X Descending (33 page)

Needless to say, I was immediately suspicious of how Col. Clayton even knew of Richard Doty if it had nothing to do with Doty being at LS-85? With both of them having military backgrounds, and if Doty had been involved in something sensitive, was it possible that Col. Clayton might be trying to 'cover' for Doty, even at this late date? Perhaps national security, or intelligence requirements still existed that could compel them to maintain some degree of secrecy. It was a possibility I had to consider at the time, though my instincts told me that was not the case.

Over the next months, Col. Clayton shared a great deal of information with me and provided several important leads that I pursued. He was extremely open and straightforward with me, and I quickly became convinced he was as interested as I was in getting to the truth about Doty. Our mutual interest in uncovering the truth led to some very interesting and startling discoveries.

Early in our email exchange, Col. Clayton suggested that I ask Doty if he had ever worked for Federal Electric Corporation, a civilian contractor that had operated and maintained a variety of communication sites and systems in Laos. Federal Electric Corporation technicians apparently maintained some of the TACAN equipment at LS-85 around the time Doty claimed to have been there. There was a slim chance that, if Doty had been a technician, he might have been to the site without it having been widely known. Unfortunately, in light of my earlier email exchange with him, I was certain my chances of asking him about it were practically nonexistent. Even so, nothing Doty had written in his message on the History Channel web site gave the slightest indication that he had been a technician—he claimed to have been a Combat Controller. Eventually, questions about Doty having worked for Federal Electric Corporation became moot, and other information came to light.

At this point I was at an impasse. Was there any way to resolve the discrepancy between Doty's claims to have been at LS-85 and LS-20A, and Col. Clayton's opinion that Doty getting to either location was extremely unlikely? Doty had given very specific details: the dates he was at LS-85, that he had served two tours of duty in Laos as a Combat Controller (CCT), and, very specifically, the claim to have spoken with Roger Huffman in May of 1968 at Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base (NKP), Thailand. Huffman was the Combat Controller who had been on-site when LS-85 was attacked and was the only person Doty had mentioned by name. Huffman would become a major issue before long.

Doty's message also contained seemingly innocuous details that, at the very least, lent credibility and indicated he knew certain facts. Initially I had not thought much about the mention of NKP, Thailand, which was where Doty said he had spoken to Huffman. In one email I sent to Col. Clayton, I mistakenly said that Doty claimed he had met Huffman, following the attack on LS-85, when they were both at LS-20A. Col. Clayton quickly caught the error, pointing out that Huffman had not gone to LS-20A after the attack—he was injured and had been taken to the military hospital at NKP, Thailand. Later, on rechecking what Doty had actually written, I realized I had been mistaken. The sequence and locations Doty described were correct and matched what Col. Clayton knew had happened. Huffman had been taken to NKP, Thailand, which was exactly where Doty said he had spoken to him.

As for Doty's mention of being at Lima Site 20A, Col. Clayton acknowledged that a great deal of traffic went in and out of that site and he had no way to know whether Doty could have ever been there. Still, the only way he could imagine Doty being sent to LS-85 without his knowledge was if Doty had been there on a special assignment. It could not have had anything to do with the men or facilities under Col. Clayton's command or he would have known about it…but there were other operations on the mountaintop.

Access to Lima Site 85 required strict authorization. Only a limited number of American men were stationed there at any given time. The men directly under Col. Clayton's command, working under the code name Commando Club, were under orders not to mingle with others at the site any more than absolutely necessary. They were officially civilians and their cover story could be endangered if they happened to be recognized at military locations, such as Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base or NKP, Thailand. During their assignments at Phou Pha Thi, the Laotian name for the mountain, his men stayed away from most of the others stationed there. The radar bombing equipment manned by Col. Clayton's men was situated at the peak of the mountain, a difficult climb of several hundred yards from a narrow landing strip below.

