The CIA's Bomb School

June 5, 2002
Via: GlobalSecurity

After 41 years of explosive training at a secret base in eastern North Carolina, the CIA's paramilitary wing is back on the front lines. For the base's neighbors in nearby Hertford, the echo of bombs is business as usual--and nobody's business.

B Y J O N E L L I S T O N
The Independent Weekly
April 11, 2002

On Jim Pavitts, the Central Intelligence Agency's top covert operations official, stood up before a Duke University Law School conference on national security issues and did something he almost never does: He spoke publicly about his operations.

In the little-noticed speech, Pavitts assured the audience that the CIA is actively engaged in the fight against terrorism. To prove it, he cited the early involvement of the agency's commandos in Operation Enduring Freedom.

"Teams of my paramilitary operations officers, trained not just to observe conditions but if need be to change them, were among the first on the ground in Afghanistan," Pavitts said.

Indeed, the first U.S. casualty, Johnny "Mike" Spann, who was killed in the prison uprising at Mazar-e-Sharif on Nov. 25, was one of those officers. Spann was part of an elite and super-secretive unit, the CIA's Special Activities Division, which serves as the knifepoint of the agency's cloak and dagger contributions to national security.

With personnel drawn from other commando units like the Navy SEALs and the Army Special Forces, the unit is skilled in the dark arts of paramilitary warfare: assassination, advanced demolitions, high-tech surveillance and behind-enemy-lines combat.

...Pavitts offered few details, saying he could share "just a bit" of what the CIA has been up to lately. Among the matters he did not discuss was North Carolina's crucial but behind-the-scenes role in the CIA's paramilitary program.

Officials have maintained strict silence about that role for more than four decades. In fact, no serving CIA officer has ever uttered the words "Harvey Point" in public.

That's because the Harvey Point Defense Testing Activity, a high-security compound tucked into a quiet corner of marshland near Hertford, N.C., and officially owned by the Defense Department, has served as the spy agency's secret demolitions training base since 1961.

It's where CIA operatives like the ones who infiltrated Afghanistan--and the ones who will likely lead the way in the next battles of the war against terrorism, starting with Iraq--learn the rough stuff.

The CIA's covert warriors train as secretly as they spy and fight. So at Harvey Point, the boom! boom! is very hush-hush.

...For anyone who does want to know, getting the facts from the government can prove to be a frustrating endeavor. Because of the shroud of secrecy over Harvey Point, military and intelligence spokespeople have difficulty being candid about it, and they can't quite get the cover story straight.

The Independent started by calling the Navy, which acquired the property during World War II and later announced it was setting up an off-limits testing center there. A spokesman for the Navy's Mid-Atlantic Region Command in Norfolk, Va., which oversees operations in the area, checked with the Defense Department and then referred questions to the CIA. A CIA public affairs officer, in turn, refused to discuss the base and suggested contacting the Defense Department.

Eventually, a Pentagon spokesman, Maj. Mike Halbig, agreed to field questions about Harvey Point. "The Department of Defense took over the facility in 1961," he says. "The primary mission is to test and evaluate conventional explosives, ordnance and ballistic materials."

And what of the stories that it's a major center for CIA special warfare training? "It is a Department of Defense facility that serves the military services and it serves the special needs of other U.S. government departments," is all Halbig will say.

Base personnel cannot speak to reporters, he says, nor can visits be arranged. "The projects and materials that they test there are highly classified, and for that reason we do not allow public access," he says.

...Despite the CIA's best efforts to keep its role at Harvey Point under wraps, there is a mounting body of public information about the base's secret history.

The latest example: In his newly published memoir, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, former CIA officer Bob Baer describes the "two weeks of nonstop demolition training" he received in North Carolina as a young recruit in the early 1970s:

"We spent two days crimping blasting caps to make sure we understood that if you crimped them too high, they'd explode and take your hand off. After we'd mastered that, we crimped them in the dark, by feel. Then we started blowing things up: cars, buses, diesel generators, fences, bunkers. We made a school bus disappear with about 20 pounds of U.S. C-4. For comparison's sake, we tried Czech Semtex and a few other foreign plastic explosives.

"Not that you really needed anything fancy. We blew up one bus using three sacks of fertilizer and fuel oil, a mixture called ANFO (ammonium nitrate fuel oil), that did more damage than the C-4 had. The biggest piece left was a part of the chassis, which flew in an arc, hundreds of yards away. We learned to mix up a potent cocktail called methyl nitrate. If you hit a small drop of it with a hammer, it split the hammer. Honest. We were also taught some of the really esoteric stuff like E-cell times, improvising pressurized airplane bombs using a condom and aluminum foil, and smuggling a pistol on an airplane concealed in a mixture of epoxy and graphite. By the end of the training, we could have taught an advanced terrorism course."

