A general problem in threatened underdeveloped countries is that of developing and strengthening the basic governmental and social institutions that are prerequisites to modernization. In some cases, as in the Congo, the local leadership is responsive to the need for change but lacks the background and competence to take needed steps on its own. In other cases, a frustrating and exasperating problem in countries severely plagued by Communist political and military subversion . . . is the reluctance—bordering on blind obstinacy—of the governmental leaders to admit the need for reform. In both cases the traditional and internationally accepted tools of government-to-government diplomacy . . . are unlikely by themselves to provide the guidance or the resources to achieve the reforms and changes essential to winning broad-based popular support for the national regime. In such situations the broad range of covert action measures available to us offers our best and only chance of increasing our leverage and achieving needed changes in time.

  Bissell foresaw a “suitable covert operational methodology” that would involve “funding and guidance channels of bona fide private international or regional organizations,” particularly labor, youth, farm, or veterans groups; confidential relationships with local political leaders (“non-attributably backstopped”); and covertly funded consultants to local regimes.

  There could also be a CIA role strengthening internal security and defense. “Offensive countermeasures” would be “primarily intended as spoiling operations,” including cross-border operations. With a finely honed sense of the dangers inherent in this, the paper admitted such tactics would become “almost unpredictably dangerous” if the adversary believed there existed a possibility he or she might be overthrown or lose territory. And, “The advantage is lost if an offensive operation against the aggressor is conducted in such a manner as to compel him to regard it as a formal act of war.” A further important theme—which fed back to Walt Rostow’s advocacy—was that “public expression would be given to the rationale.”

  On December 8 the final counter–guerrilla warfare task force paper contained Dick Bissell’s statement of the techniques the Kennedy administration imagined would make the world safe for democracy. It also met Robert Komer’s agenda, saying, “Because of its responsibilities in directly related fields and because the agencies chiefly concerned are already represented on it, expansion of the mandate of the NSC Special Group seems the most effective way to carry out this function.” The Special Group would designate threatened countries, and for each of them Washington would form a task force to ensure optimal use of resources.

  Richard Bissell’s last act would thus be to move Kennedy to reorganize his machinery for covert action. In fact the Special Group talked over the Bissell report on December 14. General Taylor formalized the early ad hoc procedures, drafting a directive that JFK approved on January 18, 1962. Because there has been confusion about Kennedy’s leadership of the secret war, this structure is worth underlining: The president established the Special Group (CI)—the abbreviation stood for “counterinsurgency”—to formulate plans on guerrilla warfare matters, in any country so designated. The existing Special Group—formerly the 5412 Group—on Cold War matters continued (the nomenclature had now been reversed: “5412” became the insider jargon). A third Special Group also appeared, the Special Group (Augmented). The difference was that Max Taylor chaired the 5412 Group existing since Harry Truman’s day while Bobby Kennedy skippered the Special Group (Augmented), identical save for his addition and its specific focus on Cuba.

  Maxwell Taylor had been a paratrooper. In the army in his time, paratroopers were considered a military elite—thoroughly modern and flexible officers. Solidly cast in this “Airborne” mold, Max Taylor was unusual, just as Kennedy thought. More typical were the army officers who throughout the 1950s hindered the development of Special Forces. The Tenth Special Forces Group had been in place at Fort Bragg since June 1952. In September 1953 it was supplemented by the Seventy-seventh Group, which remained in the United States while almost eight hundred men of the Tenth Group deployed to western Germany, where they occupied an old German army base at Bad Tolz in Bavaria. This expansion coincided with the return of the Korean War veterans, a major source of Special Forces recruits. Subsequent growth slowed to a snail’s pace as anxious army generals preserved conventional units as best they could within the New Look budgets. Preoccupied with adjusting to nuclear war, the brass had little time for advocates of unconventional warfare.

