Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  Many of these operations were done in daylight, in support of the air rescue unit, rather than as part of the unit’s real mission of delivering agents behind enemy lines.

  On one mission, Sullivan and Frank Westerman, the unit commander, flew deep into enemy territory in a vain attempt to locate an American reportedly attempting to avoid capture near the city of Antung. The crew was told that this mission was the deepest helicopter penetration of enemy territory during the war.

  “That one happened to be our own mission,” Sullivan says. “One of air rescue’s SA-16 crews flew navigation for us on that mission at about a hundred feet off the water and then stayed up there with us until we came back out offshore. Man, that crew was good!”

  Sullivan’s own account understates the difficulty and danger of the mission. He and Westerman took off from Ch’o Do before dawn and flew just above the waves for two hours. At dawn, they dashed inland toward the position where radio signals indicated an American flier was awaiting rescue. Antung, a major Chinese fighter base, was only ten minutes’ flying time away.

  As they came into the valley where the pilot was believed to be, hundreds of guns opened up. Quickly realizing they had been lured into a trap, they turned and fled successfully back out to sea. For their attempt, Westerman and Sullivan were awarded the Silver Star and Distinguished Flying Cross.

  “All in all, we—six of us—put roughly one thousand hours on four H-19s,” Sullivan continues. “We did both the ARCS mission and the air rescue mission, having never refused a single one. We earned a bunch of decorations, took our share of battle damage, yet never, as long as combat missions were flown in that theater, had an accident, a combat loss, or a fatality. Not too shabby for a bunch of beginners, huh?”

  A major assignment for the ARCS unit was dropping propaganda leaflets over enemy territory. Some of the leaflets warned civilians of bombing raids; others urged enemy soldiers to defect; still others were calculated to undermine enemy morale.

  The wing was capable of producing and distributing an amazing volume of leaflets: as many as 4 million five-inch by seven-inch leaflets a day, printed in two colors on both sides of the sheet.

  It was on a leaflet-dropping mission near the Chinese border that the 581st Wing suffered one of its most serious losses, one that also focused unwanted attention on what was supposed to be a very secret operation.

  On the night of 12 January 1953, a B-29 piloted by Col. John K. Arnold, commander of the 581st Wing, was assigned to drop leaflets—some of them warning of imminent B-29 bombing attacks—over five North Korean towns. As the plane approached the last target, the village of Ch’olson, it was suddenly illuminated by searchlights. Seconds later, it was attacked by a MiG-15 fighter plane. The right inboard engine burst into flames.

  For these special missions, the plane had been stripped of all its guns except for one gun position in the tail. The tail gunner fought back as two more MiGs joined the attack, but he was badly outgunned. Two more engines were hit. With the plane fatally crippled, Arnold rang the bail-out alarm. Eleven members of the fourteen-man crew survived the crash. They were quickly captured and moved across the border into China, where they were accused of espionage.

  Arnold and the other members of his crew remained in captivity until their release on 3 August 1955—the last American prisoners of the war to be released by the Chinese.

  As the Korean War wound down and the United States moved into its traditional postwar downsizing, it became obvious to leaders of ARCS that they had better come up with an important peacetime mission or they would be out of business. The dilemma was that ARCS had no peacetime mission beyond training. Once crews were trained, there was little or nothing for them to do.

  Brigadier General Monro MacCloskey, who was the controversial commander of special operations forces operating out of Italy in World War II, became commander of ARCS on 15 September 1952 and immediately set about finding a peacetime mission for his command.

  Early in 1953, he organized Operation Think. The object was to stimulate everyone in ARCS to think up jobs the unit could do in peacetime.

  Suggestions poured in. Most focused on ways to “create fear, panic, and general unrest among enemy groups” in the Soviet Bloc. Red Fratricide was a plan to spread discrediting information about communist military leaders and thus undermine confidence in their leadership. Red Finesse was a proposal to target the control elite of the Communist hierarchy for propaganda attacks. This Week was a plan to encourage Soviet Bloc aircrews to defect with their airplanes.

