Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon. Wiki Commons.
Operation Tailwind Revisited after CIA Report to Kissinger Released
Picture this scenario: It is September 11, 1970. American commandoes wearing nondescript fatigues devoid of insignia and dog tags and carrying weapons not made in the USA attack a North Vietnamese Army/NVA logistical base on the Ho Chi Minh Trail near Chavane, Laos. Operation Tailwind is a “black” operation run by long range reconnaissance soldiers trained in stealth, deception, and arts of killing prohibited by Geneva Conventions. Sixteen fighters in the top-secret Studies and Observation Group/SOG are accompanied by more than 100 Montagnard mercenaries. The raid is backed by Air Force bombers.
SOG’s objective: Subdue the base and locate military documents and signals codes. Find and kill American prisoners of war presumed to have “defected.” Call in air strikes on enemy infrastructure, vehicles, weapons, ammunition and food supplies. During an 80-hour battle, cluster bombs filled with a deadly nerve gas, Sarin, are barraged twice by Air Force Skyraiders—once to quiet the NVA base, and a day later to assist a helicopter rescue of besieged special forces.
Operation Tailwind is a politically sensitive joint operation of the Army, Air Force, Central Intelligence Agency, and National Security Agency. It is supervised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Nixon White House. It is designed to be deniable in perpetuity. Because the United States maintains that it has no soldiers deployed in Laos, information regarding Tailwind is classified at the highest levels of secrecy; personnel records are falsified to disguise SOG participation; handwritten after action reports are fabricated.
But soldiers who were there live to tell the tale to CNN reporters decades later, presenting this scenario.
Secret Wars
In 1970, the United States is losing a decade long war on North Vietnam and indigenous forces in South Vietnam. The Air Force is carpet bombing cities north of the 17th parallel dividing North and South Vietnam with no lasting military effect.
Desperate to avoid military defeat, President Richard M. Nixon and his National Security Advisor, Henry A. Kissinger are orchestrating secret wars on North Vietnamese Army (NVA) supply routes winding into South Vietnam through the mountainous terrains of Laos and Cambodia. In accord with a top-secret plan codenamed Duck Hook, the White House is prepared to authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons against North Vietnamese dams and industrial zones. Stockpiles of Sarin bomblets are deployed in the war zone for secret usage by the Air Force when authorized by the White House.
Ultimately, millions of Vietnamese people and 58 thousand American soldiers will perish before the U.S. is forced out of Vietnam in 1975.
But in 1970, along the Ho Ch Minh Trail, the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency are supervising the bombing, strafing, and napalming of NVA transportation hubs, radio interception facilities, villages, food crops, roads and rivers in a Quixotic attempt to stop the trucking of weapons, food, medical supplies and soldiers into South Vietnam.
In South Vietnam, the CIA, led by William Colby, is covertly waging a terrorist campaign called Operation Phoenix against civilians adjudged to be communist sympathizers. U.S. air forces are burning villages, massacring women, children, elderly, and crop-dusting poisonous chemicals to defoliate forests and ruin subsistence agriculture. And still, the imperialist forces are losing.
In Laos and Cambodia, the CIA assesses that scores of American prisoners of war, so-called “defectors” are providing tactical information to the NVA. Some prisoners are mimicking forward air controllers, spoofing U.S. military radio channels, luring American bombers into NVA antiaircraft artillery traps.
Operation Tailwind is part of a larger US military operation attacking NVA depots along the Trail during this autumnal wet season. CIA reports transmitted to Kissinger in October 1970 reveal that the multi-pronged campaign was priced at an unexpectedly high cost in lives, helicopters, and troop morale, especially during Tailwind.
The Battle Scene
Skyraiders fire cluster bombs filled with Sarin nerve gas into the 559 Group Transportation base, which is also home to families of NVA personnel. SOG enters the camp without meeting opposition. Commandoes throw grenades into hootches turning already gassed and quiescent inhabitants into raw meat. They hunt and execute at least two American prisoners of war thought to be defectors. They find and pack up 800 pages of documents, including signals codebooks.
But before they can exfiltrate via the waiting flotilla of helicopters, NVA reinforcements storm down the Trail, guns blazing, and artillery on a nearby ridge traps SOG outside the landing zones. Two helicopters are shot down by the NVA, and then obliterated by Air Force bombers, so that the enemy cannot retrieve precious radio equipment and cryptological codes. Other helicopters flutter back to a base in Thailand, shot up so badly as to become unserviceable.
The SOG unit is facing extinction.
