Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (9 page)

The mobile strike/reaction force (“Mikeforce”) groups, salted with Green Berets, melded sometimes with Special Forces “project groups,” known by ancient Greek codenames such as Project Omega and Project Sigma. Each had about 600 men from 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), as well as an advisory command group, reconnaissance and quick reaction forces. Among their many successes, they rescued many U.S. airmen shot down over the demilitarized zone ostensibly separating North and South Vietnam. “BLACKJACK 33, a typical unconventional operation, was carried out between 27 April and 24 May 1967…. It was the first operation in which a mobile guerrilla force was employed in conjunction with the long-ranged reconnaissance capability of a project force, Project Sigma, Detachment B-56. The operation was highly effective; 320 of the enemy were killed.”
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Pentagon planners believed that the VC and their North Vietnamese ally would cave in under the pressure of a campaign of attrition. The enemy did not have the same mystical belief in the power of the body count. Around a million North Vietnamese, civil as well as military, died during the war.

The greatest tactical success among the Project teams was scored by Gamma, which did much in its brief two-year existence from 1968 to 1970. Operating from nine sites under the pretense of running civil aid projects, Gamma infiltrated agents, including friendly Vietnamese, into ostensibly neutral Cambodia in 1968 to identify Vietcong camps there. During the preceding two years, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the country’s ruler, hedging his bets in the event of a Communist victory, had allowed Vietnamese Communists to use areas of Cambodia near the border with Vietnam as resupply bases. The supplies, including weapons, were landed at the port of Sihanoukville, in spite of U.S. diplomatic protests. South Vietnamese and U.S. Special Forces began small raids across the border, prompting counter-protests from Cambodia.
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Project Gamma’s men were not raiders. They were a force-multiplier for what was to follow, providing 65 per cent of the intelligence on North Vietnamese base camps in Cambodia, including the number of soldiers there. By early 1969, according to one historian, the Project “had developed into the finest and most productive intelligence-collection operation the United States had in Southeast Asia.”
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It seems almost certain that this intelligence was the basis for the B-52 bomber air onslaught on Cambodia that was to follow, though some sources link the information to a North Vietnamese defector, or even aerial photography that by some magic penetrated the jungle canopy. There was one other candidate. This was the SOG. There was intense competition between the SOG and the Green Beret/Vietnamese militia teams.

The U.S. Air Force had made limited raids on Cambodia for four years before the bombing offensive of 1969, during Johnson’s presidency.
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But the escalation in March 1969 was a step-change, a response to the North’s shelling of Saigon in February. U.S. intelligence had long sought the enemy’s secret jungle headquarters, known by the abbreviation COSVN (for Central Office for South Vietnam) HQ. The Army’s best guess was that it was in Laos. But on 9 February 1969, soon after Nixon was inaugurated as president, General Creighton Abrams, C-in-C in South Vietnam, cabled the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earle G. Wheeler, with the knowledge that COSVN-HQ was in fact in Base Area 353, inside the “Fish Hook” area of eastern Cambodia, so called because it was a salient that extended into South Vietnam, northwest of Saigon. It accommodated several enemy regiments and a field hospital.

Abrams wrote: “The area is covered by thick canopy jungle. Source reports there are no concrete structures in this area. Usually reliable sources report that COSVN and COSVN-associated elements consistently remain in the same general area across the border. All our information, generally confirmed by imagery interpretation, provides us with a firm basis for targeting COSVN HQs.”
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Abrams’s opaque reference to “source reports” does not identify Project Gamma, probably to preserve the secrecy surrounding long-running Special Forces cross-border operations. His proposal was subject to a stratospheric discussion in Washington, to be finally approved by President Nixon after the enemy shelled Saigon. In the early hours of 19 March forty-eight B-52 bombers pulverized Base Area 353 with 2,400 tons of high explosive. The Hanoi authorities maintained an icy silence, in public. Over the following fourteen months, Abrams served up a list of another fifteen Base Areas for aerial assault. The first attack was codenamed Breakfast. The ensuing five operations were Lunch, Snack, Dinner, Supper, and Dessert, in which B-52s mounted 3,800 raids, dropping 108,823 tons of high explosive.

