Customer Reviews

The Secret War Against Hanoi: The Untold Story of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam

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Don't read this book expecting 408 pages detailing the adventures of individual SOG soldiers and their missions. There is really only one chapter, "Crossing the Fence" with its details of SOG operations in Laos, that fits that bill. What Shultz details, using unprecedented access to recently declassified Pentagon documents and interviews with many of the participants in SOG operations, is the complete story of the origin, operations, successes, failures, and lessons of the Studies and Observations Group. His prose may not be scintillating, he may repeat himself frequently, and the beginning of the book may bog down occasionally with flow charts of command, but Shultz isn't writing a popular history. He's writing a policy review of SOG's operations for future civilian and military leaders who may turn to covert operations and unconventional warfare to get themselves out of diplomatic binds. The final chapter of the book summarizes these lessons.

Still, this book is worthwhile reading even for ordinary civilians.

Those interested in espionage history will find a fascinating account of SOG's attempts to foster rebellion in North Vietnam and wage psychological warfare. Not only do we learn why the CIA could not start a resistance movement in the "denied" country of North Vietnam, a "counterintelligence state" of extreme paranoia and security, but why the inheritor of the project, SOG, was also doomed to fail and fail spectacularly. Of approximately 500 agents inserted into North Vietnam, all were killed or captured and many turned into double agents.

But SOG officers experienced in espionage turned this disaster into a brilliant operation that convinced North Vietnam a massive underground was operating in their country and loyal North Vietnamese were implicated as traitors. For those wanting to know exactly what is encompassed by the term "psychological warfare", Shultz gives some idea in the chapter "Drive Them Crazy with Psywar". SOG set up a fake resistance movement with accompanying bogus radio traffic, propaganda, and blocks of ice parachuted into the jungle to melt and leave empty chutes and an uneasy feeling amongst the North Vietnamese.

Shultz also tells of the few maritime operations SOG carried out against enemy targets, its sabotage efforts which included tainting caches of the enemy's rice and leaving behind tainted ammo for the VC and NVA soldiers, and its operations against the Ho Chi Minh trail.

But the documentation on SOG was initially classified for a reason. Ultimately, the program was a failure, and Shultz documents how there's plenty of blame to go around. Civilian leadership in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations micromanaged the program, had unrealistic expectations for its speed and efficacy, and held the bizarre belief that covert means should be congruent with overt public policy. Military leadership at the highest levels set up SOG as a sop to civilian leaders whom they thought naively enamored of special warfare. They expected little from it, provided little by way of support, and had no plan to coordinate SOG's efforts into the grand Vietnam strategy. Shultz also points out that special ops was, far from being a glamorous, honored posting, a career stopper for a professional military man.

While Shultz, of course, concentrates on SOG, I also learned a fair amount about the diplomatic, political, and military history of the Vietnam war in general. Prior to this, my only exposure to the war, in book form, had been a biography of Carlos Hathcock, the Marine sniper in Vietnam.

The book is a bit slow at times, but it rewards the reader who completes it.

Had U.S. political and military leaders backed these secret operations with less trepidation, Vietnam might well have been a success story. A revealing look at what unconventional warfare and clandestine operations can really achieve -- IF they are integrated into a cohesive warfighting strategy ...and why they will fail or backfire if prosecuted with only half-hearted support within the highest councils of our government. Richard Shultz unveils a whole new dimension of America's prowess at espionage, sabotage, and special operations in this page-turning history.

Benjamin F. Schemmer Editor-in-Chief Strategic Review

As each book based on declassified data comes out, the story of Vietnam and the Great American Stumble there becomes more clear.

"The Secret War Against Hanoi" is particularly good in its own way. It elucidates the liberal train of thought as they were starting the war in 1961. On January 28 Kennedy had been president for 8 days. Vietnam was divided, the French were gone, and the Viet Cong were prosecuting a campaign of terrorism in the South in order to destabilize it and absorb it into the North. On that day Kennedy met with his National Security Council and listened to what was (in his view) the bad news on Vietnam: if the current conditions persisted, the South would fall to the Communists.

Why a little underdeveloped country in Asia should have been of such concern to Kennedy is anyone's guess, but what is no longer in doubt is that major American involvement in Vietnam began at that NSC meeting of Jan 28, when Kennedy stated that he wanted "guerillas to operate in the North". All that followed for 13 years was built upon that one simple sentiment expressed by the new president.

