RIPPLE SALVO… #116…CHEAP SHOT?…but first…
Good Morning: Day ONE HUNDRED SIXTEEN of the long look back to the era of Yankee Air Pirates and Red River Rats…
24 JUNE 1966…ON THE HOME FRONT… (NYT)…Page 1: “Mississippi Police Use Gas To Route Rights Campers” in Canton while setting up a tent city on public school property. More than 2,500 were chased with a thick fog of tear gas and irritant gas after the demonstrators attempted to occupy the school property. Mississippi State Police acted at the request of city and county school and law enforcement officials… no injuries reported. Page 1: “South Vietnamese Division Mauls Troops From North”…”South Vietnamese troops have resumed heavy action in I Corps area in the northern part of South Vietnam broadening the campaigning that they shared elsewhere with Americans and other allied troops through the politically tumultuous spring. Five thousand 1st Division troops played a leading role in a three day battle 20 miles from North Vietnam. One NVN battalion was annihilated and another was mauled. More than 300 were killed and another 100 were captured in the biggest South Vietnamese operation of the year. Colonel Hal Moore (MOH) said, “This is no bargain basement operation. there are lots of enemy here.”..
Page 1: “U.S. Aides Weigh Intensified Raids in North Vietnam”… Discussion of an expanded bombing plan was revived as a consequence of Saigon’s suppression of the Buddhist uprising. Signs of a shift in air war plans are seen as the Administration is believed to be preparing for attacks on Haiphong. “Without knowing whether President Johnson has decided to strike new targets some members of congress, diplomats and officials believe that the Administration is setting the stage for such action.” Max Frankel writing from Washington: “The number of missions flown against North Vietnam targets has increased markedly in recent weeks. The President’s military advisors and some of his political counselors are well known to be urging strikes at the fuel depots near Haiphong, North Vietnam’s major port, which like Hanoi, the capital, has been spared thus far. The Administration was believed to be close to a decision to intensify the air attacks when the political strife developed among the South Vietnamese in March. The decision was deferred because of the turmoil in Saigon. Washington has always hoped that the increasing damage by air attacks would help persuade Hanoi to end the war, but such an affect was not deemed possible at a time when North Vietnamese were looking for a political collapse in Saigon. President Johnson: ‘We must continue to raise the cost of aggression at its source–that is North Vietnam.’“… Page 2: “U.S. Pilot Terms fight With MIG Personal”…LTJG Phil Vampatella said, “It was a personal thing. I had never before actually had a man shooting at me.” His opponent scored 70 hits on his F-8 Crusader before he was able to reverse the situation and score a Sidewinder hit on the MIG and down it…
24 June 1966… PRESIDENT’s DAILY BRIEFING… CIA (TS sanitized)…South Vietnam: (largely remains redacted after 50 years…) “…steps to consolidate government control over the last vestiges of dissidence continue in Saigon, Hue’ and Danang, and Ky is talking more of recasting his government. While one step, combining agencies involved in the pacification program under one super ministry appears logical and constructive to Ambassador Lodge, a reshuffling of personalities appears to be the principal feature of others. These include kicking upstairs the able foreign minister, Tran Van Do, who would become a deputy prime minister and remain one of the ten civilian members of the ruling directorate.”…North Vietnam: redacted… sources and methods still TS…
24 JUNE 1966…ROLLING THUNDER OPERATIONS…NYT (25 June reporting 24 June ops), page 4.: “U.S. Pilots Raid Truck Convoy In North Vietnam”… “United States Air Force pilots attacked a large supply convoy moving through North Vietnam toward Laos at dusk yesterday and continued to pound it until midnight. Darkness prevented bomb damage assessment…but at least ten trucks were destroyed. There had been between 75-100 trucks in the convoy. Two miles south of Thanh Hoa U.S. Navy pilots from the Ranger raided a railroad yard. They said all their bombs landed on the tracks and said that 50-100 boxcars were there amid the exploding bombs. Other Navy pilots acting on a reconnaissance report said they had destroyed six camouflaged trucks with wheels adapted for use on railway tracks. A Navy spokesperson said the pilots had scored direct hits with 500-pound bombs on the lucrative target 35 miles west of Thanh Hoa In South Vietnam, Air Force B-52 bombers attacked an enemy position and division headquarters 300 miles northeast of Saigon.”…There were no aircraft losses in Southeast Asia on 24 June 1966…oohrah…. However, the New York Times carried a short article reporting the death of NAVY LT JOHN R. McDONOUGH, a New Jersey pilot who was lost at sea in an aircraft accident in the vicinity of USS Hancock on 21 June…
RIPPLE SALVO… #116… Tonight I am putting the pipper on the CIA. Here is a short piece written by a former CIA agent that Harrison Salisbury included in his “Vietnam Reconsidered.” Sour grapes? Astute observations? You be the judge. Worth a few minutes of scarce reading time__ubetcha!
