Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (8 page)

Colonel Kelly noted: “Major Davis received the Silver Star and the Purple Heart for his efforts in this action.”

By now, the Green Berets of 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), the cutting edge of the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group, Vietnam (MAAG) were being politically outflanked by the big battalions of the Marine Corps, the conventional Army, and changing geopolitics.

The murder of President Kennedy in November 1963 led to the inauguration of Lyndon Johnson, a credo of aerial bombing in North Vietnam and attrition on the ground in South Vietnam. MAAG was swallowed up in 1964 by a new entity, the “Military Assistance Command, Vietnam: Studies and Observations Group” or MACV-SOG. The bland title, with its academic nuances, masked a major switch of manpower and resources to the service of a new aggressive strategy that was ultimately to draw 500,000 conventional U.S. troops into the war. The Pentagon Papers revealed that three days after Kennedy’s assassination on 22 November 1963, the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed a twelve-month covert offensive in North Vietnam which would include harassment, diversion, political pressure, capture of prisoners, physical destruction, acquisition of intelligence, and diversion of Hanoi’s resources. These hit-and-run operations would be non-attributable, “carried out with U.S. military materiel, training, and advisory assistance.”

This would prove to be an understatement. The Pentagon Papers also record: “On 1 February 1964, the United States embarked on a new course of action in pursuance of its longstanding policy of attempting to bolster the security of Southeast Asia. On that date, under direction of the American military establishment, an elaborate program of covert military operations against the state of North Vietnam was set in motion. There were precedents: a variety of covert activities had been sponsored by the CIA since 1961. Intelligence agents, resupplied by air, had been despatched into North Vietnam, resistance and sabotage teams had been recruited inside the country; and propaganda leaflets had been dispensed from ‘civilian mercenary’ aircraft. But the program that began in February 1964 was different…because it was a
program
…placed under control of a U.S. military command.”

This would prove to be more than mission creep. It represented a disastrous, open-ended commitment to a tottering regime in Saigon. Though the Green Beret mobile strike forces of the Special Forces Group (Airborne) soldiered on in the jungle, they were now in competition with the lavishly endowed MACV-SOG, which had its own aircraft and ships as well as ground forces including local mercenaries.

The impact of the new, covert policy was first felt in the Gulf of Tonkin on the night of 30/31 July 1964 when South Vietnamese commandos under SOG command attacked radar sites on two islands, Hon Mo and Hon Ngu, that belonged to North Vietnam. They were beaten off but then blasted away at the sites from their ships with machine-gun and cannon fire. What followed is still, in some respects, a riddle, a military whodunit. The Pentagon Papers suggest that “South Vietnam coastal patrol forces made a midnight attack, including an amphibious ‘commando’ raid’” on the islands. Cruising in the same area, the U.S. destroyer
Maddox
was trawling for signals and other electronic intelligence, her crew apparently unaware of the SOG raid. Intelligence intercepts were at the heart of the offensive. Cryptographers and linguists worked twelve-hour shifts inside a steel box bolted to the destroyer’s deck.

From the outset, signals intelligence—SIGINT—had been part of a deadly game of hide-and-seek. The first American to be killed in this struggle, three years before, was a cryptologist named James T. Davis, from Tennessee, serving with 3rd Radio Research Unit. With a team of South Vietnam bodyguards, he was hunting Vietcong guerrillas in undergrowth near Saigon, using handheld direction-finding gear to identify the source of enemy signals. The enemy found him first. He died with his escort of nine soldiers.

At mid-afternoon on 2 August 1964, less than forty-eight hours after the strike on the islands, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the
Maddox
. “Two of the boats closed to within 5,000 yards, launching one torpedo each…. Maddox fired on the boats with her 5-inch batteries and altered course to avoid the torpedoes, which were observed passing the starboard side at a distance of 100 to 200 yards…. The third boat moved up abeam of the destroyer and took a direct 5-inch hit…. All three PT boats fired 50-caliber machineguns at
Maddox
…and a bullet fragment was recovered from the destroyer’s superstructure.”
³³

Fifteen minutes later, U.S. aircraft, responding to a call for help from the
Maddox
, swooped on the torpedo boats, immobilizing one and damaging the other two. All three craft limped back to port. The
Maddox
continued on her way. The following night, SOG unleashed another attack on a radar site at Vinh Son. This operation, like the first raid, was not co-ordinated with the
Maddox
’s SIGINT missions, which were run under separate U.S. Navy command.

