MY SPY-PILOT LIFE - The Long-term agent team: The Secret War

To command the clandestine VNAF squadron that would penetrate the North, William Colby sought out a flamboyant pilot with a thin Clark Gable mustache and a penchant for black flight suits. Though only thirty years old, already he was a Lt Colonel and commanded Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Air Base and seemed willing to fly anything, anywhere-but did that include piloting unmarked C.47 deep into North Vietnam, Colby asked?

The pilot smiled and said “When do we start?” The gutsy flyer eventually wound head his country’s Air Force and go on to be South Vietnam’s president-Nguyen Cao Ky (Permanent Government don’t worry about dignity of the leadership, because South Vietnam eventually be dissolved later on, according the ‘Axiom-1’) Ky recruited his best pilots, included myself, but months of training would precede their first operational flight. To help them, the CIA brought in National Chinese instructor pilots with hundreds of missions over mainland China very similar to what Ky’s crewmembers would fly-100 feet above the treetops, at night, under 30 percent moonlight.
CIA air experts at Takhli, Thailand, were tasked to help Colby plan the North Vietnam aerial penetrations; he couldn’t have found a more capable group. Colonel Harry Aderholt, likely the most experienced special operations officer in the Air Force, had just finished the CIA’s Tibet airlift, where unmarked C.130s had penetrated Chinese-occupied Tibet to parachute supplies and guerrillas to the pro-Dalai Lama resistance. On loan to the CIA for secret projects since the Korea War, Aderholt’s Thailand based organization had just been redirected to support the CIA’s expanding guerrilla force in Laos, using Air America planes, when the infiltration analysis job was assigned.
Assisting Aderholt was probably the CIA’s finest aerial infiltration planner, USAF Major Larry-Ropka, Studious, intense, a perfectionist, Ropka had planned all the Tibet flights, and if not one plane was lost, it was largely because he applied his whole being to such a task.
With 90 percent of the North’s population arrayed along its coastal lowlands and Red river Valley, Major Ropka could see that any approach from the Tonkin Gulf-the ‘front-door’-was certain to be met by MIG and antiaircraft gun. Therefore, he planned aerial infiltration routes through the less-populated mountainous border with Laos- the ‘back-door’- where terrain masking and electronic confusion were most effective.
To improve the ‘back-door’, Ropka had Air America planes in Laos climb to 5.000 feet, where they would appear on North Vietnamese radar, fly a ‘back-door’ approach, then descend to low level, below radar, and turn back to Thailand. After dozens of false alarms, the North’s air defense network would stop alerting fighters and antiaircraft units, and wouldn’t be able to distinguish between Ropka’ feints and the real infiltration flights, which were soon to begin.
The first airdropped group, Team “Atlas”, never came up on its appointed frequency; the plane that delivered them disappeared. Colonel Ky personally flew the next airdrop mission, inserting Team “Castor” deep in North Vietnam. Three months later Hanoi held a much-publicized trial for three Atlas survivors. Then Team Castor went off the air, and CIA handlers realized Team Dido and Echo were under enemy control, so they were played as “doubles”. The last team parachuted into North Vietnam in 1961, Team “Tarzan”, was presumed captured.
Recently U.2 pilot, Captain Power was shot down and captured on the Communist territories. Despite such losses, at least Colby now had an infrastructure for conducting his secret war that he could improve and build upon. But something beyond Colby’s control unexpectedly came into play. Two months after Agent Ares paddled ashore; another CIA component of George Bush’s class, expedition landed half a world away, in a debacle forever to be known by the name of its locale, The Bay of Pigs. The catastrophic failure of the Cuban-exile landing so embarrassed President Kennedy that he appointed General Maxwell Taylor Commission concluded the Cuba project had escalated beyond a size manageable by the CIA. It recommended a worldwide review of other CIA enterprises to learn if any had grown beyond intelligence operations and if so, switched them to military control. That action had been seriously hurt by the adverse tendency of Skull and WIB members.
Some chronicle’s accounts have tied George H.W. Bush to support work in the CIA’s 1961 Bay of the Pigs invasion. Recently, if any vice president in US history could fairly be known as “the secret-arms-deal vice president”, he would be the one. George H.W. Bush, Zapata offshore drilling Company, formed in the 1950-the firm is said to have scouted for the CIA in pre-Bay of Pigs surveillance of Cuba. Zapata Offshore organized a subsidiary to carry out Kuwait’s first deep sea oil drilling in 1961. Here analysis has to rely on implication and common sense. Adamson, Loftus, The Nation magazine, and the U.S journalism effort named Project Censored all posited some direct George H W Bush – CIA connection emerging between 1954 and 1963. Zapata provided commercial supplies for one of Dulles’ most notorious operations: the Bay of Pigs invasion which will be the main target of Kennedy based on seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The government acted against, seized the assets of many companies related against the alien property custodian under 1941, December of Trading with the Enemy Act such as Zapata de Mexico, Zapata International, Sea-cat Zapata, and Zapata Overseas. Why they want make money by exploitation of oil? Seven decades ago Hitler would like to exploit by “Synthetic-Fuel” for guaranteed national question on to reduce the dependence on foreign oil. Hydrogen fuel cell technology truly becomes a viable alternative.

