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........

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