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Other works of Thomas L. Ahern, Jr. published by the Center for the Study of Intelligence include:

Good Questions, Wrong Answers: CIA's Esti~ates of Arms Traffic ThrOUgh Sihanoukville,Cambodia During the Vietnam WarD (2004

--------'

CIA and the Generals: Covert Support toMilitary Government in South VietnamD

(1999·1 I

CIA and the House of Ngo: Covert Action in South Vietnam, 1954-630(2000,1 I

CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam0(2001,1L- _

The remaining unpublished book in this series will describe CIA's management of irregular warfareIn Laos during the Vietnam conflict.D

The Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) was founded in 1974 In response to Director ofCentral Intelligence James Schlesinger's desire to create within CIA an organization that could"think through the functions of intelligence and bring the best Intellects available to bear onIntelligence problems." The Center, comprising both professional historians and experiencedpractioners, attempts to document lessons learned from past operations, explore the needs andexpectations of 'intelligence consumers, and stimulate serious debate on current and futureiritelligence challenges.

To support these activities, CSI publishes Studies in Intelligence, as well as books and monographsaddressing historical, operational, doctrinal, and theoretical aspects of the intelligence profession.It also administers the CIA Museum and maintains the Agency's Historical Intelligence Collection.

To obtain additional copies of this or any of Thomas Ahern's books contactHR CIAU CSI PubReq@DA (in Lotus Notes) or venitik@cia.ic.gov (ICE-mail).

The cover design, byl lof Imaging and Publication Support, shows the crew of a junkabout to depart on a supply mission to an agent along the North Vietnamese coast.D

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The Way We Do Things:Black Entry OperationsInto North Vietnam,1961-1964 C

THOMAS L. AHERN, JR.

"'~~\'Center for the Study ofIntelligence

Washington, DCMay 2005

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Contents

IntroductionD 1

Chapter One: When Your Only Tool Is a HammerD 7The End of the Honeymoon0 9Singletons by Sea, Teams by Air0 11Judgment by Preponderance of EvidenceD 15Father to the Thoughtn 17Under EnemyControID 19

Chapter Two: A More Ambitious AgendaD 21Stepping Up the PaceD '0'" 22An Appearance of Success : 24Teams TOURBILLON and EROS 0 25Operation VULCAN0 ., 26Soldiering On~ : 27Upping the An e 29No Other Options 31

Chapter Three: A Hesitant EscalationD 33. Stru.ctural Problem~ 33

Business as UsuaIL_J ; 35Restrictive Policy, Amoitious PlanningD 36Ambivalence at Head~uarrsl I 38Staying With the Program 40Taking Off the Gloves 41Better Aircraft but No Better LuCkD 44Improving the Technologyn 45A Game Not Worth theCa~D 47

Chapter Four: Moving Toward Military ManagementD 49A ValedictorySurge~ 50Under Military Control 52An Uneasy Partnershi 54With One Hand Tied 54

Chapter Five: "Just Shoot Them"D , 57A CUlturallmperativeD : 59The Lust to Succeed 61The.Pitfalls of "Lessons Learned"D 63

Source NoteD ~ 65

Inde~ I ~ , 67

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IntroductionD

This rnonoqraph completes a six-volume series on the contribution of the Central. Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the conduct of the Second Indochina War. Far fromexhaustive, the series samples the major aspects of the Agency's participation. Theseinclude political action, intelligence, and pacification programs in South Vietnam;management of the contemporaneous war in Laos; the analytical controversy overthe shipment of munitions to the Viet Cong through Cambodia; and the ill-fated pro­gram in which the Saigon Station inserted agent teams into North Vietnam.D

Some of these activities were rewarded with success that still looks substantial evenif, given the outcome of the war, it was necessarily transitory. Only two of thesubjectschosen for the series represent outright failures. Their unhappy outcomes made thetask of recording them a rather joyless prospect, but upon examination both of themturned out to embody the principle that failure is more instructive than success.D

The lessons vary with the case under study. This one, the story of the agents andblack teams inserted into North Vietnam, is offered as an object lesson in what hap­pens when eagerness to please trumps objective self-analysis, when the urge to pre­serve a can-do self-image delays the recognition of a talled-e-indeed, archaic­operational technique.D

To tell the story of covert penetrations of North Vietnam without tracing the influenceon them of earlier such efforts in other locales would obscure their significance as aparadigm of the CIA approach to HUMINT collection against closed and hostile soci­eties. True, the earliest correspondence about infiltrating intelligence and guerrillaoperatives into North Vietnam makes no reference to this experience, which began inEurope during World War II. But in fact the program against Hanoi adopted agent infil­tration by parachute as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had practiced it inEurope during World War II. CIA then modified-one might say diluted-it, in defer­ence to the impossibility of arranging the ground reception parties used by the OSS,in order to apply it against the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea. In this way, thecovert infiltration of intelligence and covert action teams, mostly by air although occa­sionally overland or by sea, became an endurinq facet of the Clandestine. Service'sapproach to the problem of penetrating closed societies.D .

As applied by the OSS, the practice later known as "black entry" enjoyed its mostnotable success with the Jedburgh operation, which after D-Day inserted teams ofAmerican and indigenous nationality to mobilize local resistance movements against

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the Nazis. They armed French resistance fighters, including over 20,000 combatantsin Brittany alone, and these cut rail lines, derailed trains, ambushed German roadconvoys, and cut telephone and electric power lines.1DThe respectable showing of the Jedburgh teams, coupled with the absence of prom­ising alternatives, made it natural to apply the blind drop technique against the SovietUnion as cooperation against Hitler gave way to Cold War hostility. Both Nazi-occu­pied Europe and the Soviet Union suffered the abuses of a brutal dictatorship, and itseemed reasonable to expect the rise of a resistance movement against Stalin similar'to those that Jedburgh had supported against the Germans. In any case, as Cold Wartensions hardened, the Agency had to do something, and no better alternatives wereat hand. Accordingly, between 1949 and 1959, CIA dispatchedDagents, mostly byair, into the Soviet Union under the aegis of the REDSOX program. 20The effort enjoyed almost no success. Indeed, the chief of the Soviet Russia Divisionin the Directorate of Plans wrote in 1957 that it had been "strewn with disaster." Moreagents survived who were sent overland than those inserted by blind drop; of the lat­ter, apparently someDin all, only three ever managed to exfiltrate, and one of thesewas suspected of having been doubled. Meanwhile, the intelligence product of theprogram as a whole was "pitifully small, and the anticipated intelligence support appa­ratus, grafted on... underground resistance organizations, died aborning." Not eventhe overland operations produced anything substantial, involving as they did' shallow,short-term penetrations of "largely uninhabited ... border areas." The result was that"no REDSOX agent ever succeeded in passing himself off successfully as a Sovietcitizen and penetrating, even briefly, into the Soviet heartland."3D

In 1971, Operations Directorate (DO) historians attributed the failure of REDSOX totwo factors. One was the "implacable and ubiquitous KGB." The other was theabsence of the prospect of liberation that might have fueled resistance movementslike those in Western Europe during World War 11. 4 0The same factors that produced the REDSOX program forced a similar effort in Chinaafter Mao expelled the Nationalists in late 1949 and then, in mid-1950, sent the Peo­ple's Liberation Army south to join the fray in Korea. With US forces in bloody combatthere, CIA launched a frantic effort to weaken the 'chinese intervention by infiltratingthe mainland with guerillas and potential resistance leaders. Drawing personnel fromNationalist elements and also from non-Nationalists-the latter representing the seedof a hoped-for anti-communist Third Force-the Agency trained and dropped about

[ Ite~ms of agents onto the mainland. 50

, War Report: Office of Strategic Services (055), History Project, strQc Services Unit, Office of the AssistantS reta of War War Department, Washington, DC, 1959, 199-2002 et aI., The Illegal Border·Crossing Program, Clandes me Service Historical Series (CSHP) 098, July1 ,'lbid.,142- '0• Ibid., 145-46.

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Hans Tofte, who ran the operations launched froml Ilater said thatcommunications intercepts reflected Beijing's belief that 50,000 guerrillas threatenedits rear area; he therefore rated the program a success. ButAgency managementwas not persuaded that these operations were in fact diverting any substantial Chi­nese resources from Korea. By late 1951, Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Gen.Walter Bedell Smith was prepared to give up on them. The Agency could tie up morecommunist resources, he thought, if it turned to larger scale attacks and feints alongthe coast. Accordingly, CIA trained over] guerrillas, who conductedat least a dozen coastal raids. Whatever the results of these attacks-they may havebeen significant-the black entry program remained unproductive. 6DUndeterred by this record of failure, the Agency employed the black entry tactic~gainst North Korea. Drawing on the membership of ,-I_---,-,----,-,- ---,----.J

1__1CIA trained and dropped at leastDeams into the North during 1952 and1953. The known product of the activity was limited to one team's weather reporting,useful to the US Air Force, before the team was overwhelmed in a surprise attackafter about six weeks on the ground. 7DSeeking to explain the paucity of results, a contemporary project review noted thepoor quality of team personnel and the disruptive effects of a change of mission.Teams selected and trained for sabotage missions had abruptly been directed to ere­ate resistance movements, a task requiring a very different set of skills. If these werethe operative factors, better agents and more coherent tasking would improve theprogram's performance. But the activity was canceled after the cease-tire of rnld­1953, and the thesis could not be tested. aD

I ~were thus the only teams to meet a criterion established by William Colby, when lateras Chief of the Far East (FE) Division he described the basis of the technique. "Therationale ... springs essentially from World War II experience....The population was

. essentially passive to friendly, with at least a small element willing to participate inintelligence, sabotage, or resistance operations.1I9D• Woodrow Kuhns. unpublished monograph. "CIA and China in the Time of Mao,"Center for the Study of Intelligence,9-14.n·lbld.:-nr-11.nl-- ~7 prOj~ct.Revillw;f [undated, c.late 1953, History Staff files,D8 Ibid.9 Kuhns, 4-15; William E. Colby, Memorandum to DDRlack Team Infiltration by Air and Sea Against FE DeniedAreas-Cold War," 2 August 1963, quoted in Kuhns, 9'L-J

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Probably because it was so obvious, Colby did not make explicit the connectionbetween favorable indigenous attitudes and the exactions of an occupying foreignpower. He also left unmentioned a key element in the motivation of potential recruitsfor 'ntell' ence and resistance 0 erations namel the ros ect f x .

ation.

There were other aspects of Colby's participation in ass operations in Europe thatmight have provided a cautionary note as the Saigon Station looked for ways to pen­etrate communist-controlled North Vietnam. Colby had jumped twice, once into occu­pied France and once into Norway, which was still in German hands in early 1945.The French mission featured a wild mixture of mishaps and serendipity: droppedsquarely into a town some 25 miles from the pre-arranged site, Colby's team escapedthe occupying Germans only with the help of French civilians awakened by parachut­ists landing in their gardens. 100Serendipity took over after two nights of exhausted stumbling through the countryside .toward the drop zone. Coming upon a farmhouse unaccountably still lit at two in themorning, Colby took a chance, and sent a French-speaking subordinate to the door.In a coincidence worthy of a John Buchan novel, the occupants turned out to be thevery maquis cell that had waited in vain for the airdrop. The cell leader, inexplicablyuncooperative, was later identified as a Gestapo informant. He had abstained frombetraying the impending arrival of the ass team only because the tide of war hadalready turned, and he was cautiously playing both sides of the street. 11DAs Gen. George Patton's Third Army broke the German lines at St. La and began roil­ing east, Colby found other resistance leaders to receive the munitions that fueled theuprising now erupting in the German rear area. In Norway, too, in early 1945, Colby'sdetermination and courage led to tangible results, as his team blew a bridge and sab­otaged a length of railway on the route from Finland back toward Germany. Savedfrom pursuing patrols by the end of hostilities, Colby rode a train north over the trackshe had so recently sabotaged; he later recalled having been "chastened by the shorttime in which it had been repaired by Russian paW's."12 0Despite the derring-do mystique that still surrounds ass activity in both Europe andSoutheast Asia, it is clear that black entry operations in Euro e at least made onl aperipheral contribution to the main war effort.

'0 William E. Colby, Honorable Men (New York: Simon andSchusler, 1979), Chapter10" Ibid.C1---,12 Ibid., 50.U

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Whatever the considerations that led to its application in North Vietnam, no sign hasbeen found that they conducted a serious search for an alternative. Indeed, there mayhave existed no such alternative, using either human or technical means. There arethings that, in a given place at a given time, are simply impossible.D

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Chapter One: When Your Only ToolIs.aHammerD

For five years after the Geneva Accords of1954 divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel of lat­itude, Ho Chi Minh in the North and Ngo DinhDiem in the South concentrated on consolidat­ing their respective regimes. For both of them,eradicating actual and even potential oppo­nents at home became major agenda items,and neither gave much material support to hispotential allies on the other side of the Demili­tarized Zone. For Diem, these were the Catho­lics who had chosen to remain in the Northinstead of joining the migration authorized atGeneva. Ho Chi Minh, meanwhile, imposed a .quiescent stance on the thousands of VietMinh, non-communist nationalists amongthem, who had not regrouped to the north whileCatholics were coming south. II I .

For more than a year after Diem's accessionas prime minister, the CIA in Saigon was pre­occupied with helping him prevail over hismostly non-communist opponents in theSouth. His unexpected success encouragedthe Eisenhower administration to repudiate theunification elections that the Geneva signato­ries (the United States not among them) hadmandated for July 1956. Instead, Washingtonwould support Diem as the leader of a newnation-state, one that faced a hostile Demo­cratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) across theDemilitarized Zone. This long-term commit­ment would demand as much intelligence aspossible on North Vietnamese and Viet Minhcapabilities and intentions, and the stationbegan trying to build Diem's nascent intelli­gence and security services into cooperative

partners in the intelligence war against thecommunists in both North and South. 2DThis bilateral approach seems to have beentaken as a matter of course. And it is indeedhard to see how an independent CIA effort,based In South Vietnam, could have succeededwithout Govemment of Vietnam (GVN) partici­pation. To begin with, the station lacked ade­quate access to agent candidates for useagainst either the southern Viet Minh or NorthVietnam. In addition, a unilateral program of anysubstantial size, whatever its prospects for suc­cess, would certainly have come to the attentionof a very prickly Ngo Dinh Diem. The stationtherefore relied from the beginning on SouthVietnamese partners to acquire agents and pro­vide facilities and administrative personnelD

Operating with the GVN had its drawbacks.Like any authoritarian ruler, Diem tully under­stood the potential of his security services tobe used against him by ambitious or disgrun­tled underlings, and he chose their leaderswith attention more to personal loyalty than tocompetence. This order of priority certainlyapplied in the case of Tran Kim Tuyen, a phy­sician whom Diem installed as head of the Ser­vice for Political and Social Studies, known byits French acronym SEPES. Not even a char­tered intelligence organization, it was in factonly the intelligence section of the Can Lao,nominally a political party but essentially acadre organization of Diem's functionaries. ButTuyen enjoyed the confidence of the president,and CIA began trying to cultivate a productiveworking relationShip.D

In what looked like a break for the station,Tuyen's deputy, an energetic ex-Viet Minh, dis­played none of his boss's reserve toward jointoperations. But things cooled abruptly duringhis visit to Washington in late 1955 when

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1 In Vietna:n~~H;story (Penguin Books, 1984), Stanley Karnow gives a good survey of the French defeat in Indochina andthe SUbsequent evolution of a divided Vietnam!I . . """ "2 For a more neerly comprehensive history of CTi\1elationships with Ngo Dlnh Diem and his intelligence services, see theauthor's CIA and the House of Ngo: Covert Action in South Vietnam 1954-63 (Washington, DC: Center for the StUdy ofIntelligence, 2000) (hereafter House of Ngo), especially Chapter 90

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AI Ulmer, FE Division chief, made an extempo­raneous and unsuccessful effort to recruithlm. 3DThe resulting boost to endemic Vietnamesexenophobia damaged the prospects of a colle­gial relationship with SEPES, but Diem wasInterested in it, in any case, more for domesticsurveillance than for policy-level intelligence.Perhaps not yet recognizing Diem's intentions,and still hoping to turn Tuyen into a productivepartner, the station bought him a motorizedfishing junk to transport personnel and sup­plies for the nine agent nets he claimed to berunning in the North. Case officerI I

c=!began noticing procedural anomalies intne radio messages purportedly received fromthese agents, and further investigationrevealed that the agent nets were fictitious.The junk, it turned out, had been leased to aJapanese fishing firm. 4 D 'Diem and Tuyen had also agreed to a smalljoint program of minor harassment of coastalfacilities in North Vietnam, but (assuming itwas, in fact, separate from the putative agentnets) It produced no recorded results. Indeed,it is not clear that any such operations wereever launched.sD

These embarrassments did not lead the stationto cut its ties with SEPES. Beginning in 1957,however, it did insist on full access to agentsand agent communications. This painful tight­ening of the ground rules took time to put intoeffect, and when President Diem proposedchanging the SEPES harassment program toone of intelligence collection, Chief of StationNicholas Natsios proposed to make a new

start, with new agent personnel. CIA wouldnow work also with the second of the two ser­vices that reported directly to the president, anarmy unit first called the Presidential SurveyOffice and then renamed the Presidential liai­son Office (PLO).60The PLO was headed by Lt. Col. Le QuangTung, another Diem loyalist, whose deferentialstyle tended to obscure his modest profes­sional qualifications. US support to his organi­zation came from both the Department ofDefense and CIA, and was designed at first toequip Diem with a guerrilla cadre capable ofoperating behind the lines after a communistinvasion of the South. Diem agreed in early1958 to let Natsios and Tung proceed with this,but again there were no recorded results. 70A similar fate befell parallel efforts with the Mil­itary Security Service (MSS), charged withcounterintelligence protection for the armedforces, and with the surete, the successor tothe French internal security organ later calledthe Police Special Branch. The pattern estab­lished with Dr. Tuyen and Col. Tung repeateditself with the MSS, whose commander some­how never seemed to get word in his ownchannels of Diem's agreement with the COSfor joint intelligence operations against thecommunists. Meanwhile, Diem acceptedadvisers and material support for the Surete,but the reward in useful intelligence was insig­nificant. As late as 1959, the only pol ice report­ing reaching the station came from low-level,casual informants. If the Surete had any pene­trations of the communist military or politicalapparatus, it was concealing them from thestation.aD

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3 Houseof Ngo,60.n• Kenneth Conboy ana--Dale Andrade, Spies& Commandos: HowAmericaLosttheSecretWarInNorth Vietnam (Lawrence:University Press of Kansas, 2000q19-20. No reference to this deception has been found in CIA records.O• Houseof NLfP. 60, 118-19.• Con~ 20 Houseof Ngo, Tf .0 "1lbid·LJ '• Houseof Ngo, 120.0

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The End of the 'HoneymoonD

The GVN's suppression of the Viet Minh thatbegan in 1955 eventually had the effect ofunleashinga fUll-fledged, communist-ledinsur­gency. In January 1959, answeringappealsfrom the leadership in the South to save It fromdestruction, the Politburo in Hanoi revoked itsprohibition on armed resistance. The southerncommunists now abandoned "political strug­gle" for a policy of "armedstruggle."This wouldrequire, among other things, logistical supportfrom the North. Accordingly, in May, the DRVcreated the 559th Transportation Group, themilitary organization that eventually built thetortuous supply lineth~h Laos known asthe Ho Chi Minh Trail.LJ

But the desperate communists in the Southcould not wait for supplies and men to begintrickling in from the North. On their own, theylaunched guerrilla operations and terroristattacks on Diem's officials that dramaticallyrevealed the failure of GVN repression todestTY tie Viet Minh staybehind organiza- ,tion.9

In January 1960, the first communistTetoffen­sive humiliated Diem's army and traumatizedrural administrators,driVing many of them to 'the security of military outposts, At this point,some of the younger officers in the SaigonSta­tion were already persuaded that, withoutmajor GVN reforms, the influence of the VietMinh would only grow. Indeed, a few Amerl­.cens--Ambassedor to the GVN Elbridge Dur­brow prominent among them-had begun asearly as 1957to deplore Diem's indifferencetowinning the consent of the governed. But even

Diem'scritics seem to have sharedthe prevail­ing inability to imagine spontaneous supportfor a totalitarian movement.GVN derelictionsmight make the peasantryvulnerable to men­daciouscommunist propaganda, but the con­ventional mindset viewed the insurgency ashavlnq no local impetus; it was solely a crea­ture of Hanoi,lOD

This perspective led, in turn, to the inferencethat the road to defeat of the Viet Cong, as theGVN beganlabelingthe Viet Minh, ranthroughHanoi.The insurgencywould end when thecost of supporting it rose to a level unaccept­able to the DRV.l1DDiem seems to have shared this view. Incapa­ble of finding any flaw in his own governingstyle, he was naturally inclined to look for rem­edies that took the war to the enemy. But atleast until late 1959, this orientationhad coex­isted with a stubborn aversion to joint covertoperationswith CIA against the communists in 'either North or South. At that point, it seems,the SUdden, incendiary burst of insurgentenergypersuadedhim of the needto take helpwhere he could get it.D

Whatever Diem's precise motivation, CIA inSaigon now had the green light to work on abasis of full reciprocitywith both SEPES andthe PLO.The problem was that the GVN andits CIA advisers were now playing catch-upball, especiallywhen it came to operationsagainst the North. Ho Chi Minh had had fiveyears to consolidate the regimentation of hiscountry, whose borders were almost hermeti­cally sealed off from Western-oriented neigh­bors. Theresulting dearth of the mostbasic

• The most illuminating account of Diem's contest with the Viet Cong for control of the rural population Is stili Jeffrey Race'sWar Comes /0 Long An (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). For descriptions of Diem's "Anti-CommunistDenunciation Campaign," see Race and the author's CIA and Rural Pacification In Sou/h vietnsm (Washington, DC: Centerfor the Study of Intelligence, 2001).0 .10 The CIA perspective on the Insurgency, and the Agency's contribution to the counterinsurgency effort later known as thepacification program, are described in CIA and Pacifica/ion. n11 The term Viet Minh is a contraction of Viet Nam Doc lap Do';;gJiAlnh, the Vietnam Independence league, the front createdby Ho Chi Minh in 1941 to resist the Japanese occupation of Indochina. In the late 1950s, the term gradually gave way toViet Cong, t.e, Vietnamese Communists, a pejorative term coined by the GVN and applied mainly to the party apparatus inSouth Vietnam.D

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operational intelligence-identity documenta­tion and travel controls, and the organizationand deployment of internal security forces, forexample-meant that operational planningtook place, at first, in something of a vacuum.The first, tentative step to fill that vacuumwould come in the form of singleton agentoperations across the Demilitarized zoneLJ

