Friday, July 10, 2009

The Lost Commando






















THE LOST COMMANDOS
Recruits of a Top-Secret U.S. Program Are Emerging Years Later From the Shadows of Vietnam
On that issue, the few who have taken up their cause, including two former U.S. Army commanders, believe that the U.S. government has a moral obligation to provide them some back pay and benefits and to speed the emigration of those who remain in Vietnam. But their efforts have not been successful. The United States, which has spent millions of dollars searching Southeast Asia for American prisoners of war and has yet to find one, has done very little to bring back the surviving Vietnamese agents it sent on dangerous missions. According to [Tourison], a former intelligence officer for the Department of Defense, the United States is too embarrassed to admit responsibility for one of the worst covert operations of the war. "The plan to infiltrate the north had long outlived its usefulness, and it was believed by the high command that the operations would not amount to much," he says. "In the end, it was a foolish waste of lives, and bad intelligence. It represented a major underestimation of the enemy, the kind of underestimation we made so many times in Vietnam."
That month, North Vietnamese torpedo boats reportedly attacked two U.S. destroyers in the much-disputed Gulf of Tonkin incident, which some critics say was a ruse used by the United States to escalate the war. President [Lyndon B. Johnson] called the Tonkin incident "unprovoked" aggression and ordered the bombing of North Vietnam-the first step in a massive buildup of U.S. forces. But in the months leading up to the incident, according to the official Navy history, 34A commandos had been conducting coastal raids in the area, raids that the North Vietnamese believed were coordinated by the U.S. destroyers.
Although [Guong Duc Vu] and other commandos have obtained welfare and food stamps after immigrating to the United States, efforts to secure veterans benefits or special priority for those still in refugee camps have failed. Whether they are more deserving than the hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese soldiers who have received no special help after being captured by the Communists is debatable. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs usually requires that someone serve in the U.S. armed forces to qualify for benefits. By special acts of Congress, however, Filipinos whose units were under U.S. commanders during World War II qualify for limited veterans benefits. Similarly, free medical services are available to former Polish and Czechoslovakian soldiers who fought on the Allies' side during World War I and II if they have lived in the United States for at least 10 years.

