Arafat's lieutenants were impressive, no doubt about it. Most of them had advanced degrees from American universities. They were all well-dressed, very sharp, well-spoken, and knowledgeable about world affairs. Arafat was obviously the leader — and clearly an intelligent and remarkable man — but the lieutenants who made things work struck Stiner as truly formidable. In years to come, that impression proved terribly accurate.
Later, in 1983, Stiner was assigned to Lebanon. There he got a firsthand experience of terrorism and its effects — a U.S. ambassador had been assassinated; while he was there, more than sixty people at the American Embassy. and later more than two hundred U.S. Marines, were killed by bombs.
In those days, Beirut was not only an armed camp with many hostile factions, but a place where fighting might break out anywhere at any time. No one was safe, and death was an ever-present risk — from snipers, crossfires between factions, ambushes, and indiscriminate shelling by heavy artillery and rocket fire. The shelling sometimes involved thousands of rounds, which reduced entire sections of the city to rubble in half an hour.
It was not an casy assignment. Yet, for Stiner, it proved to be rewarding. It offered a chance to learn lessons he could get nowhere else.
• You learned how to survive. Or you didn't.
• You learned whom to trust in a life-or-death situation — and whom, by faction or religious motivation, you could not trust.
• You learned to think like a terrorist.
THE EVOLUTION OF JSOTF
The traditional function of wars is to change an existing state of affairs. In the early 1970s, a new form of warfare, or maybe a new way of practicing a very old form of warfare, emerged — state-supported terrorism. Nations that were not militarily powerful learned to use terrorist tactics to obtain objectives and concessions they could never win through diplomatic or military means.
When this new form of warfare broke out, the United States quickly showed itself unprepared to cope with it. It had neither a national policy nor intelligence capabilities aimed at terrorism, nor any military forces adequately trained and prepared to respond to terrorist provocations. Although the United States was the most powerful nation in the world, its military capabilities were focused on the Soviet Union and not on something like this.
In 1972, Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics were massacred by Black September terrorists. This outrage might have been avoided if German snipers had had the ability to hit the terrorists as they led the hostages across the airport runway to their getaway plane.
The Israelis took this lesson to heart, and on July 4, 1976, eighty-six Israeli paratroopers landed at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. Their mission was to rescue the passengers from an Air France airliner hijacked eight days earlier. In a matter of minutes, the paratroopers had rescued ninety-five hostages and killed four terrorists — though at the cost of the lives of two hostages and the paratroop commander. News of the raid flashed all over the world — and pointed out even more sharply America's inadequacies in fighting terrorism.
This truth had already been brought out in May 1975: Forty-one American Marines were killed in an attempt to rescue the thirty-nine crewmen of the American merchant ship Mayaguez after it had been seized by the Cambodian government. The rescue attempt had failed.
These incidents clearly indicated that the United States was unprepared to deal with terrorist-created hostage situations.
To correct this shortfall, in the mid-70s, three farseeing people began lobbying for the creation of a special "elite" unit to deal with this unconventional threat: Lieutenant General Edward C. "Shy" Meyer, Director of Operations for the Army; Major General Robert "Bob" Kingston, Commander of the Army's Special Forces; and Robert Kupperman, Chief Scientist for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, who was managing the government's studies on terrorism.
The three initially made little headway. Scant support for the "elite" unit could be found among the services, and even within the Army, even though it was devastatingly clear that the technology in which the Army was investing so heavily — tanks, helicopters, air defense missiles, armored personnel carriers, and all the other machinery of the modern-day battlefield — was of little use against terrorists. The opposition stemmed primarily from two sources: a bias against elite units as such — elites have never been popular in the U.S. Army — and the perception that the unit would rob resources and available funds from the existing force structure.
On June 2, 1977, Lieutenant General Meyer presented the concept of this special mission unit to Army Chief of Staff General Bernard Rogers.
This unit was to be the premier counterterrorist force. Because it was expected to deal with the most complex crisis situations, it would have capabilities like no other military unit. It would be organized with three operational squadrons and a support squadron; and it was to be composed of handpicked men with demonstrated special maturity, courage, inner strength, and the physical and mental ability to react appropriately to resolve every kind of crisis situation — including imminent danger to themselves.
On November 19, 1977, the Army officially activated the unit, but it took another two years to develop the tactics and procedures required for the unit's projected mission.
The unit's final exam and validation exercise was held at Hunter Army Airfield at Fort Stewart, Georgia, and ended in the early-morning hours of Sunday, November 4. It was now certified for its special mission requirements.
Ironically, just as the exercise was taking place, a mob was invading the American Embassy in Tehran. Moments later everyone inside — fifty-three people — became hostages to the new religious-led Iranian revolutionary government.
The crisis of the next 444 days challenged the United States as it had never been challenged before, and proved a horribly painful lesson in effective response to terrorist incidents. The nation was faced with risks, quandaries, contradictions, legal issues, other nations' involvement, and sovereignty issues; and there were no easy solutions. We were presented with what was in fact an act of war, yet this "war" was on a scale that made the use of heavy weapons either impractical or overkill. And besides, there were hostages. We wanted to do something to turn the situation to our advantage.
But what?
In terms of shooters and operators, the unit was probably the most capable unit of its kind in the world, but it did not yet have the necessary infrastructure to go with it — no command organization, no staff, no combat support units. To make matters more frustratingly complex, the intelligence infrastructure necessary for support of rescue operations did not exist in Iran, either.
Meanwhile, President Jimmy Carter — sitting very uncomfortably between a rock and a hard place — decided that an operation to rescue the fifty-three hostages had to be attempted. Army Special Forces had to be the centerpiece of any rescue in Iran.
The obvious model was the Israeli raid on Entebbe. A brilliantly planned, led, and executed operation… yet only a marginally useful model. The difficulties of a raid into Tehran were incomparably larger. The Entebbe raid was made against an airfield. The raiders could land there quickly, and make their move against the terrorists almost before they themselves had been detected. Tehran was a major metropolis, with a population in the millions, and it was hundreds of miles inside a vast and hostile country. Getting inside Tehran and into the embassy undetected and with sufficient force to do any good presented many problems.