James Longhofer

James E. Longhofer was the right man in the right job. An expert in night helicopter flying and a combat veteran of Vietnam, Longhofer was in charge of one of the Army's most sensitive activities - a newly established Special Operations Division whose mission was to provide the military with the capability to strike back quickly anywhere in the world, and without trace, against terrorists and hostage-takers. The special unit's operations were kept secret from many senior Army generals and civilian leaders in the Pentagon, though not from the Central Intelligence Agency or its director, the late William J. Casey. By the fall of 1983, the Army, working through Longhofer's unit, had become an invaluable asset in the Reagan Administration's secret war against the Sandinista Government of Nicaragua. The unit that had been set up to fight terrorism was now heavily committed to supporting the contras, a United States-subsidized military force thought by many to be conducting terrorist activities itself. In many ways, the work of the Special Operations unit anticipated the later White House operation that would lead to the Iran-contra scandal. Both Longhofer and Marine Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North worked with a small group of men, operating with enormous power and under tight secrecy. Both operations suggested a lack of control at the highest levels of authority; both left many questions of who knew what, and when. Today, after a series of internal scandals that led to investigations by the Army and the Justice Department, Longhofer's unit has been abandoned. He was secretly court-martialed and sentenced to two years in prison (since reduced to one); two other members of his unit also were convicted after a court-martial and Federal trial, and a number of his key aides have received career-ending reprimands. The picture that emerges in the investigations is ugly. At one end of the spectrum was expense-account fraud; some officers and their operatives allegedly traveled first-class and took wives on personal trips at Army expense. High-priced luggage was purchased and fancy hotels and rental cars booked as the military men sought to ''live their cover'' as prosperous businessmen. At the other end were multimillion-dollar acquisitions of aircraft, most of them for operations in Central America, that were not purchased through the Army's existing intelligence organizations, which are carefully audited. Longhofer's office instead went to outside businessmen and arms dealers to make off-the-books airplane purchases. Payment was in cash, with funds that had been ''laundered'' through a secret Army finance office at Fort Meade, Md. Thanks for reading The Times. Subscribe to The Times More than $325 million was appropriated for the Special Operations Division between 1981 and the autumn of 1983. Most officers at the top of the Army, who had no idea what Longhofer was doing and how his funds were being accounted for, were apprehensive and resentful. Those generals who had lived through the Watergate scandals and participated as junior officers in the Vietnam War viewed unaccountable activities as wrong - and as very likely to get the Army in trouble. They were right. HAD THEY BECOME PUBLIC, a number of Longhofer's operations would certainly have caused enormous political damage to the Reagan Administration's campaign in Central America. The men in Special Operations were instrumental in ferrying Army Special Forces personnel under cover to Honduras, where they helped C.I.A. operatives train specially recruited Honduran troops for bloody hit-and-run operations into Nicaragua. They supplied Army rapid-firing cannons known as ''bushmasters'' to the small boats used by the C.I.A. to mine harbors and destroy oil depots during a series of controversial raids on Nicaragua's east coast in the fall of 1983. One of Longhofer's helicopter mechanics was aboard the C.I.A. ship that directed the 1983 mining of harbors inside Nicaragua, an action subsequently adjudicated by the World Court at The Hague to be a violation of international law. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story All this was at a time when Congress had barred the Defense Department and the C.I.A. from any actions aimed at overthrowing the Government of Nicaragua or provoking a military exchange between Honduras and Nicaragua. The C.I.A.'s attacks caused a political uproar when they were disclosed to Congress the next spring. But the Army's role was known to only a few members of the Congressional intelligence subcommittees, who said nothing. Many of their colleagues on Capitol Hill would have been astonished to learn that the Army and the C.I.A. had gone so far as to jointly purchase a $7 million commercial freighter, operated under cover from a civilian port in Louisiana, which was to be used in hostage rescue missions or to secretly resupply paramilitary ac-tivities. In all, Longhofer's unit was involved with the C.I.A. in more than 40 operations in Central America and elsewhere. Today, Longhofer remains on duty in an administrative job in Washington while appealing his conviction. Unlike some of his