ON THE TRAIN RIDE FROM PRISON, NHI HUNG DINH SAW HIS COUNTRY for the first time in 18 years. He would never forget the view. Rubble, bombed-out buildings and craters scarred the landscape. Conditions were so squalid in Vinh, a major port in the panhandle of northern Vietnam, that he did not want to get off the train to stretch his legs. The people seemed listless, and Dinh spotted pickpockets among the waiting passengers. It was 1982, seven years after the end of the Vietnam War, but much of the city was still in ruin-the target of some of the conflict's heaviest naval and aerial bombardment.
His train headed south across the Demilitarized Zone, which once split Vietnam into two countries, and pulled into Hue. In 1968, the Viet Cong had ushered in Tet, the Asian lunar New Year, by turning this lovely old town of palaces and temples into a bloody battleground. Shell-pocked buildings still lined the streets, and Dinh saw Amerasian youths selling fruits, cookies and black market cigarettes. He wondered who would raise them. Their fathers, American GIs, had left long ago. It was the same all the way to Ho Chi Minh City, which Dinh had known as Saigon.
At the end of the 700-mile journey, he stood in disbelief outside his family's home in the peaceful seaside town of Vung Tau. It was 10 in the evening. More than 20 years before, he had left the house a cocky, hotheaded young man bolstered, he says, by an American military adviser's promise that he would be a hero. Now, Dinh was returning, middle-aged and in ill health. There would be no hero's welcome-no one was expecting him.
The two police officers who had escorted him from prison pounded on the door and announced Dinh's arrival. There was some commotion inside, and Dinh heard members of his family cursing. They refused to open the door. A brother-in-law flatly accused him of being an impostor. His 75-year-old mother was convinced he must be a ghost. "You're dead, son, go on your way, and I will pray for your soul," she said through the door.
There was no reason for her to think otherwise. Almost two decades before, South Vietnamese military officials had told her that Dinh had been killed during a mission. Where, they would not say. It was a secret. After that, the family received death benefits courtesy of the U.S. government. The lump sum amounted to a year of Dinh's pay-about $300.
Not knowing what else to do, Dinh continued to knock on the door and insist that he was who he said he was. "Soul nothing! He's home!" yelled one of the officers. Finally, the bolt slid back, and his mother realized that the man outside was indeed her son. She wept and collapsed in his arms. Dinh sank into a chair, too numb to speak. It had been so long.
Dinh had been a member of Team Romeo, a commando unit of 10 young Vietnamese, trained, paid and commanded by the U.S. government. For almost a decade, beginning in 1961, he and at least 700 men like him, by one estimate, were sent to wage guerrilla warfare in North Vietnam, first by the Central Intelligence Agency and later by the U.S. Army. Those who were not killed were captured and left to languish for decades in Communist prison camps. Now, the survivors are slowly emerging, bringing with them haunting questions about a top-secret operation that U.S. military leaders admit was a debacle and that might have helped trigger the United States' fateful decision in 1964 to dramatically escalate the Vietnam War.
According to the military, former intelligence officials, historians and the commandos themselves, these men were part of a highly classified operation-which came to be called Operation 34A by the military-that continued from 1961 to 1970 despite repeated failures and the doubts of U.S. leaders. Sedgwick Tourison, an investigator for the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs, says that since 1979, hundreds of the former agents and commandos have been released from prison. Many have made their way to the homes of astonished relatives in Vietnam who had been told years before that their loved ones had perished. Between 50 and 60 former commandos are thought to have fled Vietnam for the United States. The rest remain in Southeast Asian refugee camps or in Vietnam, where they are treated as second-class citizens.
Their actual numbers are hard to determine. Much of the documentation about the operations remains secret in military record centers, and what has been declassified provides only a glimpse of what happened to them. In an attempt to locate American MIAs in Vietnam, Tourison says that during the mid- to late 1980s he interviewed nearly all the former commandos living in the United States. From those and other interviews he estimates that 400 to 450 CIA and military operatives, out of a total of about 700, are still living. Dale Andrade, a historian for the government's Center for Military History in Washington, says his best estimate is that 200 to 300 men participated in the 34A part of the operation.
But if the numbers are open to question, the disastrous outcome is not. "It was not worth the effort at all, in my appraisal," retired U.S. Army Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who commanded U.S. ground forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, says of the program. "It was just not productive. We grew skeptical of the teams and skeptical of the intelligence they produced. Not much was contributed to the war effort."
The cost of that failure has been borne by the commandos for years. Imprisoned for war crimes, they endured psychological torture, malnutrition, isolation and living conditions designed to break their spirits or kill them. In refugee camps, they watched as other South Vietnamese who had only spent a couple of years in re-education camps were allowed to emigrate long before they were. Those who came to the United States have had difficulty adapting to the culture. Some still eat only one small meal a day-their prison regimen is hard to shake-and many suffer from medical problems. A few have found meaningful work, but many now live on welfare or the generosity of friends, family or their former comrades. All have sacrificed their youth, and betrayal is a common word among them.
The United States did little, if anything, to seek the commandos' release from prison during the Paris peace talks in 1973 and has not given them veterans benefits for their service. "There is no question who we are," says Ngung Van Le, a former commando who spent almost 17 years in prison and immigrated to Baltimore in 1985. "We fought for our country, but from my standpoint, the United States must do more than just turn its back on us."
On that issue, the few who have taken up their cause, including two former U.S. Army commanders, believe that the U.S. government has a moral obligation to provide them some back pay and benefits and to speed the emigration of those who remain in Vietnam. But their efforts have not been successful. The United States, which has spent millions of dollars searching Southeast Asia for American prisoners of war and has yet to find one, has done very little to bring back the surviving Vietnamese agents it sent on dangerous missions. According to Tourison, a former intelligence officer for the Department of Defense, the United States is too embarrassed to admit responsibility for one of the worst covert operations of the war. "The plan to infiltrate the north had long outlived its usefulness, and it was believed by the high command that the operations would not amount to much," he says. "In the end, it was a foolish waste of lives, and bad intelligence. It represented a major underestimation of the enemy, the kind of underestimation we made so many times in Vietnam."
FEB. 4, 1967, WAS NGUNG VAN LE'S 23RD BIRTHDAY. THAT day, North Vietnamese soldiers surrounded Le's position and beat him with their rifle butts. It was just as well, he says. Torrential rain, a lack of food and fighting through dense jungle in a desperate run for the Laotian border had left the members of Team Hadley too tired to resist. Like so many other 34A missions before, the operation had gone badly. The enemy spotted Team Hadley's helicopters as the unit crossed into North Vietnam. Within 10 days, the North Vietnamese had captured the whole team.
Told by South Vietnamese officials that Le was dead, his parents held a memorial service. But their son was alive hundreds of miles to the north, where he would spend 16 years in prison, convicted of espionage by the North Vietnamese government, then another six months in jail for trying to escape from Vietnam after his release from custody.
Incarceration in such prisons as Pho Lu, Thanh Tri and Phong Quang took its toll. Le was forced to do manual labor all day, eating little more than six ounces of grain cereal. "There was nothing to eat for breakfast. You might get a potato or a piece of turnip once in a while. The barley was hard to digest and hurt your intestines," Le says in Vietnamese. "In time, the slightest amount of work became excruciatingly painful."
Human waste filled the compound and barracks, where there was no running water. Visiting nurses often wore face masks, he says, because the stench permeated everything. Disease was rampant among the prisoners. Despite the horrors of his imprisonment, Le refused to be re-educated, although it might have meant being released. "I resisted and many, many times I was shackled and put in isolation." In 1973, when his captors refused to release him and other prisoners after the Paris peace talks, Le organized a hunger strike. He spent six months in solitary confinement and lost almost half his body weight of 135 pounds. But he survived. "What I could not do was sink down to the level of my captors," he says. "I had to maintain my own honor. If I did not, I would become no better than they were."
In 1976, almost 10 years after his capture, authorities allowed prisoners to write letters home, and Le's family learned that he was alive. "If it is true," his mother and father wrote back skeptically, "you will never believe how overjoyed we are." They asked Le to tell them things only they would know. In his return letter, he reminded them of things he did as a child. Convinced that he was their son, Le's parents took down the picture of him they had placed in a shrine at home for deceased relatives.
Le completed his prison term in 1982 and was paroled. After repeated attempts, he escaped to Malaysia in 1984 and spent a year in refugee camps before the United Nations helped him immigrate to the United States. "I know of four commandos who have been in refugee camps in Thailand and Malaysia for almost two years," Le says. "They are not missing in action. It is very discouraging to know that no one really cares."
THE OPERATION REFERRED TO IN MILITARY PARLANCE AS "34 Alpha" originated in 1961 as a highly touted secret CIA program to organize armed resistance in North Vietnam. U.S. covert operations had actually begun there after the Geneva Conference in 1954, which divided the country into two nations. A handful of CIA operatives formed squads of anti-Communist Vietnamese to organize guerrillas, abduct and assassinate Communist officials, set up espionage networks and distribute propaganda. But the agents had difficulty eluding the Communist control structure, a tightly knit web of local cadres and informers that pervaded the country. Few of the CIA teams survived, and the effort ended in failure by the late 1950s.
According to a section on undercover activities in the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department's controversial account of the Vietnam War, the CIA renewed its covert operations several years later, when President John F. Kennedy called for a campaign of clandestine warfare in North Vietnam and Laos. Former CIA Director William E. Colby, then chief of the agency's Far Eastern division, started the new program in 1961.
Hung Quoc Tran was one of the first recruits. In the late 1950s, he quit his job as manager of the family jewelry store in Saigon. Channeled through the South Vietnamese military, Tran says, he eventually came under the tutelage of three American CIA officers. In 1961, Tran says, the CIA gave him the code name "Columbus." His orders were to recruit North Vietnamese citizens sympathetic to South Vietnam as spies and to deliver a series of secret messages to anti-Communists in Hanoi. A CIA trawler dropped him along the North Vietnamese coast in May, 1961, and Tran made his way to Hanoi posing as a student. He delivered the first message but the next evening he discovered he was being followed by North Vietnamese security. He was stunned they were on to him so quickly. He managed to drop off another letter to the rebels, but one day in June, police walked up to him on the street, arrested him and took him to Hoa Lo, later known as the Hanoi Hilton.
According to Colby, now 72 and still working as a lawyer in Washington, other agents were equally ineffective. The North Vietnamese captured almost all the operatives and penetrated the program with their own agents. According to recently declassified North Vietnamese records, 34 agents from 17 CIA teams were killed, and about 140 operatives were captured in 1963 alone. Many of those captured were coerced into working for the enemy; those who were not often ended up in showcase trials in Hanoi.
Despite the difficulties, U.S. leaders reorganized the operation a third time and continued it under the aegis of the military. In January, 1964, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff officially began 34A, a more ambitious program of covert operations in North Vietnam. Missions were cleared by the secret 303 Committee, headed by National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and staffed with senior CIA, Pentagon and State Department officials. Day-to-day operations were taken away from the CIA and delegated to the Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Studies and Observation Group, a branch of the U.S. Army that oversaw all types of covert activity.
According to the official history of the U.S. Navy, the groundwork for turning such covert operations over to the military had been laid on Nov. 20, 1963, when Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara ordered a program for large-scale, covert actions against North Vietnam. At the time, Colby says, he tried to warn U.S. commanders that the operation would not work. He noted the CIA's failures in Vietnam and argued that similar CIA operations in China and Korea in the late 1940s and early 1950s had not been effective. "It was my contention (that we should) phase it down," Colby says. "But the military brass wanted to continue. They had a can-do attitude."
Garbed in black pajamas and camouflage and armed with Swedish submachine guns, pistols and grenades, individual agents and teams were to infiltrate the north by helicopter or small boat. As in the previous CIA missions, recruits were mostly natives of North Vietnam, young men, full of bravado and eager to do something for their country. Once they were trained, military records show, the United States sent them into North Vietnam to organize resistance, raid naval installations, monitor the movement of enemy supplies and troops and blow up bridges and power plants. Teams were assigned to missions lasting a few days to years. According to the Pentagon Papers, McNamara, in a December, 1963, memo to President Lyndon B. Johnson, called the proposal for Operation 34A an "excellent job . . . presenting a wide variety of . . . operations against North Vietnam." U.S. Army Gens. Earl Wheeler and Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed. By June, 1964, however, the first indications of failure surfaced when, according to the official history of the Navy, a series of raids along the North Vietnamese coast produced little except considerable dissatisfaction from ranking commanders: U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge said it "might be good training, but we're certainly having no effect on Hanoi." Westmoreland, who eventually became the army's chief of staff, expressed his doubts by July, 1964. Finally, in August, McNamara himself became worried.
That month, North Vietnamese torpedo boats reportedly attacked two U.S. destroyers in the much-disputed Gulf of Tonkin incident, which some critics say was a ruse used by the United States to escalate the war. President Johnson called the Tonkin incident "unprovoked" aggression and ordered the bombing of North Vietnam-the first step in a massive buildup of U.S. forces. But in the months leading up to the incident, according to the official Navy history, 34A commandos had been conducting coastal raids in the area, raids that the North Vietnamese believed were coordinated by the U.S. destroyers.
Despite the indications that 34A was failing, the operation continued as the Vietnam War broadened and American troops poured into the country. Westmoreland says he was briefed from time to time on the operation, but it became a low priority because his attention was directed toward the buildup of U.S. forces. Some of the program's more immediate commanders, such as Col. Donald Blackburn, now a retired general living in Florida, say that they, too, had doubts but continued to send in teams. Blackburn also says he changed the role of some teams to reconnaissance missions that lasted no more than a week.