This small landing strip, carved onto a ridge slightly south of the radar site, was used primarily by helicopters, and a few brave Air America pilots, to drop supplies when weather permitted. Near this landing strip were the buildings that housed the others stationed at the site, including the "CAS" men. CAS, or “Controlled American Source”, was the term for the CIA in Laos, though often they were simply called “the customer”. The CAS men were there to run road watch teams, gather intelligence, and maintain a refueling stop for Air America helicopters. The Combat Controller’s station was also located near the end of this landing strip. The combat controllers generally carried out their mission from a vantage point near the edge of the cliffs, a spot overlooking an older Air America landing strip far below at the base of the mountain.

This older Air America landing strip led me to consider another slight possibility. In his message posted on the History Channel web site Doty had said that he had been at LS-85 from January 28th to February 19th, 1968. While the designation “LS-85” commonly referred to the entire operation on the mountaintop, technically it was the Air America designation for the original longer landing strip at the base of the mountain. If Doty had "spent some time at Lima Site 85", as he claimed, perhaps he was only referring to this older Air America landing strip. His claim would be literally accurate, but this seems an improbable distinction.

If a special assignment had taken Doty to LS-85, would anyone there have known him by his real name? One thing was made very clear to me—in Laos no one was intended to be easily identifiable. As a case in point, in Roger Warner’s book about the clandestine war,
Shooting At The Moon
, he describes Col. Clayton’s first meeting with the air attaché in Laos. The meeting took place in a soundproof chamber at the U.S. embassy, where:

…the visitor, whose name was Gerald Clayton, explained that he was in charge of Commando Club and that until recently he had been a lieutenant colonel in the Strategic Air Command. He was a civilian now, with an ID card from Lockheed Aircraft Services to prove it. When he went back across the river to Udorn, where he would live, however, he would change back into uniform again, as the commander of a radar evaluation detachment that had no official existence. The air attaché, who was used to double and triple layers of identity in Wonderland, listened politely and then took the colonel downstairs to meet Ambassador Sullivan.

If Doty had been to LS-85 as part of a special mission, one about which Col. Clayton did not have a need to know, then perhaps Doty also had a double-layered identity. His presence would certainly have been known to the CIA men and others located near the landing strip, but while there is plenty of evidence of these other men and others readily recall them, no one seems to recall Richard Doty. He claimed to have been a Combat Controller, but between late January and mid-February 1968, the only Combat Controller assigned at LS-85 was an experienced controller named James Gary, who preceded Roger Huffman. Combat controllers, often part of a Special Forces unit, were trained air traffic controllers serving on the ground, sometimes having to parachute into hostile territory. At LS-85 they called in air strikes over the surrounding region, and there appears to have been no requirement for more than one combat controller to be there at any given time. I also found no indication that Gary had ever been called away and a substitute needed for a few weeks.

At one time, on the now defunct Yahoo Geocities “Death On Call” member site (dedicated to Air Control personnel,) a note Doty had posted there stated that he had been an “AF Combat Controller, Jan 1974 to Oct 1980.” If he served two tours of duty in Laos, as stated in his History Channel web site message, then perhaps this claim referred to having been a Combat Controller only on his second tour. Nevertheless, despite these claims, I have been unable to find any independent evidence that he was ever a Combat Controller. Likewise, despite a strong sense that there was some truth to his claims of having been in Laos in early 1968, at this point I had nothing that actually proved he had ever been there and I had yet to find a witness who knew him or had seen him there.

While searching for information relating to the LS-85 incident I came across a Yahoo group where the members had been discussing the site and the attack. One of the messages happened to list several email addresses, and one them I recognized as belonging to Richard Doty. More significantly however, was an email address that appeared to belong to Roger Huffman, the Combat Controller Doty claimed he had spoken with in May of 1968. There were actually two addresses that appeared to be Huffman’s, and I quickly asked Col. Clayton about them. He confirmed that they were addresses he also had for Huffman, but, then he offered a word of caution if should I decide to write to them, “
Be forwarned that this also may be Doty.
”

I had hoped to stay under the radar as much as possible, but by this time there was no way to know who might have heard that I was asking questions. Even if I did reach Huffman, if he and Doty had both been Combat Controllers and still knew each other then I had to accept that any question I addressed to Huffman might be quickly relayed to Doty. I had little choice though. With Col. Clayton’s words in mind, I wrote to both email addresses supposedly belonging to Roger Huffman. The first came back as no longer valid but, a few days later, I had an answer from the second.

