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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 to Military 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 Vietnam 0(2001,1L- _

The remaining unpublished book in this series will describe CIA's management of irregular warfare In Laos during the Vietnam conflict.D

The Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) was founded in 1974 In response to Director of Central 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 on Intelligence problems." The Center, comprising both professional historians and experienced practioners, attempts to document lessons learned from past operations, explore the needs and expectations of 'intelligence consumers, and stimulate serious debate on current and future iritelligence challenges.

To support these activities, CSI publishes Studies in Intelligence, as well as books and monographs addressing 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 contact HR CIAU CSI PubReq@DA (in Lotus Notes) or [email protected] (ICE-mail).

The cover design, byl lof Imaging and Publication Support, shows the crew of a junk about to depart on a supply mission to an agent along the North Vietnamese coast.D S~/MR ~05303948

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

THOMAS L. AHERN, JR.

"'~~\' Center for the Study ofIntelligence Washington, DC May 2005 i I I I . I I i I ·~05303948

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Contents

IntroductionD 1

Chapter One: When Your Only Tool Is a HammerD 7 The End of the Honeymoon0 9 Singletons by Sea, Teams by Air 0 11 Judgment by Preponderance of EvidenceD 15 Father to the Thoughtn 17 Under EnemyControID 19

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

Chapter Three: A Hesitant EscalationD 33 . Stru.ctural Problem~ 33 Business as UsuaIL_J ; 35 Restrictive Policy, Amoitious Planning D 36 Ambivalence at Head~uarrsl I 38 Staying With the Program 40 Taking Off the Gloves 41 Better Aircraft but No Better LuCkD 44 Improving the Technologyn 45 A Game Not Worth the Ca~ D 47

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

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

Source NoteD ~ 65

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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 from exhaustive, the series samples the major aspects of the Agency's participation. These include political action, intelligence, and pacification programs in South Vietnam; management of the contemporaneous war in Laos; the analytical controversy over the shipment of munitions to the Viet Cong through Cambodia; and the ill-fated pro­ gram in which the Saigon Station inserted agent teams into North Vietnam.D

Some of these activities were rewarded with success that still looks substantial even if, given the outcome of the war, it was necessarily transitory. Only two of the subjects chosen for the series represent outright failures. Their unhappy outcomes made the task of recording them a rather joyless prospect, but upon examination both of them turned 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 and black teams inserted into North Vietnam, is offered as an object lesson in what hap­ pens when eagerness to please trumps objective self-analysis, when the urge to pre­ serve a can-do self-image delays the recognition of a talled-e-indeed, archaic­ operational technique.D

To tell the story of covert penetrations of North Vietnam without tracing the influence on them of earlier such efforts in other locales would obscure their significance as a paradigm of the CIA approach to HUMINT collection against closed and hostile soci­ eties. True, the earliest correspondence about infiltrating intelligence and guerrilla operatives into North Vietnam makes no reference to this experience, which began in Europe during World War II. But in fact the program against Hanoi adopted agent infil­ tration by parachute as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had practiced it in Europe during World War II. CIA then modified-one might say diluted-it, in defer­ ence 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, the covert infiltration of intelligence and covert action teams, mostly by air although occa­ sionally overland or by sea, became an endurinq facet of the Clandestine. Service's approach to the problem of penetrating closed societies.D .

As applied by the OSS, the practice later known as "black entry" enjoyed its most notable success with the Jedburgh operation, which after D-Day inserted teams of American and indigenous nationality to mobilize local resistance movements against I: 0:05303948

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the Nazis. They armed French resistance fighters, including over 20,000 combatants in Brittany alone, and these cut rail lines, derailed trains, ambushed German road convoys, and cut telephone and electric power lines.1D

The respectable showing of the Jedburgh teams, coupled with the absence of prom­ ising alternatives, made it natural to apply the blind drop technique against the Soviet Union as cooperation against Hitler gave way to Cold War hostility. Both Nazi-occu­ pied Europe and the Soviet Union suffered the abuses of a brutal dictatorship, and it seemed 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 War tensions hardened, the Agency had to do something, and no better alternatives were at hand. Accordingly, between 1949 and 1959, CIA dispatchedDagents, mostly by air, into the Soviet Union under the aegis of the REDSOX program. 2 0

The effort enjoyed almost no success. Indeed, the chief of the Soviet Russia Division in the Directorate of Plans wrote in 1957 that it had been "strewn with disaster." More agents survived who were sent overland than those inserted by blind drop; of the lat­ ter, apparently someDin all, only three ever managed to exfiltrate, and one of these was suspected of having been doubled. Meanwhile, the intelligence product of the program as a whole was "pitifully small, and the anticipated intelligence support appa­ ratus, grafted on... underground resistance organizations, died aborning." Not even the 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 Soviet citizen and penetrating, even briefly, into the Soviet heartland."3D

In 1971, Operations Directorate (DO) historians attributed the failure of REDSOX to two factors. One was the "implacable and ubiquitous KGB." The other was the absence of the prospect of liberation that might have fueled resistance movements like those in Western Europe during World War 11. 4 0

The same factors that produced the REDSOX program forced a similar effort in China after Mao expelled the Nationalists in late 1949 and then, in mid-1950, sent the Peo­ ple's Liberation Army south to join the fray in Korea. With US forces in bloody combat there, CIA launched a frantic effort to weaken the 'chinese intervention by infiltrating the mainland with guerillas and potential resistance leaders. Drawing personnel from Nationalist elements and also from non-Nationalists-the latter representing the seed of a hoped-for anti-communist Third Force-the Agency trained and dropped about [ Ite~ms of agents onto the mainland. 5 0

, War Report: Office of Strategic Services (055), History Project, strQc Services Unit, Office of the Assistant S reta of War War Department, Washington, DC, 1959, 199-200 2 et aI., The Illegal Border·Crossing Program, Clandes me Service Historical Series (CSHP) 098, July 1 , 'lbid.,142- • Ibid., 145-46.'0 b05303948

Hans Tofte, who ran the operations launched froml Ilater said that communications intercepts reflected Beijing's belief that 50,000 guerrillas threatened its rear area; he therefore rated the program a success. ButAgency management was not persuaded that these operations were in fact diverting any substantial Chi­ nese 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 more communist resources, he thought, if it turned to larger scale attacks and feints along the coast. Accordingly, CIA trained over] guerrillas, who conducted at least a dozen coastal raids. Whatever the results of these attacks-they may have been significant-the black entry program remained unproductive. 6 D

Undeterred 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 and 1953. 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 attack after about six weeks on the ground. 7 D

Seeking to explain the paucity of results, a contemporary project review noted the poor 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 ere­ ate resistance movements, a task requiring a very different set of skills. If these were the operative factors, better agents and more coherent tasking would improve the program's performance. But the activity was canceled after the cease-tire of rnld­ 1953, and the thesis could not be tested. aD

I ~ were thus the only teams to meet a criterion established by William Colby, when later as Chief of the Far East (FE) Division he described the basis of the technique. "The rationale ... springs essentially from World War II experience....The population was . essentially passive to friendly, with at least a small element willing to participate in intelligence, sabotage, or resistance operations.1I9 D

• 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 Stafffiles,D 8 Ibid. 9 Kuhns, 4-15; William E. Colby, Memorandum to DDRlack Team Infiltration by Air and Sea Against FE Denied Areas-Cold War," 2 August 1963, quoted in Kuhns, 9'L-J 3 SEC~

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Probably because it was so obvious, Colby did not make explicit the connection between favorable indigenous attitudes and the exactions of an occupying foreign power. He also left unmentioned a key element in the motivation of potential recruits for '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 that might have provided a cautionary note as the Saigon Station looked for ways to pen­ etrate communist-controlled North Vietnam. Colby had jumped twice, once into occu­ pied 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: dropped squarely into a town some 25 miles from the pre-arranged site, Colby's team escaped the occupying Germans only with the help of French civilians awakened by parachut­ ists landing in their gardens. 100

Serendipity 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 the morning, 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 the very maquis cell that had waited in vain for the airdrop. The cell leader, inexplicably uncooperative, was later identified as a Gestapo informant. He had abstained from betraying the impending arrival of the ass team only because the tide of war had already turned, and he was cautiously playing both sides of the street. 11D

As Gen. George Patton's Third Army broke the German lines at St. La and began roil­ ing east, Colby found other resistance leaders to receive the munitions that fueled the uprising now erupting in the German rear area. In Norway, too, in early 1945, Colby's determination and courage led to tangible results, as his team blew a bridge and sab­ otaged a length of railway on the route from Finland back toward Germany. Saved from pursuing patrols by the end of hostilities, Colby rode a train north over the tracks he had so recently sabotaged; he later recalled having been "chastened by the short time in which it had been repaired by Russian paW's."12 0

Despite the derring-do mystique that still surrounds ass activity in both Europe and Southeast Asia, it is clear that black entry operations in Euro e at least made onl a peripheral contribution to the main war effort.

'0 William E. Colby, Honorable Men (New York: Simon andSchusler, 1979), Chapter 10 " Ibid.C1---, 12 Ibid., 50.U ------~------..,..- C05303948

Whatever the considerations that led to its application in North Vietnam, no sign has been found that they conducted a serious search for an alternative. Indeed, there may have existed no such alternative, using either human or technical means. There are things that, in a given place at a given time, are simply impossible.D C05303948 ~t'~,

North Vietnam: Administrative Divisions, Circa 1961-64 .

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Chapter One: When Your Only Tool partners in the intelligence war against the Is.aHammerD communists in both North and South. 2 D

This bilateral approach seems to have been taken as a matter of course. And it is indeed hard to see how an independent CIA effort, For five years after the Geneva Accords of based In South Vietnam, could have succeeded 1954 divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel of lat­ without Govemment of Vietnam (GVN) partici­ itude, Ho Chi Minh in the North and Ngo Dinh pation. To begin with, the station lacked ade­ Diem in the South concentrated on consolidat­ quate access to agent candidates for use ing their respective regimes. For both of them, against either the southern Viet Minh or North eradicating actual and even potential oppo­ Vietnam. In addition, a unilateral program of any nents at home became major agenda items, substantial size, whatever its prospects for suc­ and neither gave much material support to his cess, would certainly have come to the attention potential allies on the other side of the Demili­ of a very prickly Ngo Dinh Diem. The station tarized Zone. For Diem, these were the Catho­ therefore relied from the beginning on South lics who had chosen to remain in the North Vietnamese partners to acquire agents and pro­ instead of joining the migration authorized at vide facilities and administrative personnelD Geneva. Ho Chi Minh, meanwhile, imposed a . quiescent stance on the thousands of Viet Operating with the GVN had its drawbacks. Minh, non-communist nationalists among Like any authoritarian ruler, Diem tully under­ them, who had not regrouped to the north while stood the potential of his security services to Catholics were coming south. II I . be used against him by ambitious or disgrun­ tled underlings, and he chose their leaders For more than a year after Diem's accession with attention more to personal loyalty than to as prime minister, the CIA in Saigon was pre­ competence. This order of priority certainly occupied with helping him prevail over his applied in the case of Tran Kim Tuyen, a phy­ mostly non-communist opponents in the sician whom Diem installed as head of the Ser­ South. His unexpected success encouraged vice for Political and Social Studies, known by the Eisenhower administration to repudiate the its French acronym SEPES. Not even a char­ unification elections that the Geneva signato­ tered intelligence organization, it was in fact ries (the United States not among them) had only the intelligence section of the Can Lao, mandated for July 1956. Instead, Washington nominally a political party but essentially a would support Diem as the leader of a new cadre organization of Diem's functionaries. But nation-state, one that faced a hostile Demo­ Tuyen enjoyed the confidence of the president, cratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) across the and CIA began trying to cultivate a productive Demilitarized Zone. This long-term commit­ working relationShip.D ment would demand as much intelligence as possible on North Vietnamese and Viet Minh In what looked like a break for the station, capabilities and intentions, and the station Tuyen's deputy, an energetic ex-Viet Minh, dis­ began trying to build Diem's nascent intelli­ played none of his boss's reserve toward joint gence and security services into cooperative operations. But things cooled abruptly during his visit to Washington in late 1955 when

1 In Vietna:n~~H;story (Penguin Books, 1984), Stanley Karnow gives a good survey of the French defeat in Indochina and the 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 the author's CIA and the House of Ngo: Covert Action in South Vietnam 1954-63 (Washington, DC: Center for the StUdy of Intelligence, 2000) (hereafter House of Ngo), especially Chapter 90

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AI Ulmer, FE Division chief, made an extempo­ start, with new agent personnel. CIA would raneous and unsuccessful effort to recruit now work also with the second of the two ser­ hlm. 3D vices that reported directly to the president, an army unit first called the Presidential Survey The resulting boost to endemic Vietnamese Office and then renamed the Presidential liai­ xenophobia damaged the prospects of a colle­ son Office (PLO).60 gial relationship with SEPES, but Diem was Interested in it, in any case, more for domestic The PLO was headed by Lt. Col. Le Quang surveillance than for policy-level intelligence. Tung, another Diem loyalist, whose deferential Perhaps not yet recognizing Diem's intentions, style tended to obscure his modest profes­ and still hoping to turn Tuyen into a productive sional qualifications. US support to his organi­ partner, the station bought him a motorized zation came from both the Department of fishing junk to transport personnel and sup­ Defense and CIA, and was designed at first to plies for the nine agent nets he claimed to be equip Diem with a guerrilla cadre capable of running in the North. Case officerII operating behind the lines after a communist c=!began noticing procedural anomalies in invasion of the South. Diem agreed in early tne radio messages purportedly received from 1958 to let Natsios and Tung proceed with this, these agents, and further investigation but again there were no recorded results. 7 0 revealed that the agent nets were fictitious. The junk, it turned out, had been leased to a A similar fate befell parallel efforts with the Mil­ Japanese fishing firm. 4 D' itary Security Service (MSS), charged with counterintelligence protection for the armed Diem and Tuyen had also agreed to a small forces, and with the surete, the successor to joint program of minor harassment of coastal the French internal security organ later called facilities in North Vietnam, but (assuming it the Police Special Branch. The pattern estab­ was, in fact, separate from the putative agent lished with Dr. Tuyen and Col. Tung repeated nets) It produced no recorded results. Indeed, itself with the MSS, whose commander some­ it is not clear that any such operations were how never seemed to get word in his own ever launched.sD channels of Diem's agreement with the COS for joint intelligence operations against the These embarrassments did not lead the station communists. Meanwhile, Diem accepted to cut its ties with SEPES. Beginning in 1957, advisers and material support for the Surete, however, it did insist on full access to agents but the reward in useful intelligence was insig­ and agent communications. This painful tight­ nificant. As late as 1959, the only police report­ ening of the ground rules took time to put into ing reaching the station came from low-level, effect, and when President Diem proposed casual informants. If the Surete had any pene­ changing the SEPES harassment program to trations of the communist military or political one of intelligence collection, Chief of Station apparatus, it was concealing them from the Nicholas Natsios proposed to make a new station.aD

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

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The End of the 'HoneymoonD Diem'scritics seem to have sharedthe prevail­ ing inability to imagine spontaneous support The GVN's suppression of the Viet Minh that for a totalitarian movement.GVN derelictions began in 1955 eventually had the effect of might make the peasantry vulnerable to men­ unleashinga fUll-fledged, communist-ledinsur­ dacious communist propaganda, but the con­ gency. In January 1959, answering appeals ventional mindset viewed the insurgency as from the leadership in the South to save Itfrom havlnq no local impetus; it was solely a crea­ destruction, the Politburo in Hanoi revoked its ture of Hanoi,lOD prohibition on armed resistance. The southern communists now abandoned "political strug­ This perspective led, in turn, to the inference gle" for a policy of "armedstruggle."This would that the road to defeat of the Viet Cong, as the require, among other things, logistical support GVN beganlabelingthe Viet Minh, ranthrough from the North. Accordingly, in May, the DRV Hanoi. The insurgencywould end when the created the 559th Transportation Group, the cost of supportingit rose to a level unaccept­ military organization that eventually built the able to the DRV.l1 D tortuous supply line th~h Laos known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.LJ Diem seems to have shared this view. Incapa­ ble of finding any flaw in his own governing But the desperate communists in the South style, he was naturally inclined to look for rem­ could not wait for supplies and men to begin edies that took the war to the enemy. But at trickling in from the North. On their own, they least until late 1959, this orientationhad coex­ launched guerrilla operations and terrorist isted with a stubborn aversion to joint covert attacks on Diem's officials that dramatically operationswith CIA against the communistsin ' revealed the failure of GVN repression to either North or South. At that point, it seems, destTY tie Viet Minh staybehind organiza- , the SUdden, incendiary burst of insurgent tion.9 energypersuadedhim of the needto take help where he could get it.D In January 1960, the first communistTetoffen­ sive humiliated Diem's army and traumatized Whatever Diem's precise motivation, CIA in rural administrators, driVing many of them to ' Saigon now had the green light to work on a the security of military outposts, At this point, basis of full reciprocitywith both SEPES and some of the younger officers in the Saigon Sta­ the PLO. The problem was that the GVN and tion were already persuaded that, without its CIA advisers were now playing catch-up major GVN reforms, the influence of the Viet ball, especially when it came to operations Minh would only grow. Indeed, a few Amerl­ against the North. Ho Chi Minh had had five .cens--Ambassedor to the GVN Elbridge Dur­ years to consolidatethe regimentation of his brow prominent among them-had begun as country, whose borders were almost hermeti­ early as 1957to deplore Diem'sindifferenceto cally sealed off from Western-oriented neigh­ winning the consent of the governed. But even bors. 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's War Comes /0 Long An (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). For descriptions of Diem's "Anti-Communist Denunciation Campaign," see Race and the author's CIA and Rural Pacification In Sou/h vietnsm (Washington, DC: Center for 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 the pacification program, are described in CIA and Pacifica/ion. n 11 The term Viet Minh is a contraction of Viet Nam Doc lap Do';;gJiAlnh, the Vietnam Independence league, the front created by Ho Chi Minh in 1941 to resist the Japanese occupation of Indochina. In the late 1950s, the term gradually gave way to Viet Cong, t.e, Vietnamese Communists, a pejorative term coined by the GVN and applied mainly to the party apparatus in South Vietnam.D

I 9 operational intelligence-identity documenta­ Only a week after his inauguration, the new tion and travel controls, and the organization president told the National Security Council and deployment of internal security forces, for that he wanted "guerrillas to operate in the example-meant that operational planning North," with CIA his executive agent. In March, took place, at first, in something of a vacuum. he inquired about progress, whether the North The first, tentative step to fill that vacuum Vietnamese were getting a taste of their own would come in the form of singleton agent medicine. They weren't, at least not yet, and operations across the Demilitarized zoneLJ Kennedy ordered the Agency to implement his "instructions that we make every possible effort It took a full year for the first jointly run agent to to launch guerrilla operations in North Vietnam cross the Demilitarized Zone into North Viet­ territory."13D nam. COde-namedI Ihe paddled across the Ben Hai River on an inner tube just Not everyone familiar with such operations before midnight on 5 December 1960. His Viet­ thought the idea made much sense. At about namese case officer, hidden on the south the same time that Kennedy was pressing for bank, heard the air escape from the inner tube results in North Vietnam, Robert Myers, then asl Islashed it before burying it COS inl Ivisited Saigon. Briefing and setting off on foot toward the north. The his fellow COS on activity In Vietnam, William documentation provided by CIA'~ I Colby described the new program in which I Igot him through two police teams of Vietnamese were dropping by para­ challenges, and he proceeded to the nearby chute into North Vietnam. Myers, who had town of Ho Xa before returning to South Viet­ watched the failure of such operations into nam the same day. 120 China in the mid-1950s, told Colby it wouldn't work: Just as the Chinese civil war was over, By the time agent! !conducted and Mao firmly established in Beijing, Ho Chi his first mission, South Vietnam was about to Minh was now in charge in Hanoi. His Leninist become the testing ground of a new US com­ regime would be proof against any interlopers mitment to contain the spread of communism wandering the countryside, collecting intelli­ in the post-colonial Third World. John F. gence and/or fomenting reslstance.!' 0 Kennedy had become president-elect after a campaign featuring Republican charges that Colby disagreed, arguing that suitable safe the Democrats were "soft on communism." In areas could be found, at least in lightly popu­ January 1961, Soviet leader Nikita Khrush­ lated areas where black teams could set up chev proclaimed his commitment to "wars of reasonably secure bases. In retrospect, Myers national liberation," and Kennedy promptly thought this a projection onto Vietnam of accepted what he interpreted as a direct Soviet Colby's ass experience with the Jedburgh challenge. Growing anxiety over the GVN's program: "he thought it was like Norway." 150 deteriorating position meant that South Viet­ nam would now become the laboratory for US Whatever the merits of Myers's objections, experimentation with the new doctrines of Colby's enthusiasm matched White House counterinsurgency and irregular warfare.D eagerness to challenge Ho Chi Minh's control in the North. An~ challenge to thefuture of Projectl ]was being made on the ---_.._--_._.._--.__.__..__._-_._--

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North Vietnam: Black Insertions, 1961-62

other side of the world , in the form of the III­ conceived operation to unseat Cuba's Fidei Castro. Approved by the Eisenhower adminis­ tration and adopted by John F, Kennedy, it came to grief at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Even though the burgeon ing CIA-supported Hmong resistance in northeastern Laos was / then beginning to look like a major success, the Bay of Pigs inflicted a grievous blow to the

