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A Murder in Wartime: The Untold Spy Story That Changed the Course of the Vietnam War
A look at the greatest unsolved mystery and political coverup of the Vietnam War describes how, in 1969, eight Green Berets in Vietnam were arrested for the murder of a Vietnamese agent working for the Vietcong, even though it had been ordered by the CIA.
- GenresHistory
414 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 1992
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91 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 20, 2021
A brilliant account of the Vietnam Green Beret murder of a suspected double agent in 1969. It ties the murder, the subsequent arrests of the Green Berets, and the raucous publicity with Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers and ultimately with Watergate. Absolutely fascinating and horrifying.
Want to read
April 19, 2012I'm looking forward to reading this book, a little off the beaten track for me, because it's written by someone I really respect and have great affection for, going back to our days in graduate school. An army intelligence officer, Stein is now the master of the blog SpyTalk, a spin-off of a column he wrote for years for the Washington Post. He wrote this some time ago, but isn't the beauty of the internet? You discover that books never really die, they just go to a Cyber Shelf waiting for you to catch up with them.
May 10, 2008
A fasinating look at a situation that helped to bring the war in Vietnam to an end. Much of the information covered in the book had been classified until recently. The author was a Captain in the SF while in Vietnam and had first hand knowledge of the situation which made the book even more interesting.
May 18, 2012
Best true story on Special Forces interacting with the CIA that I've ever read.
April 24, 2014
It's a history book that reads like a novel, giving insight to some of the problems with the Vietnam war.
October 9, 2022
Excellent on several levels – the author wove several strands into a unified history. In the process he provided as close to a 360-degree examination of this ugly, tragic affair as anyone could have done. I was especially struck by his success in balancing the personal, human aspects of the case with the details turned up by his beyond-extensive research.
The titular murder was the killing by a team of Green Beret officers of a Vietnamese man they had hired to help them with intelligence-related parts of their duties, but whom they had come to believe was really a North Vietnamese spy based on circumstantial evidence that could probably be described as being moderately strong.
From the time they came to this suspicion, the story turned into what would have been a comedy of errors had it not led to his death. The participants included the Green Berets themselves; the local detachment of the CIA; the commanding general of all U.S. military forces in Vietnam and several of his staff; a dozen or more military and civilian lawyers, on both sides; members of Congress; the director of the CIA and some of his staff; the Secretary of the Army and some of his; then-President Nixon, Henry Kissinger, other members of Nixon's staff; the future Watergate “plumbers”; and Daniel Ellsberg, for whom this case was the tipping point in his decision to leak the Pentagon Papers to the press.
Ultimately, the story leaves me feeling sad, tired, and disgusted. My level of disgust rises with each rung up the chain of command. Some of it stems from the inevitable way warfare dehumanizes, for its participants, whoever is designated as the enemy, and how that view spreads to entire nationalities.
That dehumanization, the reduction of fellow human beings to objects to be used, manipulated, and sometimes disposed of to protect not only the lives but the careers and egos of the more senior people involved, extended to their treatment of the junior Americans involved. One of the most important things I learned as an NCO and commissioned officer was that if my people did something, following my orders, I was ultimately responsible.
One of the things the senior people here did was a classic buck-passing maneuver, giving their subordinates vague orders with multiple possible meanings, then when the one they picked blew up, piously saying, “Well, that wasn't what I meant at all. I never told them to do that,” and leaving their people twisting in the wind.
Another dirty trick by the brass was one of Nixon's specialties, illegally spying on people on the other side of an issue and trying to intimidate them – opening their mail and resealing it in obvious ways; conspicuously tapping their phones; grilling their friends,neighbors, and employers looking for dirt that could be used to make them look bad; putting the Green Berets involved in solitary confinement before the investigation was even half done in 5' x 7' cells made of converted shipping containers, in the hot season in South Vietnam.
Meanwhile, the background is the Vietnam War raging in 1969, with the news about to break of the slaughter at My Lai of hundreds of hapless civilians by an over-stressed, under-trained, horribly led Army unit. With thousands dying daily under air and artillery strikes and nightly via assassinations of suspected enemy agents under the CIA/Special Forces Phoenix program, this case became a headline story nationally, if not worldwide.
Ultimately, to me, those themes are what this book is about: how even good people are sucked into the perspective of dehumanization and end up doing things they would, at one time, never have believed they would do; cowardly failures of leadership at the highest levels and scapegoating of subordinates instead of accepting responsibility; lies and secrecy piling up in layers like compounded interest; and the unintended consequences of hubris.
Again, an ugly, tragic story very well told. Recommended for anyone interested in geopolitics and the psychology of warfare.
