A small group of seventy-year-old veterans of the US Army found themselves in 3 years ago in Fort Bragg to commemorate their unit for the first time.
To the secret unit - which operated a West Berlin - it has recovered only after having crossed several documents declassified thanks to Freedom of Information Act. For nearly three decades a detachment of US special forces was stationed in Berlin, hidden in the American contingent that guarded the Sector n.3 during the Cold War. They were there in case the Red Army was ordered to invade the city - an event that never occurred - letting the 'teams' that took turns over the years concentrate more than anything on intelligence operations: gathering information regarding the enemy beyond' curtain'.
When at the end of the Second World War the Allies and the Soviet Union militarily occupied the capital of Germany dividing it into 4 sectors: on the one hand French (Sector n.1), English (Sector n.2), American (Sector n.3 ) and on the other the Soviets in the so-called USSR Sector; NATO began to fear an invasion by the Soviet neighbor. It was then that the American commanders planned to send from the 1956, six teams of special forces selected by the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) (10th SFG A) then detached at the base of Bad Tölz (West Germany), in the heart of West Berlin - to intervene in case the worst eventuality occurred.
The teams, which comprised a staff of 15 men each, were required to be equipped with sniper rifles, 'Bazooka', demolition kits, radio kits and additional highly specialized mission kits, according to an official document. Soldiers who were part of this unit classified as 'unconventional' - later as 'Detachment A' - according to US Army documents were operating undercover. They could not be equipped with the green insignia granted to the special forces but wore the light blue ones that signaled belonging to a common infantry unit, they had false names and false identification plates that declared them to belong to the 6th Infantry regiment of Berlin Brigade.
The operators who were selected to enter this clandestine unit had to speak fluent German; among other things, they were provided with civilian clothes that let them perfectly camouflage with the Berlin population and, often, they were sent 'over the curtain' on civilian machines to collect sensitive information to be sent directly to the United States.
For the first ten years the SF operators who were sent to Berlin to join this secret unit were not identified differently than their roommates in Bad Tölz, until they were officially framed in what was identified as 39th Special Forces Operational Detachment (SFOD).
In the 1972 the numbers of this unit reached the 100 / 200 men and its size continued to vary throughout the Cold War. In the 1980 the team became theUS Army Europe Operational Security Detachment that, having equipped itself with civilian vehicles (for which the unit had always had a weak detail), it began to methodically spy on the Soviets, working above all on BMW vans that were equipped with interception equipment. The unit was dissolved in the 1984, just five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Today the reconstituted 39th Special Forces Detachment (Airborne) is framed in the 1st Special Forces Regiment and operates in South Korea with its official 'green' pennant and with tasks you can imagine.
