Tom Glenn's Blog, page 111

Rerun: Việt Cộng and North Vietnamese

A reader of this blog has asked again why I always refer to the communists in Vietnam as the North Vietnamese and never the Việt Cộng (VC). To repeat in part a post of several years ago, here is the answer.

First of all, “Việt Cộng” is short for the Vietnamese Việt Nam Cộng-sản which simply means Vietnamese Communist. The communists themselves never used the term. Americans used Việt Cộng or VC to mean the communists native to South Vietnam, independent of the north, as opposed to the North Vietnamese army regulars who infiltrated South Vietnam. The Americans who used the term bought into the fiction North Vietnam had created that an independent movement developed in South Vietnam that rebelled against the South Vietnamese government. That movement, according to the fiction, was named the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (Mặt trận Dân tộc Giải phóng miền Nam Việt Nam), shortened to National Liberation Front or NLF. The front was never a real organization. It was a cover for North Vietnamese operations in South Vietnam.

Second, the entire effort to defeat the South Vietnamese government and the American forces was a North Vietnamese endeavor. Every aspect of it was controlled by Hanoi. There was no independent rebellion in the south. So the American distinction between “North Vietnamese Army” (NVA) and “Việt Cộng” (VC) addressed a difference that never existed. The North Vietnamese army, called the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) by the north, included three categories of forces: regulars, regional forces, and guerrillas. The latter two were what we Americans called Việt Cộng, but troops in these categories were neither independent of the north nor native to south Vietnam. All three types of PAVN soldiers included northern, central, and southern natives.

The evidence that southern communist forces were an integral part of the North Vietnamese armed forces and under the iron control of Hanoi was apparent in the communications structure of the communists. The entire operation, both military and political, was controlled from Hanoi. Confirmation of Hanoi’s control came from messages we intercepted and decrypted in the early 1960s. In those messages, the politburo of the Vietnamese Workers Party (Đảng lao động Việt Nam—the name of the communist party) in Hanoi transmitted to covert party members operating in South Vietnam the manifesto of the Liberation Front, proclaiming it was an independent southern organization opposed to the legitimate government of South Vietnam. The front never existed. It was a propaganda invention of Hanoi.

Therefore, the most accurate term for the forces fighting the South Vietnamese and the Americans is the North Vietnamese. That’s who they were, and that’s what I call them.

Rerun: Who Shot at My Escaping Helicopter?

My mention of escaping under fire when Saigon fell in April 1975 brought a question from a reader: who was shooting at me? So I resurrected an old blog post on the subject. Here it is, revised with recent information:

On the evening of 29 April 1975, I escaped from Saigon after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city. My flight from Tan Son Nhat, on the northern edge of Saigon, was part of Operation FREQUENT WIND, the evacuation of Americans and some South Vietnamese. I flew out on a slick, a little Huey, rather than one of the big CH-53 helicopters. As soon as we were airborne, I saw the tracers coming at us. We took so much lead in the fuselage that I thought we were going down. But we made it. In the dark and the rain, we flew out to the South China Sea where the ships of the U.S. 7th Fleet were waiting. The pilot, despite the pelting rain and the pitch black, circled repeatedly. Finally, very slowly, he descended and landed on the floodlit helipad of the Oklahoma City, the flagship of the 7th Fleet. He told me later that he, an Air America civilian pilot, had never before landed on a ship.

One aspect of the escape intrigues me even today: who was firing at us?

Background: During FREQUENT WIND, 71 American military helicopters flew 662 sorties between Saigon and elements of the 7th Fleet. The operation succeeded in extracting more than 7,800 evacuees from the Defense Attaché Office and U.S. Embassy on April 29 and 30, not counting the U.S. Marines that had landed that day. The North Vietnamese by the evening of 29 April were already in the streets of Saigon. They had a full complement of anti-aircraft weapons. And yet, as far I know, not one chopper was shot down. They could have brought down dozens, but they didn’t.

In puzzling through what happened, I’ve concluded that the North Vietnamese didn’t want to impede the U.S. flight from Vietnam. Had they fired at our helicopters, we could have inflicted great damage on them with the combat aircraft we had in the vicinity. All they wanted was for us to leave.

So who shot at the Huey I was in?

My best guess is that it was the South Vietnamese military whom we were abandoning to their fate. They had large weapons with tracer ammunition—used to show the shooter if his bullets are hitting the target. And they were both furious and desperate as we flew away and left them to the mercies of the North Vietnamese.

I escaped alive, though they certainly tried hard to bring me down. I can understand how they felt. In the end, I was the lucky one. They were all killed or captured by the North Vietnamese.

Character Names: An Artistic Device

A technique I use in my fiction is to employ character names to establish mood or emotional ambience. Unless the character name is nakedly suggestive—like Killer or Slaughter—readers don’t react to the meaning of names at the conscious level. But they do at the unconscious level. They see characters with malevolent sounding names as malicious until and unless the characters prove themselves otherwise.

