Covert Warrior: Fighting the CIA's Secret War in Southeast Asia and China, 1965-1967 - Hardcover

Smith, Warner

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0891415971 ISBN 13: 9780891415978

Publisher: Presidio Press, 1996

Synopsis

During the Vietnam War, the CIA created and trained small teams of elite fighting men for reconnaissance and covert combat patrols in areas where the American military were forbidden to operate. These patrols operated in North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and even mainland China. Cryptically, they were known as FRAM 16, and their super-secret story has never before been told. CIA/Naval Intelligence veteran Warner Smith tells the remarkable, true account of a secret soldier's twenty-month combat odyssey through Southeast Asia.
Months of rigorous training taught Smith and the other fifteen men of his unit what it takes to become a CIA covert warrior. Adapting skills developed by their special operations brethren, Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, Marine Corps Force Recon, and Air Force Ravens, these shadow warriors operated in black pajama "uniforms" or camouflaged fatigues with no identification markings, routinely engaging unsuspecting North Vietnamese, Viet Cong, and Pathet Lao forces in their backyards, often far from the killing fields of South Vietnam.
Covert Warrior relates some of the most daring feats of combat ever described in print. One mission found Smith and his five-man team in Laos, sent to observe enemy troop movement when they stumbled upon a POW camp holding downed American fliers. In a superbly orchestrated attack, Smith, armed with his Stoner machine gun, and his team members ambushed the enemy guards, freed the POWs, and helicoptered them to safety and freedom courtesy of Air America.
Even more remarkable is the edge-of-your-seat story of being parachuted - alone - into southern China. The mission: determine the origin of surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) that are shooting down U.S. warplanes attacking North Vietnam. Miraculously, Smith survived to tell the tale.

About this title

Reviews

Shortly after his graduation from an unnamed Ivy League college in the early 1960s, Smith, who had joined the Naval ROTC, was called to duty. Ten months later, he arrived in Vietnam, as a member of FRAM-16, an elite, CIA-trained unit of 16 men. Lacking uniforms and insignia, the unit was assigned not to fight but to infiltrate enemy areas and gather information. After 20 months, 14 of the 16 had died, while another had been severely wounded by a Claymore mine. This account of Smith's Vietnam days is rich in suspense and adventure, replete with stories of secret intelligence missions that went unrecorded by reporters. Acknowledging that most of his missions were boring and resulted in little action, Smith concentrates on the most important and action-packed forays. On one mission in Cambodia to locate a suspected Vietcong supply line, he and his team instead stumbled across a POW camp; in a scene worthy of Stallone, they rescued the captive Americans. Against nearly unbelievable odds, Smith parachuted alone into southern China to spy on supply routes to North Vietnam in an effort to learn which country was sending SAM missiles to Hanoi. Other chapters chronicle the team's training, early missions and Smith's final mission, to destroy a Vietcong radio tower, which resulted in a back injury to him and the death of his partner. An emotional visit in 1990 to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C.-which, Smith says, doesn't include any of his comrades' names-convinced the author to write his spine-tingling story and thus to heal the wounds of his 20 months of hell.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The shadowy influence of the Central Intelligence Agency on the Vietnam War has not been fully understood; first it assisted civilians in organizing counterinsurgency; later, the agency aided the military by collecting intelligence and producing havoc for the North Vietnamese. In all these operations, the CIA's conduit was the Vietnamese themselves, from espionage and sabotage to psychological warfare. In this memoir of his Navy hitch in Vietnam under the CIA, it is curious that Smith's only mention of Vietnamese is when he has to kill one of them on a mission. Apparently, he carried out covert operations, but his exploits seem too amazing to be true; for example, he claims that one particular mission, built around the supposition that in the mid-Sixties Soviet and Chinese cooperation aided North Vietnam, could have produced another U-2 incident. Although one can infer from details here that the author has had military experience, too much of this excitable account seems fanciful or perhaps blurred by the passage of 30 years. Entertaining but not recommended.?Mel D. Lane, Sacramento, Cal.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Presidio Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0891415971
• ISBN 13: 9780891415978
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256