  Of nearly a hundred suggestions, thirty were considered promising enough to be sent on to the United States Information Agency and other government organizations for consideration.

  While a few of the proposals were adopted—the suggestion to encourage defections by aircrews became an operation with the code name of Gretna Green—ARCS was told to concentrate on projects that could be done by the Air Force alone, and then came the event that MacCloskey and others had feared: ARCS itself was put on the budget chopping block as the perceived threat of war with the Soviet Union declined and the Eisenhower administration looked for ways to cut spending.

  Fish recalls being assigned to sort out the functions that ARCS had tried to bring under its umbrella:

  “I was called back to the Pentagon on short notice to complete the downsizing of this program. I was sent to Wiesbaden to look at the whole program and assign parts to an appropriate government entity. We had the Army, Navy, Air Force, State Department, CIA, FBI, the Voice of America on the committee. We spent three weeks sorting it out. When it was done, the Air Force had the flying end left. That was it. By the 1960s, it was all gone.”

  During the latter part of the 1950s, the ARCS wings shrank to group size and then down to squadrons, but they continued with their basic Air Force special operations for a number of years.

  Units operating out of England and Libya dropped agents in Albania and other Balkan countries as the CIA sought to influence events in those areas.

  In the late 1950s, the ARCS amphibious SA-16s stood by to rescue U-2 pilots if they crashed. The lightweight U-2 planes, flying so high they could not be reached by Soviet fighters or antiaircraft rockets, flew back and forth over the Soviet Union, photographing air bases and missile sites. On two occasions, U-2 pilots were rescued by the SA-16s after landing in the water, once in the Black Sea, on another occasion in the Caspian Sea. The U-2 program over the USSR came to an end after a U-2 flown by Francis Gary Powers was finally hit by a surface-to-air missile on 1 May 1960.

  As early as 1953, ARCS crews in the Far East were called upon to support the French in their losing battle against the Vietminh in Vietnam.

  Some of the early flights, carrying supplies from the Philippines to the French in Hanoi, were considered something of a junket. On one occasion, twelve members of the organization went along on what seemed like a sightseeing trip in a C-119. They were supposed to land, unload their cargo of aircraft engines, and return home the next day. But their plane had a malfunction, and they were stranded in Hanoi long enough to survive an attack on the airfield where they had landed.

  Later, the ARCS unit at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines became both a training center for civilian pilots flying for Civil Air Transport, a company operated by the CIA, and the source of fresh aircraft for the French. Planes flown in from Japan entered a hangar with American markings and emerged with French markings. ARCS crews then flew them to Hanoi and picked up war-weary planes, which they flew back to the Philippines.

  By the late 1950s, the Air Force ability to carry out a significant special operations mission had been allowed to wither almost completely away. It was time for another rebirth.

  PART 4

  The Longest War

  CHAPTER 14

  They Called It Jungle Jim

  In the spring and summer of 1961, Air Force crew members in various parts of the world received mysterious, disturbing orders: “Report to the base commander.”


  There was a note of urgency about the orders. One pilot returned from a flight one evening and was told to report at eight o’clock the next morning—a Sunday.

  Richard Secord, then a captain, recalls returning from a test flight in a jet fighter and being ordered to report to a major general. Since leaving West Point, he had never even met a general officer. He figured something very big, or very strange, must be going on.

  The first reaction, of course, was an anxious review of the last few weeks: “What have I done wrong?”

  When the men reported, they were greeted cordially. It soon became apparent that they were not there for a chewing out. Then came the questions:

  “Would you like an interesting flight assignment in World War II aircraft?

  “Would you like to fly these aircraft in foreign countries?

  “Would you be willing to fly them in civilian clothes?

  “Would you fly them in hostile-fire situations?”

  A single negative answer was enough to end the interview.

