Part 5 :Surprise, Kill, Vanish...Kill or Capture...Green Berets....Revenge

Surprise, Kill, Vanish

by Annie Jacobson

13 

Kill or Capture

After the assassination of President Kennedy in November of 1963, President Johnson renamed the Special Group (Augmented) the 303 Committee. Assassination plots against foreign leaders appeared to have been toned down, or at least the president’s inner circle of advisors stopped allowing the minutes of meetings in which they were discussed to be recorded. The exception was with plans to kill Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, which moved ahead full-bore. In 1967 the CIA inspector general ordered an internal report on its assassination capability, the working papers of which were then destroyed on the orders of CIA director Richard Helms.

At least one significant assassination plan was likely part of the destroyed cache: an extraordinarily sensitive mission to kill General Giap, the indomitable leader of the North Vietnamese Army. Giap was to visit an NVA command center in supposedly neutral Laos, a sovereign nation. The group chosen to kill him was MACV-SOG. One of the first two men to the target area was to be Billy Waugh. 

It was June 2, 1967, and Billy Waugh was summoned to a briefing inside SOG headquarters at Khe Sanh. Something unprecedented was about to happen, he was told, a direct-action operation so important that all the other air-supported missions across Vietnam would come to a halt. Over the previous twenty-four hours, the CIA and the Pentagon had intercepted roughly 1,500 communiqués between Hanoi and an NVA stronghold located just a few miles from Khe Sanh, inside Laos. The area had been given the code name Oscar Eight. Analysis of the intercepted messages confirmed that Oscar Eight was the secret NVA field headquarters the CIA had been trying to locate for months.

The CIA sent its U-2 spy planes overhead in search of photographic intelligence. Images confirmed enemy traffic along the lower portion of the Ho Chi Minh Trail was being diverted to Oscar Eight. Then came a reconnaissance coup d’état: signals intelligence intercepted by the U.S. Army indicated that General Giap himself was headed to Oscar Eight for a meeting. 

Billy Waugh would act as forward air controller, in charge of observation and relay for the mission. At 4:00 a.m. the next morning he’d fly in over the target in a Cessna and circle overhead for the duration of the mission—high enough to avoid NVA antiaircraft fire, but low enough to watch through binoculars what was unfolding on the ground. It would be Waugh’s job to relay information to the various parties involved, via SOG’s communication system, serving as a kind of battle coordinator in the sky. 

The mission plan was succinct. Nine B-52 bombers would fly in over the target to drop 900 bombs, each 200 pounds—a means of inflicting massive damage on the enemy camp and obliterating its capacity to respond. Fourteen minutes later, two marine helicopter gunships would strafe the area, clearing a landing zone (LZ). Next, two troop transport helicopters, piloted by marine corps pilots, would deposit two teams of SOG Hatchet Forces, large thirty- or forty man units used in big operations. Air support would come from two Skyraider aircraft, propeller-driven workhorses that were slow but effective. Two Kingbee helicopters would insert two nine-man SOG teams, experienced operators tasked with locating and killing General Giap. Finally, four fast-flying F-4 Phantom fighter jets would provide close air support. SOG had seven hours to kill or capture General Giap and get out. 

But Oscar Eight was a defender’s dream. The bowl-shaped valley was surrounded by hills on three sides, forming a strategic ridge-shaped horseshoe. On earlier recon missions, SOG teams reported seeing 12.7mm antiaircraft artillery, called triple-A, scattered on hilltops and platforms in the jungle canopy, like hunting blinds. 

Now it was dawn at Khe Sanh. Billy Waugh climbed into the Cessna O-2 spotter aircraft, into the seat beside the pilot, James Alexander, an air force major. They flew eight miles out from Khe Sanh, over the jungle canopy and into Laos, becoming the first to survey the Oscar Eight target area. Waugh had been in combat missions in Vietnam off and on since 1961, and he thought to himself, This day could change the war. The Pentagon had determined General Giap to be an even greater source of morale to fighters than Ho Chi Minh himself. Killing Giap could end the war. 

Through binoculars, Waugh spotted cook fires down below, soldiers up early preparing breakfast for the fighters, he surmised. Major Alexander moved the Cessna roughly fifteen miles to the south, where he began to circle overhead, in anticipation of the B-52 bombers soon to arrive. Waugh checked his watch. It was 4:45, the sun was coming up, and the sky was purple and orange. Above and in the distance, Waugh spotted the contrails of the B-52s. Like clockwork, at 6:00 a.m., nine B-52 bombers passed over Oscar Eight, inundating the target area with 200-pound bombs. It was a colossal attack, one that left the surrounding valley seemingly destroyed. Waugh observed how the land below was now pockmarked with hundreds of apartment-building-sized bomb craters, burned-out, smoking holes. Through binoculars, he watched weapons depots explode and burn. Grass sleep shacks had been set ablaze and scores of enemy fighters were rushing out from makeshift buildings, hurrying to put out fires. He watched fighters remove weapons from burning boxes and roll gasoline barrels out of the way. 

Overhead, as the B-52s made a second pass, suddenly something entirely unexpected happened: the ridges around Oscar Eight lit up. NVA soldiers down below were firing back with a barrage of anti-aircraft fire. How could this be, thought Waugh. The camp had been heavily bombed, and yet the NVA air defenses appeared to be entirely intact. The B-52 bombers flew too high for the NVA to hit with anti-aircraft fire, but the SOG helicopters that were about to come in would be vulnerable to direct fire. Concerned with the speed and aggression of the NVA gunners’ response, Waugh picked up the radio and called the marine helicopter gunship pilots who’d soon be heading into the target area. They needed to turn around immediately. 

“Abort this mission!” Waugh shouted. “Abort!” 

No answer. Nothing but silence over the comms. 

Waugh tried again. Then he tried contacting the marine pilots who were flying the CH-46 troop transport helicopters, each one packed with thirty SOG Hatchet Forces. 

No answer. Silence. Shit. 

“Did everybody switch VHF channels?” Waugh asked Major Alexander. 

Major Alexander shook his head and tried his own commo. Nothing but radio silence on his, too. 

Waugh checked his watch. The helicopters delivering the Hatchet Forces were scheduled to arrive fourteen minutes after the first B-52 bombing run,which meant any minute now. Desperate to get in touch with someone, Waugh kept trying his radio, but it was too late. Below and to the east, he spotted two marine helicopter gunships flying in fast and low. They began strafing the target area, clearing the LZ for the Hatchet Forces to land. Waugh and Alexander watched in horror as one of the gunships was picked off by NVA ground fire. Then the second helicopter was hit. The two helicopters each began to wobble and spin, then crashed into the landing zone almost side by side. 

The sight of the twin helicopter crashes sent adrenaline coursing through Waugh’s body. He had to get the CH-46 on the radio. Those Hatchet Forces could not land. It was suicide, he thought. He tried the UHF radio, then the VHF radio again. 

“Do not land!” he shouted. “Abort. Hatchet Forces, do not land!” 

All this high technology and nobody could hear anything. But the landings were now in progress, and Waugh watched helplessly as the CH-46s entered the target area. Double rotors spinning, one in front, one in back, like two school buses in the sky, he thought. Based on the angle at which they were flying in, the CH-46 pilots would be unable to see the crashed helicopters until after it was too late. 

Waugh and Alexander were both shouting into their radios, “Abort! Abort!” 

The helicopters were now roughly seventy feet above the ground, side by side over the landing zone. Through binoculars, Waugh could see into one of them. The door was open and dozens of men were inside, amped up and ready to deploy. He’d been in that position countless times, standing in the doorway before the helicopter even landed, waiting to hit the ground running. He knew precisely how charged they had to be when, hovering now only fifty feet above the ground, the helicopter was hit with antiaircraft fire. It appeared to split in half. Waugh watched as the SOG men tumbled out of the aircraft and began falling like stones to the ground. It was impossible to survive that kind of fall. Waugh felt ill. 

The second helicopter was now forty feet over the landing zone when it, too, was hit with antiaircraft fire and split open. Waugh watched some of the men inside fall out and down. Others hung on to anything they could. The helicopter spun and maintained some of its lift, crash-landing in a way that left Waugh thinking there might be survivors. Straining to see through the binoculars, he counted nine, possibly ten men alive. He watched as they scrambled out of the burning aircraft and ran. Training taught them to take cover in the jungle, to evade and escape. 

In came the two H-34 Kingbee helicopters carrying the SOG teams assigned to kill Giap. One was raked with enemy gunfire. Waugh watched as it burst into flames, then crashed into the ground. Through binoculars he saw three crew members scramble out of the burning helicopter and take cover. One SOG operator was shot dead as he ran, but the other two appeared to have made it into the jungle. Waugh kept his eyes on the SOG men as they evaded capture. They were definitely alive and definitely running for cover, he noted. The second helicopter appeared to have landed. As Waugh strained to see, Major Alexander moved the Cessna up to 4,000 feet, where the comm channels might be better, and as he did, Waugh briefly lost sight of what was happening on the ground. 

Up at 4,000 feet, the radio worked and Waugh reached Major Kilburn at the SOG facility at Khe Sanh. Kilburn knew nothing about what was happening at the target area. 

“We got a real problem here at Oscar Eight,” Waugh said, and he relayed the dire situation as quickly and succinctly as he could. 

The mission to kill or capture General Giap was now a rescue mission, Kilburn said. The goal was to try and get anyone trapped inside Oscar Eight out of there alive. 

As Waugh discussed the situation with Major Kilburn, two Phantom fighter jets screeched in over the valley at Mach 2. Waugh watched, stunned, as antiaircraft fire hit one of the fast-moving jets in the right wing, near the fuel tank. The silver Phantom exploded in the air. 

“Come on, parachute,” Waugh wished out loud as the jet spiraled down. No parachute. The Phantom jet crashed into the hillside and exploded. 

“Skyraiders coming in,” someone said over the comms, startling him. “They think they can take out the triple-A.” 

Waugh shook his head. This was suicide. He and Major Alexander watched as two A-1E Skyraider propeller aircraft came in low and slow. Skyraiders fly 110 mph, and in this scenario they were sitting ducks. With an explosion of fire, each of them was hit by antiaircraft guns and crashed violently into the hillside below. 

“It’s a graveyard down there,” Major Alexander said. 

Through binoculars, Waugh watched as enemy fighters on the ground swarmed to the downed aircraft. He tried again to make radio contact with any of those who’d gone down, but no one responded to his calls. The Cessna was running low on fuel. Soon they’d have to turn back. Waugh called over the radio again. Nothing. Not a sound. 

Then, suddenly, Waugh’s radio crackled to life. 

“This is Hatchet Force. On the ground,” a faint voice said over the comms. 

Incredible, thought Waugh. “Hatchet Force, where are you?” he asked. 

“See the two red panels at the edge of the crater?” the SOG Hatchet Force operator asked. 

Through binoculars, Waugh scanned the ground until he located a group of SOG men and Yards, gathered inside one of the bomb craters made by the B-52s just an hour or so earlier. 

“We need air support,” the soldier said. “We’re twenty-five alive.” 

Unbelievable! 

But the men in the bomb crater were surrounded on all sides by hundreds of NVA. As Billy Waugh and Major Alexander returned to Khe Sanh to refuel, they pondered the question: How do you get twenty-five men out of a target area when you can’t get any aircraft in? 

In the jungle outside Oscar Eight, SOG operator Sergeant First Class Charles F. Wilklow crawled along on his belly, leaving behind a trail of blood as he went. Wilklow had been badly injured in the CH-46 helicopter crash, along with two other SOG men, four aircrew, and thirty Montagnards, all of whom were now either killed or missing. 

