Green Beret writes about secret Cold War mission

The 1968 World War II film "Where Eagles Dare" thrilled some viewers — and scared the bejesus out of others — with its tale of commandos storming a snow-covered mountain fortress and a scene of Richard Burton wrestling with Nazi thugs on the roof of a swaying cable car.

But for an Omaha teen named James Stejskal, seeing the movie inspired his life's work as an Army Green Beret.

"I was always interested in that kind of life," said Stejskal, 63, now retired from careers as a soldier and CIA agent and living in Alexandria, Virginia. "A small unit fighting against the bigger enemy (using) a combination of military and intelligence operations, not just brute force."

This spring, Stejskal published a book called "Special Forces Berlin: Clandestine Cold War Operations of the U.S. Army's Elite, 1956-90," about the secret unit with which he spent nine of his 23 years in the Army. Its work was so sensitive that the Pentagon didn't acknowledge its existence until 2014.

"That's when we finally came in from the cold," said Tom Merrill, 63, of Martinsburg, West Virginia, who served with Stejskal in Berlin and remains a friend.

Stejskal enlisted in the Army in 1973, a year after graduating from Central High School. Soon he became a Green Beret, serving on small special ops teams. He was a weapons sergeant and a medic, known to his buddies as "Styk."

"He was the consummate operator — natively smart, well-educated, thought well on his feet," said Merrill, who lived in Council Bluffs as a boy.

The Berlin unit, created in 1956, was blandly named Detachment "A." It disbanded in 1990, after the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended.

The soldiers of Detachment "A" didn't look much like soldiers. They dressed in modish clothes, wore beards and long hair, made local friends, lived in off-base apartments. All spoke German, many of them fluently.

"Working in civilian clothes, blending in with the locals, doing cool stuff in West Berlin and the middle of (Communist) East Germany," recalled Stejskal, who served in the unit from 1977 to 1981, and from 1984 to 1989. "It was a very ambiguous kind of duty."

They were expert at soldierly skills like marksmanship, wilderness navigation, rappelling from helicopters, urban combat. But they also learned the tradecraft of spies, including surveillance and secret messaging.

In the event of a Soviet-led invasion of Western Europe, the detachment's job was to melt into the population of Berlin and engage in acts of sabotage behind enemy lines. In his book, Stejskal describes it as a "Hail Mary plan to slow the (Soviet) juggernaut they expected when and if a war began."

Each of the detachment's six teams was to be responsible for sabotaging bridges and railroads, harassing the enemy in designated slices of East Berlin and East Germany.

The work evolved as new threats emerged in Europe, and encompassed training in guerrilla warfare, direct-action precision strikes, and counterterrorism.

As radical groups spread terror across Europe with kidnappings, mass shootings and hijackings in the 1970s, Detachment "A" practiced rescuing hostages from trains and airplanes. Pan Am let them drill using airliners stored in its hangars at Berlin's Tegel airport.

The detachment's highest-profile mission had little to do with the Cold War and didn't even take place in Europe. In 1980, the detachment was tapped to help rescue 52 U.S. diplomats held hostage in Tehran by radical Iranian students.

Soon after the embassy was captured Nov. 4, 1979, the U.S. military began developing a plan to seize the hostages. Most were held in the main embassy compound, but the job of Detachment "A" was to snatch three who were being held separately at the Iranian Foreign Ministry.

The first rescue attempt, Operation Eagle Claw, ended in disaster when a plane and a helicopter collided in the dark in the Iranian desert.

The military quietly began planning a second rescue attempt, again including members of Detachment "A." Stejskal and Merrill, who hadn't been part of Eagle Claw, were involved in the second, Operation Storm Cloud. It involved using Air Force transport planes to fly partly disassembled helicopters into an airfield commandeered in the desert. The helicopters would be quickly reassembled and used to assault the Foreign Ministry.

The team traveled to Florida to conduct live-fire drills and spent weeks rehearsing with helicopter crews. They honed their weapons skills with extra-long hours on the shooting range.

"We were blowing (our weapons) up, we were firing them so much," Stejskal said.

They ran a dress rehearsal in late November 1980, but soon the word came down: The mission had been scrubbed.

"It was deflating, extremely," Stejskal said. "It's like preparing for a big game and then being told you can't play."

The hostages were released Jan. 20, 1981, the same day President Ronald Reagan was inaugurated.

Stejskal soon rotated out but returned to the unit in 1984. The 1980s are remembered now as the death throes of the Soviet empire. But at the time, it wasn't clear whether popular movements like Poland's Solidarity might provoke a Soviet crackdown.

"No one was really sure how it would all play out," he said.

Stejskal left Berlin in the spring of 1989, but he flew back in November when he heard that the Wall had fallen. He wanted to see the end of the Cold War icon that had shaped his life.

"In one way, it was a relief: The mission as I knew it in Berlin was over, or soon would be," Stejskal said. "On the other hand, there was a bit of nostalgia for the way things were."

Not that his life on the razor's edge ended when the Wall fell. In December 1992, Stejskal was badly wounded when his car drove over a land mine in Somalia.

Stejskal suffered a serious head injury and a shattered leg.

"I basically had 3½ inches of bone that was turned to confetti," he said.

Stejskal returned to duty a year later. But he knew he would never regain his former strength. So he retired in 1996.

That was the same year he married Wanda Nesbitt, a State Department foreign service officer he had met five years earlier during an evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Kinshasa, in the country then known as Zaire.

At his first overseas posting with Nesbitt, Stejskal said, someone handed him a sticky note with a telephone number on it and said to call if he wanted a job. That led to a 13-year stint with the CIA.

In recent years, Stejskal has attended Detachment "A" reunions, where the stories flow along with the beer.

"Somebody said, 'We need to get this down on paper. We've got a history. Who's going to write it down?'" he said.

Stejskal volunteered. Merrill said the book, published in March by Casemate Publishers, has taught him a lot he didn't know about the unit's history.

"He gave it the respect it deserved," Merrill said. "He was able to take his insider knowledge and transfer it to something an outsider can understand."