The Green Beret Affair

In 1969, the U.S. Special Forces were America's elite soldiers. Their heroic deeds were praised in story and song. The refrains from Sgt. Barry Sadler's stirring song, "Ballad of the Green Berets," beckoned many to try and become a member of "America's best." In the same year, a highly respected career infantry officer, Col. Robert "Bob" Rheault, took command of all Special Forces in Vietnam. He spoke flawless French, was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, graduated from West Point in the Class of 1946, and received a Master's Degree in international relations from the University of Paris. He was certain to be a two-star general, at least. But by year's end, the glory for both faded rapidly.

Eliminating opponents by whatever dirty means necessary was the dark side of the war in Vietnam. The French had the efficient if brutal Surete. President Dien had secret police agencies that rounded up Viet Minh and later, his political opponents. Most were never heard of again.

The traditions of those agencies were passed on to the Americans - mostly clandestine operations run by the CIA or Green Berets or both. The most sweeping program for waging political war by violence was a joint operation that became world-famous. That program was Phoenix.

In theory, Phoenix's goal was to get the numerous American and South Vietnamese intelligence units to cooperate with each other through intelligence-gathering, sharing, and coordinating effort designed to identify individual members of the Viet Cong infrastructure so as Vietnamese armed forces could take action against them. In practice, Phoenix was a wave of terror that washed over remote villages throughout South Vietnam. The indigenous, black-clad Phoenix teams acquired the aura of the Gestapo in wartime France. A Green Beret sergeant who advised the teams said, "We had a sense that we were the law." Although it was not its intent, Phoenix became a program of organized assassinations.

While the Phoenix program was in operation, an estimated 26,369 people suspected of NLF membership were killed. How many of them were innocents falsely accused, mistakenly "hit," or gunned down as bystanders will never be known. 

It was one such assassination that had far-reaching ramifications - a killing so important that it served to discredit the Green Berets, temporarily leading to its downfall as America's unconventional warfare element.

The story begins in a beautiful coastal city two hundred miles northeast of Saigon. Throughout the war, the city of Nha Trang - famous as a French resort - was the command headquarters for the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne). It was also home to the Group's many highly-secret operations, the exact operations Phoenix was devised to help orchestrate.

One such clandestine operation was Project GAMMA (a name given to Detachment B-57 in 1968), which consisted of hundreds of indigenous secret agents running counterespionage missions along the borders of Laos and Cambodia. Ironically, the operation was code-named "Black Beard," after the pirate who cut the throats of loyal followers. 

In October of 1968, the top intelligence officer in Vietnam on Gen. Creighton Abrams staff estimated that Project GAMMA was providing 65 percent of the information known on North Vietnamese Army (NVA) strength and locations in Cambodia and some 75 percent of the same information known on NVA within South Vietnam. 

It has been said that the reason that Project GAMMA was so successful was that the South Vietnamese had been not "read on" to the program. As a successful 1968 turned into 1969 for Project GAMMA, it was noticed that many extremely valuable intelligence nets and agents had begun to disappear, and many feared the worse, that the highly classified operation had been compromised by a double agent.

The S-3 or Operations Officer, Capt. Budge Williams, for the project, felt that Project GAMMA was in danger of going under from an unseen and unknown communist spy. Other intelligence and counter-intelligence officers, to include Capt. Leland Brumley, Maj. Thomas Middleton, and Chief Warrant Officer Edward Boyle, became convinced also there was a security leak somewhere in the organization. All began investigations but made little headway until the spring of 1969, but did discover the unpleasant truth that some of the South Vietnamese Special Forces working for U.S. forces were involved in selling weapons and medical supplies to the communists. Then, ironically enough, a Special Reconnaissance team, in a classified area across the border where U.S. troops officially did not operate, discovered documents and a roll of film in a communist base camp. When the film was developed, one of the Viet Cong pictures on the roll was believed to be that of Project GAMMA Vietnamese agent Thai Khac Chuyen, a 34-year old ex-Vietnamese ranger. The leak has been discovered, or had it?

After conferring with the Agency, the Special Forces soldiers involved in the investigation were told that the best way of handling the problem would be to get rid of the double agent, but the CIA could not authorize the execution, somewhat disingenuously. 

Capt. Robert Marasco ordered that the agent in question be brought in for questioning to include a polygraph test, which ominously the agent had not been given when recruited for Project GAMMA.

Eventually, Chuyen would undergo some ten days of rigorous interrogation and solitary confinement to include the use of polygraph tests and sodium pentothal, commonly known as "truth serum." The bad news, at least for the agent, was the fact that the polygraph tests would indicate that Chuyen was not telling the truth when he denied having compromised any Project GAMMA security details and working for the Viet Cong. Additionally, the possibility existed that Chuyen was also working for the South Vietnamese intelligence service on the side, a triple agent. For the Special Forces officers of Project GAMMA, the leak that everyone had been looking for had been found. It would be distasteful, but they knew what must be done; if Chuyen was turned over to the South Vietnamese Army or National Police, there was the chance he might go free due to the actions of another communist plant and cause further damage and loss of American lives.

