Congressman Bo Ginn: Mr. Secretary, the Defense Agencies Supplemental Request includes $15 million for additional funding under the Emergency Construction Fund. Has this fund been used yet for fiscal year 1981?

Secretary Perry Fliakas: Yes, sir, it has. In December of 1980, the Secretary approved a project at $3.2 million for what is a highly classified activity. It’s a joint special operations command at Fort Bragg, and we have another project in the pipeline, if you will, of $3.1 million for similar facilities at Dam Neck in Virginia.

—From House Appropriations Subcommittee Hearings, 19811

Secrecy, or at least the show of it, was central to their purpose. It allowed the dreamers and the politicians to have it both ways. They could stay on the high road while the dirty work happened offstage. If some Third World terrorist or Colombian drug lord needed to die, and then suddenly turned up dead, why, what a happy coincidence! The dark soldiers would melt back into shadow. If you asked them how they made it happen, they wouldn’t tell. They didn’t even exist, see?

—Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down2

Notes

1. Hearings before Subcommittees of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, 97th Cong., 1st sess. part 1, Supplemental Appropriation and Rescission Bill, 1981 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981), 681.

2. Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999), 33.