By 1968, the last 34A team had been sent into North Vietnam; according to Tourison it was dropped by mistake on top of an enemy anti-aircraft installation. Two years later, the teams had all been killed or captured, or were working for the enemy. "The Vietnamese were helpful and brave, but it just did not work," Colby says. "I tried to turn it off after a year or two. Yet, the military wanted to make a fresh start. I don't think they were very effective. But in war, you try everything you can."
SINCE HIS YOUTH IN NORTH VIETNAM, NHI HUNG DINH says, he wanted to avenge his father and other political dissidents who had been forced to flee to South Vietnam because of political persecution by the Communists. His anti-Marxist fervor, he recalls, attracted the attention of a Catholic priest who helped recruit him for covert operations when he was 18.
"I liked the glamorous side of espionage," Dinh, who once fancied himself as a Humphrey Bogart, says in Vietnamese. "I saw it was different from what other people did. I thought the military would be too ordinary, but this would allow traveling here and there, and you'd always be able to have a gun on you."
Sitting in his cramped Huntington Beach apartment recently, Dinh remembers the assurances his American military advisers gave him during training. " `Everywhere you are, there we will be,' " he quotes them as saying. "We didn't see them anywhere."
Dinh's first mission as a 34A commando was on Nov. 19, 1965. It was his last. Team Romeo's choppers flew into North Vietnam. The plan was to stay two years, conducting reconnaissance and sabotage. Instead, the commandos were lost in the jungle for six weeks after being dropped off at the wrong place. Border defense forces finally ambushed the team the first week of January, 1966.
Romeo's members were first sent to prison in Quang Binh, where each commando was put into an underground cell. "A grave for the living," Dinh calls the cells. After nine months, he was transferred to another prison in Thanh Tri near Hanoi and spent a year in solitary confinement. A daily bowl of rice barely kept him alive. On the day of his release in 1982, authorities gave him 20 dong, worth about 2 cents. He says he spent it all on noodle soup at the first food stand he came to. The peddler dished out the portion into a tub instead of a bowl. There was so much, he says, he asked his police escorts to help him eat it.
When he returned home, he found not only his family waiting, but also his fiancee, Bay Nguyen. "His mother told me that he had died," Nguyen says. "But I continued to think that he was still alive." On their wedding night, six months later, she learned for the first time what he had been through. She cried over the scars his shackles had deeply etched around his wrists and ankles. "He told us about how they had stomped on his stomach and about how everyone had open sores from lice in the camps," she says. "There are still scars all over his body."
By 1990, Dinh had managed to get himself and his family to the United States under a U.S. resettlement program for political prisoners, but not before he served three more years for trying to escape from Vietnam. Dinh, 54, and his family now live with another Vietnamese family in a $450-a-month two-bedroom apartment. They get $770 a month in welfare and food stamps. He shares his bed with his wife and their two sons, Anh Hong, 6, and Quan Hong, 4. Dinh, whose injuries left him with chronic fatigue and an inability to concentrate, cannot work.
"Now, I think that I as an individual was so insignificant," he says. "The Americans abandoned an entire government, (so) what am I? I just want people to understand it wasn't as if I was sweet-talked into this. I went into North Vietnam because of my country. Now, I can only live from day to day."
A year after Dinh was captured, U.S. Army Lt. Gen. John K. Singlaub, then a colonel, assumed command of the unit that oversaw 34A missions. Singlaub, who later funneled arms to the Nicaraguan Contras and remains an anti-Communist activist in Alexandria, Va., says that a short while after he took command he became convinced that most of his teams in North Vietnam had been "rolled up by Communist security." In many cases, radio operators were broken under torture and forced to act as double agents. They lured other 34A teams into ambushes and repeatedly ordered airdrops of U.S. equipment the North Vietnamese could use. Retired U.S. Army Col. Fred Caristo, who helped run 34A missions as a captain, remembers one radioman ordering 30 pistols and silencers, 200 cartons of Salem cigarettes, 20 Seiko watches and dozens of pairs of paratrooper boots. "I mean we're talking about some real goodies," says Caristo, who now lives in Woodbridge, Va.
The operation soon emphasized ferreting out double agents and team members who worked for the enemy. Supplies were booby-trapped and teams were lured into position for airstrikes. Yet, in a still-classified report, Singlaub says now, he concluded that the Communist network of informers made it extremely difficult to establish covert operations. "It was not completely futile," Singlaub says, "but from the standpoint of achieving its original goals it was. It was compromised to the extent that it could not achieve those goals."
In retrospect, Dale Andrade, who had some expertise in covert operations during the Vietnam War, contends that U.S. leaders did not take the operation seriously enough. "What makes the tragedy greater," he says, "is that we relied on an operation like this, when we could not think of anything better to do. To the Vietnamese it was very patriotic. But when you read the Pentagon Papers, it is clear that our leaders didn't think it would work very well. The South Vietnamese didn't realize the doubts the Americans had. In that sense, it is tragic."
THE CAPTURED CIA AND 34A COMMANDOS ENDED UP IN RE-EDUCAtion camps and prisons ranging from the infamous Hanoi Hilton to squalid facilities of barbed wire and thatched huts in the countryside. Dinh and Le say they saw scores of 34A commandos and CIA operatives in prison, and many of them died of malnutrition, dysentery, malaria and tropical parasites. Prisoners deemed incorrigible were put into isolation cells for months.
But in late 1972, as the Paris peace talks convened, clothing and food improved for the captured commandos. Word spread among them that all prisoners of war would be released under the emerging treaty. On Jan. 27, 1973, the cease-fire agreement was signed by the United States, South Vietnam and North Vietnam, calling for the return of prisoners of war within 60 days. Although almost 600 U.S. POWs were released, the commandos-some of whom had been in the same prisons as the Americans-were not. In protest, scores of them staged a series of hunger strikes that were mercilessly broken up by prison guards armed with clubs and dogs.
At the negotiating table in Paris, the United States might not have been in any position to ask for the release of the commandos. "How could you ask for them?" Andrade asks. "These were not supposed to be United States teams, and you would not want to disclose your collusion in a secret operation. Even if we were involved in the training and the missions, it was (South Vietnamese) President Nguyen Van Thieu's job to ask for them."
Apparently, the South Vietnamese leader was prepared to ask but did not. According to a former South Vietnamese army colonel now living in Orange County who asked that his name not be used, a list of more than 100 captured South Vietnamese commandos and operatives was supposed to be discussed during the talks. The colonel said that he had participated in preparations for the Paris peace talks and knew of the list of POWs. Thieu, he says, ordered it stricken from the discussions, fearing that the commandos would organize an uprising against his government upon their return. Thieu's whereabouts are unknown.
Tourison, who is writing a book on the commandos, says there is strong evidence that the United States knew the commandos were alive yet did not negotiate for their release. Trials of many of the men were written about by North Vietnamese newspapers or broadcast on their radio networks, he says. Caristo, too, recalls that there were broadcasts about surviving commandos after their families had been paid death benefits. But to his knowledge, he says, the surviving families were never told of the news. "Our intelligence operation failed, and we lied to their families, " Tourison says. "When we had a chance to get them out, we did not take it."
John Madison, now a retired U.S. Army colonel, who headed a U.S. delegation sent to Vietnam to assure the return of American prisoners of war, says he does not recall that the commandos were ever mentioned to him nor was his delegation instructed to inquire about them. The responsibility, he says, rested with the South Vietnamese government, but he does not recall the South Vietnamese talking about them either. Retired U.S. Army Col. Harry G. Summers Jr., a member of the same delegation, says the commandos should have been repatriated under the peace treaty's broad language related to prisoners of war. "They should have been included, but I am not sure their names were brought up by us or anyone else," says Summers, now editor of Vietnam magazine. "Trying them for war crimes or espionage could have been a way the North Vietnamese were able to hang on to them. If anyone is to blame, they are."
SEVEN YEARS AFTER THE Paris peace talks, Guong Duc Vu, now 54, was among the first commandos to escape from prison and make it to the United States. For 10 years, he has lived with his wife, mother and three children in a roach-infested, two-room flat in Chicago that is bare except for a bed salvaged from the garbage and a shelf of religious icons.
Vu was a member of a commando team sent on raids along the North Vietnamese coast. His first three missions had to be aborted. On his fourth and final raid in March, 1964, Vu was captured after his team could not find the patrol craft it was supposed to sink. "We were trying to find another target when some other boats came into view," Vu recalls. "Their guns opened fire. One of our men was killed and another was hit." After a month on the run, he and another team member were captured while they were trying to walk back to South Vietnam.
For 16 years, Vu lived in a filthy thatched prison hut and supplemented his daily ration of barley with snakes, cockroaches and mice. When that wasn't enough, he cinched banana leaves around his midsection to relieve the hunger pangs.
Vu says that in 1980 he was transferred to another camp, where prisoners occasionally received temporary passes to visit relatives. After one furlough, Vu did not return, becoming a fugitive and risking a longer prison term. He joined the exodus of more than a million Vietnamese who left the impoverished nation by boat or dangerous overland routes to reach U.N. refugee camps. Some drowned as overcrowded vessels capsized in heavy seas. Others simply vanished on jungle trails.
"Over there, life had nowhere to go. Here we have freedom," says Vu, speaking in Vietnamese. "My family was reunited only because of God. I never believed we would be back together."
He and his family have tried to be optimistic. He no longer faces the risk of recapture, the prospect of more years in prison or the stigma of an espionage conviction that would keep him from getting work in Vietnam. But lately they have had a string of misfortune. Vu was laid off from his job as a carpenter a few months ago, and his youngest son is a hemophiliac. "We're so weary of everything now," Vu says. "We just want to be left in peace to live day to day."
Although Vu and other commandos have obtained welfare and food stamps after immigrating to the United States, efforts to secure veterans benefits or special priority for those still in refugee camps have failed. Whether they are more deserving than the hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese soldiers who have received no special help after being captured by the Communists is debatable. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs usually requires that someone serve in the U.S. armed forces to qualify for benefits. By special acts of Congress, however, Filipinos whose units were under U.S. commanders during World War II qualify for limited veterans benefits. Similarly, free medical services are available to former Polish and Czechoslovakian soldiers who fought on the Allies' side during World War I and II if they have lived in the United States for at least 10 years.
Changing the qualifications for veterans benefits is a complicated process, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Exceptions can only be made by act of Congress. "It is quite an effort to get things done. In the case of these Vietnamese, they probably aren't qualified for benefits under the current rules," says spokesman William Layer. "Just because our military used segments of a native population for operations, doesn't necessarily qualify them for anything."
But some of the former commandos believe that they should receive benefits because they were trained, controlled and paid by the U.S. government. "Some of these guys spent more than 20 years behind bars. They certainly deserve something for their efforts," Caristo says.
Singlaub looked into the possibility of compensation, but, he says, the government was unable to rationalize helping the commandos unless the same benefits were extended to all former South Vietnamese soldiers in the United States.
"The explanation was that they are in the same position as regular South Vietnamese soldiers," Singlaub says.
"At one time we looked for benefits for these guys, but people want to forget the war," Caristo says. "They are more interested in U.S. MIAs and normalization of relations with Vietnam."
Tourison estimates that as many as 200 commandos have applied to come to the United States through U.S. refugee programs but only three or four have gotten through despite the fact that they spent much more time in prison under harsher conditions than any captured officer from the Republic of Vietnam's defeated army.
"We have been obligated in the past to help U.S. employees whether or not they were American citizens. We have done more for people who have done less for us than these men," Tourison says. "These guys have paid a price that few American prisoners of war have ever paid."
What is being done on their behalf usually takes place on an individual basis outside the realm of government. Commandos lend each other money or pool their resources to fly a family to the United States from Vietnam. Occasionally, Ngung Van Le and others have informed the United Nations of former commandos who have made it to refugee camps. Supporters, like Tourison, have written letters to help them get jobs or welfare benefits.
In 1987, Tourison wrote the state of California to attempt to get $700 a month in disability payments for Tan Van Nguyen, a 34A commando who now lives in San Jose. Nguyen was captured in 1965 and ended up serving almost 20 years of a life sentence. He participated in one of the 1973 hunger strikes and suffered broken bones and crippling internal injuries before he lapsed into unconsciousness for three days. He is unable to work.
Most commandos have tried, however, to make it on their own, reconciled to the fact that not much will be done for them. In 1984, Hung Quoc Tran finally made it to the United States, where his autobiography "Thep Den" ("Black Steel"), written under the pen name Binh Chi Dang, became popular in the Vietnamese immigrant community. A U.S. official, Tran says, questioned him about American POWs who might still be alive in Vietnam. When Tran asked what was being done for the commandos, the official said that they were not the United States' responsibility.
"Before the man left," Tran says, "he gave me a business card and said to contact him if ever I needed help getting a job. I never called him. We don't want to ask for any more help. We survived the prisons, and we can survive here."
Ngung Van Le, now 47, earns a living hand-engraving silver and pewter in Baltimore. Since he came to the United States, he has spent hundreds of hours telling the Defense Department about the Vietnamese prison system. Officials asked if there are American prisoners of war still in Vietnam. Le says he did not see any after the Paris peace accords.
Le, like many of the former commandos, remains a kind of prisoner. He would like to get married, but he has no prospects. Though he used to get carsick when he first came to the United States, his only pride and joy, he says, is a new Toyota Corolla. Home is a tidy basement room rented from a Vietnamese family. On top of the TV is an old photograph of Team Hadley taken a few days before the unit was dropped into North Vietnam. The kitchen is a hot plate, and his few possessions all fit into the 9-by-12-foot space. Ulcers and intestinal problems caused by the prison diet limit Le to one small meal a day.
"There is probably a certain similarity," he says quietly, "to what I have been used to."
mandos