So in Secretocracy, I gave the president’s hand-picked chiefs throughout the bureaucracy names that hint at malfeasance like Hacker, Prowley, Dellaspada (Italian for “of the dagger”), Shafter, Pierce, and Cutter. Characters not involved in the attacks against the protagonist have neutral names.

At the end of the novel, with the November 2018 election that resulted in Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives, the illegal shenanigans of the villains are unmasked and the protagonist is exonerated. The villains are not punished but escape government for high-paying jobs elsewhere. I can’t help but ask what will happen with the November 2020 election?

Rerun: The Intelligence Professional (2)

Continuing my thoughts on intelligence as a profession:

Many Americans cite intelligence failures. It’s an imperfect discipline and not always successful. But I posit that for every failure one can name, there are literally hundreds of spectacular successes about which the public knows nothing because sources and methods must remain secret.

To me, intelligence is an honorable profession. Its purpose is to uncover and reveal the truth. I take great—and to me completely justified—pride in the work I did during my thirty-five year career in the business. I saved many lives by discovering what our enemies were up to. I could have saved many more had the decision-makers listened to me when I warned them about what was going to happen. Instead, the Cassandra Effect took its toll.

So I plead with Americans to honor spies who risk everything, even their lives, to provide the truth to our leaders. And I ask our leaders to listen to their intelligence experts before they act. I worry that our current president may court disaster by ignoring and even attacking his intelligence professionals. Thus blinded and deaf to threats from other nations, we could well face catastrophe.

Rerun: The Intelligence Professional

My recent post on the Cassandra Effect led me to rummage through posts from the past on the subject of intelligence. I took one such post and revised it to fit the context of today. Here it is.

Chuck Griffin, the protagonist of my novel, Last of the Annamese, is professional in the business of collecting and analyzing information from all sources about North Vietnam. He uses data from signals intelligence, aerial and satellite photography, interrogation reports, captured documents, human intelligence (spying), and even transcripts from the Liberation News Agency, the propaganda organ of the North Vietnamese, to determine what the enemy is up to. And he has the rare gift of being able to forecast what’s going to happen next.

Chuck’s profession is based on my own experience. I, too, was a professional, but only in the signals intelligence business, and I, too, had the gift.

But I’ve discovered over the years that many Americans view intelligence as a profession with suspicion. They believe there’s something sneaky about it, and they distrust those engaged in it.

They’re right that intelligence is a sneaky enterprise. It has to be. If the target knows of efforts to collect information about him, he can usually put a stop to it. So the sources and methods of intelligence must remain secret, or intelligence will not succeed.

More tomorrow.

Who Reads this Blog?

In the three years I’ve maintained this blog, I have no idea how many different people have read posts. The figures provided by the software don’t tell me who the readers are nor if they are the same people who have read it before. I’ve had as high as seventy readers recorded in a single day and as few as two. Comments from readers are few and far between.

The software does tell me the location of the readers. The cumulative total shows more from the U.S. than any other country, but on any given day foreign readers might well outnumber U.S. residents. An oddity I haven’t been able to explain is that on any given day, readers from a single nation other than the U.S. may number half a dozen when there have been no readers from that country for weeks before that. Nor do they reappear in following days.

I have readers from all over the world. They hail from Australia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sweden, Finland, France, the UK, Northern Ireland, Hong Kong, Denmark, China—and that’s the list from just one week. Vietnam appears more often than any other foreign country. I don’t find that surprising because so much of my writing is about Vietnam.

I’m glad those from other countries access my blog. I’m flattered by their interest. I encourage them to comment on what they read here.

The Cassandra Effect

I’ve written here several times about U.S. government officials ignoring warnings I gave them about the North Vietnamese, during the Vietnam war, from signals intelligence (the intercept and exploitation of the radio communications). It happened so frequently during my thirteen years in and out of Vietnam that I gave it a name: the Cassandra Effect.

Cassandra, according to Greek myth, was a Trojan woman blessed by the gods with the ability to foretell the future and cursed that no one would believe her. I found myself in Cassandra’s shoes often during the Vietnam war. American military commanders were not trained to understand the utility of signals intelligence—many had never heard of it—and dismissed my warnings.

Three spectacular examples illustrate the dilemma.

In the fall of 1967 in Vietnam’s western highlands, I alerted the U.S. 4th Infantry Division and the 173rd Airborne Brigade that the North Vietnamese B3 Front and its subordinate main force units were in the hills to the west of us preparing for combat. The commander of the 4th Infantry Division, not believing my reports on the multi-division size of the enemy force,  sent a battalion to reconnoiter. It was all but destroyed. At the end of the resulting battle, one of the bloodiest in the Vietnam war, no territory had changed hands.

In January 1968, at my behest, my agency, the National Security Agency (NSA), issued a series of reports warning that the North Vietnamese were preparing to launch a country-wide offensive. I briefed General Westmoreland and his staff at the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). The general and his staff thanked me but dismissed the warning. The Tet Offensive which began days later was a surprise.

