Part 4: Surprise, Kill. Vanish...An Assassination Capacity, JFK,KIA...The Studies and Observation Groups

Surprise,Kill, Vanish
By Annie Jacobson
10 

An Assassination Capacity

On the morning of February 23, 1961, in the residential Miramar district of Havana, Che Guevara left his home on Seventeenth Street and walked with his bodyguards down the pretty, tree-lined street, headed to his car. As he climbed in the driver’s seat, four or five assassins emerged from where they’d been hiding in the bushes and opened fire. A violent gun battle left one of Che’s neighbors, a man identified as Mr. Salinas, dead on the grass. As Che sped away, his bodyguards continued firing. Inside the house, Che’s wife, Aleida, heard the intense gunfire. She grabbed their three-month-old daughter, Aledita, and with their nanny rushed to hide under the stairwell. 

In Havana, there was a news blackout on the attempted assassination. (Aleida Guevara kept the story secret for thirty years, sharing it with Che’s biographer, Jon Lee Anderson, after she left Cuba for Spain to live in exile.) Because Cuba is a police state, very little unflattering news ever leaves the island. That such an important leader as Che Guevara would be vulnerable to assassination was not a message the Castro regime wanted to convey. Instead, a semiofficial cover story emerged, purporting that the dead man, Mr. Salinas, had been having an affair and that the killing was an illicit romance gone awry. In a country where possession of an illegal firearm was a capital offense, the cover story seems implausible. Was the CIA involved? Or were the assassins really anti-Castro Cubans acting on their own? Further news was repressed, not surprising given Che Guevara’s views of the press. “Newspapers are instruments of the oligarchy,” he told the Cuban people. “We must eliminate all newspapers; we cannot make a revolution with free press.” As of 2019, the mystery remains unsolved. But in response to the assassination attempt against him, Che Guevara is said to have kept a grenade in the cigar box he often carried. 

After three failed attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, in late January or early February 1961, Felix Rodriguez was reassigned to the CIA’s Brigade 2506. He was emplaced on a five-man direct-action paramilitary team called a Gray Team. The Gray Teams would be infiltrated into Cuba in advance of an assault by Brigade 2506, at Bahía de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs. Assassination plans aside, the CIA was now moving forward with a covert-action amphibious invasion followed by a coup d’état. 

The CIA was relying on its Gray Teams to locate, train, and equip pockets of previously identified resistance fighters, similar to what the OSS Jedburghs had done shortly after Allied forces stormed the beaches at Normandy. But in France, ninety-three Jedburgh teams had been air-dropped in behind enemy lines. In Cuba there were just seven teams, each made up of five men. “It was high-risk,” Rodriguez remembers. “Thirty-five [of us] went to Cuba, only fifteen survived.” 

On February 28, 1961, Rodriguez and the members of his Gray Team left an isolated beach in Key West bound for Cuba. This time, instead of a yacht they rode in a twenty-five-foot Zodiac boat, “filled to the gunwales with weapons and explosives.” Four and a half hours later, the team made a stealth beach landing at Arcos de Canasi, forty miles east of Havana. It was Rodriguez’s first time back to Cuba since he was a schoolboy. “We had our weapons and backpacks but we also had to land two tons of equipment, explosives, grenades, machine guns, ammunition, and communications equipment.” To be caught likely meant summary execution. Rodriguez and his Gray Team members were met on the beach by anti-Castro partisans, local farmers and sugar mill workers who were members of a group called Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionaria (MRR), a pro-U.S. resistance movement. The MRR had already been partially armed; CIA Air Branch pilots had managed to covertly air-drop bundles of World War II–era M3 submachine guns and .45 pistols. (In addition to the CIA’s Ground Branch, there is Air Branch, which is the aviation wing of the Special Activities Division, and Maritime Branch, for amphibious operations. There’s also a political action arm, which interfaces with all three branches.) 

From the beachhead at Arcos de Canasi, Felix Rodriguez was driven to Camaguey, where he met with the head of the Cuban resistance, a young man who went by the code name Francisco. “Seeing him on the street, you’d mistake him for a student,” recalls Rodriguez. Francisco was an eloquent, soft-spoken engineering student. “He naturally inspired people,” Rodriguez said. The popularity of Francisco’s movement made him the number-one target of Castro’s intelligence services, and meeting with him was a tense affair. 

Over the next few weeks, Felix Rodriguez moved from safe house to safe house around Havana, meeting individually with leaders of the underground. In mid-March, he was called back to Miami to resupply. There he was told that he’d be reinserted again soon. The invasion would be happening any day now. 

Finally word came. “I was driven to the Keys by a lanky Texan who went by the code name Sherman,” Rodriguez recalls. “He presented me with something special to take to Cuba. A mini-flamethrower. It fit very comfortably in one hand, yet it threw a fifteen-foot-wide column of white phosphorous flame.” The Texan told Rodriguez that the weapon was highly classified, “but he wanted me to have it anyway.” This time he was inserted near Morón, on the central coast. There, he was met by another member of the underground and driven to Havana in an old Buick, “the flamethrower hidden underneath the dashboard.” Rodriguez was dropped off at a safe house in El Vedado, and told to lay low and await orders. 

In its Bay of Pigs invasion planning, the CIA pulled yet again from its own history, as we have seen. Modeling the invasion and coup on the Guatemala operation was ironic, given that those operations had radicalized Che Guevara. But Cuba in 1961 was a very different environment in which to operate than Guatemala had been in 1954. President Arbenz commanded an army of 10,000 men. Fidel Castro allegedly had a million soldiers on call. Arbenz, a socialist, did not run Guatemala as a military dictatorship; Castro controlled the people of Cuba with absolute power, using Soviet tactics of repression and fear. Most significant of all, Arbenz did not have a direct line to the Kremlin the way Castro did. In hindsight, the CIA’s disastrous covert-action Bay of Pigs operation was born of wishful thinking. 

As with all military dictatorships, spies in Cuba were ubiquitous. For the CIA, the threat of a double agent was a constant source of concern. Unknown to the Agency, Castro had managed to infiltrate its ranks long before the invasion was given the green light. In Miami, the CIA had recruited Benigno Pérez Vivancos, a former lieutenant in Castro’s army, thinking he was an anti-Castro émigré. Vivancos stood out as brave and reliable and became the seventy-eighth fighting-age male recruited for Brigade 2506. In fact, he was a Castro loyalist, sent by Havana to spy. 

The actions of this double agent proved deadly. On the night of April 1, 1961, not long after Felix Rodriguez arrived in Havana with his mini-flamethrower, Castro’s G-2 intelligence conducted a raid on a house outside Havana and captured Francisco, whose real name was Rogelio Gonzalez Corso. Tried and found guilty, he was immediately executed. Based on information provided by Vivancos, Castro’s government rounded up thousands of people it identified as possible members of the resistance. “[Castro] herded them into theaters, stadiums and military bases to squelch the possibility of a spontaneous uprising to overthrow his regime,” says a CIA inspector general report. 

Unaware of the compromise, Rodriguez waited for word of the invasion. On April 13, at CIA headquarters, Brigade 2506 was given the green light to set sail from Guatemala. On the morning of April 15, eight B-26 bombers, supplied by the CIA and flown by Cuban émigré pilots, attacked military airfields in Cuba in the first move of the covert operation. In response, Castro played an ingenious and unforeseen political card: he ordered his foreign minister, Raul Roa, to call the United Nations Political and Security Committee, in New York City, and demand that an emergency session be held. The request was honored, the session attended by the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson. Cuba’s foreign minister rightly decried the United States for having attacked a sovereign nation unprovoked. “This was bad news for President Kennedy whose number one priority was hiding the hand of the U.S. Government,” lamented an anonymous CIA staff historian in an Agency report, kept classified for decades. “Lying to the UN had serious consequences and a second [air] strike would put the United States in an awkward position internationally.” The result meant disaster for Brigade 2506. President Kennedy’s “political considerations trumped the military importance of a ‘D-Day’ air strike.” 

Without a second strike, the amphibious assault had no chance for success. And the element of surprise was no longer there. Shortly before dawn the following morning, with Brigade 2506 just hours away from landing at the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy canceled the second round of air strikes. Pilots who’d been sitting on the runway awaiting orders for takeoff were told to stand down. As the sun rose on the morning of April 17, 1,311 members of Brigade 2506 made an amphibious landing. But instead of accomplishing a stealth infiltration, the CIA’s paramilitary army of Cuban exiles were met on shore by Castro’s military, whose forces far outnumbered and outgunned them. 

