Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
CIA director tied to a chair
The Final Exercise
The course is called the Special Operations Training Course, and its last exercise runs from about eight at night until six the next morning at the CIA's training facility, known as The Farm, in the Virginia countryside. William Burns, then the agency's director, had volunteered to take part, and by three in the morning he was wondering whether that had been such a great idea.
About 60 officers worked through the scenarios, and they came from all sorts of backgrounds. Some had military service, so the paramilitary challenges were nothing new to them. One case officer in her early 40s, a mother of four with no military experience, made just as significant a contribution as anyone as the group got through each scenario.
The Rescue
Around five in the morning, a Delta Force unit from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, flew up to stage a hostage rescue. The unit had been told that a couple dozen CIA officers had been captured by a hostile government and that its job was to liberate them. The young, burly Delta Force major who came up the stairs found a real, live CIA director tied to a chair.
Why does Delta Force practice hostage rescue?
Delta Force, formally the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, was founded in 1977 by Army Colonel Charles Beckwith. Beckwith had served on exchange with the British Special Air Service and came away convinced the United States needed a dedicated counterterrorism unit. The push gained urgency after the 1972 Munich Olympics attack, when a West German rescue attempt failed to save the Israeli hostages. The unit is based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Why run exercises through the night?
Fatigue narrows attention and slows judgment, so a scenario at three in the morning tests people differently than one at noon. Psychologist Donald Meichenbaum developed stress inoculation training in the 1970s, which exposes people to graded stress so they practice coping before it counts. Decades of sleep research show that going without sleep measurably slows reaction time and weakens decision making. Militaries and intelligence services have long built overnight phases into their field exercises for that reason.
More from Not Dead Yet