William Colby’s growing secret war fit the commission’s criteria perfectly; during the summer of 1962 the CIA agreed to transfer these Southeast Asian programs to the military in 18 months, dubbing it Operation Switch-back. But on the very day scheduled for Switchback-1/Nov/1963- South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated. Then three weeks later, President Kennedy was assassinated as well; further delaying the transfer. The military had yet to create a unit to absorb the CIA programs.
After two presidents’ assassinations (Kennedy and Diem), under OPLAN-34A, issued on December 15, 1963, McNamara having instruction, intended to send only a symbolic message, limiting targets to “those that provide maximum pressure with minimum risk”. However, despite McNamara’s insistence that OPLAN-34A missions commence on February 1, 1964, it wasn’t until 24 January that “Military-Assistance-Command, Vietnam (MACV), finally organized the covert unit to take over the CIA programs; soon it would be the largest clandestine military unit since World War II OSS. Commanded by an Army colonel, it would include elements of all services, from Army Green- Berets and Navy SEAL to USAF Air Commandos, operating as SOG, the Special Operation Group, and a descriptive label that made a mockery of security. A few months later the unit was renamed, yet its acronym remained SOG, only now, SOG stood for Studies and Observations Group, a supposed gathering of quiet analysts devoted to academic study.
The Studies and Observations Group was neither subordinate to MACV nor its new commander, as General William Westmoreland; it answered directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) in the Pentagon, often with White House-level input, Skull and Bones encircled in controlled around J.F Kennedy. Only five non- SOG officers in Saigon were even briefed on its top-secret doings: Westmoreland, his chief of staff, his intelligence officer (J-2), the Seventh Air Force commander, and the commander of US Naval Forces, Vietnam.
SOG’ charter authorized operations from South Vietnam and Thailand into Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam, with contingency planning for northern Burma and China’s Kwangsi, Kwangtung and Yunnan Provinces, plus Hainan Island. Officially SOG would answer solely to an office in the Pentagon’s high-status E-Ring called SACSA, (the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities) a two-star general whose small staff responded only to the Joint-Chiefs’ operations officer (J-3), with unprecedented direct access to the Chairman of the Joint-Chiefs. Any money SOG needed would be buried in the Navy’s annuals budget.
Heading SOG’ secret war and bearing the title Chief SOG was a WWII paratroop officer who’d come into Special Forces in the 1950s, Colonel Clyde Russell. A veteran of combat parachute jumps in France and Holland with the 82nd Airborne Division then commanded the Europe-based 10th Special Forces Group, then the 7th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. With OPLAN-34A allowing no time for contemplation, Col Russell’s Saigon staff fell back on the tried and true and structured SOG like the old OSS, into air and maritime sections because these are the ways agents are transported- plus a psychological operations section similar to the OSS Morale Operations Division.
The CIA offered Col Russell the agency’s unique logistic channels for exotic hardware, such as suppressed weapons and wiretap devices, via the agency’s top-secret Far-East logistics base at Camp Chinen, Okinawa. Nearby was another office created by Operation Switchback, CISO, or the Counter Insurgency Support Office, which provided specialized logistics aid to SOG and Special-Forces.
0Another CIA contribution was a clandestine C-123 transport squadron from Taiwan, flown by Nationalist Chinese pilots; known as the First Flight Detachment, these four SOG airplanes bore removable U.S insignia and formerly had flown with Nationalist China’s top-secret 34th Squadron, which had been penetrating mainland China for more than a decade, inserting and supplying agents and dropping CIA sensors. The 34th Squadron U.2s had flown over China since 1960, spying on the Lop-Nor nuclear test site and Kansu missile range. First Flight’s C-123s had proved a tough target for SAM and MIG, penetrating the mainland two hundred times.
“First Flight” evolved from the Civil Air Transport Service (CATS) a CIA airline founded in 1949 to evacuate Chiang Kai-Shek’s followers to Taiwan. In 1954 CATS by C-119 supplied encircled French paratroopers at Dien Bien Phu, and then in 1958 supported a coup attempt against Indonesian strongman Sukarno. CATS thin cover side became Nationalist China’s 34th Squadron.
In addition to the covert Chinese squadron, the CIA turned over its three-year-old long-term agent program, which by 1964 had airdropped 22 teams into North Vietnam. Of these only 4 teams: Bell, Remus, Easy and Tourbillon- plus the singleton Ares-remained intact. Meanwhile, the agents to be inserted were being instructed at Camp Long Thanh, 20 miles east of Saigon, where Green Berets and CIA officers taught them intelligence and sabotage techniques, rough-terrain parachuting, weapons handling, Morse code and survival-skills to sustain them for years in North Vietnam. As a SOG officer coldly confides “most trainees were not capable of going
Any where and we had to get rid of them; at the same time, we couldn’t turn them loose in South Vietnam because they’d been briefed and was briefed again on operations in North Vietnam”. The solution was to do with them exactly what they had been trained and paid to do: ’parachute into North Vietnam’
The six-man Team Remus parachuted in April 16, 1962, near Dien Bien Phu to ‘establish a base area from which intelligence collection activities could be launched’. It was together ‘enemy military, political, and economic information; located supply drop zones and safe areas for possible infiltration of additional agents; collect available documents; and recruit sub sources and support personnel’. In 1964, Remus reported that it had sabotaged a couple of bridges, McNamara was elated. W Colby recalled that the Secretary of Defense “was just as excited as a baby” over such reports.” I remember him thinking this was a big deal, like that’s going to change the course of the war”. Because it was believed to be successful, Remus was reinforced five times. With the 1966 change in the agents’ mission, the team began to make excuses about why it had provided so little useful information. In 1967, SOG ordered the team to ex-filtrate two agents. They claimed it was too dangerous.

Intelligence collection by observation and exploitation of locally recruited sub sources, nothing remarkable was ever reported, according to SOG documents. Nevertheless, Team Easy was reinforced four times with a total of 23 men. When alerted that some of the team members were for exhilarated, Easy “went off the air” and stopped all radio communications.

       Team Eagle was inserted near the border with China on June 27, 1964. Its mission was to conduct sabotage operations on North Vietnam Routes 1 and 4, the Mui-Nam-Quan rail line and the Mai-Pha Air Base. There was no evidence that Team Eagle ever carried out any of these operations. It was also supposed to produce intelligence reports on these targets. According to a SOG assessment,” The information received was of little or no value”. In 1966, Eagle was tasked with the road watch mission. The result, according to SOG, were the same “The mission was not completed”. In 1968, the team was instructed to move south for exhilarated. Eagle reported it was not able to get itself in position to be exhilarated. Contact with the team stopped shortly thereafter
The final team considered operational in late 1967 was Team Red Dragon. Inserted on September 21, 1967, this seven-man team was located in Northern Province of Lao-Cay and Yen-Bai (Hoang-Lien-Son). These provinces were situated in Red River Valley along the Chinese-North VN border. Major rail, road, and water routes ran through these provinces. Team Red Dragon was to conduct sabotage and intelligence missions. According to the documents, it was largely unproductive and its security status was a matter of question since its initial radio contact. Apparently, there was a serious disagreement over whether the team had been captured and forced to work for the North Vietnamese as a double agent:” U.S personnel were convinced the Team was under Hanoi control, while the South VN counterpart case officer felt otherwise, ”Contact was maintained in 1968, but Red Dragon went off the air in 1969”
In May, June and July/1964, they were airdropped as Teams Boone, Buffalo, Lotus and Scorpion. All were captured. The few quality agents-in-training reinforced the in-place, Teams Remus and Toubillon.. SOG began recruiting fresh agents for a 21 week training program at Camp Long Thanh. It would be a slow start.

