Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (6 page)

CHAPTER 1

THE PRESIDENT’S DILEMMA

T
he president’s dilemma was apparently insoluble. For nine years American Special Forces, working through corrupt surrogates in a faraway land unaccustomed to the ways of democracy, had fought a losing battle against well-organized insurgents prepared to lay down their lives. The ranks of the U.S. Army’s own locally recruited irregulars were penetrated by spies. The local CIA headquarters had been blown up by a suicide car bomber. Washington’s client head of state was a political liability, in office thanks to a fraudulent vote. There was also a healthy trade in illegal drugs, beyond everyone’s control except, perhaps, the Mafia’s. Yet for the White House to accept defeat and pull out would have catastrophic effects upon America’s credibility and probably cause serious damage to the country’s domestic security as enemies gathered strength from the belief that the U.S. giant was mortally wounded. The president’s answer was to send thousands more GIs surging into a combat zone where it was often impossible to identify the enemy. Vietnam, 1963, was not a good place to be. Nor was Dallas. On 22 November that year, President Kennedy was assassinated there.

For years, it seemed, the Vietnam War was the Alpha and Omega of Special Operations Forces, years in which a renascence of SF tactics led to belief in the nostrum that small elite ground forces directing massive air power was a winning combination, until the strategy failed and Special Forces units were consigned to oblivion for almost two decades.

More than thirty years after Vietnam, while there were many apparent similarities with the West’s involvement in Afghanistan—the commentator John Richardson, in
Esquire
magazine, was one of the first to identify “Six Signs That Afghanistan Could Be Another Vietnam”—there were significant differences. As President Obama noticed: “Each historical moment is different. You never step into the same river twice and so Afghanistan is not Vietnam…but the danger of not having clear goals and not having strong support from the American people, those are all issues that I think about all the time.” In Vietnam, America’s enemy was armed by both China and Soviet Russia. More than 320,000 Chinese soldiers served in North Vietnam, as did 3,000 Russians. Between 12 and 29 December 1972 Soviet-supplied missiles, possibly manned by Russian soldiers, shot down thirty-one U.S. B-52 strategic bombers over Hanoi. While the Taliban received covert backing from Pakistan’s intelligence service from time to time, it could not match the external aid supplied to the Vietnamese communists. In any case, under U.S. pressure, covert Pakistani aid to the Taliban was a wasting asset.

According to Obama, to compare Afghanistan to Vietnam is a false reading of history. In his West Point address he said: “Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of forty-three nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action. Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency. And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border.”

Casualty statistics also have a tale to tell. During the Vietnam War, America sacrificed an average of 5,800 lives every year, for a decade or, to express the problem another way, 400 each week at the peak of attrition. During the first eight years of U.S. fighting in Afghanistan, the average was just over seventy. The nature of the enemy in the two campaigns also differed significantly. The Afghans were ferocious fighters conditioned to believe in suicide bombing. On home ground, in close-quarter battle, they were brave and clever tacticians. But even after thirty years of conflict, they remained unsophisticated warriors. The Vietnamese—contrary to the peasant image projected by some Western journalists—often proved themselves superior to the U.S. even on the arcane battleground of electronic warfare. “The Vietcong cryptographers learned their lessons well. While throwing an electronic fishing net into the ether, they regularly reeled it back in bulging with American communications, but they seldom used radios themselves. While they listened to broadcasts from Hanoi on inexpensive transistor radios, they sent messages back to their commands with couriers, except in dire emergencies. For local communications they often used radios with very low power, frustrating American eavesdroppers.” They also cracked many American codes.
¹⁷

The Vietnamese had been trained by, and had fought a successful war against, the French including the Foreign Legion. In those days, the Legion was buttressed by hardened German veterans who had fought the Soviets on the eastern front in the Second World War. When Vietnam was part of the French colony of Indochina, it was run during the Second World War by the Japanese Army of occupation with the complicity of the Vichy French administration. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1944: “The case of Indochina is perfectly clear. France has milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indochina are entitled to something better than that.”
¹⁸