...The agency has never disclosed its reasons for setting up an undercover bomb school at Harvey Point. But the timing and the context, along with scattered press reports, offer indications of the base's original purpose. Fidel Castro, it seems, was the impetus--and the target of the first commandos to train at Harvey Point.

The story begins in 1959, when Castro led a revolutionary government to power in Cuba. At first, White House officials hoped to topple him quickly. In March of 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the CIA to create a force of anti-Castro, Cuban exile fighters, and John F. Kennedy, who succeeded Eisenhower in 1961, authorized the operation to go forward.

In mid-April of that year, the CIA staged its most ambitious and disastrous paramilitary operation: the Bay of Pigs invasion. It took Castro's military and militia just three days to rout the agency's force of 1,300 Cuban exiles. The debacle was viewed as an abject failure by the CIA's paramilitary wing.

Harvey Point had played a supporting role in the disaster, press reports would later reveal. The CIA quietly amassed weapons for the operation at the base, which was secretly on its way to becoming a full-blown training facility.

In June of 1961, two months after the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Navy announced it was officially opening a new facility at the old Seamaster base. A spokesman said that all four branches of the military would conduct "testing and evaluation of various classified materials and equipment" at the site. He added that training "now being done at Camp Perry, Va., will be transferred to Harvey Point."

At the time, Camp Perry, which is located next to Williamsburg, was officially a military base.

But since then, reporters and CIA veterans have written about the camp's true role: It is the agency's training compound for new spy officers.

Code-named ISOLATION, the 12,000-acre Camp Perry is referred to in the intelligence community as "the Farm," and to this day it serves as the CIA's main spy school.

But in 1961, the agency moved its most dangerous and sensitive training--in demolitions and unconventional weaponry--to Harvey Point.

Following the Bay of Pigs, Harvey Point is one place where the CIA hoped to continue efforts to undermine Castro.

JFK wanted the job done right, and he appointed his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to oversee the new operations, which mainly consisted of hit-and-run sabotage raids.

"Bobby wanted boom and bang all over the island," Sam Halpern, a high-ranking officer on the CIA's Cuba desk, told a historian years later.

The "boom and bang" the Kennedy brothers pressed for would be taught at Harvey Point. The base was code-named ISOLATION TROPIC, but most of the operatives who trained there came to call it "the Point."

Over the years, it has carved out a unique space in paramilitary history as a clandestine landmark, of sorts.

Veterans who have passed through it share an intimate knowledge of how covert action plays a central role in U.S. foreign policy.

Over the years, U.S. and foreign commandos who trained at "the Point" have fought in shadowy conflicts around the globe, from Cuba to the Congo, from Nicaragua to Vietnam, and lately, in Afghanistan.

For its first decade or so of operations, the base managed to maintain the covert character the CIA was looking for. But slowly, parts of the real story began to filter out. (See "The Truth About Harvey Point," p. 22.)

A major, but still only partial, disclosure appeared in the April 1967 edition of Ramparts, a once popular and now defunct leftist magazine. The issue carried a testimonial from a CIA officer who had recently resigned after passing through the agency's demolitions course.

The former officer, who kept his name out of print, did not specify the location of his training.

But now it's clear that the place he wrote about, the place where he ultimately soured on the CIA, was Harvey Point:

"The stated purpose of the paramilitary school was to train and equip us to become instructors for village peasants who wanted to defend themselves against guerrillas. I could believe in that.

"Some of the training was conventional: But then we moved to the CIA's demolition training headquarters. It was here that Cubans had been, and still were, being trained in conventional and underwater demolitions. And it was here that we received training in tactics which hardly conform to the Geneva Convention.

"The array of outlawed weaponry with which we were familiarized included bullets that explode on impact, silencer-equipped machine guns, home-made explosives and self-made napalm for stickier and hotter Molotov cocktails. We were taught demolition techniques, practicing on late-model cars, railroad trucks, and gas storage tanks. And we were shown a quick method for saturating a confined area with flour or fertilizer, causing an explosion like in a dustbin or granary.

"And then there was a diabolical invention that might be called a mini-cannon. It was constructed of a concave piece of steel fitted into the top of a #10 can filled with a plastic explosive. When the device was detonated, the tremendous heat of friction of the steel turning inside out made the steel piece a white-hot projectile.

There were a number of uses for the mini-cannon, one of which was demonstrated to us using an old Army school bus. It was fastened to the gasoline tank in such a fashion that the incendiary projectile would rupture the tank and fling flaming gasoline the length of the bus interior, incinerating anyone inside. It was my lot to show the rest of the class how easily it could be done.

I stood there watching the flames consume the bus. It was, I guess, the moment of truth.

What did a busload of burning people have to do with freedom?

What right did I have, in the name of democracy and the CIA, to decide that random victims should die?