After any air raid, the planners need a Bomb Damage Assessment. Since this can best be made on the spot, on enemy or disputed territory it is a job for Special Forces. In this case, it was not the Green Beret-led mobile forces that did the job but their rival, the SOG, which provided 70 per cent of BDA intelligence after these attacks.
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The damage done to Cambodia was reassessed in 2000 when President Bill Clinton released classified BDA data previously concealed from public view by the Air Force. Between 4 October 1965 and 15 August 1973, a total of 2,756,941 tons of ordnance was dropped on 113,716 Cambodian sites. An expert Canadian analysis by Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan concludes that more than 10 per cent of the targeting was indiscriminate. They suggest: “Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d’etat in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge and ultimately the Cambodian genocide.” The data also demonstrated that “the way a country chooses to exit a conflict can have disastrous consequences.”

The disastrous consequences in Cambodia included the failure of a succession of governments, culminating in the barbaric killing fields of Pol Pot. As General Haig revealed, in the 1980s President Reagan “continued to support the Khmer resistance movement as a means of opposing the Vietnamese military presence in Kampuchea [formerly Cambodia]. “It was with considerable anguish that we agreed to support, even for overriding political and strategic reasons, this charnel figure” [Pol Pot].
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In the short run, however, the attacks on Cambodian soil were effective. Vietcong attacks on the South, particularly the Special Forces/CIDG camps, dropped significantly. Raids on the ground by Mikeforce teams recovered huge quantities of enemy weapons and ordnance. On the waters of the Mekong Delta, using air boats—air-propelled inflatables—and sampans, another Mikeforce group kept enemy forces on the back foot.

For the Green Berets of 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) the end game was reached with Vietnamization in 1970, when 14,534 tribal guerrillas of the Civilian Irregular Defense Group were absorbed into the regular Vietnamese Army as Ranger battalions. The SF goal had differed from that of the conventional battalions. “The goal of conventional forces was the conventional one of winning the war. For Special Forces, however, the goal was to help the South Vietnamese win what was really their war, and that goal was never forgotten.”
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Civil action (assistance) programs were equally impressive. “A summary of the civil action missions of the 5th Special Forces Group in the period 1964–1970 shows that the group set up 49,902 economic aid projects, 34,468 welfare projects and 10,902 medical projects; furnished 14,934 transportation facilities; supported 479,568 refugees; dug 6,436 wells and repaired 2,949 kilometers of road; established 129 churches, 272 markets, 110 hospitals and 398 dispensaries and built 1,003 classrooms and 670 bridges.”
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By this time, the U.S. Marine Corps, not formally Special Forces, had also run a Civic Assistance Program during which they assisted thousands of sick or war-wounded civilians. Such figures might not make exciting reading for military buffs, but for almost half a million refugees and thousands of others, they were a welcome change from the carnage of war. It was time to go home, though not for everyone. “Generally, U.S. Special Forces men who had spent less than ten months in Vietnam—some 1,200 or sixty per cent of the group strength—were reassigned to other U.S. Army, Vietnam, units. The remainder returned to the continental United States.”
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MACV-SOG, the parallel multi-force Special Forces group, remained in action in Vietnam until May 1972. The SOG was an extraordinary, heterogeneous task force energized by adventurous spirits from the CIA’s Special Activities Division, SEALS, U.S. Air Force, Green Berets, Vietnamese Special Forces, local and foreign mercenaries and signals intelligence experts. Fathered by the Joint Chiefs, it also had much political clout. CIA chiefs feared that it represented a takeover. Lyman Kirkpatrick, the Agency’s executive director, suspected “the fragmentation and destruction of the CIA, with the clandestine services being gobbled up by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
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In spite of its political backing, SOG was either singularly unlucky or unwilling to learn from past mistakes, or both. The Gulf of Tonkin raid was not the only misadventure. Between 1959 and 1961, the CIA had parachuted 250 South Vietnamese agents into the North. Most were killed or turned by the enemy. For three years from 1965 SOG repeated the error. Once captured, the teams were turned by their captors. The intelligence they sent back was false. Information relayed in return, detailing the next parachute or helicopter insertion, including landing zones, was genuine. The outcome was predictable. Between 1960 and 1968 the CIA and MACV-SOG sent 456 South Vietnamese agents to their deaths or harsh imprisonment.
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In 1965, SOG turned its guns on Laos, or rather, the Ho Chi Minh trail, a rabbit warren of tracks that lay beneath the jungle canopy and rode over rugged 8,000-foot mountains. SOG targeted and USAF bombed.

