An
Affair to Remember?
Patrick R. Tower
“A” CASE:
THE VIEW FROM BELOW
A DRAMATIC
MONTH
One would be
hard-pressed to find a more dramatic month in the first term of the Nixon
administration than the period from 25 January to 26 February 1972. While it is true that significant events were
happening at home (Edmund Muskie and the Democrats were heating up election
year politics, and Attorney General John Mitchell resigned to head the
Committee to Re-Elect the President), the real drama was provided by Nixon’s
foreign policy, which began the period close to its nadir and ended the period
very close to its zenith. This
roller-coaster ride began with reports suggesting deep trouble in the Nixon
administration’s efforts to bring the war in Southeast Asia to a successful
conclusion; but the month ended with news that Nixon’s historic visit to China
had produced a last minute, unexpected agreement with Chou En-Lai, Premier of
the People’s Republic.
The
bad news about the war effort came in two strong doses on January 25. That morning the Washington Post carried a front-page, below-the-fold story
reporting the failure of a bombing campaign conducted against North Vietnam the
previous month. An estimated “245
The
second dose of bad news came the evening of January 25 when President Nixon
revealed to a national TV audience that his National Security Adviser, Henry
Kissinger, had secretly traveled to Paris on 13 separate occasions in a thus-far
futile effort to negotiate a peace agreement with the North Vietnamese. In addition to revealing his eight-point
peace plan, Nixon made a distinct point of saying he was making this
announcement to “prove beyond doubt which side has made every effort to make
these negotiations succeed. It will show
unmistakably that
The
point later was made even more forcefully by an anonymous source:
A
White House official, asked why this time was chosen to announce the
President’s offers in the secret talks, said there were three reasons: (1) an attempt to trigger a response from
Hanoi; (2) the development of a situation “where our public and private
positions diverged” to the point where administration credibility was
undermined; (3) the knowledge that there may be a Communist military offensive
and that the American people should know who is responsible for increased
fighting.
Nixon’s
speech certainly triggered a response. On
January 27, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong delegates to the Paris peace
talks “denounced [his] new peace plan in every conceivable way, but refrained
from rejecting it outright.” On the
29th, the Chinese were reported as saying “the Nixon plan was ‘absolutely
preposterous’ and that Nixon should never expect Hanoi and the Viet Cong to
accept it.” On February 2, Senator
Muskie denounced the plan, and on February 4, three analysts associated with
the Institute for Defense Analyses expressed fears that Nixon would soon renew
a bombing campaign against North Vietnam.
Two days later,
These
developments formed the international context for Nixon’s first trip to
He
said it was his wish that history would describe his trip in “the words on the
plaque which was left on the moon by our first astronauts when they landed
there: ‘We came in peace for all mankind’.”
Mr. Nixon quoted from the toast Premier Chou
En-Lai proposed at a dinner he gave in October for Henry A. Kissinger,
assistant to the President for national security affairs, when Kissinger was in
Peking on his second visit to arrange Mr. Nixon’s meeting.
In the President’s words, Chou said “the American
people are a great people. The Chinese
people are a great people. The fact that
they are separated by a vast ocean and great differences in philosophy should
not prevent them from finding common ground.”
Nixon
arrived in Peking (after stopovers in Hawaii and Guam) on February 21 and was
given a “low-key” reception.
Nevertheless, within four hours of his arrival, he and Kissinger met
with Chou En-Lai and Mao Tse Tung (who seemed to bless the warming trend in
Sino-American relations). At a banquet
in Nixon’s honor that evening, things warmed even further. In his remarks Chou En-Lai “emphasized that
Peking intends to continue improving its relations with the American people no
matter how its dealings with the U.S. government evolve.” Nixon’s response matched Chou’s tone:
Seeking
to reassure the Chinese, who have been sensitive to foreign designs on their
country for more than a century, the President said that “Neither of us seeks
the territory of the other,” and “Neither of us seeks domination over the
other.”
The President also sought to invoke Mao’s
immense prestige, quoting a poem by the chairman calling for urgent action and
ending: “Seize the day, seize the hour!”
The
ebullience of the hour was not universally shared. Expressions of concern were issued by Warsaw,
Taipei, and Delhi, but special reservations were expressed by Moscow. Izvestia
accused China of keeping silent about the American bombings of North Vietnam
while receiving President Nixon in Peking.
As reported by the Times (London),
duplicity was the central theme of the Izvestia
story:
The
Izvestia article said: “At present it is
no secret for anyone that Mr. Nixon’s trip to Peking, advertised in every way
by Washington as ‘a visit in the name of peace’, is taking place against a
background of severe enlargement of the United States military clique’s
piratical actions in Indo-China.”
North
Vietnamese negotiator Nguyen Thanh Le continued this charge of duplicity after
the members of his delegation walked out of the Paris peace talks on February
24:
[Le]
hammered home the theme by quoting from President Nixon’s speeches in
Peking—without directly identifying them—to suggest the “hypocrisy” of the
President’s words of concern for peace and children while the administration
continued “its acts of war.”
Over
the course of the next few days, it appeared as though any misgivings over a
Sino-American agreement or informal alliance might be premature. Despite the optimism and good will of the
opening banquet, Nixon and Chou seemed to be deadlocked after five days of
candid talks. The sticking point seemed
to be U.S. reluctance to withdraw American forces from Taiwan and recognize
Peking’s right to the island. Late on
the night of February 25, however, the two sides broke the deadlock and on the
26th announced “a ‘basic agreement’ on major agenda points.” Nixon had opened the door to China and had
found a way, at least temporarily, to keep it open.
LONNIE
DOUGLAS FRANKS
Not entirely
coincidentally, the period from 25 January to 26 February 1972 probably was the
most dramatic month in the Air Force career of Lonnie Douglas Franks. Born on October 8, 1948, in Cedar Rapids,
Iowa, Franks was graduated from Washington Senior High School in Cedar Rapids
and had three years of college under his belt when he enlisted in the Air Force
in 1969 and then trained as an intelligence specialist.
In
August 1971, Sergeant Franks was transferred to Udorn Royal Thai Air Force
Base, where he was assigned to the Directorate of Operational Intelligence of
the 432d Tactical Reconnaissance Wing.
Although he had completed just two years of his first enlistment at the
time of his assignment to Udorn, Sergeant Franks was no stranger to the wartime
intelligence mission or to Thailand. He
already had served a tour of duty at Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base
and had there performed some of the same duties he would perform at Udorn.
Over
the course of the next year (August 1971 to September 1972), Sergeant Franks
was assigned to two different divisions within the Directorate of Operational
Intelligence. He originally was assigned
to the Current Intelligence Division, where his primary duties included
updating maps and slides with information useful to two distinct groups of
people. The first group he was responsible
for briefing consisted in aircrews on their way to fly missions over Laos and
North Vietnam: his maps and slides would
indicate the location of friendly and enemy units, orders of battle, the nature
of enemy units, the equipment of enemy units, and the nature and location of
reconnaissance targets.
Franks
also performed similar tasks for a group consisting of senior staff of the 432d
Tactical Reconnaissance Wing. At 0800
every day the Wing Commander of the 432d, Colonel Charles Gabriel, would gather
his staff in the wing command post to exchange information and discuss issues
of pressing interest. All of the senior
commanders and staff members were present at this meeting (called “standup” in
the vernacular), including key support personnel such as the commander of the
base hospital. It was Sergeant Franks’
job to prepare slides summarizing the previous day’s reconnaissance missions
for this meeting, and he was allowed to sit in the back and listen as someone
else briefed his slides. Because standup
was a meeting with a wide and varied cast of characters, Franks’ slides were
neither very detailed nor a central topic of discussion.
These
duties continued until mid-November 1971, when Franks was transferred to the
Targeting Division of the Directorate of Operational Intelligence, which had
too few noncommissioned officers (NCOs) at the time. During his six weeks in the Targeting
Division, Franks’ jobs included plotting targets in Laos and North Vietnam for
reconnaissance aircraft and building so-called “target folders.” Included in these folders was a photo of the
target, a 1/250,000 scale map the pilot would use to navigate to the target,
and a 1/50,000 scale map on which the target was plotted within 10 meters.
