The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (54 page)

And as the situation deteriorated the air attaché’s office responded by saddling the Ravens with a flurry of new rules and regulations. It was getting to be like the old days in Vietnam. Terry Murphy had friendly troops under attack in his area and desperately needed antipersonnel ordnance to help them out. At the same time and in the same area, a colleague had a set of fighters under his control preplanned to hit a nearby bridge. The fighters showed up carrying CBU, useless against a hard target.

‘I can’t use it - give it to Terry,’ the fellow Raven reported to Cricket, the orbiting command post.

The change in plan was refused. The ordnance was dropped on the bridge, which remained standing and intact, while the troops were left to fend for themselves without air support. Furious, Murphy flipped out the code wheel provided to the Ravens to enable them to encode coordinates before passing them over the air. They rarely used it, as they could usually validate their own targets, so when Murphy got through to Cricket with a coded coordinate and a request for both target validation and special ordnance, it was unusual enough to attract attention throughout the chain of command.

Cricket passed the encoded information through to the computer at Blue Chip, the Air Force HQ in Saigon, and also to the embassy in Vientiane. In the radio room of the air attaché’s office an excited operator called over an assistant air attaché: a Raven had logged a coded request for highly unusual ordnance to be used on a controversial target which would need to be cleared with the ambassador himself - maybe even the president. The request was rapidly decoded: Murphy had asked for permission to hit the U.S. embassy in Vientiane with a nuclear weapon.

12. Down South

The Ravens were sent to the south, during the earlier years of the war, to relax and enjoy the calmer atmosphere of the so-called country-club postings. But while there could be long periods of inactivity in the panhandle, where troops from the Royal Lao Army were happy to conduct the war in a lackadaisical manner, there were also times of furious battle.

The principal preoccupation of the war in the south was the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which came out of North Vietnam into Laos and snaked through its mountains along the border of South Vietnam. Aerial reconnaissance and bombing missions over the Trail were not the province of the Ravens, who were ordered to keep well to the west. Their mission was to support the government troops on the ground, the CIA tribal irregulars, and a growing number of Thai mercenaries dressed in Lao army uniforms.

These were the only troops who could be relied on to fight in the south. ‘They were paid regularly by their case officers, who black-bagged the money in,’ a senior CIA officer said. ‘At my base I paid them once a month in cash, and I was there to see they got paid. They were fed and taken care of. If they were wounded they were air-evac’d immediately.’ In the Royal Lao Army, corrupt senior officers banked most of the money earmarked for their men, sold rations on the black market, and bought expensive foreign cars and houses, which they rented to Americans.

The CIA also operated road-watch bases of 70 to 150 men, and teams were flown out in helicopters or Pilatus Porters to count the number of trucks and troops coming down the Trail. Case officers flew over them to pick up their reports by radio, and a significant target would be ‘boxed’ for a B-52 strike. ‘Of course, you never knew who was telling the truth and who wasn’t,’ a CIA man admitted. For the Ravens, the war waxed and waned in the panhandle according to enemy activity on the Trail.

Throughout most of the war, the North Vietnamese denied that their soldiers infiltrated South Vietnam, and even that the Trail existed. Troops and supplies poured down this elaborate skein of roads and paths, sometimes no more than a narrow mountain ledge or rickety bamboo bridge capable of taking men on foot, but wide enough in other places for two trucks to pass abreast. The Communist leadership in Hanoi understood that the Trail was vital, having used it in their struggle against the French, and created Group 559 in 1959 to enlarge the traditional infiltration route into the south.

From primitive beginnings it was endlessly expanded and improved until it became a complex communication network capable of providing men and provisions to every area of the front. Despite massive and relentless bombing, it would eventually contain underground repair shops and barracks, and could carry the largest trucks and tanks.

