"The Secret War Against Hanoi" is particularly good in its own way. It elucidates the liberal train of thought as they were starting the war in 1961. On January 28 Kennedy had been president for 8 days. Vietnam was divided, the French were gone, and the Viet Cong were prosecuting a campaign of terrorism in the South in order to destabilize it and absorb it into the North. On that day Kennedy met with his National Security Council and listened to what was (in his view) the bad news on Vietnam: if the current conditions persisted, the South would fall to the Communists.
Why a little underdeveloped country in Asia should have been of such concern to Kennedy is anyone's guess, but what is no longer in doubt is that major American involvement in Vietnam began at that NSC meeting of Jan 28, when Kennedy stated that he wanted "guerillas to operate in the North". All that followed for 13 years was built upon that one simple sentiment expressed by the new president.
He wanted guerillas to operate in the North because, as he expressed it in April of that year, "We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerillas by night instead of armies by day." Kennedy was intent on fighting back in kind: infiltrating, subverting, and deploying guerillas by night.
Presumably, the CIA would train Vietnamese spies and guerillas and inflict them on the North. But the Bay of Pigs fiasco happened that April, and the Kennedy brothers were convinced the fault for that lay with the CIA. Therefore they gave the job of training and inserting spies and guerillas into North Vietnam to the Pentagon, which had little experience in such operations.
There followed a string of failures, where hundreds of Vietnamese spies and saboteurs were sent up north, and never heard from again. Or North Vietnamese fishermen would be hauled off to an island and treated to an elaborate charade intended to show them that a revolt against the communist government was imminent. Shultz discusses these attempts in a dispassionate tone, but one gets a growing sense of waste and futility from the narrative. Any of the career espionage people at the CIA could have told Kennedy that it was virtually impossible to plant people in a closed totalitarian society like North Vietnam, even if, as in the case of the CIA, that's your business. But to have the Pentagon take a crack at it? Well, you might as well try to get HUD to send a rocket to the moon.
But Kennedy's obsession with and faith in covert action remained unabated till the day of his death. His cabinet, McNamara in particular, shared his enthusiasm. Eventually the Pentagon adopted the attitude that if you want anything done in Vietnam, you have to do it yourself. So covert actions began to include Americans, at the same time the overt effort began ramping up under Johnson.
The efforts were redirected toward more practical targets, such as the Ho Chi Minh Trail (the construction of which began in 1959), but the approach was no more practical. This wasn't a "real war", according to the brightest minds in Washington; it was more of a diplomatic game. Therefore, restrictions had to be placed on the units operating against the trail builders. Special forces could not go beyond 10 kilometers into "neutral" Laos. The North Vietnamese, displaying the practicality and opportunism that became their hallmark, would then route their trail 11 kilometers from the Laos-Vietnam border. Their spies, unlike those of the Pentagon, were quite effective.
It wasn't any secret that cutting off the Ho Chi Minh trail would cut off the stream of men and materiel into the South. Shultz quotes Bui Tin, the NVA officer who accepted the surrender of the South in 1975: "If Johnson had granted General Westmoreland's request to enter Laos and block the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Hanoi could not have won the war."
As simple as that. Straight from the lips of an opposing officer. In retrospect, it seems like the logical thing to do: cut off the enemy's supply line. But from its very beginning on January 28, 1961, the Vietnam War was not conducted logically.
Perhaps the Kennedy-Johnson crowd's truly wacky ambivalence can best be glimpsed on pages 34-35. Shultz relates how President Kennedy was "stunned" by the images of Buddhist monks immolating themselves in protest of the Diem government's repression. Diem's sister-in-law, who seems to have been a cross between Immelda Marcos and Leona Helmsley, referred to the immolations as "barbecues". At the same time, South Vietnamese generals were planning a coup. It was dawning on the government of the US that the government of its ally was corrupt and effete and repressive. So where did the Kennedy Administration choose to direct its energies? Toward Hanoi: "escalation of the covert war against Hanoi became a major agenda item. The decision was made to turn up the pressure on the North."
With policy like this being made by the Best and the Brightest, one can only shudder at what a catastrophe we'd have had if our leaders had been merely average.
Could SOG create a triple-cross system to convince Hanoi that, in fact, it had uncovered only part of a much larger and more intricate subversion operation inside its borders? (p. 93).
The triple cross was not just against Hanoi but also "against our compatriots," noted the chief of OP 34, who was convinced that the STD was infiltrated by enemy intelligence. (p. 114).
"Of course, we were setting these guys up because there was no team to contact." (p. 115).
"We might also provide information about corrupt government officials who we claimed we learned about from messages sent back from agent teams inserted by us." (p. 115).
To make Project Oodles believable, different false radio messages were sent from OP 34 to each phantom team. (p. 119).
Finally, radios that sent messages out from these fake teams were air-dropped into North Vietnam. This completed the communications loop. Messages were coming in and answers were being sent out. (p. 120).
In effect, it was real evidence of spy commandos, as Hanoi referred to them. (pp. 122-3).
Finally, in November 1968, when the United States was going to have an election, MACVSOG was called by Washington, D. C., and told, "we are going to publicly say that we have no activities north of the parallel." (p. 124). Teams in North Vietnam had to get out immediately. Some people (and candidate Richard Nixon did not actually say this) were still thinking, "Just deny that you're engaged in MACVSOG operations and then crank them up. This was the way the operators saw things." (p. 126). I think about triple cross operations when I see a lot of political advertising on TV, but some of the Americans who created such operations might be engaged in other occupations today, and it would be extremely difficult to convince me that they aren't.
In 1963, a frustrated President Kennedy turned to the Pentagon for help in carrying out subversive operations against North Vietnam- a job the CIA had not managed to handle effectively. Thus was born the Pentagon's Special Operations Group(SOG). Under the cover name"Studies and Observation Group," SOG would, over the next eight years, dispatch numerous spies to North Vietnam, create a triple-cross deception program, wage psychological warfare by manipulating North Vietnamese POW's and kidnapped citizens, and stage deadly assaults on enemy soldiers traveling the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Written by the country's leading expert on SOG, here is the story of that covert war-one that would have both spectacular and disastrous results.