Agency's reputation for competence in irregu­ TOURBILLON 16 lar warfare . 0 CASTOR Son Tay * HANOI Moe Chau • • Haiphong ARES At the same time, hesitant to throw out the ·8an Mouang Cha baby with the bath, the administration over­ came its dismay over the Bay of Pigs suffi­ ciently to leave CIA, for the moment, in charge of the nascent North Vietnam program. LAOS Indeed, the president expanded Project C] ~__[modest charte r as he instructed the Gulf Xieng· Agency to use its teams to conduct wide-rang­ Khouang of Ing unconventional warfare. At the same time, Tonkin he shrank CIA's overall respons ibility with three National Secur ity Action memoranda, signed in late June 1961, which transferred to the Pentagon much of CIA's authority to plan and conduct Irregular warfare . 17 1l

.UdonThan; Singletons by Sea, Teams by Air (U) THAI LAN D Sakon· Nakhon What the president found a frustratingly slow CIA response did not reflect any lack of atten­ , Airborne insertion tion to his demand for action against the DRV. In fact, by the spring of 1961, painstaking ~ Maritime insertion preparations for team operations had been 50, 100, Kilometers underway for almost a year. These were to be o preceded by singleton agents infiltrated into the DRV. The agents would collect Information on the communists' security practices for use and operating out of otherwise uninhabi ted by airborne teams dropped near their villages safehavens. 18 D

I. Conboy 35, Shultz, 210 17 lbid·C I.Sedgwick Tourison secrotAanr SecretWar (Annapol is, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995), 34. SUbsequent recollection s of Saigon omcers Uk who interpreted the turn to airborne operations as a response tlLJllilssure lrom the new Kennedy administration, overlooked the tortuous logistics that preceded the first team inliltrationsL _ J

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eventual contact with other.. .agents inside the target area); the selection of zones of operation, base zones and general areas in which to choose drop zones, all of which had to be worked out as a tunction of the available intelligence of the area, the locations of the homes of theagents 'relatives, and the viewsof the agents themselves .... Long before , of course, the process of spotting. develop ing end organizing the agent personnel for these missions had been accomplished and involved the selection of capable candidates [and) the matching of their personalities into compatible teems. In fact, this process was begun almostexactlyone year before the first team was successfUlly dropped into North Vietnam ."U ia use to landIn Ha LonQ8ar.D Much of the sama work went into the parallel program of singleton penetrations, and on The station later oeianec lor Headquarters 26 March 1961, the Saigon Station once again what this process entailed: launched agentC-- J landing him by junk under cover 01 darkness near Dong Hoi, Preparations for each team included the not far above the DMZ. This time, he stayed procurement of steme equipment, some four days, observ ing communist pollee con­ of it authentic North Vietnamese ilems trois and "various minor military insta llations." Still using fabricated documentation, he took a bus south to Vinh linh, then walked to the Ben Hal River, crossing back into South Vietnam, .the development 0 cover a arentiy again under cover 01 darkne ss.20 stories for various contingencies;... the planning of the bundles to be dropped with each team so that they would not be The first airborne leam was still waiting for a too heavy but would include everything favorable conju nction of weather and moon necessary 10 the mission; the phase when Ihe station and Col. Tung procurement...olold French Indochinese launched the next and more ambitious sing le­ silver piaster coins [and 01) target area ton agent operat ion. Transported by a motor­ cunencles; the development...of ized fishing j unk 01 the type common 10the reporting requirements given each team; area, agent; --Was inserted intothe North the assignment of control signals (and in earty April 1961. He landed on the karst­ other bona /ides for use in case of studded coast 01 Ha Long Bay, east 01 the port

I I FV$A 12657 ,24 August 1961, 10 FVSA 1218 1, 20 April 1961, owhere.inlhe meager correspondence abOU t inf!n,stiol'l across iheDMZ ISt ere any escnption Ihe measuresused 10avoid discovery cvORV socuntyD

12 " I '05303948

of Haiphong, and set off to find his family's causes, and whenc=J:ame backon the air commune. There, he was supposed to recruit some weeks later, he offereda plausible story someone to operate the generator for his about DRV security measuresthat had forced World War ll-era RS-1 agent radio." D himout of his safehaven.Accordingly, over the course of the nextfour months,the station and Giventhe uncertaintiescreated bythe needfor its PLO partners launched at least three more a second man, the station accepted that it singletonsby land or sea into North Vietnam. might be weeks before the agent came up on Expectations remainedmodest, with survival the air. In fact, It did not have long to walt. Eiud­ the agents' maingoal. The intelligencetargets Ingdiscovery, Clcached his radiogearand for one such] I were to "be assigned made hisway to hisfamily's commune, where once the agent is in place depending on the he persuaded his brother to help. After finding access he turns outto have." Meanwhile, as a hiding place forDin the forest, the two this series of insertions began, the station retrieved the gear. They then dispatchedthe moved in late May 1961 Into the airbome first of an Initial series of 23 messages that phase of the program."D inauguratedthe longest and most prolific radio correspondence from any penetrationof the The first airborne team, dubbed CASTOR, had North run either by CfA or by its successor, the been selected primarily for its prospects of sur­ SpecialOperations Group of the MIlitaryAssis­ vivalln a remotearea populated by non-Viet­ tance CommandNietnam (MACV)."D namesa tribes; as with the singleton agents, its accessto important intelligence had beena In mid-June,Clsuddenly fell silent. On the secondary consideration. But as it happened, 17th,militiamenof the People'sArmed Security by the time it was readyto drop IntoSon La Force (PASF),a rural internalsecurity force Province, the neighboring kingdomof Laoshad underthe Ministryof the Interior, arrestedhim begunto crumbleunder communistpressure. and his brotherfor espionage, A fisherman's By happycoincidence, the team wouldbe discoveryof the undamaged skiff used by the locatedwithin range of Route6, which ran agentfa reach shorefrom the junk had led to a southwest into Laos, and could be tasked to searchof the area and the discoveryof the monitorDRV supportof the insurgency there." holes he had used for temporaryconcealment D of his RS-! radio. A house-to-house searchIol­ iowed,concentrating on familieswith ties to the Near midnight on 27 May,a twin-engine C-47 South or the Frenchcolonialregime. Reports with civilian South Vietnamese markings from two villagers then broughtthe hunt to an entered DRV airspace at a point chosen to end, One reported seeinga stranger, livingin a avoid known antiaircraft emplacements. beachfronthouse, who averted his face during Piloted by Major Nguyen Cao Ky,the flamboy­ an accidental encounter. The second reported ant Vietnamese Air Force officer who later seeing someonefrom the same house displ\!y.:..., becameprime minister, then vice president,of ing a ballpointpen,thena rarityinthe DRV."U the GVN, the intruder proceededat low alti­ tude, naVigating by the light of the full moon," The Interruptionof radio traffic could have arisen from innumerable, mostly innocuous, D

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

2~ 21~ilOlUWL[======::;::======::::J t3 Ibid.tbld.,n25-26.FVtj2.Z91..28 Soptember 1961 I IFVSA 12934, 9 Novem~1961 _ ~ Conboy, 37. 211 Conboy, 36. 13 ~05303948

Ky reported delivering Team CASTOR to the key-indicated that'ECHO's operator had in appointed drop zone, and the station waited fact transmit1ed it,29D withIncreasing anxietyforthe firstradiocontact Not until29 June didthe teambreakItssilence, The possibilitythat the operator was working but it then came on the air with a reassuring underenemycontrol seems not at first to have account of earlydifficulties now resolved. A been explicitlyaddressed. This omission relieved Saigon Station accepted the rationile'l delayed serious consideration of what turned and promised an Immediate supplydrop.27 out to be the fact. for DRVsecurityhad already

taken Team ECHO into custody. Like Team I In fact, CASTOR had come under enemycon­ CASTOR, it had landed near a village, in this .1 trol only four days after Its 27 May landing.Its case so close to it that the participants at a arrival had been compromised, first by a radar night political indoctrination session sawthe C~ instaliation located under its flight path over 47 silhouetted against the moon. Its first mes­ Mac Chau District, and'then by reports from sage, on 23 June, had been the only one not alarmed villagers reacting tothe unprece­ sent under enemy control. By that time, the dented noise of an aircraft passingat night team knew that it had been compromised; it over their remote hamlets. The drop zone, fur­ was cepturedwhile fleeing toward the laotian thermore, lay only e kilometerfrom one of border· 30 D these Villages. Havingquickly pinpointed CAS­ TOR's location, the PASF neededonly three By earlyJuly, Headquarters beginningto worry days to surroundthe team,which surrendered aboutthe tardyfirst broadcastsfrom CASTOR without a flght."D . . and ECHO, and ECHO then provoked further .worrieswith Itssilence,afterthe flrst contacton Meanwhile, unawareof this disaster, CIA and 23 June, for exactly a month. A third team, the PLO launched Team ECHO on 2 June. DIDO, had been dropped Into Lai Chau Prov­ This drop, well to the southeastof CASTOR, ince. inthenorthwest on 29 June, where it was also went according to plan.The crew, confi­ to supplementCASTOR'santicipatedcover­ dent of its navigationto the drop zone, sawall age of traffic into Laos. Washington asked personneland cargo chutes open, and the whetherit, like the others, had been instructed Insertionlooked like a success. But, as with to come on the air within three days of land­ CASTOR, the drop was followed by three ing. 3 1D weeks of silence, and, when ECHq finally came on the air, It provokedconcern by using Presumably it had, but Team DIDOhad lasted an Impropercall sign. Managersof the covert onfyaboutfour weeksbeforejoining itscompa­ communications facility suggested that this. triots in detention. Unable at first to find the "could be attributed to nervousness" at the first bundle containing its radio, the team combed contact, but they wanted reassurance that the the hills lookingfor it until they encountered a "crypto control signals" had been properly PASF patrol and were captured. Thus, by the used. If not, the team's securitywas suspect, ~dlof JU'r' all three airdropped teams, as well even thoughthe message's"fist prinf'-an as were in North Vietnamese hands.32 operator's characteristic style of operatingthe -n . ' I fS-Seplember1:1 30 June 1961 IFVSA 12657.n 8~ on ay. 6.38. Presumab)i&rer faulty intelligence or faulty naVIgation, or a combination therOOr,"accounts for the frequent drops-if Conboy's informants are correct-of blackentry learns onto populated areas, butnothing has been discovered thatiIIuminalaS~~J-1 --, 'I 1,5.h~y 1961,L- . IFVSA 12657.0 ca Conboy,39.L.J . 14

-!------_ __.._ . h05303948

~R

Judgment by Preponderance of Evidence edged that, if the team was not doubled, it was o ' certainly "extremely hot." But Saigon ques­ tioned the utility of resolvinqthe issue of bona Headquarters' query about DIDO (no answer fides by demanding more intelligence report­ to it has been found) may well have been pro­ ing. The DRV could easily feed the team, with­ voked by the loss of the aircraft trying to drop out any significant damage to national security, supplies to Team CASTOR. On 1 July, it had any information it could reasonably be entered DRV airspace, then simply disap­ expected to collect. And if pressed for more, peared. Subsequent correspondence between CASTOR's putative DRV handlers would have Headquarters and the station focused on the the team present the entirely plausible argu­ tension between the urgent neceesity of sup­ ment that its parlous security situation pre­ plying viable teams and the risk that such mis­ cluded more aggressive collection efforts. 34 0 sions might ~d aircraft and their crews to destruction·u The available evidence allowed continued hope that CASTOR was still viable, but Team The station, concerned not to abandon starv­ ECHO was another matter. Its bona fides were Ing teams-and perhaps Just vlsceratly reluc­ now "dubious," at best, the result of continuing tant to admit possible failure-wanted to anomalies in its message traffic that suggested employ a permissive standard for approval of a surreptitious effort by the radio operator to supply missions. Responding on 25 July, indicate hostile control. In early August, the Headquarters noted that Hanoi radio had station proposed ordering ECHO to exfiltrate revealed its possession of "much info re all as a way of testing its freedom. But the fact teams." The field should, therefore, assume remained that it had lost one of its four men that the "enemy may be preparing apprehen­ even before launch, when he was dismissed sion cps." Nevertheless, having reviewed the after what the station called a breach of secu­ available info on all three teams, "particularly rity. And the team had reported injuries to CASTOR," Headquarters accepted the pro­ another as he hit the ground. The remaining posed criterion: in the absence of "conclusive two, hobbled by their injured 'comrade, would IeVldere" of enemy control, elithre.!!.D be able to do little. And even if it was still clean, teams should be supplied."U the team was "almost as 'hot as CASTOR.""

Headquarters may not have known, at this D point, about the tardy second trensmission by The station announced on 1 August that CAS­ Team ECHO, on 23 July, the one that first gave TOR would get a supply drop that night. Some­ the station "strong indication that the ... team thing must have prevented it, for two days later may be under the control of the opposition." Headquarters proposed a moratorium on sup­ The main object of Washington's attention was ply missions to that team while everyone still CASTOR, as Headquarters noted on 28 stepped back to have a look at the whole pro­ July. Direction-finding (OF) analysis of CAS­ gram. Acknowledging the station's Immense TOR transmissions indicated its radio to be effort to do something about North Vietnam, sited considerably northeast of the team's Washington acknowledged a "strong reserva­ reported bivouac, and the station acknowl- tion" about the utility of infiltration efforts, at

~i!ffi~@I'i[J======~ he substanceof the station's SA 12657;SAIG 4120, 1 Augus11961,

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

15 b05303948

least those by air. "In all probability ECHO is least for the purposes of this discussion-the compromised. DIDO's status is doubtful teams' freedom from enemy control when it because of [the team's] complete silence." again cautioned against expecting too much too Regarding CASTOR, Headquarters still saw soon. All three teams, "despite understandable just two alternatives: force it to produce posi­ difficulties:' were just approaching the second tive intelligence or, falling that, order it to exfil­ phase. It was thus "premature to jU~ defini­ trate. The station should levy detailed tively either their value or 10yalty.""U requirements on roads, and ground and air traffic. The team should also be told that In addition, Saigon felt obliged to "take excep­ another try at a supply flight would have to wait tion" to Headquarters' proposed creation of for the next moon phase." D. "safe zones:' in which the teams would organize a tribal resistance to Incursion by DRV security Saigon did not respond, apparently, to the Invi­ forces. Such an effort would be "quickly mopped tation to evaluate the entire program. It did up," The station insisted, therefore, that teams agrea to send intelligence requirements, but "living clandestinely" conduct any acti~ro­ told Headquarters not to expect too much from gram of sabotage and harassment. 39 U CASTOR, "due necessity avoid capture." Washington had at this point already suq­ The debate continued, always under the tacit gested an aiternativa to Insertion by parachute, hypothesis that the three teams were free of telling the field of a "new approach" to North hostile control. On 17 August, Headquarters Vietnamese operations that would make use of noted that all had been chosen explicitiy for the Hmong irregulars then being armed in parachute drop into areas that were home to northeastern Laos. These, under their charts­ friends and relatives, and wondered why con­ matic leader Major Yang Pao, were now edg­ tact with these people would be more secure ing toward the border with the DRV's Son La after a month in hiding than after a few days. "It Province, in which Team CASTOR was operat­ could be argued that the reverse is true since ing. If tha Hmong could continue thair the longer the delay between arrival and con­ progress, their forward locations might serve tact the more the necessity for air resupply." as launch points foroverland infiltration of And the suggestion about "safe areas" had teams into the DRV's mountainous north­ assumed their location in "areas ditiicult for west, 37 D DRV forces to assaUlf.""D

Meanwhile, whatever the level of skepticism at This cable, released by the acting chief of FE Headquarters, CIA would continua to rely on air­ Division, revealed the pressures on the dropped teams for Intelligence on inland DRV Agency to get results: "Would again empha­ targets. But by mid-August 1961, although size interest very high levels [in Washington In] DIDO had finally come up on the air, none of the positive action realized thru [joint station-PLO three teams in place had produced any signifi­ team] ops North Vietnam," This pressure cant Intelligence. Headquarters suggested forc­ doubtless encouraged the station's eagerness ing the pace, getting them to move Into the to supply teams CASTOR and DIDO. DIDO planned second phase of operations by orga­ had been assessed as the best of the three nizing and directing intelligence nets. Like teams during training, and Saigon wanted to Washington, the station implicitly accepted-at run the "calculated risk" entailed in supplying it ~I~ _ 16 I C05303948

with food and radio batteries. DIDO's second surviving record reveals what, if any, reply It and third messageshad provided a "reason­ received. One can onlyinferthat the issue able explanation" for the team's six-weeks' remained, at worst, unresolved, foron that day, silence, and fhe station thoughf other minor Headquarters approved sUP,Q'Y,missions to anomalies inconclusive. These included the both CASTOR and DIDO."U strength of the radio signal and conflicting tes­ timony about the initial drop: the alrcrew had reported that all parachutes opened, while Father to the ThoughtD DIDO was now claiming that one cargo chute had failed. 41D. Whatever the obstacles-mechanical, cornrnu­ rucations, or weather-these drops were not The request for a supply mission to CASTOR made. Meanwhile, Headquarters and the sta­ also looked at the bright side of things. The sta­ tion were negotiating theterms of a progress tion and its Vietnamese partners had done a . report to the inter-agency Vietnam task force in countarespionage analysis which "Indicate[dj" Washington. One section was to deal withD that the team's security was "not compromised c::Jeam operations in the North, and Wash­ to date." Except for inconclusive OF results, ington thOUght Saigon's upbeat assessment of the "comma aspects" of the operation were their security too categorical: "Can we state with "favorable on the whole." True, if the crew of as much certainty as [you] indicate that all four the downed supply flight had been captured, it teams [are] free of enemy controlT"O could have given DRV security valuable infor­ mation, but steps had been taken, by "chang­ The four teams, unnamed in Headquarters' ing the resupply route and team location," to cable, must have been the three infiltra1ted bV] neutralize this threat. The likelihood that the air-CASTOR, ECHO, and DIDO-and aircrew had pinpointed the CASTOR drop the singleton who had at this point reported the zone, and thus the vicinity of Its operating recruitment of several informants. As it had base, was not addressed."0 done with the first approval of supply missions, Headquarters now chose to give the task force The cable offering fhis rationale crossed with a the most optimistic possible interpretation of message from Headquarters with more bad the teams' security. It changed the field's sec­ news about CASTOR. A "preliminary study" of ond submission, apparently stilt a little too rosy, its message traffic indicated that the team was but managed a reassuring tone for itsinter­ not using the only source of power dropped agency partners: "Lacking firm evidence to the with it, the GN-58 hand-cranked generator. If contrary, all four teams appear to be free of . further analysis were to confirm this finding, ORV control.""O CASTOR would have to be judged as almost certainly doubled.·O The suggestion that only conclusive evidence could create even the appearance of enemy Headquarters wanted its communications control defied FE Division's own analyses of base Inl 10 come up with a defin- .the three teams inserted by airdrop. The kind itive answer by 21 August, but nothing in the of evasive logic-chopping to which Headquar- C0 5303 94 8

•

other ...agent op is or has been above suspi­ cion: It accepted Washington's criteria as "valid to consider in [a) balanced evaluation of agent pertormance and control"; as such, they were being duly "noted and ...cons idered : " 3 , . o '. I .- But the available inlormation provided the basis, inthestation'sview, forno morethan an "educated guess as to whether [the operations -" were] enemy-controlledor not." Even with ECHO, suspect Irom the very beginn ing, the station thought it proper to have given it the -- benetit of the doubt. Urging the team to exlil­ - trate and applying "other challenges and tests" saved time otherwise wasted in the "prepara­ tion and dispatch to Hqs [all lengthy but pre­ mature and inconclusive CE analyses."4 D

The station went on 10 defend what it again described as its "educated guess" that ARES Map showingthe goographicafrange of reported'----' gents, ca. 1962n remained Iree 01 hostile control. The agent himself, it noted, had reported events-like the ters resorted here invited a skeptical response DRV's discovery 01 the skiff in which he had even from readers unfamiliar with the opera­ landed-that suggested a comp romise of tional correspondence, but there is no record security. It interpreted Hanoi radio broadcasts that anyone accepted the challenge . W~h about this and other evidence of clandestine Agency officers and the policymakers both agent activity as incompatible with C==hav­ intent on getting results, a really cold-eyed look ing been captured and doubled . The real prob­ at events on the ground was notin the cards. lem, as Saigon saw it, was the agent's reporting that he and his relatives were "hot: Cl This meant not only the continuing danger of Nevertheless, there weretoomanyindications arrest but a supportnetwork nooted even ifIts 01 trouble lor the issue to go away, and the members evoided capture ." cycle 01 aile mating doubt and optimism contin­ ued. On 7 September 1961, Team ECHO sent The cable concluded with a pro forma-even a clear-text message that said, "aiready patronizing-bow to Headquarters ' concerns arrested : It repeated the same message the about team security: next day. But the station made no mention 01 this when on the 18th it responded in charac­ {While we] appreciate Hqs frequenliy teristically ambivalent lash ion to another helpful reminders a/points (0 consider, expression 01 f/eada arters' nagging doubts, also hope it apparent we not neglecting this time about L The_station said it "fully {to] analyze these ops on continuing concurs" that "neltlier or eny basis. Hope this can eliminate lengthy