After surviving the initial helicopter crash, Wilklow took cover inside a bomb crater with SOG operators Billy Ray Laney and Ron Dexter and roughly twenty indigs. The soldiers’ injuries ranged from compound fractures to chest wounds and at least fifteen of them required immediate evacuation. From the crater, they watched as two SOG Kingbee helicopters came in, preparing to load the most grievously injured onto the helicopters to get out. 

The first Kingbee helicopter that was coming in took fire, crashed, and exploded in a fireball. But the second managed to land, Wilklow observed. The SOG operators who’d been assigned to kill General Giap jumped out while the injured soldiers from the bomb crater were loaded inside. Wilklow crawled to the helicopter and climbed aboard before it took off. Under heavy fire, the Kingbee lifted up and began to fly away. Hundreds of NVA bullets punched through the skin of the aircraft as it ascended. Then, just as the pilot got up over the jungle canopy, he took a bullet to the forehead and died. The helicopter lurched into a violent spin. For the second time that morning, Charlie Wilklow found himself in a helicopter crash. 

The chopper spun and landed in the trees, the thick jungle canopy keeping it from hitting the ground. Wilklow looked around. He was alive but there were dead bodies everywhere. Pushing past the dead, and despite grievous injuries, he climbed down from the trees and began running. That’s when an NVA bullet caught him in the leg. He crawled into hiding, out of view. For now. Through the bushes, he saw that SOG operator Billy Ray Laney was dead from a shot to the chest. He watched Ron Dexter be captured and executed on the spot. A third SOG operator, Frank Cius Jr., was also captured, but for some reason the NVA soldiers didn’t kill him. They blindfolded Cius and marched him away. 

Wilklow lay silent in the bush. He was light-headed from blood loss and without a weapon, having lost his CAR-15 in the second helicopter crash. He could hear the NVA searching for him, but he’d found a place to hide. Finally, he passed out. When he woke up, he saw an NVA soldier in the trees, staring down at him. The man had a 12.7mm machine gun trained on him and was smoking a cigarette. Wilklow passed out again. When he woke up the second time, there were a group of NVA soldiers around him. He figured he was done for. 

Back at the SOG base at Khe Sanh, Staff Sergeant Lester Pace was at work on the tarmac, loading and unloading men as they came in. He watched Billy Waugh climb out of the Cessna and hurry down into the SOG bunker. Major Kilburn was holding a briefing inside. He quickly related the facts: twenty-five SOG men were alive in a B-52 bomb crater at Oscar Eight, fighting to hold back an untold number of enemy forces. They would not last long without resupply, Major Kilburn said. He decided to have himself, with weapons and as much ammo as possible, inserted into the bomb crater immediately, by Kingbee helicopter so he could personally take charge of the situation and direct tactical air strikes. Together with the twenty-five alive, Kilburn would hold off the NVA until a rescue operation could be launched, which would have to wait until after dusk. 

Waugh reported what he’d seen: several SOG men had escaped into the jungle and were likely still alive. He volunteered to put a Bright Light rescue team together to search for anyone alive. Kilburn decided that sending in additional aircraft at this time of day was suicidal. Only the cover of darkness would change the calculus. It was barely 9:00 a.m. Waugh would have to wait until dusk to launch a rescue operation.

Mustachio volunteered to fly Kilburn in to the bomb crater at Oscar Eight. Lester Pace loaded up the aircraft for the two men. It was a radical, risky infiltration operation, which Mustachio pulled off flawlessly. In what an after action report listed as occurring in less than ninety seconds, Kilburn leapt out into the bomb crater, the SOG men unloaded the weapons and ammo, then loaded the five worst-wounded indigs onto the helicopter, and, finally, signaled for Mustachio to get out. Back at the SOG base, the question on everyone’s mind was, Could the men left in the bomb crater last until dusk? 

In the jungle, Charlie Wilklow was awake again, thirsty beyond description, maggots crawling around his gaping leg wound. The group of NVA soldiers stood over him, staring down, a few with guns trained on him. The soldiers dragged Wilklow to a small camp adjacent to the Oscar Eight bowl. They assigned a guard to him, a strange-looking man whose face had been disfigured, leaving him with no nose, just two nostrils above the top lip. Every time Wilklow passed out, he experienced a terrible nightmare about his captor and his mutilated face. 

After depositing Kilburn in the bomb crater, Mustachio made it back to base with five gravely wounded Yards. While Lester Pace unloaded the helicopter, Billy Waugh asked Mustachio how long until he was ready to go searching for missing SOG operators. Mustachio said he was ready now. It was 10:00 a.m. That’s close enough to dusk, thought Waugh. 

Mustachio and Waugh headed back to Oscar Eight, flying over it, outside the range of antiaircraft fire, desperately searching for a sign of anyone who might be alive. Any combat soldier who has evaded capture and awaited rescue will tell you that there is nothing like the sound of helicopter rotor blades to sharpen the will to survive. “These rescue operations were critical to morale,” says John Plaster. The thought that your fellow “SOG men would never give up a chance to look for you” was why so many SOG operators were willing to keep running into battle despite highly unfavorable odds. 

Meanwhile, on the jungle floor outside Oscar Eight, the group of NVA soldiers who’d captured Charlie Wilklow decided to use him as bait. Wilklow’s lower leg was nearly destroyed. He was not going anywhere, so they laid him down in an open clearing and spread out his red rescue panel on his chest, hoping the SOG helicopter flying overhead would see him and come for him. But the jungle was endless, a sea of green trees, and neither Waugh nor Mustachio spotted Charlie Wilklow spread out on the ground with a signal panel on his chest. After dusk, Kilburn and the men in the bomb crater were all extracted alive. But there were no survivors beyond that. Twenty-four hours passed. 

The next day, Waugh and Alexander continued searching. Nothing. Forty- eight hours passed, then seventy-two. Still searching, still no missing men found. On the fourth day, on a pass over the western edge of the horseshoe ridge, Waugh noticed an unusual color on the jungle floor: red. He asked Major Alexander to fly in closer. 

My God, he thought, that’s a red signal panel. 

There was a body down there, with a signal panel across the chest. Waugh was certain of it. 

Waugh used the FM radio to call back to Khe Sanh. He requested two SOG men and a helicopter for a rescue mission, but all the SOG recon men were out on new missions. The only SOG man on base was Lester Pace, working resupply. Didn’t matter. Waugh knew Pace to be a dedicated SOG man who also happened to be endowed with “hellacious strength.” 

“I told him I needed him for a rescue mission,” remembers Waugh. 

Pace said he was just about to leave for some rest and relaxation in Hong Kong. 

“No, you’re not,” said Waugh. 

“Of course I was going to go on the rescue mission,” Pace recalled in an interview for this book. “I’d already served my time in the jungle. Spent six or seven months on a SOG recon team. I knew everyone on base. Now in resupply, I’d get the guys anything they needed to complete a mission. I saw them go out, and I was [aware] who didn’t return.” 

Not wasting any time, Waugh briefed Pace on the rescue mission over the radio. He’d need to rappel down out of a hovering Kingbee wearing an extraction rig and carrying a second one. “When you reach the man on the ground,” said Waugh, “hook him to yourself, give the pilot the thumbs-up, and both of you will lift off.” Pace said he understood. 

The helicopter pilot flew Lester Pace to the target area, loitering over the jungle canopy where the man and his red panel were last seen. “I sensed nothing but danger,” Pace recalled. “All the danger in the world. The NVA were like the Tasmanian devil. They swarmed. They hid. They were everywhere. My gut feeling was, ‘Wow this might be the end for me.’” 

With the pilot hovering over the target, Lester Pace leaned out of the helicopter for a better look. He saw the SOG man move. The man was definitely alive. Pace gave the pilot the signal he was going to go, then rappelled down toward the body. He hooked the soldier to the second rig, then gave the pilot the thumbs-up. The pilot lifted the two men up off the ground and moved fast out of enemy territory. 

“Wilklow grabbed and hugged me,” remembers Pace. “He said, ‘I don’t believe this. I’m supposed to be dead.’” The pilot made it safely back to base. When they landed at Khe Sanh with Charlie Wilklow, “everyone just grabbed and hugged him,” Pace recalls. 

Sergeant First Class Charlie Wilklow had survived two deadly helicopter crashes, been captured by the NVA, held as a POW, forgotten about, and then rescued—all against impossible odds. The NVA had set Wilklow up as bait and had prepared to ambush and kill or capture the SOG rescue team. But apparently after three and a half days the NVA gave up on Wilklow being rescued and instead left him out in the open to die. Maggots that had infested Wilklow’s wounds saved his leg and probably his life; the insects ate away the dead tissue and kept him from developing blood poisoning. 

After the war, Pace recalls driving on base at Fort Bragg. He saw a man walking along the side of the road and recognized him to be Charlie Wilklow. “I rolled down my window and introduced myself. Told him who I was,” remembers Pace. “He couldn’t believe it. He invited me back to his place. His wife cooked a nice dinner and he told her the whole story about how I saved his life.” 

Pace retired from the U.S. Army Special Forces, moved to Brooklyn, New York, and worked as a schoolteacher for twenty-five years. He never told his family about any of his classified SOG missions. Lester Pace’s son, Bakari Pace, found out about his dad’s past in 2011, after the existence of SOG was finally declassified by the Defense Department and SOG members started sharing their experiences in forums online. Charlie Wilklow was the only captured SOG operator to ever be rescued during the entire Vietnam War. 

The CIA had been watching Che Guevara’s moves closely for eight years. Yet in the spring of 1967, he’d disappeared. Despite the CIA’s reach and resources, they had no idea where he was. In Cuba, things had ended badly for Che Guevara. In a speech in 1965, he’d attacked the Soviet Union, calling its leaders “state-run profiteers.” He’d expressed outrage over the fact that the Soviet Union wasn’t doing more to support small wars of liberation around the globe. Castro was unable to control Che’s pro-war rhetoric, which included a call for “nuclear war should it come about.” Moscow put pressure on Fidel Castro to do something about him. The CIA intercepted a communiqué from Leonid Brezhnev warning that “the activities of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara… were harmful to the true interests of the communist cause.” 

Under pressure from his Soviet benefactors, Fidel Castro sent Che Guevara to Africa, to start a revolution in Congo, which failed. In November 1966, Che Guevara left for Bolivia to try to start a revolution there. The handsome revolutionary was one of the most recognizable figures in the world, so he disguised himself as a middle-aged Uruguayan economist, wearing thick glasses and a skullcap that made him look bald. Before he left Cuba this last time, Che gave his wife, Aleida, a letter to read to their children should he never return. “Grow up to be good revolutionaries,” Che implored. “Remember that the Revolution is what is important and that each one of us, on our own, is worthless.” 

Now it was the summer of 1967, and a deathly ill Che Guevara was holed up in the Bolivian mountains with a small band of Marxist revolutionaries who were in equally bad shape. Like men shipwrecked on an island, Che and his guerrilla fighters had barely anything to eat. When a local peasant shared his food with them, cooked pork, they were unable to digest the meat and got sick. Eventually they slaughtered their own horses and mules. Emaciated from diarrhea, and without asthma medicine, Che hadn’t taken a bath in six months. The will to go on withered from him, he wrote in his diary. He felt depressed. The Bolivian Army was after him. So was the CIA. 

In June 1967 in Miami, Florida, Felix Rodriguez received a call from his CIA case officer. Rodriguez had continued to work for the Agency on contract operations ever since he was first recruited for Brigade 2506, the Bay of Pigs operation in 1961. 

Then came a mysterious call. “Are you willing to go to Bolivia and lead a mission?” a man asked cryptically. Rodriguez learned that the job he was being offered required unconventional-warfare skills, that it was an anti-guerrilla operation, a mission so highly classified it had been authorized by the president of the United States. The U.S. ambassador to Bolivia set forth a stipulation: that the man chosen by the CIA to lead the covert operation needed to be a non-U.S. citizen. Felix Rodriguez was still a Cuban national. 