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Tâm Thư



Trân trọng kính gửi:
- Quý Niên Trưởng, quý Chiến Hữu
- Quý Tập Thể, Liên Hội Cựu Chiến Sĩ VNCH
- Quý Hội Đoàn Cựu Quân Nhân
Một câu chuyện thương tâm cần giúp đỡ,
Trong một tuần lễ anh chị Biệt Kích Nhảy Bắc Hà văn Chấp đã cùng nhau giã từ cõi đời trong hoàn cảnh khó khăn và thiếu thốn của gia đình.
Chị Nguyễn Thị Vinh, vợ Biệt Kích Quân sinh năm 1924, đã được an táng trong Peak Family thứ Sáu, ngày 7 tháng 3 năm 2008.
Anh Hà Văn Chấp sinh năm 1927, đã được phủ Quốc Kỳ VNCH và chôn cất cũng trong Peak Family thứ Ba, ngày 11 tháng 3 năm 2008. Anh là một trong những người chiến sĩ nhảy Bắc đầu tiên của gia đình Biệt Kích Nhảy Bắc và vẫn còn bằng ban thưởng của của Cố Tổng Thống Ngô Đình Diệm .
Người con trai duy nhất Hà Văn Dũng vừa định cư đang làm công cho nhà hàng với hoàn cảnh gia đình rất túng thiếu một vợ và 6 con nhỏ, vì mới định cư. Đứng trước hoàn cảnh khó khăn và được sự yêu cầu cùng ủy nhiệm của gia đình chúng tôi Phạm Văn Hòa nguyên Trưởng Toán Công Tác Nha Kỹ Thuật đã quyết định giúp đỡ bằng cách gửi thông báo này đến để kính xin quý Niên Trưởng, Chiến Hữu vui lòng của ít lòng nhiều, vui lòng nếu được xin gửi chi phiếu thẳng vào Trust Fund account Ha Van Chap tại bất cứ nhà băng Bank of America nào trên toàn nội điạ Hoa Kỳ và thế giới. Lưu ý Trust Fund Account chỉ hạn định trong vòng 90 ngày.
Quý vị có thể đến bất cứ chi nhánh nhà băng Bank of America để chuyển số tiền giúp đỡ.
Trương mục tại Hoa Kỳ # 0932272259
Trương mục ngoài Hoa Kỳ (International) # 121000358 – 0932272259

Hoặc gửi chi phiếu về điạ chỉ:

HÀ ANH DŨNG
4117 West McFadden Ave Space # 18
Santa Ana, CA 92704
Điện thoại: 714-234-8957

Thay mặt tang quyến chúng tôi thành thật tri ân lòng quảng đại bác ái của quý vị. Trân trọng kính cảm tạ quý báo chí, đài phát thanh, truyền hình, báo điện tử đã tiếp tay thông báo này trong tinh thần bất vụ lợi.
Trân trọng kính đa tạ,


Tran trong kinh gui:
- Quy Nien Truong, quy Chien Huu
- Quy Tap The, Lien Hoi Cuu Chien Si VNCH
- Quy Hoi Doan Cuu Quan Nhan

Mot cau chuye thuong tam can giup do,
Trong mot tuan le anh chi Biet Kich Nhay Bac Ha van Chap đa cung nhau gia tu coi đoi trong hoan canh kho khan va thieu thon cua gia đinh.
Chi Nguyen Thi Vinh, vo Biet Kich Quan sinh nam 1924, đa duoc an tang trong Peak Family thứ Sau, ngay 7 thang 3 nam 2008.
Anh Ha Van Chap sinh nam 1927, đa đuoc phu Quoc Ky VNCH va chon cat cung trong Peak Family thu Ba, ngay 11 thang 3 nam 2008. Anh la mot trong nhung nguoi chien si nhay Bac dau tiên cua gia đinh Biệt Kich Nhay Bac va van con bang ban thuong cua Co Tong Thong Ngo Dinh Diem .
Nguoi con trai duy nhat Ha Van Dung vua đinh cu dang lam cong cho nha hang voi hoan canh gia dinh rat tung thieu mot vo va 6 con nho, vi moi đinh cu. Dung truoc hoan canh kho khan va duoc su yeu cau cung uy nhiem cua gia dình chung toi Pham Van Ho`a nguyen Truong Toan Cong Tac Nha Ky Thuat va Nguyen Phuong Hung CQN/QLVNCH đa quyet dinh giup đo bang cach gui thong bao nay đen de kinh xin quy Nien Truong, Chien Huu vui long cua it long nhieu, vui long neu duoc xin gui chi phieu thang vao Trust Fund account Ha Van Chap tai bat cu nha bang Bank of America nao tren toan noi dia Hoa Ky va the gioi. Luu y Trust Fund Account chi han đinh trong vong 90 ngay.
Quy vi co the đen bat cu chi nhanh nha bang Bank of America de chuyen so tien giup do.
Truong muc tai Hoa Ky # 0932272259
Truong muc ngoai Hoa Ky (International) # 121000358 – 0932272259

Hoac gui chi phieu ve điạ chi:

HA ANH DUNG
4117 West McFadden Ave Space # 18
Santa Ana, CA 92704
Dien thoai: 714-234-8957