6;1 FVSW 7393r-!-2, APriI1963.[ SAIG4S55n .. SAIG 48S5L..J ·'b".=.J

18 ~R' C05303948 ~R

cable exchanges ofCE andanalyses and The public trial in November of the survivors of .judgments {based on the] limited material the 1 July supply mission to Team CASTOR available to date {in order] to permit full meant that any DR effort to exploit that opera­ concentration on development ofother tion would challenge Saigon's credulity. Some ops·D members of the aircrew might well have known little about their destination, but as it happened, A marginal comment on this prescription indi­ the pilot was among the three survivors, and he cated the sense of at least one Headquarters would necessarily have had full knowledg~ of officer that the two parties were now talking the plane's destination and mission. 52 0 past each other: "And that, 'dear Hqs.', is thatl"5°D At their trial, the survivors acknowledged their role in supplying guerrilla operations. But their published testimony said they had given as Under Enemy controlD their destination a remote spot in Hoa Sinh Province, far from CASTOR in Son La. The Headquarters did not ask whether it made good likelihood that all three, presumably interro­ professional sense to launch new operations gated separately, had managed to improvise a without first resolving security questions about coherent story that satisfied their captors must the old. On 19 September 1961, just a day after even at the time have seemed remote. Never­ hearing Saigon's complaint about excessive theless, whatever their residual doubts, CIA attention to the control issue, it approved a sup­ officers in both Saigon and Headquarters ply mission for Team CASTOR. It appears, how­ accepted CASTOR's credentials, and Qlanning ever, that this reluctant decision was not carried began for a second supply mission. 53 D out. Whatever caused the mission to be scrapped, the outcome was fortunate for the air­ While deploring the loss of the C-47 and its crew that would have flown it; as we have seen, crew, the station found cause for celebration in CASTOR had come under enemy control only . the resulting uproar about internal security in four days after its 27 May landing. 51 D the DRV. Hanoi radio broadcasts were blasting "reactionary' elements among ethnic minori­ In the ensuing two months, ambiguous-and ties," and appealing to~mountain people" to sometimes not so ambiguous-signs of trou­ cooperate with security forces. Saigon attrib­ ble had led the Agency to write off only Team uted all this to the information derived from ECHO as probably under enemy control. Even interrogations of the surviving CASTOR air­ in the case of ECHO, the Saigon Station har­ crew personnel and of Team ECHO, whose bored some hope that the anomalies in its capture Hanoi had now announced. Black message traffic would turn out to be innocu­ entry operations, even when rolled up, were ous. Meanwhile, Hanoi began a meticulous thus "exactly the type [of] harassment" by counterespionage operation designed to con­ which the station was "seeking to force [the] vince the station and Col. Tung of the teams' DRV to dissipate its assets on [its] own internal bona fides. 0 . security in remote areas [of North Vietnam] and thus decrease its subversive efforts in South Vietnam."54D

oo~ . 6' 19 September 1961,1 INo reporting on either the planning 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 airdropped elsewhere in a new_.eration whose locale he does not specify.D 03 Conboy, 43-44.1 64 SAIG 6562, 18 beJ ember 1961,1 I 19 C05303948

CIA in Saigon offered additional evidence to press and radio were pressing their campaign support its view of a Hanoi regime under to mobilize the populace against Dlernist spies stress. A British expert on Indochina, Profes­ and saboteurs, and a message from Team sor P.J. Honey, had just evaluated its condition CASTOR indicated that it and other agent as "precarious," and a Saigon newspaper teams were forcing the DRV to divert wrote about a 24 November piece in the com­ resources to beef up internal security. As of munist daily Nhan Dan, which acknowledged late 1961, It looked to CIA as if its teams were for the first time that "enemy social foundations operating on fertile ground. 55 0 still exist, while ours are very weak." Hanoi

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

20 C05303948

Chapter Two: and suggested that the only reason for pursu­ A More Ambitious Agenda D .ing them was the "absence [of] other means to approach [our] targets."2D

The implication was that one used the means at hand to satisfy a policy requirement, how­ It could have been argued-and later was ever ill-adapted those means might be to argued-that airborne and maritime harass­ achieving the objective. By this permissive ment operations, even if successful at the tac­ standard, it was easy to justify a proposed air tical level, might not deter the southern infiltration into Hoa Sinh PrOVince, in the moun­ Insurgency, but Instead spur the Politburo in tains west of Hanoi, by another team of hill Hanoi to accelerate its campaign to annex the tribesmen. Dubbed EUROPA, the new team South, whence all the trouble was emanating. would use the usual modus operandi, para­ But the emotional climate of the moment did chuting to a safehaven from which it would c~n­ not encourage such speculation. On the emerge to contact trusted relatives and friends trary, it seemed a matter of common sense, and evaluate the area's resistance potential. both In Saigon and at Headquarters, not only to The station restrained its enthusiasm for this Infiltrate more teams, but to assign them pro­ particular venture: "We cannot make [a] pas­ gressively more ambitious missions. Replying sionate plea for tremendous strategic potential in early December to what must have been an [in the] EUROPA area." On the other hand, "we expression of concern about insufficiently can [make such a claim] for our presently pro­ aggressive tasking, Saigon offered this reas­ jected program of one team per month to give surance: us general geographic coverage of North Viet­ nam." With more teams in place, the operation We[are] not locating, recruiting, training, would move into Phase II, a program about dispatching and directing...teams which the station said only that it would be sup­ [merely] to obtainlow level or even high plemented by leaflet drops presumably aimed level [order of battle intelligence]. We at stimulating discontent with the regime. 3 certainlyinclude 08 in specific missions D but... [we] have emphasizedpotential Headquarters was apparently hoping, at the resistance, contacts wirh familiesto build end of 1961, that more rigorous targeting up intel assets, examination of potential would help conserve scarce resources, but the harassmenttargetssuch as roads, station saw no immediate potential in a more reportsof political controls, attitude of selective approach. It saw itself as limited to population, etc.1 0 the agent personnel, mostly drawn from the hill tribes, supplied it by Col. Tung, and these The station balanced this guarantee of an agents had reasonable prospects of surviving aggressive program with an acknowledgement only where they could find sympathetic local that the teams' performance was up to that contacts. Saigon was indeed "well aware of . point "far from outstanding." reminded Head­ It special areas and groups, and [was] following quarters of earlier stipulations of the "limited up all possible leads." But rather than await the results" to be expected from team operations,

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-August 1961. The cable refers to planned activity In three phases, the second of which included leaflet drops. The third presumably introduced some kind of organized resistance to communist ruleDAlso see Conboy, 45, reference to EUROPA as composed of "Muong," a possible rendering of the tribe called "Hmong."D

21 ~R C05303948 ~R

One such effort involved c=J Inserted by junk, he would be supplied the same way. On the nighl 01 14 Janu ary 1962, the junk code­ named Nautilus I crepl up amo ng Ihe karst islands sprinkled along the upper reaches of the Gull of Tonkin.The crew was unloading Ihe first 0127 cases of supplies into a dinghy, lor deposit on shore. when a North Vietna mese patrol boat, apparently lying in wail, brought the operation 10 an end.' 0

The Inlerruplio n 01radio con tact wilh Nautilus I and the junk's failure to return forced the sta­ tion andIts Vietnamese counterparts to con­ sider the possibility that c=Iwas under enemy control. But it seemed to them more likely that the supply mission had lallen victim eithe r 10 bad weather-it turned foul four days atter Ihe junk's departu re-or to a routine coastal patrol, Nevertheless, when a repla ce­ InfIltration Junk Naulllus I D ment junk , Nautilus II lett Da Nang mid-April lor another try,C,was informed 01the mis­ sion only atter Ihe junk was salely back in port. results 01a "delinitive study," it was roceeding He subsequenlly radioed thaI he had recov ­ wilh the agenl materi al at hand .' ered atl 30 bundles from Ihe cache site on a small , uninhabited island in Ha Long Bay. With Team DIDO, launched In late June 1961, the apparent success of this mission, Col. greeted Ihe New Year with two messages say­ Tung 's office- renamed the Presiden tial Sur­ ingthat it was transmittingunder duress. vey Office (PSO) alter the down ed aircrew's Again, II appears Ihatlhe station was too pre­ trial exposed the PLO label- an d CIA again occupied with other business to pay much accepted the agent's bona fides.' D attention. While preparing new opera tions. il had also 10service those agents and teams in place whose bona lides it saw no reason to Slepping Up the paceLj question .'[J Meanwhile, airborne operationshad been suspended unlil Ihe station acquired a more

•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.LJ said he knew the prisoncommander BnawasvlSltlng y PEi'TissionrThe crewmanconcluded lhat was 8 "traitor... one 0 1theirs all al~. dovbleagent.- It seemsmore liketythat 'wasoperating In goodfaith unfiT8f1er his capture. (See l Tourison, 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 crew I ==:J I a revtsed Haiphon travelpermit10 be usedwithhisHaiphong basicidenlity documenl. (FVSA 13283. 2 H bruary

22 05303948

suitable aircraft. The limited range of the twin­ lages. According to Hanoi's published interro­ engine C-47 required both a refueling stop at gation report of one member, the team was Da Nang, on the coast in Central Vietnam, spotted while still descending. Within two days, and perilously direct routes to drop zones in the PASF had every man in custody. Having the northwestern DRV. CIA officers attributed captured the agent radio along with its opera­ the July 1961 loss of theCASTOR supply tor, the communists promptly launched a plane at least partly to these factors, and addi­ deception operation similar to those alrlead tional supply missions and team insertions under way withc=Jand CASTOR. 11 were, therefore, put on hold while CIA negoti­ J ated with the US Air Force for a four-engine On 12 March, EUROPA came up on the air, DC-4. BD . assuring Saigon that the team was "safe and sound." An effort to drop supplies to the team Nguyen Cao Ky, now a lieutenant colonel, had to be scrubbed when radio contact was recruited new South Vietnamese Air Force lost, but the station assessed the communica­ pilots, and when the first DC-4 arrived at about tions failure as probably the result of bad the end of December 1961, an Air America weather. As of early June, it told Headquarters, team trained them in nighttime low-level flying the team's radio messages, including safety and navigation. When the crews were ready, signals, were in order, and there was "no rea­ the station and PSO chose to launch Team son to believe [the] team doubled." 120 EUROPA before moving to supply CASTOR. B The apparent success of EUROPA encouraged D . the station to proceed with a supply mission to The launch did not take place without still CASTOR. Ky and his crew having flown the last another policy hiccup over the proportionality mission,a second crew manned the DC-4 for between means and ends. On 11 January the flight to Son La. Once again, CASTOR and 1962, Headquarters informed Saigon that, in its North Vietnamese masters waited in vain. view of the "doubtful results this small effort Caught in a rainstorm not far from the drop can achieve," EUROPA was disapproved. The zone, the pilot lost his bearings and crashed into same cable welcomed a discussion of the a mountain. But intercepted North Vietnamese rationale for all such operations during an communications gave no sign of an alert. The Imminent visit by COS Bill Colby, a visit that station inferred that Hanoi was unaware of the must have resulted in a change of heart, for a flight, and evaluated CASTOR's security as second cable on 15 February gave EUROPA unaffectedby the disaster.13 0 the green light. 10 D The station's faith in the bona fides of Team Once again, Ky commanded the aircraft, rely­ CASTOR was at this point fully restored, and ing on his ability to spot moonlit checkpoints on plans were underway to reinforce it with the ground as he navigated a circuitous route another team, to be called TOURBILLON, that to the drop zone. All went well, it seemed to Ky, would give it a serious capacity for sabotage but in fact the area below was dotted with vil- and harassment. Meanwhile, the station made

6 Ibid., 4411c·54 was the military designationfor the Douglas DC·4, and Is used in much CIA correspondenceon the program.'l3urthecivilian nomenclatureappearsIn some traffic, sugge~ that the plane was configuredto match the cover story under Qhlh it was leased to a South Vietnamese entrepreneur.U 9 SAIG 6562 Conboy, 44-5.~ ,.- --, 16 SAIG345 0g1January 1962~15 February19621 I " Conboy. 45. 12 FVSA 1361 A ril 1962' SAIG 9993, 9 June 1962,,-1__-,

e a empted supply drop to CASTOR is not known.D 05303948 ~R

the first use of Laotian territory to insert a team . The second ploy also looked like a counsel of into the DRV. On 12 March, after reconnais­ desperation. It had been launched with a mes­ sance by a small fixed-wing aircraft, the heli­ sage to DIDO that alluded to "friendly ele­ copter descended onto the drop zone on the ments" in the border area and tasked the team Laotian side of the border, adjacent to th~ov­ to report on them. Later messages were to Ince of Nghe An in the southern DRV.14U mention the team's proposed assignment, after exfiltration, to train new teams at project The four members of Team ATLAS-appar­ headquarters. The station seems to have been ently all ethnic Vietnamese-headed east wishing for a North Vietnamese nibble at this toward their target, a village where they were offer of a penetration of the Saigon office, but to seek out two Catholic priests known for their stipulated that it had "no illusions about the anti-communist fervor. After four days of unob­ likelihood of success in exfiltrating either served movement, they suddenly encountered team."17D a small boy, who upon seeing them disap­ peared into the forest. Soon thereafter, local With little hope for DIDO and even less for militia arrived, and the team fled back toward ECHO, the station concentrated on its plans for Laos. One man was fatally shot, and another new insertions. On 16 April 1962, the six Black died when he stepped on a mine. The survi­ Thai tribesmen of Team REMUS parachuted vors managed to assemble their radio and onto a drop zone in Laotian territory some 15 report their plight, but were soon captured. Not kilometers northwest of Dien Bien Phu. The until the two survivors' later public trial did the team landed unobserved, retrieved its gear, station learn that they had been in the hands of and crept across the border. Some of the food the PASF since 5 April. 150 bundles dropped with the team were dam­ aged, and REMUS almost immediately called However powerful the urge to believe in their for a supply drop. The station complied, but the teams' survival in enemy territory, the station team's gastronomic requirements caused and its PSO counterparts did not ignore some heartburn at Headquarters, which corn­ "repeated danger and/or duress signals" from plained about the unrealistic expectations rep­ Teams DIDO and ECHO. By early April 1962, resented by a request for "chicken and duck both were assumed to be under enemy control, 'done to a golden tin1."'18 D and Saigon concentrated on turning their enemy-controlled communications back upon the North Vietnamese. One ploy began with the An Appearance of SuccessD assumption that both teams were still intact, even though controlled. Orders to them to head With the insertion of Team REMUS, the station for the Laotian border would test the willingness had what it considered four viable teams, of their handlers to move them west in order to including ARES, reporting from North Vietnam. prevent Saigon's RoF capability from revealing It was now just over a year since President a failure to comply. If the teams got lucky, in this Kennedy had called for "guerrilla operations" process-they would have to be very lucky­ there, and CIA was feeling the heat. It was not they might manage to escape. 16D just the modest number of teams in place, but their failure to engage in any significant harass-

14 FVSA 13612Q ,~ FVSA 13612 Conboy. 47. D 16 FVSA 13612. e Idea looks even more fancifull,o.Ji.\lht of SAIG 6562 of 18 December 1961, in which the station had categorically described Team ECHO as "captured."U "/lb'dO '6 C~~150Y, 50.Dse~ ~ 28 May 1962,1 . I.

24 05303948

ment or sabotage, that suggested a m~ gap Adm. Felt concurred with an Agency request between mandate and performance. 19U for submarine reconnaissance of possible tar­ gets for a maritime raid on Swatow-class gun­ It was In this climate that Secretary of Defense boats of the DRV's little navy. Also, having lost Robert McNamara and Commander-in-Chief a team to enemy action along Route 7,Ieading Pacific (CINCPAC) Adm. Harry Felt visited into northeastern Laos, the station was press­ Saigon in May 1962. In its sessions with them, ing to get ready a new team of Hmong to para­ the station found itself defending its modest chute into the DRV near the Laotian border. Its progress in the DRV. Pointing to bad weather' members would recruit fellow Hmong in the Lai as the biggest deterrent to accelerating the Chau area, then lead them out to Laos for pace of infiltration, Chief of Station Colby also training and eventual return. 22 D justified the intelligence emphasis in the task­ ing of existing teams. They needed information on local conditions and targets, he said, as a Teams TOURBILLON and EROS D framework for the "harassment and diversion" operations that remained their main charter. The COS had been right about the weather as The station and PSO were preparing 15 more an inhibiting factor. When he conferred with teams for insertion by the end of July; all of Secretary McNamara and Adm. Felt on these would prepare the way for the subse­ 12 May, the aircraft carrying sabotage Team quent addition of sabotage personnel and TOURBILLON, slated to join Team CASTOR, equipment. 20 D had already aborted three missions when It encountered heavy storms. Finall~, in a DC-4 McNamara expressed what the station called flown by a veteran aircrew ofC I his "full support" for its activities and plans. But L:]TOURBILLON's seven men reached the he drew a clear distinction between small­ drop zone on the night of 17 May.23 D scale CIA-sponsored harassment operations and "possible larger efforts of [a] military Waiting below was a company or more of nature." In so doing, he implicitly asserted the PASF militia, who had set out the flame pots as dominant military role in unconventional war­ specified in the instructions to Team CASTOR. fare that President Kennedy had assigned to But the descending guerrillas encountered the Pentagon after the failure at the Bay of Pigs strong winds that blew them away from the in April 1961. Against a background of frustrat­ drop zone, and the PASF set off in pursuit. ingly slow Agency progress, the prospect of Their first quarry was the assistant team Pentagon-run operations against the North leader, caught in a tree on landing, who was was now, in the station's words, "more open.'?' shot and killed in his harness when he fired on them. The others were surrounded and cap­ D tured within two days.24D Meantime, military support to CIA operations would continue, and two admirals working for

,. SAIG 9297, 12 May 1962,1 1 >Olbid'D .. Ibid. National Security Action Memorandum 01 28 June 1961 specified that any paramilitary operation "wholly covert or 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 of military equipment," would "exceed CIA-controlled" capabilities, and would be run by the Department of Defense with CIA "in a SUpporti~e." (See Schulz, 21.)0 2:! SAIG 9297. " Ibid.; FVSA 1 604,6 July 1964lr------,1Conboy, 48.49.0 .. Conboy, 490

/ 25 105303948

DRV security elected to conceal the capture On 20 June, EROS reported fearing that it had while it exploited the team's radio operator and been compromised. DRV security was cover­ gear to launch another deception operation. ing the vicinity of the cache site, and the team According to one survivor, interviewed after the was being, as the station reported it, "closely war, Saigon had ordered Team TOURBILLON tracked." Short of food, EROS asked for sup­ to come up on the air within two days. Given its plies, which Saigon promised for July. No drop expected reception by CASTOR, it should took place, and Saigon radioed the team that need no time to find a refuge, and initial contact bad weather was to blame. 28 D delayed for more than 48 hours would be taken as evidence ofenemy control. In fact, accord­ Left to its own devices, the team ventured out ing to the same survivor, it took the North Viet­ in a search for food. On 2 August, villagers namese 11 days to get the team's radio spotted it once again. Security forces resumed operator on the air with his first mesSage.250 their search, and a panicked Team EROS managed only to report the renewed pursuit The record is mute on this point, but it is clear before it went off the air. On 29 September, the that, despite the delay, Saigon accepted PASF surrounded the team, killing one guer­ TOURBILLON's bona fides. The station rilla and capturing a second. Three others reported the team's reception by the leader of escaped to the border, where they joined a CASTOR and the loss of one man, which party of Lao hunters until their hosts betrayed TOURBILLON had called an accident. As of 20 them to the North Vietnamese. 29D June, Saigon accepted that TOURBILLON was scoutin~tential sabotage targets along Route 41. 281_1 Operation VULCAN D

Meanwhile, on 20 May, Team EROS dropped Hesldent teams, living black, represented one into Thanh Hoa Province, just east of the Lao­ of the two possibilities for surreptitious action tian border in the upper panhandle. This inser­ against DRV military facilities. The other tion seems to have escaped PASF attention, involved maritime hit-and-run raids, using and the five men-Hmong and Red Thai techniques earlier employed against China, in dropped into an area that was home to both the early years of communist rule there, and tribes-set up a hidden bivouac. They were against the regime in Pyongyang, during the then supposed to contact tribal brethren, but Korean war. President Kennedy's repeated lost their nerve, it seems, and when some Red demand for action against the DRV required Thai villagers stumbled upon their encamp­ exploiting all the resources at hand, and these ment, they fled north. The discovery of food included, in the spring of 1962, 18 South Viet­ cans with foreign brand names triggered a namese who had been trained in underwater search by both PASF and army units. After two demolitionsIIFor a target, CIA chose weeks, they had found nothing, and the hunt the DRV naval base at Quang Khe, which lay was suspended. 27 D on the Gianh River some 40 kilometers north of Dong Hoi, the town nearest the DMZ. 300

"'Ibld.n .. FVSA17604; FVSA 13986, 27 JUly 1962,11 ~______;======'-----___, 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----' Incorrectlyto a challengequestion.u 29 Conboy,50'0 aoConboy,51.