“What’s the mission?” Rodriguez asked. 

“Train Bolivian Army Rangers in unconventional warfare and go get Che Guevara,” he was told. 

Rodriguez was flown to Bolivia, where he spent months training army rangers in unconventional-warfare techniques. By the first week of October, the CIA’s network of assets had finally honed in on where Che Guevara was hiding out. He was holed up in the mountains, in a remote village called La Higuera, in Vallegrande Province. Two days later, Rodriguez was installing an aircraft antenna in an airplane at the general headquarters of the 8th Division of the Bolivian Rangers when the coded message came over the radio. 

“Papá cansado,” the message said. “Dad is tired.” The rangers trained by Rodriguez had captured Che Guevara alive. 

Rodriguez notified his CIA handler. That same night, President Johnson received a memo from national-security advisor Walt Rostow saying that Che Guevara had likely been captured. “The Bolivian unit engaged is the one we have been training for some time,” Rostow told the president. “This tentative information that the Bolivians got Che Guevara will interest you. It is not yet confirmed.” 

In the morning, Felix Rodriguez and Bolivian colonel Joaquin Zenteno Anaya flew by helicopter to the one-room schoolhouse in the mountains where Che was being held captive. Rodriguez asked to see the prisoner alone. Che Guevara was on the floor, his arms tied and his feet bound. His clothes were torn, his hair was matted, and in place of shoes he wore pieces of leather tied with cord. There in the schoolhouse, with the prisoner looking on, Felix Rodriguez set up his radio and transmitted a coded message to the CIA station in La Paz, to be retransmitted on to headquarters at Langley, in Virginia. Rodriguez photographed Che’s diary and confiscated his belongings: besides the diary, there were some pictures, Che’s address book, and a roll of microfiche. 

Rodriguez says he spoke to Che alone for over an hour and that he told him he was Cuban and had been part of the CIA’s Brigade 2506. “I said that in the aftermath of the CIA invasion at the Bay of Pigs, he had personally executed several of my friends.” 

“Ha,” Che said in response. Nothing more. 

“I don’t know what he was thinking at the moment and I never asked,” Rodriguez recalls. He says he told Che that he was working for the CIA and that the Agency wanted him alive, not dead. 

Shots rang out in the room next door. A fighter named Aniceto had just been executed, and Rodriguez recalls hearing the man’s body fall to the floor. 

Rodriguez received a radio call from the Bolivian High Command, he later told the CIA’s inspector general, with a coded message—“the code numbers 500 and 600 as orders”—to execute the prisoner Che Guevara. He knew that this was a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Rodriguez maintains that the Bolivian Army was in charge of the operation, not the CIA. He stared at Che, a condemned man. 

“We embraced,” Rodriguez says. “It was a tremendously emotional moment for me. I no longer hated him.” 

Rodriguez walked out of the room, passing two Bolivian soldiers he says looked drunk. He asked them not to shoot Che Guevara in the face. He walked to a hilltop and stood there. When he heard shots ring out, he noted the time on his Rolex watch. It was 1:10 p.m. 

After a few minutes, one of the soldiers came out carrying Che Guevara’s watch, a Rolex like his own. 

Rodriguez asked to see it. When the soldier wasn’t looking, he says, he swapped out Che’s Rolex for his own. It was time to move out. Using a canvas tarp, the soldiers loaded Che Guevara’s body into the helicopter. But balancing the corpse inside the small helicopter was challenging, and a decision was made to strap the body to one of the helicopter’s skids. Rodriguez struggled with the task. Looking down, he noticed he had Che Guevara’s blood on his hands. 

Back at Bolivian Army headquarters, Felix Rodriguez briefed Chief of Staff General Alfredo Ovando Candia on the events of the day. At one point during the conversation, the general ordered a subordinate to cut off Che Guevara’s hands, remembers Rodriguez. “The hands were sent to Cuba, to Fidel [Castro], as proof that Che was dead,” Rodriguez stated in an interview for this book. “I know for certain from sources that they are kept in preservatives, in Havana, in a secure facility there.” Rodriguez says that on occasion, Che’s amputated hands are ceremoniously brought out and shown to anti-American revolutionaries as a physical reminder of the dirty work done by the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency. 

On February 24, 1969, Felix Rodriguez became a citizen of the United States. He told his CIA handler that he wanted to volunteer for U.S. government service in Vietnam. He was assigned to the Phoenix program, one of the most controversial programs of the Vietnam War. 

“Phoenix was one of several pacification and rural security programs that CIA ran in South Vietnam during the 1960's,” says Colonel Andrew R. Finlayson, an officer in the Phoenix program. “The premise of pacification was that if peasants were persuaded that the government of South Vietnam and the United States were sincerely interested in protecting them from the Vietcong and trained them to defend themselves, then large areas of the South Vietnamese countryside could be secured or won back from the enemy without direct engagement by the U.S. military.” 

This is not what happened. When so-called pacification was not realized, as the numbers of Vietcong in the south went up as opposed to going down, the program was expanded. Whereas the Civilian Irregular Defense Group program focused on armed defense, the Phoenix program was intelligence-based. The CIA created a network of roughly one hundred local intelligence committees across South Vietnam. These committees, says Colonel Finlayson, collected information on the Vietcong and then disseminated it to local police. When this didn’t work, the CIA-funded program became even more aggressive. “Essentially, these committees created lists of known VCI [Vietcong] operatives. Once the name, rank, and location of each individual VCI member became known, CIA paramilitary or South Vietnamese police or military forces interrogated these individuals for further intelligence on the communist structure and its operations.” 

These CIA paramilitary teams were called Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs). Felix Rodriguez was the deputy field advisor for the PRU in the village of Bien Hoa. His boss was a CIA officer named William Buckley, who, in due time, would become the central figure in President Ronald Reagan’s decision to construct a foreign policy tool called “pre-emptive neutralization.” But that was far in the future. For now, every day with the PRU was about trying to quell the communist insurgency enveloping the south. 

Every field advisor assigned to a PRU paramilitary team worked undercover. Rodriguez’s cover was that he was a civilian advisor for the U.S. Army. CIA internal memos described the Provincial Reconnaissance Units as the “investigatory [and] para-military-attack” teams that would support the Phoenix program in the field. Witnesses say that the program used torture, murder, and assassination to try to rid the south of the Vietcong. U.S. officials have long disputed this claim. A similar program was developed in Afghanistan forty years in the future. What would begin as a program of pacification in Afghanistan, in September 2001, would be transformed into the first U.S. government targeted killing campaign to be publicly acknowledged by an American president.

14 

Green Berets

The Special Forces A-Team camp at Thanh Tri was located in Kien Tuong Province in the Mekong Delta, strategically positioned just three miles from Vietnam’s border with Cambodia. What happened there in the summer of 1969 would become an international scandal known as the Green Beret Affair, a tragic conundrum that would raise complex questions about murder versus assassination, about the mysterious relationship between the CIA and the Green Berets, and about the laws of war. Most important to this story, the Green Beret Affair of 1969 demonstrates how the construct of plausible deniability shields the U.S. president from wrongdoing while exposing operators who carry out euphemistic orders vulnerable to prosecution and jail time. 

As per the terms of the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina, fighting in Cambodia was prohibited. By 1967, intelligence indicated that the communists had expanded the Ho Chi Minh Trail down into Cambodia, to a terminus point on the border just thirty miles from Saigon called the Parrot’s Beak. Starting in the spring of that same year, MACV-SOG began running secret cross-border operations into Cambodia under the code name Daniel Boone. Detachment B57 of the 5th Special Forces (Airborne) at Thanh Tri provided intelligence for those and other missions under the CIA code name Project Gamma. Like so many other Green Beret paramilitary units across Vietnam, the one at Thanh Tri was a hybrid of Special Forces soldiers, CIA personnel, and local indigenous soldiers. Detachment B57 was made up of six Green Berets, three CIA operators, and as many as 450 indigenous fighters. The unit was commanded by one of the CIA operators, a twenty-seven-year-old former insurance salesman named Robert F. Marasco. He went by the cover name Captain Martin.

By the winter of 1968–69, Marasco had assembled a network of twenty indigenous assets who spied for him around the Parrot’s Beak. His most valuable spy, called a principal asset, was a thirty-one-year-old native of the north named Thai Khac Chuyen (“Chewwin”). Chuyen’s official position was S5 interpreter, or terp, in military speak. 

Chuyen had been recruited by CIA case officer Sergeant Alvin Smith Jr., who went by the cover name Peter Sands and who reported to Marasco at Thanh Tri. Smith was an enigmatic CIA case officer, older than Marasco by fifteen years. He was also a veteran of unconventional warfare, having led covert operations behind enemy lines in Korea. According to his file, Alvin Smith once served as the only American in a battalion of 1,400 Korean and Chinese indigenous troops as part of a JACK mission that has never been fully declassified. 

For better or for worse, Alvin Smith was known for becoming friendly with his assets. At the nearby support base in Moc Hoa, he’d sometimes stay up late into the night drinking whiskey with Chuyen. How Chuyen spoke such good English irked Smith. Chuyen said he grew up reading books in English and that he’d worked for the U.S. military in Saigon. When pressed, Chuyen was vague about the details, claiming the missions were all classified. 

Now it was March 1969, and there’d been an unusual number of mortar attacks on Moc Hoa, an indicator that a bigger attack might be coming. Marasco sent a unit out on a recon mission, led by a Green Beret from Kentucky named Terry McIntosh. Just nineteen at the time, McIntosh was one of the youngest Green Berets assigned to the war. He’d already been in Vietnam for seven months. 

“It was me, Chuyen, and ten indigenous troops on the mission,” McIntosh recalled in an interview for this book. “A little before dawn, I spotted enemy movement along the tree line,” indicating an ambush. McIntosh fired a grenade launcher in the direction of the troops and watched the fighters disperse. He handed the scope off to Chuyen. “He looked through it. I remember that he smiled. I thought that was strange but dismissed it,” remembers McIntosh, who then tried calling the A-Camp for support. But the radio was dead. “Ground-to-ground comms were usually excellent out here,” he recalls. That the radio didn’t work was strange to him. Suddenly, a volley of fire erupted from all sides, as if the Vietcong had foreknowledge that the team was coming, says McIntosh. A massive firefight ensued, with McIntosh firing his assault rifle until he was out of ammunition. “Chuyen was on my left, and the others to my right, but I noticed that Chuyen wasn’t firing his weapon,” he remembers. “He was fiddling with it, and later claimed that it jammed. At the time, I accepted his explanation without reservation.” 

Back at A-Camp, the commander heard artillery fire and ordered a mortar attack based on the unit’s last known position. The firefight ended without any fatalities from Detachment B57, and the men returned to Thanh Tri. McIntosh, a radio specialist, and a teammate examined the gear. “It had been tampered with,” McIntosh recalls. He told Marasco, who became concerned. One of Marasco’s other assets told him he’d heard Chuyen was a communist spy. 

Marasco ran a search in the MACV database, but there was no record of Chuyen. As a CIA employee, Marasco had access to classified information that others did not. That no record on Chuyen appeared likely meant that he was lying about having ever worked on classified missions in Saigon. Fearing he was a double agent, Marasco radioed headquarters at Nha Trang and asked that both men, Smith and Chuyen, be reassigned. Smith was moved over to the 5th Special Forces headquarters and Chuyen returned to Saigon, where his family lived. 

A few weeks later, a Special Forces recon team recovered photographs of a high-level North Vietnamese Army general meeting with his local Vietcong spies. In one of the photographs, there was Chuyen—standing right next to the North Vietnamese general, smiling. Robert Marasco was sure it was Chuyen. Alvin Smith was also shown the photograph and had the same response: it was Chuyen. Their principal asset was a spy for the north. 