It took a full year for the first jointly run agent tocross the Demilitarized Zone into North Viet­nam. COde-namedI Ihe paddledacross the Ben Hai River on an inner tube justbefore midnight on 5 December 1960. His Viet­namese case officer, hidden on the southbank, heard the air escape from the inner tubeasl Islashed it before burying itand setting off on foot toward the north. Thedocumentation provided by CIA'~ II Igot him through two policechallenges, and he proceeded to the nearbytown of Ho Xa before returning to South Viet­nam the same day.120By the time agent! !conductedhis first mission, South Vietnam was about tobecome the testing ground of a new US com­mitment to contain the spread of communismin the post-colonial Third World. John F.Kennedy had become president-elect after acampaign featuring Republican charges thatthe Democrats were "soft on communism." InJanuary 1961, Soviet leader Nikita Khrush­chev proclaimed his commitment to "wars ofnational liberation," and Kennedy promptlyaccepted what he interpreted as a direct Sovietchallenge. Growing anxiety over the GVN'sdeteriorating position meant that South Viet­nam would now become the laboratory for USexperimentation with the new doctrines ofcounterinsurgency and irregular warfare.D

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Only a week after his inauguration, the newpresident told the National Security Councilthat he wanted "guerrillas to operate in theNorth," with CIA his executive agent. In March,he inquired about progress, whether the NorthVietnamese were getting a taste of their ownmedicine. They weren't, at least not yet, andKennedy ordered the Agency to implement his"instructions that we make every possible effortto launch guerrilla operations in North Vietnamterritory."13D

Not everyone familiar with such operationsthought the idea made much sense. At aboutthe same time that Kennedy was pressing forresults in North Vietnam, Robert Myers, thenCOS inl Ivisited Saigon. Briefinghis fellow COS on activity In Vietnam, WilliamColby described the new program in whichteams of Vietnamese were dropping by para­chute into North Vietnam. Myers, who hadwatched the failure of such operations intoChina in the mid-1950s, told Colby it wouldn'twork: Just as the Chinese civil war was over,and Mao firmly established in Beijing, Ho ChiMinh was now in charge in Hanoi. His Leninistregime would be proof against any interloperswandering the countryside, collecting intelli­gence and/or fomenting reslstance.!' 0Colby disagreed, arguing that suitable safeareas could be found, at least in lightly popu­lated areas where black teams could set upreasonably secure bases. In retrospect, Myersthought this a projection onto Vietnam ofColby's ass experience with the Jedburghprogram: "he thought it was like Norway." 150Whatever the merits of Myers's objections,Colby's enthusiasm matched White Houseeagerness to challenge Ho Chi Minh's controlin the North. An~ challenge to thefuture ofProjectl ]was being made on the

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North Vietnam: Black Insertions, 1961-62

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What the president found a frustratingly slowCIA response did not reflect any lack of atten­tion to his demand for action against the DRV.In fact, by the spring of 1961, painstakingpreparations for team operations had beenunderway for almost a year. These were to bepreceded by singleton agents infiltrated intothe DRV. The agents would collect Informationon the communists' security pract ices for useby airborne teams dropped near their villages

other side of the world , in the form of the III­conceived operation to unseat Cuba's FideiCastro. Approved by the Eisenhower adminis­tration and adopted by John F, Kennedy, itcame to grief at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961.Even though the burgeon ing CIA-supportedHmong resistance in northeastern Laos wasthen beginning to look like a major success,the Bay of Pigs inflicted a grievous blow to theAgency's reputation for competence in irregu­lar warfare .160

Singletons by Sea, Teams by Air (U)

At the same time, hesitant to throw out thebaby with the bath, the administration over­came its dismay over the Bay of Pigs suffi­ciently to leave CIA, for the moment, in chargeof the nascent North Vietnam program.Indeed, the president expanded ProjectC]~__[modest charte r as he instructed theAgency to use its teams to conduct wide-rang­Ing unconventional warfare. At the same time,he shrank CIA's overall respons ibility withthree National Secur ity Action memoranda,signed in late June 1961, which transferred tothe Pentagon much of CIA's authority to planand conduct Irregular warfare . 171l

I. Conboy 35, Shultz, 21017 lbid·CI.Sedgwick Tourison secrotAanr SecretWar (Annapol is, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995), 34. SUbsequent recollection sof Saigon omcers Uk who interpreted the turn to airborne operations as a response tlLJllilssure lrom the newKennedy administration, overlooked the tortuous logistics that preceded the first team inliltrationsL _ J

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eventual contact with other.. .agentsinside the target area) ; the selection ofzones of operation, base zones andgeneral areas in which to choose dropzones, all of which had to be worked outas a tunction of the available intelligenceof the area, the locations of the homes oftheagents' relatives, andtheviews of theagents themselves ... . Long before , ofcourse, the process of spotting.develop ing end organ izing the agentpersonnel for these missions had beenaccomplished and involved the selectionof capable candidates [and) the matchingof their personalities into compatibleteems. In fact, this process was begunalmostexactlyone year before the firstteam was successfUlly dropped intoNorth Vietnam ."U

Much of the sama work went into the parallelprogram of singleton penetrations, and on26 March 1961, the Saigon Station once againlaunched agentC-- J landing him byjunk under cover 01 darkness near Dong Hoi ,not far above the DMZ. This time, he stayedfour days , observ ing communist pollee con­trois and "various minor military insta llations."Still using fabricated documenta tion, he took abus south to Vinh linh, then walked to the BenHal River, crossing back into South Vietnam,a arentiy again under cover 01 darkne ss.20

The first airborne leam was still waiting for afavorable conjunction of weather and moonphase when Ihe station and Col. Tunglaunched the next and more ambitious sing le­ton agent operat ion. Transported by a motor­ized fishing j unk 01 the type common 10thearea, agent; --Was inserted intothe Northin earty April 1961. He landed on the karst­studded coast 01 Ha Long Bay, east 01 the port

ia use to land In Ha LonQ8ar.D

.the development 0 coverstories for various contingencies;... theplann ing of the bundles to be droppedwith each team so that they would not betoo heavy but would include everythingnecessary 10 the mission; theprocurement...ol old French Indochinesesilver piaster coins [and 01) target areacunencles; the development...ofreportingrequirements given each team;the assignment of control signals (andother bona /ides for use in case of

Preparations for each team included theprocurement of steme equipment, someof it authentic North Vietnamese ilems

The station later oeianec lor Headquarterswhat this process entai led:

I I FV$A 12657 ,24 August 1961,10 FVSA 1218 1, 20 April 1961, owhere.inlhe meagercorrespondence abOUt inf!n,stiol'l across iheDMZ ISt ere any escnption Ihe measuresused 10avoid discovery cvORVsocuntyD

12

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I'05303948

of Haiphong, and set off to find his family'scommune. There, he was supposed to recruitsomeone to operate the generator for hisWorld War ll-era RS-1 agent radio." DGiventhe uncertaintiescreatedbythe needfora second man, the station accepted that itmight be weeks before the agent came up onthe air. In fact, It did not have long to walt. Eiud­Ingdiscovery,Clcached his radiogearandmade hisway to hisfamily's commune, wherehe persuaded his brother to help. After findinga hiding place forDin the forest, the tworetrieved the gear. They then dispatched thefirst of an Initial series of 23 messages thatinauguratedthe longest and most prolific radiocorrespondence from any penetrationof theNorth run either by CfA or by its successor, theSpecialOperations Group of the MIlitaryAssis­tance CommandNietnam (MACV)."D

In mid-June,Clsuddenly fell silent. On the17th,militiamenof the People'sArmed SecurityForce (PASF), a rural internalsecurity forceunderthe Ministryof the Interior, arrestedhimand his brother for espionage, A fisherman'sdiscoveryof the undamaged skiff used by theagent fa reach shorefrom the junk had led to asearchof the area and the discoveryof theholes he had used for temporaryconcealmentof his RS-! radio. A house-to-house searchIol­iowed,concentrating on familieswith ties to theSouth or the Frenchcolonialregime. Reportsfrom two villagers then broughtthe hunt to anend, One reported seeinga stranger, living in abeachfronthouse,who avertedhis face duringan accidental encounter. The second reportedseeing someonefrom the same house displ\!y.:...,ing a ballpointpen, thena rarity in theDRV."U

The Interruptionof radio traffic could havearisen from innumerable, mostly innocuous,

causes, and whenc=J:ame backon the airsome weeks later, he offereda plausible storyabout DRV security measuresthat had forcedhimout of hissafehaven.Accordingly, over thecourse of the next four months,the stationandits PLO partners launched at least three moresingletonsby land or sea into North Vietnam.Expectations remainedmodest, with survivalthe agents' maingoal. The intelligencetargetsfor one such] I were to "be assignedonce the agent is in place depending on theaccess he turns outto have." Meanwhile, asthis series of insertions began, the stationmoved in late May 1961 Into the airbomephase of the program."D

The first airborne team,dubbed CASTOR, hadbeen selected primarily for its prospects of sur­vivalln a remotearea populated by non-Viet­namesa tribes; as with the singleton agents, itsaccessto important intelligence had beenasecondary consideration. But as it happened,by the time it was readyto drop IntoSon LaProvince, the neighboring kingdomof Laoshadbegunto crumbleundercommunistpressure.By happycoincidence, the team wouldbelocatedwithin rangeof Route6, which ransouthwest into Laos, and could be tasked tomonitorDRV supportof the insurgency there."

DNear midnight on 27 May,a twin-engine C-47with civilian South Vietnamese markingsentered DRV airspace at a point chosen toavoid known antiaircraftemplacements.Piloted by Major Nguyen Cao Ky,the flamboy­ant Vietnamese Air Force officer who laterbecameprime minister, then vice president,ofthe GVN, the intruder proceededat low alti­tude, naVigating by the light of the full moon,"

D

~l FVSA 1218'8 Conboy, 25-260i2 Conboy, 26. _

t3 tbld., 25-26. 21~ilOl<UDll<>UWL[=======::;::======::::J2~ Ibid. n FVtj2.Z91..28 Soptember 1961 I IFVSA 12934, 9Novem~1961 _~ Conboy, 37.211 Conboy, 36.

13

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Ky reported delivering Team CASTOR to theappointed drop zone, and the station waitedwithIncreasing anxietyforthe firstradiocontactNotuntil29 Junedid the teambreakItssilence,but it then cameon the air with a reassuringaccount of earlydifficulties now resolved. Arelieved Saigon Station accepted the rationile'land promised an Immediate supplydrop.27

In fact, CASTOR had come under enemycon­trol only four days after Its 27 May landing. Itsarrival had beencompromised, first by a radarinstaliation located under its flight path overMac Chau District, and'then by reports fromalarmed villagers reacting tothe unprece­dented noise of an aircraft passingat nightover their remote hamlets. The drop zone, fur­thermore, lay only e kilometer from one ofthese Villages. Havingquickly pinpointed CAS­TOR's location, the PASF neededonly threedays to surroundthe team,which surrenderedwithout a flght."D . .

Meanwhile, unawareof this disaster, CIA andthe PLO launched Team ECHOon 2 June.This drop, well to the southeastof CASTOR,also went according to plan.The crew, confi­dent of its navigationto the drop zone, sawallpersonneland cargo chutes open, and theInsertionlooked like a success. But, as withCASTOR, the drop was followed by threeweeks of silence,and, when ECHq finallycame on the air, It provokedconcern by usingan Impropercall sign. Managersof the covertcommunications facility suggested that this."could be attributed to nervousness" at the firstcontact, but they wanted reassurance that the"crypto control signals" had been properlyused. If not, the team's securitywas suspect,even thoughthe message's"fist prinf'-anoperator's characteristic styleof operatingthe

key-indicated that 'ECHO's operator had infact transmit1ed it,29D

The possibility that the operator was workingunderenemycontrol seemsnot at first to havebeen explicitlyaddressed. This omissiondelayedserious consideration of what turnedout to be the fact. for DRVsecurityhad alreadytakenTeam ECHO into custody. Like TeamCASTOR, it had landed near a village, in thiscase so close to it that the participants at anight political indoctrination session sawthe C~

47 silhouetted against the moon. Its first mes­sage, on 23 June, had been the only one notsent under enemy control. By that time, theteam knew that it had been compromised; itwas cepturedwhile fleeing toward the laotianborder· 30 DByearlyJuly, Headquarters beginningto worryabout the tardy first broadcastsfrom CASTORand ECHO, and ECHO then provoked further

.worrieswith Itssilence,afterthe flrst contacton23 June, for exactlya month.A third team,DIDO, had been dropped Into Lai Chau Prov­ince. inthenorthwest on29 June,where it wasto supplementCASTOR'santicipatedcover­age of traffic into Laos. Washington askedwhether it, like the others, had been instructedto comeon the air within three days of land­ing. 3 1DPresumably it had, but Team DIDOhad lastedonfyaboutfour weeksbeforejoining itscompa­triots in detention. Unableat first to find thebundle containing its radio, the team combedthe hills lookingfor it until they encountered aPASF patrol and were captured. Thus, by the~dlof JU'r' all three airdropped teams, as wellas were in North Vietnamese hands.32

I

.1

14

8' -n .fS-Seplember1:1 I

30 June 1961 IFVSA 12657.n~ on ay. 6.38. Presumab)i&rer faulty intelligence or faulty naVIgation, or a combination therOOr,"accounts for thefrequent drops-if Conboy's informants are correct-of blackentry learns onto populated areas, butnothing has beendiscovered thatiIIuminalaS~~J-1 --,'I 1,5.h~y 1961,L- . IFVSA 12657.0ca Conboy,39.L.J .

-!---------------_ __.._ .

h05303948

~R

Judgment by Preponderance of Evidenceo 'Headquarters' query about DIDO (no answerto it has been found) may well have been pro­voked by the loss of the aircraft trying to dropsupplies to Team CASTOR. On 1 July, it hadentered DRV airspace, then simply disap­peared. Subsequent correspondence betweenHeadquarters and the station focused on thetension between the urgent neceesity of sup­plying viable teams and the risk that such mis­sions might~d aircraft and their crews todestruction·u

The station, concerned not to abandon starv­Ing teams-and perhaps Just vlsceratly reluc­tant to admit possible failure-wanted toemploy a permissive standard for approval ofsupply missions. Responding on 25 July,Headquarters noted that Hanoi radio hadrevealed its possession of "much info re allteams." The field should, therefore, assumethat the "enemy may be preparing apprehen­sion cps." Nevertheless, having reviewed theavailable info on all three teams, "particularlyCASTOR," Headquarters accepted the pro­posed criterion: in the absence of "conclusive

IeVldere" of enemy control, elithre.!!.Dteams should be supplied."U

Headquarters may not have known, at thispoint, about the tardy second trensmission byTeam ECHO, on 23 July, the one that first gavethe station "strong indication that the ... teammay be under the control of the opposition."The main object of Washington's attention wasstill CASTOR, as Headquarters noted on 28July. Direction-finding (OF) analysis of CAS­TOR transmissions indicated its radio to besited considerably northeast of the team'sreported bivouac, and the station acknowl-

edged that, if the team was not doubled, it wascertainly "extremely hot." But Saigon ques­tioned the utility of resolvinqthe issue of bonafides by demanding more intelligence report­ing. The DRV could easily feed the team, with­out any significant damage to national security,any information it could reasonably beexpected to collect. And if pressed for more,CASTOR's putative DRV handlers would havethe team present the entirely plausible argu­ment that its parlous security situation pre­cluded more aggressive collection efforts. 340The available evidence allowed continuedhope that CASTOR was still viable, but TeamECHO was another matter. Its bona fides werenow "dubious," at best, the result of continuinganomalies in its message traffic that suggesteda surreptitious effort by the radio operator toindicate hostile control. In early August, thestation proposed ordering ECHO to exfiltrateas a way of testing its freedom. But the factremained that it had lost one of its four meneven before launch, when he was dismissedafter what the station called a breach of secu­rity. And the team had reported injuries toanother as he hit the ground. The remainingtwo, hobbled by their injured 'comrade, wouldbe able to do little. And even if it was still clean,the team was "almost as 'hot as CASTOR.""

DThe station announced on 1 August that CAS­TOR would get a supply drop that night. Some­thing must have prevented it, for two days laterHeadquarters proposed a moratorium on sup­ply missions to that team while everyonestepped back to have a look at the whole pro­gram. Acknowledging the station's Immenseeffort to do something about North Vietnam,Washington acknowledged a "strong reserva­tion" about the utility of infiltration efforts, at

SA 12657;SAIG4120, 1 Augus11961,

~i!ffi~@I'i[J===========~ he substanceof the station's

'5::;;:;:::;;~fllYy~m"":.SePtem er, the stencn cone u e t at the ECHO radio o~arator had Indeed consciously~gnaredhavmgcoma under ensmycontrol'LI _

15

b05303948

least those by air. "In all probability ECHO iscompromised. DIDO's status is doubtfulbecause of [the team's] complete silence."Regarding CASTOR, Headquarters still sawjust two alternatives: force it to produce posi­tive intelligence or, falling that, order it to exfil­trate. The station should levy detailedrequirements on roads, and ground and airtraffic. The team should also be told thatanother try at a supply flight would have to waitfor the next moon phase." D .Saigon did not respond, apparently, to the Invi­tation to evaluate the entire program. It didagrea to send intelligence requirements, buttold Headquarters not to expect too much fromCASTOR, "due necessity avoid capture."Washington had at this point already suq­gested an aiternativa to Insertion by parachute,telling the field of a "new approach" to NorthVietnamese operations that would make use ofthe Hmong irregulars then being armed innortheastern Laos. These, under their charts­matic leader Major Yang Pao, were now edg­ing toward the border with the DRV's Son LaProvince, in which Team CASTOR was operat­ing. If tha Hmong could continue thairprogress, their forward locations might serveas launch points foroverland infiltration ofteams into the DRV's mountainous north­west, 37DMeanwhile, whatever the level of skepticism atHeadquarters, CIA would continua to rely on air­dropped teams for Intelligence on inland DRVtargets. But by mid-August 1961, althoughDIDO had finally come up on the air, none of thethree teams in place had produced any signifi­cant Intelligence. Headquarters suggested forc­ing the pace, getting them to move Into theplanned second phase of operations by orga­nizing and directing intelligence nets. LikeWashington, the station implicitly accepted-at

least for the purposes of this discussion-theteams' freedom from enemy control when itagain cautioned against expecting too much toosoon. All three teams, "despite understandabledifficulties:' were just approaching the secondphase. It was thus "premature tojU~ defini­tively either their value or 10yalty.""U

In addition, Saigon felt obliged to "take excep­tion" to Headquarters' proposed creation of"safe zones:' in which the teams would organizea tribal resistance to Incursion by DRV securityforces. Such an effort would be "quickly moppedup," The station insisted, therefore, that teams"living clandestinely" conduct any acti~ro­

gram of sabotage andharassment. 39 U

The debate continued, always under the tacithypothesis that the three teams were free ofhostile control. On 17 August, Headquartersnoted that all had been chosen explicitiy forparachute drop into areas that were home tofriends andrelatives, and wondered why con­tact with these people would be more secureafter a month in hiding than after a few days. "Itcould be argued that the reverse is true sincethe longer the delay between arrival and con­tact the more the necessity for air resupply."And the suggestion about "safe areas" hadassumed their location in "areas ditiicult forDRV forces to assaUlf.""D

This cable, released by the acting chief of FEDivision, revealed the pressures on theAgency to get results: "Would again empha­size interest very high levels [in Washington In]positive action realized thru [joint station-PLOteam] ops North Vietnam," This pressuredoubtless encouraged the station's eagernessto supply teams CASTOR and DIDO. DIDOhad been assessed as the best of the threeteams during training, and Saigon wanted torun the "calculated risk" entailed in supplying it

16 I

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C05303948

with food and radio batteries. DIDO's secondand third messageshad provided a "reason­able explanation" for the team's six-weeks'silence, and fhe station thoughf other minoranomalies inconclusive. These included thestrength of the radio signal and conflicting tes­timony about the initial drop: the alrcrew hadreported that all parachutes opened, whileDIDO was now claiming that one cargo chutehad failed. 41D .The request for a supply mission to CASTORalso looked at the bright side of things. The sta­tion and its Vietnamese partners had done acountarespionage analysis which "Indicate[dj"that the team's security was "not compromisedto date." Except for inconclusive OF results,the "comma aspects" of the operation were"favorable on the whole." True, if the crew ofthe downed supply flight had been captured, itcould have given DRV security valuable infor­mation, but steps had been taken, by "chang­ing the resupply route and team location," toneutralize this threat. The likelihood that theaircrew had pinpointed the CASTOR dropzone, and thus the vicinity of Its operatingbase, was not addressed."0The cable offering fhis rationale crossed with amessage from Headquarters with more badnews about CASTOR. A "preliminary study" ofits message traffic indicated that the team wasnot using the only source of power droppedwith it, the GN-58 hand-cranked generator. Iffurther analysis were to confirm this finding,CASTOR would have to be judged as almostcertainly doubled.·O

Headquarters wanted its communicationsbase Inl 10 come up with a defin-itive answer by 21 August, but nothing in the

surviving record reveals what, if any, reply Itreceived. One can onlyinferthat the issueremained, at worst, unresolved, foron that day,Headquarters approved sUP,Q'Y,missions toboth CASTOR and DIDO."U

Father to the ThoughtD

Whatever the obstacles-mechanical, cornrnu­rucations, orweather-these drops were notmade. Meanwhile, Headquarters and the sta­tion were negotiating theterms ofa progress

. report to the inter-agency Vietnam task force inWashington. One section was to deal withDc::Jeam operations in the North, and Wash­ington thOUght Saigon's upbeat assessment oftheir security too categorical: "Can we state withas much certainty as [you] indicate that all fourteams [are] free of enemy controlT"O

The four teams, unnamed in Headquarters'cable, must have been the three infiltra1ted bV]air-CASTOR, ECHO, and DIDO-andthe singleton who had at this point reported therecruitment of several informants. As it haddone with the first approval of supply missions,Headquarters now chose to give the task forcethe most optimistic possible interpretation ofthe teams' security. It changed the field's sec­ond submission, apparently stilt a little too rosy,but managed a reassuring tone for itsinter­agency partners: "Lacking firm evidence to thecontrary, all four teams appear to be free of .ORV control.""O

The suggestion that only conclusive evidencecould create even the appearance of enemycontrol defied FE Division's own analyses of

.the three teams inserted by airdrop. The kindof evasive logic-chopping to which Headquar-

C0 5 303 94 8

•

3

{While we] appreciate Hqs frequenliyhelpful reminders a/ points (0 consider,also hope it apparent we not neglecting{to] analyze these ops on continuingbasis. Hope this can eliminate lengthy

The cable concluded with a pro forma-evenpatronizing-bow to Headquarters ' concernsabout team security:

But the availab le inlormation provided thebasis, inthestation'sview, fornomorethan an"educated guess as to whether [the operationswere] enemy-controlledor not." Even withECHO, suspect Irom the very beginn ing, thestation thought it proper to have given it thebenetit of the doubt. Urging the team to exl il­trate and applying "other challenges and tests"saved time otherwise wasted in the "prepara­tion and dispatch to Hqs [all lengthy but pre­mature and inconclusive CE analyses."4 DThe station went on 10 defend what it againdescribed as its "educated guess" that ARESremained Iree 01 hosti le control. The agenthimself, it noted, had reported even ts-like theDRV's discovery 01 the skiff in which he hadlanded-that suggested a compromise ofsecurity. It interpreted Hanoi radio broadcastsabout this and other evidence of clandestineagent activity as incompatible withC==hav­ing been captured and doubled . The real prob­lem, as Saigon saw it, was the agent'sreporting that he and his relatives were "hot:This meant not only the continuing danger ofarrest but a supportnetwork nooted even if Itsmembers evoided capture ."

other .. .agent op is or has been above suspi­cion: It accepted Washington's criteria as"valid to consider in [a) balanced evaluation ofagent pertormance and control"; as such, theywere being duly "noted and ...cons idered : "o

, ..-

Nevertheless, there weretoomanyindications01 trouble lor the issue to go away, and thecycle 01 aile mating doubt and optimism contin­ued. On 7 September 1961, Team ECHO senta clear-text message that said, "aireadyarrested : It repeated the same message thenext day. But the station made no mention 01this when on the 18th it responded in charac­teristically ambivalent lash ion to anotherexpression 01 f/eada arters' nagging doubts ,this time about L The_station said it "fullyconcurs" that "neltlier or eny

ters resorted here invited a skeptical responseeven from readers unfamiliar with the opera­tional correspondence, but there is no recordthat anyone accepted the challenge . W~hAgency officers and the policymakers bothintent on getting results, a really cold-eyed lookat events onthe ground was not in the cards.