subordinates, he was not accused of any financial wrongdoing, but was found guilty of attempting to cover up the earliest official investigation. He believes that he and his men, most of whom chose to retire after being reprimanded, have been made scapegoats - as, he believes, was Oliver North - for their superiors. Longhofer insists that his unit's activities, especially those in support of the contras, were approved, at least broadly, at the top of the Pentagon. For example, Caspar W. Weinberger, who resigned this month as Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of the Army John O. Marsh Jr., among others, approved the ship's purchase in a top-secret memorandum of understanding between the C.I.A. and the Army in August 1983. According to Longhofer, Marsh, as the Army's top civilian official, ''didn't know the specifics of person-to-person contact - who was passing $5,000 to someone in Central America - but he knew about the operations,'' including those involving the Army's cooperation with the C.I.A. Longhofer also believes he was the target of senior officers who were upset because they were denied information about his unit or its activities. Marsh refused to be interviewed for this story, but senior Army and Justice Department officials categorically reject those assertions. ''There are things you can't talk about in special operations, but there are laws and guidelines that you have to operate by,'' says Gen. Arthur E. Brown Jr., the Army's vice chief of staff. ''The Army leadership wasn't out to get Special Operations.'' ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story JAMES LONGHOFER'S new job had its origins in the April 1980 failure of the first Iranian hostage-rescue mission, known as Desert One. After the negotiated return of Iran's hostages on Jan. 20, 1981, President Reagan's Inauguration Day, the Army decided that it would fight terrorism with secret teams, secret training and secret operations. Initially, Longhofer was to develop more advanced helicopter capabilities and train the best pilots to fly them. Within a few months, his world had become one of laundered money, clandestine military units, shielded operations and vague lines of authority. The Special Operations Division operated ''in the black,'' that is, under stringent cover inside the office of the Army's Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, known by the abbreviation DCSOPS, pronounced ''dess-ops.'' But Longhofer's real patron was the Army's top military man, Gen. Edward C. (Shy) Meyer, the Chief of Staff. Meyer's support would provide enormous power to Longhofer and his handful of aides, who were assigned to a basement office in the Pentagon that came to be known as ''the zoo.'' Throughout his career, the short, squat, cigar-smoking Longhofer had proved himself - like Oliver North - to be a can-do officer, a man's man who would never turn back from a rescue operation because of a shortage of helicopters. His top aides, some of whom had served with him in the late 1970's in the Army's 24th Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Ga., enthusiastically lived their civilian cover, dressing in casual clothes and letting their hair grow long. Many senior Pentagon officers were enraged by their demeanor - and by their own inability to do anything about it. Longhofer was not only protected by Meyer, but he seemed to have access to unlimited money. Lieut. Col. Michael V. Foster, one of Longhofer's aides, recently recalled early advice from Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., Meyer's chief deputy. ''Figure out how much money you need, double it, and then come see me,'' Foster says Vessey told him. (Vessey, now retired, said in a telephone interview from his home in Minnesota that he ''did tell them to come up with a consolidated budget instead of coming up with a request for every new gadget that cost 10 bucks.'' But, he added, ''I didn't tell special ops to go off and do whatever they wanted.'') The men who worked with Longhofer understood that it was Meyer's support that enabled them to freewheel. ''If you want to stage a Delta rescue,'' says Foster, referring to the Army's Delta Force commando unit, ''it's not intelligence, but a military operation. ''If you want to send somebody from Delta to watch and collect information in a third-world country, that isn't intelligence - give a Delta guy a round-trip ticket and an advance of $500. This is precisely what Meyer understood. Meyer saw conflict on a spectrum. He saw that our adversaries were affecting us below the threshold of war. He recognized that the United States needed the ability to employ clandestine techniques - but not intelligence.'' SPECIAL OPERA-tions became involved in a series of clandestine activities, under the top-secret codename Grid Circuit. Defense Secretary Weinberger and other key Department of Defense civilians were to be informed of these activities, and regular briefings were given to the House and Senate Appropriations and Armed Services Committees, whose members and senior staff knew when not to ask too many questions. But no information was provided to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Lieut. Col. Bruce