Thus, in June of 1969, Capt. Marasco and two other Special Forces officer drugged Thai Khac Chuyen, put him on a boat and took him out into Nha Trang Bay, not far from the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) headquarters. Marasco pulled the trigger that killed Chuyen, and later in his own words, said it made the sound of a "tire puncture" and splattered "blood, skull, and bits of brain" on him and the other two Green Berets in the boat. The body of the alleged North Vietnamese double agent was then weighed down with chains and rolled into the murky waters off Nha Trang. 

An appropriate cover story was developed to explain the now obvious absence of the agent. If questions were asked, he was believed to have disappeared after being sent on a mission behind enemy lines to test his loyalty to the cause. 

Shortly after the incident, Army Intelligence was alerted, and a full investigation was ordered by Gen. Creighton Abrams, Commander of all forces in Vietnam. This resulted in seven members of Project Gamma being arrested. Also arrested was Rheault, which confused the intelligence community since the Chuyen execution had been approved before he took command of the 5th Special Forces Group. Army intelligence officers said it was because he knew of the plan and had approved his men's cover story; that Chuyen had been sent on a mission and had not been heard from since.

Contradictions clouded the roles and involvement of each. Some say it was part of a long-running, professional jealousy feud between the Green Berets and the CIA, with Gen. Abrams caught in the middle. 

Others insist that the eight Green Berets arrested for the killing of the agent was a cover-up to yet a bigger, more mysterious plot. They felt that the arrest of the eight Green Beret officers suggested that the defendants were merely scapegoats to a much larger, more diabolical scheme. Today, the contradictions appear even more insidious. 

The article 32 investigation held by the U.S. Army in Vietnam quickly became engulfed in a firestorm of publicity. Most of the American public, and the Special Forces, believed that Rheault and all involved had been made scapegoats for a matter that reflected poorly upon the Army. The affair was ultimately a tragedy. Committed and capable officers found themselves on two sides of a chasm in warfare; on one side, World War II era officers to whom events were black and white, right and wrong. The other side was a younger generation, less respectful of rules and regulations, perhaps, but completely committed to winning. 

Both main players in the affair, Rheault and Abrams, were graduates of the Military Academy at West Point, separated in time by ten years. That is where the similarities end. The affair became a clash of philosophies, world views, and personalities and caused consternation on both sides of the growing American divide over the war in Vietnam.

Hawks condemned the charges for what they saw as a Catch-22 military absurdity: the prosecution of front-line troops for killing the enemy.

Opponents of the war portrayed it as proof of American involvement in a secret campaign of terror and assassination, paralleling the combat seen nightly on television.

The seven defendants, who denied the charges, were placed in a stockade outside Saigon in the Long Binh Jail.

But three months later, there was a second firestorm when Stanley Resor, the secretary of the Army, said the charges against the seven defendants were being dropped because the Central Intelligence Agency  -  whose operatives were key witnesses  -  had refused to cooperate. When the news was announced on the floor of the House, the chamber broke into applause and cheers that went on for minutes.

Col. Rheault spoke for his men after their release when he called the charges "a travesty of justice" and accused the Army of prosecuting "dedicated soldiers for doing their job, carrying out their mission and protecting the lives of the men entrusted to them in a wartime situation." 

The murkiness surrounding the dismissal of the case, however, left Rheault and his men in a moral gray zone, neither convicted nor entirely exonerated in the murder of the man at the center of the case, Thai Khac Chuyen.

Col. Rheault resigned from the Army a few months after his release and spent most of the rest of his life as director of an Outward Bound program in Maine. He also founded an Outward Bound program to help veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He died at his home in Owl's Head, Maine, on Oct. 16 at the age of 87. 

Robert Rheault Jr. said his father remained stoical for the rest of his life about the sudden end of his military career. "He never spoke ill of the military," he said, "only of certain individuals in the military."

Ultimately we will never know whether or not the executed agent, Thai Khac Chuyen, was truly working for the Communist Viet Cong, the American Special Forces, the South Vietnamese government, or a combination of all three. Evidence suggests that he was guilty of at least attempting to conceal the truth, a dangerous game, and one that led to his execution in the summer of 1969. He became just another causality in unconventional warfare. 

As we have seen above, the 1969 Vietnam "Green Beret Affair" is not as unique as our forces continue to face similar moral and legal issues daily in the current Global War on Terror. However, all Americans can take comfort in the fact that even our "best and brightest" remain subject to the law of war and military justice. That is one certainty in an uncertain war that will not change.