Cl

'. I

-"

Map showingthe goographicafrange of reported'----' gents, ca. 1962n

---

6;1 FVSW 7393r-!-2, APriI1963.[.. SAIG 48S5L..J·'b".=.J

SAIG 4S55n

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C05303948

cable exchanges ofCE and analyses and. judgments {based on the] limited materialavailable to date {in order] to permit fullconcentration on development of otherops·D

A marginal comment on this prescription indi­cated the sense of at least one Headquartersofficer that the two parties were now talkingpast each other: "And that, 'dear Hqs.', isthatl"5°D

Under Enemy controlD

Headquarters did not ask whether it made goodprofessional sense to launch new operationswithout first resolving security questions aboutthe old. On 19 September 1961, just a day afterhearing Saigon's complaint about excessiveattention to the control issue, it approved a sup­ply mission for Team CASTOR. It appears, how­ever, that this reluctant decision was not carriedout. Whatever caused the mission to bescrapped, the outcome was fortunate for the air­crew that would have flown it; as we have seen,CASTOR had come under enemy control only .four days after its 27 May landing. 51 DIn the ensuing two months, ambiguous-andsometimes not so ambiguous-signs of trou­ble had led the Agency to write off only TeamECHO as probably under enemy control. Evenin the case of ECHO, the Saigon Station har­bored some hope that the anomalies in itsmessage traffic would turn out to be innocu­ous. Meanwhile, Hanoi began a meticulouscounterespionage operation designed to con­vince the station and Col. Tung of the teams'bona fides. 0 .

The public trial in November of the survivors ofthe 1 July supply mission to Team CASTORmeant that any DR effort to exploit that opera­tion would challenge Saigon's credulity. Somemembers of the aircrew might well have knownlittle about their destination, but as it happened,the pilot was among the three survivors, and hewould necessarily have had full knowledg~ ofthe plane's destination and mission. 52 0At their trial, the survivors acknowledged theirrole in supplying guerrilla operations. But theirpublished testimony said they had given astheir destination a remote spot in Hoa SinhProvince, far from CASTOR in Son La. Thelikelihood that all three, presumably interro­gated separately, had managed to improvise acoherent story that satisfied their captors musteven at the time have seemed remote. Never­theless, whatever their residual doubts, CIAofficers in both Saigon and Headquartersaccepted CASTOR's credentials, and Qlanningbegan for a second supply mission. 53 D

While deploring the loss of the C-47 and itscrew, the station found cause for celebration inthe resulting uproar about internal security inthe DRV. Hanoi radio broadcasts were blasting"reactionary' elements among ethnic minori­ties," and appealing to~mountain people" tocooperate with security forces. Saigon attrib­uted all this to the information derived frominterrogations of the surviving CASTOR air­crew personnel and of Team ECHO, whosecapture Hanoi had now announced. Blackentry operations, even when rolled up, werethus "exactly the type [of] harassment" bywhich the station was "seeking to force [the]DRV to dissipate its assets on [its] own internalsecurity in remote areas [of North Vietnam]and thus decrease its subversive efforts inSouth Vietnam."54D

~R

oo~ .6' 19 September 1961,1 INo reporting on either theplanning or the cancellation of this supply flight has survlved.~52 Ibid" 43; Tourison,44. Tourison says the 1 July supply f1igh a so earned a team that was to have been airdroppedelsewhere in a new_J.eration whose locale he does not specify.D03 Conboy, 43-44.164 SAIG 6562, 18 be ember 1961,1 I

19

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CIA in Saigon offered additional evidence tosupport its view of a Hanoi regime understress. A British expert on Indochina, Profes­sor P.J. Honey, had just evaluated its conditionas "precarious," and a Saigon newspaperwrote about a 24 November piece in the com­munist daily Nhan Dan, which acknowledgedfor the first time that "enemy social foundationsstill exist, while ours are very weak." Hanoi

press and radio were pressing their campaignto mobilize the populace against Dlernist spiesand saboteurs, and a message from TeamCASTOR indicated that it and other agentteams were forcing the DRV to divertresources to beef up internal security. As oflate 1961, It looked to CIA as if its teams wereoperating on fertile ground. 550

20

55 SAIG 6709, 30 December 1961,1'- _

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Chapter Two:A More Ambitious AgendaD

It could have been argued-and later wasargued-that airborne and maritime harass­ment operations, even if successful at the tac­tical level, might not deter the southernInsurgency, but Instead spur the Politburo inHanoi to accelerate its campaign to annex theSouth, whence all the trouble was emanating.But the emotional climate of the moment didnot encourage such speculation. On the c~n­

trary, it seemed a matter of common sense,both In Saigon and at Headquarters, not only toInfiltrate more teams, but to assign them pro­gressively more ambitious missions. Replyingin early December to what must have been anexpression of concern about insufficientlyaggressive tasking, Saigon offered this reas­surance:

We[are] not locating, recruiting, training,dispatching and directing...teams[merely] to obtain low level or even highlevel [order of battle intelligence]. Wecertainlyinclude 08 in specific missionsbut... [we] have emphasizedpotentialresistance, contacts wirh familiesto buildup intel assets, examination of potentialharassmenttargetssuch as roads,reportsof political controls, attitudeofpopulation, etc.10

The station balanced this guarantee of anaggressive program with an acknowledgementthat the teams' performance was up to thatpoint "far from outstanding." It reminded Head­quarters of earlier stipulations of the "limitedresults" to be expected from team operations,

and suggested that the only reason for pursu­.ing them was the "absence [of] other means toapproach [our] targets."2D

The implication was that one used the meansat hand to satisfy a policy requirement, how­ever ill-adapted those means might be toachieving the objective. By this permissivestandard, it was easy to justify a proposed airinfiltration into Hoa Sinh PrOVince, in the moun­tains west of Hanoi, by another team of hilltribesmen. Dubbed EUROPA, the new teamwould use the usual modus operandi, para­chuting to a safehaven from which it wouldemerge to contact trusted relatives and friendsand evaluate the area's resistance potential.The station restrained its enthusiasm for thisparticular venture: "We cannot make [a] pas­sionate plea for tremendous strategic potential[in the] EUROPA area." On the other hand, "wecan [make such a claim] for our presently pro­jected program of one team per month to giveus general geographic coverage of North Viet­nam." With more teams in place, the operationwould move into Phase II, a program aboutwhich the station said only that it would be sup­plemented by leaflet drops presumably aimedat stimulating discontent with the regime. 3DHeadquarters was apparently hoping, at theend of 1961, that more rigorous targetingwould help conserve scarce resources, but thestation saw no immediate potential in a moreselective approach. It saw itself as limited tothe agent personnel, mostly drawn from the hilltribes, supplied it by Col. Tung, and theseagents had reasonable prospects of survivingonly where they could find sympathetic localcontacts. Saigon was indeed "well aware of .special areas and groups, and [was] followingup all possible leads." But rather than await the

1 SAI~e5, 2 December 1961,1 I, Ibid. . . .3 Ibid. nls cable alludes to a dispatch oulllning the station's program that. jUdging by Its number, was sentl~ mid-August1961. The cable refers to planned activity In three phases, the second of which included leaflet drops. The third presumablyintroduced some kind of organized resistance to communist ruleDAlso see Conboy, 45, reference to EUROPA ascomposed of "Muong," a possible rendering of the tribe called "Hmong."D

21

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Meanwhile, airborne operationshad beensuspended unli l Ihe station acquired a more

One such effort involvedc=J Inserted byjunk, he would be supplied the same way. Onthe nighl 01 14 January 1962, the junk code­named Nautilus I crepl up amo ng Ihe karstislands sprinkled along the upper reaches ofthe Gull of Tonkin.The crew was unloading Ihefirst 0127 cases of suppl ies into a dinghy, lordeposit on shore. when a North Vietnamesepatrol boat, apparently lying in wail , broughtthe operation 10 an end.' 0The Inlerruplio n 01radio con tact wilh Nautilus Iand the junk's failure to return forced the sta­tion andIts Vietnamese counterparts to con­sider the possibility thatc=Iwas underenemy control. But it seemed to them morelikely that the supply mission had lallen vict imeithe r 10 bad weather-it turned foul four daysatter Ihe junk's departu re-or to a routinecoastal patrol, Nevertheless, when a replace­ment junk , Nautilus II lett Da Nang mid-Aprillor another try,C,was informed 01the mis­sion only atter Ihe junk was sale ly back in port .He subsequenlly radioed thaI he had recov ­ered atl 30 bundles from Ihe cache site on asmall , uninhabited island in Ha Long Bay. Withthe apparent success of this mission, Col.Tung 's office- renamed the Presiden tial Sur­vey Office (PSO) alter the downed aircrew'strial exposed the PLO label- and CIA againaccepted the agent's bona fides.' D

Slepping Up the paceLj

Team DIDO, launched In late June 1961,greeted Ihe New Year with two messages say­ingthat it was transmitting under duress.Again, II appears Ihatlhe station was too pre­occupied with other business to pay muchattention. While preparing new opera tions. ilhad also 10service those agents and teams inplace whose bona l ides it saw no reason toquestion .'[J

results 01a "delin itive study," it was roceedingwilh the agenl materi al at hand .'

• SAIG 6562 .• FVS W 7393 .• SAIG 7060. 2' anuary' 962. retyped inundalec1 draftm;L:randum,1 i

::::=J Tourison••7-48. Tourisonbases his acco unt of the 1962 _ supplymission on 8 postwar Interview with 8 Nautius ,crewman, who $aid he was visited byr----- in prisOn. Weanng 8 "fancy walch- 80(L8~w9d 10smoke.LJsaid he knew the prisoncommander BnawasvlSltlng y PEi'TissionrThe crewmanconcluded lhat was 8 "traitor... one0 1 theirs allal~. dovbleagent.- It seemsmore liketythatl 'wasoperating In goodfaith unfiT8f1er his capture. (SeeTourison, 49~ J

7 C_0!1I::!9-'y. ';.7 AIG 9012, 29 April 1962, retyped In undated drall memorand um] -=:I'---T.' eventeen OAV travel documents wore fabricated tor the supply mission, 16 for the junk and lis crewI ==:JI a revtsed Haiphon travelpermit10 be usedwithhisHaiphong basicidenlity documenl. (FVSA 13283. 2 H bruary

InfIltration Junk Naulllus ID

22

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05303948

suitable aircraft. The limited range of the twin­engine C-47 required both a refueling stop atDa Nang, on the coast in Central Vietnam,and perilously direct routes to drop zones inthe northwestern DRV. CIA officers attributedthe July 1961 loss of theCASTOR supplyplane at least partly to these factors, and addi­tional supply missions and team insertionswere, therefore, put on hold while CIA negoti­ated with the US Air Force for a four-engineDC-4. BD .Nguyen Cao Ky, now a lieutenant colonel,recruited new South Vietnamese Air Forcepilots, and when the first DC-4 arrived at aboutthe end of December 1961, an Air Americateam trained them in nighttime low-level flyingand navigation. When the crews were ready,the station and PSO chose to launch TeamEUROPA before moving to supply CASTOR. B

D .The launch did not take place without stillanother policy hiccup over the proportionalitybetween means and ends. On 11 January1962, Headquarters informed Saigon that, inview of the "doubtful results this small effortcan achieve," EUROPA was disapproved. Thesame cable welcomed a discussion of therationale for all such operations during anImminent visit by COS Bill Colby, a visit thatmust have resulted in a change of heart, for asecond cable on 15 February gave EUROPAthe green light. 10DOnce again, Ky commanded the aircraft, rely­ing on his ability to spot moonlit checkpoints onthe ground as he navigated a circuitous routeto the drop zone. All went well, it seemed to Ky,but in fact the area below was dotted with vil-

lages. According to Hanoi's published interro­gation report of one member, the team wasspotted while still descending. Within two days,the PASF had every man in custody. Havingcaptured the agent radio along with its opera­tor, the communists promptly launched adeception operation similar to those alrlead

Junder way withc=Jand CASTOR. 11

On 12 March, EUROPA came up on the air,assuring Saigon that the team was "safe andsound." An effort to drop supplies to the teamhad to be scrubbed when radio contact waslost, but the station assessed the communica­tions failure as probably the result of badweather. As of early June, it told Headquarters,the team's radio messages, including safetysignals, were in order, and there was "no rea­son to believe [the] team doubled." 120The apparent success of EUROPA encouragedthe station to proceed with a supply mission toCASTOR. Ky and his crew having flown the lastmission,a second crew manned the DC-4 forthe flight to Son La. Once again, CASTOR andits North Vietnamese masters waited in vain.Caught in a rainstorm not far from the dropzone, the pilot lost his bearings and crashed intoa mountain. But intercepted North Vietnamesecommunications gave no sign of an alert. Thestation inferred that Hanoi was unaware of theflight, and evaluated CASTOR's security asunaffectedby the disaster.130The station's faith in the bona fides of TeamCASTOR was at this point fully restored, andplans were underway to reinforce it withanother team, to be called TOURBILLON, thatwould give it a serious capacity for sabotageand harassment. Meanwhile, the station made

6 Ibid., 4411c·54 was the military designationfor the Douglas DC·4, and Is used in much CIA correspondenceon theprogram.'l3urthecivilian nomenclatureappears Insome traffic,sugge~ that the plane was configuredto match the coverstory under Qhlh it was leased to a South Vietnameseentrepreneur.U9 SAIG 6562 Conboy,44-5.~ ,.- --,16 SAIG345 0g1January1962~15 February19621 I" Conboy.45.12 FVSA 1361 A ril 1962' SAIG 9993, 9 June 1962,,-1__-,

e a empted supply drop to CASTORis not known.D

05303948

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the first use of Laotian territory to insert a teaminto the DRV. On 12 March, after reconnais­sance by a small fixed-wing aircraft, the heli­copter descended onto the drop zone on theLaotian side of the border, adjacent to th~ov­Ince of Nghe An in the southern DRV.14U

The four members of Team ATLAS-appar­ently all ethnic Vietnamese-headed easttoward their target, a village where they wereto seek out two Catholic priests known for theiranti-communist fervor. After four days of unob­served movement, they suddenly encountereda small boy, who upon seeing them disap­peared into the forest. Soon thereafter, localmilitia arrived, and the team fled back towardLaos. One man was fatally shot, and anotherdied when he stepped on a mine. The survi­vors managed to assemble their radio andreport their plight, but were soon captured. Notuntil the two survivors' later public trial did thestation learn that they had been in the hands ofthe PASF since 5 April. 150However powerful the urge to believe in theirteams' survival in enemy territory, the stationand its PSO counterparts did not ignore"repeated danger and/or duress signals" fromTeams DIDO and ECHO. By early April 1962,both were assumed to be under enemy control,and Saigon concentrated on turning theirenemy-controlled communications back uponthe North Vietnamese. One ploy began with theassumption that both teams were still intact,even though controlled. Orders to them to headfor the Laotian border would test the willingnessof their handlers to move them west in order toprevent Saigon's RoF capability from revealinga failure to comply. If the teams got lucky, in thisprocess-they would have to be very lucky­they might manage to escape. 16D

. The second ploy also looked like a counsel ofdesperation. It had been launched with a mes­sage to DIDO that alluded to "friendly ele­ments" in the border area and tasked the teamto report on them. Later messages were tomention the team's proposed assignment,after exfiltration, to train new teams at projectheadquarters. The station seems to have beenwishing for a North Vietnamese nibble at thisoffer of a penetration of the Saigon office, butstipulated that it had "no illusions about thelikelihood of success in exfiltrating eitherteam."17D

With little hope for DIDO and even less forECHO, the station concentrated on its plans fornew insertions. On 16 April 1962, the six BlackThai tribesmen of Team REMUS parachutedonto a drop zone in Laotian territory some 15kilometers northwest of Dien Bien Phu. Theteam landed unobserved, retrieved its gear,and crept across the border. Some of the foodbundles dropped with the team were dam­aged, and REMUS almost immediately calledfor a supply drop. The station complied, but theteam's gastronomic requirements causedsome heartburn at Headquarters, which corn­plained about the unrealistic expectations rep­resented by a request for "chicken and duck'done to a golden tin1."'18D

An Appearance of SuccessD

With the insertion of Team REMUS, the stationhad what it considered four viable teams,including ARES, reporting from North Vietnam.It was now just over a year since PresidentKennedy had called for "guerrilla operations"there, and CIA was feeling the heat. It was notjust the modest number of teams in place, buttheir failure to engage in any significant harass-

24

14 FVSA 13612Q,~ FVSA 13612 Conboy. 47.D16 FVSA 13612. e Idea looks even more fancifull,o.Ji.\lht of SAIG 6562 of 18 December 1961, in which the station hadcategorically described Team ECHO as "captured."U"/lb'dO'6 C~~150Y, 50.Dse~ ~ 28 May 1962,1 . I.

05303948

ment or sabotage, that suggested am~gapbetween mandate and performance. 19UIt was In this climate that Secretary of DefenseRobert McNamara and Commander-in-ChiefPacific (CINCPAC) Adm. Harry Felt visitedSaigon in May 1962. In its sessions with them,the station found itself defending its modestprogress in the DRV. Pointing to bad weather'as the biggest deterrent to accelerating thepace of infiltration, Chief of Station Colby alsojustified the intelligence emphasis in the task­ing of existing teams. They needed informationon local conditions and targets, he said, as aframework for the "harassment and diversion"operations that remained their main charter.The station and PSO were preparing 15 moreteams for insertion by the end of July; all ofthese would prepare the way for the subse­quent addition of sabotage personnel andequipment. 20DMcNamara expressed what the station calledhis "full support" for its activities and plans. Buthe drew a clear distinction between small­scale CIA-sponsored harassment operationsand "possible larger efforts of [a] militarynature." In so doing, he implicitly asserted thedominant military role in unconventional war­fare that President Kennedy had assigned tothe Pentagon after the failure at the Bay of Pigsin April 1961. Against a background of frustrat­ingly slow Agency progress, the prospect ofPentagon-run operations against the Northwas now, in the station's words, "more open.'?'

DMeantime, military support to CIA operationswould continue, and two admirals working for

Adm. Felt concurred with an Agency requestfor submarine reconnaissance of possible tar­gets for a maritime raid on Swatow-class gun­boats of the DRV's little navy. Also, having losta team to enemy action along Route 7,Ieadinginto northeastern Laos, the station was press­ing to get ready a new team of Hmong to para­chute into the DRV near the Laotian border. Itsmembers would recruit fellow Hmong in the LaiChau area, then lead them out to Laos fortraining and eventual return. 22 D

Teams TOURBILLON and EROS DThe COS had been right about the weather asan inhibiting factor. When he conferred withSecretary McNamara and Adm. Felt on12 May, the aircraft carrying sabotage TeamTOURBILLON, slated to join Team CASTOR,had already aborted three missions when Itencountered heavy storms. Finall~, in a DC-4flown by a veteran aircrew ofC IL:]TOURBILLON's seven men reached thedrop zone on the night of 17 May.23 D

Waiting below was a company or more ofPASF militia, who had set out the flame pots asspecified in the instructions to Team CASTOR.But the descending guerrillas encounteredstrong winds that blew them away from thedrop zone, and the PASF set off in pursuit.Their first quarry was the assistant teamleader, caught in a tree on landing, who wasshot and killed in his harness when he fired onthem. The others were surrounded and cap­tured within two days.24D

,. SAIG 9297, 12 May 1962,1 1>Olbid'D.. Ibid. National Security Action Memorandum 01 28 June 1961 specified that any paramilitary operation "wholly covertor disavowable, maybe assigned to CIA, provided that it is within the normal capabilities of the agency" (emphasis added).Any operation, "wholly or partially covert," requiring "significant numbers of militarily trained personnel, [and] amounts ofmilitary equipment," would "exceed CIA-controlled" capabilities, and would be run by the Department of Defense with CIA"in a SUpporti~e." (See Schulz, 21.)02:! SAIG 9297." Ibid.; FVSA 1 604,6 July 1964lr-----------------,1Conboy, 48.49.0.. Conboy, 490

/ 25

105303948

DRV security elected to conceal the capturewhile it exploited the team's radio operator andgear to launch another deception operation.According to one survivor, interviewed after thewar, Saigon had ordered Team TOURBILLONto come up on the air within two days. Given itsexpected reception by CASTOR, it shouldneed no time to find a refuge, and initial contactdelayed for more than 48 hours would be takenas evidence ofenemy control. In fact, accord­ing to the same survivor, it took the North Viet­namese 11 days to get the team's radiooperator on the air with his first mesSage.250The record is mute on this point, but it is clearthat, despite the delay, Saigon acceptedTOURBILLON's bona fides. The stationreported the team's reception by the leader ofCASTOR and the loss of one man, whichTOURBILLON had called an accident. As of 20June, Saigon accepted that TOURBILLONwas scoutin~tential sabotage targets alongRoute 41.281_ 1

Meanwhile, on 20 May, Team EROS droppedinto Thanh Hoa Province, just east of the Lao­tian border in the upper panhandle. This inser­tion seems to have escaped PASF attention,and the five men-Hmong and Red Thaidropped into an area that was home to bothtribes-set up a hidden bivouac. They werethen supposed to contact tribal brethren, butlost their nerve, it seems, and when some RedThai villagers stumbled upon their encamp­ment, they fled north. The discovery of foodcans with foreign brand names triggered asearch by both PASF and army units. After twoweeks, they had found nothing, and the huntwas suspended. 27D

On 20 June, EROS reported fearing that it hadbeen compromised. DRV security was cover­ing the vicinity of the cache site, and the teamwas being, as the station reported it, "closelytracked." Short of food, EROS asked for sup­plies, which Saigon promised for July. No droptook place, and Saigon radioed the team thatbad weather was to blame. 28DLeft to its own devices, the team ventured outin a search for food. On 2 August, villagersspotted it once again. Security forces resumedtheir search, and a panicked Team EROSmanaged only to report the renewed pursuitbefore it went off the air. On 29 September, thePASF surrounded the team, killing one guer­rilla and capturing a second. Three othersescaped to the border, where they joined aparty of Lao hunters until their hosts betrayedthem to the North Vietnamese. 29D

Operation VULCANDHesldent teams, living black, represented oneof the two possibilities for surreptitious actionagainst DRV military facilities. The otherinvolved maritime hit-and-run raids, usingtechniques earlier employed against China, inthe early years of communist rule there, andagainst the regime in Pyongyang, during theKorean war. President Kennedy's repeateddemand for action against the DRV requiredexploiting all the resources at hand, and theseincluded, in the spring of 1962, 18 South Viet­namese who had been trained in underwaterdemolitionsI IFor a target, CIA chosethe DRV naval base at Quang Khe, which layon the Gianh River some 40 kilometers north ofDong Hoi, the town nearest the DMZ. 300

26

"'Ibld.n.. FVSA17604; FVSA 13986,27 JUly1962,11 ~______;======='-----___,27 Conboy,'!9-50.n ,-_----,28 Blind memoranclLim;'\ pperalions," "Date of Info: 20 June 1962,"1

[ 1FVSA 13986DCOri50g0. FVSW 7393 says that as early as 21'--;A'--u-'-gU---=S7t,-:Cth---=e-=-ra=-=d"'io---=0---=p":"":er::"'atC:-or::-:r""'es=-=p70n=-=d:i:"e-:Td----'Incorrectly to a challengequestion.u29 Conboy,50'0aoConboy,51.

