Spycraft - Melton [176]
After Stockdale and the other POWs were released in 1973 and books began to be written about their experiences, concern mounted that the closely held secret methods of communication would be exposed. Word reached DCI William Casey that Stockdale intended to include a detailed account of the covert communications in his autobiography and a subsequent movie starring James Woods.
Stockdale, now retired from the Navy as a Rear Admiral and awarded the Medal of Honor, seemed determined to write about POW communications. He reasoned that since the war was over, secrecy surrounding the covert channels was no longer necessary. “The Agency told Stockdale, ‘You can’t do this,’” Lipton remembered. “And Stockdale said, ‘The hell I can’t. What are you going to do, court-martial me?’”
With negotiations mired, Lipton offered to visit Stockdale. Along with an Agency lawyer, he met the retired Admiral at his Southern California home in a face-to-face attempt to dissuade him from revealing the POW secrets. “It was a very hostile environment when we walked in—electric, fiery,” Lipton recalled. “It took two hours, but we convinced him to remove the most sensitive references to our capabilities. Then he bought us lunch at the Hotel del Coronado.” Back in Washington, Lipton and the lawyer went directly to Casey’s office. “I don’t know how you did it,” the DCI said. “I couldn’t, but you did. Congratulations and thanks.”
For his work that made secret communications possible, an association of American POWs called Nam-POWs Inc. declared Lipton an honorary member and “prisoner of war in Vietnam.” Lipton remembered his first POW reunion. “A heck of a lot of guys came up to me and said, ‘I wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t for what the CIA did. That’s what kept me going.’ That’s how I was able to go in and work all night long, then come back and work the next day. I knew that we were doing things that really made a difference; not only in military value, but for those warriors and their families.”
The U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam did not end OTS’s involvement in covert warfare. President Reagan and DCI William Casey believed that Central America was in danger of falling under the influence of Communist, pro-Soviet regimes in the early 1980s. The leftist Sandinista government that came to power in Nicaragua in July of 1979 bore troubling similarities to Castro’s Cuba. The five-member junta ruling the country after overthrowing the former leader, Anastasio Somoza, almost immediately established close ties with the Soviet Union and began building up military forces.50 The Sandinistas had an estimated 5,000 guerilla fighters in 1979, a number that quickly grew to an army of 70,000 troops by 1982.51
American satellite photography also showed an expanding military infrastructure with three dozen new bases constructed in rapid succession. Sandinista pilots were training to fly advanced Soviet MiG aircraft and the army was being equipped with Soviet tanks and artillery.52
The effect of another Marxist government in the Western Hemisphere suggested a breach in the U.S. policy of containment and the potential to destabilize pro-American governments in nearby countries such as El Salvador. U.S. intelligence reported weapons flowing to the El Salvadorian guerillas through Nicaragua. Reagan and Casey agreed that CIA covert operations should be part of the strategy to thwart Soviet-Marxist ambitions in Latin America.
Under Casey, reconstituting the CIA’s covert action infrastructure, dismantled after Vietnam, became a priority. Casey decided to visit one of the OTS’s newly upgraded facilities for training of foreign counterinsurgency teams and target analysis. Jameson and Parr acted as hosts.
“Casey sat with several OTS special missions officers until three in the morning,