P. Mauldin, one of Longhofer's subordinates, recalls the reasoning: ''Our assumption was that it was the C.I.A.'s responsibility to brief the intelligence committees.'' In March 1981, Longhofer's unit went operational. The Army and the C.I.A. agreed to set up a special aviation company, called Seaspray. Only a few of the senior Army generals were briefed on the new unit, which was formally endorsed in writing a week later by Vessey and John H. Stein, deputy director of operations at the C.I.A. Seaspray's unmarked helicopters, specially adapted Hughes 500D's, were to operate out of Fort Eustis, Va. That April, Longhofer won approval from Meyer and the Office of the Secretary of Defense for the establishment of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Battalion, another secret helicopter training and support unit based at Fort Campbell, Ky., whose existence became widely known in the aftermath of the October 1983 invasion of Grenada. The reason for setting up the 160th, Longhofer now says, was ''deception.'' He explains, ''We set it up so the media would think the 160th was the big secret unit and would dig up Fort Campbell looking for it.'' Seaspray remained unknown until 1985. One early mission supported by Seaspray was a trip to Washington in August 1981 by the late Bashir Gemayel, the Lebanese Christian leader who without public notice visited the White House, State Department and Pentagon. The trip was handled by the C.I.A., with Army Special Operations responsible for Gemayel's safe return. He was flown by private jet to an airfield west of Cairo; from there, a Seaspray helicopter ferried him to a rendezvous point at a beach just north of Beirut. Longhofer and several aides flew to the Middle East to monitor the operation, and to coordinate with the Israeli Air Force, which provided search and rescue support. Longhofer's most enduring accomplishment was an aerial intelligence operation in Central America, which his unit established in March 1982. The Administration's secret war against Nicaragua was still in its early phase, and the National Security Agency, which is responsible for intercepting communications around the world, was only beginning to increase its collection assets in Central America. Within two weeks, Longhofer's team, through a front company, secretly bought several small, twin-engine light aircraft, outfitted them with the most advanced electronic and interception gear, and began operating them without detection from a small landing strip in Honduras. It was supposed to be a civilian aerial photography operation. But some of the photographers were specially assigned National Security Agency communications experts, whose function was to monitor Nicaraguan Government and Salvadoran rebel messages and relay them to the United States. The operation was code-named Queens Hunter. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story IN A RECENT INTER-view, Meyer, who retired as Army Chief of Staff in 1983, defended his role in setting up the Special Operations Division. He said his goal, after the debacle of the hostage-rescue effort in Iran, was for the Army to develop its own operational group capable of conducting sensitive and clandestine military activities. At the time, there was a widespread belief throughout the intelligence community that the C.I.A., which has primacy for such paramilitary operations through its Special Activities Group, had been weakened by the personnel policies of Adm. Stansfield Turner, its director in the Carter Administration. Turner had forced out and retired hundreds of old hands, including many clandestine operatives with Vietnam War experience. If the C.I.A. couldn't do it, the Army would. A new cover unit was set up, known as the Intelligence Support Activity; it would be a separate entity in the Army's new secret world of special operations, with its own commander, Col. Jerry M. King. Both King and Longhofer were self-assured officers who would become bitter rivals. The support activity was to rely on Longhofer's unit for mission planning and operational support, including all the laundered cash deemed necessary. The men and officers assigned to the unit were issued no military weapons or clothing; they trained at civilian locations, flew in unmarked aircraft and were prepared to be disavowed by their Government if necessary. As he had done with the special operations unit, Meyer put the support unit under Army operations -DCSOPS - rather than under intelligence. This freed it from the bureaucracy, and scrutiny, of most military-intelligence activities. Longhofer and his colleagues in Special Operations considered any involvement on the part of Gen. William E. Odom, who was assistant chief of staff for Army Intelligence, to be a form of bureaucratic death. Meyer said that he had no qualms about the less rigid reporting requirements for King and Longhofer's activities in operations: ''I never worried about placing it in Ops because I knew there was a reporting system in place. Longhofer had to go to the deputy chief of staff for operations and to the Secretary of the Army for approval. There was a regular trap line.'' The Army's involvement in secret operations first became known to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees in early 1982, shortly after retired Army Lieut. Col. James G. (Bo) Gritz, a former Green Beret, began telling newsmen about his contacts with Jerry King in planning a privately financed prisoner-of-war rescue effort in Southeast Asia. