Charles F. Reske
Alpha Publications, Sharon Center, Ohio, USA.
For Vietnam War buffs — and no particular political persuasion is necessary to be fascinated by the surreal, epic quality of that conflict — the holiest of holies is probably the Special Operations Group (SOG). One of the most shadowy organizations ever formed by the Pentagon, SOG conducted a war within a war, sending commando teams into Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam itself. Its activities included seaborne raids that may have triggered the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident (which laid the foundation for a wider war), and its commanders included John K. Singlaub, later a figure in the World Anti-Communist League and Iran-contra affair. So mysterious was the group that even its name causes uncertainty: for cover purposes, it was the Studies and Observations Group, but purists and insiders knew it as MACVSOG or MACSOG (after the ‘U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam’, to which it was nominally attached), and still others called it the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force.’
Given its elusive nature, SOG is quick to frustrate those who attempt to track its history. The fifth chapter of the so-called Pentagon Papers, as published in conjunction with the New York Times (New York, Quadrangle, 1971), contains numerous references to covert operations that commenced in 1964 under the banner of Operation Plan 34A, but there is not a word as to what unit actually executed OPLAN 34A. The Washington Post of August 12, 1973, managed to name SOG and discuss several of its secrets, but there appears to have been little journalistic follow-up. ‘
Over the next two decades, SOG emerged chiefly in the course of books devoted to other subjects: Benjamin F. Schemmer’s belatedly acclaimed account of the 1970 POW rescue mission at Son Tray, The Raid (New York, Harper and Row, 1976); the memoirs of 1964-68 MACV chief General William C. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (New York, Dell, 1980); Charles M. Simpson III’s history of the U.S. Special Forces, Inside the Green Berets (Novato, California, Presidio, 1983); Shelby L. Stanton’s own study of those elite soldiers, Green Berets at War (New York, Dell, 1987); a survey of clandestine action in Vietnam by Kevin M. Generous, Vietnam: The Secret War (London, Bison, 1985), and T. L. Bosiljevac’s book on U.S. Navy commandos, SEALS (New York, Ivy, 1991). These provided several insights, but a volume devoted to SOG alone remained a missing quantity until Charles F. Reske came along.
Reske is one of those people who shift easily between intelligence and academe. During the Vietnam years, he served with the Naval Security Group, the U.S. Navy’s agency for signals intelligence (SIGINT), and he has collected degrees in history and archaeology. With SOG, what Reske did was amusing in its simplicity: he lodged a Freedom of Information request for SOG’s very own ‘command history’ — although Reske tells me that fight lasted five years — and let the unit tell its own story. In particular, what he has worked with are the several annexes to the command history which deal with the events of specific years. These annexes have been censored in places but Reske has been able to reconstruct — or at least give an astute facsimile of — the deleted passages, using such sources as the Pentagon Papers. His current volume, which covers the annexes discussing SOG’s first three years, is actually the second in a series, the first of which (Annex B) concerned the period 1971-72.
As the often dry, official accounting of an organization plainly seeking to justify all the furtive fuss it caused, the SOG annexes require quite a bit of reading between the lines. For example, one section of Annex N notes the recommendation in September 1965 that SOG acquire ‘a civilian personnel officer (Grade W-2) to administer employment of local nationals’ (p. 70). The translation, Reske points out, is that SOG was still not acquiring local recruits on an orderly basis twenty months after its creation in January, 1964. This situation, Reske annotates, would deteriorate to the point where a 1970 survey found that 77% of SOG’s Asian employees had not been screened and hence were all potential security risks.
Here are some other eye-openers: the corrupt South Vietnamese air force often demanded pay-offs to perform special missions requested by SOG (p. 77); the vessels used in coastal attacks were so troublesome that SOG frequently had to consult the British engine designers of Napier-Deltic and the Norwegian shipbuilding firm Batservice (pp. 49-50); and, most amazing of all, for an outfit so concerned with intelligence and dirty tricks, there were shortages of everything from photo-interpretation equipment to transmitters for propaganda broadcasts (pp. 83-84 and 86). Indeed, the American contingent of SOG numbered just 132 military personnel and 14 civilians at the start of 1965 (p. 70).’
Although they are demystification at its best, Reske’s annexes also confirm that SOG was still one mean, little critter. It spent about $20 million a year from 1965 on (p. 123); its shaky, private air force still managed to transport almost 14,000 passengers in 1966 (p. 109); and its private navy not only distributed — by mortar — 2 million ‘psywar’ leaflets that year but also briefly captured and ‘re-educated’ a total of over 350 North Vietnamese civilians (p. 106). If anything, SOG showed the same false sense of conveyor-belt efficiency that so poisoned the entire U.S. war effort in Indochina: over umpteen billion served, as a certain fast-good chain would say — but served what?