Next day, 3 August, the
Maddox
—now accompanied by a second destroyer, the
Turner Joy
—sent a radio message claiming that it was being stalked in the darkness by sea and air. A mysterious “intelligence source” suggested that “North Vietnamese naval forces had been ordered to attack the patrol.”
³⁴
In the early hours of 4 August, colorful accounts of an onslaught by numerous enemy vessels were relayed back to the Pentagon. Later investigations, however, soon indicated that “there was no attack. But the original report of an attack was not a lie concocted to provide an excuse for escalation; it was a genuine mistake.”
³⁵
The mistakes started with inaccurate warnings from a Marine signals establishment in South Vietnam followed by misjudgments by radar and sonar analysts aboard the destroyers. Believing they were under attack, “the two destroyers gyrated wildly in the dark waters of the Gulf of Tonkin” firing at brief, suspect radar contacts as they did so.
³⁶
The contact signals mysteriously disappeared almost as soon as they were spotted. Eventually, officers aboard the two vessels realized that their own maneuvers were the source of these apparitions. “The rudders of the two ships had caused the high-speed returns when they reflected the turbulence of the ships’ own propellers.” By now, however, the ships had sent word that they were under attack. This raw, uncorrected intelligence—always questionable in the fog of war—was put into the hands of Defense Secretary Robert MacNamara, who promptly called President Johnson. Three hours after the “attack” was over, the president had ordered a retaliatory air raid on North Vietnamese naval bases.

Early doubts were expressed within the National Security Agency, responsible for signals intelligence, but they were suppressed. What seemed to confirm the apparent reality of the attack was a later signal originating from North Vietnamese sources. This said that its forces had “shot down two planes in the battle area” and “we had sacrificed two ships and all the rest are ok.” The signal in question, it transpired, related to the first, genuine attack of 2 August in response to the SOG raid on the islands, not the “attack” of 4 August, which never happened. It was also ambiguous. In better translation, the phrase “we had sacrificed two ships” probably meant “two comrades,” which would be consistent with the casualties suffered by the communists on 2 August. The communist signal was itself inaccurate in claiming that two U.S. aircraft were shot down.

The mistake in translation had not gone unnoticed where it mattered. President Johnson later admitted: “The North Vietnamese skipper reported that his unit had ‘sacrificed two comrades.’ Our experts said that this meant either two enemy boats, or two men in the attack group.” He went further with the acid comment: “Hell, those damn stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish” or, according to another source, at whales. In an increasing atmosphere of war excitement, most of the raw SIGINT data was suppressed, some of it forever. As the NSA historian Robert J. Hanyok, having examined what was left of the record, concluded: “The extensive amount of SIGINT evidence that contradicted both the initial attack order and the notion that any North Vietnamese boats were involved in any ‘military operations,’ other than salvage of the two damaged torpedo boats, was either misrepresented or excluded from all NSA-produced post-incident summaries, reports, or chronologies…. What was issued in the Gulf of Tonkin summaries beginning late on 4 August was deliberately skewed to support the notion that there had been an attack. What was placed in the official chronology was even more selective. That the NSA personnel believed that the attack happened and rationalized the contradictory evidence away is probably all that is necessary to know in order to understand what was done. They walked alone in their counsels.”
³⁷
And, apparently, freely away from the war they had helped precipitate. The role of SOG in precipitating the extension of the war that resulted from its raids was concealed from Congress and the American public along with doubts about the reliability of signals intelligence and the very fact of the “attack” of 4 August. As black operations go, this was an unusually dark shade.