  The German deployment became the first giant step. At Bad Tolz the Tenth Special Forces planned for partisan campaigns in Eastern Europe and showed what they could do in NATO maneuvers. Detachments sent from the United States to other nations to help in training inaugurated a Special Forces role that has endured ever since. A permanent presence in the Far East began in 1956 when provisional teams went to Hawaii, then to Okinawa. In June 1957 this became the First Special Forces Group. Special Forces began missions to Laos as early as 1959, and in 1960 they appeared in South Vietnam, training Vietnamese rangers at the invitation of President Ngo Dinh Diem.

  A wave of disillusionment swept through Special Forces, as at the CIA, when Eisenhower took no action during the Hungarian revolt. The unconventional warfare experts also smarted from their encounters with the army bureaucracy, which banned the wearing of Special Forces’ semi-official headgear, the green beret. Dedication was a valued attribute in a Special Forces soldier, but a person needed a lot to stay in the teams at that time. By 1960 Special Forces groups had tripled but amounted to only about two thousand troops, fewer than the personnel spaces the army had allocated in its 1952 decision to maintain a single unconventional warfare unit.

  As military formations go, a Special Forces “group” represented something new. One component, an administrative base, served the needs of many distributed teams, called “operational detachments.” From group headquarters a C Team provided control and intelligence support for a large area while a B Team did the same for a region. The operational detachment was the A Team. These had a wide range of skilled experts for technical and medical services and combat leadership. The basic concept called for an A Team essentially leading a large partisan force or providing a training cadre. Special Forces recruited experienced officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs), selected only the best, and then cross-trained team members in several of the required skills. During the 1950s this was quite necessary since many of the teams had but a fraction of their authorized complements.

  The notion of Special Forces commands for regions and countries, with A Teams for field forces, clearly aimed at organizing resistance to an adversary’s military advance or occupation. The essential function, similar to the CIA’s stay-behind nets, was to harass and disrupt. But because of the expertise of their members, the A Teams were also highly suited for the training mission and for command of friendly irregular units within friendly territory. The latter became a key task in counterinsurgency. Here Special Forces at last found the role that sustained it through the Vietnam era and after.

  This only became evident later. Good fortune came to Special Forces with the election of John F. Kennedy. Within days of JFK’s inauguration one of the president’s NSC staff, Walt Rostow, began questioning the adequacy of army training for war against guerrillas. Special Forces already ran counterinsurgency courses at its headquarters in Fort Bragg. These emphasized the economic, social, political, and psychological origins of war. Special Forces seemed to be on top of the subject, and President Kennedy saw a major role for Special Forces’ knowledge in “brushfire” wars.

  A few months later Rostow went to Fort Bragg to address the students of the Special Warfare Center, his speech approved by Kennedy. Rostow’s speech put guerrilla war in the context of global underdevelopment, a sort of crisis of modernization. Although Rostow commended the students for reading Lenin, Guevara, and Mao Zedong, he insisted that guerrilla war dated to long before the Russian Revolution. “Guerrilla warfare,” as Rostow put it, “is not a form of military and psychological magic created by the Communist.” Rather, “we confront in guerrilla warfare in the underdeveloped areas a systematic attempt by the Communists to impose a serious disease on those societies attempting the transition to modernization.” America’s central task would be “to protect the independence of the revolutionary process now going forward.” Guerrilla warfare “is powerful and effective only when we do not put our minds clearly to work on how to deal with it.”

  Kennedy perceived Special Forces to have done just that. Rostow returned to Bragg in late 1961, this time accompanying the president on a personal tour of the Special Warfare Center. Its commander, Brig. Gen. William Yarborough, took a calculated risk and greeted Kennedy wearing the proscribed green beret. The president came and saw, spoke supportively, and helped Special Forces gain new impetus. On April 11, 1962, JFK released an official message to the army, calling the green beret “a symbol of excellence, a badge of courage, a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom.” Henceforth Special Forces would be known as Green Berets, with official regulations to govern their size and color and how they should be worn. In a remarkable expansion of the franchise, decades later the entire U.S. Army clamored for berets of their own and now wear this headgear in varied colors and devices.