         After President Kennedy’ assassination, according the secret orders, many U.S military build up increase in intensity, magnitude; Impatience was driving the program, Bone-man McNamara had called for the first OPLAN-34A raid by February 1, 1964, incredibly, just seven days after SOG’ founding. Such insistence instigated perhaps the strangest episode of Vietnam’s cover war. Each proposed OPLAN-34-A operation had to weave its way between Defense, State and the White House for approval due the conflict was still between government administrations (Kennedy and Johnson) and Harriman, with each stop liable to change, restrict or delay SOG plans. Colonel Russell found this “a tremendous operational handicap” and complained that, “By the time we got it back, we were out of implementation time and the restraints were too many and too frequent because the president wasn’t policymaker”

OPLAN-34A perplexed Russell, because deniable attacks on objectives having little military value did not make sense. ”I don’t feel that the objectives of OPLAN-34A were clearly spelled out”. Colonel Russell later explained” So we didn’t know exactly what we were trying to do”. But this was not his only problems and so all generals as well. The secret agreement with China and Soviet wasn’t military and industry targets that are not the objectives because their personnel in there.

After President Diem’ assassination, strange chaotic-event take place, a certain evening of summer 1964, suddenly U.S helicopters flew to pick-up all U.S advisors in three Camps: Buon Ho, Buon Mega, and Boun Sapa to Ba Me Thuoc, highland province for the so called ‘urgent-meeting’ and typically during that night all Vietnamese officers were killed by highland minority (Rhade-Montagnard) After that massacre, the tribe Rhade’s soldiers were equipped with Carbine M.2 (automatic-firing-weapon) for their self-controlled, while ARVN troops were still equipped M.1. I was angry about having sacrificed my youth, professional flight operation to the traitor of U.S Special Forces from this Project-Delta. I was so frustrated
(However after four decades, by chance I found-out by discovering in the internet: authors Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, “The Wise-Men” Six Friends and the World They Made, book published in 1986 coinciding the death of the last Wiseman W A .Harriman, a leader among Six-Friends and the world they made at July 26, 1986, and his deputy Prescott Bush (death in 1972) Finally, by way of conclusion, I will just state my conviction that the war in Vietnam was a just war created by these Six Friends for their conspiracy in the Old ‘Eurasian Great Game’ And now resumed by George H W Bush for the New Game)
To support OPLAN-34A’s hit-and-run coastal attacks, the CIA had replaced its old junks with 88-foot high-speed Norwegian Nasty-class PT boats, bringing in former Norwegian skippers to help SOG SEAL instruct the new Vietnamese crews. Developed for 47-knot runs from Norway’s fjords to nip at passing Russian ships, the Nasty PTF (Patrol Type, Fast) were light, heavily armed and bat-out-of-hell fast, the naval cigarette boats of the 1960s. Accustomed to tiny runabouts and junks, however, our Vietnamese simply couldn’t master the Nasty boat at a tricky high speed maneuvers.

Within SOG’ Naval Advisory Detachment- a dozen SEAL from Boat-Support-Unit-One at Coronado, California; and five Marine Force Recon men-were plenty of eager volunteers to crew the Nasty for raiding the North, but political deniability absolutely precluded using Americans; indeed, throughout the war no SEAL ever would be allowed north of the 17th Parallel.