Franks
certainly understood the importance of his targeting job to the mission of the
wing. A photo reconnaissance plane at
that time was crewed by two persons—a pilot and a navigator—and it was flown
utterly unarmed, i.e., without
offensive or defensive weaponry. In
order to take accurate pictures of the target, it had to fly straight and
level; banking or turning would render the film “absolutely useless.” If the plane flew at an altitude other than
the one required by mission plans, those reading the photos later would not be
able to tell the size of the objects photographed. In short, a reconnaissance plane is a
“sitting duck,” thus making it imperative that the target be properly
identified and charted on the maps before the mission is flown.
This
does not mean that reconnaissance flights in Southeast Asia were suicide
missions. It was standard practice for
the reconnaissance plane to be escorted by at least a pair of fighter-bombers
armed with offensive weapons. These
escorts would fly behind the reconnaissance (or “recce”) aircraft, but they did
not have to fly straight and level at a predetermined altitude. Instead, they engaged in something called
“jinking”—flying in irregular patterns, trying to anticipate ground fire that
might be directed at the recce bird. If
someone on the ground fired at the reconnaissance mission (or the
fighter-bomber escorts), then the escorts were permitted to drop their ordnance
directly and immediately on the source of the ground fire (whether it be one
man with an AK-47 assault rifle or a battery of anti-aircraft artillery, also
known as “AAA” or “triple-A”). The
release of ordnance under these circumstances was called a “protective reaction
strike”—the kind of strike that played a role in the story that appeared on the
front page of the Washington Post on
25 January.
Lonnie
Franks very firmly believed that the rules governing protective reaction
strikes were strict and subject to little, if any, interpretation. The rules of engagement (ROE) prohibited an
attack on a ground target unless that target was an immediate threat to the
mission. That is, the target had to be
engaged in offensive action against the reconnaissance plane or its
escorts. The reaction could only be
directed at the source of hostile fire on the ground—they could not start
bombing any or all targets of opportunity in the area. The sole purpose for the fighter-bombers was
to protect the recce aircraft—and that meant they could only drop their bombs
in response to a confirmed hostile threat on the ground. One official source gives the following brief
history of these flights:
Since
the bombing halt pause began in November of 1968, the United States has been
conducting manned tactical reconnaissance over the southern portion of North
Vietnam. Very shortly after the bombing
pause began the North Vietnamese attacked one of our unarmed reconnaissance
aircraft and we began to escort the reconnaissance aircraft with armed
fighters. During 3 1/2 years between November 1968, and March 1972, these
escort aircrafts were authorized to retaliate if fired upon.
Despite
the importance of his targeting job, Franks’ talents were needed more in the
Current Intelligence Division, and so he returned there during the first week
of January 1972. As in the past, Franks
went about the business of preparing maps and slides to be used in the wing
commander’s daily standup, and he continued to brief crews who were about to
fly missions over Laos and North Vietnam.
But he was also asked to learn something entirely new—he was asked to
become a “debriefer,” a person who meets aircrews as they return from a mission
and picks their brains for every scrap of information having possible value to
those who plan, fly, or assess the value of operational missions.
As
practiced by Sergeant Franks, “debriefing” was actually a two-stage
process. It involved, first, the
conscientious writing down on a sequence of preprinted forms a multitude of
facts about what the crew encountered and what the crew accomplished. Once these forms were completed, the second
stage of the debriefing began: the
writing of an operational report that was sent to a host of organizations who
had a need to know about the mission and its particulars. In Sergeant Franks’ case, the report written
was called an “operational report-4” (OPREP 4), which became the official
record of the mission once it was transmitted.
Obviously, the integrity of the OPREP 4 was of crucial importance; for,
it was an essential datum factored into the overall assessment of the success
of the air war, and the integrity of the OPREP 4 was a function of the
debriefer’s ability to conscientiously and accurately complete the first stage
of the process.
An
official source once explained the operational reposing system used in
Southeast Asia in this way:
OPREP
1 indicates the intent to conduct the operation and the nature of the
operation.
The
OPREP 2 indicates that the operation is now underway,
the aircraft have been launched, for instance.
OPREP
3 reports special events that are of particular interest which may occur during
the progress of the operation.
OPREP
4 is the report that the pilots make immediately after they return from a
flight.
We
recognize that this report may not be complete and may be subject to
reevaluation but it gives us immediate information on what has happened.
For
instance, when the mining operation was conducted in
And
finally there is an OPREP 5 which gives a good summary of the verified
information that has been reviewed and evaluated and more or less winds up the
reporting on the particular operation.
Franks
performed these duties for three weeks without incident, but on 25 January—the
same day the Washington Post carried
the story about the failure of December’s pre-planned raids over North
Vietnam—something new and totally unexpected happened to Lonnie Franks. On that date, Sergeant Franks was debriefing
a reconnaissance crew that had just flown a routine mission, when either the
pilot or the navigator gave a particularly disturbing answer to one of his
questions. When Franks asked them if
they had received any hostile fire, one of the crew members said something
like, “No, we didn’t, but we have to report that we did.” What made this especially odd was that the
escort aircraft hadn’t dropped any bombs on this mission. Nevertheless, Franks was instructed to report
that they had received anti-aircraft fire so that if they had dropped their
bombs, they would have been justified in doing so under the ROE.
Franks
was upset at the suggestion that he should falsify the debrief forms and
subsequently lie on the OPREP 4, so he kept the aircrew waiting while he went
to check this out with his immediate supervisor—a Technical Sergeant (TSgt) by
the name of Voichita. TSgt Voichita told
Franks to do as the recce crew instructed—”make it look real; just make up some
sort of hostile reaction.” This response
from his immediate boss was unsatisfactory, so Franks approached the next
person in the chain of command—the officer in charge (OIC) of Current
Intelligence, a Captain by the name of Murray.
Again, Franks was told to follow the orders given him by the aircrew.
At
this point Franks decided to take the matter no further (his next step would
have been to speak to Lieutenant Colonel Glendenning, the Director of
Intelligence for the 432d Tactical Reconnaissance Wing). Instead, he returned to the debriefing table
and undertook the task of falsifying the debrief data. Franks decided to report that the crew had
received “10 to 15 rounds of 23-millimeter,” but he couldn’t simply write a sentence
to that effect on the debrief form.
Rather, he had to write it as though it had actually occurred, and that
meant fabricating a complete and believable real world context: Where was the gun that was doing the
firing? What altitude and direction was
the plane flying when attacked? What
evasive maneuvers were taken by the pilot? and so on. Even the rate of fire of the 23-mm gun had to
be accounted for: “You couldn’t have an
airburst every 3 seconds when it shoots at a half-second interval; you should
have an airburst every half a second.”
After considerable effort, the debrief forms were completed, the aircrew
initialed them, and a false OPREP 4 was placed into official channels.
In
other words, on the very same day the Washington
Post carried a story in which unnamed “military planners” were said to have
experienced “some bitterness” because of their perception that “White House
restrictions imposed on the bombing were so tight that it was impossible to get
the job done,” Sergeant Lonnie Franks found himself falsifying an official classified
report so that, had they wished to do so, fighter-bomber crews could have
gotten around one of Nixon’s rules of engagement. On the very same day that Nixon appeared on
national television and accused the North Vietnamese of being the prime
obstacle to peace, Sergeant Lonnie Douglas Franks found himself involved in an
enterprise whose raison d’ être
seemed to be to increase the level of US aggression against North Vietnam.
It
was not long before Franks found himself beset by serious questions. He wondered, for example, “where the false
reports were going and whom we were trying to fool”; and he was equally
concerned that no one seemed to be keeping track of the accurate data. When he falsified the report on 25 January,
he had done nothing to flag the good data or to separate it from the lies. Now the historical record of that mission was
permanently distorted. He could not retrieve the report or repair the
damage done from his modest level, and he worried about that fact.
