SECRET WARRIORS Inside the Covert Military
Operations of the Reagan Era. By Steven Emerson. 256 pp. New York: G. P.
Putnam's Sons. $17.95.
In the annals of secret warfare there
are few disasters to match the bloody humiliation at Desert One, the remote
landing strip where the attempt to rescue American hostages from the United
States Embassy in Teheran in 1980 collapsed of its own ungainly weight.
The enemy was nowhere in sight, but eight men died anyway when a helicopter
collided with a troop transport plane. The survivors made their dismal way
home, leaving the hostages to molder in captivity for another nine months.
Never again! swore the new President
inaugurated in 1981, Ronald Reagan. The result was an all-out Pentagon effort
to build a formidable covert capability to fight terrorism, rescue hostages
and carry the war to clandestine enemies wherever they challenged American
interests. The story of that effort is told by Steven Emerson, a senior
editor of U.S. News & World Report, in ''Secret Warriors.''
Alas, the title is a sad irony. Far
from secret, hardly warriors, the new team made a mess of things from the
beginning. A single heartening success - the rescue, with United States
help, of Brig. Gen. James Dozier from a Red Brigade hideout in Italy in
1982 - was followed by a string of failures. The 1983 bombing of the United
States Embassy and the Marine barracks in Lebanon never should have happened
and went unpunished afterwards. The hijackers of a T.W.A. airliner in 1985
were two jumps ahead of American rescuers from the start, and other covert
operations - to bug the offices of Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega in Panama,
to rescue the C.I.A.'s chief of station, William Buckley, kidnapped in Beirut
- were failures, comic in the first instance, tragic in the second. Buckley
died after a year of torture in captivity.
Mr. Emerson's carefully documented
effort to sort out the secret history of this effort is no academic exercise.
The operational failures and occasional small successes were matched by
a growing covert mentality in really efficient secret team could not only
confound the enemy, but evade the scrutiny of Congress and the press. Careful
students of the Iran-contra affair will find many suggestive new details
in ''Secret Warriors'' about its origins in the C.I.A.'s use of Pentagon
assets in carrying out President Reagan's policies in Central America. But
Mr. Emerson's real subject is how the Pentagon, trying to learn from the
disaster at Desert One, got so little in return for its trouble and its
money.
What went wrong? The Pentagon did its
best, spared no expense, assigned some of its most promising young officers
to the task, and even abandoned its most time-honored standard operating
procedures to cut a path through the red tape. In the case of one small
elite group code-named Yellow Fruit, the Army jettisoned all the red tape,
spinning the unit off into an orbit of its own. As described by Mr. Emerson,
the group's leaders abandoned the perils of operations for the pleasures
of unvouchered funds. A string of courts-martial eventually ended the boondoggle.
Other failures were more prosaic, the doing of bureaucratic jealousy, confusion
of purposes, official timidity when action was called for and action when
caution would have been better.
''Secret Warriors'' is a reporter's book, full of stories and colorful characters but short on analysis. Mr. Emerson has no quarrel with official insistence that the country ''desperately needs a special operations capacity'' but nowhere suggests what the country needs this capacity for. President Reagan seems to have wanted it so the country could stand tall and give as good as it got when terrorists challenged our interventions in the far corners of the world. Fair enough. No one likes to look the fool. The real question is whether the fights we picked were important and necessary.
MR. EMERSON touches on this question when
he says that the American military has grown cumbersome and unwieldy -more
like the redcoats who marched with heavy packs into Lexington and Concord
in 1775, than the minutemen who picked them off with long-barrelled squirrel
guns from behind trees and stone walls. The comparison is apt, but not because
the British were equipped for the wrong war. The British failure had a deeper
cause: they were far from home, trying to assert imperial rights that meant
nothing to them against aroused local citizens who made up in passion whatever
they lacked in military expertise.
Throughout ''Secret Warriors'' it is
always the Americans who are far from home. With few exceptions they are
able and dedicated professional soldiers, trying their best to carry out
the orders of superiors in Washington. But no amount of expertise or high-tech
gear, fabulous as some of it is, can quite compensate for the fact that
they are alien. Among the grace notes of Mr. Emerson's fine book are many
small, well-told stories, like the one about two members of the Army's supersecret
Intelligence Support Activity on a mission in Lebanon in December 1983,
trying to pin down just who had been responsible for the bombings of the
embassy and the Marine barracks. When the two men were stopped at a road
checkpoint manned by Syrian Army regulars, loudly demanding - in Arabic,
of course - to see their papers, they knew they were in the deepest sort
of trouble. Their papers identified them as American military men and neither
spoke Arabic. But one of them had learned Vietnamese, and he managed to
squeak them through by shouting back in this unknown tongue. There you have
it - two American ''secret warriors,'' trying to spy out somebody else's
country with the wrong language, picked up in the last war, already lost.
This is not the sort of problem that can be solved by more R & D back
at the Pentagon.