“The Intelligence of the Central Intelligence Agency In Vietnam”…Ralph McGehee… I quote…
I joined the CIA in 1952, as a paramilitary officer, and served overseas in Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand (three tours), and Vietnam. During one of my tours in Thailand, I discovered that something was wrong with agency intelligence and something was seriously wrong in Vietnam.
I was assigned to northeast Thailand, in early 1967, to develop a program to counter insurgency that was just beginning there. I developed a very comprehensive interrogation program, in which a twenty-five man team of interrogators would go into villages known to be under some Communist organization to discover how the communists organized a revolution. The Thai Communists, we knew, had been trained in Vietnam and had gone to school in North Vietnam. In Thailand, A Masses Mobilization Unit (MMU) of the Thai Communist party would move into a village and sit there for three months assessing the class structure. Who had a problem with the government? Who was poor? At the end of three months, if the MMU thought the village was ready for the next stage, they would identify one man and recruit him into the Communist Liberation Association, whose goals were to establish a more egalitarian society through land reform and to eliminate those people supported by the Americans. This man would recruit two more and a cell would be formed. These three would then be programmed to go out and recruit three more. Women were brought in to Women’s Liberation Associations and youth into Youth Liberation Associations. Over a period of a year–through indoctrination, through talking, and by gradually elevating propaganda to the themes of basic Marxist class struggle–they were able to recruit and transform the entire village into supporters of the movement. They went from village to village to village, and when they had what they had organized enough villages in a contiguous area, they had what they called a base area. Then they would begin recruiting people as guerrillas, forming a secret government and setting up a country inside a country.
Meanwhile the agency was reporting there were only 2,500 guerrillas in the entire country, that these forces had no support from the people, and that they would come down from the mountains occasionally and force the people to give them money and recruits. I was finding out just the opposite. The people were not only cooperating wholeheartedly with the guerrillas, but they were totally organized, had code names and were doing it all in secret. My reports were initially graded the highest. But after a few months of reports (including finding a province that had 2,500 guerrillas alone), I was pulled out of there, told to go home, the program was shut down, and the agency went right back to reporting 2,500 Communists in all of Thailand.
With the knowledge I had, I tried back at headquarters to say, “Look, you are doing something wronghere, you are reporting these things incorrectly.”
The more I agitated, the further away I was moved from positions of authority from where I could do anything about agency policy.
I stayed in the agency even after I found out that there was a problem in Thailand, because I thought Thailand’s problem unique. Not until I completed my tour in Vietnam, in late 1970, was I completely convinced that the agency was wrong. At that point, I had a very venal motivation for remaining–I had four children, two in expensive colleges. It would be very difficult to support them if I left. Also, if I had left at that point, I would have no way to protest what was going on, no way to call attention to what was happening. As it was, I used every protest channel I could think of. I went through the suggestions awards channel, I went to the inspector general, I went to the grievance officer, I went to the director, William Colby.
Agency intelligence estimates did not include the numbers of recruits Communists in Vietnam were announcing over their own radio network. Agency people refused to read the works of Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, Le Duan, or Nguyen Vo Giap in order to find out how Asian Communists developed revolutions. Finally, I wrote a study on Communist revolutionary practices. I was only able to do that by effecting a series of deceits, foiling the attempts of the leadership to stop me from doing the report.
In 1974, two reports came across my desk, one stated that thirty percent of the military and government officials of a particular province had deserted the Thieu government to join the Vietcong, the other said that the Vietcong owned a second province, except for the capital city. These reports had been cabled directly to headquarters instead of through the normal route via Saigon, where they were checked before being sent on. When the chief of Station Saigon heard what had happened, he wrote a hasty cable to agency headquarters. Do not, it said, disseminate those reports: they are poorly sourced; they are not accurate; and they give a false impression of the war. In fact, these were the only two reports that I saw that were accurate at all. Based on these two reports, I wrote an end-of-year report saying the place was coming apart and deteriorating before our eyes. I knew that nobody would do anything about it–and nobody did. A few months later the Thieu government collapsed…………………….end quote
A cheap shot by a disgruntled agent? Perhaps. So why fire a salvo at the CIA? (1) From personal experience I can vouch for the fact that there are folks in our government who turn a blind eye and deaf ear to facts that do not match their imagined state or outcome. Self-deception and political correctness run amuck. (2) History provides lessons for those who want to learn. Disgruntled Ralph McGehee’s 1984 essay account of how revolutionaries go about the business of building a base and a “state within a state” corresponds to the instructions recorded in Saul D. Alinsky’s 1971 “Rules for Radicals.” What was going on in Thailand and Vietnam in the 1960s and the 70s, and wherever in the world communism was and is achieving a foothold, is the same sort of “community organizing” that is transforming our country before our very eyes. “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.”…Jefferson…
Lest we forget….. Bear ………. –30– ……….