            But, a SOG staff officer shrewdly observed, the Norwegians weren’t Americans. However, any Caucasian at the throttles of a covert boat in Asian waters flew in the face of plausible denial; How could a Norwegian possibly explain his attacking the coast of North Vietnam? But in the rush to get the raids under way the absurd became the acceptable; thus, due to impatience, SOG’ first covert attacks on North Vietnam would be led by Norwegians.
On the night of February 16, 1964, three Norwegian-piloted Nasty attempted to land Vietnamese frogmen to demolish a bridge, but heavy coastal fire drove them away, aborting the mission. A few nights later another swimmer demolition was attempted, but it, too, failed, with eight Sea-Commando swimmers lost (with my speculation, these are serious allegations U.S counterespionage in advance warning, because this concurrency scam)
By early summer the swashbuckling Scandinavian skippers began displaying a tad too much joie de vivre for their sedate SOG superiors. As one warned, “They were getting in trouble in Da-nang, so there were definite fears in Washington circles that the whole program would be blown, because these people were getting involved with Vietnamese girls and the police in Da-nang”. With new urgency, Vietnamese boat crews were prepared to take over from the Scandinavians, but not before the latter got in a final few licks.
By July, SOG’ Nasty and Vietnamese Sea Commandos had demolished five targets in North Vietnam, followed by two hit-and-run, over-the beach attacks on 9 and 25 July. On 30 July, SOG launched its biggest bombardment ever, employing five PT’ Nasty against radar sites so far north, they were closer to Haiphong than to Danang, an action SOG headquarters praised as “well executed and highly successful, with secondary explosions”
Two days later, when word came that North Vietnamese PT boats had attacked the U.S destroyer Maddox?, in what became known as the “Tonkin Gulf incident”. Although he made no reference to the SOG raids, of which he was informed, President Lyndon Johnson warned Hanoi that another high-seas attack would have dire consequences, and ordered the destroyer Turner Joy to reinforce the Maddox.
I will discuss the ‘Axiom-2’ “The U.S had no legitimate reason to be involved in Vietnamese affairs”, in the dominant interpretation of the U.S-Vietnam War that was produced by the Triumvirate, composing William A Harriman, Prescott Bush, and Robert A Lovett; and introduced to teachers at most schools and universities as the basis for explaining the war, subsequently taken up by the antiwar movement during the late 1960s.
So, Tonkin Gulf Incident was the good-reason for the U.S troop invasion and retaliation on Vietnam soil.
Although Hanoi still denied it had a single soldier in Laos, by October 1965 its security, engineer and logistics troops there numbered at least 30,000 not to mention an additional 4500 men passing through each month on their way to South Vietnam. About two hundred truckloads of supplies rolled down the Harriman’s Super Highway, parallel with its P.O.L pipe-lines (Ho Chi Minh Trail named by Western-countries with specific political purpose, in contrast Hanoi named it Route 559) monthly, and by the fall of 1965 the Air Force crews already knew Hanoi had spun its 900-miles road system the length of Laos, all the way to South Vietnam’s Central Highlands. On 2 October 1965, I flown on the treetops along Ho Chi Minh Trail, from Tchepone to Target D-1, only about 20 miles northwest of Kham Duc, and Master Sergeant Donald-Duncan hanging in the door side took the pictures; meanwhile RF-101 Woodo, and U-2 fresh photos disclosed new roads in Laos, while other aerial photos snapshots by H.34 showed new truck traffic.
SOG’ capabilities in North Vietnam had been expanding apace with the rest of the war. By 1966, SOG’ Nationalist Chinese aviators of the First Flight Detachment were penetrating North Vietnam’s night sky almost monthly. In addition to parachuting supplies and reinforcements to the five established agent teams, First Flight had inserted another three teams. Even the H.34 Queen-Bees got into the act, in November 1965, when they landed Team Romeo in the southern panhandle, near Mu-Gia Pass. The four new agent teams plus the five surviving ex-CIA teams- Bell, Easy, Remus, Tourbillon, and the singleton, Ares- gave SOG nine teams and 112 agents in the enemy’s heartland.
SOG had reinforced all the old CIA teams except Ares, with some so expanded that they were almost small platoons. SOG was planning to reinforce Ares by sea, the same way that I wrote on infiltration by sea; as he’d been infiltrated nearly five years earlier, but using high-speed Nasty boats. During the three years the CIA managed the agent team program, 18 of 23 teams were lost, mostly upon landing; by contrast, excluding the malingerers SOG purposely dumped into North Vietnam in the spring of 1964, SOG had lost not just one team, although a few individual team members had been lost in parachute accidents or clashed with NVA patrols. It was an impressive turnaround.
SOG sought authority to establish a resistance movement in North Vietnam and combine it with a SAFE areas program.(SAFE was the acronym for Selected Areas For Evasion) The program evolved from a Strategic Air Command plan to recover nuclear bomber crews from remote regions of the Soviet Union, in turn an idea not without precedent. During WW II, the American OSS and British Special Operations Executive (SOE), working with Tito’s guerrillas, maintained enclaves deep in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia for bailouts and emergency landings. Likewise, during the Korean War, the CIA had guerrilla bands on many offshore islands where crippled airplanes could ditch and fliers could bail out. Actually, SOG wanted similar SAFE areas west and north of Hanoi, where pilots could bail out and receive medical aid, food and protection, then be retrieved by helicopters from Laos; when properly armed and supported by tactical air for rescue.
KQ Trung Tá Trương Văn Vinh