From
Franks’ perspective things deteriorated over the next few weeks. At the very least, things became more complex
and entangling. On or about 6 February,
for example, Franks found himself debriefing what he would call a “strike”
mission. A strike mission, like a
reconnaissance mission, involved fighter-bombers flying in conjunction with
reconnaissance aircraft, but that was as far as the parallel went. During a normal reconnaissance mission, it
was standard practice for 2 fighter bombers to escort every reconnaissance
plane; in a strike mission, however, the ratio was either 4:1 or even 8:1 such
that 2 reconnaissance planes could be escorted by 16 fighter-bombers. In a normal reconnaissance mission,
furthermore, the reconnaissance planes were the raison d’ être for the fighter-bombers, but in a strike mission
that relationship was reversed. That is, during a normal reconnaissance mission
the fighter-bombers flew cover for the reconnaissance planes, but during a
strike mission the reconnaissance planes were used to cover up the mission of
the fighter-bombers. In other words, a strike mission was a pre-planned attack
on various targets in North Vietnam conducted under the guise of a protective
reaction strike.
The
planning for a strike mission was straightforward. The target information for a
strike mission came from above Sergeant Franks’ level, but be was unsure of its
ultimate source. This target information
was not transmitted in writing but came over the telephone to someone in Franks’
shop. The targets could be fuel dumps,
truck farms, or other such targets of military value. The fighters would bomb those targets as the
reconnaissance aircraft flew in their general vicinity—but there was no
requirement that the targets bombed would be photographed by the reconnaissance
planes. Indeed, there was no requirement
that the fighters would even follow the reconnaissance planes to the target
area. Sometimes the bombers would attack
before the reconnaissance planes had even arrived in the general area of
operations.
However,
these messy details could be cleared up during debriefing, which could take as
many as three hours after a strike to complete.
What made it so time-intensive was the Air Force accounting system,
which defined a reconnaissance mission as one reconnaissance plane flying
against a target, while an escort or strike mission was apparently defined as 4
fighter-bombers flying against a target.
Thus, if 2 reconnaissance planes were escorted by 16 fighter-bombers,
that meant 6 separate missions had to be debriefed and 6 separate OPREP 4s
transmitted. In human terms, 6 separate
intelligence specialists had to carefully coordinate 6 separate debriefings and
the content of 6 separate OPREP 4s for every such strike mission flown against
North Vietnam. In fact, the coordination process was so tricky that a seventh
intelligence specialist would have to run from table to table to ensure the
internal consistency of the fabrications being recorded on the different
debrief forms.
There
were four very specific areas requiring fabrication: target type, target coordinates, timing, and
bomb damage assessment. With respect to
target type, for example, they could not truthfully report the bombing of a
fuel depot or truck farm because those targets were not permitted under the
ROE. Rather, they could report as
targets only those things that were capable of firing at the reconnaissance
planes—in other words, offensive weapons such as anti-aircraft artillery. Likewise, they couldn’t report that the
fighters had bombed a target 20 miles away from the recorded flight of the
reconnaissance aircraft since such a distant target could not be a threat to
the recce plane. Thus, regardless of
where the bombs actually fell, the specialists had to be sure that the target
coordinates actually reported on the OPREP 4 had to be close to the reported
flight path of the reconnaissance plane.
Timing
was just as sensitive. Because the ROE
stated that fighters could bomb only in reaction to attacks on the
reconnaissance mission, the intelligence specialists could never report that
the fighters had entered the area of operations ahead of the recce planes or
bombed the targets before the recce aircraft had crossed into North Vietnamese
air space. They would only report what the ROE allowed and nothing more.
Finally,
to solve the problem of bomb damage assessment, they always reported that “the
targets were not observed because of smoke and foliage.” Thus, what the OPREP 4 may have represented
as a protective reaction strike with unknown results against an emplacement of
anti-aircraft artillery that had fired on a pair of reconnaissance aircrafts
could actually have been a very successful strike against a fuel storage area 1
hour and 20 miles from when and where the recce birds flew their mission.
Before
too long it became apparent to someone up the chain of command that some effort
should be made to segregate the actual facts about a strike mission from the
lies fabricated about it. Thus, on or
about 18 February (the day Nixon left for China), Captain Murray directed
Sergeant Franks to record the correct and incorrect information in separate
columns on the debrief sheets. The
incorrect information would still be used to write the OPREP 4, but Captain
Murray would collect the correct information and send it up-channel to Seventh
Air Force at Tonsunhut.
Headquarters
Seventh Air Force was responsible for all Air Force operations in Southeast
Asia. Its commander, General John D.
Lavelle, was also the “Deputy for Air” to General Creighton Abrams, who had overall
responsibility for in-theater operations.
The person on General Lavelle’s staff responsible for tracking
day-to-day flying operations in Southeast Asia was Major General Alton Slay. Sergeant Franks believed it was to Major
General Slay that Captain Murray telephoned the truthful information he had
culled from Sergeant Franks’ debrief forms.
Thus, as far as Sergeant Franks knew, only Seventh Air Force—in the
person of Major General Slay—had all of the correct information about the
strike missions.
This
two-track reporting system manifested itself in the briefing slides Sergeant
Franks also continued to prepare. The
incorrect information was placed on the slides Franks prepared for the Wing
Commander’s daily standup, but the correct information was placed on a separate
set of slides that were used for a second, newly instituted meeting that began
in Colonel Gabriel’s office immediately following the standup. This second, inner sanctum-type meeting was
with those persons and only those persons having direct responsibility for
flying operations in the wing, and it was instituted at about the same time
that the “strike” missions began, i.e.,
in early February 1972.
Thus,
during the last week of February 1972, Franks found himself involved in what
appeared to be a clandestine bombing campaign against North Vietnam. At the same time that Nixon and Chou En-Lai
were in secret deliberations over the future of Sino-American relations, Franks
was involved with an internal struggle about the enterprise in which he found
himself entangled. At the same time that
Izvestia was denouncing China for
turning its back on the “enlargement of the United States military clique’s
piratical actions in Indo-China,” Franks actually found himself trying to avoid
debriefing crews returning from strike missions over North Vietnam and Laos
because it so deeply bothered him to be falsifying official reports. He was being asked to write reports that
asserted the wing’s full compliance with rules of engagement established by
civilian authority—rules he knew the wing blatantly violated on a regular
basis. At what level was the
falsification order generated? Franks
knew that the Wing Commander, Colonel Gabriel, and the Vice Wing Commander,
Colonel O’Malley, were both aware of the falsifications. In fact, the two of them actually stood in
the debrief room and watched as the intelligence specialists carefully crafted
their false reports following one of the strike missions. He also had good reason to believe that
General Slay was also fully aware of what was happening. But how much higher did it go? Was General Lavelle the mastermind or did it
go as high as General Abrams? Could it
be coming from the Chief of Staff of the Air Force {General Ryan) or even
higher?
Thus,
at about the time that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong delegates walked out
of the Paris peace talks—a move “formally justified as a protest against
‘escalation’ of American bombing of North Vietnam”—Sergeant Lonnie D. Franks
found himself in a quandary. He could shut
up and do nothing, but he wasn’t sure his conscience would allow him to do
that. He could take his concerns to the
Inspector General system, but the Wing Inspector General was Colonel O’Malley
(who Franks believed was knee-deep in the falsification effort), and Franks
wasn’t sure that anyone else in the Inspector General system could be trusted. (After all, if the Chief of Staff of the Air
Force was running the clandestine operation, wouldn’t Franks get into trouble
by complaining to the Air Force Inspector General?) Any complaint inside the Air Force could
invite recrimination, but what else could Franks do? He could go to the press, but he didn’t want
to compromise classified information.
What other options did he have?
“B” CASE:
THE VIEW FROM ABOVE
WHAT THE
SERGEANT DID
On either 25
or 26 February, Sergeant Franks sent a letter to his Senator, Harold E. Hughes
(D-IA), who was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee or “SASC.” Hughes received the letter in early March and
immediately referred it to Senator Stuart Symington, another SASC Democrat and
former Secretary of the Air Force, for evaluation and possible action. On 8 March, Senator Symington transmitted a
sanitized version of the letter to General John D. Ryan, Chief of Staff of the
Air Force:
Senator
Harold Hughes
Capitol Building,
U.S. Senate,
Washington, D.C.
