Spies and Commandos - Spies and Commandos: How America Lost the Secret War in North Vietnam - Review

Parameters, Autumn, 2001 by Dr. Henry G. Gole

Spies and Commandos: How America Lost the Secret War in North Vietnam. By Kenneth Conboy and Dale Andrade. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. 347 pages. $34.95.

Conboy and Andrade, both of whom have written other books dealing with covert operations in Vietnam, provide us a thoroughly researched and comprehensive account of America's failed clandestine war in North Vietnam. The book is grounded in previously untapped sources, whose full exploitation promises to reveal other aspects of that war. Finding truth in covert operations is difficult due to the nature of operations replete with deception and cover stories designed to mislead. Failed operations provide yet another reason to hide the father of the bastard child. Therefore, the authors' "Note on Sources" is especially useful to the reader.

The Pentagon Papers, leaked in 1971, exposed a covert program in North Vietnam from 1954, a secret war deemed appropriate before US combat troops were committed openly. In 1992, the "Military Assistance Command Studies and Operations Group (MACSOG) Documentation Study," written in 1970, came to light. It provided evidence for what previously had been speculation and rumor, and, because it named names, led to interviews with participants. This source was cross-referenced with classified special operations annexes to the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) command histories to get the details of specific missions into North Vietnam. Then, in late 1995, archivists at the National Archives discovered 80 boxes of SOG financial records, allowing researchers to follow the money trail. Moreover, since 1984 Hanoi has permitted the publication of accounts of countermeasures taken against agents from the South, thus adding insights from "the other side of the hill." Diligence in mining sources and the backgroun ds of our authors have produced an authoritative and convincing story.

It is a story of failure--failure in concept, preparation, and execution; in learning from experience; and in loyalty to the indigenous people the United States used, deserted, and forgot. The story begins in 1952, describing the optimism and naivete of the five-year-old CIA, whose agents behaved like irresponsible cowboys. It points to the folly of encouraging the post-1954 migration of Catholics from North to South Vietnam, thus removing a stay-behind potential that would have facilitated the survival of agents inserted into North Vietnam. It characterizes incompetence in a world in which "Terry and the Pirates" met Charlie Chaplin's feckless little hobo. It is a litany of defects.

The Saigon government was (and would remain) too busy with palace intrigue to heed events in the countryside. American advisers failed to recognize the difference between inserting agents into World War II Europe, with resistance to Hitler ready to support them, and putting agents into a land in the iron grip of Hanoi, where militia was present in almost every village. Repeated use of the same insertion techniques by air and sea between 1961 and 1967 resulted in 54 teams (some 500 men) being killed or captured. SOG's own figures show almost complete failure from 1964 (when it took the mission from the CIA) to 1968. Indications that inserted teams had been turned by the enemy were ignored. Non-Vietnamese speakers were given Vietnamese identification and cover stories. Missions were clumsily conceived and blurred, failing to make distinctions between long-term intelligence gathering (requiring patience and passivity) and sabotage, kidnapping, and ambushing missions (requiring shock, violence, and firepower, th us revealing their presence). Background investigations of agents were crude and ineffective. Agents from different programs mingled in training and recreation, making it easy for enemy spies to determine and report to Hanoi who was doing what. The same safe houses were used for years. The US military in Vietnam negotiated with the American Ambassador in Laos as though with a foreign power. Despite almost uninterrupted failure, Walt Rostow and Robert S. McNamara considered Oplan 34A-64 "a well-reasoned plan of gradual escalation." Distance between thought and deed was great.

Not until 1968 was it determined that North Vietnam was paranoid regarding threats to its total control. That is, psychological operations, cheap in money and lives, caused counterproductive repressive measures by North Vietnam. Ironically, just when enemy vulnerabilities and SOG capabilities were properly matched and SOG hit its stride, President Johnson summoned General Abrams to Washington to tell him that bombing and other operations in North Vietnam would be halted.

The authors conclude that the CIA and SOG operations in North Vietnam affected Hanoi's war only marginally. This reviewer accepts that conclusion and commends the book to readers with three observations. First, the book is very detailed, making it valuable to specialists in covert operations and to scholars, but perhaps a bit overwhelming to the general reader. Second, your reviewer does not accept the charge of SOG ineptness in connection with operations in Laos and Cambodia, but that is a topic for another book. Finally, as a professional soldier and proud American, your reviewer feels unmitigated shame for the shoddy manner in which we used and discarded our brave and loyal foreign "assets" after the war.