In the reply, Roger Huffman, or the person I hoped was Huffman, wrote briefly about his memory of the incident at LS-85. But I noticed that he had not actually answered any of the questions I asked about Doty, which struck me as odd since those questions were my whole reason for writing. However, after the next two emails, and after forwarding to him a copy of Doty’s message from the History Channel web site, I finally had what seemed to be all the verification I could have hoped for. He stated very plainly that he knew Doty well and that they had both been Combat Controllers in Laos. More important to me was his statement that “after checking with our history guys” he had learned that Doty had, in fact, been at the LS-85 site for some type of operation. Curiously though, he said it had only been for a few days at the beginning of February, not the almost three week period that Doty had given. To cap it off, he also claimed to not only have seen Doty at NKP, Thailand, but also at Phan Rang, Vietnam, though he could not recall the exact dates. However, in his second email he also brought up the attack on Site 5, the third location that Doty had mentioned in his message on the History Channel web site. For Huffman to bring up this incident on his own struck me as very interesting, if not strange—I had certainly never mentioned Site 5.

Now, finally, I seemed to have eyewitness testimony that Doty had indeed been in Laos. This would also mean that if Doty had been in the Air Force at that time, his military service records, as released by the National Personnel Records Center, had been intentionally adjusted to hide this fact. And yet, even as I was enjoying this apparent breakthrough, the fact that Huffman volunteered information about the Site 5 attack without being asked, continued to bother me. I had already done several online searches and found nothing at all about a “Site 5” in Laos. So for Huffman to casually insert it into our conversation brought back Col. Clayton’s words of caution. It also brought to mind another peculiarity I had noticed when I first saw the Huffman email address. The username was very straightforward, but the letters “nm” had been added at the end. Whatever purpose there was for those two letters, one thought kept coming to mind...New Mexico.

I wrote a few more messages to Huffman using the same email address, though most of our exchange had little of significance as far as Doty was concerned. Eventually, I asked Huffman where he was living, hoping that there was a chance we could meet some day (though I was also growing more curious about the letters “nm”.) After several days with no reply, I began to wonder if asking him where he lived had posed a problem, so I decided to see if I could determine where his emails were originating from. What I found convinced me beyond any doubt that I had been in communication with someone impersonating Roger Huffman.

As I am certain many people know, each email contains what is called the email “header.” The “header”, which is separate from the message body, shows the Internet route the message travels on its way to the recipient. When an email is sent, it may be received and transferred by a number of email servers along the way, each of which places its Internet Protocol (IP) address and a date/time stamp in the email “header”. By examining these IP addresses, it is often possible to trace where each IP address is in use geographically, and ultimately, where the email originated. In most cases the locations can be traced fairly accurately, and, in this case, the locations immediately raised my suspicions.

The first email I received from Huffman appeared to originate in New York, which was certainly not what I expected. Col. Clayton had told me that he thought Huffman might be living somewhere in Florida, though it was possible that Col. Clayton was mistaken. Also, having some experience with Internet services, I thought it was unusual that the email originated from a static IP address. Without going into too much detail, while it is possible to pay for a permanently assigned (static) IP address, it is far more common in these days of cable and DSL Internet services for the average user not to have one. Internet service providers typically own a block of IP addresses and allocate these dynamically to their customers, so a static address for an individual is somewhat unusual. Checking on the originating IP address in Huffman’s first email turned up another bit of strangeness.