Dear Senator Hughes:
I am an intelligence specialist
__________ (for the Air Force). . . .
I and other members of __________ have
been falsifying classified reports for missions into North Viet Nam. That is, we have been reporting that our
planes have received hostile reactions such as AAA and SAM firings whether they
have or not. We have also been
falsifying targets struck and bomb damage assessments.
I have been informed by my immediate OIC,
__________ that authorization for this falsification of classified documents
comes from secure telephone communications from the Deputy of Operations, 7th
Air Force.
I do not know where the original
authorization comes from and this is my major concern. This same (officer) quipped that the
President doesn’t even know about the situation.
I am writing this letter to inform you of
what is happening and to find out if this falsification of classified documents
is legal and proper.
Sincerely yours, __________
The next day
General Ryan sent Lieutenant General Louis L. Wilson, Jr., Air Force Inspector
General (AF JIG) to Southeast Asia to investigate the matter.
On
23 March Wilson confirmed to Ryan that “some missions had not been flown in
accordance with the Rules of Engagement and there were irregularities in the
operational reports.” That same day,
Ryan “summoned General Lavelle to Washington.”
Lavelle arrived 26 March, discussed the matter with the Chief of Staff,
and Ryan “offered [Lavelle] the option of continued service—a new assignment—in
his permanent grade.”1 To sharpen General Lavelle’s thinking on the
matter, General Ryan “told him an application for retirement would probably be
accepted.”
After
receiving assurances that the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Air
Force would receive full explanations of his decision, Lavelle submitted a
letter requesting retirement on 31 March.
On 6 April, General Ryan chose Lavelle’s replacement: General John w. Vogt, Jr. On 7 April, Lavelle retired, and the Pentagon
issued a press release announcing these events; Lavelle, it said, was retiring
“for personal and health reasons.”
Lavelle retired at his permanent grade:
Major General (= two stars).
The
matter lay dormant for nearly a month, and then it came to the attention of
Michael Getler of the Washington Post:
On
April 7, just one week after the North Vietnamese invasion began across the
demilitarized zone and in the midst of a massive U.S. build-up of air power in
Southeast Asia, the Pentagon abruptly announced the assignment of a new
commander for the Seventh Air Force, which directs all Air Force operations in
the war zone.
The Pentagon announcement claimed that
four-star Gen. John D. Lavelle, who had commanded the Seventh Air Force since
July [sic], 1971, was “retiring for
personal and health reasons.” Defense
spokesmen would offer no further explanation for the action.
The unexpectedness of the move was also
dramatized by the appointment on the same day of Air Force Gen. John W. Vogt to
replace Lavelle. Vogt, until the
previous day was slated to become chief of staff for allied headquarters in
Europe.
The retirement of Lavelle has been
handled in an unusual fashion since it was first announced. Normally the announcement of retirement for
high-ranking generals is accompanied by the White House nomination for
retirement rank. In Lavelle’s case, the
nomination came several weeks later.
Technically, all active-duty three- and
four- star generals at the instant of retirement revert to a permanent two-star
rank which is the highest allowed by law.
But the President then nominates them, subject to Senate confirmation,
to advancement to higher rank as retired officers.
Spokesmen for the Army and Navy say that
to the best of their services’ knowledge, no four-star general or admiral has
ever been retired at a lesser grade. The
Air Force declined to answer a similar query, but Defense Department officials
say they also know of no precedent for the current situation.
Representative
Otis Pike (D-NY) picked up on the story and said the following on the floor of
the House on 15 May:
Mr.
Speaker, it is time the Air Force and the Pentagon told the American people the
truth about the so-called retirement of a four-star general who was removed as
the head of all of our Air Force operations in Vietnam just 1 week after the
Communist offensive was launched.
The Air Force put out a little story that
the general had retired “for personal and health reasons.” The Air Force did not tell the truth. I believe there is a major issue here,
important to our Air Force, and important to our Nation.
Perhaps the most major issue is the
credibility of our military. The
military complains that it is misunderstood and mistrusted. It cannot be understood
and it cannot be trusted as long as it tries to sweep its scandals under the
rug and as long as it persists in trying to obscure the truth instead of
telling the truth.
Later that
same afternoon, General Ryan released a statement saying that “he personally
relieved Gen. John D. Lavelle as commander of the Seventh Air Force in Vietnam
‘because of irregularities in the conduct of his command responsibilities.’”
The
level of controversy generated by these and other statements was sufficient to
prompt the House Armed Services Committee or “HASC” to hold cursory hearings in
June. These hearings, which essentially
involved the testimony of Lavelle and Ryan, were not sufficiently in-depth to
resolve anything. In fact, the mild
manner in which the HASC treated Lavelle only managed to stoke the fires of
controversy even further. For example,
Tom Wicker’s assessment was the following:
The
Vietnam War has generated so much dishonesty and moral blindness through three
Administrations that the nation now appears to consider these normal. So there is no particular outcry over the
disclosures that numerous “protective reaction” raids on North Vietnam have
been staged, to let American fliers bomb what they wanted to bomb, when they
wanted to bomb it.
Time’s 26 June article on Lavelle (which termed him a “veteran
Air Force ‘tiger’”) ended with this paragraph:
Senator
William Proxmire of Wisconsin urged the Air Force to court-martial Lavelle,
who, though now a civilian, can be legally returned to stand military
trial. Proxmire rightly termed Lavelle’s
shoot-from-the-hip action a violation of “the principles of civilian control
over the military.” Then there was the
haunting possibility that Lavelle’s raids might have contributed to the
mysterious breakdown of Kissinger’s secret peace negotiations in Paris last
November—the very month Lavelle began his extracurricular activity with strikes
at three North Vietnamese airfields.
Beyond that is yet a fresh puzzlement in the often baffling conduct of
the war: how one man could get away with
such grave and potentially disastrous cowboyism for four months without his
superiors in
The 26 June Newsweek saw it this way:
At
the very least, the evidence against Lavelle made it clear that scores of
pilots, squadron and wing commanders, intelligence and operations officers and
ordinary airmen were caught up in the plot.
The existence of such a widespread conspiracy dredged up Strangelovian
fears that if a four-star general could so easily circumvent conventional
bombing directives, he might also be able to launch a nuclear war. And although the Pentagon insisted that
virtually foolproof command-and-control safeguards protected America’s nuclear
arsenal from seizure by a crackpot, this did not put everyone’s mind at rest.
The
SASC scheduled hearings for September to review Lavelle’s nomination to be
promoted to Lieutenant General on the retired list. Sergeant Franks got wind of these hearings
and sent a letter to Senator Hughes requesting a chance to testify. Among the portions of the letter published in
the Congressional Record were the following paragraphs:
The
actions taken by the military against General Lavelle and the other people
involved have shown that a military member can exceed the limitations placed on
him by civilian authorities with relative safety. Further, the apparent lack of any action
against General Lavelle’s subordinates has shown that it is safer and in many
ways even preferable to obey illegal and immoral orders.
The events of these past weeks have made
it obvious to me that definite civilian control must be placed over the
military. In my own case, I had very few
alternatives of whom I could go to in order to reveal my information. It seemed impossible for me to contact either
my Wing Commander or the base Inspector General, since both were involved in
the air strikes. It would also have been
difficult for me to contact anyone at higher headquarters.
At the time I wrote the letter, the Paris
peace talks had deteriorated to the point that the U.S. refused to continue
negotiations, alleging that the North Vietnamese were using the talks as a
forum to disseminate untruthful propaganda concerning our indiscriminate
bombing of North Vietnam. It was for
this reason that I was compelled to write to you, you in turn having no other
course but to release my letter to military authorities for them to
investigate. The military investigating
itself negates any check or balance civilian authorities might exercise over the
military. It is apparent that Congress
should establish a civilian inspection system at base level, similar to the
present military inspector general, but not under military or DoD control.
Sergeant
Franks’ request to testify was honored.
LAVELLE’S DEFENSE
The SASC
hearings opened on 11 September with General Lavelle’s testimony. The thrust of the hearings was to decide
whether or not Lavelle should be allowed to retire as a Lieutenant General (=
three stars) by exploring in detail the circumstances surrounding his relief as
commander of Seventh Air Force. In two
days and 99 pages of testimony, Lavelle impressed the committee with his
cooperation and candor. He affirmed to
them his unwavering belief in the primacy of civilian control of the military
and the Constitutional foundations of that relationship. He also openly subscribed to the axiom that a
commander is always responsible for all actions undertaken by persons in his
command, even if he is not aware of them.
