“The lure of clandestine warfare lingered on after 1945, but these peacetime operations often proved disastrous.”

By Charles Glass

BEFORE PRESIDENT Barack Obama authorized clandestine operations to defeat the Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad in 2013, he asked the CIA to write the history of its secret wars since 1945. The classified document, according to those who have read it, is a record of failure from Albania and Cuba to Angola and Nicaragua. Despite the findings, Obama went ahead with the covert program for Syria anyway, which the CIA ran from Turkey and Jordan. Like its predecessors, Operation Timber Sycamore failed. It neither toppled Assad nor prevented Salafi jihadi fanatics from dominating the Syrian opposition. President Trump cancelled the program in July of last year, but he too is not immune to the siren call secret wars – in his case, a campaign against Iran, one that’s about as likely to succeed as the U.S. operation in Syria.

But why is there such interest in arming foreign insurgents and proxy armies to fight wars that the U.S. won’t fight itself?

“We’re busily training local troops to fight local militants. Why do we think we have this aptitude for creating armies?” Andrew Bacevich, a retired army colonel and author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, once told me. “I don’t know. It sure as hell didn’t work in Vietnam.”

Some reasons stand out. One is that, as Bacevich explained, insurgencies are wars “on the cheap.” Not only are they less costly in dollars, but since American soldiers’ lives are not in danger, the political risks are low. They also represent a compromise between an outright invasion and doing nothing. And most American presidents, faced with an opportunity to undermine rival states, want to do something.

Ironically, one of the first modern examples of a world power arming local militants occurred in Syria, where Britain conducted a successful insurgency against Ottoman Turkey from 1916 to 1918. The famed leader of the Arab rebels was T.E. Lawrence, whose landmark Seven Pillars of Wisdom remains required reading for any operative embarking on a campaign of clandestine warfare. In fact, Lawrence became the inspiration for Britain’s first secret warfare organization, Special Operations Executive (SOE).

SOE came into being in the summer of 1940 at a time when Britain lacked the resources to fight Germany on equal terms. Following  Hitler’s conquest of Belgium, Holland and France, Winston Churchill created the office of “ungentlemanly warfare” to “coordinate all action by way of subversion and sabotage against the enemy overseas.” Through SOE, the British would train, arm and finance local insurgents to harass the Germans, as well as their Italian and Japanese allies, in all countries under Axis occupation. The organization’s first director of operations, Lieutenant Colonel Colin Gubbins, who became overall chief in 1943, wrote the Art of Guerrilla Warfare and the Partisan Leader’s Handbook, based on what he called “Lawrence’s epic campaign.” What he instigated was, by SOE’s admission, “terrorism” on the Axis.

SOE mobilized mountain tribes in Burma, communist and royalist rebels in Yugoslavia, and disparate anti-Nazi factions in France. It also encouraged the U.S. to establish its own covert operations unit, which became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Gubbins assigned a major named Bill Brooker to train U.S. personnel at a top-secret Canadian facility in the Toronto suburbs known as Camp X. Not all Americans were initially enthusiastic about the concept. “What type of training was required to make an American un-American enough to stick the enemy in the back?” wondered one U.S. official. Yet the school, which opened three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, eventually instructed more than 500 inexperienced Americans in the dark arts of sabotage, assassination, irregular warfare and the recruitment and training of partisans.

The entry of the Soviet Union and the U.S. into the war against Germany altered the balance in Britain’s favor and changed SOE’s covert mission in Europe from harassment to support for the future Allied invasion of the Continent. When Britain and the U.S. invaded Italy and then France, SOE-backed guerrilla units unleashed chaos behind the lines forcing the Germans to divert troops away from countering the advancing Allied armies. The resistance was not decisive, but it saved Allied lives and shortened the war.

SOE and OSS claimed numerous other achievements in their time. Both benefited from effective leadership by men and women who knew the countries in which they worked. Allied operatives spoke the local languages, lived among their fighters and observed strict security. One of the best in the service was George Starr. A mining executive who happened to be working in Belgium at the time of the German invasion in 1940, Starr escaped Europe during the Dunkirk evacuation. He later joined the SOE and set up operations in southwest France where he slowly grew the Wheelwright Sector, a secret resistance network run inside of Nazi-occupied territory. In 1944, his forces helped to impede Germany’s Second SS Panzer Division from reaching the Normandy landing beaches for 17 crucial days. By the time the battered division finally arrived, the beachheads had been secured and Allied troops were pushing inland.

