Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad by Tony Geraghty

from Delta. According to the Activity’s 1986 Historical Report, the job involved “locating, surveying, reporting and operating landing zones [for helicopters] and drop zones [for parachutists].” “ISA executed their mission primarily through tradecraft means,” that is, in civilian dress and maximum deception. “ISA’s success was very impressive and well received.” 80
    ISA soldiers also conducted twenty-nine airborne operations in FY 86. Airborne operations consisted of static-line [low-level parachute drops] and HALO [high altitude freefall drops, using oxygen from above 12,500 feet down to low opening at around 3,000 feet]. These were night jumps, with a full load of combat equipment, carried in rucksacks mounted below the parachute pack, a highly dangerous process even if, as is likely, these jumps were not live operations but exercises. It is normal SF practice to go into freefall at night from high altitude. If the parachutist loses grip of his stable, face-to-earth posture at terminal velocity, as his canopy opens, the result can be fatal as the canopy snags on his boots (a “horseshoe” malfunction), collapsing the canopy instead of allowing it to rise cleanly from the backpack to “breathe.” The presence of a 100-pound rucksack, if it shifts, can make it very hard to maintain stability in freefall.
    There were other difficulties at ground level. “A major problem occurred in that eight personnel were surveilled and later apprehended by State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) personnel, who thought they were involved in drug smuggling-type operations.” The matter was resolved when two senior officers “were dispatched from headquarters to the exercise area.” The forces of law and order were usually more obliging. “In January and February 1986, two…personnel were dispatched to Miami to talk to U.S. Customs Services and the Drug Enforcement Administration about concealment devices and techniques currently being used [by smugglers] and to obtain their views on how to do it better. These trips came to the personal attention of the Secretary of the Army who was advised of the results, which were primarily, we would have to do each on a case by case basis, depending on what, where and when it was needed.” 81
    It was an elegant coincidence, perhaps, that the Activity should take lessons from the DEA in the methods used by drug smugglers. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan revived the Nixonian concept of a war on drugs, but this time, it was more than a metaphor. As the Cold War ended, it gave the armed services of the U.K. and U.S. an identifiable conflict zone and a new raison d’etre. In September that year the Pentagon announced that it would “lead the attack on the supply of illegal drugs from abroad.” 82
    Like other White House declarations of war on drugs, before and after, it was doomed to fail but it provided the British SAS and American Special Forces including the Activity with an opportunity to test themselves in live operations against a real enemy. Such adventures are sometimes known as “operational exercises.” The principal battleground was Colombia.
    Over the next three years, using airborne intercepts siphoned electronically out of the Colombian jungle, the ISA tracked two cocaine barons controlling the apparently omnipotent Medellin Cartel: Jose Rodriguez Gacha and Pablo Gavria Escobar, men whose business turnover was greater than the gross domestic product of some countries, men who commanded private armies equipped with missiles and heavy machine guns, and a ruthlessness matched only by the Mafia. Gacha was the first to die. Thanks to the ISA’s intercepts, a local paramilitary team hit his hideaway, a farmhouse on the border with Panama, with helicopter gunships. Gacha tried to escape into the jungle with his son and five bodyguards. On the ground, a captain in the Anti-Narcotics Police used his SAS training to identify Gacha’s likely escape route. He set up an ambush