26 05303948 ~R

Quang Khe was home to several of the DRV's Gunfire from a pursuing Swatow killed the Swatow-class gunboats, 83 feet long and car­ fourth frogman and wounded the captain of the rying up to three 37mm cannon, four heavy Nautilus 111 before the gunboat rammed the machine guns, and eight depth charges. junk and took the survivors prisoner. They Although assigned to coastal security, they had missed just one, who hid in the half-sub­ not been encountered in the station's maritime merged cabin and was overlooked by the Swa­ infiltrations using motorized fishing junks, and tow's crew, who never boarded the sinking their nearly continuous presence in port made junk. The survivor drifted south of the DMZ on them attractive targets for hit-and-run attack. a piece of wreckage and was rescued next day Accordingly, PSO acquired four of the 18 frog­ by aSouth Vietnamese patrol boat. Col. Tung's men, and the station commenced training and PSO accepted the high casualty rate as just operational plannlnq.?' D the fortunes of war,and the station seemed ready to proceed with more operations like CIA arranged with the Navy for a reconnais­ VULCAN, whose results it summarized for sance by the USS Catfish, a World War II-era Headquarters: "Mission successful, price submarine that had long been devoted to intel­ heavy."340 ligence collection along the Asian littoral. It confirmed the Swatows' presence at Quang Khe, and on 30 June 1962 the program's third Soldiering anD junk, Nautilus /II, carried the frogmen and their limpet mines to the mouth of the Gianh River. As of late Jul~ 1962, the station was preparing They made their way In on a raft for a quick 28 newC ~teams, most of them to be beach reconnaissance before returning to the given a sabotage mission, for infiltration Into junk. A small sampan would then take them the DRV. The chief of the External Operations upriver into the vicinity of the gunboats.32D Section ,I lundertook to explain to Headquarters what it could reasonably expect Aerial reconnaissance supplementing the sur­ from current and proposed operations. His dis­ reptitious observation of the junk confirmed patch, painfully honest yet spotted with wishful just three Swatows, each to be attacked by one thinking, encapsulated the Agency's dilemma frogman, who would swim to it, attacti limpets as it struggled to affect the DRV's war-making below the waterline, and return to the sampan. capability with the means at hand.C]began And indeed It appears that each of the swim­ with a starkly pessimistic judgment about the mers reached his target-in one case an uni­ results to be expected from operations on the dentified naval vessel larger than the scale then projected: "The possibilities of any Swatows-and planted at least one mine. How large diversion from the DRV effort against many of them detonated remained unclear, for South Vietnam are remote. Our operations are one of them went off prematurely, with the at too small a scale and initiated at too late a swimmer already spotted and trying to escape. date [in the course of the Insurgency] to seri­ The explosion crippled the gunboat but killed ously affect DRV aggression against the the frogman; the station reported that it thought South."3sD a second Swatow had also gone Up.33 D "Some effects," however, should be possible. Sabotage of targets like military facilities,

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 a small [investment in] the program." Pursuing beefed-up militia to improve security; this, in this theme,Dnvoked the prospect of creat­ turn, would burden not only the regime but also ing more "tension in an already strained econ-: the peasantry being forced to supply the man­ orny' with activity that demonstrated South power. Operations against targets like locomo­ Vietnamese determination even as it gave tives and rolling stock would force the regime hope to restive Northerners that they did not to spend scarce foreign exchange for replace­ "stand alone." 38 0 ments and parts. Meanwhile, an increasingly oppressed population might take heart from ~dispatch, released in the name of the these examples of regime vulnerability, and chief of station, thus served to justify continu­ itself engage In economic sabotage. This, In ing the program even while he disclaimed its turn, would provoke another cycle of repres­ ability to achieve the stated purpose. With this sive measures that would exacerbate the piece still en route, Headquarters cabled the alienation of the populace. 360 results of a comparable soul-searching, pro­ voked by the conclusion in July of the Geneva r=J:lcknowledged certain risks in this Agreements on Laos. The agreements would approach, even at the level of activity then allow the DRV to divert forces from Laos to planned. Use of minorities might provoke the South Vietnam, an advantage that the United regime Into "large scale repressive action" States and the GVN must somehow offset. An against particular ethnic or religious groups. effective program of harassment and sabotage Probably with events like the 1956 Hungarian in the DRV was more urgently needed than revolution in mind,Dcautioned against ever, but Headquarters was driven to the same "spark[ing] premature uprisings which we are conclusion as the station. Measured against neither willing nor able to support." This held stated objectives, "our record in [the] DRV [is] true especially in the heavily populated coastal not good." Operations in the North had been areas; it might be more practicable to encour­ costly in both men and materiel while leading age revolt among the "widely scattered moun­ to little harassment or sabotage. Operation tain groups which would divert DRV troops into VULCAN had succeeded, but teams like CAS­ policing large areas of difficult terrain."37D TOR, to be admired for their very survival, had done little or nothing. 3sD Having cited some salutary side effects­ larger numbers of trained South Vietnamese, Headquarters did not question the suitability of the accumulation of operational intelligence, the operational technique, confining itself and the refinement of operational tech- .instead to some conventional cautionary niques-] fNenton to draw a measured but advice. The station should avoid spreading itself ultimately optimistic bottom line. He still too thin. It should apply rigorous standards to thought it "unlikely that any major physical the selection of both agent personnel.and tar­ change in the scale of DRV aggression against gets and pay careful attention to the lessons of South Vietnam will result." On the other hand, experience. And it should never "succumb to it seemed probable that the "material and eco­ pressures from any outside organization, GVN nomic damage as well as the engendered sus­ or US Government," to launch operations about picion and confusion far exceed the relatively whose soundness it had any doubts. 4oD

3.~~VS . 31 Ibid. 960.0

:Ib:ao- 30 July 1962·1 _

28 ~R I C05303948

Potential US Air Force Targets in North Vietnam, Circa Early 1962 The single concrete recommendation con­ cemed the scale and frequency of sabotage and harassment operations. Speaking for FE Division, Don Gregg urged "intermittent small scale harassments... [rather than) one or two larger scale ops against bridges or POL dumps ." The success of Team TOURBILLON's planned bridge-blowing would be very wel­ come, but probably no more effective in influ­ encing North Vietnamese behavior than a series of "smaller actions ... against isolated convoys or camps which could be undertaken [by a) single team member" firing rifle gre- 41 nades. C . ·8anMouang Cha

The Department of State, and particularly its ambassador in Vientiane , Leonard Unger, were preoccupied with avoiding the collapse of AOS the just-signed Geneva Agreements, and Gulf vetoed the supply overllightthat the TOURBIL­ Xieng· LON sabotage operation would require. Wash­ Khouang of ington turned down Saigon's appeal of this Tonkin decision, but informed the field that the inter­ agency covert action oversight committee was now reviewin the entire question of Laos overflights.42

Upping the Anten • Military support complex .. Army depot The impassioned debate over the competing ~ goals of vigorous action against the DRV and Barracks the preservat ion of the Geneva Agreements 1 Radio station raged until 23 August. On that day, Lt. Gen. .t Power plant Marshall Carter, the acting DCI, told Deputy )( Bridge Director for Plans Thomas Karamessines that o Rail transfer site the "highest levels in the Government"-Le., 50, 100, Kilome ters President Kennedy-had just approved a 0 1Car togra phy Cenler/MPG 769690 AI (G00095) 3-05 "concept of intensified operations against North Vietnam ." This decision did not, in fact, ited TOURBILLON sabotage operation, and resolve the overflight question. But Headquar­ invited the station to identify specific targets ters counted on it to win reversal of the prohib- and means of attacking them.430 .

"lbid1l- _ ___J 15 August 1962J_ _ arsn rs.Carter Action M limoi'anaU rmC..!:B::::.~~3~! ~n o~s~u~b~J e~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 erup­ The list went on, with more teams already in tion of ambitious proposals intended, the sta­ training slated to knock out bridges and mine tion said, to "divert:..DRV attention from roads, and even to ambush military convoys external to internal matters and cause material and raid storage depots. The heavily popu­ damage to their expansionist efforts into lated coastal area provided no refuge for resi­ [South Vietnam] and Laos." Proposed opera- dent teams, but furnished lucrative targets for . tions included destroying dredges and cranes hit-and-run attacks from the sea or down from in Haiphong harbor, blowing up the POL dump the mountains. All of this would be supple­ at Vinh, mining the channels at Haiphong and mented by a massive psychological warfare Vinh, blowing up a highway bridge in Thanh campaign using leaflets and radio to pillory the Hoa Province, and a 1DO-man commando raid regime for the draconian measures it would against a "probable electronic site" on the Mui presumably take to combat the paramilitary Doc promontory in the Vinh Son area. High­ campaign of harassment. 46 D speed boats could carry other commandos in company-size raids on bridges, docked ferries, Almost as if abashed by its own grandiosity, and isolated military outposts along coastal the station accompanied this wish list with a Route 1 as far north as Thanh Hoa. 44 D dispatch, sent the same day, that responded to Don Gregg's call for more but smaller opera­ Even more ambitious; a resistance effort in the tions. It outlined In depressing detail the reali­ northwest, modeled on the successful Hmong ties that inhibited speedy, secure, and effective program in Laos and using some of the same action in the North. So different in tone from the tribes. The station also suggested cutting the operational proposal that it might have had rail line entering the DRV from China. Using another author, it identified the obstacles to the . enough 14-man sabotage teams, it could, it success of any kind of action program against claimed, cut the railroad at five or even 10 the DRV.47D places at the same time. Another team, sched­ uled for launch in December, would live in the This comRanion piece noted first the likelihood mountains southwest of Lang Son, "constantly that morel pperations would mean cutting the main rail line and Route One from more casualties. The South Vietnamese had China into the DRV." Two other teams then accepted with equanimity their losses in the being prepared could hit vital roads into Laos, VULCAN operation, but expansion would one of them operating along Route 7, leading require a willingness to sustain many more. into Xieng Khouang Province, and the other on More limiting than this hypothetical problem Route 8, running down into Khammouane was the lack of reliable, detailed target intelli­ Province from Vinh. The latter team, BOU­ gence. A breezy reference in the operational VIER, could recruit "local relatives for incendi­ cable to 800 targets then being "carded, plot­ ary sabotage and harassment"; along with ted, and studied" was implicitly qualified in the Team JASON, it could s~ the reception of a companion dispatch. There, the station said it "large guerrilla force." 45 U . had "just begun assernblinq a target file," and it would take months to bring it into usable shape. 4sD

...SAlrl52' 29 August 1962,1 ·'Ibid. "Ibid. • 7 FVS 118,29 August 1962,'1------1It was common practice, at least at the time, for the field to senel good news by cable, givenwide distribution, and bad news by dispatch,normally seen only at branch level.One may infer that the stationwas implicitly. askinglor working-Ievel~erstanding of the difficulties it faced in implementing a set of proposalsil had formulated only under policy-level duress.U •• SAIG 1952; FVSA 14118.0 30 /' 11~5303948

Patience and hard work might fill the intelli­ ences as inhibiting the rigorous cost/benefit gence gap, but the suitability of agent person­ analysis that might have diluted CIA's commit­ nel was not subject to CIA control. Agent ment to infiltration operations.D quality had consistently been "very low," the • result of an overstretched national manpower First was the fierce pressure. dating at least to pool itself low in quality. "Not much can be the beginning of 1962, not only from the White done about this problem," the station con­ House but from State and the Pentagon. Sec­ cluded, but it took some comfort from the sur­ retary of State Dean Rusk was pushing both vival of Team CASTOR, not yet known to be the military and CIA to bolster the South Viet­ under enemy control. CASTOR's disappoint­ namese by raising the cost to Hanoi of its cam­ ing intelligence reporting should be chalked up paign to annex the South. At Defense, Robert not to nonfeasance but to CIA's "miscalculation McNamara was Insisting that the Agency com­ of the quality and quantity of information avail­ mit its paramilitary resources in support of able" in its operating area. 490 combat operations in South Vietnam. The major bone of contention was the tribal militia Reminding Headquarters that it took four to six program in the Central Highlands, which for months to "locate, vet, train and launch" a CIA represented a means of expanding the team, and four-and-half months just to train a GVN's authority over population and territory, radio operator, the station cautioned that the but whose Strike Force units MACV coveted as full Impact of the new program would not be felt another Increment of firepower that could be until the end of the year. And that timetable devoted to finding and fixing the enemy's main assumed both renewed freedom to overfly forces. In this climate, the infiltration program Laos and the absence of significantly improved provided, If not much else, at least a demon­ DRV countermeasures. Finally, the station stration of the Agency's good faith. 510 raised the question whether the game was worth the candle. It noted that judging the Reinforcing the continuing attachment to the human cost was up to the GVN. But only Head­ team concept was a managerial mindset in the quarters could determine whether results justi­ Directorate of Plans (DDP) that almost reflex­ fied CIA's investment in equipment and money. Ively applied the techniques of World War II In the sole explicit reference in surviving corre­ partisan warfare to denied-area operations in spondence to earlier infiltration operations, the the Cold War. Gregg and other junior officers station invited a comparison, for this purpose, were aware of the slim results produced by the with those against North Korea and China. 50 teams infiltrated into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, in the early years of the Cold D . War, and then into China and North Korea, but they accepted this modus operandi as "the No Other OptlonsO way we do things." D

It seems unlikely, given the pressure to do In Gregg's view, accidents of temperament also something-anything-to shake Hanoi's confi­ played a part. 'Warrior-priest" Bill Colby had dence in the DRV's internal security, that any­ returned from Saigon in mid-1962 to become one in Headquarters thought it worth the Desmond FitzGerald's deputy In FE Division. trouble to examine the historical record. Don Gregg saw Colby's operational philosophy in Gregg later saw four mutually reinforcing intlu- much 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 05303948

~R

Renowned for his World War II exploits support­ in the North the options were limited, at best. ing partisan units in Europe for the OSS, Colby As the Saigon Station had earlier pointed out, had not yet accepted the force of Myers' argu­ with seaied borders and practically no travel, ment against trying to apply that experience in either by officials going abroad or by non-com­ communist-controlled Asia. Instead, Colby . munist legal visitors to the DRV, there really focused on doing more, and doing it qUiCkly.D weren't any alternatives. The only question­ explicitly addressed, as we have seen, by the Finally, as Gregg came to see the matter, the station but apparently not at Headquarters­ fast pace of operations, planned and con­ involved the prudence of adhering to a failed ducted in an endemic atmosphere of crisis, mil· strategy. As of mid-1962, both Headquarters ttated against a serious look at the and the field concentrated on the practical assumptions underlying the program.D obstacles to the exploitation of existing teams and the insertion of new ones. 52 0 In any case, whatever the variety of possibili­ ties for operations In the South, it is clear that

., Ibld·DFVSA 14118.0

32 ~R

1------·.··· 05303948

Chapter Three: A Hesitant had its hands full, in any case, trying to arrange EscalationD the exflltratlorr of Teams DIDO, CASTOR, and EROS.3D

In the case of EROS, the station acknowl­ edged, for the first time in the surviving record, With the Geneva Agreements set to go into that delayed team response to security chal­ effect in October 1962, the administration still lenges suggested enemy control. But Col. wanted covert action in North Vietnam, but it Tung's people disagreed, at least about also wanted no flaps. It took presidential EROS, and there was no conclusive evidence approval-given on 7 September 1962-to get about either itor Team DIDO. Moreover, it was a supply drop to one of the four teams still just possible that a team doubled by theDRV operating-or believed to be operating-in would be allowed to exfiltrate, its masters in North Vietnam. I D Hanoi trying to use it to penetrate Col. Tung's PSO. Accordingly, the station intended to Passing word of this decision to the DDP on make a supply drop to EROS, using a drop 7 September 1962, Acting DCI Carter noted zone several miles from the appointed spot. It that Roger Hilsman, of State's East Asia would then rad.io the team, apologi~for the Bureau, "was not enchanted with dropping errant drop and giving Its location. 4U teams into mountainous areas where he said 'their effectiveness was nil-one wooden Unlike those of DIDO and EROS, CASTOR's bridge in one year was not worth the price.''' To bona fides were no longer In doubt. But CIA get around what he clearly saw as unproduc­ wanted the team out anyway, for debriefing tive second-guessing, Carter urged Karamess­ and rest. Being in fact under DRV control, it ines to get "overall approval along policy lines" found pretexts not to comply, including the from Assistant Secretary of State Averell Harri­ claim that It lacked a knowledgeable guide to man for more insertions via aircraft entering the Laotian border.sD DRV airspace from Laos. The Acting DCI wanted this as his "party line for all clandestine activities.... If higher authority wishes to get Structural Prob,emsD involved (such as the Special Group or the White House), then let this involvement be Even without the inhibitions of post-Geneva concerned with the policy decision and not with policy, the station entered the last quarter of the minute operational details."2D 1962 facing an increasingly difficult operational climate in the North. Part of the problem was . Carter's drive for more operational autonomy terrain. The station wanted to insert teams had to contend with the administration's near­ below the 20t~ parallel, farther south than ear­ obsession to avoid blame if the GenevaAgree­ lier drops, and within striking distance of low­ ments collapsed. When these took effect on 6 land targets. But it had found only a October, the White House suspended all "pro­ "distressing lack" of drop zones within an vocative acts," including sabotage attacks acceptable distance of proposed sites of team even by teams already in place. The station hideouts. 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 3 Conboy, 57. Q '~IG25j eptember 1962'j ~L _ 29 September 1962'L. _ ~05303948

Finally, the report took a stab at assessing the The star reporter from North Vietnam, agent program's overall effect. It stipulated having c=J had filed 44 messages, from which only a few "hard facts" on which to base such three intelligence reports had been dissemi­ an evaluation; one of these included intensified nated. The agent had once failed to use the beach and coastal patrolling in the wake of the prescribed safety signal, but when challenged VULCAN operation. From this, it was "reason­ came back, "apparently somewhat annoyed," able to assume that word went out to all DRV with the correct response. The incident was naval vessels and commercial ships to take not "considered an indication that he has fallen precautions against frogmen and to be on the under enemy control," and planning was going alert against strange junks and sampans." It forward~rovide him a three-man sabotage could be "assumed further that a number of team. 14 U futile alerts have been sounded and more than one depth charge has been dropped" in . The apparent progress of Teams TOURBIL­ response to a "strange sampan or an unusual LON and EUROPA, like that ofc=J also noise." But the program had so far managed gave rise in the statjon to a sense of having only two acts of sabotage, and the station succeeded in a difficult assignment. Following thought its effectiveness more likely a function a brief postponement after the signing of the of the uncertainty about its scope engendered Geneva Agreements, TOURBILLON reported in Hanoi by the capture of several teams. Per­ having blown a bridge on 29 July. Saying it was haps for lack of "hard facts," the report did not back in its refuge, the team stated its readiness venture to guess whether this uncertainty had for a supply drop, which the station executed in led the DRV to divert any significant amount of late September. A supply flight had also gone attention or resources from support to the to Team EUROPA, which reported finding all southern insurgency. 120 the parachuted bundles; another supply mis­ sion, with two agents trained in sabotage, was scheduled for it in November. Team CASTOR, Business as usualO its bona fides also still accepted, would again be ordered to exfiltrate through Laos once a Still waiting for authority to fly drop missions, long-delayed supply drop could be made. ISO the station took a look at teams on the ground. None of three singleton agents put ashore in The station's practice of giving the benefit of May and June from CIA's little fleet of fishing the doubt to teams displaying occasional junks had been heard from, but it seemed "pre­ anomalous behavior did not apply, in the fall of mature to conclude" that any or all had been 1962, to Teams 01 DO and EROS. Agency peo­ captured. They could have been used to sup­ ple in Saigon saw both of these as enemy-con­ plement the mid-summer propaganda cam­ trolled, but could not bring PSO to the same paign with which Hanoi had exploited the view. The Vietnamese impulse to look for seizure of Teams ATLAS and ECHO. The innocuous explanations forsecurity lapses DRV's failure to include them, therefore, sug­ meant that, in order to prevent disaffection gested that they had just gone to ground, for among its liaison counterparts, CIA might have reasons yet unknown. 13D to authorize a supply drop, at least to EROS. But if it did so, the team would be informed of the DZ's location only after the fact. ISO