BY THE WAY: The author, Jeff Stein, cohosts (at the time of this review) a pretty good podcast called "Spy Talk" about the interlocking worlds of espionage, the military, diplomacy, and related fields. I'll just say that he is a bona fide subject matter expert.
The titular murder was the killing by a team of Green Beret officers of a Vietnamese man they had hired to help them with intelligence-related parts of their duties, but whom they had come to believe was really a North Vietnamese spy based on circumstantial evidence that could probably be described as being moderately strong.
From the time they came to this suspicion, the story turned into what would have been a comedy of errors had it not led to his death. The participants included the Green Berets themselves; the local detachment of the CIA; the commanding general of all U.S. military forces in Vietnam and several of his staff; a dozen or more military and civilian lawyers, on both sides; members of Congress; the director of the CIA and some of his staff; the Secretary of the Army and some of his; then-President Nixon, Henry Kissinger, other members of Nixon's staff; the future Watergate “plumbers”; and Daniel Ellsberg, for whom this case was the tipping point in his decision to leak the Pentagon Papers to the press.
Ultimately, the story leaves me feeling sad, tired, and disgusted. My level of disgust rises with each rung up the chain of command. Some of it stems from the inevitable way warfare dehumanizes, for its participants, whoever is designated as the enemy, and how that view spreads to entire nationalities.
That dehumanization, the reduction of fellow human beings to objects to be used, manipulated, and sometimes disposed of to protect not only the lives but the careers and egos of the more senior people involved, extended to their treatment of the junior Americans involved. One of the most important things I learned as an NCO and commissioned officer was that if my people did something, following my orders, I was ultimately responsible.
One of the things the senior people here did was a classic buck-passing maneuver, giving their subordinates vague orders with multiple possible meanings, then when the one they picked blew up, piously saying, “Well, that wasn't what I meant at all. I never told them to do that,” and leaving their people twisting in the wind.
Another dirty trick by the brass was one of Nixon's specialties, illegally spying on people on the other side of an issue and trying to intimidate them – opening their mail and resealing it in obvious ways; conspicuously tapping their phones; grilling their friends,neighbors, and employers looking for dirt that could be used to make them look bad; putting the Green Berets involved in solitary confinement before the investigation was even half done in 5' x 7' cells made of converted shipping containers, in the hot season in South Vietnam.
Meanwhile, the background is the Vietnam War raging in 1969, with the news about to break of the slaughter at My Lai of hundreds of hapless civilians by an over-stressed, under-trained, horribly led Army unit. With thousands dying daily under air and artillery strikes and nightly via assassinations of suspected enemy agents under the CIA/Special Forces Phoenix program, this case became a headline story nationally, if not worldwide.
Ultimately, to me, those themes are what this book is about: how even good people are sucked into the perspective of dehumanization and end up doing things they would, at one time, never have believed they would do; cowardly failures of leadership at the highest levels and scapegoating of subordinates instead of accepting responsibility; lies and secrecy piling up in layers like compounded interest; and the unintended consequences of hubris.
Again, an ugly, tragic story very well told. Recommended for anyone interested in geopolitics and the psychology of warfare.
BY THE WAY: The author, Jeff Stein, cohosts (at the time of this review) a pretty good podcast called "Spy Talk" about the interlocking worlds of espionage, the military, diplomacy, and related fields. I'll just say that he is a bona fide subject matter expert.
January 8, 2026
A terrific, compelling read.
Heroes?
Absolutely none!
Villains?
Take your pick. Lots to choose from!
Victims?
The murdered. His widow and children.
And, of course, all the countless Viet Namese.
Colonel Rheault was my cousin. Technically my second cousin as he was my mother's cousin. I knew him slightly. Knew his parents better. And the extended family better still.
His uncle was Bobby Cutler, Eisenhower's closeted gay National Security advisor(see Ike's Mystery Man...).
What a strange crowd that was indeed.
Heroes?
Absolutely none!
Villains?
Take your pick. Lots to choose from!
Victims?
The murdered. His widow and children.
And, of course, all the countless Viet Namese.
Colonel Rheault was my cousin. Technically my second cousin as he was my mother's cousin. I knew him slightly. Knew his parents better. And the extended family better still.
His uncle was Bobby Cutler, Eisenhower's closeted gay National Security advisor(see Ike's Mystery Man...).
What a strange crowd that was indeed.
September 11, 2023
Excellent book. It reads like a mystery novel except that it is... tragically... a true story. Having lived through the Vietnam War era, Jeff Stein provided new insights into things I had not known before. It is a bit long but well worth the read.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews