The Associated Press October 23, 2001
War Details Remain Secret for Years
By Sally Buzbee
WASHINGTON - A decade later, Americans still don't know how far special-operations forces went inside Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. Some parts of the fighting in Kosovo and Vietnam - even Korea - remain sketchy.
Even in conventional wars, there are many secrets. In the war against terrorism, where special-operations forces play a crucial, almost unprecedented role, the public may never learn more than a sliver of what happens inside Afghanistan.
"If they catch someone on the most-wanted terrorist list, they might eventually acknowledge that," said John Pike, a military and intelligence analyst in Washington. "But not quickly. Anybody they'll catch, they're going to want to interrogate first" in secret, to help catch others.
And when American special-ops soldiers die? "They'll tell us that," Pike said. "But they may not say where - or how."
Saturday's raids by perhaps 200 airborne Army Rangers and other special forces into southern Afghanistan were the first publicly acknowledged covert missions of the war - and a bit of an anomaly.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday that no prisoners had been taken. But he said officials would never again provide such detail.
Rumsfeld expressed frustration about having to fend off questions about news reports that special forces had been inserted into Afghanistan - while the operation had not been fully completed.
"When I was asked those questions, the U.S. Rangers were still in Afghanistan, which, of course, I knew," Rumsfeld said.
"I knew that they had not cleared Afghan airspace or returned. As a result, I refused to respond to the questions.
"The fact that some members of the press knew enough about those operations to ask the questions and to print the stories was clearly because someone in the Pentagon had provided them that information. And clearly, it put at risk the individuals involved in the operation."
Rumsfeld said he was "too busy" at the moment to track who leaked the information, but he emphasized they had violated federal criminal law.
"I certainly hope that the people who were parachuting in don't find the person," he said. "They totally disregard the fact that people's lives could be put in jeopardy by giving notice to the al-Qaida and the Taliban that U.S. forces were planning to make an entry into their country."
U.S. officials would not say what the raid's objectives were beyond gathering "useful intelligence" on the movements of Taliban leaders, specifically leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. They wouldn't say what they found beyond a cache of weapons and documents. They said two soldiers were killed in a helicopter crash in neighboring Pakistan but provided almost no details.
Two U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said troops were still conducting secret operations inside Afghanistan, including some operations that will be kept secret even when they are over.
"Some of the invisible operations we will provide information on," said Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "There will be other invisible operations where we will not say a thing."
The reasons for secrecy are clear: to protect soldiers' safety and to protect tactics that might be used elsewhere. Special ops have to be secret, Pentagon officials say, and they are necessary to hunt Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network. Airplanes and bombs "can't crawl around on the ground and find people," Rumsfeld said.
But maintaining the public's support is trickier.
Americans were so outraged by the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon they will give the military much leeway to wage war and will not demand constant accounting, said Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution.
But over time, "if people don't get a sense of movement, that this is the direction things are headed, they are going to get extraordinarily antsy," said Dan Goure, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute.
The military will announce its successes, most think, perhaps omitting details of how they happened. But secrecy also allows officials to hide bad news, at least temporarily. They might wait to announce troop deaths, for example, until they also can announce positive results.
"We will do our best to give you as much information as we can safely provide," Rumsfeld said.
Asked, for example, if helicopters had been used to extract the Rangers from southern Afghanistan, Myers said, "If I were to divulge that, then the next time we conduct an operation somewhere in this world on this globe, people would have an understanding of how we operate."
Goure noted that many military operations, both special ops and conventional, become public only when former soldiers tell war stories - sometimes decades later.
Details of the killing of refugees at No Gun Ri by Army troops in 1950 took a half-century to surface, Goure said. Information about U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey's actions as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam came out more than 30 years later. Stories of special-ops teams hunting Scud-missile sites in the Gulf War have appeared, but there has been no hard information about how far the teams went into Iraq.
It's still unclear where all the Apache helicopters were based during the Kosovo air campaign, Pike said. All of that secrecy will be magnified in Afghanistan - and beyond.
"Here, almost everything we do will be behind the line of secrecy," said Daalder of the Brookings Institution. "That's very different."
Information from Reuters is included in this report.
Wartime secrets
The work of special-operations forces during wartime can remain secret for years. Details of CIA covert operations may not surface for decades, if ever. Even actions of conventional troops sometimes remain hidden. A few examples:
. Kosovo air campaign: Apache attack helicopters were placed in Albania for possible use. But there were unconfirmed reports they also were placed right at the Kosovo border.
. Persian Gulf War: Special-ops teams scouted for Scud-missile sites and tried to pinpoint bombing targets for U.S. aircraft. But it's unclear how many teams were used, where they operated from or how far they traveled into Iraq.
. Afghanistan: The CIA helped train and arm rebels who fought against Soviet occupation in the 1980s, but it's not known how many Americans were there or how much money the United States spent.
. Vietnam: Former U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey said this year that about 13 civilians were killed "by mistake" during a 1969 Navy SEAL mission he led.
. Iran: The CIA's covert role in reinstalling Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran in 1953 was made public two years ago.
. Korea: Details of the killing of refugees at No Gun Ri by Army troops in 1950 took a half-century to surface.
Copyright © 2001 The Seattle Times Company
