The Intelligence Support Activity (ISA) and UFOs
A History of the US Army’s Most Clandestine Unit and Its Former Members
by Garrett from Patterns Tell Stories Podcast; @libertybirb on X
- - - - - - - -
“The CIA had proven unable, and in some cases unwilling, to fill the Pentagon’s needs. The new unit would consist of undercover agents who would go in ahead of the rescue operation to coordinate the landing, protection, transportation and extraction of the invading Delta commando force. The new unit would also secretly enter the foreign site to collect intelligence details that CIA agents were not trained to obtain. The CIA had traditionally focused on recruiting political sources and obtaining political intelligence from spies at high foreign governmental levels. The Army’s agents would provide the specific intelligence needed to launch an operation. In an interview a former assistant chief of staff for intelligence recalled, “During the first Iran mission, the CIA couldn’t deliver support to the military. The intelligence the Agency provided was virtually useless in operational terms — the military needed peripheral on-the-ground intelligence, which the Agency didn’t have the capability to provide.” Army Colonel Jerry King, who had served as chief of staff for operations on the first mission, was selected to head the new unit created in July 1980. It was called the Foreign Operating Group (FOG) and consisted of about fifty members carefully selected from Special Forces and military intelligence. In later years, as the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), it was to evolve into one of the most classified units in Army history.”
STEVEN EMERSON, SECRET WARRIORS: Inside the Covert Military Operations of the Reagan Era (1988)
- - - -
President Jimmy Carter’s embarrassing 1980 failure to rescue US hostages held in Iran highlighted serious problems with joint-service coordination and led to major reforms in US Special Operations. The Field Operations Group (FOG) was a US Army unit created in 1980 to provide clandestine intelligence support for a potential second Iran hostage rescue. Led by Special Forces Col. Jerry King, the unit was comprised of about 50-100 hand-selected personnel trained in intelligence gathering and reported directly to the Army’s Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence. FOG was soon made permanent and re-designated as the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), with Col. King serving as its first commander, and Lt. Col. Tom O’Connell — a former PHOENIX program leader — acting as his senior advisor.
I’ve mentioned the ISA in two of my previous articles, ‘The Eyes, They Never Lie’ and ‘The 902nd Military Intelligence Group’. In 1982 the head of the US Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), Major General Albert Stubblebine, facilitated an ISA signals intelligence team in Italy, which used aerial and ground-based systems to monitor and geo-locate the communications of General James Dozier’s Red Brigade kidnappers.
Controversy erupted in 1983 when retired Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel James “Bo” Gritz revealed to a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee that the ISA had supported classified plans for a cross-border mission into Laos, where ISA operatives would infiltrate to verify reports of live American POWs using surveillance and recording equipment. This testimony inadvertently blew the unit’s operational cover. A June 1983 New York Daily News report explained Gritz’s perspective. “I am not a vigilante,” Gritz said. “I was asked by my government to do what I am doing, and I am doing it.” The article continues, “Gritz claimed to be working for a special intelligence group known as the ISA.”
When USSOCOM (US Special Operations Command) was established in 1987 with JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) as one of its major subordinate commands, the already-existing ISA was fully embedded as JSOC’s dedicated clandestine intelligence support element. This gave ISA its mission: providing HUMINT, SIGINT, and specialized reconnaissance to enable Delta Force, DEVGRU, and other JSOC task forces.
Researcher Jeffrey Richelson uncovered a March 1989 memo from the ISA commander which directed termination of the use of the term “Intelligence Support Activity.” The unit would adopt new codenames such as “CENTRA SPIKE” and “GREY FOX” — the codename used by the ISA at the beginning of the War in Afghanistan. Over the years, the unit has used inconspicuous and strange names like “Task Force Orange”, “The Office of Military Support”, and “The Army of Northern Virginia”, and today , “the Activity” is widely considered to be the most secretive unit in the US Army.