Thay mat tang quyen chung toi thanh that tri an long quang dai bac ai cua quy vi. Tran trong kinh cam ta quy bao chi, dai phat thanh, truyen hinh, bao diện tu đa tiep tay pho bien thong bao nay trong tinh than bat vu loi.
Tran trong kinh da ta,

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

AIRBORNE AGENTS / XAM NHAP














AIRBORNE AGENTS
Although Office 45's earliest efforts focused on the infiltration of singleton agents by land and sea, the backbone of its North Vietnam program came from the sky. Airborne insertion was not an original idea. In fact, Saigon intentionally borrowed a page from one of the most successful French-led units in Indochina, the Groupes de Commandos Mixtes Aeroportes (Mixed Airborne Commando Group, or GCMA).
First fielded in 1951, the GCMA was an effort by French intelligence to harness the historical animosity between hill tribesmen and the ethnic Vietnamese of the lowlands. Using small teams of French airborne advisers as cadre, ethnic tribesmen were given the opportunity to take up arms against the Viet Minh, which was dominated by lowlanders. Thousands accepted the offer and were organized into tribal guerrilla bands. For the French, the GCMA was an economical means of denying the rugged countryside to the communists. For the minorities, the concept gave them the hope of defending themselves after centuries of domination and prejudice.
The GCMA never amounted to more than 9,500 partisans in northern Vietnam, but these guerrillas struck a nerve with the Viet Minh. Referring to the tribesmen by the Vietnamese name Biet Kich (commandos), the Viet Minh in December 1953 issued a resolution calling on field units to "surround and arrest the [GCMA], root them up from their social bases, and isolate and wipe them out." Three months later, another Viet Minh decree called on its armed forces to launch a "prolonged struggle" to wipe out the GCMA by "leaning on the public, persevering to the end, and killing off the root." Even after the withdrawal of French advisers from North Vietnam in early 1955, the GCMA threat refused to die. By Hanoi's own admission, it was not until the end of 1956 that the last of these tribal commandos was subdued.
Hoping to repeat this success, the CIA organized a similar project within Office 45. In fact, some of those involved with the new venture had been Biet Kich during the French war. Prominent among them was Se Co Tin, a village chieftain from Lao Cai near the Chinese border. From the Tho ethnic group, Se Co Tin had been instrumental in helping the French organize twenty-five hundred GCMA partisans around Lao Cai, which had then been used in October 1953 on a spectacular guerrilla attack against communist forces along the Chinese frontier.


By the early 1960s, Se Co Tin was in Saigon as a key adviser to Office 45. "He was a canton chief and had respect, so he could introduce our case officers to recruits from his province and ethnic group," recalled Ngo The Linh, the office commander.2 One of those Se Co Tin brought forward was his nephew, Lo Ngan Dung, himself a GCMA guerrilla from Lao Cai. Dung had come south after the French withdrawal, joined the South Vietnamese army, and was posted to the General Studies Department, the forerunner of the Presidential Liaison Office.3 Following his introduction to Linh, Dung, by then a lieutenant, underwent intelligence training in 1960. Given the call sign Jacques, he was assigned in early 1961 as the first case officer for the airborne agent teams.
Paired with a young CIA counterpart named David Thoenen, Jacques began forming the first hill tribe team. Just like the GCMA, this team was to operate along the border highlands where North Vietnamese security, the CIA believed, had "less control . . . due primarily to poor access and to the traditional animosity of the tribal groups there to the lowland Vietnamese." Unlike the GCMA, which had run sabotage operations and recruited tribal partisans, the team would be tasked just with reconnaissance and intelligence—observing roads and establishing only limited contact with the local population.
In opting for such a limited mandate for its initial team, the CIA and Office 45 appeared to be building a cautious, though perhaps flawed, foundation. While it was true that the highlands could offer the best chance of concealment, the harsh topography and thin population in those areas meant that there was little information for an intelligence-gathering team to collect. Mountainous terrain also meant that it would be difficult to find food. And since the team was forbidden from organizing local guerrillas, the fact that those locals might harbor an exploitable dislike for the ethnic Vietnamese would probably not help its mission.
Still, selection of the first team began in early February. Given the need to find northern tribesmen with solid political credentials and military experience, Jacques was given permission to scour the ranks of the Presidential Liaison Office's own 1st Observation Group. Because it had been conceived as a stay-behind force in the event of a Chinese invasion, the 1st Observation Group was composed mainly of northerners. It had also begun accepting South Vietnamese army volunteers of Tai, Muong, and Nung origin—all natives of northern Vietnam—in anticipation of upcoming forays into the Lao panhandle.5 From among these, Jacques found three suitable Muong and a Tai.
Whisked off to a Saigon safe house, the four began instruction on the RS-1 radio. Airborne and jungle warfare training had already been completed

under the auspices of the 1st Observation Group, sparing Office 45 the trouble. And unlike ARES, who had been trained for an entire year to lead a double life as a full-time spy within Vietnamese society, the four trainees were to live isolated in the hills, so they were not required to learn any spycraft techniques. After three months, they graduated.
As its first airborne team was being readied for deployment, the CIA needed to decide on a form of air transport into North Vietnam that was both reliable and deniable. The agency had performed dozens of similar parachute missions into China since 1952, using a variety of airframes: C-47 and C-54 transports, converted bombers like the B-17 and B-26, and even refitted P-2V submarine chasers. In the case of North Vietnam, it was not so much the aircraft that caused concern as the pilots. The need for "de-niability"—hiding the American hand in the operations—meant that the U.S. Air Force was out of the question. And the CIA was adamant that Air America, its proprietary airline in Asia, not be used because of its high profile in neighboring Laos.
By the process of elimination, this left the Vietnamese to do the flying. But while the South Vietnamese air force had suitably qualified pilots, it, too, needed to operate under a veneer of deniability. So the CIA created a shell company by initiating a paper exercise between the Delaware Corporation—which was affiliated with Air America—and a Vietnamese partner. Called Vietnamese Air Transport, or VIAT, the new "airline" had only a single unmarked C-47 aircraft.
To pilot the VIAT plane, the CIA approached Major Nguyen Cao Ky, commander of Tan Son Nhut airport on the outskirts of Saigon. The young officer—only thirty at the time—had originally been trained as a transport pilot by the French in Morocco. Known for his flamboyance and charisma, Ky put out the word among the Vietnamese air force's two transport squadrons that volunteers were being sought for a special unit. Twenty Vietnamese, led by Ky himself, were quickly rounded up for the northern assignment, which was code-named HAYLIFT.
While the volunteers had sufficient experience with conventional transport flights, the missions to the north required special instruction. Specifically, the crews would be required to fly extremely long missions at very low altitudes to precise drop zones—all without the aid of advanced navigational equipment. And if that was not enough, North Vietnam's heavy rainfall and rugged terrain combined to create some of the worst flying conditions in the world.
To help coach the Vietnamese aviators, the CIA arranged for the loan of one pilot instructor and one navigator from Air America. The pilot, Captain Al Judkins, had spent the previous months on a CIA assignment parachuting Khampa guerrillas into Tibet. The navigator, Jim Keck, was also a Tibet veteran. Beginning with daylight low-level sorties, Judkins and Keck soon had the Vietnamese flying their C-47 at treetop level at night. Many dropped out of the difficult training, eventually leaving a five-man primary crew under the command of Major Ky and a backup crew under Lieutenant Phan Thanh Van.
For a final rehearsal run, Ky took the C-47 for a night flight over the Tonkin Gulf. Aboard for the ride was the CIA Saigon station chief, William E. Colby, long a proponent of action operations. Colby's own military career had more than its share of derring-do. In August 1944, he led an OSS team into occupied France, establishing a flank guard for General George Patton's advancing tank columns. The following March, he parachuted with another OSS team into Norway. At the time, the Germans were redeploying 150,000 troops into northern Norway. They were using the Nordland rail line, moving their men at a rate of one battalion per day. Armed with demolition charges, Colby and his guerrillas cut a bridge and a large section of track, slowing the redeployment to one battalion per month. The mission was rated a major success.8
At the controls, Ky tried to impress his CIA passenger with his ability to infiltrate at low levels. The plane dipped toward the sea until it barely cleared the wave tops. Colby was impressed. "Ky, the next time you fly me like that so close to the water," he quipped, "let me know beforehand and I'll bring my fishing rod.”

Haifa world away, President John F. Kennedy's new administration was talking tough behind closed doors. The war in Indochina was rising to the top of a growing number of foreign policy crises, and the young president wanted to send Hanoi a message. North Vietnam, after all, was not only infiltrating arms and personnel into South Vietnam but also intervening against the pro-Western royalist government in Laos. Edward Lansdale, the CIA's roving expert on both covert operations and counterinsurgency, finished a fact-finding trip in January 1961 and returned to Washington to brief the National Security Council. Kennedy later told his advisers that "for the first time [it] gave him a sense of the danger and urgency of the problem in Vietnam."
Kennedy wanted to act without igniting a superpower rivalry in Southeast Asia, so he turned to the CIA. On 9 March 1961, during another meeting with his National Security Council, the president said that he wanted to "make every possible effort to launch guerrilla operations in Viet Minh territory at the earliest possible date," and he asked both the CIA and the Defense Department to present "views on what actions might be undertaken in the near future and what steps might be taken to expand operations in the longer future."


Kennedy also approved several covert operations already on the table. The first of these, infiltrating agents into North Vietnam, was currently in progress. The CIA told the president that it had teams "allocated to working on a series of guerrilla pockets" near the Lao—North Vietnam border." But Kennedy felt that this was insufficient; "he wanted] guerrillas to operate in the North."12 So further plans, such as sabotaging northern ports and recruiting North Vietnamese living elsewhere in Asia and in Europe, were put on the fast track.13 Two months later, however, the president again checked on the progress of his covert plan and found that the CIA was not acting fast enough, so in early March he issued National Security Action Memorandum No. 28 (NSAM 28) ordering the agency to "make every possible effort to launch guerrilla operations in North Vietnamese territory."14
Before these measures could be fully implemented, Washington suffered a pair of policy setbacks. On 19 April a CIA-sponsored paramilitary operation by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs went terribly wrong. This was followed immediately by a series of reversals for the American-backed Royal Lao army, leaving them on the ropes after a North Vietnamese-led communist land grab.
Gathering his National Security Council on 29 April, Kennedy again hoped to turn the tables by using the CIA. William Colby had traveled back to Washington to help make the pitch for an increase in covert operations.15 these actions, far more broad than those outlined the previous month, included propaganda leaflet drops, clandestine radio broadcasts, and sabotage raids into North Vietnam and Laos by the 1st Observation Group. It also called on agent teams in North Vietnam not only to conduct reconnaissance and gather intelligence but also "to form networks of resistance, covert bases and teams for sabotage and light harassment."
This latest Kennedy action plan was extremely ambitious—and very confusing. In the space of a month, Washington had expanded the mandate of its untested Vietnamese agent teams to include the full gamut of unconventional warfare. Whereas the original CIA plan had its agents focused on low-profile intelligence collection, they were now approaching a full-fledged GCMA concept, but without any additional training.
The effect of the National Security Council decision had yet to filter down to Saigon. As the council was meeting in the White House, the first airborne team had just finished its brief training. In mid-May, it underwent final fitting and was given the code name CASTOR, referring to the Greek god who aided Hercules. Ironically, CASTOR had also been the name for France's November 1953 airborne operation to retake the Dien Bien Phu valley—an operation that led to France's final defeat in Indochina.