He wanted guerillas to operate in the North because, as he expressed it in April of that year, "We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerillas by night instead of armies by day." Kennedy was intent on fighting back in kind: infiltrating, subverting, and deploying guerillas by night.

Presumably, the CIA would train Vietnamese spies and guerillas and inflict them on the North. But the Bay of Pigs fiasco happened that April, and the Kennedy brothers were convinced the fault for that lay with the CIA. Therefore they gave the job of training and inserting spies and guerillas into North Vietnam to the Pentagon, which had little experience in such operations.

There followed a string of failures, where hundreds of Vietnamese spies and saboteurs were sent up north, and never heard from again. Or North Vietnamese fishermen would be hauled off to an island and treated to an elaborate charade intended to show them that a revolt against the communist government was imminent. Shultz discusses these attempts in a dispassionate tone, but one gets a growing sense of waste and futility from the narrative. Any of the career espionage people at the CIA could have told Kennedy that it was virtually impossible to plant people in a closed totalitarian society like North Vietnam, even if, as in the case of the CIA, that's your business. But to have the Pentagon take a crack at it? Well, you might as well try to get HUD to send a rocket to the moon.

But Kennedy's obsession with and faith in covert action remained unabated till the day of his death. His cabinet, McNamara in particular, shared his enthusiasm. Eventually the Pentagon adopted the attitude that if you want anything done in Vietnam, you have to do it yourself. So covert actions began to include Americans, at the same time the overt effort began ramping up under Johnson.

The efforts were redirected toward more practical targets, such as the Ho Chi Minh Trail (the construction of which began in 1959), but the approach was no more practical. This wasn't a "real war", according to the brightest minds in Washington; it was more of a diplomatic game. Therefore, restrictions had to be placed on the units operating against the trail builders. Special forces could not go beyond 10 kilometers into "neutral" Laos. The North Vietnamese, displaying the practicality and opportunism that became their hallmark, would then route their trail 11 kilometers from the Laos-Vietnam border. Their spies, unlike those of the Pentagon, were quite effective.

It wasn't any secret that cutting off the Ho Chi Minh trail would cut off the stream of men and materiel into the South. Shultz quotes Bui Tin, the NVA officer who accepted the surrender of the South in 1975: "If Johnson had granted General Westmoreland's request to enter Laos and block the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Hanoi could not have won the war."

As simple as that. Straight from the lips of an opposing officer. In retrospect, it seems like the logical thing to do: cut off the enemy's supply line. But from its very beginning on January 28, 1961, the Vietnam War was not conducted logically.

Perhaps the Kennedy-Johnson crowd's truly wacky ambivalence can best be glimpsed on pages 34-35. Shultz relates how President Kennedy was "stunned" by the images of Buddhist monks immolating themselves in protest of the Diem government's repression. Diem's sister-in-law, who seems to have been a cross between Immelda Marcos and Leona Helmsley, referred to the immolations as "barbecues". At the same time, South Vietnamese generals were planning a coup. It was dawning on the government of the US that the government of its ally was corrupt and effete and repressive. So where did the Kennedy Administration choose to direct its energies? Toward Hanoi: "escalation of the covert war against Hanoi became a major agenda item. The decision was made to turn up the pressure on the North."

With policy like this being made by the Best and the Brightest, one can only shudder at what a catastrophe we'd have had if our leaders had been merely average.

This book presents a lot of information I had never seen, detailing the Pentagon's covert actions in Vietnam. It's main charm is that it is well researched, using previously secret information. The book's serious drawback is that it really needed an editor. The chapters read like individual journal articles: state a theme, present the facts, conclude that you showed what you claimed initially. I am currently half way through, and every interesting fact has been repeated three times, down to identical quotation snippets. The book is not organized by group within SOG, or by timeline. A better presentation would have been shorter, and "taught the lessons of Vietnam" better.

Richard Shultz has uncovered many new facts about how the CIA and the military carried out secret operations during the Vietnam War. His careful research and brutal honesty tells the story--warts and all. He gives both a strategic and a tactical perspective. You will get to know well some extraordinary characters who fought political, diplomatic and bureaucratic barriers to try to undermine the regime in Hanoi. Many lessons here for future conflicts.