On June 9, CIA headquarters instructed Alvin Smith to bring Chuyen in, under the guise of a covert operation. For five days, Chuyen was interrogated. He repeatedly failed the polygraph, all the while insisting the person in the photograph was not him. The transcript of what he actually said has never been declassified, but according to reports leaked to the press, he cursed the Americans and said they’d lose the war to the communists in the north. 

What to do with the double agent Chuyen? He couldn’t be sent to local law enforcement; the police around the Parrot’s Beak were notoriously corrupt and rife with double agents. Chuyen knew the identities of all the undercover CIA officers, operators, and assets at Thanh Tri. Alvin Smith suggested they try to turn Chuyen into a triple agent, someone who could work for the CIA again.

Marasco contacted the CIA station in Nha Trang and asked what he should do. He was told to kill him. “[Chuyen] was my agent and it was my responsibility to ‘eliminate him with extreme prejudice,’” Marasco later told the New York Times. Marasco said these were “oblique yet very, very clear orders.” He explained further that everyone working covert operations for the CIA and Special Forces knew that the phrase “eliminate with extreme prejudice” was a euphemism for kill. 

Marasco reached out to the commander of the U.S. Army Special Forces, Colonel Robert B. Rheault, asking for his orders on the matter. Colonel Rheault told Marasco that the group was “to proceed.” The CIA officers and U.S. Army Green Berets agreed on a cover story. They’d say Chuyen had been assigned to a covert mission and then disappeared. Everyone involved agreed to proceed— except Alvin Smith, who refused to participate. 

Agent Chuyen was told he was needed for a highly classified mission. On June 20, 1969, the CIA officer and the Green Berets drugged Chuyen with morphine, drove with him to a remote beach near Nha Trang, and loaded him into a boat. They took the boat out into deep waters in Nha Trang Bay, where Marasco shot Chuyen in the head with a .22-caliber pistol, equipped with a suppressor, while Chuyen was still unconscious. The men loaded Chuyen’s body into a mail sack, weighted it down with chains and tire rims, and threw him overboard into the South China Sea. 

The following day, a cable came in from CIA headquarters. “Killing is no solution,” it read. 

Paranoia gripped CIA case officer Alvin Smith. He went to his CIA superior in Nha Trang and asked for asylum in exchange for information. With immunity in place, he told his superior officer that his colleagues at Thanh Tri had killed Chuyen and that now Smith feared for his own life. Things moved fast. The CIA officer notified the U.S. Army, which sent the information up the chain of command, all the way to the U.S. commander in Vietnam, General Creighton Abrams Jr. 

General Abrams summoned Colonel Rheault to his office and asked what had happened to Chuyen. Rheault told the general that the asset was away on a secret mission, when in fact he’d already been killed. When General Abrams learned he’d been lied to, he exploded with rage. The following day, Colonel Rheault, Robert Marasco, and six Green Berets were arrested, handcuffed, and sent to the Long Binh Jail outside Saigon. They’d be tried for conspiracy to commit murder and murder in the first degree, Abrams said. 

The military imposed a gag order on those who knew about the case, but reporters quickly learned of the arrests and the details of their imprisonment. That American Green Berets were being held in solitary confinement, in tiny 5' × 7' cells with just a cot and a bare light bulb, seemed outrageous. How could the U.S. Army treat its own soldiers like this? Most shocking of all, the secretary of the army said that if the men were convicted, their punishment would be “life in prison, not a firing squad.” Firing squad? The press cried absurd. Despite the growing antiwar movement across America, a majority of civilians sided with the Green Berets, calling them scapegoats of the Pentagon war machine. 

More mysterious details emerged: double agents, triple agents, Green Berets, the CIA. Then came the rumor that the Green Berets were operating across the border in Cambodia, this at a time when the Nixon White House had already insisted that a New York Times reporter who’d revealed that the United States was dropping bombs on Cambodia was a liar. When someone leaked to the press the photograph of Chuyen standing next to the North Vietnamese Army general, smiling, citizens and congressmen alike began to ask questions. How could killing a Vietcong spy in a war zone be considered a war crime? Life magazine interviewed Colonel Rheault’s eleven-year-old son, Robert Jr. “What’s all the fuss about?” asked the fifth grader. “I thought that’s what Dad was in Vietnam for—to kill the Vietcong.” 

Henry Rothblatt, defense attorney for the Green Berets, made a brilliant move. He deposed the CIA. Marasco’s identity as a CIA officer remained classified (Marasco revealed his identity to the New York Times in 1971). Rothblatt was betting that there was no way the White House would allow the CIA to testify in court. Between its ongoing assassination programs, the Phoenix program, the classified MACV-SOG missions into Laos and Cambodia—these were but a few of the president’s hidden-hand programs that surely needed to remain that way. The president’s inner circle would never allow the CIA to testify about its operations in Vietnam. The White House had far too much to lose. 

President Nixon had a last-minute idea, a double cross of CIA director Richard Helms, whom Nixon disliked. In a note to Henry Kissinger, his national security advisor, Nixon wrote, “K—I think [Richard] Helms should be made to take part of the rap.” While there’s no record of Kissinger’s reaction, based on actions taken it is likely he advised the president against throwing Helms under the proverbial bus. Instead, the following morning, on September 29, 1969, the U.S. Army unexpectedly dropped all charges against the eight men involved in the Green Beret Affair. The U.S. Department of Justice concluded that a fair and impartial trial was not possible. Further details of the CIA’s refusal to testify remain classified, but under pressure, the Nixon White House was forced to acknowledge that the president had been involved in the decision to drop all murder charges. 

Decades later, after MACV-SOG was declassified, a fascinating detail emerged. On August 25, a month after the CIA officers and the Green Berets were arrested but before the Nixon White House dropped the murder charges, a SOG recon team called RT Florida was sent on a Top Secret cross-border mission into Cambodia. There the team was pursued by a squadron of NVA soldiers using dogs to track them. In the process of evading capture, the SOG operators shot and killed two NVA officers. One of the dead men turned out to be a high-ranking intelligence officer. Inside the large leather satchel he carried was a gold mine: a cache of documents, one of which was a partial roster of double agents and spies operating for Hanoi inside South Vietnam. One name on the roster “was the double agent executed by order of Colonel Rheault,” writes scholar Richard Shultz. 

“War is never pleasant,” says Terry McIntosh. “War is bigger than the individual soldier. For the record, as tragic as it was for all parties, I salute Marasco and others who were charged. They were soldiers under orders. There were no good options for them. The job fell to them. The moral issues are still unresolved.” 

It was into this highly charged environment that a young Green Beret named Lewis C. Merletti volunteered to go to Vietnam. Lew Merletti stood in the green grass on the side of Interstate 95 North in Fayetteville, North Carolina, with his thumb out. It was 1969, he was twenty-one years old, and he was hitching a ride to the Pentagon to volunteer for service in Vietnam. His whole life was in front of him, including his plans, dreams, and aspirations—of doing great things for himself, his family, and his country—but he also felt he could not do any of this in good conscience if he skipped out on Vietnam. 

“This war was going on, and I knew a lot of guys my age that were being drafted and didn’t want to go and they were going anyway,” recalls Merletti. “I really felt like, ‘Hey, it’s not right, I have to contribute to this. I can’t be sitting back here safe [in the United States] if these guys are going over there fighting this war.’ It just didn’t seem to me to be fair.” In 1969, the young Lew Merletti had no way of knowing what his immediate future included. He certainly had no idea that one day he would serve on the Presidential Protective Detail of three U.S. presidents, or that he would become the nineteenth director of the U.S. Secret Service—a law enforcement agency created by President Abraham Lincoln and signed into law on the morning of April 14, 1865, the day of Lincoln’s own assassination. 

The journey to war for Lew Merletti began two years earlier, when he signed up for military service as an airborne infantryman. At the end of his first week of jump school, a very confident, very focused, physically fit young man showed up in full military dress to speak to Merletti’s group of roughly three hundred soldiers-in-training. The man wore the green beret. “He gets up on this platform in front of us and says, ‘Gentlemen, I’m gonna be honest with you, Special Forces is losing men and we need volunteers,’” Merletti recalls. He volunteered. 

Training lasted forty-two weeks. “You learn how to treat gunshot wounds, perform surgeries and amputations. It’s basically like becoming a highly trained paramedic,” Merletti explains. The U.S. Army Special Forces also wanted some of its medics to speak Vietnamese—they would be treating a lot of citizens in country—and so Merletti was sent to the language school, at Fort Bragg. Over the course of the next five months, for eight hours a day, he was taught Vietnamese by a lively young woman originally from North Vietnam. By the time he finished training, he had less than one year on his three-year enlistment. “I was told I didn’t have to go to Vietnam,” he remembers. It was too close to the end of his tour. “Unless I volunteered.” This is why he was hitchhiking to the Pentagon, in Washington, DC, that spring day in 1969. 

Merletti had been standing on the side of the road in full dress uniform with his green beret for about five minutes when a man in a VW bug pulled up, slowed to a stop, and rolled down the window. 

“Where are you going?” the man asked. 

“The Pentagon,” Merletti said. 

It was the height of the Vietnam War. It was also the height of the anti– Vietnam War movement. The country was terribly divided. Lew Merletti had a feeling that the outcome here—with the driver of the VW bug—could go either way. 

“The Pentagon. Are you kidding me?” the man asked, incredulous. 

Lew said he was not kidding. That he was going there to volunteer for combat service in Vietnam. 

“Well, if you’re going to the Pentagon,” the driver said, “I’ll take you straight there.” And he did. Nearly fifty years later, Merletti vividly remembers being dropped off in the parking lot of the Pentagon, and he still thinks about the anonymous man who drove him there, the man’s willingness to help do his part, however incremental. 

There in Washington, DC, inside Defense Department headquarters, Merletti located Mrs. Billie Alexander, just as Billy Waugh had sought out and found Mrs. Alexander when he wanted to get assigned to SOG. “Everyone knew Billie Alexander was in charge of assigning volunteers to Special Forces in Vietnam,” remembers Merletti, and, as she had for so many others, she approved his request. “You’ll be in Vietnam in August,” she said. 

To get to Vietnam, Merletti first flew from his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Chicago, Illinois, where he had a layover. He traveled in his Class A dress uniform and green beret. “You really stood out as a soldier back then,” Merletti recalls. “No one else in the entire military was authorized to wear a beret. There was only the Green Beret.” Then, to his surprise, as he approached the gate, Merletti spotted a fellow Green Beret. But it wasn’t just anyone—it was his very good friend from Special Forces training, 7th Group: Mike Kuropas. “He was saying good-bye to his family, so I kind of held back,” he remembers. Eventually Mike Kuropas spotted Merletti, and introduced him to his family, a group of whom had come to the airport to see him off to war. “I met everybody and then it was time to go, to get on the plane,” recalls Merletti. To go fight the war in Vietnam. 

On the airplane a strange thing happened. Merletti and Kuropas were sitting together in the front of the plane. The flight attendants began to serve lunch, Merletti recalls. “They put a meal in front of me and then they said to Mike, ‘We’ll get you a meal in a minute.’” Five or so minutes passed before the flight attendant returned. “She says, ‘We’re really sorry, but we don’t have any meals left. But here’s a little voucher so the next time you fly, you’ll get an upgrade or something like that.’” Mike Kuropas looked at the voucher. “He looks at me,” remembers Merletti, “and he says, ‘You know this is a bad omen,’ and I say, ‘What do you mean?’ He says, ‘I’m not coming back.’ I say, ‘Mike, don’t say that. Don’t say that at all.’ I said, ‘You know, we all have those thoughts, but don’t go there, just don’t do it.’” 

