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Author: Sedgwick Downey Tourison
Publisher: US Naval Institute Press
Published: 1995
Total Pages: 432
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Former Army intelligence officer and Defense Intelligence Agency analyst "Wick" Tourison unravels the tragically flawed and costly operation that according to many analysts helped trigger, the Vietnam War. Some b & w photos. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
Author: Kenneth Conboy
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2000-03-16
Total Pages: 358
ISBN-13: 0700611479
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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 Hanoi: 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.
Author: John Stryker Meyer
Publisher:
Published: 2007-01-01
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780977143177
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Hidden from the media and the public, hundreds of US elite soldiers under the wraps of "top secret" were on missions carried out across the fence in Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam. To military insiders, it was the "secret war." Mission authority was carried out under the aegis of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam's top secret Studies and Observations Group. SOG's chain of command for after-action reports extended to the White House and Joint Chiefs of Staff. When the secret war ended eight years later in 1972, most SOG military records were destroyed. The cloak of secrecy remained over SOG for 29 years until April 14, 2001, when a Presidential Unit Citation--the military equivalent of the Distinguished Service Cross, our nation's second highest award for valor--was awarded to SOG and its support units.--Publisher description.
Author: John Stryker Meyer
Publisher:
Published: 2011-02-15
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13: 9780983256700
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →QUOTE: "As the commander of SOG, I can say that "Across The Fence" accurately reflects why the secret war was hazardous for our troops and so deadly for the enemy. Major General John K. Singlaub (U.S. Army Ret.) ----------------------------------------- Far beyond the battlefields of Vietnam, across the fence in Laos and Cambodia, America fought a deadly secret war. Known only as SOG, the Special Forces men of the Studies and Operations Group didn't play by the rules. They used every trick in the book to defeat the communist forces and if those didn't work they made up new ones. SOG operators tapped into phone wires, ambushed enemy units and gathered some of the most important intelligence of the war. All of this came at a staggering price in terms of casualties. At one point the casualty rate exceeded one hundred percent. So, what kept these extraordinary men running missions that were sure to get them wounded or killed? Why did they return to Vietnam for a second tour of duty with SOG? The answers to those questions are in this book.
Author: John L. Plaster
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2019-01-01
Total Pages: 368
ISBN-13: 1501189581
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →John Plaster’s riveting account of his covert activities as a member of a special operations team during the Vietnam War is “a true insider’s account, this eye-opening report will leave readers feeling as if they’ve been given a hot scoop on a highly classified project” (Publishers Weekly). Code-named the Studies and Observations Group, SOG was the most secret elite US military unit to serve in the Vietnam War—so secret its very existence was denied by the government. Composed entirely of volunteers from such ace fighting units as the Army Green Berets, Air Force Air Commandos, and Navy SEALs, SOG took on the most dangerous covert assignments, in the deadliest and most forbidding theaters of operation. In SOG, Major John L. Plaster, a three-tour SOG veteran, shares the gripping exploits of these true American warriors in a minute-by-minute, heartbeat-by-heartbeat account of the group’s stunning operations behind enemy lines—penetrating heavily defended North Vietnamese military facilities, holding off mass enemy attacks, launching daring missions to rescue downed US pilots. Some of the most extraordinary true stories of honor and heroism in the history of the US military, from sabotage to espionage to hand-to-hand combat, Plaster’s account is “a detailed history of this little-known aspect of the Vietnam War…a worthy act of historical rescue from an unjustified, willed oblivion” (The New York Times).
Author: Kevin M. Generous
Publisher:
Published: 1985
Total Pages: 196
ISBN-13: 9780861242436
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Lonnie M. Long Gary B. Blackburn
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2013
Total Pages: 493
ISBN-13: 147599057X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Traces the activities of the Army Security Agency and its members during the Vietnam war.
Author: James L. Gilbert
Publisher:
Published: 2003-09
Total Pages: 131
ISBN-13: 9780756736330
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: John L. Plaster
Publisher: Casemate
Published: 2022-05-19
Total Pages: 410
ISBN-13: 1636240852
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A new edition of this classic illustrated history of the operations and operatives of MACV-SOG in the Vietnam War. In 1972 the U.S. military destroyed all known photos of the top-secret Studies and Observations Group, with the intention that details could never be made public. But unknown to those in charge, SOG veterans had brought back with them hundreds of photographs of SOG in action and would keep them secret for more than three decades. In this new edition of SOG: A Photo History, more than 700 irreplaceable photos bring to life the stories of SOG legends Larry Thorne, Bob Howard, Dick Meadows, George Sisler, "Q" and others, and document what really happened deep inside enemy territory: Operation Tailwind, the Son Tay raid, SOG's defense of Khe Sanh, Hatchet Force operations, Bright Light rescues, HALO insertions, string extractions, SOG's darkest programs and much more.
Author: Joshua Kurlantzick
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2017-01-24
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13: 1451667892
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The untold story of how America’s secret war in Laos in the 1960s transformed the CIA from a loose collection of spies into a military operation and a key player in American foreign policy. January, 1961: Laos, a tiny nation few Americans have heard of, is at risk of falling to communism and triggering a domino effect throughout Southeast Asia. This is what President Eisenhower believed when he approved the CIA’s Operation Momentum, creating an army of ethnic Hmong to fight communist forces there. Largely hidden from the American public—and most of Congress—Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States. The brutal war lasted more than a decade, left the ground littered with thousands of unexploded bombs, and changed the nature of the CIA forever. With “revelatory reporting” and “lucid prose” (The Economist), Kurlantzick provides the definitive account of the Laos war, focusing on the four key people who led the operation: the CIA operative whose idea it was, the Hmong general who led the proxy army in the field, the paramilitary specialist who trained the Hmong forces, and the State Department careerist who took control over the war as it grew. Using recently declassified records and extensive interviews, Kurlantzick shows for the first time how the CIA’s clandestine adventures in one small, Southeast Asian country became the template for how the United States has conducted war ever since—all the way to today’s war on terrorism.