13 Ibid. '"Ibid. '·Ibld. r'"Ibid. / 35 C05303948

With regard to Team DIDO, the station took 1963 largely ignored the practical difficulties that some satisfaction from indications that DRV had figured so prominently the previous August; security had taken the bait of a notional team there was just one passing reference to the that DIDO was to contact as it exfiltrated shortage of drop zones that had iP tl that point toward Laos. This contact having, of 'course, , bedeviled the airborne program. not been made, the ploy had run its course. Hanoi would now have to decide whether to cut The station judged impractical only one of radio contact with Saigon or let DIDO exfiltrate Washington's suggestions, the one for overland and try to use the team to penetrate PSO and infiltration across the Demilitarized Zone. Other­ the station. Meanwhile, the suspension of new wise, Saigon thought that Headquarters had operations, imposed when the Geneva Agree­ presented a "realistic and factual presentation ments on Laos came Into force in October, of [CIA] capability against [the) DRV under remained in effect. '70 present operational conditions." It went on to identify 22 potential targets, Including bridges and railroads, "coal producing, transporting, Restrictive Policy, Ambitious PlanningD processing and loading facilities," power plants, petroleum storage facilities, and ferries. Finally, As 1962 ended and operations continued In the entrance to Haiphong Channel would be the new year, Agency correspondence contin­ closed, using commandos to sabotage the ued to display what in retrospect seem buoys that allowed ships to avoid going aground strangely inconsistent perceptions of the pros­ en route to the harbor. 19 0 pects for significant results in both airborne and seaborne operations against the DRV. But most of this depended on an end to the When policy considerations, almost always in suspension of flights through Laotian airspace the context of the Geneva Agreements, prohib­ imposed when the Geneva Agreements went ited operations near the Laotian border, Head­ Into effect in October 1962; For the moment, quarters casually dismissed the "marginal not even those teams ready for launch could benefits" these might have conferred. In late be dispatched, if insertion had to be made November, it recognized the imprudence of through Laos. For fear of demoralizing its liai­ repeated attempts at supply drops when it pro­ son partners, CIA had not shared with them the hibited a third to Team REMUS after two fail­ policy basis for delaying such operations, but ures. But it persisted in urging the program's its reticence soon had the opposite of the expansion, even reversing itself, in mid-Janu­ desired effect. By January 1963, Col. Tung and ary, to allow supply drops, urged by the station, SEPES chief Tran Kim Tuyen were chafing both to REMUS and even-presumably as a under what seemed to them arbitrary sop to the Vietnamese-to suspect Teams restraints. Some key Vietnamese personnel DIDO and EROS. laD ' were looking for transfer back to their parent organizations in the military, andl I The station, in turn, responded with an expan­ midway through his assignment as chief of sion of the ambitious agenda it had proposed at external operations, warned that "stoppages the end of August 1962. Its proposal of January

17 Ibid.DThe station may later have expressed some residual hope for DIDO and EROS, for Headquarters telt obliged, in late DecemberJQ-put t a.burdan.on the field to supply the "clear Indication"of their bona fides that would justify~rop to either 01 them,U(See 26 December 1962 1 23 November 1962 12 January ''=-:-=-r_,- ---,--JThe dispatch outlining eadquarters suggest ons has not

36 05303948 SE~IMR

and slowdowns" might inducethe collapse of team had yet to be heardfrom. It neverwould the entire program.20D come up on the air, for it had beenspotted almostimmediately uponlanding by an outpost One exceptionto policy-its rationale probably on the coast. Five menwere captured on the the high priorityattached to monitoring DRV spot,andtwoothers, fleeing south, werepicked compliancewith the Agreements-involved up within a few days. Betternewscamefrom Team TARZAN. The team was dropped in Team TARZAN, now reporting fromits vantage early January into the lower DRV panhandle, pointoverRoute 12. It hadpromptly comeupon near Route 12, presumablyfrom an aircraft the radio, and eventhoughtherewere anoma­ that crossedfrom Laos.Trainedas a sabotage lies in the first three messages-procedural team, TARZAN wasinstructedinitiallyto report errorsand thetelltale preoccupation withthe North Vietnamese road traffic acrossthe bor­ landing operations-it cameup withthe correct der. In addition, the first SEPES-sponsored answerto a challenge question.23D. sabotageteam, named LYRE, was put ashore from a junk on 30 December. But most of the Thefirst quarterof 1963 foundthe Agencycon­ inventory of teams trained and ready to go tinuing its attemptto balancetwo competing remained on hold. There were nine of these in imperatives for its effortsagainst the DRV. January 1963, with 29 more in various stages First,reflecting growingevidenceof the GVN's of formation or trairp.oo; new recruiting had declinein theface of the VietConginsurgency, been suspended. 21LJ was expansion of the effort to distract Hanoi from its designson annexingthe South. Sec­ On the maritime side, some 50 candidates ond, embodying Washington's determination were to begintraining at the program's Da to give the GenevaAgreements every chance Nang site in mid-January. Just two of the sta­ to succeed, wasthe continuingmoratorium on tion's little fleet of fishing junks were judged crossing the DRV border from Laotian air­ capable of landing a team and its equipment space. In the background, affectingall plan­ on the DRV coast; two more of the sametype ning, lurked the perpetual-though little­ Iwer~being fitted for team operations.c=J scrutinized-uncertainty about the status of escribed his vessels as "slightly inferior teams in place, perhapsdoubled, perhaps to the ships used by ChristopherColum- dead, perhapsworking-If to little effect-as bus...we are really hurting for a maritime deliv­ some reported they were dOing. 24D ery capability."22D The most dramaticevidence of growing Viet Thestationandits partners werealsohurting for Cong military prowess came with the humiliat­ a successful team insertion. Team LYRE had ingdefeatof a numerically superiorgovemment beenput ashorefroma junkat uninhabited Deo forceat Ap Bac, a hamletInthe Mekong Delta, Ngang, wherea gorge openedonto the sea InJanuary1963. The shock of this disaster, about25 kilometers north of the Swatowbase combined withincreasingly aggressive commu­ attacked in theVULCAN operation. Fourweeks nist movesin northeastern Laos againstboth later, in late January, the station fretted that the RLGforces and anti-communist Neutralists,

l!O FVSA 14993,30 January 1963~L --.J 21 Ib.id.O .- 22 Ibid. ao Conboy, 58-59D SAIG5053, 24 January1963,1 1FVSA17604.0 Tourison, 66-67, unaccountably hasTeam LYRE insertedby air.He alsoclaimsthat two teammemberswerekilled resisting capture and the leader later executed.1I 2' For an accountot the trayingof the GerlevaAgreements, and the resulting relaxation of restrictions on covert operations in andtromLaos,see theauthor's Undercover Armies:CIAandSurrogate Warfare In Laos, 1961-1973(Centertor the Study ot Intelligence, 2005), Chapter7.0

37 / 05303948

began to reduce Washington's sensitivity to Ambivalence at Headquarters D charges of violating the Geneva Agreements. The proscription on penetration of DRV air­ Both Washington and the field had always har­ space from Laos remained in effect. Butthe per­ bored conflicted views of the value of agent­ ceived need to take the war to the enemy was especially black-operations into the DRV. again operating to raise expectations of the Having returned to Headquarters in mid-1962, covert program against the DRV.D Bob Myers ran FE Division's North Vietnam Task Force before becoming deputy chief The pressure for results may also account at when Bill Colby took over the division in early . least in part for a recurrence of the perennial 1963. The debate continued, and Myers urge In Saigon to explain away indications of remembered persisting in his objections to trouble with teams already on the ground. Projectl [Even if the thing were more Commenting on RDF testing of agent radio successful than Headquarters had any reason traffic that placed team transmitters well away to believe, he argued, there wasn't any sense from their claimed locations, the station urged in a program of covert pinpricks at a time of Headquarters not to overreact. Standard secu­ overt, if undeclared, warfare. But Colby's readi­ rity measures were already testing team bona ness to tolerate contrarian views was not fides, and RDF testing did no more than to sup­ matched by a willingness to change course, plement these techniques. An "error of [a] few and his support for the program seemed miles" in an RDF triangulation could actually unshakable." D give a false indication that a team had been doubled. 25 D At Headquarters, this ambivalence accommo­ dated both the expansive planning mandated The station's description of its security precau­ in January and a skeptical review of the pro­ tions acknowledged, on the one hand, that the gram's results and prospects. Implementation DRV would use the radio operator of any team of the planning began on 13 April 1963 with the it wanted to double. On the other hand, it insertion of six ethnic Tho agents onto high appealed to favorable results of testing of a ground some 75 kilometers northeast of Hanoi. radio operator's identity-his ''fist''-as one of Their target: the railway running northeast from three indicators of freedom from enemy con­ Hanoi into China. 28 D trol. The other two were the use of pre-deter­ mined danger signals and incorrect responses While the station waited for the Tho agents­ to challenge questions from the base. But both Team PEGASUS-to come uo.onjhe.alr.a of these were subject to manipulation by DRV Headquarters officer named[ ~ security once it had broken an operator's will to I ~as completing the survey of the resist. The station thus seemed to be resorting program's results. Pouching the study to to an act of faith to give its teams a clean bill of Saigon, Headquarters noted that the disadvan- health; in late February 1963, it even sug­ tage ofl Iprevious unfamiliarity gested that the status of Team EROS, earlier with the program was "in part compensated written off as compromised, remained to be [for] by,the absence of any vested interest In established. 2GD the matter." The aim here was, presumably, to deter the station from protesting the study'S carefully agnostic results.C Inoted

38 05303948

that the priority given to Intelligence collection located near Canton, in southeastern China. in the effort's first year had yielded such disap­ The readings were "as yet not definitive," but pointing results that the emphasis had been Headquarters noted that if TOURBILLON was shifted to sabotage operatlons. Then, the bad, so in all probability was CASTOR, which restrictions resulting from the Geneva Agree­ had prepared Its drop zone. Echoing the sta­ ments had prevented new insertions, and only tion's reservations about RDF accuracy, the two teams-TOURBILLON and VULCAN­ study categorized it as only one of a battery of had attacked a target. 290 security checks which, even taken together, furnished "no sure answer to whether or not a [Giv,'he small number of operations, I I team has been comprornised.'?' D esitated to make categorical judgments about the program's accomplishments or Almost as ambivalent as the station about the future, although it was clear to him that results interpretation of inconclusive eVidence,D had "so far been rather unimpressive." Appar­ I f,vas prepared to accept, at least ten- ently concerned not to make adverse jUd~ tatively, what still remained to be proved. The ments that he could not definitively prove,L! correct response to a challenge, after a series I Itreated as viable all operational of anomalous messages, could be interpreted teams carried by the station. But he did a care­ as meaning that a team at least "appear[ed]" to ful comparison of radio traffic from teams be "safe," and the study applied this standard known to be or to have been under enemy con­ to ITeamTARZAN, whose first three messages trol. He warned the station that a dela ed first had raised concern. Only two months later did radio contact, the team go off the air, and even then there was no way to know whether it had previously

'------:--;-;;-;--:;-----:--;""""T--::-::o--.J meant the pros­ been under DRV control, or had suffered some pect of "further trouble." Communications from sudden mishap.32[] doubled teams dis la ed other similarities, I lreatment suggests that he In this context, the study made as favorable an assessment of reporting '-n-o-te-d""'t'"'"h-e-p-r-ob;-'Ic-e-m'of doing something useful teams' security as the evidence allowed. Ifthe with a team known to be doubled. It could be choice was conscious, it may well have reflected a perception that division manage­ ment would dismiss as biased a set of conclu­ sions that emphasized indications of I -'AIbem,1 1009- ! compromise. Such a perception might well ment, "tneusefulness of this cat and mouse have been valid, but it resulted in implicit game is not Immediately obvious."3°D acceptance of team bona fides until and unless definitive e~rical evidence established the Although he abstained from an explicit chal­ contrary. 331~ ienge to the team's viability, I l . noted that the RDF measurement of TOUR­ This mindset ledl Ito an uncritical BILLON's radio traffic indicated its transmit­ evaluation of the late-1962 supply drop to ter-like that of doubled Team EROS-to be Team CASTOR. He noted that the bundles hit

2. FVSW 7393.nConboy. 58, says that the North Vietnamese effort to use TOURBILLON for deception purposes Included deslr0(j'the lma'ge that the team then reported having sabotaged.D 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. No information supports the RDF indication of Canton as a radio base for DRV security.D 32 Ibid., FVSA 1-ZfiQ4:D 33 FVSW 7393.U

39 I I C05303948

Nort h Vietnam: Black Insertions, 1963

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

other observe rs, both at Headquarters and in the field, he found nothing suspic ious in the claimed survival of Team TOURBILLON even after it reported having lost a man in a firefight with DRV security forces.[ J

L---,-,-__.,----_rook note of the paucity of infor­ mation on team operations in the DRV. Of the 14 operations launched by early 1963, only VULCAN, with its dramat ic denouement, had been followed by a detailed report. Losses of aircraft had also engendered relatively com­ "Ban Mouang Cha plete reporting . But otherwise there was little to go on: "We have no recent analys is from the station on the causes of losses or successes." Consequently, the action demanded in the cov­ os ering dispatch- it was released by FE Division Gulf Chief Colby-was confined to new reporting Xleng" Khoang of requirements. These included team compos i­ Tonkin tion at launch, analysis of failures, and the for­ warding of numbered and dated translations of all team radio messages D

Staying With the programD

Udon Ihanl, W n..Colby accepted as sufficientI I . Imuted criticism and modest reporting L-----,,---J T HI LAN D Sako" requirements , he was, in his own words ,"well Nakhon aware that black entry operations against the Airborne inser tion Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were found to be unfruitful." But in May 1963 he still saw ..::.. Maritime inse rtion "substantial differences in... FE denied areas"

o 50, 100, Knometers that included draconian limits on legal travel , f­ o the "difficulties of Caucasian access," and a "much more war-like relationsh ip" between the parts of divided countries like Vietnam . These the ground so far from the DZ that they were differences compounded the problem even as not found until the following week , but he did they reduced further the prospects for alterna­ not mention the risk of their having been spot­ tives to the black entry technique. Colby was ted, meanwhile, by villagers or security forces. looking only at the absence of other Likewise, he seems entirely to have ignored approaches when he said that he had "contin­ the early communications anomalies that ued to conduct a certain numbe r of these black had-with good reason-east doubt on sev­ entry operations."34C eral other teams, especially CASTOR . Like

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

40 / 05303948 S~MR

Over the course of the next three months, as action,it is clear that the only remaining uncer­ more teams disappeared into SRV jails, the tainties arose from purely technical consider­ weight of evidence overwhelmed even Bill ations·O Colby's native optimism. In early August, he wrote the DDP that "No intelligence of value Some of these considerations derived from the has been, nor... is likely to be, obtained from changing risk environment in DRV airspace and such operations." The same applied to sabo­ others from the relative merits of available air­ tage: "we have never been, nor in a cold war craft. The DC-4 had the advantage of four situation are we likely to be, able to conduct engines, greater range and speed, and radar, small team operations on a wide enough scale while the twin-engine C-123 had a greater cargo for [significant] cumulative results." Whether capacity and electronic countermeasures out of loyalty or out of fear, the populace could (ECM) gear to foil radar-controlled antiaircraft be expected to expose black entry teams to the fire. It would also allow a drop to be made in one communist authorities. Colby concluded that pass over the DZ, because men and supplies any potential In this technique lay in political exited quickly through the rearward-facing ramp and psychological operatlon~sthow it would rather than taking turns at a door in the side. be realized he did not say.35U The greater experience of the DC-4 crews gave that aircraft the edge, for light-of-the-moon There was nothing left to do but cut mounting insertions, but as soon as DRV interceptor air­ losses by canceling Project! !or at craft appeared on the scene, the C-123, with its the very least suspending it until some break­ ECM capability, and dark-of-the-moon opera­ through in tasking or techniques offered a real tions would become standard.J7D prospect of success. Colby did neither. Instead, he proceeded to deploy as many as possible of the 46 teams that, as of April 1963, Taking Off the Gloves D were ready to parachute or infiltrate by sea into their intended hideouts in the North. Eighteen !perhaPj lulled by the defensive tone ofI I' teams would be launched by air if "proper air­ request in April, the station seems not to craft" were acquired, while 11 would go by sea; have taken very seriously Washington's desire the means of insertion for the other 17 was still for more reporting. Two weeks after inserting uncertain. What was not in doubt was the con­ Team PEGASUS, also in mid-April, it finally tinued pursuit of the program. 360 answered a Headquarters query by summariz­ ing the aircrew's description of the drop. The It is hard to attribute the perpetuation of,Project intervals between exits-four seconds from the I Ito anything but bureaucratic inertia, last bundle to the first man, and two- to four-sec­ coupled, perhaps, with a certain reluctance on ond intervals between men-suggested a dis­ Colby's part to accept the practical implications persed landing and subsequent "difficulty [in] of his own admission of failure. Acting on this regrouping." As many as four men might have judgment would, moreover, have run counter landed in trees, with an attendant increase in to a can-do culture that insisted on the Clan­ both recovery time and risk of injury. The "great­ destine Service's ability to do anything est concern" for the station was the possibility required of it. In any case, whatever the rea­ that the DZ had not been cleared before dawn. sons for this gUlf between perception and Nevertheless, it saw the "lack of radio contact

35 William E. Colby, Memorandum 10DDP, "Black Team Infiltration by Air and Sea Against FE Denied Areas-Cold War," 2 August 1963,[ 1 :lO FVSrJ.:3931-' 37 Ibid; =r19 March 1963,,-1 ---' 05303948 ~R

[as] not yet reason for concern," for experience No after-action reporting, or at least none that had established that "no contact ~thel first survives, followed any of these developments. three weeks [is] not abnormal." 38U Had it been called to account at this point for its reticence, the station would likely have argued Indeed, delayed initial contact had become that the demands of an accelerated operations almost the rule, and by 1963 there was ample schedule precluded spending time on mere reason to take this as a sign that the reporting history. For as hostilities resumed in Laos and team had been captured. In July, Hanoi con­ Ngo Dinh Diem struggled with massive Bud­ firmed that this had, in fact, been the fate of dhist unrest in South Vietnam's cities, the case Team PEGASUS; its members were tried and for bringing the war to North Vietnam became sentenced to prison terms. But neither the all the more compelling. The station now aban­ team's silence nor subsequent news of its cap­ doned its insistence on using Laotian airspace. ture led the station to examine the reasons for Entering the DRV from the Gulf of Tonkin, its failure, or to explore the possibility that its project aircraft continued deploying the reser­ silence had represented enemy control. voir of teams that had accumulated after the Instead, it continued with the new round of Geneva Agreements of mid-1962. 0 insertions. 39 D During the first two weeks of June 1963, two In May 1963, the Saigon Station conducted DC-4sl Idropped three overflights of the DRV. Only one resulted seven teams into the DRV. Two of them landed in insertion of a new team, when JASON para- ­ on high ground overlooking the Red River val­ chuted into North Vietnam on the 14th. Two ley and their target, the rail line running north­ other flights had to be aborted, one because of west from Hanoi into China. Anotherteam was bad weather at the DZ, and the other because to hit bridges and an "elevated tramway" serv­ the static line to which the ripcords of cargo ing a coal mine north of Haiphong. Two more chutes were attached tore away from a bulk­ were supposed to hit bridges along coastal head as the bundles fell from the plane. Route 1. The last two were directed at Routes Another flight, with supplies and two sabotage 7 and 12, leading into Laos.vD agents for Team EUROPA, was cancelled because of bad weather. 400 Only one of the seven teams came up on the air. It did so 10 days after launch, reporting that The aircrew carrying Team JASON reported, it had landed some 10 kilometers from the on return, that all chutes had opened. But the intended DZ. But all members were safe, and team did not come up on the air. The station's all bundles recovered. The station challenged silence on this outcome matched its treatment Team BELL, but, "probably because we ·have of Team PEGASUS, and then of LYRE, whose become too subtle" in formulating such que­ capture Hanoi announced on 29 May.4'0 ries, received no reply. But it had, in fact, been captured within three days of landing, and its

38 SAIG 7013, 26 April 1963,[ I I"Headquartersdoes not feel that the re requesteaeitner represent a uselessincrease in reiftape or tnaf they would impose an undue amount of extra work.' 39 FVSA 17604 In the case of any single operation,the absence 01 a post-mortem might represent no more than the vagaries ot thee file retirementprocess. It is the near-totalabsellc.e of station reviews ot] loperationallallures that suggests 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.

42 lr------05303948 ~TIIMR

, radio operator coerced into full cooperation officers and Headquarters managers had to , " with DRV security. 43 0 ' continue dismissing the anomalous behavior of Teams CASTOR and TOURBILLON, pre­ Meanwhile, also in June, CIA attempted or sumed to be working together. But, as had completed a total of three supply drops to become standard practice, rigorous CI analy­ teams already on the ground. The first, judged sis of teams in radio contact gave way to a successful, went to Teams CASTOR and search for technological and policy solutions to TOURBILLON, operating in the same area in the difficulties facing the infiltrations of new the northwest. Bad weather forced the second teams, and support to those In place. D flight to turn back; it had carried an eighth new team in addition to supplies for Team And, in fact, there were, as we have seen, EUROPA, long since under DRV control. major obstacles In both the policy and techni­ Another try at delivering supplies and sabo­ cal areas. In mid-1963, the ban on overflying tage agents to EUROPA failed too, when the the DRV from Laos remained in effect, despite pilots could not find the DZ.440 the declining fortunes of the Diem regime in Saigon and the resultlnq perceived need to These moonlit airdrops alternated with dark-of­ distract Hanoi from its support of the insur­ the-moon maritime operations. A slightly gar­ gency. This restriction required all drop mis­ bled station report indicates a June total of at sions to defy the radar and anti-aircraft least 10 maritime missions, aimed at Inserting concentrated along the Gulf of Tonkin, and to or supplying four teams, all of which failed to forgo exploitation of what Headquarters called reach their targets. The reasons included bad the "virtually undefended" border with Laos. weather, mechanical failure, and the unex­ The limited number of gaps in the coastal radar pected presence of a North Vietnamese junk screen was forcing project aircraft to use the fleet at the site of one intended delivery. same few entry and exit points, and CIA IImaritime case officer at Da expected the DRV soon to close even these Nang, held out no hope of success as long as loopholes in its defenses. Finally, entry from these operations relied for transportation on the sea deprived alrcrews of the many refer­ the small, slow fishing junks in service since ence points afforded by the mountainous ter­ theCJlaunch in April 1961. He intimated rain in the west, which also provided some that the station was continuing its use of these defense against radar detection. 4sD junks only at Washington's insistence: it would "do all that is possible" with them, but warned In the middle of 1963, the Agency seemed to Headquarters that It could "continue to expect harbor little hope of getting the moratorium only minimum results."45D lifted, for a Headquarters complaint about Its deleterious effects was made only for the Minimum remained close to zero, as the 20 air record. An information copy went to the desig­ and maritime missions conducted in June nated liaison officer at the Department of State, 1963 produced only two apparent successes. but the memo was not addressed even to the To reach even that modest success rate, case chief of FE Division, its distribution being lim-

43 Conboy, 59,1560 FVSA 17604' SAIG 9215 12 Jul 1963 FVSA 16252, 1 August 1963"'1 J---, "I 111 Jut 1963 1 ' "FVSA 16152,r'-"''''''--''-''-''>February 1964. (Conboy, 61).