05303948

Quang Khe was home to several of the DRV'sSwatow-class gunboats, 83 feet long and car­rying up to three 37mm cannon, four heavymachine guns, and eight depth charges.Although assigned to coastal security, they hadnot been encountered in the station's maritimeinfiltrations using motorized fishing junks, andtheir nearly continuous presence in port madethem attractive targets for hit-and-run attack.Accordingly, PSO acquired four of the 18 frog­men, and the station commenced training andoperational plannlnq.?' DCIA arranged with the Navy for a reconnais­sance by the USS Catfish, a World War II-erasubmarine that had long been devoted to intel­ligence collection along the Asian littoral. Itconfirmed the Swatows' presence at QuangKhe, and on 30 June 1962 the program's thirdjunk, Nautilus /II, carried the frogmen and theirlimpet mines to the mouth of the Gianh River.They made their way In on a raft for a quickbeach reconnaissance before returning to thejunk. A small sampan would then take themupriver into the vicinity of the gunboats.32DAerial reconnaissance supplementing the sur­reptitious observation of the junk confirmedjust three Swatows, each to be attacked by onefrogman, who would swim to it, attacti limpetsbelow the waterline, and return to the sampan.And indeed It appears that each of the swim­mers reached his target-in one case an uni­dentified naval vessel larger than theSwatows-and planted at least one mine. Howmany of them detonated remained unclear, forone of them went off prematurely, with theswimmer already spotted and trying to escape.The explosion crippled the gunboat but killedthe frogman; the station reported that it thoughta second Swatow had also gone Up.33D

Gunfire from a pursuing Swatow killed thefourth frogman and wounded the captain of theNautilus 111 before the gunboat rammed thejunk and took the survivors prisoner. Theymissed just one, who hid in the half-sub­merged cabin and was overlooked by the Swa­tow's crew, who never boarded the sinkingjunk. The survivor drifted south of the DMZ ona piece of wreckage and was rescued next dayby aSouth Vietnamese patrol boat. Col. Tung'sPSO accepted the high casualty rate as justthe fortunes of war,and the station seemedready to proceed with more operations likeVULCAN, whose results it summarized forHeadquarters: "Mission successful, priceheavy."340

Soldiering anDAs of late Jul~ 1962, the station was preparing28 newC ~teams,most of them to begiven a sabotage mission, for infiltration Intothe DRV. The chief of the External OperationsSection ,I lundertook to explain toHeadquarters what it could reasonably expectfrom current and proposed operations. His dis­patch, painfully honest yet spotted with wishfulthinking, encapsulated the Agency's dilemmaas it struggled to affect the DRV's war-makingcapability with the means at hand.C]beganwith a starkly pessimistic judgment about theresults to be expected from operations on thescale then projected: "The possibilities of anylarge diversion from the DRV effort againstSouth Vietnam are remote. Our operations areat too small a scale and initiated at too late adate [in the course of the Insurgency] to seri­ously affect DRV aggression against theSouth."3sD

"Some effects," however, should be possible.Sabotage of targets like military facilities,

~R

31 Ibid.,52-530 '32 Ibid.,53-55. S00546, 2 JUly 1962'LI --J

33 Ibid.; FVSA13986.'" SAIG0546; FVSA 9 6.0.. FVSA13986; FVSA13960, 24 July 19&2,1 -,- --..J

27/'

105303948

roads, railroads, and crops would require abeefed-up militia to improve security; this, inturn, would burden not only the regime but alsothe peasantry being forced to supply the man­power. Operations against targets like locomo­tives and rolling stock would force the regimeto spend scarce foreign exchange for replace­ments and parts. Meanwhile, an increasinglyoppressed population might take heart fromthese examples of regime vulnerability, anditself engage In economic sabotage. This, Inturn, would provoke another cycle of repres­sive measures that would exacerbate thealienation of the populace. 360

r=J:lcknowledged certain risks in thisapproach, even at the level of activity thenplanned. Use of minorities might provoke theregime Into "large scale repressive action"against particular ethnic or religious groups.Probably with events like the 1956 Hungarianrevolution in mind,Dcautioned against"spark[ing] premature uprisings which we areneither willing nor able to support." This heldtrue especially in the heavily populated coastalareas; it might be more practicable to encour­age revolt among the "widely scattered moun­tain groups which would divert DRV troops intopolicing large areas of difficult terrain."37D

Having cited some salutary side effects­larger numbers of trained South Vietnamese,the accumulation of operational intelligence,and the refinement of operational tech-niques-] fNenton to draw a measured butultimately optimistic bottom line. He stillthought it "unlikely that any major physicalchange in the scale of DRV aggression againstSouth Vietnam will result." On the other hand,it seemed probable that the "material and eco­nomic damage as well as the engendered sus­picion and confusion far exceed the relatively

small [investment in] the program." Pursuingthis theme,Dnvoked the prospect of creat­ing more "tension in an already strained econ-:orny' with activity that demonstrated SouthVietnamese determination even as it gavehope to restive Northerners that they did not"stand alone." 380~dispatch, released in the name of thechief of station, thus served to justify continu­ing the program even while he disclaimed itsability to achieve the stated purpose. With thispiece still en route, Headquarters cabled theresults of a comparable soul-searching, pro­voked by the conclusion in July of the GenevaAgreements on Laos. The agreements wouldallow the DRV to divert forces from Laos toSouth Vietnam, an advantage that the UnitedStates and the GVN must somehow offset. Aneffective program of harassment and sabotagein the DRV was more urgently needed thanever, but Headquarters was driven to the sameconclusion as the station. Measured againststated objectives, "our record in [the] DRV [is]not good." Operations in the North had beencostly in both men and materiel while leadingto little harassment or sabotage. OperationVULCAN had succeeded, but teams like CAS­TOR, to be admired for their very survival, haddone little or nothing. 3sD

Headquarters did not question the suitability ofthe operational technique, confining itself

.instead to some conventional cautionaryadvice. The station should avoid spreading itselftoo thin. It should apply rigorous standards tothe selection of both agent personnel.and tar­gets and pay careful attention to the lessons ofexperience. And it should never "succumb topressures from any outside organization, GVNor US Government," to launch operations aboutwhose soundness it had any doubts. 4oD

28

~R

3.~~VS960.0. 31 Ibid.

:Ib:ao- 30 July 1962·1 _

IC0530 3948

AOS

Xieng·Khouang

Potential US Air Force Targets inNorth Vietnam, Circa Early 1962

Gulf

of

Tonkin

0 1Car togra phy Cenle r/MPG 769690 AI (G00095) 3-05

100 Kilome ters,50,

• Military support complex

.. Army depot

~ Barracks

1 Radio station

.t Power plant

)( Bridge

o Rail transfer site

·8anMouang Cha

ited TOURBILLON sabotage operation, andinvited the station to identify specific targetsand means of attacking them.430 .

The Department of State, and particularly itsambassador in Vientiane , Leonard Unger,were preoccupied with avoiding the collapse ofthe just-signed Geneva Agreements, andvetoed the supply overllightthat the TOURBIL­LON sabotage operat ion would require. Wash­ington turned down Saigon's appeal of thisdecision, but informed the field that the inter­agency covert action oversight committee wasnow reviewin the entire question of Laosoverflights.42

The single concrete recommendation con­cemed the scale and frequency of sabotageand harassment operations. Speaking for FEDivision, Don Gregg urged "intermittent smallscale harassments ... [rather than) one or twolarger scale ops against bridges or POLdumps ." The success of Team TOURBILLON'splanned bridge-blowing would be very wel­come, but probably no more effective in influ­encing North Vietnamese behavior than aseries of "smaller actions ... against isolatedconvoys or camps which could be undertaken[by a) single team member" firing rifle gre-nades .41C .

Upping the Anten

The impassioned debate over the competinggoals of vigorous action against the DRV andthe preservat ion of the Geneva Agreementsraged until 23 August. On that day, Lt. Gen.Marshall Carter, the acting DCI, told DeputyDirector for Plans Thomas Karamessines thatthe "highest levels in the Government"-Le.,President Kennedy-had just approved a"concept of intensified operations againstNorth Vietnam ." This decision did not, in fact,resolve the overf light question. But Headquar­ters counted on it to win reversal of the prohib-

"lbid1l-_ ___J 15 August 1962J _ _arsn rs.Carter Action Mlimoi'anaUrmC..!:B::::.~~3~! ~no~s~u~b~Je~ct"-:. 2~3~A~u~~g~us~1~96~2:.!J.! I -r-t- ---l

...I...-__....J 5 Sept ember 1962,L ---l

29

05303948

s~

On 29 August, Saigon responded with an erup­tion of ambitious proposals intended, the sta­tion said, to "divert:..DRV attention fromexternal to internal matters and cause materialdamage to their expansionist efforts into[South Vietnam] and Laos." Proposed opera-

. tions included destroying dredges and cranesin Haiphong harbor, blowing up the POL dumpat Vinh, mining the channels at Haiphong andVinh, blowing up a highway bridge in ThanhHoa Province, and a 1DO-man commando raidagainst a "probable electronic site" on the MuiDoc promontory in the Vinh Son area. High­speed boats could carry other commandos incompany-size raids on bridges, docked ferries,and isolated military outposts along coastalRoute 1 as far north as Thanh Hoa. 44DEven more ambitious; a resistance effort in thenorthwest, modeled on the successful Hmongprogram in Laos and using some of the sametribes. The station also suggested cutting therail line entering the DRV from China. Using

. enough 14-man sabotage teams, it could, itclaimed, cut the railroad at five or even 10places at the same time. Another team, sched­uled for launch in December, would live in themountains southwest of Lang Son, "constantlycutting the main rail line and Route One fromChina into the DRV." Two other teams thenbeing prepared could hit vital roads into Laos,one of them operating along Route 7, leadinginto Xieng Khouang Province, and the other onRoute 8, running down into KhammouaneProvince from Vinh. The latter team, BOU­VIER, could recruit "local relatives for incendi­ary sabotage and harassment"; along withTeam JASON, it coulds~ the reception of a"large guerrilla force." 45U .

The list went on, with more teams already intraining slated to knock out bridges and mineroads, and even to ambush military convoysand raid storage depots. The heavily popu­lated coastal area provided no refuge for resi­dent teams, but furnished lucrative targets forhit-and-run attacks from the sea or down fromthe mountains. All of this would be supple­mented by a massive psychological warfarecampaign using leaflets and radio to pillory theregime for the draconian measures it wouldpresumably take to combat the paramilitarycampaign of harassment. 46DAlmost as if abashed by its own grandiosity,the station accompanied this wish list with adispatch, sent the same day, that responded toDon Gregg's call for more but smaller opera­tions. It outlined In depressing detail the reali­ties that inhibited speedy, secure, and effectiveaction in the North. So different in tone from theoperational proposal that it might have hadanother author, it identified the obstacles to thesuccess of any kind of action program againstthe DRV.47D

This comRanion piece noted first the likelihoodthat morel pperations would meanmore casualties. The South Vietnamese hadaccepted with equanimity their losses in theVULCAN operation, but expansion wouldrequire a willingness to sustain many more.More limiting than this hypothetical problemwas the lack of reliable, detailed target intelli­gence. A breezy reference in the operationalcable to 800 targets then being "carded, plot­ted, and studied" was implicitly qualified in thecompanion dispatch. There, the station said ithad "just begun assernblinq a target file," and itwould take months to bring it into usableshape. 4sD

30/'

...SAlrl52' 29 August 1962,1·'Ibid."Ibid.• 7 FVS 118,29 August 1962,'1--------------1It was common practice, at least atthe time, for the field to senel good news by cable, givenwide distribution, and bad news by dispatch,normally seen only atbranch level.One may infer that the stationwas implicitly. askinglor working-Ievel~erstanding of the difficulties it faced inimplementing a set of proposals il had formulated only underpolicy-level duress.U•• SAIG 1952; FVSA 14118.0

11~5303948

Patience and hard work might fill the intelli­gence gap, but the suitability of agent person­nel was not subject to CIA control. Agentquality had consistently been "very low," the

• result of an overstretched national manpowerpool itself low in quality. "Not much can bedone about this problem," the station con­cluded, but it took some comfort from the sur­vival of Team CASTOR, not yet known to beunder enemy control. CASTOR's disappoint­ing intelligence reporting should be chalked upnot to nonfeasance but to CIA's "miscalculationof the quality and quantity of information avail­able" in its operating area. 490Reminding Headquarters that it took four to sixmonths to "locate, vet, train and launch" ateam, and four-and-half months just to train aradio operator, the station cautioned that thefull Impact of the new program would not be feltuntil the end of the year. And that timetableassumed both renewed freedom to overflyLaos and the absence of significantly improvedDRV countermeasures. Finally, the stationraised the question whether the game wasworth the candle. It noted that judging thehuman cost was up to the GVN. But only Head­quarters could determine whether results justi­fied CIA's investment in equipment and money.In the sole explicit reference in surviving corre­spondence to earlier infiltration operations, thestation invited a comparison, for this purpose,with those against North Korea and China. 50

D .No Other OptlonsO

It seems unlikely, given the pressure to dosomething-anything-to shake Hanoi's confi­dence in the DRV's internal security, that any­one in Headquarters thought it worth thetrouble to examine the historical record. DonGregg later saw four mutually reinforcing intlu-

ences as inhibiting the rigorous cost/benefitanalysis that might have diluted CIA's commit­ment to infiltration operations.D

First was the fierce pressure. dating at least tothe beginning of 1962, not only from the WhiteHouse but from State and the Pentagon. Sec­retary of State Dean Rusk was pushing boththe military and CIA to bolster the South Viet­namese by raising the cost to Hanoi of its cam­paign to annex the South. At Defense, RobertMcNamara was Insisting that the Agency com­mit its paramilitary resources in support ofcombat operations in South Vietnam. Themajor bone of contention was the tribal militiaprogram in the Central Highlands, which forCIA represented a means of expanding theGVN's authority over population and territory,but whose Strike Force units MACV coveted asanother Increment of firepower that could bedevoted to finding and fixing the enemy's mainforces. In this climate, the infiltration programprovided, If not much else, at least a demon­stration of the Agency's good faith. 510Reinforcing the continuing attachment to theteam concept was a managerial mindset in theDirectorate of Plans (DDP) that almost reflex­Ively applied the techniques of World War IIpartisan warfare to denied-area operations inthe Cold War. Gregg and other junior officerswere aware of the slim results produced by theteams infiltrated into Eastern Europe and theSoviet Union, in the early years of the ColdWar, and then into China and North Korea, butthey accepted this modus operandi as "theway we do things." DIn Gregg's view, accidents of temperament alsoplayed a part. 'Warrior-priest" Bill Colby hadreturned from Saigon in mid-1962 to becomeDesmond FitzGerald's deputy In FE Division.Gregg saw Colby's operational philosophy inmuch the same light as had Bob Myers:

•• sAI<;U,952·D""lbldLJ .G' DoniilcfP. Gregg, Interview by the author, Washington, DC, 22 October 2003.0

31

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~R

Renowned for his World War II exploits support­ing partisan units in Europe for the OSS, Colbyhad not yet accepted the force of Myers' argu­ment against trying to apply that experience incommunist-controlled Asia. Instead, Colby .focused on doing more, and doing it qUiCkly.D

Finally, as Gregg came to see the matter, thefast pace of operations, planned and con­ducted in an endemic atmosphere of crisis, mil·ttated against a serious look at theassumptions underlying the program.D

In any case, whatever the variety of possibili­ties for operations In the South, it is clear that

., Ibld·DFVSA 14118.0

32

~R

1------------·.···

in the North the options were limited, at best.As the Saigon Station had earlier pointed out,with seaied borders and practically no travel,either by officials going abroad or by non-com­munist legal visitors to the DRV, there reallyweren't any alternatives. The only question­explicitly addressed, as we have seen, by thestation but apparently not at Headquarters­involved the prudence of adhering to a failedstrategy. As of mid-1962, both Headquartersand the field concentrated on the practicalobstacles to the exploitation of existing teamsand the insertion of new ones. 52 0

05303948

Chapter Three: A HesitantEscalationD

With the Geneva Agreements set to go intoeffect in October 1962, the administration stillwanted covert action in North Vietnam, but italso wanted no flaps. It took presidentialapproval-given on 7 September 1962-to geta supply drop to one of the four teams stilloperating-or believed to be operating-inNorth Vietnam. I DPassing word of this decision to the DDP on7 September 1962, Acting DCI Carter notedthat Roger Hilsman, of State's East AsiaBureau, "was not enchanted with droppingteams into mountainous areas where he said'their effectiveness was nil-one woodenbridge in one year was not worth the price.''' Toget around what he clearly saw as unproduc­tive second-guessing, Carter urged Karamess­ines to get "overallapproval along policy lines"from Assistant Secretary of State AverellHarri­man for more insertions via aircraft enteringDRV airspace from Laos. The Acting DCIwanted this as his "party line for all clandestineactivities .... If higher authority wishes to getinvolved (such as the Special Group or theWhite House), then let this involvement beconcerned with the policy decision and not withthe minute operational details."2D

. Carter's drive for more operational autonomyhad to contend with the administration's near­obsession to avoid blame if the GenevaAgree­ments collapsed. When these took effect on 6October, the White House suspended all "pro­vocative acts," including sabotage attackseven by teams already in place. The station

had its hands full, in any case, trying to arrangethe exflltratlorr of Teams DIDO, CASTOR, andEROS.3D

In the case of EROS, the station acknowl­edged, for the first time in the surviving record,that delayed team response to security chal­lenges suggested enemy control. But Col.Tung's people disagreed, at least aboutEROS, and there was no conclusive evidenceabout either itor Team DIDO. Moreover, it wasjust possible that a team doubled by theDRVwould be allowed to exfiltrate, its masters inHanoi trying to use it to penetrate Col. Tung'sPSO. Accordingly, the station intended tomake a supply drop to EROS, using a dropzone several miles from the appointed spot. Itwould then rad.io the team, apologi~for theerrant drop and giving Its location. 4U

Unlike those of DIDO and EROS, CASTOR'sbona fides were no longer In doubt. But CIAwanted the team out anyway, for debriefingand rest. Being in fact under DRV control, itfound pretexts not to comply, including theclaim that It lacked a knowledgeable guide tothe Laotian border.sD

Structural Prob,emsD

Even without the inhibitions of post-Genevapolicy, the station entered the last quarter of1962 facing an increasingly difficult operationalclimate in the North. Part of the problem wasterrain. The station wanted to insert teamsbelow the 20t~ parallel, farther south than ear­lier drops, and within striking distance of low­land targets. But it had found only a"distressing lack" of drop zones within anacceptable distance of proposed sites of teamhideouts. With seven sabotage teams being

, Gen. Marshall S. Carter, Action Memorandum to Deputy Director (Plans), 7 Seplember 1962J~",--r ----J

I IThis document does not idenlify the team, which was probably REMUS.D

TffiidT I Q3 Conboy, 57.'~IG25j eptember 1962'j~L _ 29 September 1962'L. _

~05303948

Finally, the report took a stab at assessing theprogram's overall effect. It stipulated havingonly a few "hard facts" on which to base suchan evaluation; one of these included intensifiedbeach and coastal patrolling in the wake of theVULCAN operation. From this, it was "reason­able to assume that word went out to all DRVnaval vessels and commercial ships to takeprecautions against frogmen and to be on thealert against strange junks and sampans." Itcould be "assumed further that a number offutile alerts have been sounded and more thanone depth charge has been dropped" in .response to a "strange sampan or an unusualnoise." But the program had so far managedonly two acts of sabotage, and the stationthought its effectiveness more likely a functionof the uncertainty about its scope engenderedin Hanoi by the capture of several teams. Per­haps for lack of "hard facts," the report did notventure to guess whether this uncertainty hadled the DRV to divert any significant amount ofattention or resources from support to thesouthern insurgency. 120

Business as usualO

Still waiting for authority to fly drop missions,the station took a look at teams on the ground.None of three singleton agents put ashore inMay and June from CIA's little fleet of fishingjunks had been heard from, but it seemed "pre­mature to conclude" that any or all had beencaptured. They could have been used to sup­plement the mid-summer propaganda cam­paign with which Hanoi had exploited theseizure of Teams ATLAS and ECHO. TheDRV's failure to include them, therefore, sug­gested that they had just gone to ground, forreasons yet unknown. 13D

r13 Ibid.'"Ibid.'·Ibld.'"Ibid.