During the secret war in Laos, it is common practice for Air Force B-52s to destroy downed American pilots and trapped reconnaissance forces by “arc lighting,” dropping thunderously fiery concatenations of bombs that annihilate equipment and bodily evidence of the secret war. The SOG commandoes know that the hell of arc-lighting is bound to be their fate if they cannot escape within minutes.
In accord with training procedures, the SOG field commander calls for another round of Sarin or “GB” or so-called knockout or sleeping gas—not relatively mild tear gas, as is later alleged was used in Tailwind by U.S. government officials. Authorized by the Nixon White House—probably by Kissinger whose practice it is to micromanage battles in Laos and Cambodia from afar—the Skyraiders fire more rounds of CB-15 nerve gas bomblets. A poisonous vapor spreads over the elephant grass and NVA soldiers who inhale it begin writhing, convulsing as their nervous systems fatally overload with contradictory synaptic signals, dying horribly as every orifice excretes bodily fluids and organs fail.
The American commandoes, but not the Montagnards, are provided with nerve gas masks and injectable ampules of atropine—the antidote to inhaling Sarin. Three Montagnards perish. The Americans survive as the valley turns into an abattoir for life forms lacking M17 gas masks.
Back in America
Twenty-eight years later, a half dozen Tailwind veterans tell the story of this battle on camera to a team of CNN-Time Warner reporters during an 8-month investigation led by April Oliver, 36, and Jack Smith, 62. Oliver is a rising television news star, Smith is a legendarily meticulous broadcast journalist.
Of the soldiers and ranking officials who came in from the cold to speak their truths to CNN, some are seeking absolution, some are bragging, a handful are not sure or outright deny that lethal gas was used and POWs killed. In hours of on- and off-camera interviews, retired Navy Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, 85, who had chaired the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Tailwind, repeatedly confirms that defectors were a target of the operation, and that Sarin was deployed to save SOG. Moorer notes that because the U.S. did not ratify the 1925 Geneva Protocols until 1975, using Sarin in 1970 was “not technically illegal yet, [and] treaties will never stop people from using this weapon [Sarin]…I would have used any weapon, any tactic and any move to defend the security of the United States.”
So vital is his confirmation of the details, that Moorer is allowed to read the script of “Valley of Death” several days before the broadcast. He confirms the accuracy of the reporting. Several highly placed military and intelligence sources who were granted anonymity confirm the story to the CNN team. Nearly a dozen former Air Force pilots interviewed by CNN say that Sarin, also known as “grubby” and “glink,” was used in battle during the war on Vietnam as many as twenty times. The Pentagon issues no comment. Kissinger declines CNN’s interview requests.
After rounds of exhaustive vetting by executives and lawyers at CNN, the network broadcasts “Valley of Death” on June 7 and 8, 1998, narrated by famous war correspondent, Peter Arnett. Post-broadcast, several SOG members enthuse in press interviews praising the show. Oliver and Smith produce a follow up show that airs on June 14 with additional testimony from newly emerged sources confirming the core facts. Oliver and Arnett byline “Did the U.S. Drop Nerve Gas?” in Time. The story appears to be a journalistic success.
For the national security state apparatus, “Valley of Death” is a public relations catastrophe, and the institutional reaction is swift. The politically influential Special Forces Association loudly proclaims to the national press that the story is fictional. Under duress from leaders of the Association and the Department of Defense, several SOG members backtrack, saying that they were “tricked” by reporters. Oliver, who is eight months pregnant, is showered with death threats and hate emails. Kissinger and Colin Powell call the president of CNN, Tom Johnson, claiming that deploying Sarin and killing defectors did not occur during Operation Tailwind.
On July 21, the Department of Defense publishes a quickly manufactured report on department interviews with SOG participants who now claim that only tear gas was used to enable their escape from certain death. The Pentagon asserts that it can find no classified or unclassified evidence of the use of Sarin or the targeting of defectors in its internal investigation of details of the still classified operation.
The Department does not explain that in accord with standard operating procedures Operation Tailwind was designed to be deniable, covered by theoretically plausible counterfactuals—off the books, black.
The CIA tells the Pentagon that it has no record of Sarin use, nor of killing defectors during the raid. The NSA is not asked for a report on its participation. Nor does the investigation reveal that during the war on Vietnam, the military tested the efficacy of explosive Sarin weapons in tropical regions scores of times, including in the Upper Waiakea Forest Reserve on the island of Hawaii adjacent to the city of Hilo.