In Havana, Felix Rodriguez learned about the Bay of Pigs invasion while listening to the radio. “All the Cuban radio stations were broadcasting the same emergency network,” he remembers, saying the same thing: that the Americans had tried to launch a coup d’état and had failed. Peering out the window, Rodriguez watched in horror as a sea of military vehicles moved through the streets, each one overflowing with Castro’s soldiers. On Cuban state TV, news footage showed members of Brigade 2506 as they were captured on the beach and marched off into the woods, their fates unknown. 

Four members of Felix Rodriguez’s Gray Team were picked up and arrested. Rodriguez fled the safe house and made a run for the Venezuelan embassy. He was aware of a treaty that allowed political refugees safe passage out of Cuba. After weeks of hiding inside the embassy, he was finally loaded onto a bus of refugees and driven to the airport. In a bitter twist of fate, the bus drove first through Miramar, passing Che Guevara’s home on Seventeenth Street, where, two months earlier, the assassination attempt against him had failed. It continued on past Uncle Toto’s once grand home, on Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Eighth Street, where Felix had enjoyed so many happy childhood memories. “It had been turned over to the state,” says Rodriguez. Like all private property, it would be divided up among the people. “Later I would learn five Soviet families were living there,” he recalls. 

The Bay of Pigs was an extraordinary political embarrassment for President Kennedy. In the Dominican Republic, Consul General Henry Dearborn, the U.S. State Department’s chargé d’affaires at the embassy in Santo Domingo, was woken in the middle of the night and told to cancel the CIA’s plan to assassinate Trujillo. “I recall a frantic message from the [State] Department, I guess signed off on by President Kennedy,” Dearborn remembered in 1991. It was “saying, in effect, ‘Look, we have all this trouble with Castro; we don’t want any more trouble in the Caribbean. Tell these people to knock it off’”—meaning the assassination plot. Dearborn followed orders, he says. “I communicated to the opposition people that Washington was very much against any attempt at assassination. The answer I got back from them was, ‘Just tell Washington it is none of their business. This is our business. We have planned it and we are going to do it and there is nothing you can do about it.’ I relayed this to Washington,” said Dearborn. 

The plan to assassinate Trujillo went ahead despite Washington’s eleventhhour attempts to call it off. On the night of May 30, 1961, Trujillo was seated in the backseat of his chauffeur-driven 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, traveling down a country road outside the capital, when he was ambushed by a group of seven assassins brandishing weapons provided to the rebel group by the CIA. “We started shooting,” recalled one of the killers, General Antonio Imbert, in an interview with the BBC in 2011. President Trujillo and his chauffeur were both armed, and they began shooting back. Trujillo managed to get out of the car. “Trujillo was wounded but he was still walking, so I shot him again” and killed him, said General Imbert. “We put him in [our] car and took him away.” The assassins drove the dictator’s dead body to a safe house belonging to the partisans, where it was later discovered by state police. 

Dearborn remembered hearing the news. He was out in the suburbs, at a country club. “The Chinese Ambassador was giving some kind of a money raising thing [for] charity, to which I went.” After the event ended, Dearborn and a colleague left together in a State Department car. “We started back around 11:00 p.m. and ran into a roadblock along the ocean highway.” The state police were stopping cars and conducting searches. “They looked in trunks, pulled up rugs, etc. I had a CIA fellow in the car—along about January the CIA had sent a couple of people into the consulate—and I said, ‘Bob, this is it. I am sure this is it.’” The state police wouldn’t let the men continue down that road. “When we [finally] got to the Embassy, where I had been living for about a year, the telephone rang and one of my main contacts of the opposition said, ‘It is over, he is dead.’ I knew immediately what happened and went down to the office and sent off a message to Washington.” 

For the CIA, the assassination of President Trujillo had been an inadvertent success. The killers got away, although they were soon to be betrayed by coconspirator General José Román. Hundreds of people suspected of being complicit in Trujillo’s assassination were rounded up, detained, and tortured, in a move that echoed what happened in Czechoslovakia after Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination by the British Special Operations Executive. Six of the seven Trujillo assassins were caught and executed. Only General Antonio Imbert got away. Decades later, the consensus in the Dominican Republic is that killing Trujillo was a heroic act, a textbook example of tyrannicide, the justified killing of a tyrant. “We Dominicans react very negatively when the people who killed Trujillo are called assassins,” says Bernardo Vega, a former ambassador to the United States. Killing the cruelest dictator in the Americas, says Vega, “was a good thing to do.” 

The week after General Trujillo was buried, the U.S. State Department’s Henry Dearborn was notified of a plan for his assassination. Dearborn was ordered to pack up his things, drive to the airport, and leave at once. He hurried to his office and loaded all the secret files into a burn barrel to destroy. Now, in good conscience, he said, he could leave. In a State Department oral history, he relayed “a funny incident” that drew to a close his three years as America’s top diplomat in the Dominican Republic. “I had my shirt, tie, shoes and socks on but couldn’t find my pants,” he remembered. “I said [to my administrative assistant], an officer’s wife, ‘where are my pants?’ She said, ‘Oh, my god, I packed them.’ [She] had to go back down to the car outside and unpack my pants so that I could leave the country with dignity.” 

Upon landing in the United States, Dearborn was called to Washington, DC, to participate in a briefing of the president of the United States. John F. Kennedy, himself intensely interested in covert action, had asked to be briefed on the Trujillo assassination by those involved. In declassified Senate testimony, Dearborn later recalled, “One enlightening part of the discussion occurred when I interrupted [Kennedy] and said: ‘I think that—.’ The President interrupted me and said, ‘We already know what you think.’” In his oral history, Dearborn made clear what President Kennedy’s statement meant to him. “That showed clearly enough that he had been reading my cables,” Dearborn said. 

Dearborn’s remembrance is notable given an official Department of Justice summation “with respect to Trujillo’s assassination.” In giving testimony for the attorney general’s official report—that would be Attorney General Robert Kennedy, chairman of the Special Group—the CIA officials who were interviewed stated that they had “no active part but had a faint connection with the groups that in fact did [assassinate]” the president. Henry Dearborn knew otherwise. “When the meeting [with the president] broke up he shook hands with me and said, ‘You did a good job down there.’” 

Dearborn stood by his actions and those taken by the president’s Special Group advisors, the State Department, and the CIA. “It is my firmly held view that those who killed Trujillo and those who backed them up would have acted if there had never been a CIA. They were only waiting for a favorable domestic and international atmosphere to give them the required courage,” Dearborn stated on the record, in 1991. He died in 2013, at the age of one hundred. 

Shortly after Rafael Trujillo was assassinated, President Kennedy’s Special Group formalized assassination as a foreign policy tool—a program it called Executive Action Capability but which Congress later determined was “an assassination capability.” Declassified testimony given to Senate investigators by CIA deputy director of plans Richard Bissell suggests that the person who authorized the assassination capability was President Kennedy. The Special Group (Augmented) had received its “orders from National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and [Deputy National Security Advisor] Walt Rostow,” Bissell told Senate investigators behind closed doors, but these presidential advisors “would not have given such encouragement unless they were confident that it would meet with the President’s approval.” 

Moving forward under the Kennedy administration, assassination operations acquired new euphemisms, including “direct positive action,” “neutralization operations,” “an accident plot,” and “the last resort.” Under the impossibly unsubtle cryptonym ZR/RIFLE, the CIA’s Executive Action Office was staffed with an array of people, from senior managers to case officers, even a “principal agent with the primary task of spotting agent candidates,” operatives willing to carry out “and to conceal the ‘executive action capability.’” The CIA’s Technical Services Division provided covert-action operators with whatever items they might need, from disguises to weapons to poisons. The Directorate of Support handled financial and administrative matters. The Office of Security made sure overseas clandestine facilities remained secure. 

“Assassination was [now] an acceptable course of action,” Congress learned, made possible through the establishment of plausible deniability: “The chairman of the Special Group was usually responsible for determining which projects required presidential consideration and for keeping him abreast of developments.” According to Bissell, after President Kennedy appointed his brother chairman of the Special Group (Augmented), the construct became almost impenetrable. In this way, a system of “plausible denial” was fortified, said Bissell, a series of obfuscations that “served as ‘circuit breakers’ for presidents,” preventing the Oval Office from being dragged into a scandal should a hidden-hand operation be revealed. 