The star reporter from North Vietnam, agentc=J had filed 44 messages, from whichthree intelligence reports had been dissemi­nated. The agent had once failed to use theprescribed safety signal, but when challengedcame back, "apparently somewhat annoyed,"with the correct response. The incident wasnot "considered an indication that he has fallenunder enemy control," and planning was goingforward~rovide him a three-man sabotageteam. 14U

The apparent progress of Teams TOURBIL­LON and EUROPA, like that ofc=J alsogave rise in the statjon to a sense of havingsucceeded in a difficult assignment. Followinga brief postponement after the signing of theGeneva Agreements, TOURBILLON reportedhaving blown a bridge on 29 July. Saying it wasback in its refuge, the team stated its readinessfor a supply drop, which the station executed inlate September. A supply flight had also goneto Team EUROPA, which reported finding allthe parachuted bundles; another supply mis­sion, with two agents trained in sabotage, wasscheduled for it in November. Team CASTOR,its bona fides also still accepted, would againbe ordered to exfiltrate through Laos once along-delayed supply drop could be made. ISOThe station's practice of giving the benefit ofthe doubt to teams displaying occasionalanomalous behavior did not apply, in the fall of1962, to Teams 01 DO and EROS. Agency peo­ple in Saigon saw both of these as enemy-con­trolled, but could not bring PSO to the sameview. The Vietnamese impulse to look forinnocuous explanations forsecurity lapsesmeant that, in order to prevent disaffectionamong its liaison counterparts, CIA might haveto authorize a supply drop, at least to EROS.But if it did so, the team would be informed ofthe DZ's location only after the fact. ISO

/ 35

C05303948

With regard to Team DIDO, the station tooksome satisfaction from indications that DRVsecurity had taken the bait of a notional teamthat DIDO was to contact as it exfiltratedtoward Laos. This contact having, of 'course, ,not been made, the ploy had run its course.Hanoi would now have to decide whether to cutradio contact with Saigon or let DIDO exfiltrateand try to use the team to penetrate PSO andthe station. Meanwhile, the suspension of newoperations, imposed when the Geneva Agree­ments on Laos came Into force in October,remained in effect. '70

Restrictive Policy, Ambitious PlanningD

As 1962 ended and operations continued Inthe new year, Agency correspondence contin­ued to display what in retrospect seemstrangely inconsistent perceptions of the pros­pects for significant results in both airborneand seaborne operations against the DRV.When policy considerations, almost always inthe context of the Geneva Agreements, prohib­ited operations near the Laotian border, Head­quarters casually dismissed the "marginalbenefits" these might have conferred. In lateNovember, it recognized the imprudence ofrepeated attempts at supply drops when it pro­hibited a third to Team REMUS after two fail­ures. But it persisted in urging the program'sexpansion, even reversing itself, in mid-Janu­ary, to allow supply drops, urged by the station,both to REMUS and even-presumably as asop to the Vietnamese-to suspect TeamsDIDO and EROS. laD 'The station, in turn, responded with an expan­sion of the ambitious agenda it had proposed atthe end of August 1962. Its proposal of January

1963 largely ignored the practical difficulties thathad figured so prominently the previous August;there was just one passing reference to theshortage of drop zones that had iP tl that pointbedeviled the airborne program.

The station judged impractical only one ofWashington's suggestions, the one for overlandinfiltration across the Demilitarized Zone. Other­wise, Saigon thought that Headquarters hadpresented a "realistic and factual presentationof [CIA] capability against [the) DRV underpresent operational conditions." It went on toidentify 22 potential targets, Including bridgesand railroads, "coal producing, transporting,processing and loading facilities," power plants,petroleum storage facilities, and ferries. Finally,the entrance to Haiphong Channel would beclosed, using commandos to sabotage thebuoys that allowed ships to avoid going agrounden route to the harbor. 190But most of this depended on an end to thesuspension of flights through Laotian airspaceimposed when the Geneva Agreements wentInto effect in October 1962; For the moment,not even those teams ready for launch couldbe dispatched, if insertion had to be madethrough Laos. For fear of demoralizing its liai­son partners, CIA had not shared with them thepolicy basis for delaying such operations, butits reticence soon had the opposite of thedesired effect. By January 1963, Col. Tung andSEPES chief Tran Kim Tuyen were chafingunder what seemed to them arbitraryrestraints. Some key Vietnamese personnelwere looking for transfer back to their parentorganizations in the military, andl Imidway through his assignment as chief ofexternal operations, warned that "stoppages

36

17 Ibid.DThe station may later have expressed some residualhope for DIDO and EROS, for Headquarters telt obliged, inlate DecemberJQ-put t a.burdan.on the field to supply the "clear Indication"of their bona fides that would justify~rop toeither 01 them,U(See 26 December 19621 23 November 1962 12 January

''=-:-=-r_,- ---,--JThe dispatch outlining eadquarters suggest ons has not

05303948

and slowdowns" might induce the collapse ofthe entire program. 20DOne exceptionto policy-its rationale probablythe high priorityattached to monitoring DRVcompliancewith the Agreements-involvedTeam TARZAN. The team was dropped inearly January into the lower DRVpanhandle,near Route 12, presumablyfrom an aircraftthat crossedfrom Laos.Trainedas a sabotageteam,TARZAN was instructedinitiallyto reportNorth Vietnamese road traffic across the bor­der. In addition, the first SEPES-sponsoredsabotageteam, named LYRE, was put ashorefrom a junk on 30 December. But most of theinventory of teams trained and ready to goremained on hold. There were nine of these inJanuary 1963, with 29 more in various stagesof formation or trairp.oo; new recruiting hadbeen suspended.21LJ

On the maritime side, some 50 candidateswere to begin training at the program's DaNang site in mid-January. Just two of the sta­tion's little fleet of fishing junks were judgedcapable of landing a team and its equipmenton the DRV coast; two more of the sametypeIwer~being fitted for team operations.c=J

escribed his vessels as "slightly inferiorto the ships used by ChristopherColum-bus...we are really hurting for a maritime deliv­ery capability."22D

Thestationanditspartners werealsohurting fora successful team insertion. Team LYRE hadbeenput ashorefroma junkat uninhabited DeoNgang, wherea gorge openedonto the seaabout25 kilometers northof the Swatowbaseattacked in theVULCAN operation. Fourweekslater, in late January, the station fretted that the

teamhad yet to be heardfrom. It neverwouldcomeup on the air, for it had beenspottedalmostimmediately upon landing by an outposton the coast. Five menwere captured on thespot,andtwoothers, fleeing south, werepickedup within a few days. BetternewscamefromTeam TARZAN, now reporting fromits vantagepointoverRoute 12. It hadpromptly comeuponthe radio, and eventhoughtherewere anoma­lies in the first threemessages-proceduralerrorsand thetelltale preoccupation with thelanding operations-it cameup with thecorrectanswerto a challenge question.23D .Thefirst quarterof 1963 foundthe Agencycon­tinuing its attemptto balancetwo competingimperatives for its effortsagainst the DRV.First, reflecting growingevidenceof the GVN'sdeclinein thefaceof the VietConginsurgency,was expansion of the effort to distract Hanoifrom its designson annexingthe South. Sec­ond, embodying Washington's determinationto give the GenevaAgreements every chanceto succeed, wasthe continuingmoratorium oncrossing the DRVborder from Laotianair­space. In the background, affectingall plan­ning, lurked the perpetual-though little­scrutinized-uncertainty about the status ofteams in place, perhapsdoubled, perhapsdead, perhapsworking-If to little effect-assome reported they were dOing. 24DThe mostdramaticevidence of growing VietCongmilitary prowess came with the humiliat­ingdefeatof a numerically superiorgovemmentforceat Ap Bac, a hamlet In the Mekong Delta,InJanuary1963. The shockof this disaster,combined with increasingly aggressive commu­nist movesin northeastern Laos againstbothRLGforces and anti-communist Neutralists,

SE~IMR

l!O FVSA 14993,30 January 1963~L --.J

21 Ib.id.O .-22 Ibid.ao Conboy, 58-59D SAIG5053, 24 January1963,1 1FVSA17604.0Tourison, 66-67, unaccountably hasTeam LYRE insertedby air.Healsoclaimsthat two teammemberswerekilled resistingcaptureand the leader later executed.1I2' For an accountot the trayingof the GerlevaAgreements, and the resulting relaxation of restrictions on covertoperationsin andtromLaos,see theauthor's Undercover Armies:CIAandSurrogate Warfare InLaos, 1961-1973(Centertor the Studyot Intelligence, 2005), Chapter7.0

37/

05303948

38

began to reduce Washington's sensitivity tocharges of violating the Geneva Agreements.The proscription on penetration of DRV air­space from Laos remained in effect. Butthe per­ceived need to take the war to the enemy wasagain operating to raise expectations of thecovert program against the DRV.DThe pressure for results may also account at

. least in part for a recurrence of the perennialurge In Saigon to explain away indications oftrouble with teams already on the ground.Commenting on RDF testing of agent radiotraffic that placed team transmitters well awayfrom their claimed locations, the station urgedHeadquarters not to overreact. Standard secu­rity measures were already testing team bonafides, and RDF testing did no more than to sup­plement these techniques. An "error of [a] fewmiles" in an RDF triangulation could actuallygive a false indication that a team had beendoubled. 25DThe station's description of its security precau­tions acknowledged, on the one hand, that theDRV would use the radio operator of any teamit wanted to double. On the other hand, itappealed to favorable results of testing of aradio operator's identity-his ''fist''-as one ofthree indicators of freedom from enemy con­trol. The other two were the use of pre-deter­mined danger signals and incorrect responsesto challenge questions from the base. But bothof these were subject to manipulation by DRVsecurity once it had broken an operator's will toresist. The station thus seemed to be resortingto an act of faith to give its teams a clean bill ofhealth; in late February 1963, it even sug­gested that the status of Team EROS, earlierwritten off as compromised, remained to beestablished. 2GD

Ambivalence at HeadquartersDBoth Washington and the field had always har­bored conflicted views of the value of agent­especially black-operations into the DRV.Having returned to Headquarters in mid-1962,Bob Myers ran FE Division's North VietnamTask Force before becoming deputy chiefwhen Bill Colby took over the division in early1963. The debate continued, and Myersremembered persisting in his objections toProjectl [Even if the thing were moresuccessful than Headquarters had any reasonto believe, he argued, there wasn't any sensein a program of covert pinpricks at a time ofovert, if undeclared, warfare. But Colby's readi­ness to tolerate contrarian views was notmatched by a willingness to change course,and his support for the program seemedunshakable."DAt Headquarters, this ambivalence accommo­dated both the expansive planning mandatedin January and a skeptical review of the pro­gram's results and prospects. Implementationof the planning began on 13 April 1963 with theinsertion of six ethnic Tho agents onto highground some 75 kilometers northeast of Hanoi.Their target: the railway running northeast fromHanoi into China. 28 DWhile the station waited for the Tho agents­Team PEGASUS-to come uo.onjhe.alr.aHeadquarters officer named[ ~

I ~as completing the survey of theprogram's results. Pouching the study toSaigon, Headquarters noted that the disadvan-tage ofl Iprevious unfamiliaritywith the program was "in part compensated[for] by,the absence of any vested interest Inthe matter." The aim here was, presumably, todeter the station from protesting the study'Scarefully agnostic results.C Inoted

05303948

that the priority given to Intelligence collectionin the effort's first year had yielded such disap­pointing results that the emphasis had beenshifted to sabotage operatlons. Then, therestrictions resulting from the Geneva Agree­ments had prevented new insertions, and onlytwo teams-TOURBILLON and VULCAN­had attacked a target. 290[Giv,'he small number of operations, I I

esitated to make categorical judgmentsabout the program's accomplishments orfuture, although it was clear to him that resultshad "so far been rather unimpressive." Appar­ently concerned not to make adverse jUd~ments that he could not definitively prove,L!I Itreated as viable all operationalteams carried by the station. But he did a care­ful comparison of radio traffic from teamsknown to be or to have been under enemy con­trol. He warned the station that a dela ed firstradio contact,

'-------:--;-;;-;--:;-----:--;""""T--::-::o--.J meant the pros­pect of "further trouble." Communications fromdoubled teams dis la ed other similarities,

In this context, the study'-n-o-te-d""'t'"'"h-e-p-r-ob;-'Ic-e-m'of doing something usefulwith a team known to be doubled. It could be

I -'AI bem,1 1009- !ment, "tneusefulness of this cat and mousegame is not Immediately obvious."3°D

Although he abstained from an explicit chal­ienge to the team's viability, I l

. noted that the RDF measurement of TOUR­BILLON's radio traffic indicated its transmit­ter-like that of doubled Team EROS-to be

located near Canton, in southeastern China.The readings were "as yet not definitive," butHeadquarters noted that if TOURBILLON wasbad, so in all probability was CASTOR, whichhad prepared Its drop zone. Echoing the sta­tion's reservations about RDF accuracy, thestudy categorized it as only one of a battery ofsecurity checks which, even taken together,furnished "no sure answer to whether or not ateam has been comprornised.'?' DAlmost as ambivalent as the station about theinterpretation of inconclusive eVidence,D

I f,vas prepared to accept, at least ten-tatively, what still remained to be proved. Thecorrect response to a challenge, after a seriesof anomalous messages, could be interpretedas meaning that a team at least "appear[ed]" tobe "safe," and the study applied this standardto ITeamTARZAN, whose first three messageshad raised concern. Only two months later didthe team go off the air, and even then therewas no way to know whether it had previouslybeen under DRV control, or had suffered somesudden mishap.32[]

I lreatment suggests that hemade as favorable an assessment of reportingteams' security as the evidence allowed. Ifthechoice was conscious, it may well havereflected a perception that division manage­ment would dismiss as biased a set of conclu­sions that emphasized indications ofcompromise. Such a perception might wellhavebeen valid, but it resulted in implicitacceptance of team bona fides until and unlessdefinitive e~rical evidence established thecontrary.331~

This mindset ledl Ito an uncriticalevaluation of the late-1962 supply drop toTeam CASTOR. He noted that the bundles hit

2. FVSW 7393.nConboy. 58, says that the North Vietnamese effort to use TOURBILLON for deception purposes Includeddeslr0(j' the lma'ge that the team then reported having sabotaged.D30 Ibid.31 Ibid. No information supports the RDF indication of Canton as a radio base for DRV security.D32 Ibid., FVSA 1-ZfiQ4:D33 FVSW 7393.U

39I

I

C053039 48

North Vietnam: Black Insertions, 1963

Udon Ihanl,

"Ban Mouang Cha

Xleng"Khoang

Staying With the programD

W n..Colby accepted as sufficientI I. Imuted criticism and modest reporting

L-----,,---Jrequirements , he was, in his own words , "wellaware that black entry operations against theSoviet Union and Eastern Europe were foundto be unfruitful." But in May 1963 he still saw"substantial differences in... FE denied areas"that included draconian limits on legal travel ,the "difficulties of Caucasian access," and a"much more war-like relationsh ip" between theparts of divided countries like Vietnam . Thesedifferences compounded the problem even asthey reduced further the prospects for alterna­tives to the black entry techn ique. Colby waslooking only at the absence of otherapproaches when he said that he had "contin­ued to conduct a certain numbe r of these blackentry operat ions."34C

L---,-,-__.,----_rook note of the paucity of infor­mation on team operations in the DRV. Of the14 operations launched by early 1963, onlyVULCAN, with its dramat ic denouement, hadbeen followed by a detailed report. Losses ofaircraft had also engendered relat ively com­plete reporting . But otherwise there was little togo on: "We have no recent analys is from thestation on the causes of losses or successes."Consequently, the action demanded in the cov­ering dispatch- it was released by FE DivisionChief Colby-was confined to new reportingrequirements. These included team compos i­tion at launch, analysis of failures, and the for­warding of numbered and dated trans lations ofall team radio messages D

other observe rs, both at Headquarters and inthe field, he found nothing suspic ious in theclaimed survival of Team TOURBILLON evenafter it reported having lost a man in a firefightwith DRV security forces.[ J

Gulf

of

Tonkin

Be ~ry represent Ion ISrot nece ;anly '1ulhofl latlv&

the ground so far from the DZ that they werenot found until the following week , but he didnot mention the risk of their having been spot­ted, meanwh ile, by villagers or security forces.Likewise , he seems entirely to have ignoredthe early communications anomalies thathad-with good reason-east doubt on sev­eral other teams, especially CASTOR . Like

100 Knometers,

os

50,

T H I LAN D Sako"Nakhon

Airborne inser tion

..::.. Maritime inse rtion

of­o

,. William E. Colb Memorandum to DDP, "Black Entry OperationsAgainst FE Denied Areas- Cold War," 29 May 19630

40 /

05303948

Over the course of the next three months, asmore teams disappeared into SRV jails, theweight of evidence overwhelmed even BillColby's native optimism. In early August, hewrote the DDP that "No intelligence of valuehas been, nor ... is likely to be, obtained fromsuch operations." The same applied to sabo­tage: "we have never been, nor in a cold warsituation are we likely to be, able to conductsmall team operations on a wide enough scalefor [significant] cumulative results." Whetherout of loyalty or out of fear, the populace couldbe expected to expose black entry teams to thecommunist authorities. Colby concluded thatany potential In this technique lay in politicaland psychological operatlon~sthow it wouldbe realized he did not say.35U

There was nothing left to do but cut mountinglosses by canceling Project! !or atthe very least suspending it until some break­through in tasking or techniques offered a realprospect of success. Colby did neither.Instead, he proceeded to deploy as many aspossible of the 46 teams that, as of April 1963,were ready to parachute or infiltrate by sea intotheir intended hideouts in the North. Eighteenteams would be launched by air if "proper air­craft" were acquired, while 11 would go by sea;the means of insertion for the other 17 was stilluncertain. What was not in doubt was the con­tinued pursuit of the program. 360It is hard to attribute the perpetuation of,Project

I Itoanything but bureaucratic inertia,coupled, perhaps, with a certain reluctance onColby's part to accept the practical implicationsof his own admission of failure. Acting on thisjudgment would, moreover, have run counterto a can-do culture that insisted on the Clan­destine Service's ability to do anythingrequired of it. In any case, whatever the rea­sons for this gUlf between perception and

action,it is clear that the only remaining uncer­tainties arose from purely technical consider­ations·O

Some of these considerations derived from thechanging risk environment in DRV airspace andothers from the relative merits of available air­craft. The DC-4 had the advantage of fourengines, greater range and speed, and radar,while the twin-engine C-123 had a greater cargocapacity and electronic countermeasures(ECM) gear to foil radar-controlled antiaircraftfire. It would also allow a drop to be made in onepass over the DZ, because men and suppliesexited quickly through the rearward-facing ramprather than taking turns at a door in the side.The greater experience of the DC-4 crews gavethat aircraft the edge, for light-of-the-mooninsertions, but as soon as DRV interceptor air­craft appeared on the scene, the C-123, with itsECM capability, and dark-of-the-moon opera­tions would become standard.J7D

Taking Off the GlovesD!perhaPj lulled by the defensive tone ofI I'

request in April, the station seems not tohave taken very seriously Washington's desirefor more reporting. Two weeks after insertingTeam PEGASUS, also in mid-April, it finallyanswered a Headquarters query by summariz­ing the aircrew's description of the drop. Theintervals between exits-four seconds from thelast bundle to the first man, and two- to four-sec­ond intervals between men-suggested a dis­persed landing and subsequent "difficulty [in]regrouping." As many as four men might havelanded in trees, with an attendant increase inboth recovery time and risk of injury. The "great­est concern" for the station was the possibilitythat the DZ had not been cleared before dawn.Nevertheless, it saw the "lack of radio contact

S~MR

35 William E. Colby, Memorandum 10DDP, "Black Team Infiltration by Air and Sea Against FE Denied Areas-Cold War," 2August 1963,[ 1:lO FVSrJ.:3931-'37 Ibid; =r19 March 1963,,-1 ---'

05303948

~R

[as] not yet reason for concern," for experiencehad established that "no contact ~thel firstthree weeks [is] not abnormal." 38U

Indeed, delayed initial contact had becomealmost the rule, and by 1963 there was amplereason to take this as a sign that the reportingteam had been captured. In July, Hanoi con­firmed that this had, in fact, been the fate ofTeam PEGASUS; its members were tried andsentenced to prison terms. But neither theteam's silence nor subsequent news of its cap­ture led the station to examine the reasons forits failure, or to explore the possibility that itssilence had represented enemy control.Instead, it continued with the new round ofinsertions. 39 DIn May 1963, the Saigon Station conductedthree overflights of the DRV. Only one resultedin insertion of a new team, when JASON para- ­chuted into North Vietnam on the 14th. Twoother flights had to be aborted, one because ofbad weather at the DZ, and the other becausethe static line to which the ripcords of cargochutes were attached tore away from a bulk­head as the bundles fell from the plane.Another flight, with supplies and two sabotageagents for Team EUROPA, was cancelledbecause of bad weather. 400

The aircrew carrying Team JASON reported,on return, that all chutes had opened. But theteam did not come up on the air. The station'ssilence on this outcome matched its treatmentof Team PEGASUS, and then of LYRE, whosecapture Hanoi announced on 29 May.4'0

No after-action reporting, or at least none thatsurvives, followed any of these developments.Had it been called to account at this point for itsreticence, the station would likely have arguedthat the demands of an accelerated operationsschedule precluded spending time on merehistory. For as hostilities resumed in Laos andNgo Dinh Diem struggled with massive Bud­dhist unrest in South Vietnam's cities, the casefor bringing the war to North Vietnam becameall the more compelling. The station now aban­doned its insistence on using Laotian airspace.Entering the DRV from the Gulf of Tonkin,project aircraft continued deploying the reser­voir of teams that had accumulated after theGeneva Agreements of mid-1962.0During the first two weeks of June 1963, twoDC-4sl Idroppedseven teams into the DRV. Two of them landedon high ground overlooking the Red River val­ley and their target, the rail line running north­west from Hanoi into China. Anotherteam wasto hit bridges and an "elevated tramway" serv­ing a coal mine north of Haiphong. Two morewere supposed to hit bridges along coastalRoute 1. The last two were directed at Routes7 and 12, leading into Laos.vDOnly one of the seven teams came up on theair. It did so 10 days after launch, reporting thatit had landed some 10 kilometers from theintended DZ. But all members were safe, andall bundles recovered. The station challengedTeam BELL, but, "probably because we ·havebecome too subtle" in formulating such que­ries, received no reply. But it had, in fact, beencaptured within three days of landing, and its

42

38 SAIG 7013, 26 April 1963,[ I I"Headquartersdoes notfeel that the reerequesteaeitner represent a uselessincrease in reiftape or tnaf they would impose an undue amountof extra work.'39 FVSA 17604 In the case of any single operation,the absence 01 a post-mortem might represent no more than thevagaries ot the file retirementprocess. It is the near-totalabsellc.e of station reviewsot] loperationallallures thatsuggests that the reporting ~cllQ..EE~Sllii..ls-J)QJaIlQma1'Lj

oot I, 7 June 1963,4, SAIG 7431 15 Ma 1963\-----------------=t.IG7896, 30 May 1963,1,-__

I lam.

lr-----------

05303948

, radio operator coerced into full cooperation, " with DRV security. 430 '

Meanwhile, also in June, CIA attempted orcompleted a total of three supply drops toteams already on the ground. The first, judgedsuccessful, went to Teams CASTOR andTOURBILLON, operating in the same area inthe northwest. Bad weather forced the secondflight to turn back; it had carried an eighth newteam in addition to supplies for TeamEUROPA, long since under DRV control.Another try at delivering supplies and sabo­tage agents to EUROPA failed too, when thepilots could not find the DZ.440

These moonlit airdrops alternated with dark-of­the-moon maritime operations. A slightly gar­bled station report indicates a June total of atleast 10 maritime missions, aimed at Insertingor supplying four teams, all of which failed toreach their targets. The reasons included badweather, mechanical failure, and the unex­pected presence of a North Vietnamese junkfleet at the site of one intended delivery.I Imaritime case officer at DaNang, held out no hope of success as long asthese operations relied for transportation onthe small, slow fishing junks in service sincetheCJlaunch in April 1961. He intimatedthat the station was continuing its use of thesejunks only at Washington's insistence: it would"do all that is possible" with them, but warnedHeadquarters that It could "continue to expectonly minimum results."45D

Minimum remained close to zero, as the 20 airand maritime missions conducted in June1963 produced only two apparent successes.To reach even that modest success rate, case

officers and Headquarters managers had tocontinue dismissing the anomalous behaviorof Teams CASTOR and TOURBILLON, pre­sumed to be working together. But, as hadbecome standard practice, rigorous CI analy­sis of teams in radio contact gave way to asearch for technological and policy solutions tothe difficulties facing the infiltrations of newteams, and support to those In place.DAnd, in fact, there were, as we have seen,major obstacles In both the policy and techni­cal areas. In mid-1963, the ban on overflyingthe DRV from Laos remained in effect, despitethe declining fortunes of the Diem regime inSaigon and the resultlnq perceived need todistract Hanoi from its support of the insur­gency. This restriction required all drop mis­sions to defy the radar and anti-aircraftconcentrated along the Gulf of Tonkin, and toforgo exploitation of what Headquarters calledthe "virtually undefended" border with Laos.The limited number of gaps in the coastal radarscreen was forcing project aircraft to use thesame few entry and exit points, and CIAexpected the DRV soon to close even theseloopholes in its defenses. Finally, entry fromthe sea deprived alrcrews of the many refer­ence points afforded by the mountainous ter­rain in the west, which also provided somedefense against radar detection. 4sDIn the middle of 1963, the Agency seemed toharbor little hope of getting the moratoriumlifted, for a Headquarters complaint about Itsdeleterious effects was made only for therecord. An information copy went to the desig­nated liaison officer at the Department of State,but the memo was not addressed even to thechief of FE Division, its distribution being lim-

~TIIMR

43 Conboy, 59,1560 FVSA 17604' SAIG 9215 12 Jul 1963FVSA 16252, 1 August 1963"'1 J---,"I 111 Jut 1963 1 '"FVSA 16152,r'-"''''''--''-''-''><L-----------..O'''n'''e'''0T':ft"Lhe:c::s-:-e"'''te-:-a"''"m-:-s,--::-::'an ethnic Nung unit called DRAGON,~IIY made It as ore on uty.lflfien dlsappeare; e agents' beneficiaries were paid oil in February 1964. (Conboy, 61).