I just want to say that I based my senior thesis based off of this clandestine unit, and this book was one of my most valuable sources.

Richard Shultz, Jr., delves deeper into the origins of the MACV-SOG in his book, The Secret War against Hanoi. As an historian, Shultz looks at the origins of SOG and the task force's role in the Vietnam War. Looking back to the events in the early 1960's, he outlines the inception of creating an unconventional means to wage warfare from President Kennedy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the CIA, who were all growing frustrated and exhausted from the war in Vietnam.

For eight long, arduous years, this battalion-sized task force was assigned to suicidal missions, specifically on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, as well as Laos and Cambodia. He stressed the need to keep the SOG absolutely quiet from the public and how effective the SOG was in attempting to sabotage enemy facilities and rescuing U.S. POWs. If the public, American or Vietnamese, ever found out that a multiservice task force broke boundary jurisdiction outside of Vietnam, the U.S. government would face political retribution and the war would have escalated.

The soldiers of SOG would be inserted and create a complex deception mission that included the manipulation of North Vietnamese POWs, as well as sabotaging enemy facilities. While doing so, they distributed propaganda materials and forged letters to the Hanoi government. They would even lead covert maritime missions like intercepting, capturing, or destroying enemy dreadnoughts and supply ships, and traverse on foot across the border in order to conduct covert reconnaissance operations along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, targeting supplies and enemy soldiers.

The process of developing the means to accomplish these goals was incredibly difficult was another point that Shultz stressed. The operations for SOG were no easy feat to accomplish, either. Shultz offers insight to what both the CIA and MACV-SOG hoped to collaborate: collecting enemy intelligence, developing psychological warfare operations among the Vietnamese civilian populace, sabotage facilities and installations, and fostering a relationship with the South Vietnamese in the hopes of developing a guerrilla warfare against the VC and NVA. However, missions often took a toll on the task force, as many soldiers never came back.

The organization and infrastructure of an unconventional warfare task force had not been established easily, partially because there had not been any organized task forces like SOG in American military history. Many military commanders argued amongst themselves as to who should be in charge of leading the SOG unit. In the end, General William Westmoreland was chosen to plan and organize the MACV-SOG by high-ranking officials in the Pentagon. With this, Shultz exclusively argues that SOG became a truly lethal, mysterious unit to both sides of the war.

When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, the records of SOG's top-secret missions were buried, while the men received no public recognition. There was no evidence that gave SOG a rogue name either. Richard Shultz placed together a tremendously thorough and accurate analysis and the story of SOG behind enemy lines during the Vietnam War. He was able to obtain these records, documents, and accounts that were never supposed to be brought to light.
Shultz also focused on the North Vietnamese government in Hanoi. Hanoi had "sensed the political and military weakness of the Saigon government...and decided to conduct a conventional war in addition to promoting insurgency (unconventional)...it upgraded Viet Cong forces and brought in regular NVA forces to fight against poorly led South Vietnamese soldiers." This was essentially what the U.S. government sought to do: build an insurgency using the MACV-SOG to train South Vietnamese.

For those who are sincerely interested in military history, or the Vietnam War, I highly recommend you read this. As the forerunner of today's Special Forces, the MACV-SOG deserve to be publicized as one of the greatest American military assets.

This book should be required reading -- from Camp Lejeune to Fort Bragg; from NAB Coronado to Okinawa. But, beware -- its painful...

Why? Because if the military is your profession -- SpecWar and Recon-types, in particular -- you may want to consider making plans to move into another field after reading the author's thoroughly documented account of how the US/South Vietnam attempted to conduct secret ops in Southeast Asia during the '60s and early '70s.

The author exposes the whole sordid affair from start to finish, and in a way that makes you feel both ashamed and proud -- proud of those in the bush who put their lives on the line and ashamed of those in high places who put them in harms way without a well-defined game plan, without proper support.

If you can gut-out finishing the book (I recommend you do; it will make you stronger in the long run), you'll want to take a deep breath of fresh air, pause to reflect on those comrades that never made it home, and then PT for about 12 miles...

Richard H. Shultz provides a well researched book to support the claim that politicians caused us to lose the Vietnam War. He describes how some SOG operations were extremely effective despite interference from Washington. This effectiveness is based on relatively recent information from the Vietnamese, not just declassified US records. The book itself is a pretty good read. Although some parts drag along, the majority of the book moves quickly.