He also publicly stated that he agreed with Sergeant Franks’ act of
conscience, although he also asserted that Franks would have received no less
satisfaction by sending his original letter to Lavelle.
The
General also admitted that he very liberally interpreted the rules of engagement
such that from 23 January to 9 March 1972 he ordered so-called “pre-planned”
protective reaction strikes against critical, clearly hostile sites in North
Vietnam. Even more surprising, perhaps,
was Lavelle’s admission that persons in his command falsified at least 3
official reports because they believed he wanted them to do it.
Nevertheless,
General Lavelle steadfastly proclaimed his own innocence. He rejected General Ryan’s assessment that he
had “exceeded his authority” and he was convinced that the SASC, which had
access to all classified information associated with the case, would reject the
public depiction of him as “an unprincipled malefactor, who recklessly
endangered the prospects of peace, by conducting a massive private air war, in
a calculated disregard for orders from the President and personally engineering
a conspiracy to conceal it all through falsification of reports.”
Lavelle’s
testimony was grounded in four central considerations, reasons, or organizing
principles. These considerations led him
to conduct the air war in the manner in which it actually came to be conducted
over the first few months of his short tenure as commander of Seventh Air
Force. It was Lavelle’s belief that (1)
he was facing an increasingly aggressive enemy; (2) his superiors were
pressuring him to be more aggressive; (3) the rules of engagement had been
rendered obsolete by changing enemy technology; and (4) every commander has
important moral obligations.
Increasing Enemy Aggression.
The first of these principles began to play a part in his
decision-making from almost the instant he assumed command of Seventh Air Force
and its influence continued and grew over the next seven months:
This
was not by any means a routine period.
This was, as we well recognize, a critical period of tremendous enemy
buildup in preparation for the invasion of South Vietnam. To protect this buildup, the North Vietnamese
had moved into the area north of the DMZ the largest concentration of missiles,
antiaircraft artillery and radars we had ever seen in Southeast Asia.
Lavelle made
it clear that the enemy’s increasing aggression was a multifaceted phenomenon
whose growth followed a steep upward curve:
Considering
the air war alone, from the start of the dry season, which ran from November 1
through the end of February of this year [1972], a period of 4 months, there
were 72 incursions by North Vietnamese Mig’s2 into Laos or Northern
South Vietnam as compared with only four the previous year.
During the same period there were over 200
surface-to-air missiles fired at U.S. aircraft, as compared to approximately 20
for that period the previous year. . .
Another indication of the aggressiveness
of the North Vietnamese was on the day that their forces launched their attacks
in the Plain of Jars, which as you recall was on the 18th of December, over 25
enemy Mig’s were airborne and several of them crossed into Laotian territory.
And in
response to written questions from Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME), he
developed this point even more explicitly:
During
January and February, the NVN were steadily step stoning their missile sites
closer and closer to the DMZ to protect their pre-invasion build-up. The last site they attempted to build was
right on the northern edge of the DMZ.
They moved a large ground force into the area between the DMZ and Bat
Lake and set up what appeared to be a communications center for a headquarters
complex. Reconnaissance aircraft had
photographed about 60 tanks in this same Bat Lake area, about 10 miles north of
the DMZ. The North Vietnamese air
defense forces had become extremely aggressive in an effort to conceal and
protect this pre-invasion buildup. In
fact, for the first time in this war, they fired missiles at aircraft flying
over South Vietnam. They had fired a
missile from North Vietnam at the gunship we were maintaining over Dong Ha
every night. [Deleted.] The NVN were preparing for an invasion and the only
rule they were following, and they were following it very aggressively, was
“shoot down” U.S. aircraft.
Pressure From Above.
As the enemy turned up the heat, Lavelle’s superiors reciprocated with
increased pressure on him to be more aggressive in dealing with the enemy. This increasing pressure from above is the
second organizing principle in Lavelle’s testimony. He became acutely aware of the pressure from
above in December 1971, but its application can be traced to events in October
and November. In October 1971, “a Mig
taking off from Quinn Lang [Air Force Base in North Vietnam] had attempted to
attack a B-52 over Laos.” The Mig
missed, but Lavelle’s fighters also failed to intercept and destroy the
Mig. Consequently, on 8 November an
escorted reconnaissance flight” was flown against Quinn Lang, and strict rules
of engagement were followed, i.e.,
the escort assiduously followed the dictum to “fire only when fired upon.”
Lavelle
viewed the 8 November raid as significant for his case because of the response
it generated from higher headquarters.
The American planes were fired upon, and they returned that fire. This prompted a call from the Commander in
Chief, Pacific Air Forces (CINCPACAF), in Hawaii:
.
. . he called me and said that he had been called from
I resolved then if we were going back to
any more of these, and if we were going to be questioned about how effective we
were, we had to plan them more precisely to be sure that we did do a good job.
. . .
Even
more obvious was the pressure conveyed from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS)
during a conference hosted in Honolulu by the Director of the Joint Staff on 4
and 5 December:
During
the conference, as reported to me by my representative, the Director, JCS,
indicated:
(1)
Field commanders should be more aggressive.
(2)
Field commanders had not been flexible enough in the use of existing
authorities.
(3)
Fighter escorts for reconnaissance aircraft should be increased to 8 or 16 to
insure adequate damage on protective reaction strikes.
(4)
When intelligence indicates MIG presence on Southern airfields, schedule
maximum escorts.
(5)
JCS would not question our aiming points (targets) on protective reaction
strikes.
(6)
In the advent of adverse publicity we could expect full backing from the JCS.
This
also seemed to be reiterated by Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird when he
met with Lavelle for about 10 minutes during the farmer’s visit to Saigon in
early December. Although he could not
remember verbatim what Secretary Laird had said, Lavelle recalled the gist of
the conversation as “don’t come into Washington requesting new authorities, it
was an inopportune time; make maximum use of the authorities we had and he
would support us in Washington.”
Obviously,
Washington wanted something done about the increasingly hostile enemy massing
forces just over the border. As proof of
this, Lavelle pointed to the three mass raids they were directed to carry out
in September, December, and February.
The December raid he mentions is the same raid discussed in the Washington Post story of 25 January:
Late
in September we were directed two days of mass raids below 17 degrees: In December we had the mass 5-day raid going
on up to 20 degrees and in February we had the raid to hit the guns within 7
nautical miles of the DMZ. . . .
This
suggested to Lavelle that Washington was not very serious about the rules of
engagement or the targets that could be struck.
This last point was especially apparent with respect to the December
raids:
We
had made specific recommendations to JCS that we be allowed to hit the
airfields, that we be allowed to hit the missiles, that we be allowed to hit
the radars, that we be allowed to hit the marshaling areas, storage areas. The authority that came through, initially
came through authorizing us to strike; it directed maximum effort strikes in
North Vietnam up to 20 degrees. It did
not respond to any of our requests. It
didn’t say marshaling areas; it didn’t say radar; it didn’t say airfields; it
said maximum effort up to 20 degrees.
Rules Made Obsolete.
It was during that series of late-December raids when the third
organizing principle first presented itself to Lavelle. Sometime between Christmas and New Year’s Eve
it became apparent to him that the North Vietnamese had developed a technology
that took full advantage of the rules of engagement under which Lavelle’s
troops had to operate and which were first developed during the Johnson
administration—”. . . we were operating under 1968 Rules of Engagement in a
1972 environment.” The rule with which
Lavelle was most concerned was this:
Fighter
aircraft may strike any SAM or triple A in NVN below 20 degrees north which
fires at or is activated against U.S. aircraft conducting missions over Laos or
North Vietnam.