4. Blind memorandum, "Black Flights into North Vietnam and the Laos Overtlight Restriction," 26 June 1963,1I I ~~

43

05303948

next drop. Meanwhile, as with Team GIANT,PACKER failed to come up on the air.49DTwoacts of faith, one in the bona fides of TeamEUROPA and the other in the C-123's invulner­ability to ORVair defenses, came within awhisker of producingdisaster 'when the nextsupply and reinforcement mission to EUROPAtook off on 10 August. The station, embold­ened by a long series of missions with no mis­hap, had four months earlier declared that"careful planning and professionalairmanshipby flight crews can eliminate virtually all dan­ger," But the North Vietnamese, apparentlyrunning out of patience with repeated over­flights, had now moved 10 antiaircraft compa­nies Into the vicinity of the EUROPAOZ.Approaching the OZ,the supply palletsalreadylined up on the roller conveyor, the plane wassuddenly buffetedby shells exploding on bothsides.The crew and the new EUROPAagentsfought to resecurethe pallets so that the pilotcould start evasive maneuvers. Meanwhile,the ECMgear worked well enough to stave offa direct hit.500The plane made it back to base, but accordingtoone account,thecaptainwasso traumatizedby his brush with death that he took the nextflight bac~ IHis fellow pilots inSaigon, unwilling to accept his close call asmere coincidence, sent a back-channel rnes­sa e 0 arran e a reconnaissance ba

Over the EUROPADZ, the lnstru­Lm-e-n-:-ts-"-"w-e-n-'!t wild" with indications of at leastfour antiaircraft positions; in due course,thisinformation reached the crews in Saigon.Meanwhile, Team EUROPA, claiming not tohaveheard the supplyplanecross the OZ,hadreestablished contact with the station. But theI Ihad had enough; they refused furtherdrops to it.51D

r'--------------~l.EJSA 176040

-------_._--------------_.

ited to the branch level. In any case, its rathertimorous conclusion recommended merelythat "the Laosoverflight restriction be re-exarn­ined."47D

Better Aircraft but No Better LUCkD

Logistical andtechnical problems were lessintrac­table than those of policy, andefforts to remedyequipment deficiencies hadbegun to bearfruit inearly1963. InSeptember 1962, 301 II !airmen sponsored byCIAstarted train­ingon theC-123 at Pope AirForce Base in Northcarolin~, InFebruj-ry 1963, fiveunmarked C-123sarrived L ..Their crews, having finished thebasic program intheUnited States, spent thenextseveral months perfecting theirtechniques inlow­level night flying aridtheuseof theplane's ECMgear. Thefirstoperational deployment from SouthVietnam tookplace on2 July, withtheinsertion ofTeam GIANT at a DZin themountains westof thepanhandle cityofVinh, Thestation andSEPES,which hadsupplied theagent personnel, waited forit tocomeupontheair, butit neverdid.411DMeanwhile; with thel loc-4 crewsreaching the end of their contract, the stationdecidedto exploittheir experience by dispatch­ing that aircraftjust once more, in a missionlaunchedon 4 July.The planecarriedone newteam, PACKER, targetedat the same railwayagainstwhich Team BELLwas to haveoper­ated, and a two-man reinforcement party forTeam EUROPA. Team PACKE:R's DZ was firston the flight plan, and the crew watched theagents floating downtoward it. The DC-4then

. proceeded toward EUROPA's OZ. It neverreturned to Saigon; judgingby the absence ofany reaction fromHanoi,Saigon concluded thatit had notbeenshot down but hadcrashedintoa mountainside on its low-altitude routeto the

44

......_._----------------------------------_.......

05303948

Instead, the pilots' commanding office~complained to CIA about alleged "doub"'li-ng-o-'f;-­teams," which the station took as a reference tothe EUROPA incident. Thel Imay havechosen not to mention the overflight fromllfor the station's response did not address~~ere right about EUROPA, the stationsaid, the team had been "cleverly doubled," for ithad rejected a proposed second supply mission,claiming inadequate security at the OZ. CIAtherefore remained reluctant to write the team off:EUROPA, It argued, was "not necessarily dou­bled." On the other hand, perhaps it was, and thestation did not propose to tempt fate. It had "noplans [to] resupply again at this time."52DDespite inferior navig~tional equipment on theC-123-in this respect, the DC-4 was better­Its survival of the mid-August EUROPA dropproved the wisdom of the change of aircraft.The station recognized the C-123's limitationsbut, before.turning the program over to MACVin early 1964, seems never to have tried toobtain the superior C-130, a four-engine prop­jet with sophisticated electronic equipment.

[ Isubsequent rationale for thisapparent passivity noted that plausible denialwould have failed with the C·130, then flownonly by the US Air Force; he did not note thatthe same applied to the C-123. S3 D

ImprOVing the TechnologyD'

Agency management had recognized the newrequirements in maritime as well as air trans­portation support imposed by the sabotagemission adopted in 1962. The search for a suit­able replacement for whatl !calledhis "seven prehistoric junks" found an interimsolution in a civilian craft called the Swift. Usedto service oil drilling platforms in the Gulf ofMexico, it was big enough-50 feet long-andfast enough-up to 30 knots-to handle teaminsertions and supply missions. Modified withbigger engines and extra fuel tanks, and fittedwith machine guns, rocket launchers, andelectronics, it would make up in performancewhat it lacked in deniability. The DOCIapproved the purchase of three Swifts in mid­November 1962.540

. According to William Colby, the Swift repre­sented a stopgap measure, adopted partly ona competitive basis, to accelerate the pace ofCIA operations at a time when the US Navywas preparing its own covert capability. Mean­while, both the Agency and the Navy wereacquiring the Norwegian-built Nasty, an 80­foot patrol boat whose two diesel enginesdrove it at speeds over 40 knots. In early 1963,CIA turned over its two newly acquired Nastysto the Navy for testing. Much more complexthan the Swift, the Nasty required more sophis­ticated repair facilities that were to be built andstaffed by Navypersonnel detailed to CIA'sbase at Oa Nang.ssD

"I I IConboy, in an unsourcedpassage, says that CIA Insisted on continuing to treat the team as viable. In his view. this decision constiluted a "stunningunderestimation of the North Vietnamese security services and a blatant disregard for the telltale signs of compromise .... "In fact, the station may well finally have begun to treat EUROPA as suspect, for In December 196311 instructed th~m toe~fillrateJhroJgh Laos; such orders had become a standard way of testing suspect teams.n See FVSA 17604.U&3 Clandestine Services Historical Paper 36, "Operational Program Against Nort'nVletnam, 1960-1964," 36-37,March 1966, CIA History Staft (hereafter CSHP 36).nWhat might have been a rich source of fact and even Interpretationof the North Vietnam program is, in fact, a protractedCOmplaint about difficult operating conditions and about the elementsthat the author saw as having abdicated, to one degree or another, their responsibility to help him make the program work.These included policymakers, other CIA field stations, the author's predecessor in Saigon, Saigon Station management, andHeadquarters. No Individual operations are identified. An appendix by Da Nang maritime case officerI Iadopts a similar tone.D•• Ibid.; DConboy, 70-71; draft memorandum for the DCI, "Request for Authority to Initiate StjPS to Obtain Certain Vesselsand Personnel Needed lor Augmented Maritime Operations into North Vietnam," 5 July 1963, II [J•• Conboy, 67-70. The Navy unaccountably gave Widepubilclty to Nastys in US service when it sent one of the CIA's twoboats up Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River to WaShington, where the Secr~ of the Navy and other Navy brassboarded for a halt-hour's demonstration that was covered in the Washington POSI.LJ

/ 45

IC05303948

located with a small, standard radio receiver.Meanwhile,L __ Ian Agencyproprietary at Marana, Arizona , was workingon impact opening devices and on new "controllines" to drop parachutists and 500-pound bun­dles into stands of timber.560The station was also exploring using homingpigeons to establish an "immediate commochannel until [a] newly infiltrated team hasopportunity [to] establish [a] safe area and startuse [of) radio commo ." A bird carrying a pre­pared warning message, released at the firstsign of trouble, would foil any DRV effort todouble a captured team . Meanwhile, the sta­tion would begin sending in two radios witheach team, one In a supply bundle and a sec­ond whose components would be dividedamong team members.570

Faded newspaper clipping ot patrol boat of tile type intended forSlIbotago oporations in North Viotnam.D

The station proposed another refinement, inthe form of vacuum packing of blankets andclothing, in order to reduce their volume and ,therefo re, the size of cargo bundles. On thetactical side, It thought to aggravate DRV wor­ries about the scale of operations with decep­tion ploys that included I

With an acceptable aircraft in the inventory andthe Swifts and Nastys on the way, the Agencyused the summer of 1963 to experimen t withvarious technological fixes to the problem ofInserting and supplying teams within strikingdistance of their targets . The scarcity of suit­able drop zones , in particular, sparked effortsto deliver men and materiel with greater preci­sion, in more difficult terrain, and in areas pos­ing greater danger to the program's aircraft.Saigon wanted devices permitting low-alt itudeopening of chutes for supply bundles droppedfrom high altitude. It also asked for beacons , tobe attached to cargo bundles, that could be

SAIG 9322 , 16 July 1963[

-'=-='-= "-- ---,- -----.-..J SA1G 9842,

46

05303948

A Game Not Worth the candIeD

The original intelligence mission of 1961,expanded that year to include sabotage, nowIncluded Inciting popular resistance among theDRV's ethnic minorities. In May 1963, Head­quarters sent Herbert Weisshart, a covert polit­ical action specialist, to Saigon to set up anotional resistance movement. Invoking Viet­namese mythology, it was to be called theSacred Sword Patriots' League (SSPL). Itwould provide an ostensible sponsor for realteams on the ground and, if all went well, wouldprovoke paranoia in the DRV hierarchy. Thefirst team trained for this multiple missionincluded ethnic Hmong and Thai. Team EASYparachuted into the DRV. near the Laotian bor­der, on 11 August 1963, and soon came up onthe air.saD

Team SWAN had the same training and a sim­ilar multiple mission to spread SSPL leaflets

while collecting intelligence and hitting sabo­tage targets. But it had much less luck. Jump­ing on 4 September into the area of Cao Bang,in the northern reaches of the DRV, it waspromptly seized by security elements. All the "station knew, for the moment, was that it failedto come up on the air.60 DThe same period brought word of what the sta­tion took to be welcome results of operations Inlate August. A team inserted in the northernDRV reported having laid explosives on theHanoi-Lao Kay railway, after which it heard thesound of an approaching train, followed by agigantic explosion, then silence. This team, notidentified in the station's report, has to havebeen BELL, whose capture and doubling byDRV security was not yet suspected. Anotherteam, also unidentified in the report,announced having destroyed a bridge. 61D

~R

onConboy 75-76 n60 Conboy, 80' SAIm'499. 8 October 1963, VSA17604.00' SAIG14990 If there was spot reporting at the time of these activities, it has not survived.

47

( 05303948

48 /

05303948

Chapter Four: Movin~wardMilitary ManagementU

The reported sabotage operations. modesteven If authentic,came near the end of a tortu­ous process designed to comply with theKennedy administration'sJune 1961 mandateto put the Pentagon in charge of most uncon­ventional warfare. When complete, the pro­cess would transfer to Defense the entireprogram of air- and seaborne team operationsagainst the DRV, as well as most of the uncon­ventionalwarfareactivityinSouthVietnam.D

These negotiations were taking place in anatmosphere of rising doubt, in CIA, about thecapacity of its programto affect NorthVietnam­ese behavior in the South. Bill Colby's deputyin FE Division, Bob Myers, was still arguingthat the "totality of communist control" abso­lutely precluded, in the Sino-Soviet bloc, thekind of resistance operations conducted inAxis-occupied countries during World War II.Indeed, the so-calledJedburgh operationsrunby OSS had themselves, in Myers's opinion,enjoyed much less success than postwarmythgave them credit tor.' D

The September gUidance noted the inability ofsmall sabotage teams to hit targets of anyimportance.Tocompensatefor this, the stationshould prepare its teams for "political actionand [psychological warfare] missions,"whichwould include recruitment among the localpopulationfor both paramilitaryand psycholog­ical harassment. Presentedas if it were new­earlierwork on the SSPL got no mention-thisguidance did not specify just what form thenew activityshould take. Indeed,the cablehasa rather pro forma cast, almost as if the

author-FE Division officer] ~waswriting what he'd been told to write, and doingso with littleconviction.In the event, bothof theteams Headquartersnominatedfor this mis­sion-BULL and RUBY-were captured onlanding, one in October and the other inDecember. 2DMeanwhile, the bureaucratictrendwas runningin the other direction. Despitehaving no gUid­ance from the Pentagon, MACV hadexpressed what the station called a "generalwillingness" to take over the station's pro­grams,on a phasedbasisand with CIA footingthe bill until 1 July 1964. But it wanted to keepsome CIA specialists for the "medium to longterm." To this the station objected that Wash­ington now wanted a "more bold and aggres­sive posture"; it Impliedthat it expectedMACVto forgo any further effort at cover or deniabil­ity.3D

The question of detailingAgency personneltoa MACV-run programdid not, it seems, comeup at the conferenceon VietnamsponsoredbySecretaryMcNamaraat Honolulu on 20November 1963. At issue was the more basicquestion of the potential of team operationsinto the DRV. According to Bill Colby's lateraccount, DCI John McCone assigned him topresent the Agency'sviews to McNamaraandthe assembled military. Echoing the doubtshe'd expressed to the DDP in August, Colbytold themthat mostof the teams had beencap­tured or killed. "It isn't working, and it won'tworkany betterwith the militaryin charge."Leftto its own devices, the Agency would shut theprogramdown by 1965, turning instead to psy­chologicaloperations-including black radioand leaflet drops-"infiltrating ideas, ratherthan agents and explosives."4D

~R

.====;_._---1 Conboy, 82-83: Myers intervlew:1 19 September1963'LI --.J

TJ--IFVSA 17604.nl-·~~~~===: ~3 SAIG 1747,17~ber 19"631L .......J

4 Conboy, 83-84.LJ

49

IC053039 48

A Valedictory SurgeD

With transfer of management responsibilityimminent , the Saigon Station wanted its stew­ardship to end with a bang, both literally andfigurative ly. In mid-October, it proposed twomaritime operations. A Swift would carry a sab­otage team to a coastal targe\. Just what thiswas is not recorded , but it was so difficult to

However unenthusiastic about devot ingresources to a failed activity-one about to berun, furthermore , by somebody else-CIAmanagement appea rs to have worked to givethe military the benefit of its experience. Writ­ing from Saigon in late December, Bill Colbytold his people at Headquarters to do a studyof recorded DRV and Chinese radar pickups ofpast CIA overflights . both coastal and fromLaos. McNamara, whom he had accompaniedto Vietnam, had just asked for it, and Colbywanted it read u on their imminent return toWashington .7

In any case, McNamara took none of theseconsiderations into account. His reaction sug­gested to Colby a belief that, if the effort hadfailed. up to that point, it was just a matter ofthe Agency's being too small to run it. The Pen­tagon was already prepared with a plan. onethat-given the military's disdain for theAgency 's efforts-took the ironic approach ofechoing nearly everything that the Saigon Sta­tion was already doing. Drafted for the newchairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen.Maxwell Taylor, the concept went to CINCPACfor expansion into what became MACV's Ope r­ational Plan (Oplan) 34-63.Sn

whatever the particu lar influences on histhinking , had not the imperative to contributeto the war effort ruled out such a drasticmove .sO

Gulf

of

Tonkin

.Ilinh

Colby later attr ibuted his change of heart toBob Myers 's persistent critique of the pro­gram . He may-indeed ought-to have beeninfluenced also by a record of failure that, bythe most optimistic measure . was nearlyunbroken. As Myers later speculated. Colbymight have canceled the program forthwith ,

100 Kilometers,50,

os

SakonT H A I LAN 0 Nakhon

Xleng·Khuoang

.:. Maritime raid

Udon Thanl;

·8anMouallll Cha

North Vietnam: Maritime Raids, 1961-63

5 Tourison, 100; My. rs interview.U• Conboy, 83-847 SAIG 3240, 20 ecember 1963'LI ---l

50

05303948

reach that the station calculated a round trip toit of some nine hours from the offshore launch­ing point. Headquarters thought even ninehours too optimistic an estimate, and disap­proved the operation as simply too risky. The

, second operation appears also to have beencanceled, for neither the official record norpostwar accounts by captured agents mentionit further. 8D . .Meanwhile, unaccountably using one of themuch-maligned Junks, the station and its PSOcounterparts launched what appears to havebeen the last singleton agent insertion beforeMACV took over management of the US role.Agent~sailed north on 27 October 1963.At the~ point, not far from Dong Hoi, fiveof the 1a-man crew paddled him to the beachin a rubber boat. The party then failed to returnto the junk, and after two-and-a-half hours ofwaiting, its captain headed south in order toclear DRV waters before daylight. Two dayslater, the rubber boat and its five crewmen alsoreached South Vietnamese waters, somehowhaving eluder DRV tatrols after landing theagent. Agent himself disappeared, andthe station never knew whether he'd been cap­tured or had simply gone to ground, somehowevading communist security.aDThe last CIA-sponsored maritime sabotage ini­tiative of 1963 reprised the VULCAN operationof 1962 against the North Vietnamese navalbase at Qua~. A Swift, crewed by newly­hired[ ercenaries, brought theteam toIFielaunch point, from which TeamNEPTUNE proceeded by rubber boat. A bril­liant rotating light at the mouth of the riverrevealed two sampans, whose occupants chal-

.Ienged the team. The agents saw no wayaround the sampans, anchored in mid-stream,

• SAIG 1776 17 October 1963

and fled back to the Swift. Anothe~on23 December met a similar fate. ,oU

This effort inaugurated a cycle of new opera­tional ploys that alternated with public trials ofcaptured teams. On the 24th, Hanoiannounced the trial of "another group of US­puppet spy commandos, the tenth since Junethis year." The six agents were sentenced toterms ranging from five to 16 years. Threeweeks later, on 14 January, two Swifts, againmanned by[ Imercenaries, headednorth. Team ZEUS would attack a target nearDong Hoi, while Team CHARON headedanother 18 kilometers north to take out the RonRiver ferry that served coastal Route 1.11DThe simpler of the two operations had the bet­ter success. Whether it was a desalinizationplant, as survivors recalled, or a "Dong Hoisecurity installation," as reported by the sta­tion, it would be hit by rockets fired from thebeach, and the hazards of underwater swim­ming would be avoided. A rubber boat tookTeam ZEUS ashore, where it succeeded inplacing its package of six 3.5in rockets, timedfor delayed firing. Having pointed the device asbest it could, .the team returned to the Swift.The station evaluated its effort as "probablysuccessful." 120Team CHARON never reached its target.Delayed by thel . }aptain's evasivemaneuvers around a North Vietnamese ves­sel, it arrived an hour late off the mouth of theRon River. Like the agents of Team ZEUS, itstwo pairs of swimmers left the Swift in a rubberboat. Leaving the boat at the mouth of the RonRiver, two of the frogmen started upstreamalong the north bank while the other two pro­ceeded along the south. One pair soonencountered a junk, and promptly did an

i\lG2f43. ovem er'0 FVSA 16907, 24 Decemb·e-r-1;~9'""6A3,.---------------j--111 Conboy,72-73. The station's report says ZEUS was to hit a "Dong Hoi security installation,"not further described.D12 Ibid: SAIG 3823, 16 January 1964,I I

51

05303948

about-face back to the rubber boat. There theywaited in vain for the other two, and finallyreturned to the Swift. With only half his teamback on board, the skipper was about to giveup and return toDa Nang when he saw a flash­light blinking near shore. Braving the risk ofdiscovery, he ran the Swift into the shallows,rescued the ~cked frogmen, and headedout to sea. ' 3U .