Even though this book was published in 1999, it contains many valuable lessons that are acutely applicable to today's War on Terrorism. The Vietnam era Pentagon contained many officers who believed conventional warfare to be far superior to special operations. The book makes the argument that special operations can provide invaluable support to a conventional war, but cannot win the war by itself. Similar discussions were held prior to the recent war in Afghanistan. The military would have preferred to fight a conventional war but was forced by time constraints to send in special forces. In hind sight, the reader can compare Vietnam to Afghanistan where Special Operations not only fought a war, but won it single handedly. This bit of historical hind sight makes the book all the more disturbing. Had SOG been given a real chance, the outcome of the Vietnam War might have been different.

Specifically, the author describes how the national command authorities were afraid of success. The Pentagon and the White House were afraid that if SOG's activities were too successful, they might widen the war and draw in China. The book also illustrates the incredible lack of common sense displayed by administration officials. Numerous covert action plans were denied because they differed from overt US policy. This explanation lacks any logic. If covert action activities were in sync with overt US policy, then there is no reason to do it covertly. Covert action should be for activities that support national objectives but which cannot be disclosed openly because they may run counter to our public policy.

The book does not pull punches. The efforts of Ambassador Sullivan and Averell Harriman seem almost treasonous. They waged a bureaucratic war against the Pentagon that effectively kept SOG from doing its job. The North Vietnamese could not have had better friends.

Bottom line, this book tells a compelling tale of how senior military and political figures failed to aggressively prosecute the Vietnam War. It is a good insight into how Washington, in an effort to avoid a repeat of the Korean War, was simply afraid of being too successful. The criminal aspect of this policy is that if the Government sends the military to war, it has an obligation to at least try and win it.

I had heard of the Studies and Observations Group as far back as the early 80s. As it the organization was so shrouded in mystery, it was hard to tell what was fact. Richard Schultz pulls the shroud away in this scholarly work and we discover the truth is stranger than fiction.

In the early 1960s, JFK directed his underlings to unleash a covert war against North Vietnam. Sort of a do to them what theyre doing to us deal. The CIA and then Defense Department create the Studies and Observations Group (SOG)and give it four primary missions. These were to insert Vietnamese spies into North Vietnam, conduct attacks on the North Vietnamese Coast, undermine North Vietnam with Psychological Warfare (Psywar), and finally to collect intelligence on and impede use of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The author comes to the reasoned conclusion that SOG was a moderate failure. He shows the main factors in this failure to be timidity of policy makers to use SOG to its full potential out of a fear too much success would expand the war, indifference on the part of conventionally minded military leadership, a failure to incorporate SOG's unconventional war with the conventional war and effective North Vietnamese countermeasures.

Despite these fatal flaws, Schultz shows SOG did manage to provide some assitance to the war effort. In particular, the psywar program apparently drove the already paranoid North Vietnamese of the deep end and SOG recon teams on the Ho Chi Minh trail collected valuable intelligence and eliminate significant amounts of men and materiel.

The best part in my opinion was the portions relating to psywar. SOG went so far as to develop a fake resistance movement and left physical hints of its existence in interesting ways. Other psywar efforts included fake letters meant to implicate the Communist faithful in coup plots and exploding ammunition inserted into supply caches. Pretty cool stuff!

The only down side to the book is its kind of dry reading. By all accounts, SOG was the most highly decorated unit in US history. To his credit, Schultz touches on this but should have gone farther. There is no mention of Fred Zabitosky, Roy Benavides or Bob Howard (a man nominated three times for the Medal of Honor before finally receiving the award). Also, he does not quantify the success of the Ho Chi Minh Trail activities. The author tells us that recon team activities hurt and annoyed the North Vietnamese but there is no mention of exact tonnage of Communist equipment destroyed or the thousands of Communist soldiers tasked with patrolling the Trail because of SOG activities.

All and all a good, solid work. But sadly incomplete. To get the full picture, read this book in conjunction with John Plaster's "SOG".

Having been involved with Vietnam since 1945, I was always amazed by the wrong decisions of my superiors. After citing instances in my own book, The Winking Fox, I now realize that I was under the control of ignorants who unfortunately ran, not only our military, but our country! Thanks a million Richard Shultz.