Within a few months, the number of air raids had increased from twenty to 1,000 a month. By now, the State Department and its ambassador in the Laotian capital—defending the country’s notional neutrality—were in conflict with the Joint Chiefs, who claimed that the trail was part of “the extended battlefield.”

In 1968, as the war dragged on and enemy supplies and manpower continued to flow in vast quantities from the North with 20,000 enemy troops infiltrating the South each month, SOG tried its luck again in North Vietnam, running intelligence agents in support of conventional forces. Unlucky as ever, SOG’s new enterprise coincided with North Vietnam’s Tet Offensive. A series of feints from the North in remote border areas succeeded in drawing the attention of the U.S. and South Vietnamese armies away from cities in South Vietnam. On 31 January 1968, at the start of the most important Vietnamese holiday, “the full scale offensive began with simultaneous attacks by the communists on five major cities, thirty-six provincial capitals, sixty-four district capitals and numerous villages. In Saigon, suicide squads attacked the Independence Palace (residence of the president), the radio station, the Vietnamese Army General Staff compound, Tan Son Nhut airfield and the U.S. embassy.”
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If the assault was meant to take and hold ground, it failed, at a cost: the lives of 32,000 communist soldiers were sacrificed. But like the hidden dimension of General Giap’s siege at Dien Bien Phu—plus his unexpected use of anti-aircraft guns and howitzers—its true purpose was political and psychological. In that sense, the Tet offensive succeeded. “On March 31, 1968, President Johnson announced that he would not seek his party’s nomination for another term of office, declared a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam (except for a narrow strip above the Demilitarized Zone) and urged Hanoi to agree to peace talks.”
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Johnson’s credibility at home was mortally damaged and so was the public’s belief in this war. “With U.S. troop strength at 525,000, a request by [General] Westmoreland for an additional 200,000 troops was refused by a presidential commission headed by the new U.S. secretary of defense, Clark Clifford.”
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On 6 November, Richard Nixon, a Republican, won the presidential election with a promise of “peace with honor.” This meant training the South Vietnamese armed forces up to a level where they could guarantee the security of their country. Meanwhile, the war was extended to Cambodia and Laos, assisted in both cases by regime change. Communist bases and the Ho Chi Minh trail were targeted by MACV using, among other tools, electronic sensors linked to computers in an attempt to automate intelligence collection. This endeavor, codenamed Operation Igloo White, has been described as “the keystone of the U.S. aerial interdiction effort of the Vietnam conflict.” Enthusiasm for bombing Laos grew as a result to 433,000 tons in 1969. Devastating though that figure was, it was modest compared with what was happening in Cambodia. Within two years, MACV’s clandestine operations in Cambodia and Laos were ended by Congress. MACV stayed in business by proxy, running local mercenaries known as Special Commando Units.

As U.S. Special Forces’ involvement in ground operations in Vietnam neared its end, the Pentagon planned a spectacular that, had it succeeded, might have lifted morale back home. This was the airborne raid by fifty-six Green Berets and CIA paramilitaries on Son Tay, a sprawling military complex a mere twenty-three miles west of Hanoi, and identified as a prison holding seventy U.S. soldiers and airmen. The operation, though it cost only two minor casualties and one aircraft, was fatally flawed in two respects. First, intelligence on which the raid was planned was out of date. The prisoners had been moved to other locations when the rescuers arrived. Second, it took too long for the military bureaucracy to get its act together. SOG had suspected since 1968 that Son Tay held POWs. In early May 1970, following an analysis of aerial recce photographs, planning began. The raid did not happen until 20 November 1970. The outcome provoked controversy for years afterwards. In March 1983, a Washington symposium brought together leading theorists and practitioners to discuss special operations in U.S. strategy.