In his 2024 memoir, Imminent, UFO whistleblower Luis Elizondo mentioned being recommended by Lieutenant Colonel Michael Seage for the “Great Skills” program — also called “Grey Fox”, according to Lue. In my previous article, ‘The Eyes, They Never Lie’, I mentioned an old edit of an online biography on Lue, which stated, “After approximately a year, he was assigned to the Army’s elite 902nd MI Group at Fort Meade, MD where he worked counterespionage investigations and protecting advanced DoD technologies. During his initial enlistment, Elizondo was recruited into a specialized US Army program as a civilian.” While this has not yet been officially confirmed by Elizondo, his background available on Congress’s official website plainly states, “In 1998, he [Elizondo] was recruited as a civilian intelligence officer into a sensitive US intelligence program within the Department of Defense (”DOD”), where he rose to Senior Intelligence Officer and Special Agent In-Charge.” Are they talking about Grey Fox?
Elizondo’s former close associate, US Air Force veteran Jeremy McGowan, even conceded in his 2024 Medium article on this matter, “It is POSSIBLE, that after leaving active duty, Elizondo managed to secure an administrative support role with a Grey Fox team as a DoD civilian — but his records do not support this progression in any way, shape, or form.” In McGowan’s deep dive into Elizondo’s military history, however, he completely ignored the deep, complex history of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group — a major counterintelligence unit with ties to figures like Albert Stubblebine (who commanded the 902nd in the 1970s) and Joe McMoneagle. Can’t we just FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request more information to get a clear answer from the government?
No.
In an August 2018 presentation, Elizondo seemingly attempted to explain why. “FOIA-exempt? What do you mean? Everything’s FOIA-able… No it’s not. Exemptions one and five. Why would you mark information ‘FOIA-exempt’? Well, for one, so the adversary never gets the chance to see it. People say, ‘Well if AATIP existed, I should be able to FOIA it.’ Not necessarily.” What are exemptions one and five? FOIA Exemption 1 protects information that is properly classified in the interest of national security. Agencies may withhold records that are specifically authorized under criteria established by Executive Order 13526 to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy. Exemption 5 protects inter-agency or intra-agency memoranda or letters that would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with the agency. If Elizondo was actually tied to the Army’s most clandestine unit, good luck getting the government — or Lue — to cleanly admit it. The higher the classification level, the higher likelihood the matter has to do with National Security.
In his October 2017 interview on the Joe Rogan Experience (episode #1029), Tom DeLonge made a fascinating remark about Elizondo. When DeLonge was describing his team of TTSA advisors, he stated, “They all have their top secret, TS/SCI clearances, yeah. I’m the only one that doesn’t.” The rockstar continued, “On my entire team — I’m the only one that doesn’t. Actually, Lue — that just came out. I hired him away. So he was head of all — god I can’t say that — he was in charge of all classified operations for Secretary of Defense Mattis. So he was what’s called a GS-15, right underneath the 1, 2, and 3-stars. He ran the advanced aerial threat program.” Did DeLonge accidentally (or purposely) let a secret about Elizondo’s classified history slip out?
The son of a Cuban Brigade 2506 member, Lue Elizondo speaks multiple languages. At age seven he was assembling AR-15s blindfolded. By age nine he was taking flying lessons. Before enlisting in the US Army, Elizondo double majored in Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Miami. For those unaware, the CIA used to have a covert station about twelve miles south of Miami’s main campus called “JMWAVE.” With a background like that, intelligence agencies would be intrigued.
Who better to handle all classified operations for Mattis than a member of the Army’s most clandestine unit?
- - - -
“US and British special operations forces had been on the ground inside Afghanistan for more than a month, liaising with the Northern Alliance and other factions like the Shi’ite Hazara, Mongoloid descendants of members of Genghis Khan’s forces whose Hazarajat mountain fortress had never been subjugated by the Taliban. But in the south, the US and British troops had fewer allies and were seeking more brutal ways of undermining their opponents. This operation was set up by the Activity, now using the codename Grey Fox, but normally referred to on the ground as Task Force Orange. The Activity’s agent-handlers, the spooks, had recruited sources among those Pushtun tribesmen who once supported the Taliban but were clever, and pragmatic, enough to realise that the old regime’s days were numbered. Now the shooters were taking over, creeping up on the convoy without a sound. The first the startled truckers knew of what was going on was when they were hauled out of their cabs at gunpoint, flung to the ground and had their wrists and feet bound together with white plasti-cuff restraints. They struggled in vain as they were dragged off and dumped behind the rocks above their trucks. Totally disorientated and terrified that they were about to be killed by bandits, the smugglers barely had time to work out that their captors, who were talking into microphones attached to their black hockey-style helmets and wearing night-vision goggles that glinted green, must be American troops before they heard the staccato whack-whack-whack of the rotor blades of approaching helicopters. Suddenly there was a series of flashes and the whoosh of missiles passing overhead followed by massive explosions as the two tankers burst into flames, sending out a wave of intense heat, and the oil drums on the back of the flat-bed were catapulted hundreds of feet into the air. The US special operations forces cut the plasti-cuff restraints from the wrists of their captives and paid one of the villagers twenty dollars to take the disgruntled truckers to the nearest town, telling them in basic Farsi to make sure they spread the word about what the American forces could do. While attention focused on CIA and Army Special Forces operations in the north, the Activity was busy making a name for itself in the south.”