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

43 05303948

ited to the branch level. In any case, its rather next drop. Meanwhile, as with Team GIANT, timorous conclusion recommended merely PACKER failed to come up on the air.49D that "the Laos overflightrestriction be re-exarn­ ined."47D Twoacts of faith, one in the bona fides of Team EUROPA and the other in the C-123's invulner­ ability to ORVair defenses, came within a Better Aircraft but No Better LUCkD whisker of producingdisaster 'when the next supply and reinforcement mission to EUROPA Logistical andtechnical problems were lessintrac­ took off on 10 August. The station, embold­ table than those of policy, andefforts to remedy ened by a long series of missions with no mis­ equipment deficiencies hadbegun to bearfruit in hap, had four months earlier declared that early1963. In September 1962, 301 I "careful planning and professional airmanship I !airmen sponsored byCIAstarted train­ by flight crews can eliminate virtually all dan­ ingon theC-123 at Pope AirForce Base in North ger," But the North Vietnamese, apparently carolin~, InFebruj-ry 1963, fiveunmarked C-123s running out of patience with repeated over­ arrived L .. Their crews, having finished the flights, had now moved 10 antiaircraft compa­ basic program inthe United States, spent thenext nies Into the vicinity of the EUROPA OZ. several months perfecting theirtechniques inlow­ Approaching the OZ,the supply palletsalready level night flying aridtheuseoftheplane's ECM lined up on the roller conveyor,the plane was gear. Thefirstoperational deployment from South suddenly buffeted by shells exploding on both Vietnam tookplace on2 July, withtheinsertion of sides. The crew and the new EUROPAagents Team GIANT at a DZin themountains westofthe fought to resecurethe pallets so that the pilot panhandle cityof Vinh, Thestation andSEPES, could start evasive maneuvers. Meanwhile, which hadsupplied theagent personnel, waited for the ECM gear worked well enough to stave off itto comeuponthe air, butit neverdid. 411D a direct hit.50 0

Meanwhile; with thel loc-4 crews The plane made it back to base, but according reaching the end of their contract, the station to one account,the captainwasso traumatized decidedto exploittheir experience by dispatch­ by his brush with death that he took the next ing that aircraftjust once more, in a mission flight bac~ IHis fellow pilots in launchedon 4 July.The planecarriedone new Saigon, unwilling to accept his close call as team, PACKER, targetedat the same railway mere coincidence, sent a back-channel rnes­ againstwhich Team BELLwas to have oper­ sa e 0 arran e a reconnaissance b ated, and a two-man reinforcement partyfor a Team EUROPA. Team PACKE:R's DZ was first Over the EUROPADZ, the lnstru­ on the flight plan, and the crew watched the Lm-e-n-:-ts-"-"w-e-n-'!t wild" with indications of at least agentsfloating downtoward it. The DC-4then four antiaircraft positions; in due course,this . proceeded toward EUROPA's OZ. It never information reached the crews in Saigon. returned to Saigon; judgingby the absence of Meanwhile, Team EUROPA, claiming not to any reaction fromHanoi,Saigon concluded that haveheardthe supply planecross the OZ,had it had notbeen shot down but had crashedinto reestablished contact with the station. But the a mountainside on its low-altitude routeto the I Ihad had enough; they refused further drops to it.51D ------_._------_.

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

44

...... _._------_...... 05303948

Instead, the pilots' commanding office~ ImprOVing the TechnologyD' complained to CIA about alleged "doub"'li-ng-o-'f;-­ teams," which the station took as a reference to Agency management had recognized the new the EUROPA incident. Thel Imay have requirements in maritime as well as air trans­ chosen not to mention the overflight fromll portation support imposed by the sabotage for the station's response did not address~ mission adopted in 1962. The search for a suit­ ~ere right about EUROPA, the station able replacement for whatl !called said, the team had been "cleverly doubled," for it his "seven prehistoric junks" found an interim had rejected a proposed second supply mission, solution in a civilian craft called the Swift. Used claiming inadequate security at the OZ. CIA to service oil drilling platforms in the Gulf of therefore remained reluctant to write the team off: Mexico, it was big enough-50 feet long-and EUROPA, It argued, was "not necessarily dou­ fast enough-up to 30 knots-to handle team bled." On the other hand, perhaps it was, and the insertions and supply missions. Modified with station did not propose to tempt fate. It had "no bigger engines and extra fuel tanks, and fitted plans [to] resupply again at this time."52 D with machine guns, rocket launchers, and electronics, it would make up in performance Despite inferior navig~tional equipment on the what it lacked in deniability. The DOCI C-123-in this respect, the DC-4 was better­ approved the purchase of three Swifts in mid­ Its survival of the mid-August EUROPA drop November 1962. 54 0 proved the wisdom of the change of aircraft. The station recognized the C-123's limitations . According to William Colby, the Swift repre­ but, before.turning the program over to MACV sented a stopgap measure, adopted partly on in early 1964, seems never to have tried to a competitive basis, to accelerate the pace of obtain the superior C-130, a four-engine prop­ CIA operations at a time when the US Navy jet with sophisticated electronic equipment. was preparing its own covert capability. Mean­ [ Isubsequent rationale for this while, both the Agency and the Navy were apparent passivity noted that plausible denial acquiring the Norwegian-built Nasty, an 80­ would have failed with the C·130, then flown foot patrol boat whose two diesel engines only by the US Air Force; he did not note that droveit at speeds over 40 knots. In early 1963, the same applied to the C-123. S3 D CIA turned over its two newly acquired Nastys to the Navyfor testing. Much more complex than the Swift, the Nasty required more sophis­ ticated repair facilities that were to be built and staffed by Navy personnel detailed to CIA's base at Oa Nang.ssD

"I I IConboy, in an unsourced passage, says that CIA Insisted on continuing to treat the team as viable. In his view. this decision constiluted a "stunning underestimation 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 to e~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 Interpretation of the North Vietnam program is, in fact, a protractedCOmplaint about difficult operating conditions and about the elements that 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, and Headquarters. No Individual operations are identified. An appendix by Da Nang maritime case officerII adopts a similar tone.D •• Ibid.; DConboy, 70-71; draft memorandum for the DCI, "Request for Authority to Initiate StjPS to Obtain Certain Vessels and Personnel Needed lor Augmented Maritime Operations into North Vietnam," 5 July 1963, I I [J •• Conboy, 67-70. The Navy unaccountably gave Widepubilclty to Nastys in US service when it sent one of the CIA's two boats up Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River to WaShington, where the Secr~ of the Navy and other Navy brass boarded for a halt-hour's demonstration that was covered in the Washington POSI.LJ / 45 I C05303948

located with a small, standard radio receiver. Meanwhile,L __ Ian Agency proprietary at Marana, Arizona , was working on impact opening devices and on new "control lines" to drop parachutists and 500-pound bun­ dles into stands of timber.560

The station was also exploring using homing pigeons to establish an "immediate commo channel until [a] newly infiltrated team has opportunity [to] establish [a] safe area and start use [of) radio commo ." A bird carrying a pre­ pared warning message, released at the first sign of trouble, would foil any DRV effort to double a captured team . Meanwhile, the sta­ tion would begin sending in two radios with each team, one In a supply bundle and a sec­ ond whose components would be divided among team members.570

The station proposed another refinement, in the form of vacuum packing of blankets and clothing, in order to reduce their volume and , therefo re, the size of cargo bundles. On the tactical side, It thought to aggravate DRV wor­ Faded newspaper clipping ot patrol boat of tile type intended for SlIbotago oporations in North Viotnam.D ries about the scale of operations with decep­ tion ploys that included I

With an acceptable aircraft in the inventory and the Swifts and Nastys on the way, the Agency used the summer of 1963 to experimen t with various technological fixes to the problem of Inserting and supplying teams within striking distance of their targets. The scarcity of suit­ able drop zones , in particular, sparked efforts to deliver men and materiel with greater preci­ sion, in more difficult terrain, and in areas pos­ ing greater danger to the program's aircraft. Saigon wanted devices permitting low-alt itude opening of chutes for supply bundles dropped from high altitude. It also asked for beacons , to be attached to cargo bundles, that could be

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

SAIG 9322 , 16 July 1963[

46 05303948 ~R

A Game Not Worth the candIeD while collecting intelligence and hitting sabo­ tage targets. But it had much less luck. Jump­ The original intelligence mission of 1961, ing on 4 September into the area of Cao Bang, expanded that year to include sabotage, now in the northern reaches of the DRV, it was Included Inciting popular resistance among the promptly seized by security elements. All the " DRV's ethnic minorities. In May 1963, Head­ station knew, for the moment, was that it failed quarters sent Herbert Weisshart, a covert polit­ to come up on the air.60 D ical action specialist, to Saigon to set up a notional resistance movement. Invoking Viet­ The same period brought word of what the sta­ namese mythology, it was to be called the tion took to be welcome results of operations In Sacred Sword Patriots' League (SSPL). It late August. A team inserted in the northern would provide an ostensible sponsor for real DRV reported having laid explosives on the teams on the ground and, if all went well, would Hanoi-Lao Kay railway, after which it heard the provoke paranoia in the DRV hierarchy. The sound of an approaching train, followed by a first team trained for this multiple mission gigantic explosion, then silence. This team, not included ethnic Hmong and Thai. Team EASY identified in the station's report, has to have parachuted into the DRV. near the Laotian bor­ been BELL, whose capture and doubling by der, on 11 August 1963, and soon came up on DRV security was not yet suspected. Another the air.saD team, also unidentified in the report, announced having destroyed a bridge. 61D Team SWAN had the same training and a sim­ ilar multiple mission to spread SSPL leaflets

onConboy 75-76 n 60 Conboy, 80' SAIm'499. 8 October 1963, VSA17604.0 0' SAIG14990 If there was spot reporting at the time of these activities, it has not survived.

47 ( 05303948

48 / 05303948 ~R

Chapter Four: Movin~ward author-FE Division officer] ~was Military ManagementU writing what he'd been told to write, and doing so withlittleconviction.Inthe event, bothof the teams Headquartersnominatedfor this mis­ sion-BULL and RUBY-were captured on landing, one in October and the other in The reported sabotage operations. modest December. 2D even If authentic,came near the end of a tortu­ ous process designed to comply with the Meanwhile, the bureaucratictrendwas running Kennedy administration'sJune 1961 mandate in the other direction. Despite having no gUid­ to put the Pentagonin charge of most uncon­ ance from the Pentagon, MACV had ventional warfare. When complete, the pro­ expressed what the station called a "general cess would transfer to Defense the entire willingness" to take over the station's pro­ program of air- and seaborneteam operations grams,on a phased basisand with CIA footing against the DRV, as well as most of the uncon­ the bill until 1 July 1964. But it wanted to keep ventionalwarfareactivityin SouthVietnam.D some CIA specialistsfor the "medium to long term." To this the station objected that Wash­ These negotiations were taking place in an ington now wanted a "more bold and aggres­ atmosphere of rising doubt, in CIA, about the sive posture"; it Impliedthat it expectedMACV capacity of its program to affect North Vietnam­ to forgo any further effort at cover or deniabil­ ese behavior in the South. Bill Colby's deputy ity.3D in FE Division, Bob Myers, was still arguing that the "totality of communist control" abso­ The question of detailingAgency personnelto lutely precluded, in the Sino-Soviet bloc, the a MACV-run programdid not, it seems, come kind of resistance operations conducted in up at the conferenceon Vietnamsponsoredby Axis-occupied countries during World War II. Secretary McNamaraat Honolulu on 20 Indeed,the so-called Jedburgh operationsrun November 1963. At issue was the more basic by OSS had themselves, in Myers's opinion, question of the potential of team operations enjoyed much less successthan postwarmyth into the DRV. According to Bill Colby's later gave them credit tor.' D account, DCI John McCone assigned him to presentthe Agency's views to McNamaraand The September gUidance notedthe inability of the assembled military. Echoing the doubts small sabotage teams to hit targets of any he'd expressed to the DDP in August, Colby importance.Tocompensatefor this, the station told themthat most of the teams had been cap­ should prepare its teams for "political action tured or killed. "It isn't working, and it won't and [psychological warfare] missions,"which workany betterwiththe militaryin charge."Left would include recruitment among the local to its own devices,the Agency would shut the populationfor both paramilitaryand psycholog­ programdown by 1965, turning insteadto psy­ ical harassment. Presentedas if it were new­ chologicaloperations-including black radio earlier work on the SSPL got no mention-this and leaflet drops-"infiltrating ideas, rather guidance did not specify just what form the than agents and explosives."4D new activityshould take. Indeed,the cable has a rather pro forma cast, almost as if the .====;_._--- 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 I C053039 48

North Vietnam: Maritime Raids, 1961-63

whatever the particu lar influences on his thinking , had not the imperative to contribute to the war effort ruled out such a drastic move .sO

In any case, McNamara took none of these considerations into account. His reaction sug­ gested to Colby a belief that, if the effort had failed. up to that point, it was just a matter of the Agency's being too small to run it. The Pen­ tagon was already prepared with a plan. one that-given the military's disdain for the ·8anMouallll Cha Agency's efforts-took the ironic approach of echoing nearly everything that the Saigon Sta­ tion was already doing. Drafted for the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. os Maxwell Taylor, the concept went to CINCPAC Gulf for expansion into what became MACV's Ope r­ Xleng· S Khuoang of ational Plan (Oplan) 34-63. n Tonkin .Ilinh However unenthusiastic about devoting resources to a failed activity-one about to be run, furthermore , by somebody else-CIA management appea rs to have worked to give the military the benefit of its experience. Writ­ ing from Saigon in late December, Bill Colby Udon Thanl; told his people at Headquarters to do a study of recorded DRV and Chinese radar pickups of Sakon past CIA overflights . both coastal and from THA I LAN 0 Nakhon Laos. McNamara, whom he had accompanied to Vietnam, had just asked for it, and Colby wanted it read u on their imminent return to .:. Maritime raid Washington .7 50, 100, Kilometers

A Valedictory Surge D

Colby later attributed his change of heart to With transfer of management responsibility Bob Myers 's persistent critique of the pro­ imminent , the Saigon Station wanted its stew­ gram . He may-indeed ought-to have been ardship to end with a bang, both literally and influenced also by a record of failure that, by figuratively. In mid-October, it proposed two the most optimistic measure . was nearly maritime operations. A Swift would carry a sab­ unbroken. As Myers later speculated. Colby otage team to a coastal targe\. Just what this might have canceled the program forthwith , was is not recorded , but it was so difficult to

5 Tourison, 100; My. rs interview.U • Conboy, 83-84 7 SAIG 3240, 20 ecember 1963'LI ---l

50 05303948

reach that the station calculated a round trip to and fled back to the Swift. Anothe~ on it of some nine hours from the offshore launch­ 23 December met a similar fate. ,oU ing point. Headquarters thought even nine hours too optimistic an estimate, and disap­ This effort inaugurated a cycle of new opera­ proved the operation as simply too risky. The tional ploys that alternated with public trials of , second operation appears also to have been captured teams. On the 24th, Hanoi canceled, for neither the official record nor announced the trial of "another group of US­ postwar accounts by captured agents mention puppet spy commandos, the tenth since June it further. 8D. . this year." The six agents were sentenced to terms ranging from five to 16 years. Three Meanwhile, unaccountably using one of the weeks later, on 14 January, two Swifts, again much-maligned Junks, the station and its PSO manned by[ Imercenaries, headed counterparts launched what appears to have north. Team ZEUS would attack a target near been the last singleton agent insertion before Dong Hoi, while Team CHARON headed MACV took over management of the US role. another 18 kilometers north to take out the Ron Agent~sailed north on 27 October 1963. River ferry that served coastal Route 1.11 D At the ~ point, not far from Dong Hoi, five of the 1a-man crew paddled him to the beach The simpler of the two operations had the bet­ in a rubber boat. The party then failed to return ter success. Whether it was a desalinization to the junk, and after two-and-a-half hours of plant, as survivors recalled, or a "Dong Hoi waiting, its captain headed south in order to security installation," as reported by the sta­ clear DRV waters before daylight. Two days tion, it would be hit by rockets fired from the later, the rubber boat and its five crewmen also beach, and the hazards of underwater swim­ reached South Vietnamese waters, somehow ming would be avoided. A rubber boat took having eluder DRV tatrols after landing the Team ZEUS ashore, where it succeeded in agent. Agent himself disappeared, and placing its package of six 3.5in rockets, timed the station never knew whether he'd been cap­ for delayed firing. Having pointed the device as tured or had simply gone to ground, somehow best it could, .the team returned to the Swift. evading communist security.aD The station evaluated its effort as "probably successful." 120 The last CIA-sponsored maritime sabotage ini­ tiative of 1963 reprised the VULCAN operation Team CHARON never reached its target. of 1962 against the North Vietnamese naval Delayed by thel . }aptain's evasive base at Qua~. A Swift, crewed by newly­ maneuvers around a North Vietnamese ves­ hired[ ercenaries, brought the sel, it arrived an hour late off the mouth of the team toIFielaunch point, from which Team Ron River. Like the agents of Team ZEUS, its NEPTUNE proceeded by rubber boat. A bril­ two pairs of swimmers left the Swift in a rubber liant rotating light at the mouth of the river boat. Leaving the boat at the mouth of the Ron revealed two sampans, whose occupants chal- River, two of the frogmen started upstream .Ienged the team. The agents saw no way along the north bank while the other two pro­ around the sampans, anchored in mid-stream, ceeded along the south. One pair soon encountered a junk, and promptly did an

• SAIG 1776 17 October 1963

i\lG2f43. ovem er '0 FVSA 16907, 24 Decemb·e-r-1;~9'""6A3,.------j--1

11 Conboy,72-73. The station's report says ZEUS was to hit a "Dong Hoi security installation,"not further described.D 12 Ibid: SAIG 3823, 16 January 1964,I I

51 05303948

about-face back to the rubber boat. There they moved from CIA to the Department of Defense. waited in vain for the other two, and finally To run them, MACV created the Special Oper­ returned to the Swift. With only half his team ations Group MACSOG), to be commanded by back on board, the skipper was about to give Col. Clyde Russell. Despite the perceived up and return toDa Nang when he saw a flash­ inadequacy of the CIA effort, the military light blinking near shore. Braving the risk of wanted to continue running any teams still on discovery, he ran the Swift into the shallows, the ground, and it took over five CIA-supported rescued the ~cked frogmen, and headed teams the station thought had evaded capture. out to sea. ' 3 U. In fact, all five were under DRV control, and the military was in effect starting from scratch. 16 Tit fortat continued on 28 January, when Hanoi D sentenced the six-man crew of a boat, sent to cache supplies for doubled Team C==UO The pressure for results that greeted Col. Rus­ terms ranging from four to 15 years." U sell was even more Intense than that which had earlier encouraged CIA operators to short­ change the counterintelligence side of the pro­ Under Military controlD gram. This resulted not merely from the pollcyrnakers' discontent with the CIA effort, That portion of official Washington devoted to but from the ominous decayof the GVN hold covert operations against the DRV spent the on the South Vietnamese countryside in the month·of January 1964 debating the program's . wake of President Diem's assassination. If organizational and command arrangements. Saigon's generals were failing to mobilize their Despite the Pentagon's two-year lobbying people, something serious would have to be campaign for a greater role in these opera­ done to distract the DRV from its support of the tions, it had at the turn of the year not formally insurgency. D asked for the lead role in Implementing Oplan 34A-64. The final version of that document, Unfortunately for Col. Russell, his new office worked out by MACV and the Saigon Station, was understaffed, and neither he nor any of his had reached Washington with no recommen­ few men had experience In covert operations. dation about future command relationships. These deficiencies were to be ameliorated, in Bill Colby looked at the endless quarreling the short term, by detailing to Russell some of between State and Defense over the appropri­ the station officers who had been running the ate targets for an expanded program and con­ program. In the new organization, each unit cluded that CIA would be better off if it merely had a chief from one service and a deputy from supported team operations while it continued the other. Herb Weisshart became chief of the to run covert psychological warfare. He urged psyops sections, with an Army deputy; by one this position on DCI McCone, who-judging by account, he also served as Russell's deputy. the outcome-adopted it in his final ne~­ I !the station's maritime opera- . tions with the Department of Defense.15U tions officer in Saigon, found himself deputy to the Navy commander now in charge of the On 1 February 1964, the management of irreg­ equivalent section In MACSOG. 17 0 ular warfare operations against the DRV