The Gulf of Tonkin
Of course, all the foregoing is secondary to the chief interest of any Vietnam War historian approaching a book about the first years of SOG, and that would be the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Was SOG, as some have suspected, the witting instigator of a larger war? Did it deliberately orchestrate coastal raiding to provoke a North Vietnamese assault against U.S. Navy destroyers cruising around on an intelligence-gathering mission?’
Before proceeding, it is important to be clear about the true nature of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Recommended as guides are Joseph C. Goulden’s Truth is the First Casualty (New York, James B. Alder/Rand McNally, 1969) and a July 23, 1984 cover story in U.S News and World Report. These are hardly the final words on the incident — Goulden did not know SOG’s name and even botched the type of attack boats it used — but they do sketch out the basics.
On July 31 1964, just as an SOG coastal raid was ending, the USS Maddox entered the Gulf as part of a ‘DESOTO’ patrol, which mostly involved SIGINT work. On August 2, the Maddox clashed with North Vietnamese torpedo boats, which were angrily scouring the area in the wake of the SOG raid. This clash really did occur, and Hanoi freely admitted its boats had taken on a nosy U.S. destroyer. The Maddox retreated from the Gulf, but a decision by no less than President Lyndon Johnson himself, via the Joint Chiefs of Staff, caused it to return to complete its patrol, this time with the reinforcement of a second destroyer, the C. Turner Joy. On the night of August 4/5, in the wake of yet another batch of SOG forays, the two destroyers thought they were being stalked by torpedo boats and blazed away at the darkness for hours. Afterwards, there was plenty of embarrassing evidence that the ‘torpedo boats’ were the result of over-wrought nerves and freak radar problems — Hanoi certainly denied anything happened this time — but Washington had already lost what little patience it had, and retaliatory air strikes were on the way. Congress then passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave Johnson a blank cheque as to the handling of the situation in Southeast Asia.
As presented by Reske, Annex A contains the following about the Gulf of Tonkin Incident:
(1) it confirms that raids were unleashed on July 30 and August 3;
(2) it shows that MACV ordered the DESOTO patrol to stay in the northern reaches of the gulf on the night of August 3/4, to separate it from SOG activity;
(3) it does not mention the August 2 clash of the incident at all; and (4) the August 4 ‘clash’ is mentioned only because it prompted the Joint Chiefs to suspend briefly all operations in the Gulf (pp. 45-46).
Reading between those particular lines is not easy. There is no hint of guilty knowledge, but there is a hint of ignorance (or disinformation) in the reference to the August 4 ‘clash’ which likely never occurred. The degree of reticence shown by Annex A could be construed as ominous, but the way the August 4 ‘clash’ is cited only to explain suspended operations seems to indicate a lack of specific concern for the DESOTO mission. That MACV moved to separate SOG and DESOTO only after the genuine clash took place could denote anything from bumbling to connivance. By themselves, these bits and pieces are not much. Seen in the context of SOG’s logistical and personnel problems, however, they may point to a conclusion that, even if SOG did spark the full-blown phase of the Vietnam War, such a result was not intended. Moreover, it now appears that any conspiracy theory cuts two ways. If SOG was riddled with untrustworthy, local employees right from the start, then Hanoi may have known what was coming in advance and have chosen to play along.
Whatever happened in the Gulf of Tonkin in early August of 1964, it surely was a sore point for the Pentagon in the years to come. A former MACV interrogator, Sedgwick D. Tourison Jr., provides a telling anecdote in his 1991 reminiscences Talking With Victor Charlie (New York, Ivy, pp. 190-185). In the summer of 1966, Tourison was sent up to Danang to interview the luckless crews of some North Vietnamese PT boats that had just been blown away by U.S. ships. One of the POWs claimed to be the officer who wrote the North Vietnamese navy’s assessment of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Intrigued by this peek at hidden history, Tourison let the man rattle on. Unfortunately, neither the POW nor Tourison was in complete control of the facts. Tourison still thinks — as do many — that the incident involved only the August 4 ‘clash’, while the POW was fixated not with the SOG commando raids but rather with the DESOTO destroyers’ violation of what Hanoi considered its territorial waters. This curious dialogue came to an abrupt end when news of Tourison’s line of questioning spread right up the chain of command to the office of the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), to which MACV was subordinate. (In turn, CINCPAC was directly under the Joint Chiefs.) Tourison duly received an instruction from CINCPAC to leave the matter of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident to interrogators from MACSOG. Reluctantly, he obeyed, although he did not know at the time what MAGSOG meant — and he never heard whether the MACSOG interrogators appeared.
For all its limitations as a censored unit history, Reske’s book is essential to a better understanding of covert operations in Vietnam and Reske must be congratulated for bringing this material to light. Those interested can order the book directly from Alpha Publications at PO Box 308, Sharon Center, Ohio 44272, USA. The price is $19.95 (U.S.), not including postage, which for U.K. residents is an additional $7.00 surface or $12.50 air mail.
Scott Van Wynsberghe