Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group
Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group was a highly classified, multi-service United States special operations unit which conducted covert unconventional warfare operations before and during the Vietnam War.
Established on 24 January 1964, it conducted strategic reconnaissance missions in the Republic of Vietnam, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. MACV-SOG's missions included taking prisoners, rescuing downed pilots, conducting rescue operations to retrieve prisoners of war throughout Southeast Asia; and overseeing agent team activities and conducting psychological operations.
The unit participated in most of the significant campaigns of the Vietnam War, including the Gulf of Tonkin incident which precipitated increased American involvement, Operation Steel Tiger, Operation Tiger Hound, the Tet Offensive, Operation Commando Hunt, the Cambodian Campaign, Operation Lam Son 719, and the Easter Offensive. The unit was downsized and renamed Strategic Technical Directorate Assistance Team 158 on 1 May 1972, to support the transfer of its work to the Strategic Technical Directorate of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam as part of the Vietnamization effort.
Foundation
The Studies and Observations Group was a top secret, joint unconventional warfare task force created on 24 January 1964 by the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a subsidiary command of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. It eventually consisted primarily of personnel from the United States Army Special Forces, the United States Navy SEALs, the United States Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance, the United States Air Force, and the Central Intelligence Agency.The Special Operations Group, as the unit was initially titled, was in fact controlled by the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities and his staff at the Pentagon. This arrangement was necessary since SOG needed some listing in the MACV table of organization and the fact that MACV's commander, General William Westmoreland, had no authority to conduct operations outside territorial South Vietnam. This command arrangement through SACSA also allowed tight control of the scope and scale of the organization's operations.
Its mission was:
...to execute an intensified program of harassment, diversion, political pressure, the capture of prisoners, physical destruction, acquisition of intelligence, generation
of propaganda, and diversion of resources, against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
These operations were conducted in an effort to convince North Vietnam to cease its sponsorship of the Viet Cong insurgency in South Vietnam. Similar operations had been under the purview of the CIA, which placed agent teams in North Vietnam with airdrops and over-the-beach insertions. Under pressure from Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, the program, and all other agency para-military operations, was turned over to the military in the wake of the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion operation in Cuba.
SOG's first commander, Colonel Clyde Russell, had difficulty creating an organization to fulfill his mission since, at the time, United States Special Forces were unprepared doctrinally or organizationally to carry it out. At this point the Special Forces' mission was to conduct guerrilla operations behind enemy lines in the event of an invasion by conventional forces, not conducting agent, maritime, or psychological operations. Russell expected to take over a fully functional organization and assumed that the CIA would see the military through any teething troubles. His expectations and assumptions were incorrect. The contribution of the South Vietnamese came in the form of SOG's counterpart organization.
After a slow and shaky start, the unit got its operations underway. Originally, these consisted of a continuation of the CIA's agent infiltrations. Teams of South Vietnamese volunteers were parachuted into the North, but most were quickly captured. Maritime operations against the coast of North Vietnam resumed after the delivery of Norwegian-built "Nasty" Class Fast Patrol Boats to the unit, but these operations also fell short of expectations.
Gulf of Tonkin Incident
On the night of 30–31 July 1964, four SOG vessels shelled two islands, Hon Me and Hon Ngu, off the coast of North Vietnam. It was the first time SOG vessels had attacked North Vietnamese shore facilities by shelling from the sea. The next afternoon, the destroyer began an electronic intelligence-gathering mission along the coast, in the Gulf of Tonkin. On the afternoon of 2 August, three s of the Vietnam People's Navy came out from Hon Me and attacked the Maddox. The American vessel was undamaged, and the U.S. claimed that one of the attacking vessels had been sunk and that the others were damaged by U.S. carrier-based aircraft. On the night of 3–4 August, three SOG vessels shelled targets on the mainland of North Vietnam. On the night of 4 August, after being joined by the destroyer, Maddox reported to Washington that both ships were under attack by unknown vessels, assumed to be North Vietnamese.This second reported attack led President Lyndon B. Johnson to launch Operation Pierce Arrow, an aerial attack against North Vietnamese targets on 5 August. Johnson also went to the United States Congress that day and requested the passage of the Southeast Asia Resolution, asking for the unprecedented authority to conduct military actions in Southeast Asia without a declaration of war.
Johnson's announcement of the incidents involving the destroyers did not mention that SOG vessels had been conducting operations in the same area as the Maddox immediately before, and during, that cruise; nor did it mention that, on 1 and 2 August, Laotian aircraft, flown by Thai pilots, carried out bombing raids in North Vietnam itself, or that a SOG agent team had been inserted into the same relative area and been detected by the North Vietnamese. Hanoi, which may have assumed that all of these actions signaled a coordinated military escalation against them, decided to respond in what it claimed as its territorial waters. Thus, the three P-4s were ordered to attack the Maddox. The second incident, in which Maddox and Turner Joy were claimed to be attacked, never took place.