CASTOR would face an increasingly hostile environment in North Vietnam. Already paranoid about penetration by counterrevolutionaries, Hanoi became more concerned in February with the discovery of ARES's boat along the beach near Ha Long Bay. On 1 March the Vietnamese communist party issued secret instructions ordering its security forces to redouble efforts at combating undercover agents, a measure no doubt driven home when ARES was captured three weeks later.18
South Vietnam played into Hanoi's hand by telegraphing its next move with two violations of northern airspace in early May.19 Already fearful about aerial insertions—which had prompted a 1959 directive calling on border defense forces to search the terrain under the flight path of intruding planes—Hanoi undoubtedly saw these probes as clear evidence that an airborne threat would soon materialize.
As if not to disappoint, CASTOR was scheduled to go north on 27 May. A full moon and favorable weather were forecast for that night. Unlike maritime infiltrations, which used moonless nights to approach the coast, the Vietnamese air force crews needed something approaching a full moon that was at least thirty degrees over the horizon—usually only four nights a month—to navigate to the drop zone. In addition, the agents needed the moonlight to get a visual fix on the drop zone and on each other during descent.
As planned, the four CASTOR members boarded the unmarked VIAT C-47 at Tan Son Nhut. In the cockpit was Major Ky. The entire crew was dressed in sterile flight suits with no identification or connection to the military. If they went down over the north, their thin cover story was that they were a civilian outfit smuggling illegal goods. Each member also carried one hundred dollars, to be used during an escape.
The plane left Tan Son Nhut and flew north to Danang for refueling. At 2200 hours, Ky lifted off and headed low over the Gulf of Tonkin on a direct course for Ninh Binh Province in central North Vietnam. The two navigators remained busy: one gave a ground fix every two minutes, the other plotted the route to the target.
Coming upon the Ninh Binh coast, Ky banked the plane on a northwest heading across Hoa Binh Province, then veered north toward Son La. Crossing the Da River, the two navigators called corrections. Below, a forested high point—marked on the maps as Hill 828—shone in the moonlight. As Ky activated the green jump light, parachute delivery officers in the cabin pushed palleted supply bundles through the rear door, with the four members of CASTOR following quickly behind. The aircraft then reversed course and headed home.
On Hill 828, Sergeant Ha Van Chap, the CASTOR team leader, stripped off his parachute harness and assembled his men. They had landed one kilo-meter from a nearby village. Nine kilometers farther south was the Da River, and another ten kilometers south of that was Route 6. By North Vietnamese standards, Route 6 was a major road. Leading across the neighboring district, it then veered southwest into the Lao province of Sam Neua. Given the Kennedy administrations preoccupation with Laos and the fact that Sam Neua was the communist stronghold in Laos, CASTOR's ability to provide an accurate accounting of movement down Route 6 gave the team's mission a strategic dimension. Moreover, CASTOR's ethnic composition—which included two minority groups indigenous to the area—would hopefully enable the team members to supplement their observations with information from local contacts.
Even before they could move off the mountain, however, CASTOR was doomed to failure. The CIA had counted on the ability of a low-flying aircraft to successfully skirt the North Vietnamese heartland without detection. This meant avoiding Hanoi's already robust antiaircraft defenses. By early 1961, North Vietnam had ten antiaircraft regiments in its order of battle, three of which were equipped with radar. Unfortunately for the commandos, a company from one of these regiments was in Son La's Moc Chau District, which had been overflown during CASTOR's infiltration.
Even if the VIAT aircraft managed to evade North Vietnamese radar, much of the flight path was over provinces dotted with small villages. The sound of a twin-engine aircraft, especially in the dead of night, was certain to draw the attention of the rural population. Even in the remote interior, villages were connected through a security network, the Cong An Vu Trang Nhan Dan (People's Armed Security Force, or PASF). Created in March 1959 within the Ministry of the Interior, the PASF was a combination of gendarmerie and border defense force deployed in rural areas as the vanguard in Hanoi's defense against counterrevolution. Decidedly low-tech but highly effective, the PASF provided a coherent, well-armed network that enforced party control down to the district, and in some cases village, level.
When CASTOR jumped over Hill 828, villagers were within earshot. They reported what they heard, and by the morning of 28 May the North Vietnamese authorities had a good idea of the plane's likely drop zone. Immediately, three local PASF formations converged around the commune closest to Hill 828. After three days of hunting, they came upon the team. CASTOR surrendered without a fight.20
Even as CASTOR was being pursued, the PASF headquarters issued a classified set of instructions ordering its field units to "heighten vigilance to cope with, prevent, and defeat the enemy plot." This plot, explained the directive, involved new commando teams being sent by Saigon to the north.

Significantly, the name Hanoi used for the commandos was Biet Kich, the same term it had used in relation to the GCMA.21
While privately ordering its security forces to deal with the Biet Kich threat, publicly North Vietnam made no mention of CASTOR's arrest or the associated airspace violation. Just as with the capture of ARES back in April, Hanoi chose to secretly exploit its captive commandos.
Meanwhile, the CIA and Office 45, as yet unaware of CASTOR's fate, were busy preparing more intelligence teams for infiltration. Just as before, they were allowed to scour the ranks of the 1st Observation Group for candidates. Helping in the selection was Father Nguyen Viet Khai, the same Catholic priest who had helped Lieutenant Colonel Tung find agent recruits in 1957.22
Khai's participation was necessary because the next team was set to parachute into central Quang Binh, North Vietnam's southernmost province, and contact a specific Catholic priest assigned to the village of Trooc. It was hoped that the Trooc priest, when shown a photo and letter of introduction from Khai, would offer food and shelter to the commandos. Using the church as cover, the agents were then to watch Route 15, a major artery running west into the Lao panhandle, which Hanoi used to transport supplies to South Vietnam. The agents were also tasked with confirming the presence of a North Vietnamese infantry division and an artillery unit, both believed to be located just north of the Demilitarized Zone.
On 2 June, this second airborne team of three commandos, code-named ECHO, headed north from Danang aboard the VIAT C-47. Making a shallow arc over the seventeenth parallel, the plane crossed into Quang Binh Province, and the team parachuted into the hills five kilometers north of Trooc.
The team's timing could not have been worse. As the paratroopers exited the plane, two nearby hamlets were in the midst of a late-night ideology session. Hearing the aircraft engine, they rushed outside in time to see the C-47 silhouetted against the moon. It took only a few hours to round up a search party using PASF militia, a dog platoon, and an infantry company. Coordinating along three fronts, they began to work their way up the hills.
ECHO was in bad shape from the start. One of the commandos had drifted three kilometers and landed in a tree. Cutting loose from his harness, he fell to the ground and injured his leg. The other two commandos managed to link up, but they were nervous wrecks, well aware that their drop had been spotted by nearby villagers. With survival foremost on their minds, they contacted Saigon by radio to say they intended to run toward the border. Before they could make any progress, however, North Vietnamese search parties tightened the noose. The next day all three were captured.

Again, the CIA was unaware that its team had been captured. Twelve days later, a third team, code-named DIDO and consisting of four Black Tai agents, departed Danang. The agents' target was the heart of the Black Tai minority, Lai Chau Province in extreme northwestern North Vietnam.24 There they were to parachute near Route 6 midway between the provincial capital and the crossroads village of Tuan Giao. Once more, the connection to the war in Laos was prominent. From their vantage point, DIDO could observe traffic heading toward Tuan Giao, where a prominent road artery forked southwest through the Dien Bien Phu valley—now being used as a base for the North Vietnamese 316th Brigade—and into northern Laos.
Overflying the Gulf of Tonkin toward the Chinese border, Major Ky steered the C-47 across northernmost North Vietnam. Pausing to drop propaganda leaflets over Cao Bang Province near the Chinese border, the plane headed west toward the designated drop zone in Lai Chau. When the green light flashed, the four commandos leaped into the void, while the C-47, linking up with the same return flight path used by CASTOR, turned southeast toward the coastal province of Ninh Binh.
Landing in a mountain clearing, the four DIDO commandos hid their parachutes and assembled. Unlike ECHO, all had escaped injury. But their main supply bundle—containing clothes, ammunition, food, and their radio—was nowhere to be found. For over three weeks, the parachutists, by now very hungry, combed the hills to no avail. Then one morning they ran into a PASF patrol, which for the previous ten days had been sweeping four neighboring districts after receiving villager reports of a parachute drop. The weakened commandos ran for Laos, only to be captured at the border.2^
By the second week of July, Hanoi had all three airborne teams in custody. Publicly, not a word had been uttered. Privately, its security services were working overtime. Fearful that more airborne teams would follow, on 22 June party officials issued a directive underscoring the need for swift searches when commandos were dropped.26 This was followed by publication of a classified PASF booklet outlining how to counter airborne teams.
Even at that early date, the PASF booklet showed a remarkably complete understanding of the CIA's unfolding operation. Written with strong assistance from Beijing, it drew several lessons from China's long experience with CIA airborne teams and revealed an intimate understanding of the agency's methodology. For example, the publication noted that in both China and North Vietnam, teams jumped between 2200 and 0100 hours. The booklet also noted that teams usually parachuted into mountainous areas or along district boundaries, where the jurisdiction between local security forces was often confused. It also correctly pointed out that agent teams would normally move from the drop zone to a nearby area to regroup.

Of course, Hanoi knew very well that whenever agent teams were parachuted into North Vietnam they would soon be followed by supply drops. It was these follow-on drops that convinced the Ministry of the Interior to launch a "counterespionage operation." The plan was to double the Biet Kich radio operators, "persuade" them to establish controlled contact with Saigon, and convince their former masters that the teams were safe. In doing so, North Vietnam's intelligence officials hoped they could not only channel disinformation but also lure supplies—or even future teams—into drop zones of their choosing.
At 1200 hours, 29 June—just over a month after insertion—CASTOR flashed its first message to BUGS, the CIA's radio relay station in the Philippines. Saigon was apparently not overly concerned about the delay in establishing contact because it immediately sent back words of encouragement, followed by a promise to send supplies in four days. To Hanoi's satisfaction, the ploy appeared to be working.
On the afternoon of 1 July, one day before the promised re-supply, pallets were packed at Tan Son Nhut and loaded on the VIAT C-47. Major Ky was scheduled to fly the plane, but at the last moment handed off the mission to the backup crew headed by Lieutenant Phan Thanh Van. Joining Van's men would be three noncommissioned officers seconded from the 1st Observation Group to help kick the supplies out the rear door to CASTOR's position.
After a final CIA briefing, Lieutenant Van lifted off for Danang late that afternoon. This would be the first attempted re-supply of an in-place team, an extremely challenging mission. Using nothing more sophisticated than a navigator looking out the window and following the terrain in the moonlight, the team was expected to work its way through the mountains and find CASTOR's small drop zone.
Following the customary refuel at Danang, the VIAT crew took off near midnight and, traveling along the same air corridor used by CASTOR and DIDO, made a direct line for Ninh Binh Province. Up in Son La Province, meanwhile, PASF officials had hiked to the mountain clearing where, according to their radio play with Saigon, CASTOR would be awaiting the drop. Joining them at the scene was Ha Van Chap, the CASTOR team leader, who had been coerced into providing assistance.28 A signal fire blazed nearby as the North Vietnamese waited for the plane.29
On Hon Ne, a small island six kilometers off the coast of Ninh Binh Province, North Vietnamese soldiers heard the C-47 as it approached the mainland. The garrison on the island had been augmented in mid-June after Hanoi deduced that Ninh Binh was the primary infiltration point used

during the commando flights. By overflying Ninh Binh, Hanoi correctly reasoned, the planes could skirt the antiaircraft ring around Hanoi and take the most direct path to the mountainous northwestern portion of the country where rough terrain and sparse population played against the security forces.
The soldiers on Hon Me—which included both PASF and an antiaircraft platoon—had failed to react during two previous VIAT overflights. This time, the gunners were alert as the drone of the low-flying C-47's engines grew louder. As the plane came into view, the gunners opened fire, riddling the bottom of the aircraft with bullets. Seriously damaged, it dropped from the sky and crashed in a plantation twenty kilometers inland.30
Word of the shootdown raced through official Saigon. The U.S. ambassador, Fritz Nolting, was livid over the potential for diplomatic embarrassment.31 Within the CIA and Office 45, there was a sinking feeling that

CASTOR was under North Vietnamese control and that the re-supply plane had been lured into an ambush.
Strangely enough, the mood in Hanoi was restrained. While the North Vietnamese media converged on the crash site and reported outrage at the obvious purpose of the flight, the Ministry of the Interior was probably less than pleased. The shootdown, after all, jeopardized its long-term plans because CASTOR would now fall under intense scrutiny. Unless it could placate the CIA's suspicions, Hanoi's first counterespionage operation would likely end prematurely.


