QUANTICO, Va. -- On Oct. 20, 1983, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations received notification from higher headquarters of a pending United States led military rescue operation which was to be conducted on the Caribbean Island nation of Grenada. Within hours, AFOSI Special Agents began receiving movement orders on what they initially believed was a training exercise.
Arriving at Roosevelt Roads Naval Air Station, Puerto Rico, a few days later, the first cadre of forward deploying agents quickly realized upon seeing operational aircrew and support personnel preparing for obvious contingency operations that this was no exercise.
One day prior to AFOSI receiving the notification, on Oct. 19, the Prime Minister of Grenada, Maurice Rupert Bishop, was executed during a coup led by the country’s Deputy Prime Minister, Bernard Coard. The coup had begun a week earlier on Oct. 12. Bishop was the head the communist People's Revolutionary Government of Grenada that came to power in 1979 following a revolution which toppled the elected government.
Having achieved independence from the United Kingdom just five years earlier in 1974, once the People's Revolutionary Government assumed power, Grenada became the only communist state within the British commonwealth.
With the People's Revolutionary Government in power, Grenada began receiving extensive military aid almost immediately from both Cuba and the Soviet Union. Of particular note was the construction of Point Salines Airport, today’s Maurice Bishop International Airport, located 5 miles south of St. George, the capital of Grenada.
Though it was publicly announced that the airfield was being constructed as an international airport to promote increased tourism to Grenada, the airfield was also being constructed with a 9,700-foot runway capable of accommodating a wide variety of military aircraft including fighters, bombers, and transports.
U.S. government officials and neighboring countries feared that the airfield would be used as a waypoint for Soviet and Cuban military aircraft, potentially threatening sea lanes in the southern Caribbean, while also serving as a base of operations to extend communist influence into Central America, South America, and eastern Africa.
The seizure of the government by the deputy prime minister, who himself was deposed from power and replaced by a military government after just six days, led to widespread protests and rioting across the country. Bishop was initially placed under house arrest, but he was freed from captivity by a group of 3,000 protestors. Bishop and the protestors marched to a nearby military base and began clashing with troops there. Gunshots rang out and Bishop was recaptured. When the altercation was over, Bishop and three of his former cabinet members were among a total of 18 former government officials who were executed.
When the military assumed power, a national curfew was declared, troops began conducting armed patrols, and the main airport and other points of entry and exit to the nation were closed. On the morning of Oct. 22, the Grenadian born Governor-General, who served as the representative to the British monarchy, asked the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States to free his country from the Revolutionary Military Council.
That same day, the United States and other friendly nations received a request from the five-member-nation Organization of Eastern Caribbean States for help in forming a military response to “remove the outlaw regime in Grenada and restore democracy by any means.”
At the time, there were approximately 1,000 U.S. citizens living in Grenada. Roughly 600 of those were students at the St. George’s University School of Medicine. According to U.S. government reports, several hundred of those citizens had expressed a desire to leave the island but could not due to the closure of the airport and seaports on the island.
Planning for noncombatant evacuation of American citizens was initiated shortly after the coup began on October 12th, with the U.S. State Department leading the effort. As conditions in Grenada continued to deteriorate, the Department of Defense was brought in to support evacuation planning and eventual implementation.
Within just a few hours of receiving the request from the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, President Ronald Reagan ordered direct United States military intervention, with major operations to begin on Oct. 25. President Ronald Reagan stated that this was to be a rescue mission conducted primarily to preserve the lives and safety of U.S. citizens in Grenada. He declared that intervention was necessary to “protect innocent lives, to forestall further chaos, and to assist in restoration of law and order and government institutions.”
The president also remarked that he felt compelled to act due to fears of a potentially larger scale repeat of the Iran hostage crisis, which had ended less than three years earlier with the release of 52 Americans who had been held in captivity by that nation for more than a year.
