CP Note: October 25th, 2011, CommandPosts ran the piece "Intelligence Support Activity: Frustration from Beirut to Grenada," excerpted from Michael Smith's book Killer Elite: The Inside Story of America's Most Secret Special Operations Team.

Noel Koch, who was mentioned in the excerpt, served for eleven months as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Wounded Warrior Care and Transition Policy in the Obama Administration. He also served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Africa Region, and Director of Special Planning with responsibility for anti-terrorism and counter-terrorism as well as the restoration of Special Operations Forces during the Reagan Administration. The Special Planning Director was the precursor of SO/LIC."

Thank you to Noel for weighing in on the excerpt and providing an extended first-person view of 1983 Beirut, Grenada and the development of ISA within the following post.

Let me flesh out a couple of points that are not entirely clear from this excerpt, beginning with ISA in Beirut. The bombing of the Embassy on 18 April 1983 was the first evidence that we were going to pay a price for our ill-conceived involvement in Lebanon -- itself a response to Ariel Sharon's duplicitous actions there. [More...]

Michael Ledeen, then a Pentagon consultant, said the failure to share intelligence "drove a change in the structure of the intelligence community, because what they found was that we should have seen it coming, we had enough information so that we should have seen it coming. We didn't because of the compartmentalization of the various pieces of the intelligence community. So the people who listen to things weren't talking to the people who looked at things who weren't talking to people who analyzed things and so on."

But that didn't mean that the people who had got it so wrong in Beirut were suddenly going to listen to the Activity.

Even within the special operations community, there were senior officers with little regard for Jerry King's unit, and that attitude was once again going to get US servicemen killed. Ever since coming to office, the Reagan administration had railed against the left-wing government of the small Caribbean island of Grenada, complaining that the prime minister Maurice Bishop was too closely aligned to the Soviet Union and Cuba.

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Grenada was supposed to be a simple operation.

U.S. intelligence analysts had predicted little or no resistance from the Cubans working on the island and only token opposition from the PRA, the People's Revolutionary Army.

Plainly, the intelligence was wrong.

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