign Policy objectives are increasingly being met by small teams of operators in the back alleys of the world. The unit is commonly known as the "Activity" and occasional snippets concerning its various missions and techniques have periodically emerged in the mainstream media for the past few decades. Its mission is to support the better-known and more overt Special Operations Forces such as DELTA and the SEALS in conducting their missions. They do this by providing actionable intelligence that they gather via various means such as the handling of agents or through eavesdropping of communication networks. The book further describes how the unit is now evolving into more expanded missions that are similar to the traditional clandestine agent handling performed by the CIA.
The books' beginning reads similar to Steven Emerson's classic, Secret Warriors: Inside the Covert Military Operations of the Reagan Era, but springs forward into more current and less known operations. I was surprised at the level of research and the author's contacts with both the US and British Special Operations and Intelligence Communities. It sheds a great deal of light and is an excellent read for anyone interested in Special Operations or Human Intelligence gathering. For those interested in this field, Fishers of Men by Rob Lewis is also an excellent book.
23 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
Inside the World of U.S. Special Ops
By Matthew M. Aid
As a writer on intelligence matters, I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the worldwide activities of the U.S. military's Special Operations Forces, as seen through the spectrum of the U.S. Army's secretive clandestine intelligence unit formerly known as the "Intelligence Support Activity." Not only is Mr. Smith's book very readible, but it is also very informative and thought provoking about the vitally important role played by the U.S. military in trying to combat the growing number of terrorist and insurgent threats around the world.
Regardless of where you come down on the political spectrum about U.S. foreign and military policy, this serious book is important because it reminds us that U.S. Special Operations Forces have played an important, albeit secretive role in virtually all significant counterterrorist and counterinsurgency operations since the end of World War II, and that their role in the war on terrorism is becoming increasingly important.
Mr. Smith has a well-deserved reputation for being a top-flight military affairs reporter in England, and this book further confirms his standing as one of the best in the field.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Don't judge this book by the title
By JMC
Smith's account of the special forces community from Desert One to Enduring Freedom offers an interesting glimpse into the byzantine workings of special operations. If you were expecting a white knuckle Clancy-esque account of operations reeking of cordite and sweat; FORGET IT.
Smith reveals that much of the work is in gathering and proper inmplementation of intelligence, through exploitation and signals gathering. There are myriad of operations recounted in this book: the killing of Pablo Escobar, SAS and Delta snatches of Serb war criminals and the current ops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Smith also covers the battles within the Penatagon, the scramble for funding and the decision makers.
The authors approach is academic and even handed, so if you expected "go-team-go" and techno-thriller action you're going to be VERY disappointed. Killer Elite is a great page turner for those of us who understand that "James Bond" movies are just that and the REAL shooters are quiet professionals.
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