The last aspect of SOG's original missions consisted of psychological operations conducted against North Vietnam. The unit's naval arm picked up northern fishermen during searches of coastal vessels and detained them on Cu Lao Cham Island off Da Nang, South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese crews and personnel on the island posed as members of a fictional dissident northern communist group known as the Sacred Sword of the Patriot League, which opposed the takeover of the Hanoi regime by politicians who supported the People's Republic of China. The kidnapped fishermen were well fed and treated, but they were also subtly interrogated and indoctrinated in the message of the SSPL. After a two-week stay, the fishermen were returned to northern waters.
This fiction was supported by the radio broadcasts of SOG's "Voice of the SSPL", leaflet drops, and gift kits containing pre-tuned radios which could only receive broadcasts from the unit's transmitters. SOG also broadcast "Radio Red Flag," programming purportedly directed by a group of dissident communist military officers also within the north. Both stations were equally adamant in their condemnations of the PRC, the South and North Vietnamese regimes, and the U.S. and called for a return to traditional Vietnamese values. Straight news, without propaganda embellishment, was broadcast from South Vietnam via the Voice of Freedom, another SOG creation.
These agent operations and propaganda efforts were supported by SOG's air arm, the First Flight Detachment. The unit consisted of four heavily modified C-123 Provider aircraft flown by Nationalist Chinese aircrews in SOG's employ. The aircraft flew agent insertions and resupply, leaflet and gift kit drops, and carried out routine logistics missions for SOG.
''Shining Brass''
On 21 September 1965, the Pentagon authorized MACV-SOG to begin cross-border operations in Laos in areas contiguous to South Vietnam's western border. MACV had sought authority for the launching of such missions since 1964 in an attempt to put boots on the ground in a reconnaissance role to observe, first hand, the enemy logistical system known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. MACV, through the Seventh Air Force, had begun carrying out a strategic bombardment of the logistical system in southern Laos in April and had received authorization to launch an all-Vietnamese recon effort that had proven to be a disaster. U.S. troops were necessary and SOG was given the green light.
On 18 October 1965, MACV-SOG conducted its first cross-border mission against target D-1, a suspected truck terminus on Laotian Route 165, inside Laos. The team consisted of two U.S. Special Forces soldiers and four South Vietnamese. The mission was deemed a success with 88 bombing sorties flown against the terminus resulting in multiple secondary explosions, but also resulted in SOG's first casualty, Special Forces Captain Larry Thorne in a helicopter crash. William H. Sullivan, U.S. Ambassador to Laos, was determined that he would remain in control over decisions and operations that took place within the supposedly neutral kingdom.
The Laotian Civil War that raged intermittently between the communist Pathet Lao and the Royal Lao armed forces compelled both sides to maintain as low a profile as possible. Hanoi was interested in Laos due only to the necessity of keeping its supply corridor to the south open. The U.S. was involved for the opposite reason. Both routinely operated inside Laos, but both also managed to keep their operations out of sight due to Lao's supposed neutrality pursuant to the 1962 International Agreement on the Neutrality of Laos.
Ambassador Sullivan had the task of juggling the bolstering of the inept Lao government and military, the CIA and its clandestine army, the USAF and its bombing campaign, and now the incursions of the U.S.-led reconnaissance teams of SOG. His limitations on SOG's operations led to immediate and continuous enmity between the embassy in Vientiane and the commander and troops of SOG, who promptly labelled Sullivan the "Field Marshal." The ambassador responded in kind.
Regardless, MACV-SOG began a series of operations that would continue to grow in size and scope over the next eight years. The Laotian operations were originally run by a Command and Control headquarters at Da Nang. The teams, usually three Americans and three to 12 indigenous mercenaries, were launched from Forward Operating Bases in the border areas. After in-depth planning and training, a team was airlifted over the border by aircraft provided by the U.S. Marine Corps or by dedicated Republic of Vietnam Air Force H-34 Kingbee helicopters of the 219th Squadron, which would remain affiliated with MACV-SOG for its entire history. The team's mission was to penetrate the target area, gather intelligence, and remain undetected as long as possible. Communication was maintained with a forward air control aircraft, which would communicate with USAF fighter-bombers if the necessity, or the opportunity to strike lucrative targets, arose. The FAC was also the lifeline through which the team would communicate with its FOB and through which it could call for extraction if compromised.
By the end of 1965, MACV-SOG had shaken itself out into operational groups commanded from its Saigon headquarters. These included Maritime Operations, which continued harassment raids and support for psychological operations ; Airborne Operations, which continued to insert agent teams and supplies into the north; Psychological Operations, which continued its "black" radio broadcasts, leaflet and gift kit drops, and running the operation at Cu Lao Cham; the revised Shining Brass program; and Air Operations, which supported the others and provided logistical airlift. Training for SOG's South Vietnamese agents, naval action teams, and indigenous mercenaries was conducted at the ARVN Airborne training center at Long Thành, southeast of Bien Hoa. Training for the U.S. personnel assigned to recon teams was conducted at Kham Duc.