The president’s assassination capability was intended to serve as a means of bringing order to the increasingly volatile situations unfolding in Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. Instead it created mayhem, chaos, and collapse. But the real question, the riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma, was and remains: By allowing the use of assassination as a hidden-hand foreign policy tool, did President Kennedy become an easier target to assassinate?

11

JFK,KIA

President John F. Kennedy was outraged with the CIA over the failure at the Bay of Pigs, which stained his first one hundred days as president. He’d campaigned on an anticommunist plank, singling out Cuba as a “hostile and militant communist satellite [receiving] guidance, support and arms from Moscow and Peking.” To have failed so publicly, so early in his presidency, infuriated him. 

Adding insult to injury, Che Guevara personally expressed his gratitude to the young president for the spectacular defeat, using White House emissary Richard Goodwin to relay his sarcastic message. “Guevara said… he wanted to thank us very much for the invasion,” Goodwin told the president, “that it had been a great political victory for them—enabled them to consolidate—and transform [Cuba] from an aggrieved little country to an equal.” 

In response, President Kennedy made a move so shocking it upended covert action operations in a way not seen since the creation of Title 50 and National Security Council Directive 10/2 (NSC 10/2). He gutted the existing paramilitary authority at the CIA, making “any large paramilitary operation [that was] wholly or partially covert [now] the primary responsibility of the Defense Department, with CIA in a supporting role.” 

“The fiasco at the Bay of Pigs… changed everything,” says CIA staff historian John L. Helgerson. CIA director Allen Dulles asked to meet with the president, who refused. The president’s mind was made up. “There [is] no point in the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] discussing the matter directly with the President as that would be counterproductive,” presidential advisor General Chester Clifton curtly informed the CIA. For the first time since 1947, the Pentagon was now in charge of the president’s guerrilla warfare corps. “I can’t overemphasize the shock—not simply the words—that procedure caused in Washington: to the Secretary of State, to the Secretary of Defense, and particularly to the Director of Central Intelligence,” said Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy. “Historians have glossed over that or don’t know about it,” Prouty said in 1989. 

Kennedy lost the battle for a democratic Cuba in a most humiliating and public way. Now he was unwilling to experience a loss in Vietnam. It wasn’t that the new president opposed hidden-hand paramilitary operations; he opposed the CIA’s handling of them. In a series of meetings with his national-security advisors, he ordered covert-action operations to be accelerated in Vietnam, only now they would be led by U.S. Army Special Forces. This maverick move would have far-reaching consequences—not just in Vietnam but around the world, and not just in 1961 but for decades to come. By their very definition, paramilitary operations exist outside formal military operations (para means “distinct from”). To have the Defense Department now engaging in nonofficial military operations inside a foreign country during peacetime was a radical move into uncharted territory. 

Immediately after the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy asked top advisor General Maxwell Taylor to review all U.S. paramilitary capabilities and advise on next steps. Taylor submitted a report recommending that the president broaden the scope of classified covert operations in Vietnam. Kennedy authorized three Top Secret National Security Action Memorandums in succession, significantly widening a war that technically did not exist. To oversee operations in theater, the Joint Chiefs of Staff created a new office inside the Pentagon called the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities (SACSA), to be run by a military general and his staff. SACSA would now function as the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination had during Korea. The man chosen to run SACSA was a marine corps general named Victor “Brute” Krulak. 

A legend among his men, Brute Krulak was famous at the Pentagon for the risky, nighttime amphibious raids he’d led on islands across the Pacific during World War II. On one of these raids, he was leading thirty commandos on an ambush when their vessel hit a reef and began to sink. Facing certain death, they were rescued by a torpedo boat crew commanded by a young lieutenant colonel named John F. Kennedy. The president and the general had history, and now Krulak was entrusted with a highly classified, highly unorthodox new job at the Department of Defense: to oversee quasi-military operations inside a sovereign nation against a belligerent force of guerrilla fighters, without a formal declaration of war. One of SACSA’s first questions was, what to do about Laos? 

President Eisenhower left John F. Kennedy with a muddled, complicated, and intractable situation in Laos. Laos was a victim of geography, Kennedy’s Special Group advisors told him. “Hardly a nation except in the legal sense.” But to lose Laos would be “the beginning of the loss of most of the Far East,” Eisenhower forewarned. In an effort to contain the communist insurgency within Vietnam’s borders, President Kennedy decided to pursue diplomacy in Laos. He canceled Operation White Star and instructed his advisors to negotiate a neutralization treaty. In July 1962, the governments of the United States, the Soviet Union, North Vietnam, and numerous other nations all signed the Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos, agreeing to leave Laos alone. “They all did,” says scholar Richard Shultz, “except for the NVA,” the army of North Vietnam. Insurgents do not honor borders or treaties. This reality continues to plague the Defense Department in 2019. 

The Laos neutralization treaty of 1962 was a colossal deception, and a huge strategic win for North Vietnam. By the time the treaty was signed, Hanoi had already spent three long years building a clandestine transportation route and logistical system from Hanoi through Laos and into the south. Eventually, it also would include trails through Cambodia. This was the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the secret supply route Hanoi used to move fighters and weapons into territory it sought to control in the south. While the United States felt bound by honor to adhere to the neutrality declaration, Hanoi escalated its prohibited use of the trail. This gave the communists extraordinary momentum and new advantage at a critical time in their revolution. 

Blind to the realities of the trail, the month after the Laos treaty was signed Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara called a meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii, bringing together the Defense Department, the Pacific Command, the CIA, and the State Department. McNamara presented Operation Switchback, a robust covert-action program designed to “inflict increasing punishment upon North Vietnam.” One of the first orders of business was to create a new guerrilla warfare corps for the president, to carry out the punishment promised by the secretary of defense. 

Now in a subordinate role, the CIA merged its existing paramilitary program, the Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG), into the Defense Department’s Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). Billy Waugh was an early member of the group and became one of the first Green Berets sent to Vietnam in this capacity. Waugh’s group trained President Diem’s soldiers in paramilitary tactics, “in everything from sabotage and assassination, to evade and escape,” Waugh recalls. 

The goal of the CIDG program was to create direct-action strike-force units made up of South Vietnamese peasants from indigenous hill tribes led by U.S. Army Green Berets and CIA advisors. This was a grander, more ambitious version of what the OSS Special Operations groups, including the Jedburghs, had accomplished during World War II. Waugh and his fellow trainers were to arm the rebels and teach them how to sabotage, subvert, and assassinate the communist infiltrators coming down from the north. 

The effort was astonishing. Unlike the CIA, whose access to military resources had been limited, SACSA had the Defense Department to call upon, with its resupply capacity that seemed to know no bounds. Through a CIDG support office on Okinawa, warfighting supplies were air-dropped into Vietnam by the ton. Each month an average of 740 tons of weapons and supplies were delivered to Special Forces units set up in remote villages across South Vietnam. By the end of 1962 there were over 33,300 South Vietnamese peasants being paid by the Defense Department to participate in the CIDG program. Assigned American military–style titles, the participants were broken down by number: 6,000 Direct Action Strike Force Troops; 19,000 Village Defender Militia; 2,700 Mountain Scouts; 5,300 Popular Forces troops, and 300 Border Surveillance guards. Twelve months later, the number skyrocketed again. There were now more than 87,000 peasants on U.S. taxpayer payroll. But the program was grossly ineffective. When the NVA and Vietcong attacked a village, the strike force just ran away. 

“This is not to say that they were afraid,” wrote Colonel Francis J. Kelly, an unconventional-warfare expert for the Pentagon and the man who later commanded all Special Forces in Vietnam. “Most had seen a great deal of fighting. They were just not interested in, or even remotely enthusiastic about, the program. From the point of view of the Vietnam Special Forces and the government the CIDG program was an American project.” 

For Ngo Dinh Diem, the American-supported president of South Vietnam, what was happening in remote areas of the country meant very little. His own situation in Saigon had become dire. The Americans were beginning to lose faith in his leadership, and his military generals were plotting to overthrow him. The people of South Vietnam hated him. He persecuted Buddhists and liberal democrats in equal measure, arresting monks and nightclub owners, banning boxing matches and beauty pageants. He could barely control the unrest that was building in the cities, in Saigon and Hue. When people gathered to protest, Diem dispatched military police to beat them into submission. 