Resistance to Japanese wartime occupation in Vietnam was led by a founder member of the French Communist Party in Paris. His name was Nguyen Hai Quoc, which he later changed to “He Who Lights The Way” or, in Vietnamese, Ho Chi Minh. In that struggle, the Vietminh resistance movement received weapons, training, and moral support from America’s Office of Strategic Services led locally by Colonel Lucien Conein, a Paris-born OSS warrior and former French soldier trained by the British. He was known, thanks to his sinister appearance, as “Black Luigi” among Corsican drug gangs in Saigon, who were his friends. Later, working for the CIA, he would play a significant role in the evolution of South Vietnam.

After a war of attrition lasting nine years from 1945 to 1954, the French were defeated by the Vietminh at Dien Bien Phu. French officers had resisted a recommendation from the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group in Indochina to train and arm a local army. In fact most American expert advice was rejected by French colonial officers who were still living, culturally, in the 1930s. Finally, during the last days of the epic fifty-five day siege of Dien Bien Phu, a French representative proposed to Douglas MacArthur II, a State Department official, a joint venture called Operation Vulture (Operation Vautur). This was “that the United States could commit its naval aircraft to the battle of Dien Bien Phu without risking American prestige or committing an act of belligerency by placing such aircraft, painted with French insignia and construed as part of the French Foreign Legion, under nominal French command for an isolated action consisting of air strikes lasting two or three days.”
¹⁹
The military options considered to bail out the French included the use of tactical nuclear bombs.

Congress argued that the British should be brought into the planning. Churchill vetoed the idea, reasoning that China might invoke a pact with Soviet Russia, provoking a reprisal nuclear attack on U.S. bases in England. The proposal ended there. Vietnam was then divided into two political entities at a Geneva peace conference. Though a dividing line was drawn on the 17th parallel, it meant little in practice for months, during which time thousands of refugees and agents of various sorts moved north or south and back again.

In this fluid situation, months of dynamic covert action followed. An American team under Lucien Conein, then a major, spirited out of North Vietnam fourteen paramilitary teams for training on allied soil. An American Special Forces officer known as Captain Arundel “engineered a black psywar strike in Hanoi: leaflets signed by the [Communist] Vietminh instructing Tonkinese how to behave for a Vietminh takeover in early October [1954] included items about property, money reform….” This exercise terrified anyone with money in the bank. “The day following the distribution of these leaflets refugee registration [of people wishing to leave the country] tripled. Two days later Vietminh currency was worth half the value prior to the leaflets.”
²⁰

In another psyops adventure, “the patriot we’ve named Trieu Dinh had been working on an almanac for popular sale, particularly in the northern cities and towns we could still reach. Noted Vietnamese astrologers were hired to write predictions about coming disasters to certain Vietminh leaders and…to predict unity in the south. The work was carried out under Lieutenant Phillips, based on our concept of the use of astrology for psywar in Southeast Asia. Copies of the almanac were shipped by air to Haiphong and then smuggled into Vietminh territory.”
²¹
(In later years, the CIA would put the Koran to a similar purpose in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and elsewhere.)

Back in Saigon, meanwhile, a team of Saigon Military Mission officers supported by CIA and Air Force personnel working like coolies, throughout the night, moved tons of cargo to build an anti-communist resistance movement in North Vietnam. “All officers pitched in to help as part of our ‘blood, sweat and tears.’” By early 1955, the group had smuggled into North Vietnam 8.5 tons of materiel including fourteen agent radios, 300 carbines, 90,000 rounds of carbine ammunition, fifty pistols, 10,000 rounds of pistol ammunition, and 300 pounds of explosives. Around 2.5 tons were delivered to a separate team of agents in Tonkin, run by Major Fred Allen and Lieutenant Edward Williams, “our only experienced counter-espionage officer.” The remaining materiel was cached along the Red River by Conein’s Saigon Military Mission, helped by the Navy.

