IN LATE NOVEMBER 1968 I ARRIVED IN SAIGON and a few days later walked through the looking glass of the U.S. military command’s intelligence headquarters in South Vietnam. There, in an airconditioned briefing room several stories up, I was told that we had the communists on the run.
Winking, Blinken and Nah.
This was news to me. The consensus I’d carried from stateside was that the American project in South Vietnam had received a staggering, if not mortal, blow from the communist side back in January, when some 80,000 North Vietnamese and local Vietcong troops had launched a massive surprise attack across the country, including on the national capita, where a squad managed to get inside the American embassy compound. The fight went on for weeks more in many other places, including the ancient capital of Hué, where the communists laid heavy casualties on young U.S. Marines.
The questions arose (and not for the first time): What’s the American plan for winning? What’s winning look like? There was none, as it turned out, beyond fighting to stave off defeat long enough to leave.
But my briefers were upbeat: the communists had been routed, they pointed out Their troops had been decimated. The Saigon regime and its troops, targeted for destruction, held.
All true, I learned firsthand when I took up my post a few weeks later in the major coastal city of DaNang. The intelligence I was gathering on the enemy showed local Viet Cong battalions in the countryside had been whittled down from 250-300 troops to, in many cases, just 25 or 30 men—the very definition of decimation. Da Nang, an old French colonial port city, was quiet and safe, masking, of course, the insurrection boiling underneath.
But by the end of my tour 11 months later, the VC units were back up to full strength. North Vietnamese army regiments were entrenched in the mountains a few clicks outside the city. And whatever the American plan was in late 1969, it was not evident to me—beyond staving off defeat. Until then, laissez the bon temps rouler.
Echoes
This long ago chapter in my life flushed up in the wake of Israel’s “brilliant” op to infiltrate lethal electronic pagers and walkie-talkies into Hezbollah’s supply chain. Many a CIA veteran said they were dazzled by Israel’s inventive and daring sabotage op, which killed a couple dozen Party of God fighters and functionaries and wounded some 2,800 others, children and women among them.
“I’d be absolutely over the moon with joy at the huge operational success and possibly ignoring what this means for peace…,” James Lawler, a retired former CIA ops officer told me last week, describing how the “symphony” of various intelligence functions in successful such ops is seductive. “The challenge for the operations chief is not to lose sight of the overall goal just because the music he/she is creating is so beautiful operationally,” he said. “I nearly fell into that trap because it was intoxicating.”
But sober questions have quickly followed about what’s next for Israel and Lebanon, like faint echoes from my own long ago war. The U.S. had introduced a dazzling array of technological advances into the Vietnam contest, from lightweight M-16s and fast moving Huey helicopters and electronic ground sensors to napalm, defoliant sprays, massive B-52 carpet bombing raids and the computer-driven Phoenix assassination program. The enemy reeled, but was not defeated. The carnage piled up. By the late 1960s, Washington had turned into the political equivalent of a leper.
As Frank Snepp, the CIA’s top analyst in Saigon at the time commented on this site last week, ”Search and destroy ops and Agent Orange were mercilessly effective in eliminating immediate human threats in Vietnam, but we wound up dancing celebratory jigs on the grave of America’s global moral standing and suffered incalculable political and diplomatic damage.”
Israel long ago headed down that path, but in spades after Oct. 7, taking Hamas’s suicide bait. Superior intelligence is not wisdom, it turns out.
“There are reports that the Israelis had planned to activate the pagers and their lethal circuitry as part of some future yet unscheduled military initiative and were stampeded into immediate action by fear of discovery,” Snepp added. “Let’s hope that is what happened, because causing such carnage in Lebanon, so much of it to the civilian population, at this critical moment in the Hamas and Hezbollah negotiations and at risk of a devastating wider war, raises questions about the sanity of Bibi [Netanyahu] and his immediate advisers.”
In Lebanon, as in the wider Middle East arena, any claims that Israel’s superb intelligence-gathering, technological wizardry and daring can translate into more than a fleeting tactical victory are, at best, premature, if not hallucinogenic. Hezbollah is a death cult. It doesn’t care much about casualties. It’s willing to fight until the last Lebanese or Palestinian, as is its sponsor in Iran. Israel seems happy to oblige them.
Last week, following the second round of sabotage planted in Hezbollah’s walkie-talkies, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant thumped his chest a bit, saying, “the results are very impressive.” But not for long.
“What I’m watching now in Lebanon is hauntingly similar to what I saw in 1982 as a young reporter in Beirut covering the Israeli invasion that year,” veteran national security journalist David Ignatius grimly warned Monday night in The Washington Post. “The problem, then as now, was overreach. Israel wanted to go to the root, to crush its chief adversary at the time, the Palestine Liberation Organization. No more halfway measures; use every weapon in the arsenal.”
In went the IDF. Now it’s itching to go in once again and “finish” the job, driven by the unacceptable Hezbollah attacks on its northern towns. It looks like a suicide pact.
Then and Now
“Israel had dazzling military and intelligence dominance back then, just as it does now,” Ignatius continued. “Its troops reached the suburbs of Beirut in days. But then what? Israel’s overwhelming power masked a strategic weakness: Its leaders didn’t have a good answer to the question, ‘Tell me how this ends.’”
I wondered the same after a few days walking around Saigon. The capital was even then mortally bloated with stripper bars, beggars, heroin, crippled war veterans, double agents, opium dens, compromised generals and cigar-puffing war profiteers cruising by thousands of desperate refugees camping on the muddy banks of the Saigon river, where supply ships disgorged palates of TVs, air conditioners, tape players, shampoos and liquor along with tanks, choppers, Jeeps, machine guns and trucks. Equivalent scenes played out in Kabul for 20 years.
There, as in Saigon, It would take a few more years before the ends came—and then they came fast. In Kabul in 2021, as in Saigon in 1975, the whole rickety enterprise melted like a Madame Tussaud’s on fire.
That’s an unimaginable scenario for Israel—as long as Washington has its back. But Bibi and his cronies are testing our patience. The Biden administration, desperately seeking an offramp for all sides, won’t let the country go under, even as it shudders with the prospect of Israel instigating an all-out war with Iran. But the shiites are fantastically determined, and the butcher’s bill is still open. Surely Israel and the U.S. can find a better use of its intelligence agencies than cell phones, pagers and walkie-talkies that go boom.
This is exactly what caused the war. William Burns, current director of CIA wrote this in a memo to Condaleezza Rice 20 years ago. This was a known red line laid out by the Russians
Officials say two days of attacks have created carnage across the country. Also: US IT firm CrowdStrike apologises for the world’s worst computer glitch, and the country with a growing number of mountain gorillas.
