Special Forces

WASHINGTON -- Well before allied ground units swept into Iraq, U.S. commando teams were waging a clandestine war deep inside Iraqi territory, Pentagon officials say.["It was turning into a special-operations theme park," one source told the Associated Press.]In operations that still remain partly cloaked in secrecy, special-operations forces tracked Iraqi armored units from behind enemy lines and hunted for Scud missile launchers.Infiltrated into Iraq at night by aircraft, the Special Forces teams gathered intelligence about the movement of Iraqi forces north and south of the Euphrates River.

A Maryland subsidiary of the Texas defense contractor Tracor Inc. said yesterday that it has won a $38 million contract to provide communications systems for the Navy.Tracor Applied Sciences Inc. of California, Md., will design, develop, test and install exterior communications systems for various vessels for the next five years. The work was awarded by the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division at Patuxent River.The contract covers a wide range of activities, according to Bob Wieland, general manager of the Electronic Systems Division of Tracor Applied Sciences, which employs about 850 in St. Mary's County.

An excerpt of a Monday New York Times editorial: FOR DECADES, Congress has tried to ensure that U.S. military aid and training does not go to foreign soldiers who use it to kill and torture their own people. But a 1991 law allowed training by special forces units free of many congressional restrictions.As a result, such trainers have been in more than 100 countries and have worked with some of the world's most abusive and brutal militaries. In some cases, their training works at cross purposes with U.S. foreign policy.

Somewhere back in the American psyche, there's Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler standing on the stage of the Ed Sullivan Show mouthing the words to his No. 1 hit, "Ballad of the Green Berets."That was 1966, and Sadler's dirge would stand as one of the last jingoistic gasps connected with Vietnam and with the U.S. Army's Special Forces.A decade later, their image riddled by the war, the Green Berets fell on hard times as the Army emphasized a more conventional approach to soldiering. On the nation's movie screen the stereotypical Green Beret became a killing machine.

Col. Francis J. Kelly, 78, who devised Army plans for unconventional warfare in the early 1960s, then commanded the Special Forces in Vietnam when the Green Berets were earning a formidable reputation for battlefield heroics, died Dec. 26 at Garden Terrace Nursing Home in Aurora, Colo.As commander of all Special Forces in Vietnam from June 1966 to June 1967, Colonel Kelly led an elite corps of a few thousand men who teamed up with South Vietnamese soldiers and ethnic-minority civilian irregulars such as Montagnard tribesmen to wage counterinsurgency warfare against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in some of the most remote areas of South Vietnam.

A & L Shatto Inc., a five-year-old Bel Air engineering firm, has been awarded a $40 million, five-year contract by the Department of Defense.Allen W. Shatto, the firm's president, said his company will be responsible for systems engineering and technical assistance to the U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla. He said the company won the contract after a six-month competition among 27 bidders."

NEW YORK -- Federal prosecutors have filed secret charges against a former sergeant in the U.S. Special Forces who is suspected of switching sides in the war against terrorism and joining the global campaign to attack Americans mounted by the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden.The charges are part of federal authorities' efforts to prove that bin Laden was behind the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in August and a series of other attacks against U.S. soldiers in Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

BAGHDAD - Predawn raids by elite Iraqi forces yesterday resulted in the fatal shooting of a government employee and the arrest of two prominent Sunni Arabs, according to witnesses and officials. The troops were from the central government's counter-terrorism units, said Gov. Raad Rashid al-Tamimi of Diyala province, where the raid took place. They had stormed the governorate building in the city of Baqouba and arrested Sunni provincial council member Hussein al-Zubaidi, who belongs to the Iraqi Islamic Party.

KABUL, Afghanistan - U.S. soldiers and Special Forces will move into the presidential palace and take over responsibility for the security of President Hamid Karzai, illustrating concern for his safety after the assassination of a vice president this month, a presidential spokesman said yesterday. In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the newest mission for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan might last several months and is designed to ensure that Afghans keep Karzai, who was recently appointed by a grand council of representatives from all over the country.

Previously undisclosed conversations and letters by Timothy J. McVeigh to his younger sister before the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City portray him as so deeply frustrated and angry that when the bomb exploded on April 19, 1995, his family suspected him almost immediately.His sister, Jennifer McVeigh, told FBI investigators she had an "eerie feeling" he was involved. His father, William McVeigh, said he had worried that his son would do something to get himself in serious trouble and added that his ex-wife, McVeigh's mother, ,, thought her son "did the bombing."