Determined to control political damage and to preserve its trademark military access, CNN hires a Wall Street attorney named Floyd Abrams to “independently” investigate the reporting with the assistance of CNN’s general counsel, David Kohler, who had pre-approved the broadcast. Abrams and Kohler do not review the bulk of the reporting materials, nor do they allow Oliver and Smith to read or respond to the conclusion of their report which opines that even though the allegations of Sarin use and targeting defectors might be true, the reporting does not support the most controversial elements of the story. As for Moorer, they insinuate he was senile and not reliable.
CNN retracts the story but does not say it is false. A CNN executive tells staffers the issue is not a journalism problem, but a public relations problem. CNN fires Oliver and Smith after they refuse to resign. The journalists release a detailed 77-page report rebutting the Abrams-Kohler document and hold a press conference attended by more than 200 reporters. They make a fact-filled case, but the mood in the room is ugly; Beltway media prefers to echo the Pentagon, not to investigate further.
Subsequently, Oliver and Smith appear on a variety of television talk shows to be willingly interrogated. They convincingly defend their reporting. But the government source-dependent Washington press corps embarks on an extended field day, typically depicting Oliver and Smith as agendized renegades.
Oliver and Smith sue CNN and win substantial settlements based on adjudications that their reporting did indeed fully support the broadcast. The sharply intelligent Admiral Moorer is deposed and under oath states that he had confirmed the facts and quotes in the script and that Oliver’s reporting notes of their interviews are accurate.
Steven Weinberg, a highly regarded investigative reporter reviews the CNN team’s original reporting materials—transcripts, memos, notes, military records and weapons handbooks—for a supportive story in The Nation, which is spiked by the publisher. Weinberg later tells Editor & Publisher, “The paper trail shows they did a great job. It was a very thorough piece of journalism…For that piece to have been disowned was ridiculous.” And Weinberg is not alone.
In December 1998, TV Guide publishes an unprecedently detailed twenty-thousand-word series investigating the Tailwind reporting, including independently interviewing the reporter’s sources. Journalists Mary Murphy and Dennis McDougal determine that “Valley of Death” holds up journalistically.
In early February this year, McDougal and I talk for two hours about Tailwind. McDougal, 77, has published 14 investigative books and has won multiple reporting awards during a distinguished career. He observes, “The government and the media lied collectively about the Tailwind story. It was checked, double checked, triple checked, and spot on. It was documented up the eyeballs, and still, the Washington press corps said, ‘It’s not true.’ What is true is that Jack and April are martyrs for real journalism—they paid the price for reporting on a matter the Pentagon wanted buried.”
Sadly, to this day, it is widely and erroneously asserted in mainstream news media and television sitcoms and military blogs that Oliver and Smith had failed to report accurately, because, after all, CNN retracted it.
Following a Paper Trail
Oliver goes on to fashion a stellar career as a corporate attorney specializing in enforcing internal compliance with ethical standards. Smith retires to Chicago and teaches journalism and politics to college students for many years. Both maintain the factual and journalistic integrity of “Valley of Death” as based upon the reporting records.
In 2014, I am invited to review their Tailwind reporting archive. I dig into 20 boxes of historical materials, which include everything from notes on napkins to published objections to the story. After a multi-month review, I agree with TV Guide and Weinberg—the Tailwind story is fully justified by the reporting, and it is CNN’s retraction that should be retracted.
In 2014, I file freedom of information requests related to Tailwind with the Air Force, the CIA, and the NSA. I do not expect to find records acknowledging the use of Sarin, nor the execution of American POWs, but perhaps unclassified records providing circumstantial evidence to further buttress statements made by Moorer, other military and intelligence officials, and the SOG soldiers.
The Air Force replies that the records I request, “remain classified and cannot be released to the public.” Classified records are scheduled to be released after 25 or 50 years, unless doing so is determined by reviewers to “gravely harm national security.” “Inactive” files are regularly destroyed. The decisional criteria for declassification and destruction are themselves classified.
The CIA asserts that it can find no records on Tailwind, nor on the use of Sarin, but it does produce a series of previously declassified and partially redacted CIA intelligence cables. These are cables issued during the secret war in Laos that describe the sighting of large numbers of well-fed, unshackled POWs in the Chavane region in August 1970. The cables were distributed to an array of military and intelligence agencies, including the NSA.
According to the partially redacted 1998 NSA publication titled Spartans in the Darkness, the NSA sometimes deployed SOG to counter the NVA’s radio interception and deception capabilities inside the Southeast Asian war zone, including Laos, where the agency monitored both enemy and U.S. military communications.