The price of peace
An in-depth look at the men and the details behind U.S. involvement in Vietnam

By Mark Feeney / Boston Globe

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No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam
By Larry Berman
Free Press, $27.50
334 pages
(A good read)

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Richard Nixon admired no statesman more than Charles de Gaulle. Henry Kissinger esteemed him nearly as much. Yet their admiration did not extend to emulation. De Gaulle's greatest act as French president was to recognize the futility of France's position in Algeria and end it.
Nixon and Kissinger, who by no means failed to recognize the impossibility of the U.S. position in Vietnam, were unwilling to do the same. The subtitle of Larry Berman's book isn't really necessary for anyone much older than 40. "Peace with honor," which doubled as plea and policy statement, was the great mantra of Nixon's first term. (the mantra of his second term was "Who, me?")
Thus a title like No Peace, No Honor all but inevitably summons up the names Nixon, Kissinger and Vietnam. And part of why the war remains such a wound for so many is because those names in turn summon up "betrayal" for almost all parties involved: Vietnamese and American, hawk and dove, victor and vanquished.
It's not as though the signing of the Paris Peace Accords on Jan. 27, 1973, fooled anyone (other than the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which later that year conferred the Nobel Peace Prize on the agreement's two chief negotiators, Kissinger and North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho).
Soon after the accords were signed, Nixon's chief domestic policy adviser, John Ehrlichman, asked Kissinger what South Vietnam's chances for survival were.
"I think that if they're lucky they can hold out for a year and a half," Kissinger said. Ever conservative, he'd underestimated by eight months.
Shortly before the war really did end, with the fall of Saigon in April 1975, President Gerald Ford was handed the text of a speech he was to deliver to a joint session of Congress. It included the sentence, "And after years of effort, we negotiated a settlement which made it possible for us to remove our forces with honor and bring home our prisoners." Ford deleted the words "with honor."
Berman, the director of the University of California's Washington Center, has published two previous books on the war, Planning a Tragedy and Lyndon Johnson's War. He brings to No Peace, No Honor a sure command of his material, much of which is newly declassified and drawn from archives in Hanoi as well as Washington. He also brings to it a real, if measured, sense of outrage.
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Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon's approaches to peace during the Vietnam War are examined in Larry Berman's book, "No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam."
"Well rounded" might be as good a description as "measured." Berman's loathing for Nixon, Kissinger and the war is patent. But that makes him no admirer of the North Vietnamese or National Liberation Front. (As he makes plain, Hanoi treated the NLF with a high-handedness not unlike Washington's toward Saigon; and the almost-theatrical intransigence of its negotiating tactics can be seen as having served no end beyond ideological self-congratulation.)
What Berman works to show is the inherent dishonesty of Nixon's Vietnam policy. This is no great challenge. Even before he was elected president, Nixon strove to undercut the possibility (admittedly slim) of the Johnson administration achieving any breakthrough in the Paris peace talks. That dishonesty continued, and to little purpose, in his and Kissinger's shared mania for secrecy in their negotiations with the North. And, finally as well as most important, there was his highly cynical view of the accords.
"Nixon," Berman writes, "recognized that winning the peace, like the war, would be impossible to achieve, but he planned for indefinite stalemate by using the B-52s to prop up the government of South Vietnam until the end of his presidency. Just as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution provided a pretext for an American engagement in South Vietnam, the Paris Accords were intended to fulfill a similar role for remaining permanently engaged in Vietnam. Watergate derailed the plan."
Berman hasn't discovered a smoking gun. Instead, he offers a deeper, more detailed description of what was generally known or assumed about Nixon's handling of the war and planned handling of the peace. Indeed, what's most impressive about No Peace, No Honor is the comprehensiveness with which it examines what Berman all too accurately terms "a massive historical shell game called 'peace with honor.' "

Congresstional Honor Nha Kỹ Thuật / Kỹ Yếu Sở Bắc Nha Kỹ Thuật






















The Lost Commando






















THE LOST COMMANDOS
Recruits of a Top-Secret U.S. Program Are Emerging Years Later From the Shadows of Vietnam
On that issue, the few who have taken up their cause, including two former U.S. Army commanders, believe that the U.S. government has a moral obligation to provide them some back pay and benefits and to speed the emigration of those who remain in Vietnam. But their efforts have not been successful. The United States, which has spent millions of dollars searching Southeast Asia for American prisoners of war and has yet to find one, has done very little to bring back the surviving Vietnamese agents it sent on dangerous missions. According to [Tourison], a former intelligence officer for the Department of Defense, the United States is too embarrassed to admit responsibility for one of the worst covert operations of the war. "The plan to infiltrate the north had long outlived its usefulness, and it was believed by the high command that the operations would not amount to much," he says. "In the end, it was a foolish waste of lives, and bad intelligence. It represented a major underestimation of the enemy, the kind of underestimation we made so many times in Vietnam."
That month, North Vietnamese torpedo boats reportedly attacked two U.S. destroyers in the much-disputed Gulf of Tonkin incident, which some critics say was a ruse used by the United States to escalate the war. President [Lyndon B. Johnson] called the Tonkin incident "unprovoked" aggression and ordered the bombing of North Vietnam-the first step in a massive buildup of U.S. forces. But in the months leading up to the incident, according to the official Navy history, 34A commandos had been conducting coastal raids in the area, raids that the North Vietnamese believed were coordinated by the U.S. destroyers.
Although [Guong Duc Vu] and other commandos have obtained welfare and food stamps after immigrating to the United States, efforts to secure veterans benefits or special priority for those still in refugee camps have failed. Whether they are more deserving than the hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese soldiers who have received no special help after being captured by the Communists is debatable. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs usually requires that someone serve in the U.S. armed forces to qualify for benefits. By special acts of Congress, however, Filipinos whose units were under U.S. commanders during World War II qualify for limited veterans benefits. Similarly, free medical services are available to former Polish and Czechoslovakian soldiers who fought on the Allies' side during World War I and II if they have lived in the United States for at least 10 years.

