Behind the mystery unit that blasted into Maduro’s military complex

Photos: Defense Visual Information Distribution Service

When a problem is too messy for a diplomat and too delicate for a tank, the president picks up a very specific phone. That’s what happened last Friday night, when a mysterious unit blasted into Nicolas Maduro’s military complex in Caracas. Pull back the curtain on Delta Force, the brainchild of a maverick army colonel and one of the most lethal assets in the US arsenal

You’ve probably seen one. He was completely unremarkable; you didn’t look at him twice. He could have been the guy browsing electrical supply behind you at Home Depot, wearing a faded baseball cap and a pair of sturdy work boots. But he may have spent last Tuesday night fast-roping onto a moving train or breaching a compound in a place not shown on any maps.

He’s part of an elite group widely known as 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta (1st SFOD–D), or more commonly, Delta Force. They are the ghosts of American foreign policy, silent operators who take up more space in fiction than reality, members of a unit so secretive that entire books have dissected information as basic as its real name.

There’s a direct line from Washington to its North Carolina office. When a problem is too messy for a diplomat and too delicate for a tank, the president picks up a very specific phone. This is what happened at 10:46 p.m. on Friday night, when President Trump signed off on Operation Absolute Resolve.

Here’s a look behind the heavy curtains shrouding the mysterious unit that blasted into Nicolas Maduro’s Fuerte Tiuna military complex in Caracas, an exploration of how the concept for the force sprang from the brain of a maverick army colonel, and how it became one of the most lethal assets in the US arsenal.

A New Breed

The Delta Force story doesn’t begin in a Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting or a secret Pentagon basement, but in the mud and rain of an English countryside. In the early 1960s, a US Army Green Beret named Charlie Beckwith served as an exchange officer with the British Special Air Service, or the 22 SAS, during an operation known as the Malayan Emergency. He was captivated by what he saw.

The SAS didn’t care about the bluster, fluff, and pageantry that made up so much of military life around the world. Here was an elite anti-terrorism unit: small, agile, independent, and incredibly smart, measuring lethality by results, not shiny boots.

Beckwith returned to the United States with a new mission of his own — to build an American version of the SAS. He told his superiors that the US Army needed a team dedicated to counterterrorism and specialized missions too sensitive for the regular infantry or even classic special forces.

But Army brass was little impressed, and less amused. They saw Beckwith as a troublemaker — and his dream of special operators as a private army of “cowboys.” For years, the resolute Beckwith slammed into bulkhead after bulkhead of institutionalized resistance, government inertia, and military bureaucracy. The Army already had the Green Berets, and there was no room for a new group of mavericks.

In the end, the world made Beckwith’s argument for him. Terrorism became a household word in the 1970s. With the internationally televised murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and seven high-profile aircraft hijackings, the United States realized it needed a team of experts who could extract hostages from foreign soil.

Finally, in 1977, Beckwith authored a proposal that Army wags called the “Robert Redford Paper,” in a dig at Beckwith’s youthful appearance. The document was no joke. It laid out the vision for a fighting force so secret that it wouldn’t even have a formal name in public records — but it could move like lightning.

Until today, Delta operators are stricken from Army records when they transfer to the unit. Those killed in the line of duty are not identified as Army casualties but casually mentioned in a sleepy press release as victims of “training accidents.”

The Pentagon was finally convinced, and Delta Force became operational in 1977.

The post Fateful Lightning first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

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