By the spring of 1963, Diem’s presidency was on the brink of collapse. The Kennedy White House now viewed the colonialist in the white three-piece suit as a losing horse. The only person in South Vietnam more hated than President Diem was his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, chief of the secret police and commander of army special forces. In a last-ditch effort to salvage Diem’s presidency, the White House wondered if perhaps the real problem wasn’t Nhu. Through State Department channels, President Diem was told to consider getting rid of his brother. Word came back: never. 

The tipping point came in June 1963 when, in protest of Diem’s policies, a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire in the middle of a busy Saigon street. The self-immolation was photographed, and the image of a human being on fire was reprinted in newspapers around the world. While the international community was shocked by the horror and tragedy of the monk’s self-sacrifice, the Diem regime publicly mocked him. This led to what would become known as the Buddhist uprisings. In August 1963, after Diem declared martial law, the White House decided that it would no longer support President Diem. 

The CIA dispatched Lieutenant Colonel Lucien Conein to gather intelligence. Conein served the CIA as the Saigon station liaison between Henry Cabot Lodge, then serving as U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, and South Vietnam’s top military generals, a job Conein did well owing to a unique history with several of Diem’s generals. Back in 1945, the French-speaking Conein served as a member of the OSS Deer Team, the American group that armed and trained Ho Chi Minh, General Giap, and several hundred of their Viet Minh guerrilla fighters. During that time period Conein befriended many young Vietnamese officers, some of whom now served as generals under President Diem. In an effort to determine what was happening at the palace, Conein met with several of Diem’s generals, using a dentist’s office for these clandestine meetings. 

Conein learned that the generals were planning to overthrow President Diem. The leader of the insurrection was General Duong Van Minh—“Big Minh,” as he was known. Conein relayed this information to the president and his advisors. In turn, Conein was told to tell the generals that the White House supported this idea. “[We] will not attempt to thwart” this action, President Kennedy told Conein, trying to sound officially uninvolved. 

On the morning of November 1, 1963, Lucien Conein awoke, changed into his military uniform, and prepared himself for the coup d’état that was about to begin. He tucked an ivory-handled .375 magnum revolver into his waist and filled a bag, meant for Big Minh, with three million Vietnamese piastres, roughly $40,000, in cash. Years later, Senate investigators asked Conein if he knew that the generals he was giving this money to planned on killing President Diem. “The majority of the officers… desired President Diem to have an honorable retirement,” Conein swore. Regarding his brother and other powerful figures in the regime, “the attitude was that their deaths… would be welcomed.” 

With Green Berets guarding his family, Conein picked up a secure telephone given to him by Big Minh and called the CIA with a secret code: “nine, nine, nine, nine, nine…” The coup d’état against President Diem was about to begin. Conein kissed his wife and children good-bye, climbed into an army jeep waiting in the driveway, and headed off to headquarters, near the airport. 

At 1:30 p.m., scores of Big Minh loyalists burst into army offices, police headquarters, and radio stations around Saigon, holding people at gunpoint and informing them that if they resisted they’d be shot. Military trucks loaded with artillery surrounded the palace. President Diem and his brother slipped out the back and disappeared. Diem’s loyal bodyguards had no idea that their president had fled, and dozens of these men died defending the palace and Diem’s honor. By 3:00 a.m. the palace was overrun, and soon looters were running through the streets with President Diem’s possessions: gilded furniture, fine whiskey, American adventure magazines. 

At 6:00 a.m. President Diem reached out to Big Minh from inside the Catholic church in Cholon where he and his brother were hiding. Diem offered to surrender, provided he was given the full honors due a departing president. When Big Minh refused, Diem settled for unconditional surrender and gave up his location at the church. Big Minh dispatched an American-made M113 armored personnel carrier and four jeeps filled with soldiers to retrieve the deposed president and his brother. 

On the drive back to the palace, alongside a train crossing, Diem and Nhu were executed, shot with automatic weapons inside the armored vehicle. Their bullet-riddled bodies were photographed and then buried in an unmarked grave adjacent to the Saigon residence of U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge.

For all the euphemism and convoluted language behind and around President Kennedy’s assassination program, there was absolutely nothing vague or indirect about the assassination that took place just three weeks later, on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. From the perspective of U.S. Secret Service agent Clinton J. Hill, killing a leader is a visceral and sickening reality. 

Clint Hill, age thirty-two, had been on the Presidential Protective Detail since the Eisenhower administration, when he guarded the president’s mother-in-law, Elivera Mathilda Carlson Doud. During the Kennedy White House he served as the special agent in charge of Jacqueline Kennedy, overseeing her safety at all times. On this day in Dallas, the president had made a protocol change. He didn’t want Secret Service agents, including Clint Hill, to be standing on the running boards of the open-topped presidential limousine. Instead, Hill was now riding in a car directly behind the president and Mrs. Kennedy. He had weapons at the ready: a pistol at his waist, an AR-15 automatic rifle on the seat beside him, and a shotgun in the compartment near the jump seats. 

When the first shot rang out, Clint Hill leapt out of the vehicle he was traveling in and ran to the president’s limousine, using the rear running board to climb onto the trunk area and reach for Mrs. Kennedy, who was reaching out to him. He watched as the president grabbed his throat and lurched forward. A second shot rang out, blasting off a portion of the president’s head. 

As Clint Hill covered Mrs. Kennedy with his body, he observed the president. “The right rear portion of his head was missing. It was lying in the rear seat of the car. His brain was exposed. There was blood and bits of brain all over the entire rear portion of the car,” Hill told the Warren Commission. 

As the limousine raced to the hospital, a sobbing Mrs. Kennedy tried to make sense of the carnage. 

“My God, they have shot his head off,” she told Clint Hill. Then, to her dead husband, she implored, sobbing: “Jack, Jack, what have they done to you?” 

At the hospital, doctors determined that a piece of the president’s skull was missing. “The next day we found the [missing] portion of the President’s head,” Clint Hill told investigators. “It was found in the street.” 

Years later, in an interview for the New York Times, former CIA director Richard Helms made a provocative statement. Helms began his intelligence career with the OSS in 1942 and retired in 1973, having served Presidents Johnson and Nixon as director of Central Intelligence. Under the Kennedy administration, he served as CIA deputy director of plans, which put him in charge of the president’s Executive Action capability. In this capacity Helms oversaw the Kennedy administration’s assassination program, including more than twenty now-declassified plots to kill Fidel Castro—with an exploding cigar, a contaminated diving suit, poison botulism-toxin pills, and other schemes, all of which failed. 

“If you kill someone else’s leaders,” Helms told David Frost on national television in 1978, “why shouldn’t they kill yours?” 

Within a year and a half, the covert war became an overt war. The United States increased its military forces in South Vietnam and in March began bombing Hanoi in Operation Rolling Thunder. The governments of Russia and China increased support to Hanoi, providing men, weapons, and guerrilla warfare expertise to the communists. In Washington, DC, in an effort to define U.S. Defense Department goals inside Vietnam, John McNaughton, assistant secretary of the department, used a percentage calculus in a memo for national security advisor McGeorge Bundy: “70%—to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat; 20%—to keep SVN [South Vietnam]… territory from Chinese hands; 10%—to permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life.” In South Vietnam, Joint CIA/Defense Department hit-and-run ambush operations by the Civilian Irregular Defense Group continued full-bore, unleashing bloodshed and chaos on an increasingly divided civilian population while achieving little of the Pentagon’s percentage-based goals. 

Now it was dawn on June 17, 1965, and Billy Waugh was leading a ninety man CIDG team on an ambush against an enemy camp inside a village called Bong Son. The camp, believed to house 200 to 300 communist fighters, was located in South Vietnam but was under the control of communist forces. Of ninety CIDG men, one was CIA, three were Green Berets, and eighty-six were indigenous villagers. The mission was to sneak up on the enemy soldiers while they were sleeping, kill as many of them as possible, and get out without loss. Surprise, kill, vanish. 

The CIDG men had left their Special Forces A-Team camp at 1:30 that morning. Waugh was the point man, now leading the team silently on a narrow trail that snaked along the An Lao River. Just seventeen kilometers inland from the coast, the terrain was dense jungle. It was hot and humid, already 85 degrees. After roughly an hour of walking, the team came upon an NVA soldier who was supposed to be keeping guard but had fallen asleep. Waugh instructed one of the indigs to cut the man’s throat. 

“Examining the dead soldier’s possessions,” remembers Waugh, “we noted the modern gear he carried: a shiny Chinese pistol, a Russian AK-47, brand-new jungle boots, and an excellent radio.” Inside the soldier’s medicine kit was an array of supplies almost identical to what Special Forces medics carried, and Waugh remembers noting the odd symmetry involved. The kill-or-be-killed rule of unconventional warfare. “We took his gear and continued on.” 