Just before 5:30 a.m. on Oct. 25, a parachute drop of several hundred Army Rangers landed at Point Salines Airport, which was located immediately adjacent to one branch of the St. George’s University School of Medicine in close proximity to where a large group of American students were sheltered. Within a few hours the airport was secured. The first Air Force aircraft to land at the field touched down just after 2 p.m. The first AFOSI Special Agent arrived at Point Salines Airport the next day on October 26th.
Operation Urgent Fury marked the largest American military action since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, and for most of the AFOSI personnel who participated it marked their first combat-related deployment ever.
During the operation, a total of 28 AFOSI personnel deployed to locations that included Grenada, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Antigua, Florida and North Carolina. Most of the Special Agent personnel deployed from detachments located in District 7 (Florida), District 8 (Tennessee/Alabama/Florida), and District 21 (North Carolina/Virginia). They were joined by administrative support personnel who deployed from AFOSI Headquarters (District of Columbia), and also District 8 and District 21 respectively.
Some AFOSI personnel deployed on little as a 24-hour notice, many without the ability to tell their families exactly where they were going, not necessarily due to operational security, but due to the fact that they themselves were not immediately aware. Others deployed without the approved battle dress uniforms having to borrow those from military members at the stateside bases where they worked.
Described by one agent as “seat-of-the-pants operation that none of us were really prepared or equipped for,” another agent remembered being: “Unceremoniously shoved off the tailgate of a C-141 along with two other guys, a bunch of camping gear, a portable manual typewriter and $1,500 in contingency funds in a plastic bag.”
Despite these initial challenges, these Special Agents did what Special Agents do best and they improvised solutions to the problems they faced, all the while remaining mission focused. Arriving in country with no transportation and no communication tools, they acquired vehicles and radios. Some of these resources were obtained through the AFOSI chain of command back in the U.S., while many of the resources were garnered locally through military channels or on the ground by personal ingenuity.
The latter included salvaging parts from inoperable vehicles and communications equipment to keep AFOSI resources operational. The reasons they were successful, as one agent put it: “Everyone had enough nerve, common sense, and perhaps overblown self-confidence to take it on.”
Once combat operations began, Headquarters AFOSI, Operating Location-G was established in a command post that was adjacent to the U.S. Embassy in St. George. Forward-deployed personnel largely consisted of one-to-five-person Special Agent teams, supported later by a one-to-four-person administrative support team. For the first six days of operations, personnel shuttled back and forth between Grenada and nearby Barbados, hitching rides on Air Force C-130 transports.
Their first billet location in Grenada was in an under-construction terminal at the Point Salines Airport, later moving to a rustic hotel that was three miles closer to St. George.
The primary job of Special Agents deploying to Grenada was to provide tactical counterintelligence support to the various Air Force elements involved in the operation. During Operation Urgent Fury, Air Force aircraft and personnel conducted a wide range of missions, including reconnaissance, close air support, troop and cargo delivery, casualty and evacuee transportation, air refueling, psychological warfare, communications and air traffic control.
Special Agents established an area source network with local business and community leaders in country, conducted surveys of airports, hotels, restaurants, shopping areas and shipping and port facilities across the island, and collected and reported information on potential threats. Special Agents coordinated their collection and information sharing efforts regularly with Air Force Security Police, Army Military Intelligence and Central Intelligence Agency officers.
“Any and all information relative to the threats and vulnerabilities was greatly appreciated and valued,” commented a deployed agent. “The jointness seemed to work well at the tactical level. Because we were all meeting and talking, incidents of dual-reporting, misreporting, and no-reporting were greatly minimized.”
Throughout the region, Special Agents provided multiple daily briefings to on-scene Air Force and ground defense commanders and other senior military leaders keeping them informed of real-time conditions. The primary threat of concern for the Air Force on Grenada itself focused on protecting Point Salines Airport from small-arms and shoulder-fired rockets beneath the approach and departure routes to the runway, along with defending the perimeter of the airfield from ground attack by military or local partisan forces.
