What The NVA Really Said About MACV-SOG 

What The NVA Really Said About MACV-SOG 

On the 16th of July, 1964, Radio Hanoi went on the air and read out a list of names. Six men. Their home addresses. The dates each one had been captured and the date their trial would begin. Those six men were a commando team code-named Attila. Dropped into North Vietnam by parachute less than 3 months earlier by an American-run program.

Washington had never admitted the team existed. Hanoi had just read their names out loud to the entire world. For 60 years, America’s secret war has been told almost entirely from the American side. Veterans, memoirs, unit citations. Search for what the other side thought of it and you will find endless videos quoting North Vietnamese generals speaking in awe of their enemy.

So, why is it that when you go hunting for those quotes in the actual documentary record, almost none of them survive contact? While the things Hanoi genuinely did say have been sitting inside a public American government document for the last 30 years. To answer that, you need a man who spent a decade of his life digging through it.

Sedgwick Tourison was a United States Army interrogator in Vietnam and Laos and later a prisoner of war analyst. In 1996, he sat down in front of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and laid out what he had found in roughly 240,000 pages of declassified records. What he described was not one secret war.

It was two and they have been getting mixed together ever since. The first was the war against the North itself. Agent teams recruited in South Vietnam, trained by Americans, parachuted or landed by boat into North Vietnam to spy and sabotage. It began under the Central Intelligence Agency in 1961 and was handed to the Pentagon in January 1964 when the Studies and Observations Group was created.

The second was the cross-border war. Small reconnaissance teams going over the fence into Laos and Cambodia to watch the supply trails. Different men, different mission, different results. Almost everything Hanoi is quoted as saying about the famous cross-border teams turns out to belong to the other war. And in that other war, Hanoi was not quietly impressed.

Hanoi was talking constantly. Start with the word itself because the vocabulary tells you what Hanoi thought it was fighting. The Vietnamese term is biet kich. It translates roughly as commando or raider. And it is a real word that appears in genuine captured enemy paperwork. A People’s Liberation Armed Forces circular captured in early 1967 carried the title Experiences in killing biet kich. Not a memoir.

 Not a legend. A working instruction sheet on how to hunt commandos. Here’s the detail that almost everyone reporting on this misses. In its public output, Hanoi rarely bothered separating anybody. Central Intelligence Agency agent teams, South Vietnamese commandos, American-led recon patrols, all of it got folded into a single propaganda category.

 Spies and commandos sent by the imperialists. Tolson explains exactly why that lumping was useful. In his written statement to the Senate, he notes that North Vietnamese security officials publicly labeled the captured men American commandos because their presence was the evidence Hanoi wanted. In the early 1960s, there were very few American ground troops in Vietnam.

 And Hanoi was struggling to prove to its own population that the Americans were really running the war. Captured commandos put on trial with the press invited were that proof. Which means the men were worth more to Hanoi talking than dead. So, Hanoi talked. Publicly, repeatedly, and by name. In December 1961, an agent named Din Hu Khoa was put on public trial in Hanoi.

Torson testified that the capture was reported widely in the international press. His wife was paid death benefits the following month. Then came Attila, the team from the opening of this video. Senator John Kerry read the sequence into the Senate record. The team went in on the 25th of April, 1964, and was captured almost immediately.

3 months later, Radio Hanoi broadcast their names, their addresses, their capture dates, and their trial dates. Declassified Defense Department papers show the American side knew the team was in enemy hands. By the beginning of the following year, the Defense Department had declared all and paid small benefits to their families.

 You would think someone would have said something. Nobody did. This was not a handful of men. Kerry told the committee that starting with the very first team in early 1961 and running to the early 1970s, 52 teams, totaling roughly 500 commandos, were inserted into North Vietnam. Committee Chairman Arlen Specter put it plainly in his opening statement.

The majority were captured, tried for treason, and then imprisoned. Hanoi was announcing the outcome of the secret war on the radio while Washington was still calling it a secret. Now, for the part that turns this from embarrassing into something much colder. Torson’s written statement to the committee describes what American investigators eventually confirmed in the declassified files.

The agent teams that appeared to be alive and radioing home from deep inside North Vietnam had all been captured. Their radio operators were transmitting under the control of North Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security Counterespionage Directorate. The intelligence flowing back to Saigon was being written by the people it was supposed to be spying on.

That is not a raid or an ambush. That is an enemy service holding the pin. what the Americans learned about North Vietnam. And for years the Americans paid for the privilege and asked for more. Toursin put numbers on the cost. Between 1960 and late 1963 roughly 250 agents were lost under agency control. Between the spring of 1964 and October 1967 under Pentagon control another 240 were lost inside North Vietnam along with more in Laos and Cambodia.

Not one long-range agent team came home. The teams asking for reinforcements were the enemy asking for more prisoners. And the resupply drops were being guided in. Still the program continued year after year because the illusion of agents inside North Vietnam stayed politically useful in Washington. The document that surfaced next made all of it worse.

Buried in the declassified record was the instruction for how to clear the books. Toursin quoted the operations officer United States Marine Corps Colonel John Winzer describing what was done. They reduced the number of dead gradually declaring a set number dead each month until the men had all been written off paid and removed from the monthly payroll.