Mike Kuropas looked squarely at Lew Merletti and said, “No, I know I’m not coming back.” 

When they arrived in country, Merletti, Kuropas, and the rest of the Green Berets were taken to the island facility of Hon Tre, off the coast of Vietnam. There, Special Forces soldiers coming from the United States for insertion into the battlefield generally spent several days getting a refresher course in shooting, using hand grenades, setting off claymore mines, and using of mortars. When the training on Hon Tre was over, the group traveled to Special Forces headquarters in Nha Trang. “They tell us, ‘Okay, everybody fall out, you have your orders.’ We lined up, and we’re standing at attention and they begin calling names off and telling you where you’re going.” 

Merletti heard the sergeant say his name: “Merletti, A-502.” This meant he’d been assigned to Detachment A-502 of the 5th Special Forces Group. The detachment’s mission was to advise and assist the Vietnamese Special Forces in the joint CIA-Pentagon program, the Civilian Irregular Defense Group. Lew Merletti remembers thinking to himself, “Hey, that’s not a bad assignment.” Then he heard Mike Kuropas’s name being called out, and the assignment he’d been given: “Kuropas, CCC.” Merletti remembers thinking to himself, “Oh, God.” 

Everyone knew that CCC was part of MACV-SOG. The acronym CCC stood for Command and Control, Central, one of what were now three SOG bases in South Vietnam. Special Forces soldiers who were new to the program knew SOG was the place where hard-core warriors with extensive combat experience fought direct-action missions behind enemy lines. SOG was where Special Forces legends like Larry Thorne, Ed Wolcoff, and Billy Waugh fought and thrived—some until they died. But for newcomers, for initiates into combat, SOG was dangerous. It was Suicide on the Ground. Merletti tried to make light of Kuropas’s assignment but found the reality of the situation difficult to accept. 

“I volunteered for Vietnam,” he recalls, “I don’t think Mike Kuropas had. I believe he’d received orders to go. I knew he didn’t want to go to SOG, to CCC,” remembers Merletti. “But I knew he’d give it his best.” 

The sergeant in charge announced that helicopters would be arriving momentarily to take everyone to their specific destinations. “The formation breaks up,” says Merletti, “and Mike, who was standing maybe two people down from me, he steps over and he put out his hand and he says, ‘Hey, thank you for your friendship and everything, it’s been wonderful.’ He said, ‘I really appreciate you being my friend but this is it. It’s over.’ And I said, ‘Please, Mike, don’t say that.’ And he says, ‘No, no, no, it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen. It’s alright.’” 

Lew Merletti got on one army helicopter and Mike Kuropas got on another army helicopter. Either right before the birds flew away or as they were taking off, Merletti either said out loud to Mike Kuropas or he said to himself: No, I’ll meet you back here in one year. 

Lew Merletti was sent to a small village called Trung Dong in the Central Highlands, a remote area at risk of being dominated by the Vietcong. He lived in a Special Forces A-Camp there, built earlier by Green Berets. His team consisted of twelve Americans and a unit of indigenous mercenaries, called CIDG strikers, being paid by the Department of Defense to defend their village and to stop the enemy from gaining further control of the area. 

“I had not been exposed to combat,” Merletti remembers, and on the very first night, there was an ambush. In the ensuing firefight, six Viet Cong were killed and one of the mercenaries was bitten by a poisonous snake, which Merletti treated in the field before having the man medevaced out, thanks to the guidance, he says, of teammate Sergeant John Deschamps. Some weeks later, he and the team were out on patrol in the dense jungle when the CIDG striker standing right next to him was shot in the head. “My immediate reaction,” says Merletti, “was, I’ve got to get help! Then I realized I was the help.” After a few intense and shock-riddled moments, Merletti’s Special Forces medical training kicked in. “I knew exactly what to do,” he recalls. “I said to myself, ‘I can do this, I was trained for this.’” And he did. He stopped the bleeding, wrapped the wound, and again oversaw the medevac. 

For the better part of the year, Merletti served in combat as part of a Special Forces A-Team. “Every time you go out on patrol, you have a lump in your throat,” he recalls. “You wonder, ‘Is this it?’ Every footstep you take, you know it could be your last footstep.” To stay focused and not let his mind wander, when he went out on patrol, Merletti learned to pay attention to minute details. Every detail mattered. If he wasn’t paying attention, he could cross a trip wire or step on a land mine or make a noise that might alert the enemy. “You couldn’t let your mind drift. You couldn’t think, Man I wish I were at the ballpark. I wish I had a cold lemonade or a beer in my hand.” Do that and you’re dead. “You learn to look at the ground in front of you, to look at your flank. Pay attention to every single detail, every moment of every day.” 

Merletti’s one-year tour of duty was scheduled to come to an end on May 30, 1970. But in the spring of 1970, the Defense Department announced it was reducing troop numbers in Vietnam, at President Nixon’s request, and all soldiers were being given what was called a thirty-day drop. And so, in the first week of April 1970, Lew Merletti learned he was scheduled to leave Vietnam on April 28. All across Vietnam, Green Berets received this same news, and that included Mike Kuropas—who for ten straight months now had been fighting intense direct-action missions on a recon team for SOG, CCC. 

On the morning of April 15, 1970, trouble began near a Special Forces A Camp at Dak Seang, in the Central Highlands, ten miles from the border with Laos. Intelligence showed a massive buildup of NVA forces was under way, positioned to overtake the camp and surrounding valley. The plan was to insert a battalion of Special Forces soldiers and their ARVN counterparts on top of the mountain to protect the camp and all it stood for. One of the soldiers who fought there described this hilltop as “little more than a bald knob with craters,” but it was a strategic position, with a vantage point over the surrounding valley. The U.S. Army and the North Vietnamese Army each wanted to control it. Designated LZ Orange, the Defense Department would initiate an offensive move to control it. 

“So it was that at 0430 in the morning of April 15th, the flight-line at Kontum Air Field came alive with pilots, crew chiefs, and gunners busying themselves with their preflight checks, mounting weapons and loading rocket pods,” recalled Donald Summers, a member of the 170th Assault Helicopter Company. He was about to be inserted. As the sun rose, the offensive began. As at Oscar Eight, helicopter gunships cleared LZ Orange while two troop transport helicopters ferried in South Vietnamese soldiers and their U.S. Special Forces commanders. The first helicopter landed, and its crew charged out. Then, in a move perfected by the North Vietnamese Army, as the second helicopter hovered fifty feet over the landing zone, it was rocketed out of the air, killing nine of the twelve men on board. On the ground, there were eight South Vietnamese soldiers and five American soldiers who’d survived, including one pilot, one copilot, a door gunner, a pathfinder, and the crew chief. 

U.S. Air Force fast fliers came in screeching overhead, laying down suppressive fire. Over the past several hours, the losses in the area had been staggering: four helicopters shot down, seven helicopters hit, fate unknown. One of the A-1E Skyraiders was last seen losing altitude above a ridge line, its engine on fire. It was at this point in the operation that the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force command assessed the operation, from headquarters, and decided a rescue mission was not possible without “an unacceptable further loss of life.” Which is when a SOG Bright Light team operating out of Kontum was asked to volunteer for a rescue mission. Like firefighters running into a burning building, Staff Sergeant Mike Kuropas, Staff Sergeant Dennis Neal, and six Montagnard mercenaries volunteered for the job. The operational plan was to insert the Bright Light team onto LZ Orange to rescue the men trapped on the hill. Bill McDonald, of the 170th Assault Helicopter Company, volunteered to pilot the team into the target area. 

Helicopter pilot Donald Summers was one of the men bleeding out and dying on the hill. He later recalled seeing the helicopter carrying the SOG Bright Light team on its approach. Roughly half a mile out from the landing zone, pilot Bill McDonald dropped his SOG helicopter into a deep dive and headed down to the valley floor. He had to fly in “low and fast, up the side of the mountain to the LZ,” Summers recalled, or he would have been shot down long before he got anywhere near the hill. “He was taking extensive fire from 360 degrees, but he pressed on.” Crippled from enemy gunfire but still flying, Summers watched, horrified. “The bird slammed into the landing zone.” Fuel poured out of a large hole in the fuel cell. A rocket had lodged near the tail but not exploded. 

Under a barrage of small arms fire, Summers and the other survivors ran toward the helicopter. Summers remembered reaching the aircraft and looking inside. There, SOG Bright Light team leaders Mike Kuropas, Dennis Neal, and the six Montagnards lay dead on the floor, shredded from multiple gunshot wounds. Summers climbed into the crippled helicopter, and by some strange aviation miracle, Bill McDonald was able to fly the helicopter away. 

Thirteen days later, on April 28, Lew Merletti completed his service in Vietnam. He was helicoptered down from the A-Team camp at Trung Dong to Special Forces headquarters in Nha Trang. The first action he took was to walk up to the bulletin board and search for Mike Kuropas’s name. He found it. 

It read: “Michael Vincent Kuropas, Killed in Action, April 15, 1970.” 

Merletti felt crushing loss. “Standing there, I became overwhelmed with emotion,” he recalls. “The reality set in. I thought about Mike and I still think about all the guys who died in Vietnam. Each one of them. They were alive one moment and then they got shot. There’s no anesthesia on the battlefield. You get shot. It’s incredibly painful to get shot. You bleed out before you die,” Merletti says. Standing in front of Mike Kuropas’s name, Merletti made a vow. “I wanted to try to live up to certain expectations of myself, for him. For Mike.” Merletti vowed that moving forward in his life, were he to perceive something in front of himself as difficult, he would stop and think of Mike Kuropas. He would acknowledge that whatever problem he was having, he was having the problem because he was alive. Mike Kuropas would not have the luxury of problems. Mike Kuropas, age just twenty-two, was dead. 

By the end of 1970, the war was all but lost, the human losses too great to bear. The mighty U.S. Defense Department could not win the war. There were no front lines. The enemy swarmed like bees, like ants crawling, or fish swimming, just as Mao Zedong warned in On Guerrilla Warfare and General Giap had echoed in his own manifesto. The communists dominated the geography of every environment. For much of the war, the Defense Department believed its helicopters could tip the balance of power, but by 1971 helicopter losses were insurmountable, too. The precise number of helicopters shot down during the Vietnam War remains classified as of 2019.

Still, the Defense Department was not ready to accept their loss, and several eleventh-hour attempts were made within SOG, before 1971, to develop new tactics to win a guerrilla war. Billy Waugh was at the locus of one of these new ideas: insertion by parachute in an unorthodox manner. It was to be called a HALO jump. This involved exiting an aircraft above 10,000 feet, free-falling to roughly 2,000 feet or even lower, then gliding to the earth using a steerable parachute. During the Korean War, General Jack Singlaub had practiced this tactic himself, as a possible insertion technique to use in the covert air operations he was in charge of for the CIA. But the tactic was never used in Korea. 

In 1970, the HALO jump remained untested in war. Since World War II, paratroopers had always jumped into battle using static lines that would open the parachutes automatically, predictably, one after the next, so a large group of jumpers could land in a pattern on a drop zone. Vietnam was different. SOG recon teams knew the NVA didn’t keep watch over landing zones at night because no one ever parachuted in the darkness. Until now. 

