"Striking where the enemy is weakest and melting away into the darkness before he can react. Never confronting a stronger force directly, but using audacity and surprise to confound and demoralize an opponent. Operations driven by good intelligence, area knowledge, mobility, speed, firepower, and detailed planning, and executed by a few specialists with indigenous warriors—this is unconventional warfare.
T. E. Lawrence was one of the earliest practitioners of modern unconventional warfare. His tactics and strategies were used by men like Mao and Giap in their wars of liberation. Both kept Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom close at hand. This book examines the creation of the 'Hedgehog' force, looks at the formation of armored car sections and other units, and focuses on the Hejaz Operations Staff, the Allied officers and men who took Lawrence's idea and prosecuted it against the Ottoman Turkish army, assisting Field Marshal Allenby to achieve victory in 1918.
Stejskal concludes with an examination of how Hedgehog influenced special operations and unconventional warfare, including Field Marshal Wavell, the Long Range Desert Group, and David Stirling's SAS."
"On November 4, 1979, 'student' supporters of the Ayatollah seized the U.S. Embassy with over sixty hostages. Although the Cold War was in full swing, the Iran hostage crisis was a watershed for the United States.
Detachment A had been established in Berlin early in the Cold War to harass and delay any Soviet military advance west. This Special unit trained relentlessly for every aspect of unconventional warfare, and was later assigned a second mission of counterterrorism.
The plan for Operation Eagle Claw, as it became known, was extremely complex. The first stage was intelligence gathering—no mean feat as most of the CIA's capabilities in the country had been eliminated. With operatives trained in intelligence work, fluent in many languages, and adept at blending in, Det A took on the advanced recon of the targets. Then, when Delta Force admitted that it could only manage the assault of the Embassy, Det A volunteered to rescue the three Americans at the Foreign Ministry.
Veteran and historian James Stejskal details Det A's unique and integral role in Operation Eagle Claw, based upon firsthand accounts of the operatives involved."
"When Neil Fitzpatrick, a rogue Green Beret soldier, is recruited by the Irish Republican Army to help prepare a terrorist attack, Paul Stavros, his former teammate, is sent to stop him and bring him home. Fitzpatrick, the American son of an Irish rebel who was forced to flee his birthplace, is a Special Forces demolitions expert. Fitzpatrick knows his trade and has a personal agenda with the IRA.
Alarm bells erupt when the US government learns that Fitzpatrick has gone over to the IRA. The American public can't find out that one of its elite soldiers is involved in terrorism and the US government won't rely on the British to find him. They need someone who knows Fitzpatrick and how he operates. Who better than one of his former teammates?
Paul Stavros is also a Special Forces veteran. He knows little of the Irish Troubles but is about to learn. What he does know is how to fix problems and Neil has just become his biggest headache.
Once, Fitzpatrick and Stavros were comrades and friends. Now they are pawns on opposite sides of an ugly war. The British want to kill one, the IRA wants to kill the other. It's a race to see who will be first."
"When radical Iranian students seize the U.S. Embassy compound in Tehran and take over fifty diplomats hostage, the U.S. President has to negotiate with a government that wants only to humiliate the United States. When talks fail, the President must turn to the military to bring the Americans home by force. As preparations are made for an audacious rescue, an American intelligence officer hides alone in a Tehran safehouse with a secret. He is protecting a powerful weapon known as the Perses Device, which is now at risk of being captured and employed against the United States. The Agency Director orders that it must be brought out at all costs. But as a small American team clandestinely enters Tehran to lead the way for the rescue force, a traitor spills the secret and KGB Spetsnaz operatives begin their own search for the weapon. At the last minute, one more American is added to the advance team—his sole mission is to get the Agency officer and the Perses device to safety. When the rescue mission fails, only two Americans are left to run the gauntlet of enemy agents and get the weapon out. Getting in was easy . . ."
"Berlin, 1979.
When the CIA's most valuable spy is compromised, the Agency realizes it does not have the capability to bring him to safety. If he cannot evade the dreaded East German security service, the result will be chaos and a cascade of failures throughout the Agency's worldwide operations.
Master Sergeant Kim Becker lived through the hell of Vietnam as a member of the elite Studies and Operations Group. When he lost one of his best men in a pointless operation, he began to question his mission. Now, he is serving with an even more secretive Army Special Forces unit based in Berlin on the front line of the Cold War.
The CIA turns to Becker's team of unconventional warfare specialists to pull their bacon out of the fire. Becker and his men must devise a plan to get him out by whatever means possible. It's a race against time to prepare and execute the plan while, alone in East Berlin, the agent must avoid his nemesis and play for time inside the hostile secret service headquarters he has betrayed.
One question remains—is the man worth the risk?"
"The massive armies of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies posed a huge threat to the nations of Western Europe. U.S. military planners decided they needed a plan to slow the juggernaut they expected when and if a war began. The plan was Special Forces Berlin.
Their mission should hostilities commence was to wreak havoc behind enemy lines, and buy time for vastly outnumbered NATO forces to conduct a breakout from the city. In reality it was an ambitious and extremely dangerous mission, even suicidal. Highly trained and fluent in German, each man was allocated a specific area. They were skilled in clandestine operations, sabotage, and intelligence tradecraft, and able to act as independent operators, blending into the local population and working unseen in a city awash with spies looking for information on their every move.
Special Forces Berlin was a one of a kind unit that had no parallel. It left a legacy of a new type of soldier expert in unconventional warfare, one that was sought after for missions such as the attempted rescue of American hostages from Tehran in 1979. With the U.S. government officially acknowledging their existence in 2014, their incredible story can now be told."
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