Tit fortat continued on 28 January, when Hanoisentenced the six-man crew of a boat, sent tocache supplies for doubled TeamC==UOterms ranging from four to 15 years." U

UnderMilitary controlD

That portion of official Washington devoted tocovert operations against the DRV spent themonth·of January 1964 debating the program'sorganizational and command arrangements.Despite the Pentagon's two-year lobbyingcampaign for a greater role in these opera­tions, it had at the turn of the year not formallyasked for the lead role in Implementing Oplan34A-64. The final version of that document,worked out by MACV and the Saigon Station,had reached Washington with no recommen­dation about future command relationships.Bill Colby looked at the endless quarrelingbetween State and Defense over the appropri­ate targets for an expanded program and con­cluded that CIA would be better off if it merelysupported team operations while it continuedto run covert psychological warfare. He urgedthis position on DCI McCone, who-judging bythe outcome-adopted it in his final ne~­tions with the Department of Defense.15UOn 1 February 1964, the management of irreg­ular warfare operations against the DRV

moved from CIA to the Department of Defense.To run them, MACV created the Special Oper­ations Group MACSOG), to be commanded byCol. Clyde Russell. Despite the perceivedinadequacy of the CIA effort, the militarywanted to continue running any teams still onthe ground, and it took over five CIA-supportedteams the station thought had evaded capture.In fact, all five were under DRV control, and themilitary was in effect starting from scratch. 16

DThe pressure for results that greeted Col. Rus­sell was even more Intense than that whichhad earlier encouraged CIA operators to short­change the counterintelligence side of the pro­gram. This resulted not merely from thepollcyrnakers' discontent with the CIA effort,but from the ominous decay of the GVN holdon the South Vietnamese countryside in the

. wake of President Diem's assassination. IfSaigon's generals were failing to mobilize theirpeople, something serious would have to bedone to distract the DRV from its support of theinsurgency. DUnfortunately for Col. Russell, his new officewas understaffed, and neither he nor any of hisfew men had experience In covert operations.These deficiencies were to be ameliorated, inthe short term, by detailing to Russell some ofthe station officers who had been running theprogram. In the new organization, each unithad a chief from one service and a deputy fromthe other. Herb Weisshart became chief of thepsyops sections, with an Army deputy; by oneaccount, he also served as Russell's deputy.I !the station's maritime opera- .tions officer in Saigon, found himself deputy tothe Navy commander now in charge of theequivalent section In MACSOG. 170

52

13 Conboy, 73.0 _1.C=·- I,. William E. Colb , Memorandum for the DCI, "Krulak Committee Paper on North Vietnam Operations,' 4 January 1964,

, Tourison, 113; Conboy, 158, 197, 202; ~ F A~f_.-----------___,,7 Shulz, 42-430 SAIG 4433,12 February 1964~L... ~ _J

05303948

It would appear that of the CIA officers detailedto the project, only Weisshart, running psyops,exercised any managerial authority] I.remembered being called upon only for logisti­cal support and for help in dealing with theVietnamese. He could offer operational advice,but his Navy counterpart could and did ignoreC~heir cordial personal relationship.

as not surprised, given that the mil­itary saw their job as succeedin~ere CIAhad already essentially failed. 18LJ

The Inexperience of MACSOG's military con­tingent and the uncritical attachment of stationofficers to the operational status quo militated .against a rigorous evaluation of techniquesand operational resources. The official recordsand the tales told by survivors suggest a widerange of causes to suspect that these teamsmight be doubled. Team TOURBILLON, as weknow, had provoked considerable suspicionbefore its responses to radio challengessoothed CIA and PSO into thinking that all waswell. At the other end of the scale was REMUS,.wnose ORV handlers played a flawless gameto convince Saigon of the team's viability.When In late 1963, for example, the team wasordered to mine a road near Oien Bien Phu, theNorth Vietnamese proceeded to block trafficwith a simulated attack. Later, with the teamunder MACSOG management, the ORVresponded to Saigon's demand for sabotage ofa bridge by creating or simulating visiblecracks in the structure for the benefit of USaerial reconnaissance. 19DHanoi's painstaking deception operations andthe lust for results In Washington and Saigoncombined to perpetuate the familiar opera­tional routine. In February and March, the Oa

Nang base, at least nominally under MACSOGcontrol, tried twice more to hit the Swatows tiedup at the Quang Khe naval base. Whatever theimpetus for these raids-one accountattributes it to the residual CIA staff at OaNang-they employed the same tactics usedagainst the same targets in 1962 and 1963.Nothing went right. A sudden wind capsized arubber boat, Swatows were not berthed asexpected, and foot patrols appeared along theshore. The frogmen in the February attemptsucceeded at least in getting back to the Swift,but the four swimmers involved in the Marchforay ali wound up in captivity.2°D

Following the March attack, CIA in Saigonsummarized for Headquarters what it calledMACSOG Oa Nang's "speculative comments"on the results. "Everything went very close toplan." Although all four swimmers had beenlost, there remained a "good possibility" thatthe mission had succeeded. Two more opera­tions in March 1964 reflected this resolutelypositive spirit, as MACSOG targeted bridgeswell north of Quang Khe. Both of these raidsfailed, each with the loss of two swimmers."c==J' .

In April and May, Hanoi's Vietnam PressAgency announced the capture and trial ofTeams RUBY and BULL, dropped into theNorth in late 1963. These operations had, ofcourse, preceded MACV's assumption of com­mand over penetrations operations into theORV,and the revelation of their fate did nothingto deter new efforts. Indeed, aided by thearrival of the Nasty patrol boats newly refittedat Sublc Bay In the Philippines, MACSOGaccelerated Its planning for more, and moreambitious, operatlons.«D

" Shulz,43;~lntervleW.D" Conboy, 9 .20 Conboy, 101- . '.2' SAIG 5127.13 March 1964.L !Conboy, 106-80 .2>. Robert J. Myers, Memorandum for the DDP, "FBIS Squib on the Ca ture of Seven Commando S ies' 8 A ril1964

I IFBIS transcript ofL... -'1 L-- --'

53

05303948

An Uneasy PartnerShlpO

Despite cordial relationships with CIA at the, working level, the military rightly sensed an

Agency reluctance either to invest people in anadvisory capacity or to leave the psywar ele­ment, being masterminded by Herbert Wefs­shart, even nominally under MACV direction.As of early June 1964, Bill Colby was propos­ing to "withdraw the CIA complement from jointoperations with [MACSOG] against North Viet­nam." The military side would be left entirely toMACV, while the Agency ran a "unilateral... political and psychological program." And infact, according to a study done for the Penta­gon, CIA did finally decline to assign a seniorofficer as permanent deputy to the MACSOGcommander; instead, it would detail a relativelyjunior man with the vague title of "special assls­tant."23D

The Pentagon persisted in Its demands formore Agency support, and succeeded in get­ting the attention at least of the DDCI. Only fourweeks after Colby urged withdrawal, DDCICarter asked the DDP to assure him and theDCI that the Agency was doing "everything itcan and should to render maximum supportand assistance" to MACSOG. How much CIAcould or ought to do remained a matter ofdebate, and the military seems to have con­cluded that the Agency's help was half·hearted, at best. Its disappointment with thelevel of Agency support may have arisen inpart from surprise that CIA had turned over solittle in the way of going operations. Bob Myersthought that MACSOG had indulged a para­noid sense that CIA was holding out on the mil­itary, keeping its best operations for itself. 240The military's continual appeals for Agencyexpertise suggest some self-doubt about -

MACSOG's ability to succeed where the civil­Ians had failed. What expertise the civiliansactually had to offer is a different question, forthe station remained in the defensive crouchthat had always marked its assessments of theprogram's security and results. In mid-July1964, when Headquarters asked for a securityreview, the station insisted that Team TOUR·BILLON and a reinforcement element-TeamCOOTS-dropped to it in May were still "freeand uncontrolled in our best judgment." Forone thing, the station had independent confir­mation of some team reporting. And if the teamwere controlled, the DRV had abdicated anopportunity to shoot down the plane that sup­plied the team in May. For the station, this rein­forced the absence of any positive "indicationsof capture or control." The possibility that allthree indicators represented merely a well-runcommunist deception operation was notaddressed, even to dismiss it,2SD

With One Hand TledD

The disagreements between State and thePentagon that Bill Colby cited in his staffingrecommendation to the DCI implicitly recog­nized a paradox that had afflicted the decision­making process from the beginning. As theSaigon Station had theorized early on, Hanoimight conceivably be intimidated by penetra­tions of its borders into scaling back its supportof the Viet Cong insurgency. On the otherhand-and more Iikely~it might react in justthe opposite way, eliminating the nuisance bygoing to its source with an accelerated cam­paign to absorb the South. 26DAs long as success was measured in pin­pricks-even the claimed accomplishments ofdoubled teams like TOURBILLON and

54

23 William E. Colby, Memorandum. "Saigon Station," 3 June 1964,1Conboy, 95, cites a study done for the Pentagon in 1980 by the BI'oD~MreC;oo(j:rpiOorraamtIOinn1.U:J~~:-:-~-=-=-:-;::===~~Gen._Ma(sha!l_S,_Carter,_Memo(andulJl--'-OLlhe DDP. "Operations Under 34-A Plan In SVN," 30June 1964'[ 1

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REMUS were nothing more-the risks weremanageable. As the number and size of oper­ations rose, under military management, therisk-benefit calculation would become moredelicate,D

In particular, two of the proposed programsmight call Into play the law of unintended-andunwelcome-consequences. As the stationhad observed as early as mid-1962, the stimu­lation of resistance activity In the DRV could, atleast in theory, lead to a reprise of the Hungar­'ian revolution of 1956. In that case, the Westhad felt compelled to stand aside, watching therepression of a movement its propaganda hadhelped to Incite. The same outcome could beexpected in North Vietnam, whose communistregime would react with draconian measuresand might even, in extremis, invite Chineseintervention. In such an eventuality, successwould have resulted in a massively largerwar,27D

Less catastrophic but still unacceptable wasthe possible effect of a new MACSOG initiativeto challenge communist exploitation of Hanoi'ssupply route to South Vietnam with covertcross-border operations into Laos. To the poli­cymakers, the hypothetical tactical benefit ofambushes on the Ho Chi Minh Trail had to beweighed against the need to preserve theGeneva Agreements, with their guarantee of aLaos at lest nominally neutral. Even the covertdeployment of American troops into Laos fromVietnam would, therefore, always be weighedagainst the risk of provoking either a massiveDRV invasion of Laos or the collapse of theofficially neutral Laotian government,28[]

This tension between external ,strategic con­siderations and the need to reverse communistgains In South Vietnam would afflict militarymanagement of the program for the rest of the

27 FVSA 13960.D2B'bid·D29 Conboy, Chapterm-I30 Ibid" Chapter 20.0--'

war. The difference between the CIA's programand the one undertaken by the military wasessentially one of scale. It therefore aggra­vated, in the eyes of Washington policymak­ers, a problem that until 1964 had been morehypothetical than practical.D

The escalation of the war that began with thenear-simultaneous launching of the aerialbombing campaign against the DRV and thedeployment into the South of US ground forcesreflected declining administration sensitivitiesabout provoking the Chinese. But it did not byany means produce a new, anything goes,approach to ground operations on North Viet­namese soil. In addition, the insertion of agentteams under MACSOG auspices proceededunder much the same kind of inconstant mis­sion guidance that had governed the CIAeffort, and sabotage and resistance brieflygave way again to intelligence reporting in1965.2Q

The effect of policy restrictions was intensifiedby the DRV's competence at ferreting outattempted insertions. Hanoi's growing familiar­ity with the American operational routine offsetimprovements like the Nasty, replacing theSwift, and the four-engine C-130, supplement­ing the C-123. Employing the same techniquesunder comparable circumstances, MACSOGwas, therefore, rewarded with no more suc­cess than CIA had enjoyed. Suspicious behav­ior by various teams prompted one MACSOGcommander, Col. John Singlaub, to commis­sion a thorough review of the entire stable'soperational security.3oD

The files were not voluminous: four years afterassuming control under the SWITCHBACKrubric, MACSOG had radio conta~with JUSiseven penetrations, three of themTOURBILLON, and EASY-inherited from

I 55

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CIA. Singlaub's study, done in April 1968, gavea clean bill of health only to Team EASY, but asubsequent joint review by MACV intelligenceand CIA concluded that it, too, was bad. Nowdisabused of the prospects for team insertions,MACSOG then adopted, on a much more mas-

.3' Ibid., Chapler 21.0

sive scale, Bill Colby's psychological/politicalconcept. Emphasizing deception operations, itfollowed the effort that Herb Weisshart hadbegun to implement in 1963, under CIA aus­pices, and then pursued on behalf of MAC­SOG.31D

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Chapter Five: "Just Shoot Them"

D

Despite the reservations entertained by differ­ent managers at different times, the Agencypersisted into January 1964 with black entryoperations against the DRV. At that point, ithad Inserted 28 resident teams by air or sea,and eight singleton agents, some by sea andothers overland. Of these, the station thoughtfive-four air-dropped teams and c==Jbelieved to have recruited his own team-wor­thy of transfer to MACSOG. The intelligenceand covert action achievements of these fivehad been Insignificant, and the program's man­agers sometimes invoked their very survival­as the station perceived it-to justify the effort,risk, and expense.'DWhy, then, did CIA decide to launch some 36operations, persevering for almost three years,despite heavy losses, for results that barelyqualified as negligible? Why did it go on tocooperate with MACSOG, even as the lossesmounted? And why did it then so readily (com­paratively speaking) declare the Laotian com­mando raider program an irredeemablefailure?D

The short, easy answer-and one with a gooddeal of force-is that CIA had to do somethingto respond, first to the original Kennedy man­date in the spring of 1961, and then to pres­sures that increased in proportion to thedecline of South Vietnamese fortunes in 1963.A presidential order is not lightly ignored, oreven questioned, especially when it is drivenby frustration and anxiety, and both these emo­tions affected US rliclmaking on Vietnamfrom start to finish.

The fact remains that, before the DRV opera­tions were even considered, independent­minded observers had been pointing out theuniversal failure of efforts to establish blackresident teams in Leninist states. In 1959, at aconference of his FE Divi i n counterparts,

Peter Sichel had~e""n=e::a-.Jt:O-:e~pr;;:;a:-;:;c"iCtlc~e:;--a~s;;-;::a-n;:;;complete waste oftime. We may as well just shoot them." As wehave seen, Robert Myers shared that view. Hisobjections to the DRV insertion program whilehe served as Colby's deputy may well haveInfluenced his chief's stated intention, inNovember 1963, gradually to abandon theeffort in favor of psychological operations. Thedispiriting history of black teams was not, fur­thermore, unknown to the Saigon Station. Asearly as 1962, inviting Headquarters to jUdgethe cosVbenefit ratio, i~ suggested a look at therecord of similar operations in China and NorthKorea.2D

Furthermore, it was not always a given that theAgency would simply salute and march off acliff simply because "higher authority" wantedsomething. CIA was perfectly capable ofspeaking truth to power, as two examples fromthe Vietnam war attest. The Johnson adminis­tration had wanted to believe that aerial bomb­ing of the North would shatter, or at leastdampen, the DRV's will to annex the South byforce. The Agency categorically rejected this. Itpredicted that bombing would fall, that no costit could inflict on Hanoi would be likely to winSaigon a reprieve. 3DOn the operational side, too, the Agency haddemonstrated the courage of a firm conviction.Like John Kennedy before them, PresidentNixon and National Security Adviser HenryKissinger wanted direct action against theDRV. When peace negotiations with Hanoi dic­tated suspensions of aerial bombing, they

1 FVSA 17604fJ• Conboy,82. citing Evan Thomas'sCIA-authorized book The VeryBestMen, 1870 FVSA 14118.n .3 Harold P.Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes. 1962-1968 (Centerfor the Stu'aYof Int~llI.gence, .1998). 49-52. Analystsat other agenciessharedthis jUdgment. whichwas first expressed to the Johnsonadministration Ina study done in March 1964.0

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58 I

demanded covert action to keep Hanoi mindfulthat intervention in the South came at a price.Accordingly, they wanted CIA first to harassand then-after a March 1970 coup in Cambo­.dia cut the communists' maritime supply routeto South Vietnam-help to interdict the trafficentering the Ho Chi Minh Trail. 4 DFor two years, from February 1970 to April1972, CIA staged hit-and-run operations fromLaos against military targets in the DRV.Except for their use of air rather than sea trans­portation, they resembled the raids conductedby Team VULCAN in 1962. They inflictedsomewhat more damage, and with fewer casu­alties, but costs remained dauntingly high. Andthe strategic effect of the Laos-based program,like that of Saigon's teams, was scarcely per­ceptible. The main difference lay in manage­ment's reaction to meager results: in the springof 1972, after months of working-level grum­bling made its way to the 7th floor, DCI RichardHelms told Kissinger that CIA saw no point Incontinuing·D

When they threw In the towel on the so-calledCommando Raider operations, Helms and hissubordinates demonstrated a readiness toacknowledqe failure that was conspicuouslylacking in the first three years of the team oper­ations out of South Vietnam. And having doneso, they canceled the program. In Saigon, bycontrast, the effort continued for more than fiveyears after Colby's admission of its failure,almost a year of that period while it was still.under CIA management. D

It is true that circumstances differed in oneImportant respect. For Saigon, initially ambigu­ous signs of trouble allowed hopes that at leastsome of its teams were still secure. Com­mando Raiders, by contrast-like the VULCANraiders-either reached their target or theydidn't. There might be some doubt as towhether their ordnance actualiy detonated,

• UndercoverArmies,Chapter 16.0

and if it did whether it was on target, but therewere not the lingering uncertainties aboutagent bona fides. Nevertheless, it remains thateven in hit-and-run raids like VULCAN andMACSOG's first such venture, similar to thelater Commando Raiders, one sees a wishfuloptimism about results that contrasts sharplywith the hard-headed skepticism that AgrCJmanagers brought to the Laotian project.

A similar phenomenon appears in the self­evaluations that dotted the course of the pro­gram. As it happened, first Saigon, then Head­quarters, displayed more doubts about theprogram in the early days, when evidence ofcompromise was still fragmentary, than eitherof them did as signs of trouble accumulated.Later, even when Hanoi began announcing theseizure of one team after another, Washingtonshrugged off the occasional access of doubtand joined the field in looking at the bright sidewhen It came to evaluating those teams stillreporting. Not until mld-1963, as alreadynoted, did Bill Colby declare the experimentunsuccessful, and even then, he proposed tocontinue it until 1965. DThe vocal objections of contemporary criticsestablish that, in pursuing black team inser­tions into the DRV, the Agency had reason toknow the length of the odds against success.The open skeptics were in the minority, cer­tainly, but they were uninhibited about urgingtheir view on their action-oriented superiors.And even those at the working level who duti­fully concentrated on making the effort suc­ceed did so with at least occasional twinges ofdoubt. As we have seen in the artful correspon-dence from I lin August 1962, suchenthusiasm as field managers could musterseemed sometimes, at least, consciouslyaimed at meeting managerial expectations.Thus,Dbalanced his optimistic list of oppor­tunities with a warning to the desk about theobstacles to their exploitation.D

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A CUlturallmperativeD

Taken together, these attitudes and eventssuggest an answer to the questions, posedearlier, about the Agency's attachment to theSaigon program of team Insertions and its con­trasting willingness to dump the CommandoRaiders. That answer invokes the perennialtension between the Office of Policy Coordina­tion (OPC) and the Office of Special Opera­tions (OSO) cultures, and the expression ofthat tension in the styles of individual CS man­agers.D

Team operations into North Vietnam beganduring a period in which the OPC ethos stilldominated the DO's self-image. Its adherentspracticed what in retrospect seems a naivefaith that good intentions and energy, appliedwith the creativeness allowed by CIA's adrnln­istrativeflexibillty, would suffice to meet any .challenge. Anything was worth~g, andsomething would surely work. 5U

The most influential exponent of the improvisa­tional OPC approach in the FE Division of theearly 1960s was probably William Colby. Aschief of station in Saigon, he began in 1960 aflurry of experimental programs, all of themshaped by the recommendations of officers inthe field. These led to at least one signal suc­cess-the tribal Village defense program calledthe Citizens Irregular Defense Groups-and tofailures, the most costly of which was probablythe black entry program against North Viet-

namD .

But Bill Colby was far from unique in his ten­dency to operate on a rather unreflective basisof self-confidence and eager optimism. A good

many of the Agency's covert action projectsand plans of the era were little short of frivolousand on occasion potentially disastrous. Some­times, they promised only disaster, even if suc­cessful, as with the collusion with the Mafia todispose of Fidel Castro. Or they focused on asuperficial symptom while ignoring a massiveproblem, as with the abortive plot to poisonPatrice Lumumba in the chaos of the Congo in1960. For sheer detachment from reality, thereis the 1958 episode in which the Agencythought to influence Laotian elections by para­chuting bulldozers into a few remote villagesas harbingers of new roads about to be built bya beneficent government.60

Richard Helms later said that he had alwaysthought covert military action a "dubious option"in peacetime, but that wartime was different.With respect to Vietnam, in particular, he sawthe Agency as obligated to contribute whateverit could. Nevertheless, not sharing the OPC-·style reluctance to admit failure, he did not dis­courage a sober evaluation of the CommandoRaider program. After a good-faith try, hedeclared the game not worth the candle.70

By the early .1970s, moreover, EA Divisionmanagement, both at Headquarters and in thefield, was populated less by traditional activistsand more by expert professionals. Indeed, Wil­liam E. Nelson's careful, thoughtful style madehim look like a careful bureaucrat to some ofhis more activist subordinates. Even TheodoreShackley, his hard-nosed successor, who wasstill chief of station in Saigon during the Com­mando Raider episode, was more the dog­gedly efficient executive agent of policy thanhe was any kind of activist free spirit looking fornew worlds to conquer. D

e The OPC's attachment to an Improvisational style, one that In effect glorified amateuprism is just one facet of the OSSpsychology. a better understanding of which might illuminate its legacy In DO practice.• Undercover Armies, Chapter 1. The author served in FE (EA) Division from 1955 to 1 . His assignments there IncludedLaos (1960-62) and Vietnam (1963-65) as a field case officer, and he has drawn on his recollections for his description of .the operating style of the period, Full disclosure: he does not recall dissenting, at the time, from any of the cultural valuesrrofessional practices that he now criticizes. n

land Russell Jack Smith, R1cJ1ard Helms as DCI(center f~r the StUdyof Intelligence, 1993).D

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A similar evolution had taken place in fieldmanagement. Vientiane Station's\ Iwas still run by the legendary Lloyd "Pat" Lan­dry, a veteran of the abortive operation to over­throw Indonesia's President Sukarno in 1957.Managing four different paramilitary programswhile helping hold together a fractious multilat­eral command had Imbued him with a soberpragmatism that had little time for activistmacho. And Vientiane Station itself was led byHugh Tovar, whose cerebral approach to hisparamilitary programs took into account theoverarching fact that, whatever was done to"send a message" to the North VietnameshAmerica was on its way out of Indochina. 8LJ

This interpretation, which emphasizes theways In which the styles of individual manag­ers reflected their attachment to their OPC orOSO antecedents, leaves room for the influ­ence of other Institutional and environmentalfactors that contributed to perpetuation of afailed program. One of these was the DO'sinstitutional inferiority complex. This wasanother legacy of the OSS, which from themoment of its creation had confronted the hos­tility of mainstream military commanders to thefreewheeling tactics of unconventional war­fare. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, for example,shut OSS entirely out of the Pacific theater.The resulting feeling of having something toprove contributed to the DO's (then the Direc­torate for Plans) unwillingness to admit aninability to do whatever the pollcymaker­especially the occupant of the White House-might want.D .