When
that rule was originally formulated, the North Vietnamese had to activate
special radars before their surface-to-air missiles (Sims) could track and
destroy U.S. aircraft. These
missile-guiding radars had tell-tale signatures that were detectable by U.S.
pilots. But in late December 1971, the
North Vietnamese managed to create something new:
The
North Vietnamese had added [deleted] new radar sites in the southern part of
North Vietnam and had netted these stations with their missile radars to form a
most sophisticated and complex air defense system. This meant that the more powerful ground
surveillance and ground control intercept [GCI] type heavy radars were netted
with the surface-to-air radars and missiles to form a sophisticated, integrated
system, allowing either the GCI radars or the missile radars to pass target
tracks to the missile firing units.
This
development caused a very real problem for
The
normal North Vietnamese tactic was to employ the two Fan Song radars of the SAM
battalion for tracking our aircraft and controlling the missile. When the tracking Fan Song radar picked up a
U.S. aircraft and began to track it, the Radar Homing and Warning—RHAW—gear in
the cockpit was activated and alerted the crew that they were being tracked by
a missile unit. [Deleted.] This, of course, alerted the crew and, depending on
the type of aircraft and the mission, they would maneuver out of the area or be
prepared to take evasive action if a missile were fired. [Deleted.]
As a consequence of having netted their
air defense control and surveillance radars with their missile units, the North
Vietnamese were able this year to vary their tactics. Starting, I believe, in mid-December they
often used the long-range Barlock or Whiff air defense radar which always
tracked our aircraft to pass target information to the missile fire control
radar. [Deleted.]
Being deprived of radar warning, perhaps
one could make the judgment that you could no longer determine when the system
was activated against U.S. aircraft.
In the face of the new tactics, however,
a more logical judgment appeared to be that since U.S. aircraft were under
constant surveillance by the air defense radars netted with the missile units,
the system was constantly activated against us.
In other
words, whenever aircraft flew into North Vietnamese air space, the system was
constantly activated against them and that meant the 1968 rule of engagement
was satisfied. Obviously, the 1968 rule
of engagement meant to say that whenever Fan Song radars were activated against
American aircraft, those aircraft could fire on the missile sites associated
with the activated Fan Song radars. But
this new technology—this country-wide radar net—allowed Lavelle to reinterpret
what the rule was saying. In other
words, whenever fighter-bombers escorting reconnaissance aircraft crossed into
North Vietnamese air space, they should prudently assume that the missile
system was activated against them, which meant that they had immediate justification
for bombing any portion of the netted air defense system.
Commander’s Moral Obligations.
The final organizing principle in Lavelle’s testimony was no doubt at
work in his mind long before he assumed command of Seventh Air Force, but it
seems to have loomed ever-larger in his thinking as a hectic 1971 became a frantic
1972. The SASC testimony makes it clear
that Lavelle was deeply involved with what he terms “a commander’s moral
obligation to protect his men”:
.
. . all of my judgments were made as a field commander acutely mindful of my
often anguishing responsibility for the protection of the lives and safety of
thousands of courageous young airmen under my command. It was that central consideration which was
at the heart of my motivation with respect to every operational judgment I was
ever called upon to make in Southeast Asia.
This
“central consideration” also seemed to be at work in his interpretation of the
rules of engagement:
It
was my opinion at that time and it still is that the actions which I took were
consistent with the overall policies pertaining to protective reaction as they
applied to air operations in Southeast Asia.
My understanding was that the rules of engagement were designed to
afford a degree of protection to the American fighting man exposed to attack
from an enemy who was taking advantage of every rule of the game to maximize
his opportunity to kill Americans. I
interpreted the rules of engagement in away which I felt would save American
and South Vietnamese lives.
Moreover,
the General’s sense of moral obligation was so strong that it even shaped
operational plans:
I
felt I had a moral responsibility to the crews who were daily ordered to fly
over the Ho Chi Mink Trail to destroy the missiles moving into positions from
which they could destroy our aircraft and crews, and this we did.
Between late January and the 9th of
March, we attacked missiles and supporting equipment near the border on several
occasions. We had no further missile
firings from the Ho Chi Mink Trail between mid-January and the 29th of March,
which was a few weeks after we stopped hitting these missiles trying to enter
Laos.
This
same sense of moral obligation to his subordinates also prevented Lavelle from
authorizing a practice known as “trolling.”
To ensure that the rules of engagement were technically satisfied, the
Navy had adopted the tactic of sending “bait” aircraft into hostile areas in
order to provoke a hostile response from the enemy. In a final statement submitted after his
testimony was complete, Lavelle said the following:
It
was brought out during the testimony that had I elected to “troll,” i.e., send an aircraft and crew into the
area as bait to draw fire, the strikes would then have been considered
authorized under the pertinent rule of engagement. Mr. Chairman, I just
couldn’t do this in the environment in which my crews were flying. Even if a tactic of trolling would have made
these strikes legal with respect to the enemy, it would not have been morally
right in that hazardous area, with respect to my crews. Quite apart from that, it should be
remembered that in the final analysis, the practice of provoking enemy fire
through trolling was done in order to execute air strikes involving preciselly
[sic] the same degree of pre-planning
as those which I directed. Consequently,
as regards the pre-planned aspects of the strikes, I respectfully submit that
this tactic cannot be fairly differentiated.
General
Lavelle’s moment of truth arrived on 23 January 1972, when he personally
supervised the raid on Dong Hoi Air field in North Vietnam. This was the first of the so-called
“pre-planned” protective reaction missions (what Sergeant Franks called a
“strike” mission). Because Lavelle
wanted no repeat of the Quang Lang mission on 8 November, things were carefully
planned, thus ensuring execution of the plan would be as effective as
possible. Moreover, Lavelle was for the
first time applying his “liberal interpretation” of the rules of engagement: The aircraft could expend their ordnance
without first being fired upon because they were flying over
From
23 January to 9 March, Lavelle directed 19 other “pre-planned” protective
reaction missions against “highly effective North Vietnamese weapon systems”
such as missiles, missile sites, and associated equipment. None of these missions targeted civilians and
none resulted in the loss of an American aircraft. He took pains to point out to the SASC that
these 20 missions were a very tiny fraction of the 25,000-40,000 missions flown
during Lavelle’s tenure as Seventh Air Force commander, but that does not mean
that Lavelle was ashamed of them or attempted to hide them. Indeed, he believed they were wholly justified:
It
was quite clear that we were first encouraged to be and then commended for
being more aggressive; that we were told to be more flexible; that we were told
to increase the frequency of reconnaissance flights over NVN; that we were told
to increase the number of fighter escorts with the reconnaissance aircraft to
ensure effective results on protective reaction strikes; that Washington
wouldn’t question our aiming points and would back us up. It was also very clear that the J.C.S.
representative at the Honolulu conference, and higher authority, the J.C.S.,
CINCPAC, and CINCPACAF in messages, had made very liberal interpretations of
the Rules of Engagement (R.O.E.) concerning protective reaction strikes. That rule covered the targets that could be
attacked and the conditions under which they could be struck. The authorized targets are certainly less
ambiguous and less subject to interpretation than the authorized condition or
“activated against.” Higher authority
had recommended, encouraged and then commended an extremely liberal targeting
policy, well beyond the language of the R.O.E.
This liberal interpretation by higher authority of what could be struck,
plus the encouragement to be more aggressive and more flexible, influenced my
determination to make a similar, though I believe less liberal, interpretation
of the conditions under which we could strike.
When
all was said and done, the committee members had two sets of lingering
questions. The first had to do with
Lavelle’s apparent failure to share with his superiors his concerns and his
decision to liberally interpret the rules of engagement. There were, for example, the suspicious
circumstances surrounding a raid conducted on 5 January against the Moc Chau
radar, which apparently had something to do with controlling Mig’s. The SASC members were aware that the JCS had
chastised Lavelle and his boss, General Abrams, because the mission did not
clearly fit a strict interpretation of the rules of engagement. This was a clear case involving GCI
radars—the kind that were netted with the Fan Song missile radar—and the JCS
balked about attacking them. But, as
Lavelle pointed out in his testimony, he received approval to attack them
“approximately 3 weeks later,” i.e.,
before the end of January.
Of
course, this still does not address Lavelle’s failure to brief higher ups about
his liberal interpretation of the rules of engagement. If one boils down the testimony, this lapse
was largely due to missed opportunity or geographic separation. Given the frantic pace at which things were
happening, General Lavelle didn’t have the time to travel to Honolulu or
Washington to explain things to his bosses, and he fully believed that he was
operating within his sphere of proper authority as the Seventh Air Force
commander.