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; ~ FA~f_.------___, ,7 Shulz, 42-430 SAIG 4433,12 February 1964~L... ~ _J

52 05303948

It would appear that of the CIA officers detailed Nang base, at least nominally under MACSOG to the project, only Weisshart, running psyops, control, tried twice more to hit the Swatows tied exercised any managerial authority] I up at the Quang Khe naval base. Whatever the .remembered being called upon only for logisti­ impetus for these raids-one account cal support and for help in dealing with the attributes it to the residual CIA staff at Oa Vietnamese. He could offer operational advice, Nang-they employed the same tactics used but his Navy counterpart could and did ignore against the same targets in 1962 and 1963. C~heir cordial personal relationship. Nothing went right. A sudden wind capsized a as not surprised, given that the mil­ rubber boat, Swatows were not berthed as itary saw their job as succeedin~ere CIA expected, and foot patrols appeared along the had already essentially failed. 18 LJ shore. The frogmen in the February attempt succeeded at least in getting back to the Swift, The Inexperience of MACSOG's military con­ but the four swimmers involved in the March tingent and the uncritical attachment of station foray ali wound up in captivity.2°D officers to the operational status quo militated . against a rigorous evaluation of techniques Following the March attack, CIA in Saigon and operational resources. The official records summarized for Headquarters what it called and the tales told by survivors suggest a wide MACSOG Oa Nang's "speculative comments" range of causes to suspect that these teams on the results. "Everything went very close to might be doubled. Team TOURBILLON, as we plan." Although all four swimmers had been know, had provoked considerable suspicion lost, there remained a "good possibility" that before its responses to radio challenges the mission had succeeded. Two more opera­ soothed CIA and PSO into thinking that all was tions in March 1964 reflected this resolutely well. At the other end of the scale was REMUS, positive spirit, as MACSOG targeted bridges .wnose ORV handlers played a flawless game well north of Quang Khe. Both of these raids to convince Saigon of the team's viability. failed, each with the loss of two swimmers." When In late 1963, for example, the team was c==J' . ordered to mine a road near Oien Bien Phu, the North Vietnamese proceeded to block traffic In April and May, Hanoi's Vietnam Press with a simulated attack. Later, with the team Agency announced the capture and trial of under MACSOG management, the ORV Teams RUBY and BULL, dropped into the responded to Saigon's demand for sabotage of North in late 1963. These operations had, of a bridge by creating or simulating visible course, preceded MACV's assumption of com­ cracks in the structure for the benefit of US mand over penetrations operations into the aerial reconnaissance. 19D ORV,and the revelation of their fate did nothing to deter new efforts. Indeed, aided by the Hanoi's painstaking deception operations and arrival of the Nasty patrol boats newly refitted the lust for results In Washington and Saigon at Sublc Bay In the Philippines, MACSOG combined to perpetuate the familiar opera­ accelerated Its planning for more, and more tional routine. In February and March, the Oa ambitious, 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 IFBIS transcript of IL... -'1 L-- --' 53 05303948

An Uneasy PartnerShlpO MACSOG's ability to succeed where the civil­ Ians had failed. What expertise the civilians Despite cordial relationships with CIA at the actually had to offer is a different question, for , working level, the military rightly sensed an the station remained in the defensive crouch Agency reluctance either to invest people in an that had always marked its assessments of the advisory capacity or to leave the psywar ele­ program's security and results. In mid-July ment, being masterminded by Herbert Wefs­ 1964, when Headquarters asked for a security shart, even nominally under MACV direction. review, the station insisted that Team TOUR· As of early June 1964, Bill Colby was propos­ BILLON and a reinforcement element-Team ing to "withdraw the CIA complement from joint COOTS-dropped to it in May were still "free operations with [MACSOG] against North Viet­ and uncontrolled in our best judgment." For nam." The military side would be left entirely to one thing, the station had independent confir­ MACV, while the Agency ran a "unilateral mation of some team reporting. And if the team ... political and psychological program." And in were controlled, the DRV had abdicated an fact, according to a study done for the Penta­ opportunity to shoot down the plane that sup­ gon, CIA did finally decline to assign a senior plied the team in May. For the station, this rein­ officer as permanent deputy to the MACSOG forced the absence of any positive "indications commander; instead, it would detail a relatively of capture or control." The possibility that all junior man with the vague title of "special assls­ three indicators represented merely a well-run tant."23D communist deception operation was not addressed, even to dismiss it,2SD The Pentagon persisted in Its demands for more Agency support, and succeeded in get­ ting the attention at least of the DDCI. Only four With One Hand TledD weeks after Colby urged withdrawal, DDCI Carter asked the DDP to assure him and the The disagreements between State and the DCI that the Agency was doing "everything it Pentagon that Bill Colby cited in his staffing can and should to render maximum support recommendation to the DCI implicitly recog­ and assistance" to MACSOG. How much CIA nized a paradox that had afflicted the decision­ could or ought to do remained a matter of making process from the beginning. As the debate, and the military seems to have con­ Saigon Station had theorized early on, Hanoi cluded that the Agency's help was half· might conceivably be intimidated by penetra­ hearted, at best. Its disappointment with the tions of its borders into scaling back its support level of Agency support may have arisen in of the Viet Cong insurgency. On the other part from surprise that CIA had turned over so hand-and more Iikely~it might react in just little in the way of going operations. Bob Myers the opposite way, eliminating the nuisance by thought that MACSOG had indulged a para­ going to its source with an accelerated cam­ noid sense that CIA was holding out on the mil­ paign to absorb the South. 26D itary, keeping its best operations for itself. 240 As long as success was measured in pin­ The military's continual appeals for Agency pricks-even the claimed accomplishments of expertise suggest some self-doubt about - doubled teams like TOURBILLON and

23 William E. Colby, Memorandum. "Saigon Station," 3 June 1964,1 Conboy, 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

54 05303948

REMUS were nothing more-the risks were war. The difference between the CIA's program manageable. As the number and size of oper­ and the one undertaken by the military was ations rose, under military management, the essentially one of scale. It therefore aggra­ risk-benefit calculation would become more vated, in the eyes of Washington policymak­ delicate,D ers, a problem that until 1964 had been more hypothetical than practical.D In particular, two of the proposed programs might call Into play the law of unintended-and The escalation of the war that began with the unwelcome-consequences. As the station near-simultaneous launching of the aerial had observed as early as mid-1962, the stimu­ bombing campaign against the DRV and the lation of resistance activity In the DRV could, at deployment into the South of US ground forces least in theory, lead to a reprise of the Hungar­ reflected declining administration sensitivities 'ian revolution of 1956. In that case, the West about provoking the Chinese. But it did not by had felt compelled to stand aside, watching the any means produce a new, anything goes, repression of a movement its propaganda had approach to ground operations on North Viet­ helped to Incite. The same outcome could be namese soil. In addition, the insertion of agent expected in North Vietnam, whose communist teams under MACSOG auspices proceeded regime would react with draconian measures under much the same kind of inconstant mis­ and might even, in extremis, invite Chinese sion guidance that had governed the CIA intervention. In such an eventuality, success effort, and sabotage and resistance briefly would have resulted in a massively larger gave way again to intelligence reporting in war,27D 1965.2Q

Less catastrophic but still unacceptable was The effect of policy restrictions was intensified the possible effect of a new MACSOG initiative by the DRV's competence at ferreting out to challenge communist exploitation of Hanoi's attempted insertions. Hanoi's growing familiar­ supply route to South Vietnam with covert ity with the American operational routine offset cross-border operations into Laos. To the poli­ improvements like the Nasty, replacing the cymakers, the hypothetical tactical benefit of Swift, and the four-engine C-130, supplement­ ambushes on the Ho Chi Minh Trail had to be ing the C-123. Employing the same techniques weighed against the need to preserve the under comparable circumstances, MACSOG Geneva Agreements, with their guarantee of a was, therefore, rewarded with no more suc­ Laos at lest nominally neutral. Even the covert cess than CIA had enjoyed. Suspicious behav­ deployment of American troops into Laos from ior by various teams prompted one MACSOG Vietnam would, therefore, always be weighed commander, Col. John Singlaub, to commis­ against the risk of provoking either a massive sion a thorough review of the entire stable's DRV invasion of Laos or the collapse of the operational security.3oD officially neutral Laotian government,28[] The files were not voluminous: four years after This tension between external ,strategic con­ assuming control under the SWITCHBACK siderations and the need to reverse communist rubric, MACSOG had radio conta~with JUSi gains In South Vietnam would afflict military seven penetrations, three of them management of the program for the rest of the TOURBILLON, and EASY-inherited from

27 FVSA 13960. D 2B'bid·D 29 Conboy, Chapterm-I 30 Ibid" Chapter 20.0--'

I 55 05303948

CIA. Singlaub's study, done in April 1968, gave sive scale, Bill Colby's psychological/political a clean bill of health only to Team EASY, but a concept. Emphasizing deception operations, it subsequent joint review by MACV intelligence followed the effort that Herb Weisshart had and CIA concluded that it, too, was bad. Now begun to implement in 1963, under CIA aus­ disabused of the prospects for team insertions, pices, and then pursued on behalf of MAC­ MACSOG then adopted, on a much more mas- SOG.31D

.3' Ibid., Chapler 21.0 05303948

Chapter Five: "Just Shoot Them" The fact remains that, before the DRV opera­ tions were even considered, independent­ D minded observers had been pointing out the universal failure of efforts to establish black resident teams in Leninist states. In 1959, at a conference of his FE Divi i n counterparts, Despite the reservations entertained by differ­ Peter Sichel had ent managers at different times, the Agency ~e""n=e::a-.Jt:O-:e~pr;;:;a:-;:;c"iCtlc~e:;--a~s;;-;::a-n;:;;complete waste of persisted into January 1964 with black entry time. We may as well just shoot them." As we operations against the DRV. At that point, it have seen, Robert Myers shared that view. His had Inserted 28 resident teams by air or sea, objections to the DRV insertion program while and eight singleton agents, some by sea and he served as Colby's deputy may well have others overland. Of these, the station thought Influenced his chief's stated intention, in five-four air-dropped teams and c==J November 1963, gradually to abandon the believed to have recruited his own team-wor­ effort in favor of psychological operations. The thy of transfer to MACSOG. The intelligence dispiriting history of black teams was not, fur­ and covert action achievements of these five thermore, unknown to the Saigon Station. As had been Insignificant, and the program's man­ early as 1962, inviting Headquarters to jUdge agers sometimes invoked their very survival­ the cosVbenefit ratio, i~ suggested a look at the as the station perceived it-to justify the effort, record of similar operations in China and North risk, and expense.'D Korea. 2D

Why, then, did CIA decide to launch some 36 Furthermore, it was not always a given that the operations, persevering for almost three years, Agency would simply salute and march off a despite heavy losses, for results that barely cliff simply because "higher authority" wanted qualified as negligible? Why did it go on to something. CIA was perfectly capable of cooperate with MACSOG, even as the losses speaking truth to power, as two examples from mounted? And why did it then so readily (com­ the Vietnam war attest. The Johnson adminis­ paratively speaking) declare the Laotian com­ tration had wanted to believe that aerial bomb­ mando raider program an irredeemable ing of the North would shatter, or at least failure?D dampen, the DRV's will to annex the South by force. The Agency categorically rejected this. It The short, easy answer-and one with a good predicted that bombing would fall, that no cost deal of force-is that CIA had to do something it could inflict on Hanoi would be likely to win to respond, first to the original Kennedy man­ Saigon a reprieve. 3 D date in the spring of 1961, and then to pres­ sures that increased in proportion to the On the operational side, too, the Agency had decline of South Vietnamese fortunes in 1963. demonstrated the courage of a firm conviction. A presidential order is not lightly ignored, or Like John Kennedy before them, President even questioned, especially when it is driven Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry by frustration and anxiety, and both these emo­ Kissinger wanted direct action against the tions affected US rliclmaking on Vietnam DRV. When peace negotiations with Hanoi dic­ from start to finish. tated 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. which was first expressed to the Johnsonadministration In a study done in March 1964.0

57 SEcfii 05303948

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demanded covert action to keep Hanoi mindful and if it did whether it was on target, but there that intervention in the South came at a price. were not the lingering uncertainties about Accordingly, they wanted CIA first to harass agent bona fides. Nevertheless, it remains that and then-after a March 1970 coup in Cambo­ even in hit-and-run raids like VULCAN and .dia cut the communists' maritime supply route MACSOG's first such venture, similar to the to South Vietnam-help to interdict the traffic later Commando Raiders, one sees a wishful entering the Ho Chi Minh Trail. 4 D optimism about results that contrasts sharply with the hard-headed skepticism that AgrCJ For two years, from February 1970 to April managers brought to the Laotian project. 1972, CIA staged hit-and-run operations from Laos against military targets in the DRV. A similar phenomenon appears in the self­ Except for their use of air rather than sea trans­ evaluations that dotted the course of the pro­ portation, they resembled the raids conducted gram. As it happened, first Saigon, then Head­ by Team VULCAN in 1962. They inflicted quarters, displayed more doubts about the somewhat more damage, and with fewer casu­ program in the early days, when evidence of alties, but costs remained dauntingly high. And compromise was still fragmentary, than either the strategic effect of the Laos-based program, of them did as signs of trouble accumulated. like that of Saigon's teams, was scarcely per­ Later, even when Hanoi began announcing the ceptible. The main difference lay in manage­ seizure of one team after another, Washington ment's reaction to meager results: in the spring shrugged off the occasional access of doubt of 1972, after months of working-level grum­ and joined the field in looking at the bright side bling made its way to the 7th floor, DCI Richard when It came to evaluating those teams still Helms told Kissinger that CIA saw no point In reporting. Not until mld-1963, as already continuing·D noted, did Bill Colby declare the experiment unsuccessful, and even then, he proposed to When they threw In the towel on the so-called continue it until 1965. D Commando Raider operations, Helms and his subordinates demonstrated a readiness to The vocal objections of contemporary critics acknowledqe failure that was conspicuously establish that, in pursuing black team inser­ lacking in the first three years of the team oper­ tions into the DRV, the Agency had reason to ations out of South Vietnam. And having done know the length of the odds against success. so, they canceled the program. In Saigon, by The open skeptics were in the minority, cer­ contrast, the effort continued for more than five tainly, but they were uninhibited about urging years after Colby's admission of its failure, their view on their action-oriented superiors. almost a year of that period while it was still And even those at the working level who duti­ .under CIA management. D fully concentrated on making the effort suc­ ceed did so with at least occasional twinges of It is true that circumstances differed in one doubt. As we have seen in the artful correspon- Important respect. For Saigon, initially ambigu­ dence from I lin August 1962, such ous signs of trouble allowed hopes that at least enthusiasm as field managers could muster some of its teams were still secure. Com­ seemed sometimes, at least, consciously mando Raiders, by contrast-like the VULCAN aimed at meeting managerial expectations. raiders-either reached their target or they Thus,Dbalanced his optimistic list of oppor­ didn't. There might be some doubt as to tunities with a warning to the desk about the whether their ordnance actualiy detonated, obstacles to their exploitation.D

• UndercoverArmies,Chapter 16.0 58 I 05303948

A CUlturallmperativeD many of the Agency's covert action projects and plans of the era were little short of frivolous Taken together, these attitudes and events and on occasion potentially disastrous. Some­ suggest an answer to the questions, posed times, they promised only disaster, even if suc­ earlier, about the Agency's attachment to the cessful, as with the collusion with the Mafia to Saigon program of team Insertions and its con­ dispose of Fidel Castro. Or they focused on a trasting willingness to dump the Commando superficial symptom while ignoring a massive Raiders. That answer invokes the perennial problem, as with the abortive plot to poison tension between the Office of Policy Coordina­ Patrice Lumumba in the chaos of the Congo in tion (OPC) and the Office of Special Opera­ 1960. For sheer detachment from reality, there tions (OSO) cultures, and the expression of is the 1958 episode in which the Agency that tension in the styles of individual CS man­ thought to influence Laotian elections by para­ agers.D chuting bulldozers into a few remote villages as harbingers of new roads about to be built by Team operations into North Vietnam began a beneficent government.60 during a period in which the OPC ethos still dominated the DO's self-image. Its adherents Richard Helms later said that he had always practiced what in retrospect seems a naive thought covert military action a "dubious option" faith that good intentions and energy, applied in peacetime, but that wartime was different. with the creativeness allowed by CIA's adrnln­ With respect to Vietnam, in particular, he saw istrativeflexibillty, would suffice to meet any . the Agency as obligated to contribute whatever challenge. Anything was worth ~g, and it could. Nevertheless, not sharing the OPC-· something would surely work. 5U style reluctance to admit failure, he did not dis­ courage a sober evaluation of the Commando The most influential exponent of the improvisa­ Raider program. After a good-faith try, he tional OPC approach in the FE Division of the declared the game not worth the candle.70 early 1960s was probably William Colby. As chief of station in Saigon, he began in 1960 a By the early .1970s, moreover, EA Division flurry of experimental programs, all of them management, both at Headquarters and in the shaped by the recommendations of officers in field, was populated less by traditional activists the field. These led to at least one signal suc­ and more by expert professionals. Indeed, Wil­ cess-the tribal Village defense program called liam E. Nelson's careful, thoughtful style made the Citizens Irregular Defense Groups-and to him look like a careful bureaucrat to some of failures, the most costly of which was probably his more activist subordinates. Even Theodore the black entry program against North Viet- Shackley, his hard-nosed successor, who was namD . still chief of station in Saigon during the Com­ mando Raider episode, was more the dog­ But Bill Colby was far from unique in his ten­ gedly efficient executive agent of policy than dency to operate on a rather unreflective basis he was any kind of activist free spirit looking for of self-confidence and eager optimism. A good new 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 OSS psychology. 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 Included Laos (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 values rrofessional practices that he now criticizes. n land Russell Jack Smith, R1cJ1ard Helms as DCI(center f~r the StUdy of Intelligence, 1993).D

59 SECrllM" 05303948

A similar evolution had taken place in field OSS role in the partisan warfare of World War management. Vientiane Station's\ I II. The training regime implicitly assumed an was still run by the legendary Lloyd "Pat" Lan­ operating climate in which a population dry, a veteran of the abortive operation to over­ awaited liberation from foreign occupation or throw Indonesia's President Sukarno in 1957. from the exactions of a puppet regime like Managing four different paramilitary programs Vichy. It was then applied to Cold War opera­ while helping hold together a fractious multilat­ tions, where it ignored the effectiveness of eral command had Imbued him with a sober Leninist internal security discipline in the pragmatism that had little time for activist Soviet Union and the new.communist states macho. And Vientiane Station itself was led by that arose in the postwar period. It also Hugh Tovar, whose cerebral approach to his obscured the fact that the subjects of these paramilitary programs took into account the communist governments, at least those with overarching fact that, whatever was done to experience of European colonialism, did not all "send a message" to the North Vietnamesh necessarily yearn for liberation by us-spon-, America was on its way out of Indochina. 8LJ sored regimes. D .