The three other Americans on the team were Captain Paris D. Davis, the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer in the group; Sergeant Robert D. Brown, a medic; and Staff Sergeant David Morgan, the team’s liaison to the CIA. “Captain Paris Davis, a blue-eyed black man from Washington, DC, had never been in combat before,” says Waugh, and the same went for Sergeant Robert Brown, “an all-American kid from Montana who would soon be dead with a bullet in his head.” The CIA operator David Morgan, like Waugh “battle tested and sharp-witted, unafraid of fierce combat or hard work,” had already served multiple tours in Vietnam. 

Each of the Special Forces soldiers wore green battle fatigues and carried an M16 rifle and twenty-five magazines of .223-caliber ammunition, which meant each of them had five hundred rounds. Each soldier had twenty-eight grenades of various types: fourteen regular grenades, ten frag grenades, two white phosphorus grenades (an incendiary weapon meant to ignite cloth, fuel, ammunition, and more), and two smoke grenades. Rescue gear consisted of a signal mirror, a compass, and a bright red emergency panel. In his left pocket, Waugh carried hard candy for energy. 

As they moved along the riverbank, Billy Waugh began to worry about the communications gear. If the operation went bad and they needed air support, the radio was their lifeline. It had been decided early on that the PRC-25 FM radio was to be carried by one of the eighty-six indigs, but now Waugh was having second thoughts. “Most of the indigs were poor farmers,” he says. “Now they were mercenaries, paid to fight someone else’s war.” This was the first time any of them had been in combat. Waugh had trained the group in small arms and unconventional-warfare techniques, just as he’d trained hundreds of others like them, and he knew that the indigs might not stick around once shots started firing. On the other hand, he thought, there was nothing quite like a quick, successful ambush to bolster the confidence and competence of a mercenary. Either way, there was no guarantee. By nightfall all but fifteen of the indigs would be dead or gone. 

Approaching the camp, the group divided into four units, each with a Green Beret or CIA officer in the lead. A few hundred meters outside the target, Waugh suddenly found himself just feet away from a man and a woman, hunched over. By the time they looked up at him, Waugh had his weapon on them. They were NVA cooks, collecting firewood. Hard at work in these predawn hours, preparing breakfast for soldiers who’d soon be awake. Behind a fence, Waugh spotted pots of food cooking over an open firepit. As the man reached for the pistol on his hip, Waugh took a swift step forward, grabbed him around the shoulders, and pushed his knife into the man’s throat. The woman came at him with a stick, striking him and making noise. Waugh slit her throat and set her body down on the jungle floor. All was quiet again. 

He knew instantly that the pace of the raid had to quicken. The noise could have alerted a sentry. Soon, all hell could break lose. He passed word down the line. From here on out, the men would communicate using hand and arm signals, no sound. Rounding a bend, Waugh caught sight of the enemy camp. The bamboo hooches, or sleeping barracks, were wide and low, with ceilings no more than three feet tall. Each hut was roughly forty feet wide and lined with platforms, three soldiers to a bed. Doing the math quickly in his head, he figured there were 250 men here. 

He gave the signal to attack. The CIDG soldiers raised their M16s and opened fire. The gunfire led to chaos and pandemonium, with empty magazines dropping to the jungle floor. As the NVA soldiers leapt up from sleeping, a relentless barrage of firepower cut them down. Next Waugh and the others began hurling grenades, observing dispassionately as men and their barracks caught on fire. Waugh recalls watching enemy soldiers drop to the ground and roll, trying to stop from being burned alive. Some fighters returned fire, but mostly they fled. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, it got quiet. The battle was over. Waugh estimated that 150 NVA were dead. The rest appeared to have run off into the jungle. 

“For about fifteen minutes we congratulated each other,” remembers Waugh. “We were celebrating. Patting ourselves on the back. Examining the Russian weapons left behind when they fled.” Waugh remembers thinking how satisfying it was that the raid had been a success. But war is nothing if not full of surprises. 

From deep inside the jungle there was a sharp, distinct sound. A bugle call. Unmistakably a military command. “Bugles meant soldiers,” explains Waugh. “NVA regulars.” The NVA had called in the infantry using a signal instrument favored by American soldiers during the Revolutionary War. What none of them had realized was that the three sleeping hooches they’d just ambushed were the first three of several dozen hooches stretching deep into the jungle. Each held roughly sixty enemy soldiers. The Defense Department later estimated that there had been as many as three thousand soldiers at Bong Son. The bugle call had just woken them all up. 

Waugh ran into the jungle, firing at anything that moved. He threw hand grenades and let off two flares, signaling to the team to disperse and retreat. The sound of boots was everywhere around him. The clattering of men. Commands yelled in Vietnamese. There was heavy gunfire coming at him, and the green tracers of RPGs. The North Vietnamese Army had begun a massive counterattack, and Waugh was running out of ammo fast. 

Racing through the jungle, he headed toward the rally point, an old cemetery on the high ground 650 feet to the west. Moving as fast as his legs could carry him, he suddenly found himself in an impossible situation. Directly in front of him there was nothing but a wide-open rice-paddy field. He’d run out of jungle, his only means of defense. Behind him was a battalion of battle-ready NVA. He had nowhere to go but across the open field. 

He ran fast, his jungle boots sloshing through the wet grass. Concentrating hard on how to make it to the cemetery. There was commo hidden there, and commo meant an ability to call in air strikes. Rounds from AK-47s buzzed past his head. He was now out of ammunition and grenades. He saw a green tracer from an RPG headed his way. Before he could react, baamm! The RPG hit him in the right knee. 

The impact knocked him over. He lay face down in the wet grass. He pulled himself up on all fours and began to crawl. Finally, he spotted an embankment, a dirt irrigation berm running along the edge of the rice paddy. Concealed for the moment, he looked around to assess who was where. Sergeant Robert Brown, the young medic from Montana, had taken a bullet to the head and lay bleeding out in the grass. He counted twenty-five, maybe thirty mercenaries dead in the open field, cut down by NVA firepower as they tried to escape. 

Waugh kept crawling. After another hundred or so feet he came upon a hole in front of him, as if someone had dug a pit. A foxhole in a rice paddy? How strange. He pulled himself down into the darkness. It was wet inside, about four feet wide—he couldn’t determine how long. As he dragged himself down, he felt a flash of relief. He’d managed to escape from the enemy. He could hide here. Then he realized that there was someone or something down here in the hole with him. He couldn’t see much in the dark. He heard breathing. He moved down the hole a little farther until he was staring into the flaring nostrils of a water buffalo. He could make out the animal’s sharp horns and its dark black skin. There were whiskers on its nose. The animal jerked its head and snorted, as if to charge. Waugh wondered if he might die here, eviscerated by a water buffalo. But the animal was stuck in the mud, just as he was. Waugh might have laughed, except that he was soaking wet, bleeding heavily, and possibly losing consciousness. He could feel leeches crawling into his open wounds, eating their way into the space that used to be his right knee. Outside, on the field, he heard enemy machine-gun fire. 

His brain struggled to figure out a next move when suddenly David Morgan, the CIA operator, appeared alongside him in the hole. Morgan looked at the water buffalo, then at Waugh. The NVA knew they were here in this hole, Morgan said. They had to move out. But Waugh was unable to move, and Morgan couldn’t carry him. Waugh told Morgan to try to get to the cemetery alone. From there, he could call in air strikes to lay down suppressive fire and force the NVA to disperse. Waugh could still get out of here on his own. 

David Morgan took off running. Waugh pulled himself up out of the hole and started crawling across the field. He made it about ten feet when he was hit again, this time worse than before. The round smashed into the bottom of his foot, tearing through his boot and ripping apart his toes before exiting his body just above the ankle bone. He knew enough about the body to know that this most likely meant his military career was over. Facedown in the mud, he strained to breathe. Tracers hit the dirt around him. He figured the enemy was 150 feet away. He needed to keep going, keep crawling despite the pain. His right leg wasn’t working. He looked down and saw exposed bone. “My foot had been almost entirely torn off,” Waugh recalled. “There were leeches covering the wound and I could see my exposed foot and ankle bones, white as snow.” 