Following the operation, one deployed agent commented: “We served, as in any situation, as the command’s eyes and ears for the survivability of our air bases. The Air Force is dependent upon an airbase as its primary operating location. The survivability of that base is paramount. The physical task to defend a base rests with the security police air base ground defense forces. Security [police officers] have told us they are handicapped without information and that is why AFOSI is there, to give them that information.”
Administrative support personnel who deployed to Grenada supported operations by establishing files, preparing and releasing messages, operating communications equipment, and securing equipment and vehicles for Special Agent use in the field.
Regarding their efforts, Col. Robert Hildner, AFOSI’s vice commander at the time, commented: “We need admin support to accompany our agents from the day of deployment. That support is absolutely indispensable. If we don’t have it, we cannot do the job the way it has to be done.”
Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina, then home to AFOSI Detachment 2101, served as the primary staging location and courier point for AFOSI personnel before deploying and after redeploying from forward locations. Detachment members were also responsible for briefing and debriefing all Air Force and other military service aircrews who were conducting flying operations from Pope in support of operations in Grenada. This included fixed-wing attack and transport aircraft, along with a variety of rotary-wing helicopter aircraft.
AFOSI personnel at Pope Air Force Base also served as a conduit to senior leaders within AFOSI and the Air Force by receiving written reports from Special Agents in country carried by transiting aircrew who were flying daily between Grenada and the base. These hard-copy reports were forwarded on to the appropriate higher headquarters to help decision makers in their efforts supporting Operation Urgent Fury. This airborne “express mail” link was necessary due primarily to the unreliability of communications of the era, but also due to other limiting factors.
For example, communications were initially established through lines provided by the U.S. Embassy; however, those lines proved to be less than ideal as messages were sometimes overly filtered or deemed less of a priority by non-military handlers.
“Going from a base environment in the continental United States to an actual wartime situation, it was super to see how the Air Force commanders grasped how AFOSI was there to support them in a counterintelligence role,” commented another deployed agent. “AFOSI was ever in their minds, because they knew we could get them information on threats that may have existed.”
The combat phase of Operation Urgent Fury was completed on Nov. 2. AFOSI personnel remained in country until Dec. 15. AFOSI operations in Grenada lasted for 50 days, with an overall total of eight Special Agents and four administrative support personnel deployed to the island at one time or another. With the departure of the last AFOSI personnel from Grenada, Headquarters AFOSI, Operating Location-G was inactivated. By the conclusion of operations, Air Force aircraft safely returned more than 6,000 military personnel to home stations and transported more than 700 American medical students and other American citizens to the United States, all protected and guided by AFOSI efforts.
As a command, there were several lessons learned by AFOSI during Operation Urgent Fury which were later applied to future operations. Many of the deployed agents credited prior participation in exercises for helping them to prepare for real-world operations. Not all who were deployed had prior exercise experience and after-action evaluations amongst the entire cadre of deployed personnel noted that those who had exercise experience had a slight advantage over those who didn’t when it came to getting operations off and running once on the ground.
It was also identified that additional pre-deployment training was needed to help further develop those specific skills needed during contingency operations regarding establishing, building, and maintaining effective information and intelligence collection programs under varying degrees of potentially hostile conditions. Also, though joint operations with military and other intelligence community partners were deemed to have been highly successful during Operation Urgent Fury, it was also recognized that an increasing emphasis on continuing development in this area would only enhance future operations.
“Grenada heralds a new beginning for AFOSI and a greater involvement in the full range and spectrum of the Air Force mission,” commented a stateside AFOSI detachment commander following the conclusion of Operation Urgent Fury. “That mission is to fly and fight and AFOSI is as essential combat support element to that ability. We need secure bases, aircraft, and personnel to accomplish the Air Force mission. The job of gathering of counterintelligence and information necessary to ensure that security, rests with AFOSI and its people. I think we’re seeing in Urgent Fury, the harbinger of the new AFOSI.”
Historian’s Note: Operation Urgent Fury also marked a significant milestone in the then 35-year history of the command as it was the first time an enlisted Special Agent was deployed to serve as a Special Agent in Charge in a contingency location.