  From the beginning of Kennedy’s presidency a rapid expansion of Special Forces occurred. In March 1961 the army doubled the number of units. Now groups specialized geographically—the Tenth Group for Europe; the First for Asia; a new Eighth Group for Latin America; and Third and Sixth groups for Africa and Middle East assignments. The Seventy-seventh Special Forces Group became the Seventh. Authorized strength doubled to fifteen hundred soldiers per group. Psychological warfare units also increased, in early 1965, to three battalions and two companies plus detachments. By November 30, 1964, the strength of army special warfare units stood at more than eleven thousand.

  In Germany the Tenth Group retained its mission of infiltrating the Soviet bloc. The theater war plan, OPLAN 10-1, according to revelations in the British press, in 1962 provided for the Tenth Group to disperse into forty-nine guerrilla warfare zones throughout Eastern Europe. Its A Teams were each credited with the ability to mobilize a partisan battalion every month, for a potential resistance force of almost eighty thousand within six months, according to the estimates of the Special Operations Task Force Europe.

  In its concentration on behind-the-lines wartime activity, the Tenth Group became an exception. Green Berets working other areas of the globe focused more on counterinsurgency and military assistance. The future looked bright. “For the first time in United States history,” said army spokesmen in an informational publication, “this [guerrilla organizing and psychological warfare] capability has been made available before it is needed. Through it the Army now has one more weapon which can be applied with discrimination in any kind of warfare.”

  There were air force special forces too. These provided support, especially airlift. The air force called its approach to special forces the “air commando” concept. An “air commando” unit contained a little bit of everything—medium and light transport aircraft plus fighter-bombers. The same unit could supply partisans, make air strikes in their support, and maintain physical contact by flying light planes onto small airstrips. The ARC wings had continued the tradition, but the air force had abolished them. Had the Khampa partisans possessed such capabilities in Tibet, the PLA might never have been able to overcome them.

  Air commandos were eclipsed in Eisenhower’s budget-conscious air force. Faced with expensive bomber and missile programs, little interest remained. Tactical commanders were preoccupied with their transition to supersonic jet fighters. Even air transport leaders had bigger ticket programs like the C-130 Hercules or the large jet C-141 Starlifter. The air commandos fell nebulously somewhere among the functional responsibilities of the various air force commands.

  Despite all obstacles, a start was made in the late 1950s with the formation of a small, secret organization within the service. As with the army, Kennedy galvanized the air force. In March 1961, responding to instructions that each service examine how it could contribute to counterinsurgency, air force headquarters ordered the Tactical Air Command to create an experimental counterinsurgency unit along air commando lines.

  Very soon thereafter, on April 14, 1961, the air force activated the 4400th Combat Crew Training Squadron under Col. Benjamin H. King at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. The unit based its planes at nearby Hurlbut Field. Initially they included sixteen C-47s, eight B-26s, and eight T-28 Texans, propeller-driven training aircraft converted to carry bombs or rockets and machine guns. Nicknamed the “Jungle Jim” unit, the 4400th began with 350 airmen and the dual mission of training indigenous aircrews and participating in combat.

  Meanwhile, for top-secret airlift missions over longer distances the Military Airlift Command established special E-Flights in certain of its C-130 squadrons. The unit for the Far East, for example, was E-Flight of the Twenty-first Troop Carrier Squadron on Okinawa, formed in late 1961 with four or five C-130s, already involved in the Tibet operation.

  In April 1962 the air force dispensed with euphemisms and reactivated its First Air Commando Squadron, a formation that traced its lineage directly back to March 1944 in Burma. The squadron later expanded to a wing, supplemented by more combat crew training squadrons, a combat support group, and, at Eglin, the Special Air Warfare School. All these capabilities were controlled by a Special Warfare Division at USAF headquarters. Long before this stage arrived, the original Jungle Jim unit had gone into action in Southeast Asia.