Keep going, he told himself. Stop and you’re dead. When he took a shot to the left wrist, part of his brain tried having a conversation with him about what it would be like if he lost his leg and never walked on two feet again. Another part of his brain said, Don’t think about that, he recalls. The pain was intense, and he figured soon he’d lose consciousness. If the enemy got ahold of him, he was dead. Waugh reached into his rucksack. He pulled out his field syringe and morphine bottle, gave himself three quick shots. He waited for the drugs to take effect. A slight warm feeling came over him, but mostly he felt intense pain. 

Ahead, Waugh could see CIA operator David Morgan at the rallying point. He’d made it. Damn. This was a good sign, quickly followed by a bad one. David Morgan’s hand signals indicated that the radio had been shot to pieces. There was no way to call for rescue or air strikes. Waugh looked up. My God, he thought, was he hallucinating? Was this really Captain Paris D. Davis, coming to get him? Waugh remembers staring into Davis’s eyes and how incredibly blue they were. He normally didn’t notice things like this, and it jerked him back into reality. Neither man had any way to radio for help. The situation was dire. They tried discussing what to do next. Davis had his right hand up, pointing at something, when he got shot in the hand. The ends of his fingers were sheared off. Waugh watched blood spurt into the air between them. Davis howled and swore. He was right-handed, he said. Now he couldn’t even shoot. 

No commo. No ammo, thought Waugh. No way to communicate, no ability to shoot. Their only hope was rescue. The sun was coming up. Waugh pulled out his emergency panel and signal mirror. Davis made a run for the cemetery. An aircraft flying overhead, searching for the team, spotted what was happening and notified headquarters. The full fighting force of the U.S. Army and the air force was now coming to the rescue. It wasn’t over yet. 

Lying helpless in the rice paddy, Waugh looked up and watched the sky. He saw Navy F-8s and U.S. Air Force F-4C Phantom jets come in fast and low, dropping bombs and napalm on the battlefield. For a moment he had hope. Then suddenly he took a bullet to the right side of his head. Most likely a ricochet, it sliced a two-inch section of skin and bone off his forehead. The wound was not deep enough to kill him, but it was enough to knock him unconscious. 

When Waugh awoke, the sun was high in the sky. Hours had passed and he was baked in a thick mud shell, like a crust. Warm rays beat down on him and he looked at his watch to see what time it was. No watch. He was naked. The NVA must have mistaken him for dead. Stripped him naked and taken his watch. After a few minutes, he heard the sounds of a helicopter. He couldn’t believe he was alive. Thwaap, thwaap, thwaap, went the rotor blades. He watched as the helicopter landed. Out leapt a Special Forces soldier he knew, Sergeant First Class John Reinburg, a weapons expert. Was Reinburg really running toward him? He was pretty sure it was Reinburg, running in his jungle fatigues, crossing some 250 feet of open terrain. Or maybe the situation wasn’t real. Maybe Waugh was imagining things. Now Reinburg was standing over him, talking. He told Waugh he was here to get him out of this mess alive. In the distance Waugh eyed the helicopter that Reinburg said was going to medevac him to a MASH hospital not far away. It was a UH-1D; he could see people climbing inside. 

Reinburg told Waugh he was going to carry him the 250 feet across the open field to the helicopter, because Waugh’s right knee and left leg were useless. The blood had dried, but the bones were exposed and there were leeches eating at his flesh. Reinburg hoisted Waugh up from behind, holding him under his armpits, dragging him toward the helicopter. Across the field, he spotted Paris Davis, alive, crawling toward the helicopter. Then he heard the terrible sound of RPG tracers all over again. 

“We’re gonna make it,” Reinburg promised as he dragged Waugh across the rice paddy. “We’re gonna make it.” He lugged Waugh’s body five or six feet at a time. And just when Waugh started to believe he might come out of this disaster alive, Reinburg took a bullet to the chest. “The bullet hit him just above the heart,” remembers Waugh. “And as he started to fall, a second bullet impacted his body, this time six inches lower down.” Reinburg’s lung collapsed and he struggled to breathe. “In that instant, Reinburg went from being strong and heroic to being in worse shape than me.” 

Another Green Beret came rushing out of the helicopter and began running across the open field. He was young. He grabbed Reinburg and started dragging him toward the helicopter. Maybe someone grabbed Billy Waugh, or maybe he and Paris Davis continued crawling toward the helicopter on their own power. Later, in debriefs, neither man could clearly recall. Special Forces training teaches its soldiers what needs to be done to stay alive: crawl, stay low, get to the helicopter no matter what. 

Now the helicopter was just a few yards away. Waugh could see David Morgan and a few of the mercenaries waiting inside. The helicopter-door gunner was laying down suppressive fire, trying to keep Waugh and Davis from being fired upon by NVA soldiers hiding in the trees. Waugh was inside the helicopter now. As the aircraft started to lift up off the ground, a green tracer flew into the cabin and hit the door gunner, shearing off part of his arm. Waugh watched the gunner stare at what remained of his limb as the helicopter took off and they flew away. 

When Billy Waugh awoke, he heard screaming. He was in a field hospital a few kilometers from Bong Son. Beside him, in the next bed over, John Reinburg was howling in pain as the nurses worked to debride him, removing damaged tissue and foreign objects—dirt, debris, and insects—from his gaping chest wounds. Waugh realized he was screaming, too, and that the nurses were doing the same thing to his leg. 

A few days later, General William Westmoreland, commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam, stopped by the field hospital and pinned a Purple Heart on Billy Waugh’s uniform. Reinburg was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. 

Then came a U.S. Army doctor with grim news. Waugh was being sent back to the United States, to the lower-extremity amputation ward at Walter Reed.

12

The Studies and Observation Groups

The Walter Reed amputee ward was a devastating sight to behold. Billy Waugh was now one of its patients, his right leg in a cast. The infection wasn’t getting any better, and the doctor said part of his leg would likely need to be amputated, cut off below the knee. Day in and day out, Waugh watched fellow soldiers in the ward come and go. They’d get wheeled away to surgical rooms and return without an arm or a leg.

The way Waugh saw it, there were two categories of amputees. Some soldiers became a shell of their former selves after they lost a limb. Others somehow managed to keep things light, like the sergeant major in the next bed over who recently had his lower leg removed. Waugh went with him to the Friday night dance. 

“Watch this,” the sergeant major said, unhooking his prosthetic leg and putting it on backward, so the foot faced in reverse. The soldier with the prosthetic asked a pretty girl to dance and she said sure, but while they were dancing, she looked down at his backward foot, screamed, and ran away. The sergeant major howled with laughter. Waugh didn’t know which was worse: to lose a limb or to find humor in it.

Soon enough, Dr. Arthur Metz, chief of lower-extremity amputation surgery, came to give Billy Waugh the bad news. Despite two surgeries and four weeks of antibiotics, the infection in his right leg had gotten worse. Dr. Metz proposed amputating the foot from the ankle down. If it got any worse, they might have to take the bottom half of the leg. Waugh could not bear the thought. “I had it in my mind to return to combat,” he says. “In 1965, you couldn’t fight without a foot.” 

Billy Waugh pleaded with Dr. Metz to be discharged. He wanted to go heal at his sister’s house in Texas. Dr. Metz agreed and wrote him convalescent leave orders. Waugh was thrilled at first, but as he prepared to travel to Texas, hope gave way to misery. He missed being a soldier and the intensity of war. Something came over him and, penicillin bottle in hand, he decided to hitchhike to Vietnam, as a standby passenger on military aircraft. It seemed the pilots felt sorry for him with his long cast on his right leg, and he never had to wait long. In less than a week he made it from Washington, DC, to Travis Air Force Base, outside San Francisco, to the Philippines, and finally to Tan Son Nhat Airport in Saigon. 

Saigon was a busy city in the summer of 1965. Waugh checked into the Hotel Majestic and headed to the Tu Do bar down the street, the place where soldiers went for rest and relaxation. It didn’t take long for Waugh to spot two friends from Special Forces, Billy Kessinger, a medic, and Danny Horton, a communications man. Seated at a corner table, the trio of Green Berets began chatting. After a few beers, Kessinger and Horton hinted to Waugh about a highly classified direct-action unit that was just now expanding. An elite unconventional-warfare group that was secreted inside MACV. No one outside the unit knew about it; it was a special-access covert program called the Studies and Observations Group (SOG), named to deceive people into thinking its members were Ivy League–type analysts reading reports. In reality, the missions were so dangerously insane, Kessinger and Horton said, the acronym was translated to Suicide on the Ground by some guys. Kessinger and Horton were already in SOG and they showed Waugh their credentials: a photo, a few coded letters, and a telephone number that you could call 24/7 if you ever needed anything. SOG members had unprecedented authority. They could go anywhere in South Vietnam, at any time of the night or day—no getting stopped by military police (MP). If you were in SOG, you were authorized to carry a firearm at all times. Kessinger and Horton called the creds a WoW pass, because you could walk on water with it. 