The intellectual game was over. I had to leave."

Of course most officers stayed in the spy agency, and the operations that benefited from such training were many and varied.

In 1978, Outside magazine published a detailed account of a madcap mission involving Harvey Point.

According to the magazine, in 1964, the CIA brought a small group of amateur mountain climbers to the base for demolitions training. The climbers later infiltrated an isolated mountain range in India in an attempt to place listening devices for monitoring Chinese nuclear tests. The mission failed, but at Harvey Point, the climbers did learn how to blow a hole in a glacier where the devices were supposed to be placed.

Those who trained at Harvey Point certainly learned how to do some damage, and some continued to use their deadly skills after they quit working for the CIA.

The Cuban exiles were perhaps the most prodigious bomb experts to pass through the facility.

Not only did they set off a sizable wave of terrorism against Cuba, some of them went freelance after their CIA ties were cut, and helped make Miami the car-bomb capital of the world during the 1970s.

In addition, Cuban exile operatives, some of whom had received CIA training, staged two audacious acts of terrorism in 1976:

They bombed a Cuban airliner, killing 73 people, and participated in the assassination of Chilean exile leader Orlando Letelier and his assistant, Ronni Moffitt, who were killed by a car bomb as they drove up Embassy Row in Washington, D.C.

In the 1980s, Harvey Point played a role in some of the CIA's most controversial covert operations.

In 1983, a team of agency operatives mined Nicaraguan harbors--while floating the cover story that Nicaraguan contra guerrillas had placed the mines.

The attack prompted quick rebukes from Congress, which moved to halt funding of such sabotage operations.

According to a 1999 article in Jane's Intelligence Weekly, which detailed the CIA's modern paramilitary capabilities, the team that mined the harbors trained at Harvey Point.

About the same time,

The agency used the base to train three Lebanese operatives for a most-sensitive mission:

They would lead a special, CIA-sponsored squad for rescuing U.S. hostages and combating Islamic extremists. The operation is detailed in two books, Bob Woodward's Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987, and Amir Taheri's Nest of Spies: America's Journey to Disaster in Iran.

In March 1985, the squad staged a disastrous assassination attempt against a prominent holy warrior in Beirut.

They missed their target, but managed to kill an estimated 80 civilians when their car bomb crashed into the wrong building.

As a result, the CIA cut its ties to the group.

Even then, the CIA continued to instruct foreign operatives, along with its own personnel, in North Carolina.

In 1998, The New York Times reported that Harvey Point's most recent guests included members of the security detail for Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority.

Today, Harvey Point may be playing its most important role ever.

The CIA's Special Activities Division--its paramilitary force--did indeed lead the way in Afghanistan, according to a recent report in the Boston Globe.

The article, citing officials in the White House and CIA, revealed that an agency force of 50 paramilitary officers infiltrated Afghanistan on Sept. 27, 2001. Another 100 followed soon thereafter.

Inside Taliban territory, the operatives, working in small teams, spread out and laid the groundwork for the coming combat. They passed cash to Northern Alliance leaders and earned their allegiance. They acquired safe houses and conducted surveillance for the Army's Special Forces, which would be soon arriving by the hundreds to do the bulk of the fighting. Later, the CIA's commandos identified targets for the agency's pilot-less Predator drones, which fired down laser-targeted missiles on al-Qaeda leaders.

Such operations were the opening salvo in the war against terrorism, and a sign that the CIA is in the midst of its biggest expansion of paramilitary operations since the Reagan era, according to press reports and intelligence experts.

In February, the Associated Press reported the basic details of the Bush administration's funding request for the CIA during the next fiscal year. The agency's overall budget will increase from roughly $3.5 billion to almost $5 billion.

A good portion of that spending will be focused on bulking up the CIA's commando force, says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense and intelligence policy research group in Washington, D.C.

"Most of it will have to be going toward counterterrorism, toward the kinds of things they do at Harvey Point more than the kinds of things they do at Camp Perry," where traditional espionage is taught. The CIA, he says, is "hiring a lot of muscle."

The Bush administration's plans to continue a global war against terrorism could portend still more CIA paramilitary operations, Pike says.

The next target is Iraq, and if some Bush advisors get their way, the agency will lead the way in an attempt to overthrow Saddam Hussein. One faction within the administration is reported to be arguing that "the Afghanistan scenario"--carefully crafted covert operations, along with airstrikes and coordinated attacks by opposition groups--could do the job, sparing the United States from a major military commitment.

Another faction argues that Hussein is too entrenched to be toppled as easily as was the Taliban. Pike agrees. "I don't think the CIA can get rid of Saddam Hussein," he says.

"The joke going around is that this is the 'Bay of Goats' plan--it's probably just enough to get a lot of people killed and not enough to remove Hussein."

© 2002, Durham Independent