Waugh was in charge of selecting the world’s first combat HALO team, then overseeing all SOG HALO training, including of the indig fighters assigned to operations. The units practiced on a tiny islet just a few miles off the northwest coast of Okinawa called le Shima Island. There, SOG operators practiced jumping out of aircraft at 30,000 feet, in full combat gear, then performing a military free fall for 27,500 feet, reaching terminal velocity before pulling the rip cord and landing in the ocean. The attempt to train their indig counterparts was a tall order, remembers Waugh. The Green Berets were all airborne-qualified. Some, like Waugh, had been jumping out of airplanes for more than twenty years. None of the indigs had ever left Vietnam, let alone jumped out of an airplane with a parachute. “Half of our indigs had never seen the ocean before,” recalls Waugh. “One of our guys got spooked and pulled his parachute right after he jumped. He missed the target by about ten miles. By the time we got to him in the rescue boat he’d already consumed about a gallon of seawater. He got very, very sick.” 

On November 28, 1970, SOG’s first HALO team, RT Virginia, jumped into Laos. The unit was led by Staff Sergeant Cliff Newman, Sergeant First Class Sammy Hernandez, and Sergeant First Class Melvin Hill, accompanied by an officer with the ARVN and two Montagnard mercenaries “who had no experience jumping, but did just fine,” remembers Waugh. RT Virginia conducted five days of reconnaissance behind enemy lines and were exfiltrated without incident. This was the first known HALO combat jump in the history of warfare. Seven months later, on June 22, 1971, Billy Waugh led the third HALO jump team into combat, also in Laos. Teammate Madison Strohlein was captured and killed. The vertical wind tunnel at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg was named in his honor. 

But no amount of new thinking, and no number of unusual infiltration tactics, could salvage this unwinnable war. The following year, on May 1, 1972, SOG was disbanded. American citizens were fed up with violence and warfare. In January 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed, bringing an end to the Vietnam War, with the country to remain divided between the north and the south. With 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam, guerrilla warfare was a dirty word. Across the military and intelligence communities, budgets were slashed. Across the CIA and the Defense Department, covert-action programs were disbanded. 

The U.S. Army in general, and the U.S. special operations forces in particular, suffered a black eye. Four of the army’s six Special Forces groups were inactivated. The two small units that remained were assigned to a program called SPARTAN (Special Proficiency at Rugged Training and Nation-Building). To stay active, its soldiers worked with Indian tribes in Florida, Arizona, and Montana helping to build roads and medical facilities. The U.S. Army vowed to concentrate on conventional warfare—to stay out of ungovernable places like the jungles in Southeast Asia and to instead prepare for infantry and tank warfare on the flatlands of central Europe. 

Men like Billy Waugh, and the skills they possessed, were not needed by the U.S. military or intelligence services anymore. The army offered Waugh a desk job at Fort Devens, Massachusetts. Waugh knew, after more than ten years of covert action and direct-action combat operations, that office work was not for him. In lieu of a retirement ceremony, he and six Green Berets HALO-jumped out of an aircraft over Fort Bragg, pulling their parachutes 800 feet above parade grounds. They landed, packed up their parachutes, and spent the afternoon drinking beer in honor of their dead friends. Then they went home. 

Back from Vietnam, Lew Merletti enrolled at Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He would earn his four-year degree in a little over three years. One day before he graduated, he was walking through the student center when he caught sight of a notice on a bulletin board. “NSA hiring,” the notice read. He took the test being offered to new recruits, aced it, and was called in for an interview. Inside the foyer of a fancy building, he followed instructions that took him up an elevator to the thirty-fifth floor. 

“I walked around. There didn’t seem to be anyone in any of the offices, but eventually I located the correct room,” Merletti recalls. Seated behind a desk was a man. After some small talk, the man spoke candidly. 

“We’re an intelligence-gathering agency,” he said. “We’re larger than the CIA. We want to offer you a job.” 

Merletti asked why the NSA, an intelligence agency, was interested in recruiting him, a former Green Beret. “After an exchange of words, I realized the recruiter was interested in my language capabilities, that I spoke Vietnamese.” 

The man told Merletti that if he were to work for the NSA, it would be a solid career. But a job with an intelligence agency was not what Lew Merletti had in mind for his future. “The war was over,” he remembers thinking. “How long were we going to be spying on the Vietnamese?” 

Merletti told the recruiter that he was interested in finding a long-term and fulfilling career. The NSA recruiter asked Merletti what it was he wanted to do. 

“I feel that I’m really good at protecting people and saving lives,” Merletti recalls telling him. “That’s what I’d like to do.” 

“You should join the Secret Service,” the man said. 

Lew Merletti had never considered a career with the U.S. Secret Service. But it made sense. He had the skills of a Special Forces soldier and the heart and soul of a protector. After two interviews with the Secret Service, he was hired. He thought about how awesome it felt to work for the agency that protected the president of the United States. Assassination was as old as warfare and would never go away. 

For Billy Waugh, the transition to a civilian career was not easy. In need of a paycheck, he took a job at one of the few federal institutions that was hiring combat veterans without prejudice: the U.S. Postal Service. In the fall of 1972, he reported for duty at a post office in Austin, Texas, twenty miles from where he was born. Waugh rose up through the ranks. With the discipline of a Green Beret and a desire to excel, he moved from mail carrier to the person who oversaw the automated mail-sorting machine. 

“Let’s face it,” recalls Waugh, “for a person like me, post office work was worse than death.” 

Billy Waugh was forty-three. He’d spent twenty-five years of his life as a soldier, half of them in combat. In an interview in 2017, he shared a rare emotional moment about what he was thinking at that time. 

“I do not ever recall feeling fear, not up to that moment in my life. Not in combat before, and not anywhere since. But there in the post office, I feared my life was over,” he remembers. “That I would wind up some old man drinking at the end of the bar.” 

For five long years, Billy Waugh continued to work for the Postal Service, until one night, in July 1977, the telephone rang. He answered it and recognized the voice on the other end of the line. It belonged to a covert-action operator he had worked with in SOG, in Vietnam. The man asked Billy if he was ready for action, if he wanted back in. 

Waugh said yes.

15 

Revenge 

It was just after 7:00 p.m., March 1, 1973, and darkness had fallen in Khartoum, Sudan. Outside the Saudi Arabian embassy compound, small groups of diplomats stood around saying good-bye to one another after a successful cocktail party. The American guests of honor were George “Curt” Moore, the chargé d’affaires, and Cleo A. Noel Jr., the ambassador. They were getting ready to head over to the presidential palace to have dinner with President Gaafar Nimeiry of Sudan and Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, when all hell broke loose. 

A Land Rover screeched to a halt in front of the embassy’s plate-glass doors, and out leapt eight masked gunmen, each with a dagger attached to his belt. One of the gunmen shot an embassy guard in the head; another raked a wall with automatic machine-gun fire. A bullet tore into the leg of Belgian chargé d’affaires Guy Eid and he fell to the ground, bleeding. Ambassador Noel got hit in the ankle and he, too, went down. 

“Run, run, run for your lives!” shouted Jan Bertens, the Dutch chargé d’affaires, the only diplomat to make it to the street before the terrorists locked the gates and took everyone hostage. Inside a reception hall, each diplomat was forced to identify himself by nationality. The terrorists released all but three: Moore, Noel, and Eid. The gunmen identified themselves as members of the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September. Founded in 1963, it had since become the most feared terrorist organization in the world. 

Through local journalists, the terrorists made their demands known. They wanted Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian who’d assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968, freed from a California jail. And they wanted one hundred Black September operatives released from prisons in Israel and Jordan. At the White House, President Nixon was notified of the hostage situation by Henry Kissinger. The men sat down and discussed what to do next. 

Twenty-six hours later, the president held a news conference. “The Sudanese government is working on the problem,” Nixon said. He said of the hostages: “We will do everything that we can to get them released, but will not pay blackmail.” The policy, which was not written down and which Nixon had made up three months earlier, during a hostage scenario in Haiti, would play a profoundly consequential role in the decades to come. 

Just a few hours after hearing this news, the Black September terrorists in Khartoum received a phone call from their commanding officer in Beirut. Since President Nixon wasn’t going to agree to the terrorists’ demands, the commander said, the American diplomats were useless and the gunmen should “finish them off.” 

In Khartoum, Robert E. Fritts, the new deputy chief of mission, had just arrived at the American embassy, where he’d been sent to replace Curt Moore. The embassy staff was in a state of shock; the fate of their superior officers hung in the balance. But the mission of the U.S. State Department was unwavering: diplomacy must go on. Khartoum was a lawless town, fueled by anti-American sentiment, and this was a fact every Foreign Service officer knew and accepted. Islamists were fighting Marxists and tribal warlords in the streets. There had been two bloody coups in four years. This majority Arab nation had severed all diplomatic relations with the United States after the 1967 Six-Day War, and only recently had relations been rekindled, largely due to the diplomatic efforts of Curt Moore. Now he was being held at gunpoint inside the Saudi embassy, along with Cleo Noel and Guy Eid. 

As deputy chief of mission, Fritts recalled the devastation he felt, trying to bring order to the chaos he was walking into. “The embassy occupied the upper floors of a commercial office building adjoined by others on the main street,” he recalled. An intense dust storm called a haboob had kicked up, and the power was out. “Dust and grit were everywhere, in your eyes and teeth.… I climbed five or six floors up the back steps, carrying my suitcase and my garment bag over my shoulder.” 

Fritts made his way through the darkness into the embassy, where he caught sight of Sandy Sanderson, an administrative officer, standing in the dim light with his glasses on a string around his neck. “I couldn’t quite see his face,” said Fritts. “He was backlighted by the emergency lamps, but I could tell he was crying.” 

“We’ve heard there was gunfire in the Saudi embassy,” Sanderson sobbed. “They may be dead. You’re in charge.” 

Sandy Sanderson was right. Moments before their death, Eid, Moore, and Noel were allowed to write letters to their wives. “Cleo and I will die bravely and without tears as men should,” was the last sentence Curt Moore wrote. These were not bullet-to-the-head assassinations. The men, blindfolded with their hands bound, were peppered with gunfire starting at the ankles with a barrage of bullets leading up to the head. Sadism was Black September’s trademark, and its members were notorious for inflicting the maximum amount of pain and suffering on their victims. For Black September assassination was about revenge, about righting a wrong—the theft of the Palestinian homeland by the Jews. Documents kept classified for decades reveal the Black September gunmen were told by their handler that Curt Moore was the CIA’s top man in the Middle East, that he worked for the Israelis and had personally directed the killing of Palestinians, none of which is known to be accurate. 

But perhaps the most chilling details of the tragedy are tethered to the United States—in particular, to Henry Kissinger. Behind many hidden-hand operations lie secret deals and dark bargains. Just days before the assassinations in Khartoum, an NSA listening post in Cyprus picked up a radio transmission indicating that a major Black September operation was about to be carried out. “The exhibits arrive on the Egyptian plane Wednesday morning,” a man in the PLO’s Beirut headquarters told a colleague in the Khartoum office, deciphered as code for a coming attack. The “exhibits,” the State Department later confirmed, were seven gunmen from Black September, four disassembled AK47s, and eight hand grenades, all of which arrived on an Egypt Air flight from Cairo on February 28, the day before the killings. Why the State Department failed to properly warn its top diplomats in Khartoum of a suspected imminent attack would take decades to come to light. 

Although it was not known in 1973, Black September was the brainchild of Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). That the Black September terrorists took direct orders from Arafat, who planned and ordered the murder of the two American diplomats in Khartoum, was known only to a select few presidential advisors at the time. This information was kept classified by the State Department until 2006, until after Arafat—by then a Nobel Peace Prize recipient—had died. Bruce Hoffman, one of the world’s foremost experts on terrorist organizations, explains: Black September “had been formed as a deniable and completely covert special-operations unit of [the PLO group] al-Fatah by Arafat and his closest lieutenants.” Its fighters were assigned hard-core terrorist operations that included bombings, ambushes, hijackings, kidnappings, and assassinations. “It was the most elite unit we had,” one of alFatah’s former commanding generals told Hoffman. “[Our] members were suicidal—not in the sense of religious terrorists who surrender their lives to ascend to heaven—but in the sense that we could send them anywhere to do anything and they were prepared to lay down their lives to do it. No question. No hesitation.” 