The
second set of lingering questions was also an important question for Sergeant
Franks: How is it that some of the OPREP
4s came to be falsified? Was Lavelle the
mastermind of a plot to hide his liberal interpretation of the rules of
engagement from his superiors and the American people? Did he orchestrate a concerted effort to
fabricate classified official reports?
At
no time did I intend to mislead my superiors concerning these missions. I did not lie about what I was doing, nor did
I order any of my subordinates to misrepresent the truth. It is true that some reports were falsified
at a lower echelon of command, which probably resulted from my failure to make
clear my objectives and my interpretation of the pertinent rule of judgment.
In other
words, Lavelle believed that the falsification was instigated as a result of a
misunderstanding or misinterpretation of a remark Lavelle made:
Senator
Schweiker. It must have been something specific that caused the misunderstanding.
General
Lavelle. Yes, sir. On the strike at Dong
Hoi airfield on the 23rd of January, I was in the command and control center
monitoring that strike, watching it very carefully. There was our [deleted] to
Dong Hoi.
Senator
Schweiker. Yes, I saw that part of it in here.
General
Lavelle. When the strike aircraft pulled off the target they reported [deleted]
they hit Dong Hoi, they were successful, all ammunition was expended, no
reaction. At that time I told my
Director of Operations we could not report “no reaction. We should have reported “hostile reaction,
radar” because there was no way we could have flown into that area without
those radars picking us up.
In other
words, Lavelle was insisting that they report what he believed to be a fact: there had been a reaction—not firing from the
ground, but the reaction of a vast radar network that was designed to deprive
aircrews of early warnings. From
Lavelle’s perspective, “no reaction” was as false a report as the claim that
they had received anti-aircraft fire.
Senator Dominick. You did
not intend your instructions to the Director of Operations-”that we could not
report ‘no enemy reaction,’“ as a general instruction?
General Lavelle. No,
sir.
Yet,
how was it possible for the falsification system to become such an elaborate
enterprise involving so many persons and so many dedicated hours of staff work?
I
told my Director of Operations [General Alton Slay] that we could not report
“no enemy reaction.” “Hostile radar”
would have been a proper and, in my opinion, an accurate report. Unfortunately, as my instructions were passed
from my Director of Operations probably to the wing commander, to the wing
deputy for operations, to the squadron commander, to the intelligence officer
on duty and finally, to the sergeant technician who prepared the follow-on
reports, the word apparently got distorted.
Although I feel they should have reported “hostile reaction, enemy radar,”
the detailed following report form was filled out indicating heavy AAA
fire. This and at least two other
reports were submitted with similar erroneous information. The inaccurate reports were OPREP 4 reports
which are formated [sic], extremely
detailed reports; readable only by a technician or with a key to the
format. These reports were routed to the
report section of my staff; I never saw them.
As commander, I usually saw the OPREP-3 reports which are flash reports
designed to provide key personnel with limited, pertinent poststrike information.
Lavelle was a
very powerful Air Force commander who had earned the respect of his
subordinates. As the misunderstanding
was passed from echelon to echelon it became amplified and acquired the
imprimatur of rationally grounded accepted practice. Because Lavelle never read the OPREP 4s, he
had no way of telling that the falsification was occurring, and no one told him
that they were doing what they believed he had ordered.
There
was thus a single lingering question: Who
was the highest ranking person to know that falsification was occurring?
Senator Bentsen. Who do
you think was the—do you know—who the highest subordinate was that you had
under you who knew of the falsification of the reports at a time when you did
not yet know of them? Did General Slay
know of the falsification of the reports?
General Lavelle: Sir, I
would rather not say who I think because I am not sure that I know.
Senator Bentsen. All
right. Do you know?
General Lavelle. No,
sir.
Following
General Lavelle’s testimony on 11 and 12 September, General Lavelle’s boss,
General Abrams, appeared on 13 September, and Sergeant Franks appeared on
Thursday, 14 September. General Abrams
essentially confirmed that he and General Lavelle had attempted to receive
increased authority from Washington, but he denied any knowledge of Lavelle’s ,
“liberal” interpretation of the rules, and he was certainly unaware of any
false reporting. Sergeant Franks’
testimony is summarized in the “A” case.
On
Friday, 15 September, the SASC received testimony from two more key players: Colonel Charles A. Gabriel, Commander of the
432d Tactical Reconnaissance Wing, and Captain Douglas Murray, Sergeant Franks’
OIC.
COLONEL
GABRIREL’S TESTIMONY3
Colonel
Gabriel was asked a sequence of questions clearly designed to confirm or infirm
the testimony of previous witnesses. For
example, he immediately confirmed that on perhaps “25 to 30” missions, his wing
“was given instructions from Seventh Air Force to conduct a planned strike
against specific targets regardless of whether or not there was a reaction from
the air defenses in North Vietnam.”
However, while he believed that most of these missions were flown in
February and March 1972, it was his recollection that the first such mission
was flown on 8 November against the Quang Lang airfield. He did confirm that he was first told he
could not report “no reaction” on 23 January:
The Chairman. Did
that happen to you now, did you say, you got a call like that?
Colonel Gabriel. No,
sir; the call from 7th Air Force came to my command post but then I did discuss
with General Slay and he said, “Yes, you will report it that way each time,
regardless of whether or not there is a reaction you will report reaction,
fighters expended.”
The Chairman. So during the course of this
matter you and General Slay did discuss this very item about the false
reporting.
Colonel Gabriel. Yes,
sir; General Slay.
However,
Gabriel denied that he ever discussed false reporting with General
Lavelle. The only time the subject came
up was as they were entering a commander’s conference; General Lavelle teased
Gabriel about his initial “no reaction” report on 23 January. He never discussed false OPREP 4 reports or
the dual reporting with General Lavelle.
The only person with whom he ever discussed false reporting was General
Slay.
No
one in the 432d Tactical Reconnaissance Wing ever approached General Gabriel
with a complaint about false reporting.
But neither did Colonel Gabriel question the orders he was receiving
from General Slay. How come?
The
reason I didn’t, of course, is because he issued me the rules of engagement as
well as the orders. Looking back, I
think certainly if his directions were to strike civilian targets, cities or
anything not directly related to our military objectives over there, I
certainly would have questioned the orders.
But since these were all military targets and I had one authority that I
answer to, the 7th Air Force, for the rules of engagement as well as the
strikes, I assumed he had the authority to tell me what to do.
CAPTAIN
MURRAY’S TESTIMONY
Captain
Murray was Sergeant Franks’ OIC. On 1
September 1972, he had accumulated seven years of Air Force commissioned
service. He essentially confirmed
Sergeant Franks’ testimony and account of his activities. He indicated that he had received
instructions from his boss, Lt Col Glendenning, about the dual-track reporting
system. He admitted that Franks
questioned the procedure, but he did not understand this questioning to be the
equivalent of a moral objection or that he didn’t want to do it.
However,
the committee was especially interested in why “some alarm didn’t go off when
someone questioned filing false reports.”
Captain Murray’s response to this question was the following:
Sir,
let me describe it this way: I think you
have to look at the framework of thought here.
First of all, and these are all facts
that should be considered together, at the wing level we were not involved in
planning and policy decisions. Likewise
we were not involved—particularly in the intelligence division and particularly
the sections of that division which I was responsible for—we were not involved
in the determination of the rules of engagement, what those rules should be and
how they should be not only developed but also interpreted.
Then you have got to consider the fact
that they are rather complex; it is not a simple black and white decision,
issue, so far as we are concerned.
Third, you have got to consider—and this
is a factor that I would consider—that the targets that were being hit were in
fact military targets; they were targets that you hit earlier—that type, I
mean, that type of target—hit previously in missions that were authorized and
this entered into it.
The fourth factor would be the idea of
the reports themselves. Yes, the
reporting procedure was different; we have had different reporting procedures
before. The report that went out for
general dissemination did not have all the information that the report had—the
special report—that went out and in fact had protective reactions included in
it. But at the same time there was a
special, specat report that had the actual information in it and that
information was going to the 7th Air Force level of command.