  Those who passed this simple test were then subjected to a more intrusive two-day series of psychological tests. As many as 40 percent of some groups of volunteers washed out. One officer figured the goal of the exercise was to pick the crazy ones for this mystery assignment.

  For many of those chosen, the next stop was the Air Force Survival School at Stead Air Force Base, Nevada. It was a grueling three-week course designed to teach the fliers how to survive off the land in hostile territory and how to behave if they were captured.

  From there, they went to the Florida panhandle and checked in at one of a series of long wooden one-story buildings at auxiliary field No. 9 at Eglin Air Force Base. That field, one of a number of satellite fields in the swampy tidelands surrounding the main Eglin compound, is now Hurlburt Field, home of the Air Force Special Operations Command.

  When the men arrived, they learned that they were members of something code-named Jungle Jim. More formally, it was known as the 4400th Combat Crew Training Squadron. It was divided into three sections, and each section was assigned to one of the long wooden buildings: C-47 crews in one building, B-26 crews in another, and T-28 crews in a third.

  The 4400th Squadron was created by Gen. Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, on 14 April 1961.

  Creation of the Jungle Jim operation marked the reluctant recognition by the conventional Air Force of the new world of counterinsurgency or brushfire warfare—what the Communists called wars of national liberation. It also formally recognized what the Air Force, or at least some of its members, had already been doing for several years, usually in close cooperation with the CIA.

  Even though Air Force thinking and doctrine had been dominated by bomber generals such as LeMay, who had led strikes against Japan in World War II and then built the Strategic Air Command into a formidable weapon designed to destroy the Soviet Union, a fringe group of Air Force officers had been doing some strange and secret things in various parts of the world.

  In Operation Haik, in 1958, the CIA set up a small air unit to provide air support to rebels against the Indonesian government headed by President Achmed Sukarno. The original plan had been to train Indonesians to fly the planes, but they lacked experience. Instead, the CIA relied on a combination of former United States Air Force pilots plus several Poles and Hungarians who had been flying B-26s on reconnaissance missions in Europe.

  On 28 May 1958, Allen Pope, one of the Americans, was shot down as he attempted to attack a convoy of government ships moving in for a landing on the island of Morotai.

  The Indonesians imprisoned Pope and threatened to execute him. There was well-based fear in Washington that the threat would be carried out.

  A CIA crew was secretly trained in the Philippines to snatch Pope from his prison compound. The rescue of Pope would be the first operational test of an ingenious device called the Fulton Recovery System, for its inventor, Robert Fulton.

  In the Fulton “sky hook” system, a package is dropped to a man on the ground. It consists of a pair of coveralls with a parachute harness sewn in, a balloon and tank of gas, and a long nylon cord.

  The plan was this: agents in Indonesia would smuggle a pair of the special coveralls to Pope. Working outside the prison at night, they would inflate the balloon and release it to lift the nylon line high in the air. When the balloon was in position, they would throw the nylon line over the wall. Pope would grab the end of the line and attach it to his harness. A plane would then swoop down and snag the line with a boom fastened out in front of its nose. When the line became taut, Pope would suddenly rise straight up and disappear into the darkness. The plane crew would reel him in and fly away. There would be one less prisoner at the body count the next morning.

  Plans for the rescue attempt were dropped in 1961 after the pilot carefully trained for the pickup mission was killed while dropping supplies in Laos. Perhaps fortunately for Pope, the United States government found a more conventional way to spare him from execution, and he was released in 1962 after the United States paid a hefty ransom in the form of four of the new C-130 transport planes—the first of the planes delivered to a foreign country.

  Purists may argue that Operation Haik was not truly in the Air Force special operations, or air commando, tradition. But the planes were former Air Force planes, and some of those involved were either on active duty or only temporarily out of Air Force uniform to lend their expertise to the CIA. One of these was the ubiquitous Heinie Aderholt, who seemed somehow to be present whenever something a little out of the ordinary needed doing.

