Spies and Commandos: How America Lost the Secret War in North Vietnam

Modern War Studies

by Kenneth J. Conboy, Dale Andradé

During the Vietnam war, the United States sought to undermine Hanoi's subversion of the Saigon regime by sending Vietnamese operatives behind enemy lines. A secret to most Americans, this covert operation was far from secret in all of the commandos were killed or captured, and many were turned by the Communists to report false information.

Spies and Commandos traces the rise and demise of this secret operation—started by the CIA in 1960 and expanded by the Pentagon beginning in1964—in the first book to examine the program from both sides of the war. Kenneth Conboy and Dale Andrade interviewed CIA and military personnel and traveled in Vietnam to locate former commandos who had been captured by Hanoi, enabling them to tell the complete story of these covert activities from high-level decision making to the actual experiences of the agents.

The book vividly describes scores of dangerous missions-including raids against North Vietnamese coastal installations and the air-dropping of dozens of agents into enemy territory—as well as psychological warfare designed to make Hanoi believe the "resistance movement" was larger than it actually was. It offers a more complete operational account of the program than has ever been made available-particularly its early years-and ties known events in the war to covert operations, such as details of the "34-A Operations" that led to the Tonkin Gulf incidents in 1964. It also explains in no uncertain terms why the whole plan was doomed to failure from the start.

One of the remarkable features of the operation, claim the authors, is that its failures were so glaring. They argue that the CIA, and later the Pentagon, was unaware for years that Hanoi had compromised the commandos, even though some agents missed radio deadlines or filed suspicious reports. Operational errors were not attributable to conspiracy or counterintelligence, they contend, but simply to poor planning and lack of imagination.

Although it flourished for ten years under cover of the wider war, covert activity in Vietnam is now recognized as a disaster. Conboy and Andrade's account of that episode is a sobering tale that lends a new perspective on the war as it reclaims the lost lives of these unsung spies and commandos.

Genres: History, Espionage

358 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Kenneth J. Conboy is a former policy analyst and deputy director at the Asian Studies Center in Washington, D.C., and author or coauthor of seventeen books, including The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet and Spies and Commandos: How America Lost the Secret War in North Vietnam and, most recently, FANK: A History of the Cambodian Armed Forces.

Reviews

[Joe R, · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book. Story of failed attempts to infiltrate spies and saboteurs into North Vietnam.

[Jerome Otte · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-researched history of the ill-fated American effort to infiltrate agents and agent teams into North Vietnam, first under the auspices of the CIA and then MACV-SOG. Although this has been written about elsewhere (Sedgwick Tourison has written a fine history of the operation and the CIA’s own history of the war has a volume dedicated to the subject), Conboy does a fine job bringing all of the threads together.

Conboy thoroughly covers the recruitment, training, and deployment of the various agent teams run by the Agency and by SOG. Unlike other works on the subject, Conboy also covers the activities of these teams during North Vietnam’s offensives in 1972 and 1975. Conboy doesn’t really touch on what the teams actually accomplished, but he does put the operation into its larger strategic context, arguing that the failure of the early phases of the operation helped convince policymakers that escalation was necessary. The authors detail the many challenges of the operation, like the effectiveness of North Vietnam’s security apparatus and their success in “turning” so many of the singleton agents.

Interesting and thorough, if dry.

[Greynomad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fools we are fools we will always will be............number of men lost/killed through idiots running the various programs is beyond belief.