ON THE TRAIN RIDE FROM PRISON, NHI HUNG DINH SAW HIS COUNTRY for the first time in 18 years. He would never forget the view. Rubble, bombed-out buildings and craters scarred the landscape. Conditions were so squalid in Vinh, a major port in the panhandle of northern Vietnam, that he did not want to get off the train to stretch his legs. The people seemed listless, and Dinh spotted pickpockets among the waiting passengers. It was 1982, seven years after the end of the Vietnam War, but much of the city was still in ruin-the target of some of the conflict's heaviest naval and aerial bombardment.
His train headed south across the Demilitarized Zone, which once split Vietnam into two countries, and pulled into Hue. In 1968, the Viet Cong had ushered in Tet, the Asian lunar New Year, by turning this lovely old town of palaces and temples into a bloody battleground. Shell-pocked buildings still lined the streets, and Dinh saw Amerasian youths selling fruits, cookies and black market cigarettes. He wondered who would raise them. Their fathers, American GIs, had left long ago. It was the same all the way to Ho Chi Minh City, which Dinh had known as Saigon.
At the end of the 700-mile journey, he stood in disbelief outside his family's home in the peaceful seaside town of Vung Tau. It was 10 in the evening. More than 20 years before, he had left the house a cocky, hotheaded young man bolstered, he says, by an American military adviser's promise that he would be a hero. Now, Dinh was returning, middle-aged and in ill health. There would be no hero's welcome-no one was expecting him.
The two police officers who had escorted him from prison pounded on the door and announced Dinh's arrival. There was some commotion inside, and Dinh heard members of his family cursing. They refused to open the door. A brother-in-law flatly accused him of being an impostor. His 75-year-old mother was convinced he must be a ghost. "You're dead, son, go on your way, and I will pray for your soul," she said through the door.
There was no reason for her to think otherwise. Almost two decades before, South Vietnamese military officials had told her that Dinh had been killed during a mission. Where, they would not say. It was a secret. After that, the family received death benefits courtesy of the U.S. government. The lump sum amounted to a year of Dinh's pay-about $300.
Not knowing what else to do, Dinh continued to knock on the door and insist that he was who he said he was. "Soul nothing! He's home!" yelled one of the officers. Finally, the bolt slid back, and his mother realized that the man outside was indeed her son. She wept and collapsed in his arms. Dinh sank into a chair, too numb to speak. It had been so long.
Dinh had been a member of Team Romeo, a commando unit of 10 young Vietnamese, trained, paid and commanded by the U.S. government. For almost a decade, beginning in 1961, he and at least 700 men like him, by one estimate, were sent to wage guerrilla warfare in North Vietnam, first by the Central Intelligence Agency and later by the U.S. Army. Those who were not killed were captured and left to languish for decades in Communist prison camps. Now, the survivors are slowly emerging, bringing with them haunting questions about a top-secret operation that U.S. military leaders admit was a debacle and that might have helped trigger the United States' fateful decision in 1964 to dramatically escalate the Vietnam War.
According to the military, former intelligence officials, historians and the commandos themselves, these men were part of a highly classified operation-which came to be called Operation 34A by the military-that continued from 1961 to 1970 despite repeated failures and the doubts of U.S. leaders. Sedgwick Tourison, an investigator for the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs, says that since 1979, hundreds of the former agents and commandos have been released from prison. Many have made their way to the homes of astonished relatives in Vietnam who had been told years before that their loved ones had perished. Between 50 and 60 former commandos are thought to have fled Vietnam for the United States. The rest remain in Southeast Asian refugee camps or in Vietnam, where they are treated as second-class citizens.
Their actual numbers are hard to determine. Much of the documentation about the operations remains secret in military record centers, and what has been declassified provides only a glimpse of what happened to them. In an attempt to locate American MIAs in Vietnam, Tourison says that during the mid- to late 1980s he interviewed nearly all the former commandos living in the United States. From those and other interviews he estimates that 400 to 450 CIA and military operatives, out of a total of about 700, are still living. Dale Andrade, a historian for the government's Center for Military History in Washington, says his best estimate is that 200 to 300 men participated in the 34A part of the operation.
But if the numbers are open to question, the disastrous outcome is not. "It was not worth the effort at all, in my appraisal," retired U.S. Army Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who commanded U.S. ground forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, says of the program. "It was just not productive. We grew skeptical of the teams and skeptical of the intelligence they produced. Not much was contributed to the war effort."
The cost of that failure has been borne by the commandos for years. Imprisoned for war crimes, they endured psychological torture, malnutrition, isolation and living conditions designed to break their spirits or kill them. In refugee camps, they watched as other South Vietnamese who had only spent a couple of years in re-education camps were allowed to emigrate long before they were. Those who came to the United States have had difficulty adapting to the culture. Some still eat only one small meal a day-their prison regimen is hard to shake-and many suffer from medical problems. A few have found meaningful work, but many now live on welfare or the generosity of friends, family or their former comrades. All have sacrificed their youth, and betrayal is a common word among them.
The United States did little, if anything, to seek the commandos' release from prison during the Paris peace talks in 1973 and has not given them veterans benefits for their service. "There is no question who we are," says Ngung Van Le, a former commando who spent almost 17 years in prison and immigrated to Baltimore in 1985. "We fought for our country, but from my standpoint, the United States must do more than just turn its back on us."
On that issue, the few who have taken up their cause, including two former U.S. Army commanders, believe that the U.S. government has a moral obligation to provide them some back pay and benefits and to speed the emigration of those who remain in Vietnam. But their efforts have not been successful. The United States, which has spent millions of dollars searching Southeast Asia for American prisoners of war and has yet to find one, has done very little to bring back the surviving Vietnamese agents it sent on dangerous missions. According to Tourison, a former intelligence officer for the Department of Defense, the United States is too embarrassed to admit responsibility for one of the worst covert operations of the war. "The plan to infiltrate the north had long outlived its usefulness, and it was believed by the high command that the operations would not amount to much," he says. "In the end, it was a foolish waste of lives, and bad intelligence. It represented a major underestimation of the enemy, the kind of underestimation we made so many times in Vietnam."
FEB. 4, 1967, WAS NGUNG VAN LE'S 23RD BIRTHDAY. THAT day, North Vietnamese soldiers surrounded Le's position and beat him with their rifle butts. It was just as well, he says. Torrential rain, a lack of food and fighting through dense jungle in a desperate run for the Laotian border had left the members of Team Hadley too tired to resist. Like so many other 34A missions before, the operation had gone badly. The enemy spotted Team Hadley's helicopters as the unit crossed into North Vietnam. Within 10 days, the North Vietnamese had captured the whole team.
Told by South Vietnamese officials that Le was dead, his parents held a memorial service. But their son was alive hundreds of miles to the north, where he would spend 16 years in prison, convicted of espionage by the North Vietnamese government, then another six months in jail for trying to escape from Vietnam after his release from custody.
Incarceration in such prisons as Pho Lu, Thanh Tri and Phong Quang took its toll. Le was forced to do manual labor all day, eating little more than six ounces of grain cereal. "There was nothing to eat for breakfast. You might get a potato or a piece of turnip once in a while. The barley was hard to digest and hurt your intestines," Le says in Vietnamese. "In time, the slightest amount of work became excruciatingly painful."
Human waste filled the compound and barracks, where there was no running water. Visiting nurses often wore face masks, he says, because the stench permeated everything. Disease was rampant among the prisoners. Despite the horrors of his imprisonment, Le refused to be re-educated, although it might have meant being released. "I resisted and many, many times I was shackled and put in isolation." In 1973, when his captors refused to release him and other prisoners after the Paris peace talks, Le organized a hunger strike. He spent six months in solitary confinement and lost almost half his body weight of 135 pounds. But he survived. "What I could not do was sink down to the level of my captors," he says. "I had to maintain my own honor. If I did not, I would become no better than they were."
In 1976, almost 10 years after his capture, authorities allowed prisoners to write letters home, and Le's family learned that he was alive. "If it is true," his mother and father wrote back skeptically, "you will never believe how overjoyed we are." They asked Le to tell them things only they would know. In his return letter, he reminded them of things he did as a child. Convinced that he was their son, Le's parents took down the picture of him they had placed in a shrine at home for deceased relatives.
Le completed his prison term in 1982 and was paroled. After repeated attempts, he escaped to Malaysia in 1984 and spent a year in refugee camps before the United Nations helped him immigrate to the United States. "I know of four commandos who have been in refugee camps in Thailand and Malaysia for almost two years," Le says. "They are not missing in action. It is very discouraging to know that no one really cares."
THE OPERATION REFERRED TO IN MILITARY PARLANCE AS "34 Alpha" originated in 1961 as a highly touted secret CIA program to organize armed resistance in North Vietnam. U.S. covert operations had actually begun there after the Geneva Conference in 1954, which divided the country into two nations. A handful of CIA operatives formed squads of anti-Communist Vietnamese to organize guerrillas, abduct and assassinate Communist officials, set up espionage networks and distribute propaganda. But the agents had difficulty eluding the Communist control structure, a tightly knit web of local cadres and informers that pervaded the country. Few of the CIA teams survived, and the effort ended in failure by the late 1950s.
According to a section on undercover activities in the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department's controversial account of the Vietnam War, the CIA renewed its covert operations several years later, when President John F. Kennedy called for a campaign of clandestine warfare in North Vietnam and Laos. Former CIA Director William E. Colby, then chief of the agency's Far Eastern division, started the new program in 1961.
Hung Quoc Tran was one of the first recruits. In the late 1950s, he quit his job as manager of the family jewelry store in Saigon. Channeled through the South Vietnamese military, Tran says, he eventually came under the tutelage of three American CIA officers. In 1961, Tran says, the CIA gave him the code name "Columbus." His orders were to recruit North Vietnamese citizens sympathetic to South Vietnam as spies and to deliver a series of secret messages to anti-Communists in Hanoi. A CIA trawler dropped him along the North Vietnamese coast in May, 1961, and Tran made his way to Hanoi posing as a student. He delivered the first message but the next evening he discovered he was being followed by North Vietnamese security. He was stunned they were on to him so quickly. He managed to drop off another letter to the rebels, but one day in June, police walked up to him on the street, arrested him and took him to Hoa Lo, later known as the Hanoi Hilton.
According to Colby, now 72 and still working as a lawyer in Washington, other agents were equally ineffective. The North Vietnamese captured almost all the operatives and penetrated the program with their own agents. According to recently declassified North Vietnamese records, 34 agents from 17 CIA teams were killed, and about 140 operatives were captured in 1963 alone. Many of those captured were coerced into working for the enemy; those who were not often ended up in showcase trials in Hanoi.
Despite the difficulties, U.S. leaders reorganized the operation a third time and continued it under the aegis of the military. In January, 1964, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff officially began 34A, a more ambitious program of covert operations in North Vietnam. Missions were cleared by the secret 303 Committee, headed by National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and staffed with senior CIA, Pentagon and State Department officials. Day-to-day operations were taken away from the CIA and delegated to the Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Studies and Observation Group, a branch of the U.S. Army that oversaw all types of covert activity.
According to the official history of the U.S. Navy, the groundwork for turning such covert operations over to the military had been laid on Nov. 20, 1963, when Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara ordered a program for large-scale, covert actions against North Vietnam. At the time, Colby says, he tried to warn U.S. commanders that the operation would not work. He noted the CIA's failures in Vietnam and argued that similar CIA operations in China and Korea in the late 1940s and early 1950s had not been effective. "It was my contention (that we should) phase it down," Colby says. "But the military brass wanted to continue. They had a can-do attitude."
Garbed in black pajamas and camouflage and armed with Swedish submachine guns, pistols and grenades, individual agents and teams were to infiltrate the north by helicopter or small boat. As in the previous CIA missions, recruits were mostly natives of North Vietnam, young men, full of bravado and eager to do something for their country. Once they were trained, military records show, the United States sent them into North Vietnam to organize resistance, raid naval installations, monitor the movement of enemy supplies and troops and blow up bridges and power plants. Teams were assigned to missions lasting a few days to years. According to the Pentagon Papers, McNamara, in a December, 1963, memo to President Lyndon B. Johnson, called the proposal for Operation 34A an "excellent job . . . presenting a wide variety of . . . operations against North Vietnam." U.S. Army Gens. Earl Wheeler and Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed. By June, 1964, however, the first indications of failure surfaced when, according to the official history of the Navy, a series of raids along the North Vietnamese coast produced little except considerable dissatisfaction from ranking commanders: U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge said it "might be good training, but we're certainly having no effect on Hanoi." Westmoreland, who eventually became the army's chief of staff, expressed his doubts by July, 1964. Finally, in August, McNamara himself became worried.
That month, North Vietnamese torpedo boats reportedly attacked two U.S. destroyers in the much-disputed Gulf of Tonkin incident, which some critics say was a ruse used by the United States to escalate the war. President Johnson called the Tonkin incident "unprovoked" aggression and ordered the bombing of North Vietnam-the first step in a massive buildup of U.S. forces. But in the months leading up to the incident, according to the official Navy history, 34A commandos had been conducting coastal raids in the area, raids that the North Vietnamese believed were coordinated by the U.S. destroyers.
Despite the indications that 34A was failing, the operation continued as the Vietnam War broadened and American troops poured into the country. Westmoreland says he was briefed from time to time on the operation, but it became a low priority because his attention was directed toward the buildup of U.S. forces. Some of the program's more immediate commanders, such as Col. Donald Blackburn, now a retired general living in Florida, say that they, too, had doubts but continued to send in teams. Blackburn also says he changed the role of some teams to reconnaissance missions that lasted no more than a week.
By 1968, the last 34A team had been sent into North Vietnam; according to Tourison it was dropped by mistake on top of an enemy anti-aircraft installation. Two years later, the teams had all been killed or captured, or were working for the enemy. "The Vietnamese were helpful and brave, but it just did not work," Colby says. "I tried to turn it off after a year or two. Yet, the military wanted to make a fresh start. I don't think they were very effective. But in war, you try everything you can."
SINCE HIS YOUTH IN NORTH VIETNAM, NHI HUNG DINH says, he wanted to avenge his father and other political dissidents who had been forced to flee to South Vietnam because of political persecution by the Communists. His anti-Marxist fervor, he recalls, attracted the attention of a Catholic priest who helped recruit him for covert operations when he was 18.
"I liked the glamorous side of espionage," Dinh, who once fancied himself as a Humphrey Bogart, says in Vietnamese. "I saw it was different from what other people did. I thought the military would be too ordinary, but this would allow traveling here and there, and you'd always be able to have a gun on you."
Sitting in his cramped Huntington Beach apartment recently, Dinh remembers the assurances his American military advisers gave him during training. " `Everywhere you are, there we will be,' " he quotes them as saying. "We didn't see them anywhere."
Dinh's first mission as a 34A commando was on Nov. 19, 1965. It was his last. Team Romeo's choppers flew into North Vietnam. The plan was to stay two years, conducting reconnaissance and sabotage. Instead, the commandos were lost in the jungle for six weeks after being dropped off at the wrong place. Border defense forces finally ambushed the team the first week of January, 1966.
Romeo's members were first sent to prison in Quang Binh, where each commando was put into an underground cell. "A grave for the living," Dinh calls the cells. After nine months, he was transferred to another prison in Thanh Tri near Hanoi and spent a year in solitary confinement. A daily bowl of rice barely kept him alive. On the day of his release in 1982, authorities gave him 20 dong, worth about 2 cents. He says he spent it all on noodle soup at the first food stand he came to. The peddler dished out the portion into a tub instead of a bowl. There was so much, he says, he asked his police escorts to help him eat it.
When he returned home, he found not only his family waiting, but also his fiancee, Bay Nguyen. "His mother told me that he had died," Nguyen says. "But I continued to think that he was still alive." On their wedding night, six months later, she learned for the first time what he had been through. She cried over the scars his shackles had deeply etched around his wrists and ankles. "He told us about how they had stomped on his stomach and about how everyone had open sores from lice in the camps," she says. "There are still scars all over his body."
By 1990, Dinh had managed to get himself and his family to the United States under a U.S. resettlement program for political prisoners, but not before he served three more years for trying to escape from Vietnam. Dinh, 54, and his family now live with another Vietnamese family in a $450-a-month two-bedroom apartment. They get $770 a month in welfare and food stamps. He shares his bed with his wife and their two sons, Anh Hong, 6, and Quan Hong, 4. Dinh, whose injuries left him with chronic fatigue and an inability to concentrate, cannot work.
"Now, I think that I as an individual was so insignificant," he says. "The Americans abandoned an entire government, (so) what am I? I just want people to understand it wasn't as if I was sweet-talked into this. I went into North Vietnam because of my country. Now, I can only live from day to day."
A year after Dinh was captured, U.S. Army Lt. Gen. John K. Singlaub, then a colonel, assumed command of the unit that oversaw 34A missions. Singlaub, who later funneled arms to the Nicaraguan Contras and remains an anti-Communist activist in Alexandria, Va., says that a short while after he took command he became convinced that most of his teams in North Vietnam had been "rolled up by Communist security." In many cases, radio operators were broken under torture and forced to act as double agents. They lured other 34A teams into ambushes and repeatedly ordered airdrops of U.S. equipment the North Vietnamese could use. Retired U.S. Army Col. Fred Caristo, who helped run 34A missions as a captain, remembers one radioman ordering 30 pistols and silencers, 200 cartons of Salem cigarettes, 20 Seiko watches and dozens of pairs of paratrooper boots. "I mean we're talking about some real goodies," says Caristo, who now lives in Woodbridge, Va.
The operation soon emphasized ferreting out double agents and team members who worked for the enemy. Supplies were booby-trapped and teams were lured into position for airstrikes. Yet, in a still-classified report, Singlaub says now, he concluded that the Communist network of informers made it extremely difficult to establish covert operations. "It was not completely futile," Singlaub says, "but from the standpoint of achieving its original goals it was. It was compromised to the extent that it could not achieve those goals."
In retrospect, Dale Andrade, who had some expertise in covert operations during the Vietnam War, contends that U.S. leaders did not take the operation seriously enough. "What makes the tragedy greater," he says, "is that we relied on an operation like this, when we could not think of anything better to do. To the Vietnamese it was very patriotic. But when you read the Pentagon Papers, it is clear that our leaders didn't think it would work very well. The South Vietnamese didn't realize the doubts the Americans had. In that sense, it is tragic."
THE CAPTURED CIA AND 34A COMMANDOS ENDED UP IN RE-EDUCAtion camps and prisons ranging from the infamous Hanoi Hilton to squalid facilities of barbed wire and thatched huts in the countryside. Dinh and Le say they saw scores of 34A commandos and CIA operatives in prison, and many of them died of malnutrition, dysentery, malaria and tropical parasites. Prisoners deemed incorrigible were put into isolation cells for months.
But in late 1972, as the Paris peace talks convened, clothing and food improved for the captured commandos. Word spread among them that all prisoners of war would be released under the emerging treaty. On Jan. 27, 1973, the cease-fire agreement was signed by the United States, South Vietnam and North Vietnam, calling for the return of prisoners of war within 60 days. Although almost 600 U.S. POWs were released, the commandos-some of whom had been in the same prisons as the Americans-were not. In protest, scores of them staged a series of hunger strikes that were mercilessly broken up by prison guards armed with clubs and dogs.
At the negotiating table in Paris, the United States might not have been in any position to ask for the release of the commandos. "How could you ask for them?" Andrade asks. "These were not supposed to be United States teams, and you would not want to disclose your collusion in a secret operation. Even if we were involved in the training and the missions, it was (South Vietnamese) President Nguyen Van Thieu's job to ask for them."
Apparently, the South Vietnamese leader was prepared to ask but did not. According to a former South Vietnamese army colonel now living in Orange County who asked that his name not be used, a list of more than 100 captured South Vietnamese commandos and operatives was supposed to be discussed during the talks. The colonel said that he had participated in preparations for the Paris peace talks and knew of the list of POWs. Thieu, he says, ordered it stricken from the discussions, fearing that the commandos would organize an uprising against his government upon their return. Thieu's whereabouts are unknown.
Tourison, who is writing a book on the commandos, says there is strong evidence that the United States knew the commandos were alive yet did not negotiate for their release. Trials of many of the men were written about by North Vietnamese newspapers or broadcast on their radio networks, he says. Caristo, too, recalls that there were broadcasts about surviving commandos after their families had been paid death benefits. But to his knowledge, he says, the surviving families were never told of the news. "Our intelligence operation failed, and we lied to their families, " Tourison says. "When we had a chance to get them out, we did not take it."
John Madison, now a retired U.S. Army colonel, who headed a U.S. delegation sent to Vietnam to assure the return of American prisoners of war, says he does not recall that the commandos were ever mentioned to him nor was his delegation instructed to inquire about them. The responsibility, he says, rested with the South Vietnamese government, but he does not recall the South Vietnamese talking about them either. Retired U.S. Army Col. Harry G. Summers Jr., a member of the same delegation, says the commandos should have been repatriated under the peace treaty's broad language related to prisoners of war. "They should have been included, but I am not sure their names were brought up by us or anyone else," says Summers, now editor of Vietnam magazine. "Trying them for war crimes or espionage could have been a way the North Vietnamese were able to hang on to them. If anyone is to blame, they are."
SEVEN YEARS AFTER THE Paris peace talks, Guong Duc Vu, now 54, was among the first commandos to escape from prison and make it to the United States. For 10 years, he has lived with his wife, mother and three children in a roach-infested, two-room flat in Chicago that is bare except for a bed salvaged from the garbage and a shelf of religious icons.
Vu was a member of a commando team sent on raids along the North Vietnamese coast. His first three missions had to be aborted. On his fourth and final raid in March, 1964, Vu was captured after his team could not find the patrol craft it was supposed to sink. "We were trying to find another target when some other boats came into view," Vu recalls. "Their guns opened fire. One of our men was killed and another was hit." After a month on the run, he and another team member were captured while they were trying to walk back to South Vietnam.
For 16 years, Vu lived in a filthy thatched prison hut and supplemented his daily ration of barley with snakes, cockroaches and mice. When that wasn't enough, he cinched banana leaves around his midsection to relieve the hunger pangs.
Vu says that in 1980 he was transferred to another camp, where prisoners occasionally received temporary passes to visit relatives. After one furlough, Vu did not return, becoming a fugitive and risking a longer prison term. He joined the exodus of more than a million Vietnamese who left the impoverished nation by boat or dangerous overland routes to reach U.N. refugee camps. Some drowned as overcrowded vessels capsized in heavy seas. Others simply vanished on jungle trails.
"Over there, life had nowhere to go. Here we have freedom," says Vu, speaking in Vietnamese. "My family was reunited only because of God. I never believed we would be back together."
He and his family have tried to be optimistic. He no longer faces the risk of recapture, the prospect of more years in prison or the stigma of an espionage conviction that would keep him from getting work in Vietnam. But lately they have had a string of misfortune. Vu was laid off from his job as a carpenter a few months ago, and his youngest son is a hemophiliac. "We're so weary of everything now," Vu says. "We just want to be left in peace to live day to day."
Although Vu and other commandos have obtained welfare and food stamps after immigrating to the United States, efforts to secure veterans benefits or special priority for those still in refugee camps have failed. Whether they are more deserving than the hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese soldiers who have received no special help after being captured by the Communists is debatable. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs usually requires that someone serve in the U.S. armed forces to qualify for benefits. By special acts of Congress, however, Filipinos whose units were under U.S. commanders during World War II qualify for limited veterans benefits. Similarly, free medical services are available to former Polish and Czechoslovakian soldiers who fought on the Allies' side during World War I and II if they have lived in the United States for at least 10 years.
Changing the qualifications for veterans benefits is a complicated process, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Exceptions can only be made by act of Congress. "It is quite an effort to get things done. In the case of these Vietnamese, they probably aren't qualified for benefits under the current rules," says spokesman William Layer. "Just because our military used segments of a native population for operations, doesn't necessarily qualify them for anything."
But some of the former commandos believe that they should receive benefits because they were trained, controlled and paid by the U.S. government. "Some of these guys spent more than 20 years behind bars. They certainly deserve something for their efforts," Caristo says.
Singlaub looked into the possibility of compensation, but, he says, the government was unable to rationalize helping the commandos unless the same benefits were extended to all former South Vietnamese soldiers in the United States.
"The explanation was that they are in the same position as regular South Vietnamese soldiers," Singlaub says.
"At one time we looked for benefits for these guys, but people want to forget the war," Caristo says. "They are more interested in U.S. MIAs and normalization of relations with Vietnam."
Tourison estimates that as many as 200 commandos have applied to come to the United States through U.S. refugee programs but only three or four have gotten through despite the fact that they spent much more time in prison under harsher conditions than any captured officer from the Republic of Vietnam's defeated army.
"We have been obligated in the past to help U.S. employees whether or not they were American citizens. We have done more for people who have done less for us than these men," Tourison says. "These guys have paid a price that few American prisoners of war have ever paid."
What is being done on their behalf usually takes place on an individual basis outside the realm of government. Commandos lend each other money or pool their resources to fly a family to the United States from Vietnam. Occasionally, Ngung Van Le and others have informed the United Nations of former commandos who have made it to refugee camps. Supporters, like Tourison, have written letters to help them get jobs or welfare benefits.
In 1987, Tourison wrote the state of California to attempt to get $700 a month in disability payments for Tan Van Nguyen, a 34A commando who now lives in San Jose. Nguyen was captured in 1965 and ended up serving almost 20 years of a life sentence. He participated in one of the 1973 hunger strikes and suffered broken bones and crippling internal injuries before he lapsed into unconsciousness for three days. He is unable to work.
Most commandos have tried, however, to make it on their own, reconciled to the fact that not much will be done for them. In 1984, Hung Quoc Tran finally made it to the United States, where his autobiography "Thep Den" ("Black Steel"), written under the pen name Binh Chi Dang, became popular in the Vietnamese immigrant community. A U.S. official, Tran says, questioned him about American POWs who might still be alive in Vietnam. When Tran asked what was being done for the commandos, the official said that they were not the United States' responsibility.
"Before the man left," Tran says, "he gave me a business card and said to contact him if ever I needed help getting a job. I never called him. We don't want to ask for any more help. We survived the prisons, and we can survive here."
Ngung Van Le, now 47, earns a living hand-engraving silver and pewter in Baltimore. Since he came to the United States, he has spent hundreds of hours telling the Defense Department about the Vietnamese prison system. Officials asked if there are American prisoners of war still in Vietnam. Le says he did not see any after the Paris peace accords.
Le, like many of the former commandos, remains a kind of prisoner. He would like to get married, but he has no prospects. Though he used to get carsick when he first came to the United States, his only pride and joy, he says, is a new Toyota Corolla. Home is a tidy basement room rented from a Vietnamese family. On top of the TV is an old photograph of Team Hadley taken a few days before the unit was dropped into North Vietnam. The kitchen is a hot plate, and his few possessions all fit into the 9-by-12-foot space. Ulcers and intestinal problems caused by the prison diet limit Le to one small meal a day.
"There is probably a certain similarity," he says quietly, "to what I have been used to."
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