  In the late 1950s, Aderholt became commander of an outfit known as Detachment 2, 1045th Observation, Evaluation and Training Group, based at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa. What they did was very secret.

  Behind that dull-sounding bureaucratic mouthful, Aderholt and his small team masterminded an operation to support Tibetan resistance to the Chinese, who had taken over the country and eventually drove out Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

  Their plan was an ambitious one: Tibetans were smuggled out of their country, trained high in the Rockies at Camp Hale, near Leadville, Colorado, parachuted back into their homeland, and then supplied by air. It was all very reminiscent of what the Carpetbaggers did during World War II, supporting resistance fighters behind the German lines. The problem in Tibet, of course, is the extreme altitude—so high that the “lowlands” lie at thirteen thousand feet. The only plane Det 2 had available when it started out was a four-engine propeller-driven C-118—a military version of the DC-6 airliner. The plane could carry only a small cargo as it struggled over the Tibetan peaks. If one of its engines quit, the plane would go down.

  To remedy this situation, the Air Force agreed to provide several of its new long-range C-130 planes to carry out the Tibetan supply missions.

  Under the supervision of Aderholt and his team, the planes were flown to Takhli, Thailand. There, the United States markings were painted over and the Air Force crews turned the planes over to civilian crews employed by Civil Air Transport—one of several companies used by the CIA to disguise its operations.

  The contract crews were paid $350 for a routine flight and $500 if unusual hazards were involved. They earned their money.

  The crews flew at night. Like Carpetbagger crews, they preferred some moonlight to make their navigation easier. But unlike the World War II aviators, flying over the carefully mapped terrain of western Europe, the CAT crews flew with few navigation aids over rugged terrain that was either not charted or, perhaps even more dangerous, inaccurately charted. Some of their maps came in sections. Too often, they found the route of a river or road offset by several miles at the juncture between one map section and the next.

  The Tibetans caused severe problems for the Chinese invaders, although they could not force them out of their land. Perhaps their most important achievement was to set up the clandestine air drops of supplies that sustained the Dalai Lama and his entourage on their escape over
land from Tibet to India in 1959.

  At the same time as the Tibetan airlift, Aderholt was also involved in the first CIA-organized aid to Vang Pao, the charismatic leader of the Hmong hill people in central Laos. (Although records of the time often refer to Vang Pao’s people as the Meo, that name was actually derived from a term of derision used by the Chinese.) For years thereafter, Vang Pao and his people carried on a fierce resistance to the North Vietnamese and the Pathet Lao—a force supported by the North Vietnamese. In this, they were closely allied with the CIA and generations of air commandos.

  “About December 1960, we made the first drop to Vang Pao at Padong,” Aderholt recalls. Padong is a settlement in central Laos near Vang Pao’s longtime headquarters at Long Chieng.

  A few months later, Aderholt’s outfit, working as the liaison between the CIA and the Air Force, drew up plans for a very secret unit, known as Project Mill Pond, to fly B-26 bombers in “armed reconnaissance” missions over Laos. Armed reconnaissance was one of the first of the euphemisms that became common as the war in Southeast Asia grew. The object was not simply to fly reconnaissance missions, with guns for protection. Rather, the emphasis was on the word armed. The job of the Mill Pond pilots was not only to do reconnaissance but also to strafe and drop bombs.

  Records are still classified or incomplete. But some sixteen or so aging B-26s were gathered up, most of them from the aircraft graveyard maintained by the Air Force near Tucson, Arizona. The planes were flown to Okinawa.

  Meanwhile, eighteen Air Force pilots were selected and sent to Eglin for a brief familiarization with the B-26. They were then discharged from the Air Force and handed first-class tickets to Bangkok. From Bangkok, they were flown to the royal Thai air base at Takhli. After a few days there, they flew to Okinawa in an Air Force transport to pick up their B-26s. All identifying markings had been removed from the planes, and the flight down to Takhli was made in radio silence.