Word: secret
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...story of the secret army begins in late 1979, when the Pentagon set up a task force under the command of Army General James Vaught to plan a rescue of the hostages in Tehran. The CIA had no agents there, so the Army organized a Field Operations Group that slipped four intelligence officers into Tehran, where they gathered vital information on the situation at the embassy. Later, FOG members rented trucks in Tehran for the rescue team that was to be flown into Iran by helicopters supplied by the Navy. All for naught: the mission was scrubbed in April...
Nonetheless, the Army's top command -- particularly Chief of Staff General Edward Meyer and Vice Chief General John Vessey -- had become committed to secret operations. When the Reagan Administration took office, the generals made the new ad hoc groups permanent. In early 1981 Colonel James Longhofer, who had worked on Honey Badger, was assigned to head an expanded office of special operations to oversee various types of unconventional missions. One of its field units was Seaspray, jointly commanded by the Army and the CIA, which took over the special helicopters developed for the Iran rescue mission. The Pentagon dutifully briefed...
...that sum went to set up a supersecret intelligence unit, the ISA, under the command of Colonel Jerry , King. (The role of regular Army intelligence is to collect tactical military information, not to lay the ground for covert operations.) ISA initially was to act as a pathfinder for secret missions, but its functions quickly expanded. When General William Odom became assistant chief of staff for intelligence in late 1981, he argued persuasively that ISA was needed to fill gaps in the CIA's activities. Its personnel grew from about 50 at the start to 283 in 1985. At its peak...
From the beginning, friction arose between King's ISA and Longhofer's operations units. In 1981 they cooperated with the CIA on a mission to slip Christian Leader Bashir Gemayel back into Lebanon after a secret visit to the U.S., foiling a suspected Syrian plot to kill him. Gemayel made it (though he was assassinated one year later). But while the Seaspray-ISA team was in Egypt coordinating the mission with the Israelis, a special operations officer spotted an ISA man taping their discussions, on King's orders. "Young man," the officer reportedly thundered, "this is a CIA mission. Either...
...conventional military never felt comfortable with either King's or Longhofer's units. Seaspray and ISA were deliberately excluded from the 1983 invasion of Grenada by a Navy commander who claimed that he was not familiar with what they were or what they could do. Defenders of the secret groups retort that he refused a proffered briefing on those subjects...