Spycraft - Melton [162]
The primary problem that confronted the CIA and the South Vietnamese government in 1962 was halting the flow of munitions and personnel entering South Vietnam from the north. The principal infiltration routes were Highway 1, an intermittently paved road running along Vietnam’s eastern coast and the better-known Ho Chi Minh Trail, an intricate 20,000-kilometer network of roads and jungle trails. The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran along Vietnam’s western border, cutting southward through Laos and Cambodia.10 For Jameson and other Agency personnel, shutting down the flow of weapons and personnel meant taking the fight to the enemy by destroying the infrastructure along both supply routes.
It was to become a counterinsurgency war, fought by small, fast-moving teams. Employing unconventional warfare tactics and clandestine weaponry similar to those used by the OSS, U.S. military advisors worked with special units of the South Vietnamese army and indigenous groups, such as the Montagnards and ethnic Chinese Nungs.11 However, waging this type of war required training and detailed planning.
“When doing sabotage, folks tended to focus on the ‘big bang,’ the explosive charge in your hand,” Jameson said. “Part of my job was to make sure all the other pieces were in place. Leave out one of those and you’ll leave a bridge standing or lose your team.”
Planning for sabotage, Jameson recalled, required exhaustive sessions, sometimes taking two or three days for a single mission. Every detail, from the daily rations to intelligence about the target’s precise orientation, materials, and appearance had to be addressed. Destroying just one bridge required logistics, explosives, first aid, communications equipment, and a means to get the team in and out safely. The team had to be trained to handle explosives, set charges, and improvise in the field when necessary. All the intelligence about possible entry and exit routes had to be assembled and considered, since there would be only one chance to bring down the bridge.
“We had to diagnose the construction of that bridge, often with little data, and design explosive charges to do the job,” said Jameson, “but not use P equals Plenty. If you want something destroyed, use the right amount of explosives at the weakest point. We taught the Vietnamese how to attach the explosives quickly and set the time delays that allowed the team to get out before the explosion.”
Jameson devised an easy to remember acronym, CARVER, to guide preparation of the target package. “Criticality” assessed the importance or critical role of the target for the enemy. “Accessibility” asked if the team had a reasonable chance of getting to the target. “Recognizability” meant the team would know the target when they saw it. “Vulnerability” focused on a realistic appraisal of the degree of damage or destruction that could be done to the target. “Effect” addressed the impact destruction of the target would have on the enemy. “Recoverability” estimated the time and effort required for restoration or reconstruction of the target.
Taken together, the elements of CARVER provided both the planners in the field and those authorizing an operation at Headquarters with a risk-and-benefit analysis to make sound operational decisions. It was foolish, Jameson reasoned, to engage in high-risk operations unless the probability of success was also high. “Target analysis told us how to get the most ‘bang for the buck’ with limited assets,” said one of Jameson’s fellow officers. “It worked like a flow sheet that described how something worked, and then led your thinking to identify the weakest point to be attacked.”
TSD became engaged in Vietnam as early as 1961, when a marine engineer was dispatched to Hong Kong to overhaul Agency-purchased Chinese junks. Although still conventional in appearance, the junks were far from ordinary by the time the engineer was done with them. The tech replaced