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story At the time - unbeknown to Congress and with no apparent authority from the C.I.A. or any other intelligence agency - the Intelligence Support Activity was running an undercover operation in Panama City to monitor Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, the Panamanian Army chief. It was also in the midst of extended negotiations with Iraq for a Soviet tank, a deal that was canceled after Israel voiced heated objections to the unit's trading howitzers for the tank. Israel, which believed the howitzers might well end up being used against it, was in the position, as it would be in the Iran-Contra affair, of knowing more about American intelligence operations than the Congressional intelligence committees. Sign up for The New York Times Magazine Newsletter The best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week, including exclusive feature stories, photography, columns and more. Get it sent to your inbox. When they heard of the support unit's links to Gritz, House and Senate Intelligence Committee members were appalled. ''We stumbled on it,'' acknowledged one intelligence committee official. ''The Army did not come forward in 1981 to tell us that they were setting this up. They explained that this was in DCSOPS, but they looked like intelligence organizations to us. It was clear that the Army was evading our scrutiny.'' Senior Army officials said that Secretary John Marsh felt that he also had not been sufficiently briefed on the new intelligence organization. His superiors in Caspar Weinberger's office also claimed to be in the dark. The job of cleaning up the support activity was assigned to retired Army Gen. Richard G. Stilwell, the deputy under secretary of defense for policy, who was widely considered to be the intelligence czar in the Pentagon. Stilwell placed the support unit under his trusted ally, General Odom of Army Intelligence. From that point on, Intelligence Support Activity would have to submit all of its proposed activities for approval to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, and submit to the various bureaucratic reviews. The travails of the support unit reinforced the feelings of those Army men who were convinced that Longhofer and his subordinates were out of control, whether or not he had the total confidence of General Meyer. By the fall of 1982, however, Longhofer was attached to the C.I.A. as the Army's first military assistant to the C.I.A.'s director of operations, John Stein. The timing couldn't have been better: Longhofer had been pro-moted out of the Pentagon, at the request of Meyer and Casey, just as a number of Army generals were determined to make things rough for him. Longhofer's new position was designed, according to a classified memorandum, to ''enhance cooperation and control'' between the Army and the C.I.A. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story This was a period of intense demands on the Special Operations unit by the C.I.A., which was becoming increasingly involved in clandestine operations in Central America. Longhofer, who had officially been replaced in Special Operations by Col. Robert A. Kvederas, continued to work closely and meet often with the men in the ''zoo'' - a fact that few of the generals in DCSOPS, as they testified later at Longhofer's court-martial, knew. THE CLOSE TIES BETWEEN THE C.I.A. and Longhofer's unit were mutually beneficial. Special Operations, with its virtually unlimited budget and access to aircraft and helicopters, could supply untraceable - and expensive - airlift for the C.I.A.'s Central American operations, which were being closely monitored by the press and Congressional intelligence committees. The C.I.A., in turn, provided specialized support for clandestine activities, such as pseudonymous passports for Longhofer's undercover operatives. C.I.A. station chiefs could also convince local officials in third-world countries to look the other way when members of the Special Operations unit needed to land without scrutiny at a foreign airport. There was another reason for the C.I.A.'s eagerness to work closely with the Army unit. Longhofer recalls that, by mid-1983, there was a consensus inside the agency that Congress would eventually vote a cutoff or ceiling on funds for military support of the contras - indeed, a limit of $24 million for support was enacted on Dec. 8, 1983 - and the men running the contra war had contingency plans for increased operations by the Army. Because Longhofer's unit was not officially involved in intelligence, it provided the C.I.A. with an arguably ''legal'' way to continue supporting the contras without informing the intelligence committees. In addition, the special operations unit developed an ingenious method for improving efficiency and further masking the movement of helicopters and materiel: it contracted a private citizen, Richard B. Gadd, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, to transport men and aircraft. In subsequent years, Gadd and one of his associates, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord, would later work for Oliver North, as the National Security Council dramatically expanded the use of the private sector in its covert operations. IN MID-1983, MEYER RETIRED, and Gen. John A. Wickham Jr. was named the new Army Chief of Staff. Wickham took office not knowing very much about Special Operations - he had been cut out of the flow of information shortly after replacing John Vessey as Meyer's deputy. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story According to Longhofer, the initial intent was to brief Wickham fully on everything. But Longhofer came to feel that Wickham was too careful; he delegated requests to his immediate staff for recommendations, whereas Vessey had given his approval within hours. As Meyer's deputy, ''Wickham refused to make decisions, and we were waiting two weeks or more,'' says Longhofer. ''We needed answers in one or two hours.'' So, Longhofer says, he removed him from the chain of command, with Meyer's approval. In defending his decision not to brief senior officers such as Wickham, Longhofer contends he was merely following Meyer's orders. ''I could have been very friendly and told a lot of senior officers what I was doing,'' Longhofer says. ''But I thought I was doing special ops for General Meyer. I wasn't supposed to talk.'' Meyer, in a recent interview, said: ''I don't remember ever cutting Wickham out of anything. That would be abnormal. I just can't imagine that ever happening.'' By the time Wickham became Chief of Staff, Longhofer had decided that Special Operations had grown too unwieldy for the Pentagon basement and needed a cover organization, which would become known as Business Security International, with offices in suburban Virginia and a separate bank account. Longhofer briefed Gen. Max R. Thurman, Wickham's new deputy chief of staff, on his plan for the new cover organization in early August. A training and recruitment expert, Thurman was known as one of the Army's leading intellects - and a careful bureaucrat, like Wickham. ''Thurman got a paper plus a briefing, but he didn't know all the operational details,'' Longhofer recalls. ''It was my position that they didn't need to know.'' It took two briefings before Thurman finally signed on - but he hadn't been told exactly what it was he was approving. The rest was easy. Financing - the first year's budget was $750,000 - was supplied without question by an Army auditor, and Business Security, known inside special operations as ''Yellow Fruit,'' was under way. Its director was Lieut. Col. Dale E. Duncan, who had been recruited the year before by Longhofer to handle security for the special operations unit. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Duncan's job was, among other things, to make sure that the cover for the unit's operations wasn't blown. His professional life revolved around safe houses, false identities and a constant suspicion of penetrations by foreign intelligence. By most accounts, Duncan was an arrogant, insensitive officer who insisted on personal loyalty from his small staff of a half-dozen operatives - all of whom, in turn, understood that they could share the good life inside Yellow Fruit if they could cope with their boss. Longhofer's subordinates saw Duncan as a self-promoter who always seemed too eager to spend money and live well; they warned Longhofer emphatically that he had picked the wrong man. ''This was a guy who you'd ask to buy a widget for monitoring the telephone and he'd come back with a suitcase,'' one member of Special Operations recalls. ''He was a big spender.'' But Longhofer says that he viewed the complaints as normal infighting among highly competitive officers. In his view, the overall mission of Yellow Fruit was essential and Duncan's experience in operational security was unquestioned. Yet an internal audit of Yellow Fruit in September 1983 turned up enormous inconsistencies in Duncan's financial accounts. After one Special Operations field exercise in Salt Lake City in mid-1983, for example, Duncan had turned in an expense account statement for $16,000, with no receipts. The inconsistencies were reported to Colonel Kvederas, who asked Longhofer to investigate. It was at this point that Longhofer undertook what the Army would later describe in his court-martial as a cover-up. He assigned a former Army intelligence officer who was in charge of finance for the Special Operations unit, to investigate Duncan. A month later, the Yellow Fruit staff members were told that Duncan had been cleared. Court-martial witnesses later testified, however, that Duncan removed critical evidence from a secure safe in the Business Security International offices. Despite the findings, it was clear that Business Security would have to be shut down; Duncan's dispute with his staff posed obvious problems in operational security. Kvederas, amazingly, permitted Duncan to break the news to his staff. Duncan summoned them to a meeting, told them he was dismissing them and, if he had his way, would see to it that they never worked in special operations or Army intelligence again. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Duncan, as part of his responsibility in Yellow Fruit, had authorized electronic surveillance during several Special Operations exercises. He had also planned for counterintelligence activities during the annual formal ceremonial dinner for Special Operations personnel, known as a dining-in, that was to take place in the fall of 1983 at a suburban Washington hotel. Yellow Fruit personnel were ordered to attend the dinner, carrying weapons, and pose as celebrants. Duncan's expressed goal was to determine whether the partygoers were maintaining ''operational security.'' But Yellow Fruit operatives subsequently testified that his real intent was to embarrass Jerry King, the Intelligence Support Activity commander. ''Duncan's purpose was to nail King - to wire his room, set him up with a prostitute and get it on tape,'' a former Yellow Fruit officer recalled in an interview. ''We also knew there was an underlying motive'' for Duncan - to ingratiate himself with Longhofer. ''Longhofer and King hated each other's guts.'' (John M. Dowd, Duncan's lawyer, said recently that he had ''no knowledge of those allegations.'' The Government, he said, had never raised any questions, ''formally or informally,'' about Duncan's motives for conducting the dining-in security.) Before the dining-in security measures were carried out, however, word of Yellow Fruit's alleged wiretapping activities had begun to spread through the top of the Army, causing near panic. One senior general warned associates that the Special Operations Division would be responsible for President Reagan's defeat in the 1984 election. ON DEC. 8, 1983, WICKHAM ordered Yellow Fruit and all other special operations to shut down immediately. The Business Security offices and safes were sealed, pending an official investigation, and Longhofer and his subordinates were suspended from all duties. Secretary of the Army Marsh, according to an aide, was particularly incensed because he believed the problems inside Longhofer's unit had been resolved after the controversy over the Intelligence Support Activity's involvement with Bo Gritz. ''The Army had gone through the same drill two years earlier, and regularized it,'' the aide recalled. ''Marsh was furious when he found that its house had not been put in order.'' Most Army officials shared Marsh's view, but there were a few who also recognized that there were some institutional failures. The Army general counsel's office had been urged in early 1982 to write new guidelines to revise and tighten the auditing procedures for Longhofer's unit, but had not done so by late 1983. There was also, in the view of these officials, too much eagerness on the part of many senior officers to strike a blow against Special Operations. ''There were people who were out to get'' Longhofer and his men, one Army lawyer acknowledged, for reasons having nothing to do with the allegations against Yellow Fruit. The case against Special Operations eventually landed on the desk of Theodore S. Greenberg, an assistant United States Attorney with a reputation as a hard-nosed prosecutor in national security cases. Greenberg had played a key role in the successful prosecution in 1981 of Edwin P. Wilson, a former C.I.A. operative, for, among other charges, the illegal export of explosives to Libya. Greenberg was appalled by the extent of financial abuses and the lax attitude of the Special Operations Division toward the Army's requirements for bookkeeping. ''Their attitude was, 'We don't have to follow the rules,' '' Greenberg said in an interview. ''Only Government slobs get by on the $50 per diem. These men learned how to manipulate the system; they learned how to brief a concept to a general staff officer and then take that statement as authority to take action. Where did they get off buying airplanes with no contracting warrant?'' Ironically, the most dramatic and upsetting allegation against Yellow Fruit - illegal domestic electronic surveillance - didn't pan out. Greenberg concluded that Duncan had been acting without criminal intent in conducting random electronic surveillance. Nor was Greenberg able to make a Federal criminal case against Longhofer. But he did recommend the court-martial for the former Special Operations chief. In the end, Longhofer, Duncan and another member of Yellow Fruit were convicted and eight others were forced to resign as a result of the investigations. Duncan's Federal court conviction for theft was overturned early this year, but he is serving a 10-year sentence at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. for his court-martial conviction for filing false claims, theft and obstruction of justice. He has appealed the military conviction. Longhofer remains convinced that his subordinate did nothing wrong and will be vindicated by a military court of appeals. Longhofer now sees himself as a victim of an Army leadership that is frightened