Sitting and drinking at the Tu Do bar, the men talked late into the night, past curfew for American soldiers. When an American MP approached the table and asked for identification, Kessinger and Horton flashed their WoW passes. Waugh pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and showed the MP his convalescent leave orders. 

“What the hell are you doing on convalescent leave in Vietnam, Master Sergeant William D. Waugh?” the MP asked, reading from the papers. 

“I’m visiting with my amigos,” said Waugh.

The MP was not certain what to make of the situation, so he called his commanding officer, who asked if Master Sergeant Waugh was causing problems. The MP said he wasn’t. The commanding officer said convalescent leave orders were good and Waugh could be left alone. The night ended without incident. 

A week later, Waugh returned to America, more determined than ever to get himself assigned to this classified unconventional-warfare unit called SOG. 

In Washington, DC, he traveled to the Pentagon to meet with the assignments officer for Special Forces, a woman named Billie Alexander. Seated across from her, Waugh pleaded to be assigned to MACV-SOG. 

“All she could do was laugh,” he recalls. “She said I could barely walk, how did I expect to ever fight again?” 

Waugh proposed a challenge. If he was able to convince Dr. Metz to reassign him to Special Forces at Fort Bragg, and if he could last there for a month of training, would Billie Alexander recommend him for SOG? 

“Perhaps she felt sorry for me,” Waugh remembers, “because she looked at me for a while and then she said yes.” 

Waugh met with Dr. Metz, who rejected his idea. His lower leg was beyond salvage, Metz said, and required amputation. Waugh begged to undergo one last exploratory surgery. The doctor agreed. During the surgery, Dr. Metz went far up into the leg, near the knee, where he located a tiny sliver of Waugh’s army boot lodged inside the tibia. This was the likely source of the months-long infection. Once it was removed, the final round of penicillin took hold and Waugh began to heal. The following month, he returned to Fort Bragg. In his second week back in Special Forces he received new orders. He was being sent to Vietnam as part of MACV-SOG. 

The reason for SOG’s highly classified nature was that it violated the Geneva Agreement of 1962, the Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos, which forbade U.S. forces from operating inside the country. But at the Pentagon, after almost two years of reading reports from intelligence assets in the field, the Defense Department was coming around to the idea that Laos was the key to the insurgency and the Ho Chi Minh Trail the locus of the problem. Now President Johnson needed convincing. The initial job of SOG reconnaissance men would be to sneak into Laos, take photographs of activity on the trail, plant listening devices, and get out alive with the evidence. Eventually they would be assigned cross-border missions into Cambodia as well.

“Nobody knew with certainty what was in Laos,” says John Plaster, a former member of the classified unit. “Learning what was there was SOG’s new operation.” Plaster is considered one of the most competent snipers in U.S. military history, and his experiences in MACV-SOG would later serve as the basis for part of the video game Call of Duty: Black Ops. 

SOG’s first chief was Colonel Donald Blackburn, the former leader of Operation White Star, and he prepared his fighters for battles in Laos that would be decidedly ungentlemanly. Blackburn was a master of guerrilla warfare. During World War II he led kill-or-be-killed missions in the Philippines, where the tribesmen he organized into a guerrilla fighting force turned out to be headhunters. Blackburn’s wartime diary became a bestselling book, in 1955, called Blackburn’s Headhunters. In Laos, SOG operators would need to employ ruthless unconventional warfare tactics with unmerciful intensity. To direct SOG operations on the ground, Colonel Blackburn chose another guerrilla warfare legend, the Finnish-born Larry Thorne. 

MACV-SOG started with just sixteen volunteers, all Green Berets who’d been training on Okinawa. The men worked out of a forward operating base in Kham Duc, a border village located sixty miles southwest of Danang. Similar to the Civilian Irregular Defense Group program, and the OSS Jedburghs before that, each SOG team was made up of two or three American soldiers and nine tribesmen. Initially the tribesmen were Nung, an ethnic Chinese minority; later they included Montagnards, indigenous people from Vietnam’s Central Highlands whom the Americans called Yards. 

“[We] Americans had advanced technology, such as helicopters, and the tribesmen had ancient techniques, such as silent ambush,” explains John Plaster. The tribesmen helped the Green Berets understand the tactics that were being used by the NVA guerrilla fighters, things not found in any manual. For example, Nung tribesmen demonstrated how, by digging a four-foot hole into a hillside, a fighter could see and feel the vibrations of an advancing aircraft long before his ears registered the engine sound. 

Shared tricks of the trade went both ways. Tribesmen were also recruited to watch and count enemy troops and supplies being moved through the jungle. Because most could not read or write English or Vietnamese, the CIA’s technical staff developed a nonliterate system of conveyance. Instead of words, the counting devices given out to recruits featured tiny pictograms representing men, weapons, vehicles, even elephants—a common means of transport in the region. When the recruits activated a toggle switch on the device, their data was transmitted to CIA aircraft, flying overhead. 

Unlike the CIDG program, the bond between the tribesmen and the SOG operators was reported to be strong. “The Nung and Yards could have cared less about South Vietnam as a country,” recalls Plaster. “They felt no allegiance to some abstract paymaster like the United States. But they were ready to die for their recon teammates, American and Yard alike.” 

SOG’s first cross-border mission into Laos occurred on October 18, 1965. U.S. ambassador William Sullivan forbade SOG from using helicopter insertions into the supposedly neutral country, so the first team to go in, Reconnaissance Team (RT) Iowa, was inserted by helicopter on the Vietnam side of the border. They walked through the jungle into Laos. The team leader, or One-Zero, was Master Sergeant Charles “Slats” Petry; the assistant team leader, or One-One, was Sergeant First Class Willie Card. Together, these two Americans led seven Nung mercenaries and one lieutenant from the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) to gather reconnaissance of enemy activity along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Rather than oversee the mission from Kham Duc, Larry Thorne flew with his men in the helicopter, circling overhead until he received word they’d successfully crossed over into Laos. 

Each SOG team wore Asian-made uniforms with no labels or insignia. They carried sterile weapons, meaning they came with no identifying marks, such as the Swedish K submachine gun; and they smoked Chinese cigarettes. If anyone got captured in Laos, no one could identify them as Americans. SOG operators were issued unmarked V-42 stiletto knives with six-inch blades, designed by Ben Barker on Okinawa and secretly manufactured in Japan. Not since the days of the OSS had the U.S. military issued stiletto knives. 

Overhead air support was critical to the success of every mission. The H-34 Kingbee helicopter was SOG’s signature aircraft, a bubble-nosed workhorse able to withstand a hail of automatic weapons fire and keep flying. The Kingbees were flown by South Vietnamese air force pilots trained in Texas by the CIA. With radio call signs like Cowboy and Mustachio, these pilots saved countless SOG men from capture or death, performing radical jungle infiltration, exfiltration, and rescue operations day after day. “All gave some, some gave all,” says SOG operator John Stryker Meyer of the Kingbee pilots. Cessna aircraft were also used regularly on missions, and flying on the first mission in a Cessna 0-2 spotter were U.S. Air Force major Harley Pyles and U.S. Marine Corps captain Winfield Sisson. If anything went wrong, the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy were on standby, ready to send in covert air support in the form of overhead air strikes. 

RT Iowa was inserted successfully, and after a few hours they radioed Larry Thorne to say they’d crossed the border into Laos. Thorne radioed Kham Duc to say he was now heading back to base. He was never heard from again. 

“In the first few minutes of SOG’s classified border operations, the program swallowed up one of its finest officers and a whole Kingbee” helicopter, says John Plaster. “That afternoon, the Cessna carrying Major Pyles and Captain Sisson disappeared.” On SOG’s first mission, three men went missing in action (MIA), never to be seen again. It was an indication of the kind of catastrophic loss SOG would face over the next six years. The great majority of such cases are either still classified or lack records, said to have been lost. Over the next eight months, five SOG recon teams working out of Kham Duc conducted forty eight cross-border missions. In the winter of 1966, MACV headquarters opened a second SOG base up north, at Khe Sanh, closer to the demilitarized zone (DMZ). Still limping from five gunshot wounds to the leg, Billy Waugh arrived there in May. 