SOE didn’t enjoy unlimited success, however. Its critics, which included George’s brother and fellow operative John Starr, documented several blunders. The most famous occurred when agents succumbed to false German radio signals, supposedly from other SOE operators, that lured scores of British operatives to their deaths.

With the war over, it seemed that the role for special operations would come to an end, but the lure of clandestine warfare lingered on after 1945. These peacetime operations often proved disastrous.

The British absorbed former SOE agents into its traditional spy agency, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI-6. OSS veterans formed the backbone of the CIA that President Harry Truman established in 1947. Both organizations existed to collect intelligence, but they nonetheless conducted operations that included assassination and clandestine war. Historian of espionage Phillip Knightley wrote that mixing the two “made it inevitable that intelligence also involved covert action, and covert action now meant American intervention in countries with which the United States was not at war.”

The interventions never stopped. British and American agents infiltrated guerrilla bands into the Soviet Union and its satellites, in Truman’s words, to roll back communism. They sometimes employed former Nazis, notably in the Ukraine where agents armed fascist nationalists against the Russians in a disastrous campaign that left most of its participants dead, wounded or captured. The joint Anglo-American Operation Valuable infiltrated rebels into Albania to overthrow dictator Enver Hoxha, a former SOE ally during World War Two. Most of the insurgents were immediately killed or taken prisoner. Frank Wisner, the CIA point man in Albania, told Kim Philby, the SIS operative secretly working for the Soviets, “we’ll get it right next time.” They didn’t.

Attempts to use insurgents in the three Soviet-occupied Baltic nations led not only to failure but to 75,000 civilian casualties. The infiltration of thousands of guerrillas into North Korea likely helped influence Pyongyang’s decision to invade the south in June 1950. CIA support of rebellious colonels in Indonesia five years later did not prevent their total defeat by the Indonesian army. The 1961 Bay of Pigs disaster in Cuba is well known, as is the clandestine Contra war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. CIA director and OSS veteran William Casey ran the illegal war over the objections of Congress using Saudi money and funds from the illegal sale of arms to Iran. The CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan led to a mujahideen victory over the Soviets, but it produced the chaos and civil war that led to the rise of the Taliban, the hosting of Osama bin Laden, the Sept. 11 attacks and the longest war in American history.

In 2011, an uprising erupted in Syria. The U.S., which was witnessing the tragic consequences of its intervention in Libya, was reluctant to use its military again. The halfway house between quick victory by Assad, backed by allies Russia and Iran, and American invasion was a covert operation. This was supposed to be different from the failed missions catalogued in the CIA study Obama commissioned. It wasn’t. The CIA’s bid to emulate T.E. Lawrence on the master’s old terrain failed. Why?

Lawrence had advantages that the CIA lacked. First, the British army under General Edmund Allenby invaded Palestine and Syria from Egypt. Lawrence’s ill-equipped tribesmen, who on their own could not have defeated the Ottomans, served as Allenby’s right flank as his forces advanced north. The CIA had no invading American army to support in Syria, denying friendly rebel fighters a clear objective. Second, Lawrence fought alongside his men, while most CIA operatives remained at base in Turkey and Jordan. Finally, Lawrence’s strategy was not to hold territory that his irregulars could not defend. Syria’s rebels did that again and again.

Lawrence explained in a 1929 article looking back on his wartime campaign that a guerrilla force had to be “an influence, a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like gas… never giving the enemy a target.” He felt that “battles were a mistake,” a lesson the CIA neglected to teach the Syrian rebels. The next edition of the CIA’s covert ops history will have to include the $1 billion disaster in Syria.

Does that mean an end to secret wars? Rudy Giuliani’s recent calls for regime change in Iran, combined with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s announcement of an Iran Action Group, indicate that lessons remain unlearned. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is funding the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MeK), a Shiite mirror image of Al Qaeda, that seeks to overthrow the Iranian regime. The MeK was an ally of Saddam in the Iran-Iraq War, massacred Kurds in 1991 and was until recently on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. If Syria was a disaster, Iran could be a catastrophe.

A century before Britain sent Lawrence into Syria, the Duke of Wellington’s army supported Spanish partisans against Napoleon’s occupation of their country. The Spaniards won in 1814, returning King Ferdinand VII to his throne in Madrid. One of the monarch’s first acts was to restore the Inquisition. As the Syria war heads towards a conclusion in Idlib, the U.S. can take solace that its jihadis did not conquer Syria and turn it into a base of the global holy war.

Charles Glass is the author of They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France. He was the chief Middle East correspondent for ABC News from 1983 to 1993 and has covered wars in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. His writings appear in Harper’s Magazine, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, The Independent, and the Spectator. He is the author of several books including Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation, and The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II.