  Changes also came within the Pentagon. The Office of Special Operations transformed itself after the Bay of Pigs. Although OSO representatives such as Ed Lansdale had raised objections to the Cuba project, the Joint Chiefs were apportioned some blame in the failure. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, none too happy, wanted streamlining. Graves Erskine ran a tight ship, but perhaps there was just too much work for a single office.

  At that time the OSO truly functioned as an intelligence focal point. It handled liaison and everything else from allocating forces to covert projects, to military personnel for detached service at CIA, to cover arrangements, to Pentagon participation in reconnaissance satellite development. McNamara was told that he did not really need a special assistant for these matters. Suddenly, the day after the final defeat of the Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, most of the OSO personnel were reassigned to other military tasks.

  Some OSO officers feared that Lansdale might take over the special assistant’s functions. After all, he had been deputy to General Erskine and one of the foremost proponents of counterinsurgency. But there were questions as to whether Lansdale knew much about satellites and other technical intelligence issues.

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff set the stage in late July 1961 when they asked for guidance on peacetime support to the Central Intelligence Agency. An existing agreement from 1957 now seemed obsolete. The officers need not have worried. When OSO disappeared, McNamara assigned its technical responsibilities to the director of defense research and engineering. Under his August 7 directive, deception responsibilities went to a special planning office within the navy. Lansdale retained a small staff to handle only special activities. On September 12 Lansdale defined the terrain in a paper to the Chiefs and all the service secretaries: routine matters could be handled by those already assigned to liaise between the military and CIA, but anything requiring policy discussion or major participation would go to his office.

  Some credit Erskine with achieving this division of tasks. A new unit, the special assistant for counterinsurgency and special activities (SACSA) is what finally emerged. In any case, Ed Lansdale did not succeed to the OSO empire. Pulled into a renewed Cuba adventure, Lansdale disappeared. A Marine general had headed OSO, and now another Marine became SACSA. With an eye cocked toward the White House, the Marine Corps gave the post to an officer who had served with Jack Kennedy in the South Pacific during World War II, Maj. Gen. Victor “Brute” Krulak. Jack Hawkins came back from the CIA to become his assistant. Both were skeptical of the covert operations that followed the Bay of Pigs, especially Hawkins. But on counterinsurgency SACSA proved very active, and Maxwell Taylor’s Special Group (CI) made sure it stayed that way. Army civilian executive Joseph A. Califano, Jr., came to think Krulak’s nickname very well chosen.

  Dick Bissell had been an enthusiastic supporter of counterinsurgency, leading the 1961 summer study. His successor, Richard McGarah Helms, was not so much so. A professional from the espionage establishment, Helms had been poised for this job for a decade. He had been the go-to guy for spies, heading the division that covered Germany during creation of the CIA-Gehlen Organization alliance and the heady years of that country as base for penetration missions behind the Iron Curtain. He had dutifully played second fiddle to Wisner, then Bissell. Now Helms began the meteoric rise that took him to the top of the CIA in the span of a few years. Despite his proclivities, in the process Helms would preside over a peak in the secret war, the years from Kennedy to the Nixon-Kissinger era.

  Helms took over an expanding DO but one inflicted with self-doubt. Already a stream of defectors had begun to sow fears of a Russian mole at a high level within the CIA. And there were the covert action failures—which nevertheless did not impede the growth of DO capabilities. The directorate remained the largest component of the agency, a thousand stronger than when Ike took office, spending 54 percent of CIA’s budget. An extra thousand CIA personnel supported DO’s work. Field stations in Africa increased by half between 1959 and 1963, reflecting the rise of Tweedy’s Africa Division. Impelled by Cuban projects, personnel in the Western Hemisphere Division grew 40 percent between 1961 and 1965. After that the focus would shift to Southeast Asia.