Black September’s original mission was to foment regional violence and provoke Israel into bloody engagements, forcing its Arab neighbors from a passive to an active stance in its anti-Israel, anti-West campaign of violence. How Black September and the PLO worked together, in secret, is its own complex narrative. What is important to this story is that Arafat chose a man of contradictions, Ali Hassan Salameh, to serve as commander of the special operations unit. Salameh was the son of the martyred Sheik Hassan Salameh, commander of the Palestinian Holy War Army in the war against Israel, who died in battle in June 1948. But unlike his pious father, he was a playboy who drove around Beirut in expensive cars, ate at fancy restaurants, and dated models. Married, with two sons, he flaunted his girlfriend around town; she was a former Miss Universe named Georgina Rizk. Mossad gave him the insulting code name the Red Prince. 

The terrorist organization took its name from the so-called Black September conflict. In September of 1970, Arafat’s guerrilla warfare corps hijacked four international aircraft and forced them to land in the Jordanian desert, at Dawson’s Field. Jordan’s King Hussein used his army against the terrorist group, expelling all members from the kingdom. In revenge, Yasser Arafat secretly ordered the Red Prince to oversee the assassination of Wasfi al-Tal, Jordan’s prime minister, during the Arab League summit in Egypt the following year. As Tal entered the foyer of the Sheraton Cairo Hotel, a Black September gunman stepped forward and shot him in the chest at point-blank range. 

“They’ve killed me!” Tal cried out as he fell to the floor bleeding. “Murderers! They believe only in fire and destruction.” 

As Jordan’s prime minister lay dying on the floor, the assassin got down on his hands and knees and licked the blood flowing across the marble floor. This was exactly the image of his Black September killers that Arafat wanted to portray, while keeping his hidden-hand role secret from the world. The Times of London ran a photograph of this blood-licking act, an image that was reprinted in newspapers around the world. 

What Arafat also wanted, at least initially, was American passivity. As the United States withdrew its forces from Vietnam, Arab terrorist organizations started cropping up across the Middle East, inspired by the U.S. military’s inability to defeat a much smaller guerrilla army. “Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams,” Che Guevara had instructed his fellow revolutionaries around the world, calling the Middle East “a volcano… threatening eruption in the world, today.” Even after his death, Che Guevara’s words lived on. 

After successfully killing the prime minister of Jordan, in 1972 Yasser Arafat endorsed the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Summer Olympics, with operational command assigned to Ali Hassan Salameh. Eleven Israeli Olympic team members were murdered sadistically; one of the Olympians, weightlifter Yossef Romano, was castrated as his teammates looked on. Others were beaten and burned to death. Israel kept the most horrific details hidden from the public, knowing that this kind of violence opened the door to copycat operations. In response to the Munich massacre, Israeli intelligence launched Operation Wrath of God, with the goal of killing every Black September member involved. 

Immediately following World War II, before the Nuremberg trials and other forms of procedural justice addressed the killing of millions of Jews, a small group of Holocaust survivors tracked down Nazi war criminals for assassination. They called themselves Nakam, Hebrew for Avengers. The group used an underground intelligence network to learn where individual Nazis lived so that they could kill them. These assassinations were rarely reported in the media, because what country wanted the notoriety that came with a revelation that it had been harboring a Nazi war criminal? After Israel became a nation-state, a program of revenge killing was refined and developed by Mossad, Israel’s equivalent of the CIA, which was founded in December 1949. Soon, in certain situations, assassination would be Mossad’s weapon of choice. 

Mossad’s assassination program was officially classified, but unofficially it was an open secret. The logic was, “If you don’t punish for one crime, you will get another,” says Dina Porat, chief historian at Israel’s Yad Vashem, or Holocaust, memorial. “This is what was driving [the Avengers], not only justice but a warning—a warning to the world that you cannot hurt Jews in such a manner and get away with it.” In its first two decades of statehood, Mossad became the undisputed masters of assassination, overtaking even the KGB in ruthlessness, cunning, and effectiveness. The department inside Mossad responsible for assassination was named Caesarea, after the ancient Roman city built by Herod the Great. And inside Caesarea there was an even more secret, more elite assassination unit called Kidon, Hebrew for bayonet. After Black September murdered the eleven Israeli athletes in Munich, Mossad unleashed Kidon on them.

Mossad’s targeted assassinations of Black September operatives were equally brutal; this, too, was revenge. Wael Zwaiter was shot eleven times at close range (allegedly one bullet for each murdered Israeli athlete) in his Rome apartment. Mahmoud Hamshari was blown up in his Paris home after a bomb, hidden inside his telephone receiver, was detonated by Israeli assassins from across the street. A Black September operative in London was expertly pushed under a fast moving bus. More than a dozen Operation Wrath of God murders followed, including that of an innocent man named Ahmed Bouchiki, in Lillehammer, Norway, a case of mistaken identity. Kidon operatives believed that the Norwegian waiter was the Red Prince. 

As the cycle of violence escalated, Black September fought back with a plan to assassinate Israel’s prime minister, Golda Meir, during a visit with Pope Paul VI. Relations between Israel and the Vatican had been strained since Israel’s founding. Mossad legend has it that in 1948, in exchange for diplomatic relations, the Vatican asked Israel to hold a mock trial of Jesus and reverse the original biblical death verdict of Christ. Israel declined, and no prime minister had been invited to the Vatican since. Golda Meir was not about to cancel this historic trip because of a death threat by Black September. 

In Rome, Mossad learned that the Red Prince intended to shoot down Meir’s airplane with Russian-made SA-7 guided missiles as it landed at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport. Using a network of sleeper agents, Mossad disrupted the plot with just minutes to spare, according to sources familiar with the case. After failing to kill Golda Meir in Rome, Yasser Arafat assigned the Red Prince an even more incendiary job: oversee the assassination of two U.S. diplomats in Khartoum, Sudan. 

The cold-blooded, in-plain-sight assassinations of American diplomats inside another sovereign nation’s embassy in Khartoum demanded a formidable response. Except most Americans had zero appetite for getting involved in terrorist disputes overseas. Five hundred ninety-one American POWs held in North Vietnam were still in the process of being brought home from Hanoi. Diplomacy with armed revolutionaries did not work; military force was not an option. The stage was set to handle the situation with the president’s third option, the hidden hand. 

After the Black September terrorists killed Curt Moore, Cleo Noel, and Guy Eid in the basement of the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum, the killers called their PLO commander in Beirut and asked what to do next. Yasser Arafat instructed them to surrender to Sudanese authorities. 

“Your mission has ended,” Arafat said, in a communication that was intercepted by Mossad and shared with Henry Kissinger, but which the State Department kept secret until 2006. “Explain your just cause to [the] great Sudanese masses and international opinion. We are with you on the same road,” Arafat said. 

The next morning the eight gunmen surrendered themselves. Two were released, the remaining six tried for murder. During the trial, the leader of the group said that they’d acted “under the orders of the Palestine Liberation Organization and should only be questioned by that organization.” 

The assassins were convicted by a Sudanese court, but just a few hours later President Nimeiry commuted their sentences and put them on a plane to Cairo, where they were turned over to the PLO. When pressed by the State Department, President Nimeiry defended his actions by saying that other states handed over Palestinian terrorists after “far less action,” and that America needed to face the “political facts of life.” President Nimeiry said that he “had Sudanese and Arab opinion to consider.” Three decades later, in June 2006, the State Department quietly posted online a 1973 CIA Summary of the Assassinations in Khartoum. “The Khartoum operation was carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization,” it stated. 

Robert Fritts recalled the fallout at the U.S. embassy in Khartoum. “The embassy [staff] was shattered, absolutely shattered.… The U.S. government pressured the Egyptians not to release them. They were put under loose house arrest in a Nile mansion. Eventually, they evaporated”—tacitly allowed to disappear. “It was a travesty,” lamented Fritts. Henry “Kissinger [was] cited as having a bigger picture in mind.” 

That bigger picture Henry Kissinger had in mind was dark and complex. In late 1973, in addition to serving as the president’s national-security advisor, Kissinger was now secretary of state, meaning he was at the top of the chain of command of all U.S. diplomats. Instead of bringing the killers to justice, the better play, Kissinger decided, was to make a deal with Yasser Arafat to use the Red Prince, Ali Hassan Salameh, as a clandestine asset. 

At the CIA, the plan had been three years in the making. It began with a CIA case officer and expert on Middle East affairs named Robert Ames. Salameh and Ames were like two sides of a coin. Ames, thirty-five, looked like an insurance salesman, with his 1950s haircut and wide tie. A devoted husband and father of five, Bob Ames was frugal, rarely drank, and sported a small potbelly. Salameh roamed around Beirut in open shirts with chest hair spilling out, his playboy reputation preceding him. A fourth-degree black belt, the Red Prince chain smoked, drank expensive Scotch, listened to Elvis Presley, and worked out regularly in the Continental Hotel gym. The cryptonym Bob Ames chose for Salameh was MJ/TRUST/2. MJ was the code for Palestinians/PLO; Ames allegedly chose the root word “trust” because he trusted Salameh; the number two designated him as the second CIA asset in a cluster. MJ/TRUST/1 was Yasser Arafat. 

Perhaps it is impossible to understand how and why Bob Ames chose to trust a man who’d orchestrated the murder of eleven Israeli athletes in Munich, and two U.S. diplomats and a Belgian in Sudan, plus scores of others, but what is clear is that by 1974, Bob Ames’s relationship with Salameh had warped. Ames had overstepped the unwritten case officer–asset rules in dangerous ways. In a letter to his wife, Yvonne, Ames called Salameh his “important friend.” The two men exchanged gifts. After Salameh gave Ames a set of golden prayer beads, Ames wanted to give his friend a gift of equal significance. Salameh walked around Beirut with a pistol on his right hip (Beirut’s As-Safir newspaper published photographs of him like this), and Ames thought it would be a great idea to give Salameh a gun as a gift. Before he did, he sought approval from CIA headquarters. 

His superior, CIA director Richard Helms, expressed outrage. “This crossed some invisible line,” writes Ames’s biographer, Kai Bird. “The Agency could have dealings with a terrorist but it would be unseemly to make a gift of a gun.” Ames wouldn’t give up, says his former analyst colleague Bruce Riedel, so headquarters suggested a compromise. They told Ames, “Okay, why don’t you give him a replica of a gun?” Ames, insulted, rejected the idea. Former CIA case officer Henry Miller Jones has an interesting take: “They tell you in the CIA never to fall in love with your agent. But everyone does.” 

For a while, the arrangement between the CIA and Ali Hassan Salameh suited the CIA. That arrangement was to now leave U.S. diplomats and CIA officers out of the Black September bull’s-eye. “The Red Prince wrote and signed a ‘non-assassination guarantee’ for all U.S. diplomats in Lebanon,” wrote British journalist Gordon Thomas. In Beirut’s intelligence circles, the joke was, “It pays to live in the same building as American diplomats because the PLO security is so good.” But the arrangement would only last as long as Salameh was alive. And Mossad had every intention of assassinating the Red Prince. 

It would take a covert team of Mossad assassins five years to kill Salameh, with a car bomb exploded on a Beirut street on January 22, 1979. Four of his bodyguards and three innocent passersby were also killed in the targeted assassination. Before Salameh was blown up, Bob Ames was able to give to him the ultimate gift he longed for, a trip to the United States. With a CIA handler driving Salameh around, the Black September operations chief and his new bride, Georgina Rizk, visited CIA offices in Virginia, Hawaii, New Orleans, and California, where they also visited Disneyland. The Agency handler, codenamed Charles Waverly, went out of his way to make Salameh comfortable, going so far as to teach the Red Prince how to eat oysters and scuba dive. His January 1979 assassination was a turning point in the Middle East for the CIA and would impact U.S. national security for decades to come. Twenty thousand people, including Yasser Arafat, attended Salameh’s funeral. 