A CIA report dated January 17, 1971, “Detention and Treatment of American Prisoners of War” from “1964 through 31 October 1970” observes that American POWS were
“exploited for tactical and strategic information. American POWs were considered generally cooperative and much important information of tactical value was obtained from them…American pilots had provided information on flight techniques, maneuvers, operational capabilities and other information on U.S. aircraft which aided the NVA Air Defense units in devising successful counter-measures against attacks…Most American POWs were cooperative or ultimately persuaded to become cooperative because of the good treatment they received, which even included the serving of whole chicken, in lieu of turkey, on certain American holidays.”
The NSA is less forthcoming than the CIA, stonewalling, saying it will take many years to process my request. Finally, I stop calling.
In 2020, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press sponsors a program with Davis Wright Tremaine LLC to assist reporters with stalled FOIA requests. Media lawyer Thomas R. Burke files a lawsuit against the NSA on my behalf and requests that the agency use certain keywords to search its archives.
After several years of back and forth, the NSA claims that it cannot find any unclassifiable records on Tailwind, and it declines to use most of the suggested keywords.
In August 2023, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, referencing my NSA FOIA request, reports to Burke that it has located a relevant nine-page record. But it will not release the record because it is still classified as “relating to: Military plans, weapons systems,” implying that releasing it will gravely harm national security.
In January 2024, the NSA reports that it has located 22,800 potentially responsive documents, but the agency again declines to search these records using specific, non-generic keywords we have provided at the agency’s request.
Then, in September 2024, nearly a year after the death of the centenarian Kissinger, the NSA produces a declassified set of 32 pages assessing operations in Laos. The reports were delivered to Kissinger at his request in early October 1970. Recall: the NSA and the CIA previously claimed that they had no disclosable records on Tailwind.
The first CIA record is a September 9, 1970, EYES ONLY cable from the U.S. Ambassador to Laos, George McMurtrie Godley, to U.S. Army General Creighton Abrams requesting that SOG mount an operation east of Chavane as a “diversion” to draw NVA forces away from a larger U.S. attack on the Trail. The CIA was supervising the war in Laos, and CIA officers and State Department officials are well known to combine responsibilities.
Other produced documents, dated 7, 9, and 15 October 1970 were generated by the CIA’s covert war fighting Directorate of Plans commanded by Thomas Karamessines. At Kissinger’s request, Karamessines reports on interlocking “interdiction” operations in Laos, codenamed Tailwind, Gauntlet, and Prairie Fire.
One memo is scrawled “unlogged” on top of Kissinger’s handwritten request for the CIA to quantify and inventory NVA supplies destroyed during the combined operations. The Nixon administration is increasingly desperate for success metrics, such as its much vaunted “body counts,” even as evidence of its failure to stop the NVA is legion.
Karamessines reports that the overall operations have failed to seriously harm the NVA’s supply routes, and that casualties among US-led local forces are in the high hundreds, “Desertion rates are high with one entire unit abandoning its weapons and deserting en masse.”
On the bright side: “63 huts were destroyed,” and tons of rice and salt and scores of weapons and boxes of ammunitions were captured or destroyed (while being exhaustively inventoried during the heat of battle). Among a range of items that the CIA inventories as “booty” are 54 rounds of 60mm mortar ammunition, 4 ponchos, 3 hammocks, 8 canteens, 1 First Aid Kit, and “1 bar of soap—Lux.”
Karamessines claims that during Operation Tailwind 30 tons of supplies and 40 bicycles were destroyed and documents of “the highest rating for intelligence value” seized. During SOG’s three day battle no American soldiers died, but “over 400” enemy were killed by airstrikes. The report does not say that nerve gas was deployed. Nor did it say that women, children, and livestock perished in a residential military base gone suddenly silent after an airstrike. It does say, “Although met with almost continuous enemy harassment, the heavy application of close air support sustained the operation’s momentum and allowed the force to enter several enemy installations.”
CIA Directorate of Plans reports that the exact number of hundreds of enemies listed as killed during the campaign are “confirmed by polygraph examination.” It is standard practice to “confirm or deny [numbers killed] when we are able to polygraph the team.” SOG veterans told CNN that shortly after Tailwind they were put in a room and ordered to write after action reports that changed important details, such as the nationality of a Caucasian one of them burned alive with a “Willie Pete” white phosphorous grenade; he was ordered to write he killed a Russian, not an American. Copies of the after-action reports have not yet been produced in multiple FOIAs filed with multiple agencies.
As our lawsuit proceeds, additional military and intelligence records concerning Tailwind might be located and declassified and released—or not. More than a half century later, though, it is not hard to imagine what sort of information might still cause grave harm to national security. Perhaps polygraphs are in order.
This piece first appeared at The Edge.