The cycle of escalation greatly increased on the Trail once the wider war in Laos had been contained by the 1962 Geneva Accords - which supposedly denied the North Vietnamese the use of the Trail. In the early days, when all of the supplies were carried by human porters either on foot or bicycle, the journey tapped the stamina of the most resolute troops. By 1964 it still took a hellish six months; men trudged along narrow jungle paths and crossed bamboo bridges swaying over deep ravines. Even before the bombing, those who traveled down the Trail had to endure malaria, amoebic dysentery, blood-sucking leeches, and venomous snakes.

By 1964, U.S. intelligence estimated that the infiltration rate was tripling each year, and U.S. fighter jets were secretly ordered to support Lao T-28s on interdiction and strafing missions code-named Steel Tiger. In 1965 the North Vietnamese set up a special unit, Group 565, to secure the Trail from ground attack, while 36,000 troops passed along it into South Vietnam; in 1966, 90,000 troops were fed through the system. Two years of round-the-clock bombing failed even to slow down the enemy.

In reality, no amount of bombing could ever close the Trail. The North Vietnamese needed to deliver only sixty tons of supplies a day to maintain their operation in the south - the equivalent of just twenty truckloads. With North Vietnam as the open mouth of a funnel for limitless supplies of provisions and ammunition from the Soviet Union and China, it became clear to anyone who studied the problem that bombing could never work.

The military were itching to cut the Trail once and for all, and in 1966, General Westmoreland prepared detailed plans to invade far enough into Laos to block it permanently with a corps-sized force of three divisions. The plan was opposed by Ambassador Sullivan, and turned down by Washington, which calculated that the resulting casualty rate and the risk of escalation would be too high. This is when Westmoreland, stymied yet again by Laos’s ambassador, dubbed the Trail ‘the Sullivan Freeway.’

The United States reverted to ever-increasing bombing, but the B-52 proved to be an inadequate weapon against the bicycle. The network continued to be improved. By mid-1967 the idea of invading Laos and cutting the Trail was once again raised, this time by the American ambassador to South Vietnam, Ellsworth Bunker. He believed that if the Vietcong were denied supplies, weapons, and ammunition they would ‘wither on the vine.’ The idea was again emphatically rejected by President Johnson, who ordered that there should be no further discussion of invading Laos.

More bombing was ordered, and sorties increased from three hundred to nine hundred a day. The tonnage dropped staggered the imagination - more than two million tons by the war’s end - but not the enemy, who continued to improve the road network. Although U.S. intelligence claimed to have ‘every crossroad and gully’ of the seven thousand kilometers of the Trail covered by photo reconnaissance and logged in its computers, the enemy later disclosed that in actuality the network extended over thirteen thousand kilometers.

By far the greatest majority of the bombs were delivered by B-52, but it was estimated that it took three hundred bombs for every infiltrator killed. This in turn translated into less than one in a hundred infiltrators, which meant that in the peak year when 150,000 men moved down the Trail, only 1,500 would have been killed by the bombing, at a cost in excess of two billion dollars.

Richard Helms, director of the CIA, explained the realities of the situation in June 1968 to a colleague who asked him about the effectiveness of the bombing. ‘Look: before the bombing they used to send three men south to get two in place,’ Helms explained. ‘Now they have to send five. We’re willing to lose planes, they’re willing to pay in manpower. So it doesn’t make a particle of difference. There are more dead bodies. But in terms of net result, it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference.’
[209]

Between 1966 and 1971 the Trail had been the route used by Hanoi to infiltrate 630,000 troops into South Vietnam, as well as 100,000 tons of foodstuffs, 400,000 weapons, and 50,000 tons of ammunition. The total failure of the bombing to cut the Trail did not go unnoticed in Washington. One report, from the Defense Communications Planning Group - a top-secret think tank containing every type of expert - concluded that by 1967 no amount of bombing, not only of the Trail itself but even of North Vietnam, would halt the flow of supplies. Another independent report, this time from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey Group, confirmed that even the wholesale devastation of North Vietnam was no means of cutting off the Trail’s supply source. North Vietnam was actually making money on the bombing - economic damage was estimated at $100 million, while replacement aid received by Hanoi was several times this amount.

As the bombing continued to escalate, so the Trail burgeoned. It now had a permanent, elite guard 25,000 strong manning checkpoints and artillery positions. ‘Volunteer’ pioneers, made up of boys as young as fifteen years old and young women, formed a dedicated cadre for a coolie work force of 50,000. Ten thousand antiaircraft pieces were moved into position, and as many trucks were spaced throughout the road network. A Special Forces commando who saw the Trail close-up reported, ‘At times the Ho Chi Minh Trail was so busy it was like the Long Island Expressway - during rush hour.’
[210]

A program using electronic gadgetry was devised in the hope that technology could prevail where military might had failed. This remote-control interdiction campaign - ‘beep and bang’ warfare, as the military called it - was code-named Igloo White when the U.S. wired the Trail like a pinball machine. Tens of thousands of expensive seismic and acoustic sensors were dropped into the jungle. These were supposed to pick up the enemy’s every movement, the location of which could then be accurately transmitted to orbiting drone aircraft, which would pass them on to fighter-bombers, which would hit the coordinates. The primitive Vietnamese were not expected to outwit such highly sophisticated equipment as infrared scopes capable of magnifying moonlight fifty thousand times, or personnel detectors - ‘people sniffers’ - that were operated from helicopters and registered body heat or smell. (The enemy countered this particular marvel of electronic wizardry by hanging bags of buffalo urine along unused sections of the Trail, and retreating before the inevitable B-52 strike was put in. Similarly, they registered their contempt for the sensors by urinating on them.)
[211]

The ‘antenna farm’ for Igloo White was situated in Nakhon Phanom in Thailand, where it sat incongruously alongside the obsolete weaponry of the Air Commandos, one of whose principal jobs was to bomb the Trail. Using transport planes modified into gunships and slow-moving propeller fighters and bombers, the commandos actually scored a much higher ratio of truck ‘kills’ than the sophisticated Igloo White operation. (Eight Douglas A-26 Invaders, veteran bombers of World War II, flown by the Air Commandos out of Nakhon Phanom on night hunter-killer missions against truck convoys, accounted for 50 percent of all truck kills, although they only flew 4 percent of night sorties.) But nothing could keep the supplies from getting through.

The idea men were getting desperate. ‘A whole range of ordnance was specially designed for use against the Trail. Dragonseed, the pill-sized button bombs intended to blow out tires, maim foot soldiers, and activate sensors, were dropped in their millions. There were toxic defoliants that killed vegetation, and one plan, which did not work, involved dropping a chemical agent onto the soil to turn it into grease. There was a plan to use homing pigeons with bomblets attached to their legs, and even a harebrained scheme to drop Budweiser beer (which the North Vietnamese apparently loved) to slow the enemy down with drink.

The invasion of Cambodia in May 1970 denied the enemy the use of the port of Sihanoukville, through which 85 percent of the heavy arms used by the Communists in South Vietnam had come. But this short-term success on the part of the Americans was later to boomerang badly on the South Vietnamese. Hanoi, now forced to rely entirely on the Trail, allocated massive resources into widening the network still further, building all-weather roads which could take even tanks, and bringing down SAM missiles to protect them.

By the end of 1970 the U.S. finally decided to support a limited invasion into Laos with the objective of cutting the Trail. U.S. troops were returning home in large numbers, and Congress had imposed a legal prohibition on the expenditure of funds for U.S. ground forces operating outside of Vietnam. This meant the South Vietnamese would have to undertake the operation, at best a risky gamble, without even the aid of U.S. advisers. Code-named LAMSON 719, after a famous Vietnamese victory over the Chinese, the operation was intended to seize the Laotian city of Tchepone, about fifty kilometers from the border, which dominated the most important junction of the Trail. Once this had been completed - in an estimated four or five days - the plan was to use the following two months before the dry season to block the Trail completely. Success would mean delaying North Vietnamese plans to invade the south by at least two years.