Why did Henry Kissinger, as secretary of state, encourage the CIA’s use of Ali Hassan Salameh, a known terrorist, as an ally? Why choose covert action, the president’s third option, over diplomacy, the first? This decision likely had to do with Kissinger’s proximity to a series of scandalous events that were unfolding in Washington, DC. In the spring of 1973, Congress began investigating what would become known as Watergate. “For the first time in its history, the [CIA] allowed investigators from Congress to review documents from its files and interview its employees,” says former CIA inspector general L. Britt Snider. As it turned out, all five of the men arrested for burglarizing the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel in June 1972 had connections with the CIA. Here began a series of events and missteps within the CIA that would bring the Agency to the most dramatic turning point in its history. It was the closest the Agency has ever come to being disbanded. 

Nixon’s CIA director, James Schlesinger, was preparing to leave the Agency to become secretary of defense. Before he left, Schlesinger sent a memo to all CIA employees ordering them to reveal to him any illegal activity they might have been involved in since the Agency’s creation twenty-five years before. The instruction prompted a flurry of written reports, which were then compiled into a 700-page document that would become known as the “Family Jewels.” The action was unprecedented; the CIA had never compiled its hidden-hand operations before. 

Three weeks later, the New York Times broke a story revealing that Kissinger had authorized the FBI and the CIA to illegally wiretap reporters, White House officials, and even his own National Security Council staff. Mindful that a major scandal was brewing in Washington, DC, the CIA’s new director, William Colby, felt the best move was to lock the Family Jewels inside the safe in his office. Over the next fifteen months, the Watergate scandal—about a different illegal wiretapping—consumed the news media and the public. The Family Jewels remained locked in Colby’s safe. On August 8, 1974, President Nixon resigned and Vice President Gerald Ford assumed the presidency. 

But the press was unrelenting, and the focus now swung to yet another CIA scandal that had previously remained hidden, raising alarms across the Ford White House. In December 1974, Colby, who had run the Phoenix program in Vietnam, sent Kissinger a note explaining some of the contents of the Family Jewels. Kissinger drafted a five-page memorandum for the president summarizing the contents of what was there. Some of the actions “clearly were illegal,” Kissinger said; others “raise profound moral questions.” The most incendiary material covered the CIA’s role in the assassination of foreign leaders, Kissinger warned. He said that if these revelations became public, “the CIA would be destroyed.” It was a stunning concept—that the CIA could actually be considered expendable. President Ford met with his chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy chief of staff, Dick Cheney, to discuss the next move. They decided to invite editors from the New York Times to the White House for a discussion, in the spirit of transparency. 

During a luncheon at the White House on January 16, 1975, New York Times reporters asked President Ford why the Family Jewels was not going to be declassified. Ford blundered. It contained explosive material that would “blacken the eye of every President since Truman,” Ford said defensively. 

“Like what?” one of the editors asked. 

“Like assassination,” answered Ford. 

Everyone went silent. The comment was made off the record, the president insisted, but it was too late. The cat was out of the bag. 

CBS News reported the bombshell. “President Ford has reportedly warned associates that if the current [Family Jewels] investigations go too far, they could uncover several assassinations of foreign officials involving the CIA.” Across the nation and in Congress, there was uproar. Moral outrage. The White House vowed to create a commission to investigate, ultimately turning the matter over to Congress. [which did nada dc]

Starting in the spring of 1975, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Idaho senator Frank Church, held sixty days of closed hearings. Seventy-five witnesses were called to the stand, including many of the most senior officers at the CIA. Among the findings, the Church Committee learned that the CIA had conducted more than 900 “major projects” and “several thousand” smaller operations, “three-quarters of which had never been reviewed outside the Agency.” The assassination plots against Rafael Trujillo, Fidel Castro, the Ngo brothers, and others were made public for the first time. Senator Church called the CIA “a rogue elephant raging out of control.” Exotic weapons used in assassination plots were shown on TV, including a gun that shot poison darts. The investigation lasted six months. [all theater for public consumption dc]

That the CIA even had a paramilitary capacity shocked most Americans. That it engaged in plans to assassinate foreign leaders was perceived as morally outrageous. But what’s notable is how blame fell almost entirely on the CIA, when a comprehensive read makes clear that the orders were coming from the office of the president. The House Select Committee had its own investigation going on, chaired by Otis Pike, a Democrat from New York. The Pike Committee interviewed many of the same individuals as the Church Committee and found that the White House was to blame, far more so than the CIA. “The CIA does not go galloping off conducting operations by itself,” Congressman Pike wrote. “The major things which are done are not done unilaterally by the CIA without approval from higher up the line.… We did find evidence, upon evidence, upon evidence where the CIA said: ‘No, don’t do it.’ The State Department or the White House said, ‘We’re going to do it.’ The CIA was much more professional and had a far deeper reading on the down-the-road implications of some immediately popular act than the executive branch or administration officials.… The CIA never did anything the White House didn’t want. Sometimes they didn’t want to do what they did.” 

As the committees prepared to release their reports, there was a stunning move from the White House. President Ford met with his advisors Rumsfeld and Cheney, who told him the reports had to be suppressed. “Any document which officially shows American involvement in assassination is clearly a foreign policy disaster,” Rumsfeld said. “We are better off with a political confrontation than a legal one.” Dick Cheney advised him that the White House should object to the release and attempt to block the reports on grounds that it compromised national security. President Ford agreed. 

A new team of presidential advisors was needed, Rumsfeld told the president, leading Ford to dismiss several key members of his cabinet. Schlesinger was let go as secretary of defense, replaced by Rumsfeld; Cheney became White House chief of staff; CIA director William Colby was replaced by George H. W. Bush; Henry Kissinger retained his position as secretary of state but was replaced by Brent Scowcroft in the role of national-security advisor. Later, Ford expressed regret for taking these actions. “I was angry at myself for showing cowardice in not saying [no] to the ultraconservatives,” he said. “It was the biggest political mistake of my life. And it was one of the few cowardly things I did in my life.” 

Despite considerable efforts, Ford’s new team of advisors failed to keep the Church Committee report classified, with Congress asserting its right to override the president. The Church Committee report, “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” was released in November of 1975. In a note all but lost to history, the Ford White House was able to suppress the Pike Report. Months later, parts of it were leaked to the Village Voice, but the public’s mind was already made up. The CIA, not the White House, was to blame. 

In undated notes located in files at the Gerald Ford Presidential Library, Dick Cheney advised President Ford on the imperative to restore the authority of the executive branch. It had been unduly diminished by Congress in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Cheney said, and by the congressional reports. The advice was significant, as it foreshadowed Cheney’s own use of presidential authority twenty-six years later, when he served as vice president. 

“As vice president, Cheney would participate in Presidential Findings and MONs that dictated covert action,” says John Rizzo, the CIA’s long-serving clandestine service legal officer, in an interview for this book. As vice president in the George W. Bush White House, Dick Cheney served in the inner circle of presidential advisors and was “present at most covert-action meetings,” Rizzo clarifies, “not something you usually saw from a vice president.” Rizzo was hired at the CIA in 1976 and served seven presidents, including as the CIA’s top lawyer during the “war on terror.” The remarkable construct of presidential authority, says Rizzo, is that the president of the United States “can listen to whomever he wants.” 

The year after the Church Committee published its report, President Ford issued Executive Order 11905, a decree to govern covert-action operations, and this included a prohibition on assassinations. “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination,” it read. Senator Frank Church objected, stating that a presidential decree could easily be changed by decree, by another president. That by having an executive order on assassination and not a new law passed by Congress, the door was left wide-open for new liberties in interpretation when a more conservative president took the helm. Which is exactly what happened starting in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan and his advisors began exploring a new executive order allowing for preemptive neutralization of people who wanted to harm the United States. 

As Americans were reading the Church Committee report, learning about the dark underbelly of hidden-hand operations and rogue actors, one of the most outrageous hostage-taking events of the twentieth century unfolded halfway across the world, in Vienna, Austria. On December 21, 1975, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was holding a Conference of Ministers at its headquarters, in the Texaco building on Dr. Karl Lueger Ring, when six individuals, five men and a woman, casually walked up to the guard at the front desk and asked to be directed to the proceedings. They looked reasonable enough, wearing raincoats and carrying gym bags. At least one in the group spoke German. But then, reaching into their bags, they pulled out submachine guns and began shooting, killing three people. 

The gunmen stormed the OPEC conference hall and corralled sixty people as hostages, including ten of the world’s eleven oil ministers, whose countries controlled 80 percent of the world’s oil. Never before, and not since, have so many government officials, from so many different nations, been taken hostage all at once.

Austria’s head of state, Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, was out skiing in the Alps. When he learned the news from his ministers, he rushed back to Vienna to deal with this first-of-its-kind crisis. In a press conference, Kreisky said that his government did not know who the terrorists were and that their organizational demands were not clear. As chancellor, however, he had granted the terrorists permission to fly out of the country with the ten oil ministers, and others, as hostages. Kreisky neglected to say that he’d negotiated the release of the Austrian hostages, in exchange for meeting the terrorists’ demands. In hindsight this course of action appears absurd, but in 1975, Austria, like most other nations, was unequipped to deal with a hostage crisis. “We were pressured into this decision by the fear that the hostages’ lives would be taken,” Chancellor Kreisky later said. “You cannot [stamp] out terrorism by retaliation because terrorism has its own laws.”

At 7:00 the following morning, forty-one hostages were loaded onto a municipal bus, driven to the airport, and flown to Algeria, North Africa, in an Austrian Airlines DC-9 with a volunteer crew. At a second press conference, an Iraqi man acting as an intermediary said that the hostage-takers called themselves the Arm of the Arab Revolution and that their leader went by the nom de guerre Carlos the Jackal. His real name was Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. He was a twenty-five-year-old terrorist and assassin for hire. Born into a wealthy family in Venezuela, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez was sent by his Marxist father to Moscow to study at the Patrice Lumumba University, a breeding ground for a wide variety of terrorists-in-training. After getting expelled for reasons unknown, he transformed himself into Carlos the Jackal, hiring himself out to Arab terrorist organizations like Black September. By the time of the OPEC siege, the Venezuelan-born terrorist had killed at least seven people and was wanted by the British, French, and Israeli intelligence services. 

In Algiers, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez met privately with President Houari Boumediene, and an agreement was reached. Five oil ministers and thirty-one hostages were released, while five oil ministers and ten civilians would be kept as hostages. The aircraft left Algeria, this time headed for Tripoli, Libya. Here, he met privately with President Muammar Qaddafi, and a secret agreement was reached. After this meeting, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez returned to the aircraft and instructed the pilots to fly back to Algiers, where the remaining five oil ministers and ten hostages were freed. He met with Boumediene a second time, flew to Baghdad, and vanished for more than a decade. It was later revealed that in Libya, he had been paid fifty million dollars in cash. Instead of sharing the money with his revolutionary comrades, he kept the money for himself. Carlos the Jackal would live off the cash for the next eighteen years. 

The CIA now had a watchful eye on Libya, and on Muammar Qaddafi, and a list of questions it wanted answered. Who was this man who called himself Carlos the Jackal, and where was Arab terrorism headed next? Would non-Palestinians like Ilich Ramirez Sanchez remain committed to the Palestinian cause if there weren’t millions of dollars to be made? To learn the answers to these questions would require covert operations, but for now the CIA’s hands were tied. Alternative options needed to be explored, and they would be.

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Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya

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