MICHAEL SMITH, KILLER ELITE: The Inside Story of America’s Most Secret Special Operations Team (2011)
- - - -
Elizondo is not the only UFO personality tied to the secretive unit. From March 2018 through December 2019, former Special Forces Colonel Christopher C. Miller served as the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counterterrorism and Transnational Threats at the National Security Council (NSC). In this position, Mr. Miller was responsible for strategic level policy making, implementation, and support to senior NSC and White House leadership. A January 2021 Vanity Fair article described Miller as having served in “Task Force Orange”. The UFO buffs will likely recognize Miller from his appearance in Dan Farah’s 2025 documentary, The Age of Disclosure.
While the group’s current name remains elusive, there are still many former members of “The Activity” who have quietly become household names to everyday Americans. Retired Major General Charles Cleveland served as the Director of Operations and Military Deputy of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency from January 2019 to July 2022. On his online biography from the US House of Representatives, it says Cleveland has served in a variety of conventional and Special Operations organizations, including the “US Army Office of Military Support”.
Another notable individual tied to the Intelligence Support Activity — former US Army special operations warrant officer Joe Kent — served as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center from 2025 to 2026 before resigning. In Kent’s unsuccessful 2022 congressional run, he received support from both Peter Thiel and Michael Flynn. Thiel donated the legal maximum, and Flynn gave a strong endorsement on social media.
In Jacques Vallee’s newest journal, Forbidden Science 7, he revealed that Lue Elizondo and Garry Nolan met with Peter Thiel in July 2022.
According to his Air Force biography, President Trump’s Under Secretary of the Air Force from 2019 to 2021, Shon Manasco, served as a finance officer for the “Office of Military Support” from 1995-1997. Today, Manasco serves as a Senior Counselor at Palantir.
Among the former members I listed, Mr. Kent appears the most open to discussing his time in the unit.
- - - -
“In Khartoum, Waugh figured out that bin Laden owned at least four buildings. One of them stood near the Palestinian embassy, west of his private residence. The property butted up against Runway 340 at the Khartoum International Airport, giving Waugh a solid viewing perspective of goods being unloaded on the tarmac. But it was while he was observing activities at bin Laden’s building on South Riyadh Road that he got his first real break in the case. Directly across the street was a safe house owned by the US intelligence community. This safe house, it turned out, was being used by an ultrasecret US Army SIGINT unit called Intelligence Support Activity, and that went by the codename Gray Fox. Created as a Reagan-era response to the Iranian hostage rescue attempt, one of Gray Fox’s primary tasks was to collect intelligence in advance of a paramilitary operation. As Waugh understood it, Gray Fox was listening to activities going on in an Iranian safe house nearby. This Gray Fox facility presented itself as the perfect place for Waugh to set up an observation post and take the CIA’s first proprietary photographs of Osama bin Laden.”
ANNIE JACOBSEN, SURPRISE, KILL, VANISH: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins (2019)
- - - -
With its roots tracing back to the failed Iranian hostage crisis, the ISA has an interesting history and strong connections to the classified world. Considering they had a huge responsibility in capturing Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, it’s safe to assume this unit also has access to much of the DoD’s arsenal of new technology. It would also be safe to assume that ISA-related operations, which are inherently highly classified, have to do with National Security matters, making the information immune to FOIA requests.
The ISA’s alumni appear to frequently land in positions shaping national security, intelligence policy, and emerging tech oversight.
Time will tell if one of them gets a role as “UAP Czar” under President Trump.
END
- -
- -