The next factor that should be considered
is that, taking all of this into consideration, you operate under a concept or
an assumption of legitimacy and that is not to question orders unless you feel
there is some illegality in the orders and in the system of trust.
And the last factor I think to consider
was the fact that this was not done in secrecy; no one was called in
separately; the procedure was outlined to the entire office and there was never
any attempt by anyone to conceal the procedure. So all these factors together
in my mind did not present a reasonable doubt that the order was illegal and,
therefore, I proceeded to follow it.
GENERAL
SLAY’S TESTIMONY
Major General
Alton D. Slay testified on Tuesday, 19 September 1972. General Slay had been General Lavelle’s
Deputy Chief of Staff, Operations, and he assumed that job in late 1971. As Slay described it to Senator Goldwater,
his working relationship with General Lavelle was a close one: Lavelle’s approach was to be involved in “the
real nitty-gritty detailed planning right down to the nth degree as to what
could be done on that particular mission.”
This was especially true of the pre-planned reaction strikes:
General
Lavelle personally directed each one of these.
He would not allow any of his staff to make the decision to go on one of
these. This was his personal decision
and, as a matter of fact, as I said before, he would describe the numbers of
airplanes that would go and quite often we would perhaps differ on that and we
would dicker back and forth as to how many airplanes we should send on this
particular raid or, in fact, whether it should be sent.
Slay would
convey this information to Colonel Gabriel, and once the mission had been
flown, Gabriel would transmit the correct results to Slay, who then would take
this information straight to Lavelle and brief him on the outcome. Initially, Gabriel merely called Slay over a
“secure line,” but Lavelle sent Slay back for more information so often that
Slay asked Gabriel to send “specat” secret messages instead.
Was
there a time when General Lavelle switched from a strict interpretation of the
rules of engagement to a more liberal view?
Did he change his policy from “fire only when fired upon” to “always
assume hostile action”? Slay’s answer
was negative; “[Lavelle’s] position was from the very word ‘go’ that you just
by definition of the fact that you were over North Vietnam, that you would have
a reaction.”
Did
Lavelle know about the false reports? In
reply to this question from Senator Stennis, Slay said the following:
General Slay. Lavelle knew, sir, that regardless of
whether there was reaction or not, it would be reported that there would be
reaction. He knew that because he directed it.
The Chairman. That came from him; correct?
General Slay. That came from him.
The Chairman. That came from him, correct?
General Slay. That to me is the falsification of the
reports, if that is the right word.
The Chairman. Yes.
General Slay. And, again, I don’t know how many of those
there were. He knew that the specific reports, the so-called specats, came to
me because he was briefed on each one of them.
The Chairman. That was the true report that came to you?
General Slay. Whether you call it the true report, all I
asked General Gabriel was to send me the—exactly what happened on that mission
in clear text.
Did Lavelle
also see the OPREP 4s? Slay doubted that
“anyone above the rank of sergeant or so whoever, at headquarters, whoever
looks at the OPREP 4.”
Given
all of this, why didn’t Slay challenge Lavelle outright about this operation? While Slay did raise the subject of the
protective reaction strikes, he did not challenge Lavelle directly: “if you want to how the honest-to-God truth,
I thought somebody was holding his hand.”
As he put it elsewhere in his testimony:
“I accepted the fact that General Lavelle would not be such a damned
fool to go about this on his own.”
On
6 October the SASC voted on General Lavelle’s nomination to be retired as a
Lieutenant General.
“C” CASE:
THE AFTERMATH
General John
D. Lavelle’s nomination to be retired as a Lieutenant General (= three stars)
was disapproved by the SASC on 6 October 1972.
He retained his rank as a Major General (= two stars).
On
5 April 1974, Senator Hughes wrote a letter to every member of the Senate, and
that letter was entered into the record on 24 April. The opening paragraph notes that the Senate
will soon act on “Air Force promotion list 91,” and it urges the Senate to
“decline to consent to the proposed nominations of Brigadier General Charles A.
Gabriel for the temporary rank of Major General and Major General Alton D. Slay
for the permanent rank of Major General.”
Toward the end of this lengthy letter, Hughes wrote the following:
.
. . to decide not to punish a man for his actions is one thing, but it is quite
another thing to reward him with higher rank and our confidence. I could not rest easy if I thought that one
of these men who knowingly participated in this false reporting might one day
become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The integrity of our command and control
structure, both within the military and under civilian authority, depends upon
men of the highest character, whose obedience to our law and the Constitution
is unquestioned.
Hindsight is no substitute for foresight,
and honest admission of error cannot replace good judgment at the time. The otherwise distinguished military records
of these men cannot quell my own doubts to how they might act in future
circumstances.
On
24 April 1972, by a vote of 51-36, the Senate approved the nomination of Major
General Alton D. Slay to become a Major General on the permanent list. He eventually was promoted to General (= four
stars), with an effective date of rank of 1 Apri1 1978.
That
same day, by a vote of 53 to 35, the Senate voted to advance Brigadier General
Charles A. Gabriel to the temporary rank of Major General. He subsequently earned his fourth star on 1
August 1980. In July 1982 he became
Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force.
Jerome
F. O’Malley, the Vice Commander of the 432d Tactical Reconnaissance Wing,
became a general officer, earning his fourth star on 1 June 1982.
Captain
Murray eventually became a Colonel.
Sergeant
Franks asked to be relieved of his intelligence duties in June 1972. In one of his columns in June, Seymour Hersh
revealed a sergeant from Iowa and assigned to Udorn blew the whistle on
Lavelle. There were only two sergeants
in the Current Intelligence Division, and the other one was from California. Thus, Franks came to feel that his position
was untenable.
He
was transferred from the intelligence shop to base social actions, where he
became the “custodian” for the “coffee shop” run by social actions. Service members would come into the coffee
shop to discuss their problems, and Franks would counsel them. When he asked for access to classified
information to prepare his testimony before the Senate, his request was denied,
and he was taken out of the coffee shop and made a clerk-typist in the social
actions office proper. He returned to
the States on 28 August for McCoy Air Force Base in Florida, where he was also
put to work as a clerk-typist.
GLOSSARY
“AAA” “anti-aircraft artillery” ; also
known as “triple A “
“AF/IG” “Air Force Inspector General”
“Brief” “to give information to”
“CINCPAC” “Commander in Chief, Pacific”
“CINCPACAF”
“Commander in Chief, Pacific Air Forces” (works for CNCPAC)
“Debrief” “to get information from”
“DMZ” “demilitarized zone” between North
and South Vietnam
“GCI”
“ground control intercept” radars; used primarily for air traffic control”
“HASC” “House Armed Services Committee”
“IG” “Inspector General”
“JCS” “Joint Chiefs of Staff”
“Mig” type of Sino-Soviet aircraft
“NVN” “North Vietnam”
“OIC” “Officer in Charge”
“Recce” “reconnaissance”
“RHAW” “Radar Homing and Warning”
“ROE” “Rules of Engagement”
“SAM” “Surface-to-air missile”
“SASC” “Senate Armed Surfaces Committee”
“Seance” “intelligence briefing”
“Standup”
“staff meeting”; personnel come to attention (stand up) as commander enters
“Triple A” see “AAA”
“TSgt” “Technical Sergeant”
ENDNOTES
1. General officers carry a “temporary” and
“permanent” rank. The temporary rank is
the rank in which they serve. The
permanent rank is the rank at which they retire, unless Congress promotes them
to a higher rank at the time of their retirement. General Lavelle’s temporary rank was
“General” (= four stars), but his permanent rank was “Major General” (= two
stars).
2. The word “Mig” is also spelled “MIG” in the
testimony, and the plural form of “Mig” is given as “Mig’s.” The spelling of the word as it appears in the
original text is followed as faithfully as possible. In any case, a “Mig” is a fighter jet of
Soviet design and Sino-Soviet manufacture.
3. Colonel Gabriel was promoted to Brigadier
General in February 1972, but did not “pin on” or wear the rank until 1
November 1972. It is for this reason
that he is referred to as “Colonel” and “General” in the testimony.