In April 1975, I alerted the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, Graham Martin, multiple times that the North Vietnamese were preparing to attack Saigon. I repeatedly informed him in writing and briefed him personally three different times. He didn’t believe my warning, never called for an evacuation, and barely escaped by helicopter when the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city. I fled the city under fire.

I write again here about the Cassandra Effect because, as I noted recently, our country is in severe danger due to an administration that not only ignores intelligence but is actually hostile to it. As I wrote in my post about my book Secretocracy, dismissing intelligence warnings and sabotaging the intelligence agencies invites disaster.

Feedback from a Reader

As I have reported before in this blog, I exchange letters with a man in prison. We began writing back and forth three years ago when he read my novel, The Trion Syndrome, about a Vietnam vet with Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI). He was moved by it. He told me he suffers from PTSI from combat in Vietnam. As I learned later, PTSI may have been a factor in the crime that landed him in prison.

As time went on, I noted this man’s talent for writing. I encouraged him to write for publication. When he did, I submitted his articles. One has now been published; a second has been accepted for publication. Eventually, I urged him to write about PTSI which we both suffer from. It took him a year to do it, but he finally did. I’m now circulating that article to periodicals. I’m sure one will accept it.

This man, like other veterans I spend time with, is my brother. A fraction of 1 percent of the American population has seen combat and understands the damage it can do to the soul. The panic attacks, flashbacks, nightmares, irrational rages, and depression characteristic of PTSI don’t fade with time; the victim has to learn to cope. It turns out that writing down what happened to injure the psyche is one of the most effective ways to deal with PTSI. I discovered that remedy early on. These days, thanks to facing my memories head on and writing down what happened, I manage. And that writing became the raw material for my novels and stories.

But my friend in prison didn’t have writing to turn to. He struggled through the malady alone. I admire him for his strength and courage in facing the disease without flinching but especially for his positive outlook in the face of disaster. A parole board will reconsider his case later this year. My hopes are up. And my heart is with him.

Secretocracy (3)

I want to return to the last thought in yesterday’s blog post: the damage to our intelligence agencies wrought by the Trump administration and the resulting danger to our republic.

I know all too well the experience of reporting valid intelligence findings and having them ignored by government leaders. As the fall of Saigon loomed, I repeatedly warned U.S. officials of the coming disaster. They paid no heed. The president, secretary of state, and the U.S. ambassador in Saigon were all surprised when the North Vietnamese attacked Saigon even though I and others had been foretelling the assault for weeks based on irrefutable evidence. That came at the end of a thirteen-year battle I’d had with intelligence recipients warning them what the North Vietnamese were doing only to have them dismiss the warnings. Starting a week before the 1968 Tet Offensive, for example, my agency, the National Security Agency (NSA), had, at my behest, been alerting U.S officials that the communists were about to launch a country-wide offensive. Our warning was discounted, and the U.S. was taken by surprise.

On the other side of the coin, I know of half a dozen instances when intelligence warning prevented a hostile move by a foreign government. In each of these cases, the U.S. public never knew of the foreign threat or of the U.S. action to thwart it. To protect the information sources and methods involved, the entire incident remained classified.

We are now facing a threat I never saw the likes of during my thirty-five years in intelligence: a president who not only ignores intelligence but is actually hostile to it. We know that early this year President Trump dismissed repeated warnings from the intelligence community that a pandemic was about to hit the U.S and didn’t act to protect the health of American citizens. We know that he has sought to suppress alerts that Russians and others are preparing to interfere in the 2020 election. We know that he fired the Director of National Intelligence when an intelligence expert warned Congress about the Russian threat.

The president and the Republicans who support him risk severe damage to our country by disregarding and even attacking intelligence. By turning a blind eye and deaf ear to the threats against us and attacking those who give warning, the leaders now in power are inviting disaster.

We are, in short, in grave danger.

Secretocracy (2)

Gene’s college-age son moves in with him. Together they face off attacks from the president’s men. Much of the last half of the book tells of the help each gives the other in the face of adversity.

Part of the challenge of the book was to bring together Gene’s professional and personal life at the climax of the story. I have tried to do that in all my novels—establish two different narratives, personal and work life, then find a way to tie them to one another so that they reach a single climax.

My novels usually end sadly but with hope. With Secretocracy I changed the pattern. The 2018 election shifts control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats. With Gene’s help, a House subcommittee calls for hearings and unmasks FIREFANG.

Part of the reason that Secretocracy works is that it is authentic. Even though the government organizations featured in the book are fictional, they are based on real entities and real happenings. And my depth knowledge of the serpentine maneuverings of government agencies and the Congress from my many years in government provided a solid underpinning of accuracy to the story.

My expectation is that Secretocracy will sell better than my other books not because it is superior but because it addresses a hot topic—the damaging flounderings of Donald Trump. As more and more scandals erupt, public interest in the harm Trump has inflicted will grow. What has escaped attention—because it is classified—is the injury Trump has wreaked on the U.S. intelligence community, our eyes and ears to warn us about what is going on with other nations. That damage could be the worst of all. Secretocracy hints at how serious the wound may be.

More tomorrow.