of special operations. He also believes that other players in Army intelligence, including King, Odom and the bureaucracy of Army intelligence combined to poison the atmosphere and make impossible any objective assessment of his liability in the Yellow Fruit incident. And he feels that Greenberg behaved unprofessionally by insisting, after having failed to develop a criminal case, that the Army leadership initiate court-martial proceedings against him. The court-martial charges were not filed until May 1985, 17 months after Longhofer was suspended from his Special Operations duties. He describes the charges of cover-up and conduct unbecoming an officer as ''a little like being court-martialed for wearing the wrong tie to the general's reception.'' He was a stand-in, he believes, for the real target of the Army prosecution: General Meyer. ''They didn't have the moral courage to go after Meyer, so they went after me,'' he says. ''They didn't want to attack the lion, so they went after the cubs.'' ''As I look back at it,'' he says now, ''I should have picked up and left when Meyer left.'' General Meyer, who last year wrote a letter to Marsh urging a full pardon for Longhofer, says that no official from the Department of the Army or the Justice Department has ever questioned him about his role in the Special Operations Division. Greenberg acknowledges that he has emerged, in the view of Longhofer and his associates, as the villain, the ambitious prosecutor who forced the Army into courts-martial and career-damaging letters of reprimand to most of the men who worked in the Special Operations Division. ''I wasn't the heavy,'' Greenberg insists. ''The Army leadership felt these guys should be sternly dealt with. Subversion of the chain of command is a very serious offense in the Army, especially when you're talking about special operations. The Pentagon had systems for doing anything with money in a classified maneuver. There was no reason to hide things from their commanding officer.'' Greenberg and the Army are proud that the military and Federal systems were able to effectively investigate and prosecute in such a highly classified area. ''The Army found something wrong and it corrected it immediately,'' Greenberg says. THE ARMY'S INVOLVEMENT IN commandolike activities - which has always been characterized by an uneasy ambivalence - is now at a crossroads. Morale today inside the Intelligence Support Activity, which has grown into an organization of nearly 300 men, is widely considered to be low. (Col. Jerry King was reassigned in May 1984 to the military's Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.) One senior Congressional investigator depicted the support unit in a recent interview as ''the biggest bunch of misfits you ever saw.'' ''They have no sense of mission,'' he said. ''They have no operatives who are Oriental or Middle Eastern, and no language capability. If I had my way, I'd say, 'Get rid of them.' They don't do a thing.'' The investigations into the Special Operations Division suggest to some of Longhofer's former colleagues that the Army as an institution may simply be, of all things, too democratic, too ingrained with the concept of civilian and Congressional leadership, to cope with the flexibility and unpredictability of special operations. ''Army intelligence should be limited to trying to find out whether the enemy is poking around our perimeter,'' one long-time intelligence operative says bitterly. ''We should never have become involved in strategic intelligence.'' Michael Foster, Longhofer's former aide who retired from the Army early this year, reached a similar, but far broader, conclusion. ''In our heart of hearts, covert operations are distasteful and immoral to us,'' he said. ''If we have an enemy, we Americans buy war bonds and go fight face-to-face. We don't believe in sneaky stuff - cutting throats and all that. We don't really believe we're imperiled. We're sure our oceans will protect us. By God, it's laughable, but that's the way we are.'' Longhofer remains the subject of much controversy inside the Army. Retired Lieut. Gen. Robert L. Schweitzer, the former chairman of the Inter-American Defense Board, and a Longhofer supporter, calls his court-martial conviction ''the worst miscarriage of justice I've seen in my 35 years in the Army.'' Other senior Army generals, however, caustically characterize Longhofer and his senior aides as men incapable of operating inside the system. ''They think they were railroaded,'' one major general said, ''like a guy named North.'' During his troubles, Longhofer waited quietly for William Casey to defend him to the Justice Department and Pentagon higher-ups. Casey did nothing, but Longhofer remains loyal to the late Director of Central Intelligence. Casey had planned to support him, Longhofer insists, but decided not to do so because of a reluctance to get involved in Army personnel matters. Foster has a different explanation for Casey's silence: ''They used us for their benefit and then, as soon as there was trouble, they walked away.'' https://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/22/magazine/who-s-in-charge-here.html