Located in the northwest corner of South Vietnam, Khe Sanh was the most remote American military facility in all of the south, a strip of flat land surrounded by 4,000-foot mountains and treacherous ravines. Much of the activity centered around Co Roc Mountain, a 2,000-foot limestone peak visible from the base, as were Hill 1050 and Hill 950, veritable beehives of NVA activity. The geography here was unlike anything in the United States, endless karst-limestone outcroppings that looked like giant vine-covered chimneys. The base camp, under the control of the U.S. Marine Corps, was strategically located just fourteen miles south of the DMZ and twelve miles east of the border with Laos. For SOG, this meant that Khe Sanh was within striking distance of key enemy bases along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. 

The SOG base at Khe Sanh was a Special Access facility, partitioned behind concertina wire, surrounded by blast walls, and built mostly underground. SOG operations were classified, which meant that even Khe Sanh’s marine commander, Colonel David E. Lownds, wasn’t privy to its activities. In 1966, when Waugh arrived, the new SOG chief was Jack Singlaub, the former OSS Jedburgh who ran covert CIA airdrop operations during the Korean War, under the cover name Joint Advisory Commission, Korea, or JACK. “There was no rest at SOG,” remembers Billy Waugh, “only war, recon, rescue, sleep.” 

International law meant nothing to the enemy out here on the border region between Vietnam and Laos, a concept SOG men were regularly forced to grapple with. Despite the covert nature of their missions, Special Forces soldiers operated under the U.S. military chain of command and were bound by the laws of war. Ever since the Lieber Code of 1863, the execution of captured prisoners and the mutilation of dead soldiers’ bodies on the battlefield were expressly forbidden. The 1949 Geneva Conventions updated these protocols for the modern era. And yet look at what the NVA had done to Sergeant Donald Sain, thought Billy Waugh, as he flew over Co Roc Mountain in a SOG observation aircraft. 

It was June 1966. RT Montana had been ambushed three days before, with two SOG men captured and executed, and seven indigs killed in action (KIA) or missing in action (MIA). One-Zero Henry Whalen made it back to Khe Sanh and gave the ambush location coordinates to SOG commanders. Waugh was put in charge of a rescue-or-retrieval mission, which is why he was across the border in Laos now, searching for dead bodies from the Cessna. When he spotted Sergeant Donald Sain’s body in a jungle clearing, he felt contempt and disgust. 

Don Sain was a twenty-three-year-old kid from Santa Clara County, California, who’d worn a white tuxedo and a bow tie to prom just a few years before. Now he was not just dead but had been mutilated and put on display by the NVA. Sain’s captors had killed him and arranged him in a spread-eagle position with his legs staked to the earth and his arms tied to a tree. Maggots were crawling around the gunshot wounds that Don Sain had taken to the chest. Once vibrant and full of life, he was now carrion. 

It was 9:00 a.m. and Waugh assessed the situation. “I’d been in combat long enough to know Sain’s body was not only displayed so we could see it, but it had to be booby-trapped as well,” he recalls. 

Waugh instructed the pilot to head back to the SOG base at Khe Sanh. There, he briefed his commanding officer. After putting together a Bright Light rescue team, the SOG men returned to the clearing in the jungle. The team included Danny Horton, the communications man from the Tu Do bar, Sergeant First Class James Craig, a medic, and Major Gerald “Jerry” Kilburn, the most senior officer in the group and a POW during the Korean War. 

Flying the H-34 Kingbee was South Vietnamese air force pilot Nguyen Van Hoang, call sign Mustachio, so named after the Clarke Gable–style mustache he wore. Once, during a rescue operation and under heavy fire, Mustachio was struck in the neck with a bullet while piloting a Kingbee over a target. He plugged the bullet hole with his fingers and got the crippled helicopter twenty kilometers back to Khe Sanh, flying with only one hand. 

With Mustachio at the controls, the Kingbee hovered over Sain’s body. While Waugh tried to figure out how to get ahold of it without being hit by grenade frag, Mustachio searched for a landing zone. NVA were everywhere, and time was critical. Body retrieval was the perfect time for an ambush. Mustachio circled around a few times before setting the Kingbee down, roughly one hundred meters from the body. The rescue team hopped off. 

Approaching the body, Billy Waugh felt the anger and disgust return. The stench of rotting flesh was hard to bear. He grabbed a climbing rope and told Major Kilburn his plan. “I decided to tie one end of the rope to the wheel of Mustachio’s helicopter and the other end around Sain’s leg. That way we’d move the body and let the booby traps explode harmlessly,” Waugh recalls. The team looked at Waugh like he was crazy. 

“There was no manual for this kind of horrid shit,” he says. “The rope was the fastest and most efficient way to achieve the objective.” 

Waugh tied the rope to the helicopter wheel and instructed Mustachio to hover over Sain. Delicately, so as not to set off the grenades, he tied the rope around Sain’s leg. 

“Let’s move out,” he told the team. Everyone stepped back a few yards. 

Using the helicopter, Mustachio pulled the body off the ground. Three or four booby-trap grenades started going off around Sain. 

“Sain was hovering above us by his leg,” remembers Waugh. “The fluids and maggots and crap from his body poured out as he was being lifted up and away. And as it did, Kilburn got sprayed with debris.” Kilburn, a highly decorated combat veteran, had sustained three years of torture at the hands of his communist captors in the Korean War. But this was too much for him. When the fluids hit Kilburn, he screamed. 

Mustachio lifted Sain’s body and set it down. Kilburn finished screaming. Everyone got quiet. Sain’s body had been recovered, but there was more work to do. A second SOG man from RT Montana was still missing, a kid from Missouri named Sergeant Delmer Lee “Outlaw” Laws. The Bright Light team searched the area, trying to find a blood trail and maybe find Laws. The SOG men divvied up ground, each man assigned a quadrant to scour. This part of the jungle was hostile and unforgiving, filled with poisonous snakes like the two-step snake—if it bit you, you had two steps left in you before you died. Waugh found himself waist high in wait-a-minute bushes, prickly plants with claws the sharpness of a cat’s that hooked into your skin when you passed by. If you got snagged, you had to wait a minute to unhook yourself, or get torn to shreds. After several hours of searching, everyone’s fatigues were ripped up, arms and faces scratched up and bleeding, but no one was ready to stop yet. They intended to find Outlaw. 

Danny Horton called out. He’d found a blood trail. 

Waugh saw Horton emerge from the woods, looking ill. In one hand he carried an American jungle boot. Something grotesque was sticking out of the shoe, recalls Waugh, as he figured out he was looking at part of Delmer Laws’s leg. Danny Horton took the group to where he’d found it. “He’d been mostly eaten by a tiger,” says Waugh. 

The ride back to the SOG base was quiet. Beneath the helicopter, Sain’s body was swinging from a rope. Delmer Laws’s leg was lying on the floor of the helicopter in a plastic body bag. 

Once they landed on the tarmac at Khe Sanh, Billy Waugh climbed out of the helicopter carrying Laws’s leg in the bag. “My clothes were shredded, I was filthy, covered in horrible things. My arms and face were scratched, I smelled,” he recalls. Standing there on the tarmac waiting for the SOG Bright Light team was an officer from the 5th Special Forces, “taking a break from his desk duties at MACV headquarters in Nha Trang,” remembers Waugh. “He asked me to come inside.” 

Waugh followed his superior officer into the SOG base. The officer began yelling at him. 

“Goddamnit, Waugh,” he said. “You’re filthy, you smell, and you’re out of uniform. You’re a disgrace. All of you.” 

Waugh set the plastic bag on the table. He took a moment before he spoke. Every soldier knows chain of command. Every soldier respects authority. Your superior officer is always correct. But Waugh could not contain himself. He took Laws’s leg out of the body bag and set it on the table. 

“How about him?” Waugh asked, pointing. “Is he a disgrace?” 

The officer stared at the jungle boot and the bloody stump. “What the hell is that?” he asked. 

“It’s Sergeant Delmer Lee Laws’s leg,” said Waugh. “The rest of him got eaten by a tiger. Is he out of uniform, sir?” 

The officer grew quiet, apologized, and left. 

The following week, a box arrived at Khe Sanh, from headquarters in Nha Trang. Inside, there were three boxes of crisp new jungle fatigues. No markings, of course. No one could know SOG operators were violating the Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos.


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Kill or Capture

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