During the Vietnam war, the United States sought to undermine
Hanoi's subversion of the Saigon regime by sending Vietnamese
operatives behind enemy lines. A secret to most Americans, this
covert operation was far from secret in Hanoi: all of the commandos
were killed or captured, and many were turned by the Communists to
report false information.
"Spies and Commandos" traces the rise and demise of this secret
operation-started by the CIA in 1960 and expanded by the Pentagon
beginning in1964-in the first book to examine the program from both
sides of the war. Kenneth Conboy and Dale Andrade interviewed CIA
and military personnel and traveled in Vietnam to locate former
commandos who had been captured by Hanoi, enabling them to tell the
complete story of these covert activities from high-level decision
making to the actual experiences of the agents.
The book vividly describes scores of dangerous
missions-including raids against North Vietnamese coastal
installations and the air-dropping of dozens of agents into enemy
territory-as well as psychological warfare designed to make Hanoi
believe the "resistance movement" was larger than it actually was.
It offers a more complete operational account of the program than
has ever been made available-particularly its early years-and ties
known events in the war to covert operations, such as details of
the "34-A Operations" that led to the Tonkin Gulf incidents in
1964. It also explains in no uncertain terms why the whole plan was
doomed to failure from the start.
One of the remarkable features of the operation, claim the
authors, is that its failures were so glaring. They argue that the
CIA, and later the Pentagon, was unaware for years that Hanoi had
compromised the commandos, even though some agents missed radio
deadlines or filed suspicious reports. Operational errors were not
attributable to conspiracy or counterintelligence, they contend,
but simply to poor planning and lack of imagination.
Although it flourished for ten years under cover of the wider
war, covert activity in Vietnam is now recognized as a disaster.
Conboy and Andrade's account of that episode is a sobering tale
that lends a new perspective on the war as it reclaims the lost
lives of these unsung spies and commandos.
General
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