In 1965 I got lucky as a cub reporter for the Associated Press in Washington by being randomly assigned to cover the Pentagon just as the first American soldiers were openly sent into the war in Vietnam. The role of US personnel before that, beginning under Truman and through the John F. Kennedy administration, had been as—wink, wink—advisers, but it was widely understood inside the Pentagon that we were in a bitter guerrilla war against the North Vietnamese and their anti-government allies in the south known as the Viet Cong. The Pentagon, I quickly learned, housed some senior officers and civilians who did not buy into the premises of the war as outlined by Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and the generals and admirals who carried out the covert policies set by Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and now Lyndon Johnson, his fellow war-loving vice president and successor. There were the daily stories I had to write—those relayed to Pentagon journalists in background briefings and news conferences—and alternative stories that I began doing based on evening telephone calls with those in the Pentagon and Congress who disagreed with official policy. The same reportorial cat-and-mouse game is going on now as President Joe Biden, desperate for re-election, seeks ways to end a disastrous war in Israel and to expand another disastrous one in Ukraine. During these years, I formed private friendships with generals and admirals, especially after I wrote about an American military massacre in South Vietnam that had been covered up because it told a truth about American conduct in a war that had become murderous for some of the senior officers in charge. One of my private friends who served in high places was Lieutenant General Samuel Wilson. I became close to him years after he retired in 1977 as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Sam died at age ninety-three at his family farm in Rice, Virginia, in 2017. On April 6, 1865, the small hamlet of Rice, then known as Rice’s Station, was the scene of one of the last skirmishes between the forces of the North and the South in the Civil War. The war would end three days later in Appomattox, thirty miles to the west, when General Robert E. Lee, head of the out-gunned, out-supplied, and out-manned Army of Northern Virginia, reluctantly surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant. Sam told me during one of my visits with him at Rice about exploring the battleground with a metal detector and finding remnants of the war, and those who died, when he was no more than ten years of age. Historical records today state as many as sixty-six Union soldiers died on the grounds of the Rice farm. There are no known estimates of the Confederate deaths. I learned more about Sam from his obituaries than I did in our many hours of conversation. He joined the Army in 1940 when he was sixteen years old and just out of high school—he was first in his class—and by 1943 he was an expert in guerrilla warfare tactics and assigned to the staff of the Merrill’s Marauders, a famed unit that fought a brutal, deadly but ultimately successful campaign against the Japanese behind enemy lines in Burma during the Second World War. He was awarded a Silver Star for his work there. I also knew that like many American officers in the Army and Marine Corps during the war he became a counterintelligence expert and helped train early Green Beret and other units that were secretly active on the ground in South Vietnam long before the first American troops went in. I also knew that like many American men who worked for the Office of Strategic Services during the war he always maintained close ties with the Central Intelligence Agency as he rose through the ranks of the Army during the Cold War. Sam, I was aware, had worked closely with Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, operating politically and militarily against the forces of North Vietnam in the late 1950s in South Vietnam. But I did not know until after his death that he had joined Lansdale in running the ill-fated Operation Mongoose, a secret Kennedy-authorized program of November 1961 run by the CIA. Its intent was to accomplish what the Bay of Pigs invasion failed to do the previous April—the assassination of Fidel Castro and the end of communist control of Cuba. Multiple failed attempts were made on Castro’s life, and preparations for another are known to have taken place in Paris on the day of Kennedy’s assassination. From 1964 until 1967 Wilson served in Vietnam, ending up as minister-counselor of the American Embassy, a presidential appointment. It was obvious that Wilson’s work in Vietnam and his involvement with the worst side of the Kennedy administration were reasons why he took my calls and eventually invited me to the family farm in Rice. He made it clear that our talks about prior mistakes he and our government had made—especially in Vietnam—were between the two of us. Period. But whether on background or not, he never mentioned to me the post-World War II assignment he was given to study Russian at Columbia University, nor did he discuss his activities while serving later at the American Embassy in Moscow. It was an assignment clearly linked to covert CIA activities. At his death there was speculation that he ran the CIA station there. His ties to the highest levels of US intelligence, official or not, became clear in 1976 when then President Gerald Ford appointed him as deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He retired as director the next year. As the DIA’s head, Wilson had to know some of the details of the CIA’s secret spying program on American anti-Vietnam war activists who were believed by the increasingly paranoid President Johnson to have been organized by the Soviet Union. I exposed the illegal operations, which were ongoing for at least seven years, in the New York Times in December of 1974 when Wilson was on duty at the DIA, where he went to work in 1973. The stories led to the establishment of the first—and last—full-scale Senate inquiry into the covert practices of America intelligence. I got a taste of what might have been one of Wilson’s goals in asking me to come to Rice on my last visit there, after the 9/11 attacks, when Sam drove to me a far corner of the family’s land and stopped before what had once been a farm home, but was now a ramshackle mess, and showed me bullet holes from a fight there at the end of the Civil War. It was his grandmother’s home, he said, and she had taken him there when he was barely a teenager and walked him into a large room on the first floor. On one side of the room, she said, the Yankee doctors were treating their wounded and on the other side the Southern doctors were doing the same. At this point, Sam recalled her saying, “As the blood of the North and the South flowed together I knew then that the Union would survive.” I remember urging Sam to record the story and leave it for his children to share with their children. I’m pretty sure that was my last exchange with the general. One of his obituaries reported that he never fully recovered from his days in the Burmese jungle with General Frank Merrill. I later found a published account that revealed that of the three thousand men who fought the Japanese under Merrill, only ninety-nine survived and many of them suffered on and off from the effects of beriberi, amoebic dysentery, malaria, malnutrition, typhus, and dengue fever. I found it impossible, in the wake of the eightieth anniversary celebration of the invasion of Normandy, not to contrast the words of Sam Wilson’s grandmother and her assurance that, despite the bitterness of the Civil War, the Union would survive with the insistence last week by President Biden and other Europeans leaders that Russia not be invited to celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany. Russia had been invited to the fortieth international celebration of D-Day in 1984, when President Ronald Reagan made a point to acknowledge the significant Russian contribution to that victory. I was told this week by an informed American official that representatives of Russia were initially scheduled to attend the celebration, but “at the insistence” of the Biden administration the invitation was canceled. More than 20 million Russian men and women died in World War II—more than enough, I would think, to earn a seat at the table. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Seymour Hersh, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. © 2024 Seymour Hersh |