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American Morning

Interview of Tom Clancy, Carl Stiner, Authors of "Shadow Warriors"

Aired February 11, 2002 - 09:24   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JACK CAFFERTY, CNN FINANCIAL ANCHOR: In Afghanistan, U.S. Special Forces have been front and center, leading the way in the war against terrorism. Typically, though, these troops are the ones you hear least about because much of what they do is considered top secret.

There is a new book out called "Shadow Warriors" that provides a window into the world of these elite combat forces. The book's co- authors, Tom Clancy, and General Carl Stiner, who is a retired former commander of U.S. Special Forces, join us this morning from Washington.

Gentlemen, welcome. Nice to have you with us.

Mr. Clancy, to what degree were to peel away this veil of secrecy that surrounds these highly classified troops?

TOM CLANCY, "SHADOW WARRIORS": Well, I'm not going to do anything that is going to endanger these guys, because they are our soldiers, they are fighting for our country, I don't want them mad at me, so what the public is safe to know is in the book. Otherwise, we're not going to give away secrets, obviously.

CAFFERTY: What is in the book that goes beyond the conventional wisdom, or things that I as a common citizen may have some vague knowledge of? What special insights do you bring?

CLANCY: Well, the first thing people really need to know about these kids is how smart they are. These are, without a doubt, the smartest soldiers we have, and they are exquisitely trained over a period of years. They are true professionals. I describe them as brain surgeons who kill people. They study their profession about as closely and carefully as a physician does, and that's really how smart they are.

CAFFERTY: General Stiner, there was a time in the 60's that Special Forces, and I am thinking back to John Wayne, Clint Eastwood "Green Beret" movies, that Special Forces were thought of as a sort of repository for these macho kind of over-the-hill warriors, a place to put them to sort of get them out of the way. When did the transformation occur, and how is the Special Forces troop of today different from the Green Berets that fought, for example, in Vietnam?

GEN. CARL STINER, RETIRED, U.S. ARMY: Thank you.

First of all, Special Forces soldiers have always been good soldiers and done great things. In World War II in particular, when we had the Jedburghs, and then in Vietnam. But following Vietnam, and the refocusing on the Soviet Union, the Special Forces infrastructure suffered. It was used as a trade-off for more conventional forces.

The renaissance really began right before Vietnam with the vision of President Kennedy and General Yarborough in expanding their mission areas beyond just unconventional warfare to be able to respond to the insurgences that were seen out there, and that has been the case.

I guess the greatest renaissance happened in 1986 with the Defense Reorganization Act, and then the Cohen-Nunn amendment to that act which created the United States Special Operations Command, a four-star command, and took away from the services all the special operations forces, and assigned them to that command, and Congress in its wisdom gave that commander his own program and budget and authority to make the necessary decisions for the research and development and readiness of those Special Forces.

CAFFERTY: Let me get back to Mr. Clancy quickly. A fictional account of a terrorist crashing a plane into the U.S. Capitol, a book called "Debt of Honor" in 1994.

CLANCY: You guys just won't let me forget that.

CAFFERTY: Well, it was prescient, for want of a better word, I guess. And yet, you claim to have been taken totally by surprise at the events of September 11th. How so? You thought about something eerily similar several years before.

CLANCY: Well actually, the thought for that was all the back to when I was in college, and somebody asked me how to take the whole U.S. government out, and I didn't use it for, what, 35 years. As a practical matter, it's awfully hard to keep, as a fiction writer, it is hard to keep ahead of the thoughts and the actions of sociopathic personalities, because you just can't replicate the thinking of that kind of person.

CAFFERTY: Well, that's understandable. We unfortunately have run up against the station break at the bottom of the half hour, so I am going to have to cut this short, but I appreciate your time this morning. Tom Clancy, the author of "Shadow Warriors," along with his co-author, General Carl Stiner, the retired commander of the Special Forces in the military. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us. Appreciate it.

CLANCY: See you.

STINER: Thank you.

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