On 7 August, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving the president authority to take “all necessary measures” to prevent further aggression. He later asserted that thanks to the same resolution, he had legal authority to escalate the war in 1965, bringing America into direct conflict with North Vietnam. Until then, thanks to the use of Special Forces, U.S. involvement had been oblique and deniable. The political impact of this misadventure might bear comparison with the explosion that sank the U.S. battleship
Maine
in Havana harbor in 1898, triggering the Spanish-American War or the unfounded intelligence, stoked up by British sources, suggesting that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in 2003.

From February 1965 a prolonged aerial bombardment of North Vietnam was launched to fulfill the threat by General Curtis LeMay, “We’re gonna bomb them back into the Stone Age.” To protect the bases from which the attacks were launched, the first 3,500 U.S. Marines were dispatched to Da Nang. By December the number increased to almost 200,000. The scene was now set for combat between regular U.S. and North Vietnamese ground forces. Initially, U.S. planners believed in the fiction that a ground war could be won by air power alone; or at least, that the North Vietnamese could be arm-twisted into an accommodation with the South. The nostrum of strategic air power was a venerable myth dating back to the British attempt to control Waziristan in the 1930s; the belief in Europe that “the bombers will always get through” after the attack on Guernica, discredited in spite of what Goebbels called “total war” against civilians in Europe during the Second World War. Committing conventional ground forces ignored another lesson of history, including the recent French experience. This was that it is easier to put soldiers’ boots on the ground in hostile territory and much more difficult to extract them.

In Vietnam, the U.S. faced the additional complication of the draft, the use of young conscripts who had not chosen to fight this war. To make matters worse, as General Alexander Haig remarked: “As a young officer in Korea, I was repelled by the policy of granting draft deferments…that primarily benefit the white middle class. In Vietnam, the system produced even greater abuses. A draft that was openly designed to favor the rich and the educated filled the ranks with soldiers who were neither.”
³⁸
Anti-war demonstrations at home, notably on the university campuses of Kent State and Jackson State universities in 1970, further complicated the politics of the conflict on the home front and military planning on the front line as war journalists, scenting a lost cause and political blood, were no longer on-message with the military.

Richard Nixon, elected in 1969, promised “peace with honor.” His way out of the dilemma was “Vietnamization,” a process of training the army of South Vietnam in sufficient numbers to enable an American withdrawal. In practice it was a politically plausible exit strategy. Whatever Special Forces might have attempted, however heroically, could no longer affect the outcome. In that sense, they could no longer have a strategic impact, or make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear.

Nevertheless, they tried. After the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Pentagon dispatched ever more conventional battalions to Vietnam. Optimism, like the odor of coffee and napalm in the morning, was in the air. In 1966, a high-level study concluded, “Within the bounds of reasonable assumptions…there appears to be no reason we cannot win if such is our will—and if that will is manifested in strategy and tactical operations.”
³⁹
Soon, the total U.S. Army manpower committed to Vietnam was nudging toward 500,000. The Pentagon had plans to call up reservists.

In the fall of that year, U.S. Special Forces of 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) were charged with setting up mobile guerrilla forces able to operate in enemy territory undetected for up to sixty days, supplied every five days or so by bomber aircraft dropping modified 500-pound napalm containers, using genuine air strikes as cover. It was a parallel operation to the SOG adventures.

The mobile strike forces were to run intelligence-gathering recce missions, raid enemy camps, mine roads, ambush convoys, direct air strikes, and even search (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) for American and allied soldiers held prisoner by the VC. “Once in the area of operations the unit became a true guerrilla force in every respect except that of living solely off the land…. Training was simplified to the utmost for the benefit of the largely illiterate ethnic and religious minority groups who comprised the forces,” though many had already had experience with the CIDG cadres defending their villages. They started by qualifying for airborne operations, including, presumably, static-line parachuting. Six weeks of training that followed covered jungle warfare techniques including silent movement, tracking, navigation, use of “special” weapons, covert infiltration and exfiltration, and preparing helicopter landing zones.
⁴⁰
Though unacknowledged, it is likely that the training also covered silent killing.