Men sitting in North Vietnamese prisons erased from an American ledger a few at a time so the loss rate would never appear on a single page. That is not a typo, by the way. They were declared dead on a schedule. One obvious question hung over the whole program at the time. Why did almost every team land in the wrong place? Two commanders spent years hunting for a leak and never found it.

Hanoi answered that question itself in 1995 on national television. Thorson told the Senate that one month after his book was published, Vietnam’s interior ministry produced the man. Former South Vietnamese Lieutenant Colonel Do Van Tien, deputy chief of covert operations into North Vietnam. On camera, he stated that across the entire program, he had passed North Vietnamese intelligence the planned landing site of every team sent north.

Every team from the inside for years. The same officer had been the case officer handling an agent code named Aris, one of the very first men sent north who had been turned and run back against his own side. Take that in order. Hanoi knew where the teams would land before the aircraft took off because the man choosing the landing sites worked for Hanoi.

Then, Hanoi captured the teams, took their radios, and used them to order more. Decades later, Hanoi went on television and said so out loud. That is the answer to the question in the title. What the North Vietnamese said about America’s secret war was not admiration. It was a receipt. If you are finding this useful, subscribing helps this channel keep doing the archive work these stories actually need.

Every claim in this video comes from named documents and the full source list is in the description. Now, jump forward to today and look at what fills the space where the real story should be. Search this topic and you will meet a wall of confident quotations from North Vietnamese officers about how badly they feared American reconnaissance teams.

Almost none of it holds up. The most famous example does not even involve the secret war. The widely shared passage in which General Vo Nguyen Giap supposedly admits the North was ready to surrender is fabricated. HistoryNet points out that his memoir was published in 1976, not the 1985 edition the story depends on and that it contains nothing of the kind.

Snopes reached the same conclusion and traced the sentiment back to a British counterinsurgency expert rather than anyone in Hanoi. Then there is the number you have heard in every documentary that the cross-border teams forced Hanoi to divert 40 or 50,000 troops to guard the trail. Take that at face value and it sounds like Hanoi’s own assessment. It is not.

It comes from the American unit citation and from historian John L. Plaster’s work and some Studies and Observations Group veterans have publicly called the citation figure invented. The same applies to the cash bounties supposedly placed on American recon men and to the kill ratios of 100 or more enemy dead for every American lost.

Those are American estimates carrying every body count problem of the era. They are not Vietnamese claims. One caution worth stating directly because it is now the biggest source of pollution on this topic. Articles are circulating that present themselves as translated North Vietnamese documents complete with real generals’ names and plausible unit numbers and which carry a disclaimer at the bottom admitting the story is fiction written for entertainment.

That material is being scraped into videos and repeated as history. In our own research for this script, we could not find a single North Vietnamese wartime official history that names the Studies and Observations Group. The acronym appears in Vietnamese writing decades later in articles built partly on American books.

Hanoi was extremely specific about the men it caught. It was close to silent about the unit that hunted the trail. Those are two very different silences, and running them together is how the myths got made. Which brings us to the last man in this story, and the one the paperwork could not classify. Ha Van Son was recruited in 1967.

He was 19 years old. He was not on an agent team going into North Vietnam. He was on a cross-border team in Laos led by Americans in the operation the Studies and Observations Group ran itself. His team got into a firefight. The helicopter sent to lift them out was shot down and crashed, by Turse’s account, into the middle of a North Vietnamese ammunition dump.

The American team leader, Master Sergeant Ronald Dexter, was taken prisoner, and, on the evidence Turse presented, beaten to death before reaching Hanoi. A young Marine on the aircraft, Frank Sayers, was captured and came home in the prisoner exchange of 1973. Ha Van Son was declared dead. His father signed a death gratuity for 12 months of pay.

Son spent close to 20 years in prison. When American negotiators handed over their list of prisoners in Paris, his name was not on it. At the Senate hearing, the former commander of the Studies and Observations Group, retired Major General John Singlaub, was asked about him directly. Singlaub confirmed that the cross-border men were recruited, trained, and commanded by Americans, and that the United States did owe them.

Asked whether he could justify what had happened to Son, he answered that he could not. Then, Son spoke for himself. How did all these folks get from Vietnam to here? How long have they lived in the United States? Right now, I fight not only for my honor, not only for my money, but also for the future of America.

That is exactly what I want to see in the United States of America, because I think this nation is the best nation of human. Congress eventually acted. Compensation for the surviving commandos was authorized through the defense authorization legislation of the following years, at $2,000 for every year spent in prison.

Torson told the committee that nearly 300 agents walked out of North Vietnamese prisons alive in the 1980s, and that their former commanders on both sides largely behaved as though they had never existed. So, the honest answer to what the North Vietnamese really said about America’s secret war is this.

They said the names on the radio in 1964. They said them in courtrooms with the press invited. They said them through radio sets they had captured and were operating themselves. And in 1995, they put the man who sold the entire program in front of a television camera and let him explain how he did it. Everything Hanoi said was on the record.

It was the American side that could not say it out loud. As of today, Master Sergeant Ronald Dexter has still never been accounted for. Vietnamese archives on the war remain largely closed to outside researchers, and much of what does exist has never been translated into English. The story of what Hanoi knew and when is still only partly written.

If you want more work like this, the sources for everything you just heard are linked below, including the full Senate transcript, which is free to read. Subscribe if you would like the next one.