This interpretation, which emphasizes the Contributing to this blinkered view was the anti­ ways In which the styles of individual manag­ communist zeal of the period. Few if any of the ers reflected their attachment to their OPC or Agency officers serving in Vietnam in the early OSO antecedents, leaves room for the influ­ and mld-1960s recognized the nationalistic, ence of other Institutional and environmental anti-colonial appeal of the Viet Minh, and its factors that contributed to perpetuation of a success at mobilizing political talent at all lev­ failed program. One of these was the DO's els, down to and including the hamlet. Word of institutional inferiority complex. This was peasant opposition to communist rule in lower another legacy of the OSS, which from the North Vietnam in 1956 nourished the American moment of its creation had confronted the hos­ impulse to believe that the entire country was tility of mainstream military commanders to the groaning under what it saw as a despotic, freewheeling tactics of unconventional war­ exploitative elite. The North Vietnamese peas­ fare. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, for example, ant was assumed to be ready to seize any shut OSS entirely out of the Pacific theater. opportunity to cooperate with the anti-commu­ The resulting feeling of having something to nist Vietnamese of the South. In fact, when­ prove contributed to the DO's (then the Direc­ ever local peasants came upon indications of a torate for Plans) unwillingness to admit an foreign presence, their immediate and only inability to do whatever the pollcymaker­ impulse was to report to the authorities. especially the occupant of the White House- Whether they did so out of fear or out of posi­ might want.D . tive loyalty, or some combination of the two; the result was the same. 9D Another institutional factor in the conceptual rigidity of project~as the archaic Finally, in this context of cultural influences, training program that shaped comes the disdain for counterintelligence. Not the thinking of new operations 0 rcers, At least characteristic of the entire Clandestine Ser­ as late as 1957, the model for behind-the-lines vice-for many years, CI was the heart of oper­ intelligence and resistance activity was the ations against the Soviet Union-the

8 The management s~ of Tovarand Landry are descrloed In the author's Undercover Armies:CIAandSurrogateWarfare in 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 01his recollection most of his colleagues there-dismissed as mere communist disinformatlon. He can think of no batter reason for his closed mind than the threat posed to the activist ethos by the uncertainties of a complicated worldD

60 I 05303948

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prevalence of this bias corresponded roughly in neighboring Cambodia, Colby had been to the importance assigned to covert action in looking for ways to retum the emphasis to the a given area division or field station. In the FE South Vietnamese insurgency and its spon­ Division of the 1950s and Into the 1960s and sors in Hanoi. "One of the questions came up beyond, CI barely ranked as an operational very soon, why don't we do to them what they stepchild, and ritual injuncllons to pay more do to us, in North Vietnam. And we went back attention to it and to operational security in to our World War II experience of dropping general were neither enforced nor obeyed.D people in by parachute and things like that. ..·""D This institutional indifference to CI in FE Divi­ sion was, to be sure, encouraged by mutual It is significant that Colby reached back to the dislike and distrust between Bill Colby and Second World War for a precedent, for if he James J. Angleton. As chief of the CI Staff, had looked to the more recent past, he would Angleton suspected that, in the late 1950s and have found nothing but failed operations 1960s, the DRV was penetrating and playing against the Soviet Union, China, and North back Saigon Station's operations against it. Korea. There Is also the very fact of his reli­ Accordingly, he urged Colby to accept a CI ance on OSSexperience for ideas fora new Staff unit in Saigon, something comparable to and only superficially similar problem. Now, it the ass's X-2 element. Colby would have may well be that he could have offered a more nothing to do with it, and frustrated Angleton's refined rationale for the program, had his inter­ design. But as with other organizational prac-' viewer pursued the point. As it is, we are left tices, FE Division's indifference to CI was not with an account that leaves him and the the creation of a sin~manager; it pervaded Agency looking as if they were still fighting, not the entire culture. IOU even the last war; but an even earlier conflict, one whose outcome made it a more congenial mOdel.D , The Lust to succeedD In World War II, it was Americans, along with The case officers and managers of Project British and other allies, who were "drop- I Iprobably gave little if any thought to ping... in by parachute," but no one ever sug­ the cultural and institutional influences on their gested adopting this feature of OSS practice in professional practice, They were busy getting the Cold War operations that followed. If any­ on with the task at hand. The Agency seems to one had, the reaction might have tempered the have assigned itself that task, for work on it damn-the-torpedoes flavor of thel I began a year before President Kennedy's enterprise, and of similar efforts earlier in the demand for guerrillas in the North. No corre­ Cold War. An American presence would, of spondence from those early days has been course, have multiplied the already enormous found, and the only account of the inaugural ' risks, ardJheIejs_~O reason-at least in the period Is Bill Colby's, given in an interview in case ofL ito think that it would have the mid-199osD improved the results.D

As Colby recalled it after some 35 years, the The question remains whether any Agency decision to go north sounds almost casual. manager would ever have taken the same Trying to distract the Vietnamese from their risks, for so little reward, if these operations obsessive effort to overthrow Prince Sihanouk had required even a token CIA presence. It is

'0 John Prados, Lost Crusader:TheSecret Warsof CIA DirectorWilliam Colby(Oxford University Press, 2003), 160-61.0 II Tourison, 19.0 , 05303948

certainly true that the GVN tolerated its casual­ navigational error led to some teams, or individ­ ties, not all of whom were merely expendable ual team members, being dropped far from their members of despised minorities. This willing­ specified DZs. This question would have figured ness, it seems, served to legitimize for CIA the prominently in any examination of the program, exposure of dozens of Vietnamese agents to a but no serious effort of the kind was done until degree of risk that no Agency manager would 1968. At that point, as we have seen, CIA col­ ever have contemplated imposing on his own laborated with the military to conclude that even people·D Team EASY, which had enjoyed the greatest confidence, was also compromised. 13D This interpretation is necessarily speculative. But nothing else explains the Agency's appar­ The CI exercise that exposed Team EASY ent sense of detachment from the fate of the came four years after CIA had ceded to MAC­ agent personnel. That sense may have been SOGthe American side of Projectl I encouraged by the sometimes almost adver­ management. Had the Agency applied the sarial tone of the relationship with them, some­ same rigor to this kind of examination on its thing provoked by their generally low~ality own watch, it might well have written off the and frequently uncertain motivation.u teams that It eventually bestowed on the mili­ tary. One feature of their performance, notable But even lacking any sense of personal attach­ from the beginning, was their almost universal ment to the people being dispatched to an failure to come up on the air for weeks after uncertain fate, the station could be expected to insertion. Despite its standard Injunction to have devoted serious efforts to identifying the make contact immediately, the station invari­ causes of a series of failures seen by late 1963 ably accepted the excuses offered in tardy first as nearly without exception. That it did not do reports. By July 1963, it was treating the phe­ so is attributable, in part, simply to inadequate nomenon as routine when it reported a team as staffing;] [ having come up after the "usual initial one 1--' I month silence." Risky at best, this passive IBut the fact remains that the stance turned into simple credulousness as surviving official correspondence expresses one instance followed another. 14 0 almost no curiosity about or interest in the causes of known failures. 12 D The lust to succeed, In an institution that defines itself by its ability to do what the policy­ One academic study of the program, based maker wants done, cannot be eliminated, but largely on interviews conducted with captured only managed. Clearly, the notoriously risk­ agents after their release by Hanoi, makes averse stance that followed William Casey's repeated references to poorly selected drop stewardship was not and is not the answer. But zones, attributing them to the planners' reliance neither is the almost robotic activism with on old and unreliable French maps. In fact, the which the DO tends to respond to policy-level official record is replete with correspondence pressure. For examples, one need look no far­ detailing the aerial reconnaissance photos ther than the pro rams aimed at intelli ence explicitly commissioned fori [mis- penetrations of sions. But it does appear that drop zones some­ ith "recruitment" the times-perhaps often-turned out to lie in supreme-sometimes apparently the only­ populated areas. It is possible, of course, that goal, the DO let itself be manipulated into a ------"1 ~ 13 Conboy, wClSe references to faulty dropzones include oneonpage62.0 "SAIG 9322.0

62

1 05303948

series of embarrassing and damaging failures failure. But these must be identified if errors in which nearly all the agents were controlled are not to proliferate. The reasons why, for by the other side:D example, an operational component ignores all the canons of counterintelligence practice, These self-inflicted wounds might have been while it clings to a failed program, are what prevented by an institutionalized adversarial count. D process that, in effect, took the OSO-OPC cul­ tural rivalry and turned it to constructive pur­ An attempt to get behind flaws in professional pose. In the case of Project IIa CI practice to find root causes encounters its own section In the Saigon Station of the period, difficulties. To what extent Is institutional cul­ charged by the COS with challenging the oper­ ture the product of the personal style of indivld­ ators, would very early on have produced a ualleaders, and to what extent, conversely, are more balanced assessment than the station the leaders formed by their culture? One thing ever, in fact; conducted. But a CI unit would by seems certain, that in a meritocracy whose itself have had little effect, in the absence of a leadership rises from the ranks, an institutional watchfully skeptical chief, and skepticism was culture tends to be perpetuated from one gen­ uncongenial to both Colby and Richardson. eration to the next. In such an organization, the Both of them displayed more interest in a dis­ greatest threat to effective performance Is fail­ play of vigorous action than in resolving indica­ ure to adapt to a changing environment. Past tions of trouble even with the few teams still experience, especially that of an Institution's maintaining radio contact. Headquarters, more­ founders, tends to shape perceptions of events over, abdicated its oversight role, making Just and circumstances long after it has lost what­ one half-hearted effort to evaluate the integrity ever relevance It may at first have offered.D and productivity of the effort. There, too, worka­ day pressures on a small staff inhibited a hard In the case of Projectl [the pro- look at the program. But so did the comfort of gram's originator was himself one of the CS's knowing that ''this is the way we do things." D founding fathers, but Bill Colby cannot be accused of having imposed an Idiosyncratic mindset on unwilling subordinates. Only two The Pitfalls of "Lessons Learned"D CS officials are known to have opposed the effort, despite an open Colby management What is to be learned from thel Imis­ style that positively encouraged the lower adventure? For one thing, it suggests that the ranks to speak freely. Their acquiescence conventional "lessons learned" approach to a resulted more from cultural mores, accepted professional failure usually obscures what and internalized, than from any kind of subser­ most needs to be illuminated. Why? Because vience, even reluctant. Had neither Colby nor the conventional examination of a disaster is any other OSS veteran been on hand when the usually confined to mechanics, the particular Kennedy administration called for action flaws in operational tradecraft or analytical against North Vietnam, the re~nse would interpretation that led to it. Conducted by peo­ likely have been the same. 15 U ple who share the culture of those they are judging, exercises in "lessons learned" hardly One thing is certain: archaic modes of thought ever examine the institutional factors behind a and 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 that reduced the importance of manned aircraft, and thus threatened pilots' self-image. This occurred first with ballistic missiles as a threat to the manned.bomber and more recentl~th controversy over unmanned aerial vehicles as a partial substitute for manned combat and reconnaissance missions. U

63 SErETIIMR 05303948

onlyto determined, independent-minded leader­ leadershatedealingwith an ambiguousagenda ship. The challenge to DO management, in the like this one, but it cannot be avoidedwithout early 21st century, is to developa culturethat risking catastrophic failure in an era of unprece­ combinesself-confident energywith construc­ dented threatsto the nationalsecurity. D tive self-questioning. Bureaucracies and their

64 I 05303948

Source Note (U) Richard Shultz was particularly helpful on the policy context of the early 1960s. Kenneth Conboy, with Dale Andrade, and Sedgwick Tourison conducted detailed interviews with former[ [agents after their rele~se . In comparison with EA Division holdings on its from communist jails; the Conboy book, In par­ operations in Laos and South Vietnam, the sur­ ticular, has assembled narrative material that viving record on team insertions into the DRV seems to reflect a good-faith etfort to get not Is remarkably thin. Chronological files have merely stories, but facts. been found for all of the code-named opera­ D tions, including many that were never Shulz, Richard H.,Jr. The Secret War Against launched, and it thus appears that what has Hanoi: The Untold Story of Spies, Saboteurs, been seen is what was archived. If so, Project and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam (peren­ lis by far the most poorly docu- . I nial Books, 2000).0 mented of the activities researched by the author in his 15 years of work on Agency oper­ Conboy. Kenneth, and Dale Andrade, Spies ations in Indochina. The total absence of any and Commandos: How America Lost the examination of failed operations is particularly Secret War in North Vietnam (University Press striking. Opportunities for interviews with par­ of KansaS,2000).D ticipants have also, by comparison with earlier volumes, been few and far between; I am, Tourison, Sedgwick. Secret Army. Secret War: however, grateful for the useful recollections of Washington's Tragic Spy Operation in North I land Robert Myers·D Vietnam (Naval Institute Special Warfare Series, 1995). A small but serious open literature saved this D project from becoming an exerclseln futility.

d 65 ------;;S;;:ECrETIIMR 05303948 .

SEefETIIMR 05303948

A game plan, 13, 20 resupply, 14,15,16, 19,23,39,43 Castro, Fidel, 11, 59 Central Highlands, 31 CHARON,51 China, 39, 42 I~---,---,-----.:--__-­ Andrade, Dale, 65 Chondokyo,3 Angleton, James J., 61 CINCPAC,50 AQ Bac, 37 I ' I [I ' Citizens Irregular Defense Groups, 59 capture, 13, 14, 17, 18,22 Colby, William deception, 23, 24, 35 "warrior priest", 31 game plan, 13,43,55,57 and black entry operations, 3, 4, 23, 25, resupply, 22, 52 32,38,40,50,57,59 II and James J. Angleton, 61 ATLAS, 24, 35 as Chief of Station, 23 Citizens Irregular Defense Groups, 59 MACSOG, 54, 56 OSS, 4, 10, 49 B Swifts"...:4~5,-- _ c=__~-=-=-__ Bay of Pigs, 11, 25 Commando Raiders, 58, 59 BELL, 42, 44, 47 Conboy, Kenneth, 65 Ben Hai River, 10, 12 II black entry, 1,3,4, 19,40,57,59 COOTS, 54 black teams, 1 black Thai, 24 BOUVIER,30 Buddhist unrest, 42 D BULL,49 DaNang,22,23,37,43,45,52,53 DDP (Directorate of Plans), 31 Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), 7,10,36 c DIDO, 14, 16,22,24,33,35,36 Diem, Ngo Dinh, 7, 8, 42 Cambodia, 58, 61 assassination, 52 II regime, 43 Can Lao, 7 Dien Bien Phu, 24, 53 CANO,51 Directorate of Plans (DDP), 31 Canton, 39 Dong Hoi, 26, 51 Cao Bang, 47 DRAGON, 43 Carter, Lt. Gen. Marshall, 29, 33 Drop Zone (DZ), 40, 41 Casey, William, 62 DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam), 7, 9, CASTOR 11,13,37,61,65 capture, 14, 15, 16 , Durbrow, Elbridge, 9 deception, 23, 25, 28, 31, 33, 35, 39, 40, DZ (Drop Zone), 40, 41 43 05303948

E I I Hmong (Muong), 11, 16,25,26, 30, 34 EA Division, 65 Ho Chi Minh, 7, 9,10 EASY, 47, 55, 62 Ho Chi Minh Trail, 9, 55, 58 ECHO, 14,15, 18, 19,24,35 Hoa Binh Province, 19,21 Effects on airborne operations, 28, 29, 33, 34, Honey, Professor P. J., 20 36,55 HUMINT,1 Eisenhower, President Dwight, 7, 11 electronic countermeasures (ECM), 41 EROS, 26, 33, 35, 38, 39 I EUROPA, 21, 23, 35, 42,43,44 European colonialism, 60 Infiltrating ideas black radio, 49 leaflet drops, 49 F Insertion Operations, North Vietnam Airborne Code Names Felt, Adm. Harry, 25 ATLAS, 24, 35 fist print, 14 BELL,42,44,47 FitzGerald, Desmond, 31 BOUVIER,30 frogmen, 27 BULL, 49, 53 CASTOR. See CASTOR COOTS, 54 0100,14,15,16,17,24,35 G ECHO, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19,24,35 EROS, 25, 26, 35 Geneva Accords, 7, 28, 33, 36, 37, 39, 42, 55 EUROPA, 21, 23 Geneva Agreements on Laos, 28, 29, 33, 34, JASON, 30, 42 36,55 PEGASUS, 42 Gianh River, 26 REMUS, 24, 55 GIANT,44 RUBY, 49, 53 GN·58 generator, 17 SWAN,47 Gregg, Don, 29,30, 32 TARZAN, 37, 39 Gulf of Tonkin, 22, 42,43 TOURBILLON, 23, 26, 29, 43, 54 GVN (Government of Vietnam), 7, 37, 62 Maritime Code Names I ~ 15, 17, 18,22 13 H CANO,51

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

68 05303948

Insertion ops, France (continued) MACV, 13,31,45,49,50,52,54,56 Jedburgh, 1, 2, 10 MACV Operational Plan (Oplan), 50 Nepal,3 MACV Special Operations Group (MACSOG), North Korea, 3 . 52 Soviet Union Management of insertion operations, 53 REDSOX,2 MACSOG,55 Tibet 3, 4 Marana, Arizona, 46 McCone, John, 49, 52 McNamara, Robert, 25, 31, 49, 50 Mekong Delta, 37 Military Assistance CommandNietnam J (MACV), 13, 31, 45, 49, 50, 52, 54, 56 Military Security Service (MSS), 8 JASON, 30, 42 Moc Chau District, 14 Jedburgh, 2, 10,49 MSS (Military Security Service), 8 Johnson, Lyndon, 57 - Mui Doc, 30 Muong (Hmong), 21 Myem, Robert, 10,31,38,49,54,57 K

Karamessines, Thomas, 29, 33 N Kennedy, Bob,52 Kennedy, President John F., 10,25,26,29,49, Nastys (patrol boats), 45, 55 National Security Council, 10 57,61 Natsios, Nicholas, 8 Khrushchev, Nikita, 10 Nautilus I, 22 Kissinger, Henry, 57, 58 Nautilus II, 22 Ky, Major Nguyen Cao, 13,23 Nautilus III, 27 Nelson, William E, 59 Nepal,3 NEPTUNE,51 L Neutralists, 37 Nghe An Province, 24 Lai Chau, 14, 25 Nhan Dan, 20 Landry, Lloyd "Pat", 60 Nixon, Richard, 57 Lang Son Province, 30 North Vietnamese, 7,10,26,29 Laos,25,34,35,36,37,42,55 Nung,34,43 Leninist, 60 Lumumba, Patrice, 59 LYRE, 37, 42 o

Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), 59, 60, 63 M Office of Special Operations (OSO), 59, 60, 63 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 1, 60 MacArthur, Gen. Douglas, 60 MACSOG, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 62 loperation VULCAN, 26, 27, 28, 30, 35, 3~, 39, Saigon Station relationship with, 54 40,51,58

69

SEC/ETIIM" 05303948

p Rusk, Dean, 31 Russell, Col. Clyde, 52 PACKER,44 Pao, Major Vang, 16 PASF (People's Armed Security Force), 13, s 14,23,25,26 Patrol boats Sacred Sword Patriots' League (SSPL), 47, 49 Nastys,45 Saigon (city), 57 Swifts, 45 Saigon Station, 50 Patton, Gen. George, 4 Air Operations Branch, 62 PEGASUS, 38, 42 Black teams, 1, 16, 26, 54 Pentagon, 11, 25,'49, 54 CASTOR, 14, 19 People's Armed Security Force (PASF), 13, I I 14,23,25,26 counterintelligence, 61,63 Phnom Penh, 10 deception, 24 PLO (Presidential Liaison Office), 8, 9, 14 game plan, 21, 42 Police Special Branch (see Surete), 8 headquarters, 36,38,42,45 Politburo (Hanoi), 9, 21 MACV, 50, 52, 57 Presidential Liaison Office (PLO), 8, 14 Maritime Branch, .62 Presidential Survey Office (PSO), 22, 24, 27, North Vietnam, 4, 32 33,35,36,51 resupply, 15, 19, 23, 26, 44 project§3 SEPES (Service for Political and Social Project Studies), 7, 8, 9, 36, 37, 44 See . , Shackley, Theodore, 59 PSO (Presidential Survey Office), 22, 24, 27, Sichel, Peter, 57 33,35,36,51 Sihanouk, Prince, 61 Pyongyang,26 Singlaub, Col. John, 55 II Smith, Gen. Walter Bedell, 3 Q Son La Province, 13,16,19,23 South Vietnam, 7 Quang Khe, 26, 51, 53 South Vietnamese, 28 SSPL (Sacred Sword Patriots' League), 47, 49 Subic Bay, 53 Sukarno,60 R supply missions, 45 surete(see Police Special Branch), 8 SWAN,47 red Thai, 26 Swatow-c1ass, 25, 27 REDSOX,2 Swifts (patrol boats), 45, 55 REMUS, 24, 33, 36, 53, 55 SWITCHBACK, 55 Richardson, Elliot, 63 Ron River, 51 Route 1, 42, 51 Route 12, 37, 42 T Route 7, 30, 42 Route 8, 30 RUBY, 49

70 I 05303948

TARZAN, 37; 39 Tung, Lt. Col. Le Quang, 8, 12, 19,21,22, 27, Taylor, Gen. Maxwell, 50 33,36 Team ATLAS, 24, 35 Tuyen, Tran Kim, 7,8, 36 TeamBELL,42,44,47 Team BOUVIER, 30 Team BULL, 49 ' u Team CASTOR. See CASTOR Team CHARON, 51 I-;--;;----,-,:--=-'-_ Team COOTS, 54, Ulmer, AI, 7 Team 0100,14,16,22,24,33,35,36 Unger, Leonard, 29 Team EASY, 47 USS Catfish, 27 Team ECHO, 14, 15, 18, 19,24,35 Team EROS, 33, 35, 38, 39 Team EUROPA, 21, 23, 35, 42, 43, 44 Team GIANT, 44 v Team JASON, 42 Team LYRE, 37, 42 Vichy, 60 Team NEPTUNE, 51 Vientiane Station, 60 Team PACKER, 44 Viet Cong, 9,37,54 Team PEGASUS, 38, 42 Viet Minh, 7, 9, 60 Team REMUS, 24, 36 Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh (see Viet Minh), Team RUBY, 49 9 Team SWAN, 47 Vietnam Team TARZAN, 37, 39 Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), 7, Team TOURBILLON. See TOURBILLON 9, 11, 13, 37, 65 Team ZEUS, 51 Government of Vietnam (GVN), 7, 37, 62 Thanh Hoa, 46 Vietnam Press Agency, 53 Thanh Hoa Province, 26, 30, 46 Vinh (city), 44 Tibet, 3, 4 Vinh Son, 30 Tofte, Hans, 3 TOURBILLON VULCAN, 26, 27, 28, 30, 35',37, 39, 40, 51,58 capture, 40 deception, 35, 39, 40, 43, 53, 54 game plan, 23, 25, 29, 55 w resupply, 29, 35, 43 ' Tourison, Sedgwick, 65 Weisshart, Herbert, 47, 52, 54, 56 L;;?h_'_60__ x capture, 17 Cuba, 10 Xieng Khouang Province, 30 deception, 17 game plan, 10, 17,27,30,38,41,61,62, 65 Kennedy, 10, 11,63 z MACSOG,62 resupply, 15, 62 IZEUS.51

71 SEf RETIIMR CENTER/or the STUDY a/INTELLIGENCE

Washington, DC May 2005