Another institutional factor in the conceptualrigidity of project~as the archaictraining program that shapedthe thinking of new operations 0 rcers, At leastas late as 1957, the model for behind-the-linesintelligence and resistance activity was the

OSS role in the partisan warfare of World WarII. The training regime implicitly assumed anoperating climate in which a populationawaited liberation from foreign occupation orfrom the exactions of a puppet regime likeVichy. It was then applied to Cold War opera­tions, where it ignored the effectiveness ofLeninist internal security discipline in theSoviet Union and the new.communist statesthat arose in the postwar period. It alsoobscured the fact that the subjects of thesecommunist governments, at least those withexperience of European colonialism, did not allnecessarily yearn for liberation by us-spon-,sored regimes. D .Contributing to this blinkered view was the anti­communist zeal of the period. Few if any of theAgency officers serving in Vietnam in the earlyand mld-1960s recognized the nationalistic,anti-colonial appeal of the Viet Minh, and itssuccess at mobilizing political talent at all lev­els, down to and including the hamlet. Word ofpeasant opposition to communist rule in lowerNorth Vietnam in 1956 nourished the Americanimpulse to believe that the entire country wasgroaning under what it saw as a despotic,exploitative elite. The North Vietnamese peas­ant was assumed to be ready to seize anyopportunity to cooperate with the anti-commu­nist Vietnamese of the South. In fact, when­ever local peasants came upon indications of aforeign presence, their immediate and onlyimpulse was to report to the authorities.Whether they did so out of fear or out of posi­tive loyalty, or some combination of the two;the result was the same. 9DFinally, in this context of cultural influences,comes the disdain for counterintelligence. Notcharacteristic of the entire Clandestine Ser­vice-for many years, CI was the heart of oper­ations against the Soviet Union-the

60 I

8 The managements~ of Tovarand Landry are descrloed In the author's Undercover Armies:CIAandSurrogateWarfarein Laos. 1961-1973.LJ .8 The author rememl:5ers hearing for the first time, In Vietnam. about the Sino-Soviet split, which he-and to the best 01hisrecollection most of his colleagues there-dismissed as mere communist disinformatlon. He can think of no batter reasonfor his closed mind than the threat posed to the activist ethos by the uncertainties of a complicated worldD

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prevalence of this bias corresponded roughlyto the importance assigned to covert action ina given area division or field station. In the FEDivision of the 1950s and Into the 1960s andbeyond, CI barely ranked as an operationalstepchild, and ritual injuncllons to pay moreattention to it and to operational security ingeneral were neither enforced nor obeyed.D

This institutional indifference to CI in FE Divi­sion was, to be sure, encouraged by mutualdislike and distrust between Bill Colby andJames J. Angleton. As chief of the CI Staff,Angleton suspected that, in the late 1950s and1960s, the DRV was penetrating and playingback Saigon Station's operations against it.Accordingly, he urged Colby to accept a CIStaff unit in Saigon, something comparable tothe ass's X-2 element. Colby would havenothing to do with it, and frustrated Angleton'sdesign. But as with other organizational prac-'tices, FE Division's indifference to CI was notthe creation of a sin~manager; it pervadedthe entire culture. IOU

The Lust to succeedD

The case officers and managers of ProjectI Iprobably gave little if any thought tothe cultural and institutional influences on theirprofessional practice, They were busy gettingon with the task at hand. The Agency seems tohave assigned itself that task, for work on itbegan a year before President Kennedy'sdemand for guerrillas in the North. No corre­spondence from those early days has beenfound, and the only account of the inaugural 'period Is Bill Colby's, given in an interview inthe mid-199osD

As Colby recalled it after some 35 years, thedecision to go north sounds almost casual.Trying to distract the Vietnamese from theirobsessive effort to overthrow Prince Sihanouk

in neighboring Cambodia, Colby had beenlooking for ways to retum the emphasis to theSouth Vietnamese insurgency and its spon­sors in Hanoi. "One of the questions came upvery soon, why don't we do to them what theydo to us, in North Vietnam. And we went backto our World War II experience of droppingpeople in by parachute and things likethat. ..·""DIt is significant that Colby reached back to theSecond World War for a precedent, for if hehad looked to the more recent past, he wouldhave found nothing but failed operationsagainst the Soviet Union, China, and NorthKorea. There Is also the very fact of his reli­ance on OSSexperience for ideas fora newand only superficially similar problem. Now, itmay well be that he could have offered a morerefined rationale for the program, had his inter­viewer pursued the point. As it is, we are leftwith an account that leaves him and theAgency looking as if they were still fighting, noteven the last war; but an even earlier conflict,one whose outcome made it a more congenialmOdel.D ,

In World War II, it was Americans, along withBritish and other allies, who were "drop-ping... in by parachute," but no one ever sug­gested adopting this feature of OSS practice inthe Cold War operations that followed. If any­one had, the reaction might have tempered thedamn-the-torpedoes flavor of thel Ienterprise, and of similar efforts earlier in theCold War. An American presence would, ofcourse, have multiplied the already enormousrisks, ardJheIejs_~O reason-at least in thecase ofL ito think that it would haveimproved the results.D

The question remains whether any Agencymanager would ever have taken the samerisks, for so little reward, if these operationshad required even a token CIA presence. It is

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'0 John Prados, Lost Crusader:TheSecret Warsof CIA DirectorWilliam Colby(Oxford University Press, 2003), 160-61.0II Tourison, 19.0 ,

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certainly true that the GVN tolerated its casual­ties, not all of whom were merely expendablemembers of despised minorities. This willing­ness, it seems, served to legitimize for CIA theexposure of dozens of Vietnamese agents to adegree of risk that no Agency manager wouldever have contemplated imposing on his ownpeople·D

This interpretation is necessarily speculative.But nothing else explains the Agency's appar­ent sense of detachment from the fate of theagent personnel. That sense may have beenencouraged by the sometimes almost adver­sarial tone of the relationship with them, some­thing provoked by their generally low~ality

and frequently uncertain motivation.u

But even lacking any sense of personal attach­ment to the people being dispatched to anuncertain fate, the station could be expected tohave devoted serious efforts to identifying thecauses of a series of failures seen by late 1963as nearly without exception. That it did not doso is attributable, in part, simply to inadequatestaffing;] [1--' IIBut the fact remains that thesurviving official correspondence expressesalmost no curiosity about or interest in thecauses of known failures. 12DOne academic study of the program, basedlargely on interviews conducted with capturedagents after their release by Hanoi, makesrepeated references to poorly selected dropzones, attributing them to the planners' relianceon old and unreliable French maps. In fact, theofficial record is replete with correspondencedetailing the aerial reconnaissance photosexplicitly commissioned fori [mis-sions. But it does appear that drop zones some­times-perhaps often-turned out to lie inpopulated areas. It is possible, of course, that

-------------------

navigational error led to some teams, or individ­ual team members, being dropped far from theirspecified DZs. This question would have figuredprominently in any examination of the program,but no serious effort of the kind was done until1968. At that point, as we have seen, CIA col­laborated with the military to conclude that evenTeam EASY, which had enjoyed the greatestconfidence, was also compromised. 13DThe CI exercise that exposed Team EASYcame four years after CIA had ceded to MAC­SOGthe American side of Projectl Imanagement. Had the Agency applied thesame rigor to this kind of examination on itsown watch, it might well have written off theteams that It eventually bestowed on the mili­tary. One feature of their performance, notablefrom the beginning, was their almost universalfailure to come up on the air for weeks afterinsertion. Despite its standard Injunction tomake contact immediately, the station invari­ably accepted the excuses offered in tardy firstreports. By July 1963, it was treating the phe­nomenon as routine when it reported a team ashaving come up after the "usual initial onemonth silence." Risky at best, this passivestance turned into simple credulousness asone instance followed another. 14 0The lust to succeed, In an institution thatdefines itself by its ability to do what the policy­maker wants done, cannot be eliminated, butonly managed. Clearly, the notoriously risk­averse stance that followed William Casey'sstewardship was not and is not the answer. Butneither is the almost robotic activism withwhich the DO tends to respond to policy-levelpressure. For examples, one need look no far­ther than the pro rams aimed at intelli encepenetrations of

ith "recruitment" thesupreme-sometimes apparently the only­goal, the DO let itself be manipulated into a

1

62

"1 ~13 Conboy, wClSe references to faulty dropzones include oneonpage62.0"SAIG 9322.0

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series of embarrassing and damaging failuresin which nearly all the agents were controlledby the other side:D

These self-inflicted wounds might have beenprevented by an institutionalized adversarialprocess that, in effect, took the OSO-OPC cul­tural rivalry and turned it to constructive pur­pose. In the case of Project I Ia CIsection In the Saigon Station of the period,charged by the COS with challenging the oper­ators, would very early on have produced amore balanced assessment than the stationever, in fact; conducted. But a CI unit would byitself have had little effect, in the absence of awatchfully skeptical chief, and skepticism wasuncongenial to both Colby and Richardson.Both of them displayed more interest in a dis­play of vigorous action than in resolving indica­tions of trouble even with the few teams stillmaintaining radio contact. Headquarters, more­over, abdicated its oversight role, making Justone half-hearted effort to evaluate the integrityand productivity of the effort. There, too, worka­day pressures on a small staff inhibited a hardlook at the program. But so did the comfort ofknowing that ''this is the way we do things." D

The Pitfalls of "Lessons Learned"D

What is to be learned from thel Imis­adventure? For one thing, it suggests that theconventional "lessons learned" approach to aprofessional failure usually obscures whatmost needs to be illuminated. Why? Becausethe conventional examination of a disaster isusually confined to mechanics, the particularflaws in operational tradecraft or analyticalinterpretation that led to it. Conducted by peo­ple who share the culture of those they arejudging, exercises in "lessons learned" hardlyever examine the institutional factors behind a

failure. But these must be identified if errorsare not to proliferate. The reasons why, forexample, an operational component ignores allthe canons of counterintelligence practice,while it clings to a failed program, are whatcount. DAn attempt to get behind flaws in professionalpractice to find root causes encounters its owndifficulties. To what extent Is institutional cul­ture the product of the personal style of indivld­ualleaders, and to what extent, conversely, arethe leaders formed by their culture? One thingseems certain, that in a meritocracy whoseleadership rises from the ranks, an institutionalculture tends to be perpetuated from one gen­eration to the next. In such an organization, thegreatest threat to effective performance Is fail­ure to adapt to a changing environment. Pastexperience, especially that of an Institution'sfounders, tends to shape perceptions of eventsand circumstances long after it has lost what­ever relevance It may at first have offered.D

In the case of Projectl [the pro-gram's originator was himself one of the CS'sfounding fathers, but Bill Colby cannot beaccused of having imposed an Idiosyncraticmindset on unwilling subordinates. Only twoCS officials are known to have opposed theeffort, despite an open Colby managementstyle that positively encouraged the lowerranks to speak freely. Their acquiescenceresulted more from cultural mores, acceptedand internalized, than from any kind of subser­vience, even reluctant. Had neither Colby norany other OSS veteran been on hand when theKennedy administration called for actionagainst North Vietnam, the re~nse wouldlikely have been the same. 15U

One thing is certain: archaic modes of thoughtand outmoded professional self-image will yield

.. The power of cultural convention is on even more conspicuous display in the history of US Air Force programs thatreduced the importance of manned aircraft, and thus threatened pilots' self-image. This occurred first with ballistic missilesas a threat to the manned.bomber and more recentl~th controversy over unmanned aerial vehicles as a partial substitutefor manned combat and reconnaissance missions. U r 63SE ETIIMR

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64I

only to determined, independent-minded leader­ship.The challenge to DO management, in theearly 21st century, is to developa culturethatcombinesself-confident energywith construc­tive self-questioning. Bureaucracies and their

leadershatedealingwithan ambiguousagendalike this one, but it cannot be avoidedwithoutrisking catastrophic failure in an era of unprece­dented threatsto the nationalsecurity.D

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Source Note (U)

In comparison with EA Division holdings on itsoperations in Laos and South Vietnam, the sur­viving record on team insertions into the DRVIs remarkably thin. Chronological files havebeen found for all of the code-named opera­tions, including many that were neverlaunched, and it thus appears that what hasbeen seen is what was archived. If so, ProjectI lis by far the most poorly docu- .

mented of the activities researched by theauthor in his 15 years of work on Agency oper­ations in Indochina. The total absence of anyexamination of failed operations is particularlystriking. Opportunities for interviews with par­ticipants have also, by comparison with earliervolumes, been few and far between; I am,however, grateful for the useful recollections ofI land Robert Myers·D

A small but serious open literature saved thisproject from becoming an exerclseln futility.

Richard Shultz was particularly helpful on thepolicy context of the early 1960s. KennethConboy, with Dale Andrade, and SedgwickTourison conducted detailed interviews withformer[ [agents after their rele~se .from communist jails; the Conboy book, In par­ticular, has assembled narrative material thatseems to reflect a good-faith etfort to get notmerely stories, but facts. DShulz, Richard H.,Jr. The Secret War AgainstHanoi: The Untold Story of Spies, Saboteurs,and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam (peren­nial Books, 2000).0

Conboy. Kenneth, and Dale Andrade, Spiesand Commandos: How America Lost theSecret War in North Vietnam (University Pressof KansaS,2000).D

Tourison, Sedgwick. Secret Army. Secret War:Washington's Tragic Spy Operation in NorthVietnam (Naval Institute Special WarfareSeries, 1995). D

d 65-------------------------------;;S;;:ECrETIIMR

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D

game plan, 13, 20resupply, 14,15,16, 19,23,39,43

Castro, Fidel, 11, 59Central Highlands, 31CHARON,51China, 39, 42

DaNang,22,23,37,43,45,52,53DDP (Directorate of Plans), 31Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), 7,10,36DIDO, 14, 16,22,24,33,35,36Diem, Ngo Dinh, 7, 8, 42

assassination, 52regime, 43

Dien Bien Phu, 24, 53Directorate of Plans (DDP), 31Dong Hoi, 26, 51DRAGON, 43Drop Zone (DZ), 40, 41DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam), 7, 9,

11,13,37,61,65Durbrow, Elbridge, 9DZ (Drop Zone), 40, 41

I ' ICitizens Irregular Defense Groups, 59Colby, William

"warrior priest", 31and black entry operations, 3, 4, 23, 25,

32,38,40,50,57,59and James J. Angleton, 61as Chief of Station, 23Citizens Irregular Defense Groups, 59MACSOG, 54, 56OSS, 4, 10, 49Swifts"...:4~5,-- _c=__~-=-=-__

Commando Raiders, 58, 59Conboy, Kenneth, 65

I ICOOTS, 54

I~---,---,-----.:--__-­Chondokyo,3CINCPAC,50

Cambodia, 58, 61

I ICan Lao, 7CANO,51Canton, 39Cao Bang, 47Carter, Lt. Gen. Marshall, 29, 33Casey, William, 62CASTOR

capture, 14, 15, 16 ,deception, 23, 25, 28, 31, 33, 35, 39, 40,

43

Bay of Pigs, 11, 25BELL, 42, 44, 47Ben Hai River, 10, 12black entry, 1,3,4, 19,40,57,59black teams, 1black Thai, 24BOUVIER,30Buddhist unrest, 42BULL,49

B

A

c

Andrade, Dale, 65Angleton, James J., 61AQ Bac, 37[I 'capture, 13, 14, 17, 18,22deception, 23, 24, 35game plan, 13,43,55,57resupply, 22, 52

I IATLAS, 24, 35

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68

E

EA Division, 65EASY, 47, 55, 62ECHO, 14,15, 18, 19,24,35Effects on airborne operations, 28, 29, 33, 34,

36,55Eisenhower, President Dwight, 7, 11electronic countermeasures (ECM), 41EROS, 26, 33, 35, 38, 39EUROPA, 21, 23, 35, 42,43,44European colonialism, 60

F

Felt, Adm. Harry, 25fist print, 14FitzGerald, Desmond, 31frogmen, 27

G

Geneva Accords, 7, 28, 33, 36, 37, 39, 42, 55Geneva Agreements on Laos, 28, 29, 33, 34,

36,55Gianh River, 26GIANT,44GN·58 generator, 17Gregg, Don, 29,30, 32Gulf of Tonkin, 22, 42,43GVN (Government of Vietnam), 7, 37, 62

H

Ha Long Bay, 12,22Haiphong, 13, 22, 30, 42Haiphong Channel, 36Hanoi,9,35,37,42,52,57,58,62Hanoi Politburo, 9Hanoi-Lao Kay railway, 47Harriman, Averell, 33Helms, Richard, 58, 59Hilsman, Roger, 33

I IHmong (Muong), 11, 16,25,26, 30, 34Ho Chi Minh, 7, 9,10Ho Chi Minh Trail, 9, 55, 58Hoa Binh Province, 19,21Honey, Professor P. J., 20HUMINT,1

I

Infiltrating ideasblack radio, 49leaflet drops, 49

Insertion Operations, North VietnamAirborne Code Names

ATLAS, 24, 35BELL,42,44,47BOUVIER,30BULL, 49, 53CASTOR. See CASTORCOOTS, 540100,14,15,16,17,24,35ECHO, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19,24,35EROS, 25, 26, 35EUROPA, 21, 23JASON, 30, 42PEGASUS, 42REMUS, 24, 55RUBY, 49, 53SWAN,47TARZAN, 37, 39TOURBILLON, 23, 26, 29, 43, 54

Maritime Code NamesI ~ 15, 17, 18,22

13CANO,51

05303948

Insertion ops, France (continued)Jedburgh, 1, 2, 10Nepal,3North Korea, 3Soviet Union

REDSOX,2Tibet 3, 4

J

JASON, 30, 42Jedburgh, 2, 10,49Johnson, Lyndon, 57

K

Karamessines, Thomas, 29, 33Kennedy, Bob,52Kennedy, President John F., 10,25,26,29,49,

57,61

Khrushchev, Nikita, 10Kissinger, Henry, 57, 58Ky, Major Nguyen Cao, 13,23

L

Lai Chau, 14, 25Landry, Lloyd "Pat", 60Lang Son Province, 30Laos,25,34,35,36,37,42,55Leninist, 60Lumumba, Patrice, 59LYRE, 37, 42

M

MacArthur, Gen. Douglas, 60MACSOG, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 62

Saigon Station relationship with, 54

MACV, 13,31,45,49,50,52,54,56MACV Operational Plan (Oplan), 50MACV Special Operations Group (MACSOG),. 52

Management of insertion operations, 53MACSOG,55

Marana, Arizona, 46McCone, John, 49, 52McNamara, Robert, 25, 31, 49, 50Mekong Delta, 37Military Assistance CommandNietnam

(MACV), 13, 31, 45, 49, 50, 52, 54, 56Military Security Service (MSS), 8Moc Chau District, 14MSS (Military Security Service), 8

- Mui Doc, 30Muong (Hmong), 21Myem, Robert, 10,31,38,49,54,57

N

Nastys (patrol boats), 45, 55National Security Council, 10Natsios, Nicholas, 8Nautilus I, 22Nautilus II, 22Nautilus III, 27Nelson, William E, 59Nepal,3NEPTUNE,51Neutralists, 37Nghe An Province, 24Nhan Dan, 20Nixon, Richard, 57North Vietnamese, 7,10,26,29Nung,34,43

oOffice of Policy Coordination (OPC), 59, 60, 63Office of Special Operations (OSO), 59, 60, 63Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 1, 60

loperation VULCAN, 26, 27, 28, 30, 35, 3~, 39,40,51,58

69

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70 I

p

PACKER,44Pao, Major Vang, 16PASF (People's Armed Security Force), 13,

14,23,25,26Patrol boats

Nastys,45Swifts, 45

Patton, Gen. George, 4PEGASUS, 38, 42Pentagon, 11, 25,'49, 54People's Armed Security Force (PASF), 13,

14,23,25,26Phnom Penh, 10PLO (Presidential Liaison Office), 8, 9, 14Police Special Branch (see Surete), 8Politburo (Hanoi), 9, 21Presidential Liaison Office (PLO), 8, 14Presidential Survey Office (PSO), 22, 24, 27,

33,35,36,51

project§3Project

See . ,PSO (Presidential Survey Office), 22, 24, 27,

33,35,36,51Pyongyang,26

Q

Quang Khe, 26, 51, 53

R

red Thai, 26REDSOX,2REMUS, 24, 33, 36, 53, 55Richardson, Elliot, 63Ron River, 51Route 1, 42, 51Route 12, 37, 42Route 7, 30, 42Route 8, 30RUBY, 49

Rusk, Dean, 31Russell, Col. Clyde, 52

sSacred Sword Patriots' League (SSPL), 47, 49Saigon (city), 57Saigon Station, 50

Air Operations Branch, 62Black teams, 1, 16, 26, 54CASTOR, 14, 19I Icounterintelligence, 61,63deception, 24game plan, 21, 42headquarters, 36,38,42,45MACV, 50, 52, 57Maritime Branch, .62North Vietnam, 4, 32resupply, 15, 19, 23, 26, 44

SEPES (Service for Political and SocialStudies), 7, 8, 9, 36, 37, 44

Shackley, Theodore, 59Sichel, Peter, 57Sihanouk, Prince, 61Singlaub, Col. John, 55

I ISmith, Gen. Walter Bedell, 3Son La Province, 13,16,19,23South Vietnam, 7South Vietnamese, 28SSPL (Sacred Sword Patriots' League), 47, 49Subic Bay, 53Sukarno,60supply missions, 45surete(see Police Special Branch), 8SWAN,47Swatow-c1ass, 25, 27Swifts (patrol boats), 45, 55SWITCHBACK, 55

T

05303948

TARZAN, 37; 39Taylor, Gen. Maxwell, 50Team ATLAS, 24, 35TeamBELL,42,44,47Team BOUVIER, 30Team BULL, 49 'Team CASTOR. See CASTORTeam CHARON, 51Team COOTS, 54,Team 0100,14,16,22,24,33,35,36Team EASY, 47Team ECHO, 14, 15, 18, 19,24,35Team EROS, 33, 35, 38, 39Team EUROPA, 21, 23, 35, 42, 43, 44Team GIANT, 44Team JASON, 42Team LYRE, 37, 42Team NEPTUNE, 51Team PACKER, 44Team PEGASUS, 38, 42Team REMUS, 24, 36Team RUBY, 49Team SWAN, 47Team TARZAN, 37, 39Team TOURBILLON. See TOURBILLONTeam ZEUS, 51Thanh Hoa, 46Thanh Hoa Province, 26, 30, 46Tibet, 3, 4Tofte, Hans, 3TOURBILLON

capture, 40deception, 35, 39, 40, 43, 53, 54game plan, 23, 25, 29, 55resupply, 29, 35, 43 '

Tourison, Sedgwick, 65L;;?h_'_60__

capture, 17Cuba, 10deception, 17game plan, 10, 17,27,30,38,41,61,62,

65Kennedy, 10, 11,63MACSOG,62resupply, 15, 62

Tung, Lt. Col. Le Quang, 8, 12, 19,21,22, 27,33,36

Tuyen, Tran Kim, 7,8, 36

uI-;--;;----,-,:--=-'-_Ulmer, AI, 7Unger, Leonard, 29USS Catfish, 27

vVichy, 60Vientiane Station, 60Viet Cong, 9,37,54Viet Minh, 7, 9, 60Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh (see Viet Minh),

9Vietnam

Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), 7,9, 11, 13, 37, 65

Government of Vietnam (GVN), 7, 37, 62Vietnam Press Agency, 53Vinh (city), 44Vinh Son, 30

VULCAN, 26, 27, 28, 30, 35',37, 39, 40, 51,58

wWeisshart, Herbert, 47, 52, 54, 56

xXieng Khouang Province, 30

zIZEUS.51

f 71SE RETIIMR

CENTER/or the STUDY a/INTELLIGENCE

Washington, DCMay 2005