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

and waited. Gacha and his party walked onto the guns. There were no survivors. In 1993, it was Escobar’s turn. Again, ISA identified the target’s location and called in a hit team of Colombian police. Some sources suggest that the coup de grâce was delivered by a member of Delta.
    The victory over the Medellin cartel triggered the law of unintended consequences. Alfred W. McCoy points out: “After the Medellin cartel’s terror ended with Pablo Escobar’s death in December 1993, the rival Cali cartel’s quiet infiltration of the state culminated in its secret contributions to the 1994 campaign that helped elect President Ernesto Samper and half the Colombian Congress. Within two years, however, Cali’s leaders too were jailed and the traffic fragmented among dozens of smaller syndicates. In this vacuum, the leftist FARC guerrillas and their blood rivals, the rightist paramilitaries, soon captured the drug trade, using rising coco profits to buy arms for civil war…. As FARC’s influence grew, the military countered by backing the violent paramilitaries, particularly the United Self-Defense Forces commanded by Carlos Castano, a former lieutenant to drug lord Pablo Escobar.” 83 Not for the first or last time would a finely honed Special Forces team achieve a brilliant tactical success in furtherance of a failed strategy thanks to a political wish-list that was none of its making. The Activity’s pursuit of enemy big fish failed repeatedly in Somalia, Bosnia, and the pursuit of bin Laden as the targets learned to avoid using vulnerable cell phones, relying on human couriers instead. In Somalia in October 1993, the target was Mohammed Farah Aideed, a warlord and clan chieftain disinclined to go along with a Western-imposed plan for nation-building in his country. Allegedly, Italian military sources in Somalia tipped off the wanted man, who eluded capture. The attempt to snatch two of his lieutenants in Mogadishu as an alternative to Aideed resulted in the trauma of Black Hawk Down: the loss of first one helicopter, then another, and eighteen GIs as more assets were thrown into a battle which also took the lives of around 500 Somalis. In Bosnia, from 1996, the big fish that got away was Radovan Karadic, the Serb leader who allegedly presided over the massacre of 8,000 people at Srebrenica, as their UN protectors stood idly by. The British SIS had a plan to assassinate him, never put into effect. Karadic, bearded and disguised as a practitioner of alternative medicine, was finally arrested by Serbian paramilitary police in 2008 after thirteen years on the run and put on trial a year later at The Hague. His chief executioner, Ratko Mladic, was still at large, protected by the Serbian army brotherhood. Bin Laden was repeatedly sighted and targeted by a number of intelligence agencies, notably the CIA, whose historian and critic Tim Weiner quotes an Agency veteran, John MacGaffin: “The CIA knew bin Laden’s location almost every day, sometimes within fifty feet.” But, Weiner records, while at least fifteen American special forces soldiers were killed or injured in training missions for an anticipated assault on bin Laden, “commanders in the Pentagon and civilian leaders in the White House continually backed down from the political gamble of a military mission against bin Laden.” 84
    The U.S. National Commission’s report on 9/11 confirmed that it was the ghost of Desert One that inhibited conventional military commanders. “General William Boykin, the current deputy under-secretary of defense for intelligence and a founding member of Delta Force, told us that ‘opportunities were missed because of an unwillingness to take risks and a lack of vision and understanding.’…One Special Operations commander [Boykin] said his view of ‘actionable intelligence’ was that ‘if you give me the action, I will give you the intelligence.’” 85

CHAPTER 7
    BIG BOYS’ GAMES, BIG BOYS’ RULES
    O n 30 April 1980,