Perhaps the most alarming aspect of Master Sgt. Matthew Livelsberger’s suicide on New Year’s day, where he reportedly shot himself in the front seat of a Tesla Cybertruck parked outside of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas shortly before detonating low-grade explosives in the back seat, was that he was an active-duty member of the U.S. Army’s 10th Special Forces Group — essentially the European arm of the Green Berets.
As forensically documented in Col. Alfred H. Paddock’s 1982 book, “U.S. Army Special Warfare, Its Origins,” the 10th Group was formally established in 1952, two years into the Korean War, as the U.S. Army’s first post-WWII unit for conducting behind-the-lines, guerilla warfare. Its numbering would be one of many similar instances of military deception (or, MILDEC) meant to confuse the Soviet Union into assuming that at least nine other similar groups already existed. Its numbering outlived the Soviet Union and, according to reporting from April of last year, 10th Group was training “hundreds” of Ukrainian special forces members each month.
As the 10th Group established its initial focus as a seed for guerilla warfare in Europe in the event of a Soviet invasion, through German deployments in Bad Tölz and Berlin, a portion was split off in 1953 as a new 77th Special Forces Group (later renumbered to the 7th) to remain headquartered at Fort Bragg (now Fort Liberty) in North Carolina for potential deployment in other theaters. Just as 10th Group became the center of gravity for U.S. guerilla warfare in Europe, the 7th ultimately became focused on operations in Latin America, with a particular focus on counter-narcotics in collaboration with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
The 77th Group itself split off a new Pacific-focused group in 1957, known as the 1st Special Forces Group, with the training of South Korean special forces becoming a major focus. Just as 10th Group is currently leading the U.S. training of Ukrainian special forces, 1st Group is reportedly currently playing the analogous support role in Taiwan.
Two more active-duty special forces groups would be created over roughly a six year period after the creation of 1st Group: the 5th Special Forces Group in 1960, which is now largely associated with the Middle East through U.S. Central Command, and the 3rd Special Forces Group in 1963, which is now primarily affiliated with U.S. Africa Command. (Though, it should be noted, Central Command and Africa Command were only respectively established in 1983 and 2007.)
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Through his recently published book on five “lost chapters” of U.S. Special Forces, “We Defy,” 5th Group member-turned-journalist Jack Murphy highlights several aspects of the primarily Cold War-era history of Green Berets that he feels have been underserved. Drawing upon numerous interviews with former participants in the relevant groups, as well quoting from myriad first-hand books, Murphy provides a helpful grounding for readers coming into the subject fresh.
The first chapter of “We Defy” focuses on 10th Group’s highly secretive, Berlin-based 39th Special Forces Operational Detachment (“Det A”), whose ranks were filled with Eastern Europeans recruited through the Lodge Act, including a circa 1971 leader of Det A’s third team named Herman Adler, whose former report Warner “Rockey” Farr referred to him as both “a great guy” and a former Nazi SS officer who was nicknamed “Schwarzer Adler: the black eagle” and “fought his way out of Russia through the snow.”
The same chapter also provides a background on the close relationship between Det A and the German federal police’s own elite counter-terrorism force, the GSG-9, which more broadly served as an inspiration for U.S. counter-terrorism capabilities after its successful 1977 raid of a hijacked Lufthansa aircraft which had been diverted to Mogadishu from Palma de Mallorca, a particularly popular vacation city in Spain for Germans. Murphy also recounts Det A’s role in perhaps the most historically influential U.S. counterterrorism operation, the failed 1980 attempt to rescue U.S. hostages captured from U.S. Embassy Tehran towards the end of President Carter’s administration. Generally known as Operation Eagle Claw, Murphy points readers to the first-hand account from former U.S. military intelligence officer Rod Lenahan, whose 1998 book “Crippled Eagle” tells the story of the program’s original deceptive name, Operation Ricebowl, and how the catastrophic failure of the attempted rescue helped spur the creation of both Joint Special Operations Command and U.S. Central Command.
The second chapter of “We Defy” tells the story of the 1st Special Forces Group’s detachment in South Korea, “Det K,” serving as the Pacific theater’s rough analogue of Europe’s “Det A.” Drawing from a seemingly limited-publication insider history of the detachment, “DET-K: The First Fifty Years,” Murphy reports that the commander of the detachment during the December 12, 1979 coup attempt involving the U.S.-trained South Korean 1st Special Forces Brigade, Chuck Randall, was temporarily elevated above even the U.S. Ambassador as the sole interface between the temporary junta and the U.S. Government.
Six days after the publication of Murphy’s book, South Korean prosecutors sought an arrest warrant for the head of their Army Special Warfare Command, Lt. Gen. Kwak Jong-keun, for sending special operations troops to the National Assembly as part of President Yoon Suk Yeol’s temporary declaration of martial law on December 3, 2024. (For a particularly informative overview of the recent martial law declaration from retire South Korean Lt. General Chun, one can listen to the interview posted on December 12 by “Eyes On,” the current events-focused spin-off podcast of Murphy’s oral history series, “The Team House.”)
Chapters three and four respectively detail the history of Blue Light, a stop-gap counterterrorism force temporarily stood up by 5th Group circa early 1978 while Delta Force was bootstrapping itself, and the broader direct action spiritual successors to Blue Light, the Commander’s In Extremis Forces (CIF) formed within each geographic combat command to respond to potential terrorist threats in the event of Delta Force deploying too slowly. As a result of such an event never occurring, the CIFs were stripped of their affiliation with Delta Force and the broader Joint Special Operations Command, officially ended, and reborn with a reduced mission now operating under the name of Critical Threats Advisory Companies.
Perhaps the highwater mark of “We Defy” is the closing chapter, on the modification of the munition from the Davy Crockett nuclear rifle into a roughly fifty-pound device resembling a quarter-sized beer keg, named a Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM). In a particularly striking story, members of 7th Group recounted being tricked into believing they were airdropping into Cuba to detonate the mini-nuclear device in an attack on a dam. Only at the last moment were they alerted that it was an exercise, and that they were actually in New Mexico.
The author was kind enough to answer my questions for about an hour-and-a-half earlier today, and so I hope that you will consider both giving the interview a listen and buying a copy of his book.
Correction, January 8, 2025: Towards the end of the interview as an offhand response to a comment on whether or not the CIA uses journalistic cover, I stated that Gary Schroen had publicly disclosed his usage of journalistic cover to visit Afghanistan while serving as the CIA’s Pakistan station chief. The extensive public admission of CIA usage of journalistic cover in Afghanistan that I was vaguely recalling was in fact former Team House guest and former 5th Group member and Delta Force operator Gary Harrington, who retired as a CIA operations officer in 2015. Harrington was the central character in episode 7 of the 2023 Netflix documentary series “Spy Ops,” in which he extensively recounted posing as a Taliban-friendly Canadian journalist while working as a CIA case officer as part of gaining access to two would-be Afghan suicide bombers. The relevant transcript segment from Harrington, starting roughly 33 minutes into the episode, follows: “I was trying to figure out, how can I meet these [two] suicide bombers. I came up with a story for Fahim to tell them that he knew a Canadian journalist friendly to the Taliban cause, and that that journalist could interview them, but after they’d martyred themselves, he would write stories and tell the world about them and their sacrifice and make them famous. So, eventually, these two guys agreed that they would, you know, talk to this Canadian journalist. And, of course, the journalist was me.”
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