Conein’s team in the north left with the last French troops on 9 October. It “had spent the last days in Hanoi in contaminating the oil supply of the bus company for a gradual wreckage of engines in the buses, in taking the first actions for delayed sabotage of the railroad (which required teamwork with a CIA special technical team in Japan who performed their part brilliantly), and in writing detailed notes of potential targets for future paramilitary operations. U.S. adherence to the Geneva Agreement prevented Conein’s team from carrying out the active sabotage it desired to do against the power plant, water facilities, harbors and bridges. The team had a bad moment when contaminating the oil. They had to work quickly at night, in an enclosed storage room. Fumes from the contaminant came close to knocking them out. Dizzy and weak kneed, they masked their faces with handkerchiefs and completed the job.”
²²

Fred Allen’s group, meanwhile, “was able to mount a Vietnamese paramilitary effort in Tonkin from the south, barely beating the Vietminh shutdown in Haiphong as his teams went in, trained and equipped….” A Navy team (Navy Lieutenant Edward Bain and Marine Captain Richard Smith) “became our official smugglers, as well as paymasters, housing officers, transportation officers, warehousemen, file clerks, and mess officers….

“On 21 November, twenty-one selected Vietnamese agents and cooks of our Hao paramilitary group [run by Fred Allen] were put aboard a Navy ship in the Saigon River, in daylight. They appeared as coolies, joined the coolie and refugee throng moving on and off ship, and disappeared one by one…. The agents were picked up from unobtrusive assembly points…. The ship took the agents, in compartmentalized groups, to an overseas point, the first stage in a movement to a secret training area.”
²³

The Vietminh, in their turn, were targeting the National Army of South Vietnam for subversion. “It was given top priority by the Vietminh Central Committee for operations against its enemy and about 100 superior cadres were retrained for the operations” months before the Geneva agreement was signed. “We didn’t know it at the time, but this was the Saigon Military Mission’s major opponent, in a secret struggle for the National Army….”
²⁴
Not only was much of South Vietnam’s army penetrated by the communist woodworm. The civilian infrastructure was also subverted by thousands of communist sympathizers who were to be targeted, in due course, by a program of “neutralization.” This, more often than not, meant the assassination of those holding public office in South Vietnam while wearing two hats, sometimes after a trial
in absentia
before a military tribunal, a process curiously similar to Israel’s quasi-judicial process in dealing with terrorist suspects. The system, codenamed Phoenix, permitted interrogation, confession, and imprisonment where this was feasible. It was constructed by the CIA and run, in practice, by South Vietnamese entities in partnership with elements of U.S. Special Forces including the Studies & Observations Group (later the Special Operations Group).

The toxic effect of the North’s subversion was to last throughout most of the armed conflict that was to follow. But the North’s greatest ally in alienating a majority in the South was Ngo Dinh Diem, an American puppet, elected president in a rigged referendum. In Saigon, for example, Diem received 133 per cent of the vote. Diem had a talent for making unnecessary enemies, notably the Buddhists (the majority religious group) whom he persecuted and non-Vietnamese minority ethnic groups such as the Montagnards living in remote mountain areas, contemptuously dismissed by Saigon as savages unworthy of civil rights.

Communists including veterans of the Resistance against Japanese occupation were able to exploit the disaffection that resulted. A few years later, the British, saddled with a despotic local Ruler in Oman, faced a similar dilemma. In time, the CIA would orchestrate a coup against their client Diem followed by his assassination (possibly stage-managed by Lucien Conein). Both Oman and Vietnam became surrogate free fire zones as part of the Cold War. In 1954, the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group, Vietnam, still active after the French defeat, had a core strength of just 342 men. U.S. Special Forces based in Okinawa worked in Vietnam for the first time in 1957 to train fifty-eight Vietnamese commandos at Nha Trang. China and the Soviets had already offered help to the Vietminh in North Vietnam two years earlier. In South Vietnam, clashes between the Vietcong and Army of the Republic of South Vietnam (ARVN) rose gradually until 1960. From January 1960 to September that year, the number of “contacts” surged from 180 to 545. The heat was on.