Atomic Express

I by chance found one of those boxes that you miss every time you move and forget to unpack. It was a bit like Christmas when I opened this one to find it full of paperbacks, many of them published before the internet and long before the advent of e-publishing. When movies made their way from film to video to DVD, I wondered about films that would never make it through the process either because they were not commercially viable or because they were no longer culturally relevant. Now I wonder about paperback books, turning yellow and brittle over time.

The first book I pulled out was Wayne Care’s “Vietnam Spook Show.” Published in 1989 by Ballentine Books, “VSS” came out during the trailing edge of the 1980s popular culture’s  fascination with the Vietnam War. The explosion of what a colleague of mine called “grunt memoirs” had already tapered off by the time “VSS” hit the scene and by this time the Cold War was on its last legs. It was unfortunate that “VSS” never achieved greater prominence. What made “Vietnam Spook Show” different?

Unlike “Flight of the Intruder” or “Nam” or “Tour of Duty,” “VSS” gave us a fictional-but-not glimpse into the highly-classified world of signals and communications intelligence during the Vietnam War in 1968. It is clear, however, that the techniques, equipment, and mission profiles depicted in “VSS” were in fact applied much more broadly during the Cold War, particularly in Asia. Indeed, “VSS” is dedicated to the 31 lost crew members of PR-21, a US Navy WV-2 shot down in international air space by North Korea in April 1969: the shootdown was, some think, a birthday present for North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.

The SIGINT/COMINT component of the Cold War played a crucial part in the overall war itself and the information collected was deemed worth dying for if necessary. Why was that? During the Cold War, Communist countries were closed. Unlike the West, tourists could not wander at will around or immigrate to placed like North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union. Information of all types was strictly controlled and disinformation regularly disseminated on the most innocuous of topics, let alone defence matters. For the opposing side, their ability to collect information on North American and Western European defences was relatively easy: they relied on deep penetration agents, bribery, blackmail, and open observation of defence facilities and programs. They had little problem picking targets for their nuclear missiles. The West, on the other hand, had to resort to more technological means: ground signals interception from bases in Iran, Japan, and Norway, then reconnaissance aircraft, and then dangerous overflights for radar mapping, followed by the advent of spy satellites. If the US and her allies did not know what to hit with their nuclear arsenal, then that arsenal was of lesser value when it came to deterring the Soviet arsenal.

When the American and British strategic nuclear deterrent forces were based on bombers like the B-47, B-52, and the Vulcan, it was of prime importance knowing the state and capabilities of the Soviet air defence system: its missiles, interceptor aircraft, and how the whole web of radars and ground controlled intercept commands worked so that the bombers could make it through these defences, survive, and strike their targets. The same held true for the air war over North Vietnam. And this is where “VSS” tells the story of the crewmembers of a compartmentalized program designated “RIVET GYM” (and other similar programs, though “VSS” does not and perhaps could not refer to them by their code name when the book was published).

Wayne Care’s book takes us through the training programme of US Navy linguist Craig Nostrum to his deployment with the fictional Detachment Tango in South Vietnam. Based on the real Det Bravo that operated from a base near Danang, Detachment Tango flies hours-long missions off the North Vietnamese coast in its EC-121/WV-2 Constellation aircraft:

“Tac/air operators listen in on the communications system of the North Vietnamese Air Force….they listen and translate it immediately to paper. We call this transcribing. One the flight is an evaluator, an officer in charge who watches what is happening and sends out spot reports. SAM operators listen to two channels and they work as a duo. One man listens to the tracking side of the surface to air missile sites and the other listens and translates the multiple voices that we consider the control segment of the launch….there are the ‘ditty boppers’ Morse code operators who are copying the grid coordinates of all aircraft over North Vietnam. There’s a plotter who is drawing all of these flights on a map…there are the T-branchers, radar intercept operators, who are recording radar signals of the North Vietnamese, and an O brancher who sits in his spaces and sends out messages at the evaluator’s direction….”

The US Air Force and US Navy both operated the unweildy-looking EC-121- Warning Star Super Constellations in this role: the US Navy version was called the WV-2 or “Willy Victor.” During the course of the Cold War, twenty EC-121’s and WV-2’s and their crews were lost to accidents, crashes, or in the case of PR-21, enemy action.

“VSS”, however, focuses less on the technological side of these operations than on the human element. One of the crew’s roles is to provide timely information for the Search and Rescue forces in the event of the loss of American aircraft so the pilots and crew can be recovered before they can be captured by the North Vietnamese. The effects of stress of operating from an unsecure location in South Vietnam coupled with the physical and mental strain of working in a modified turbo-prop airliner for 8 to12 hour missions on the linguists provides the main plot. A sub-plot revolves around careerism and falsified intelligence. The characters eventually engage in escalatory “MASH-like” behaviour to keep their sanity and motivation while performing a vital job for which they cannot receive public recognition or credit.

The relationship between the NSA and the armed services’ signals and communications intercept agencies and their platforms is explained. I understand that “VSS” had to be vetted by the National Security Agency before publication, though no mention of this appears in the book’s front matter.

I think that Wayne Care hits the nail on the head for thousands of other Cold Warriors who did similar jobs in remote locations, as well as those who served supporting the Vietnam effort. I can’t seem to find a book that is quite like it and the truth of SIGINT/COMINT operations protrudes through Care’s fiction. It is unfortunate that “Vietnam Spook Show” has not been re-published. It should be, perhaps by Naval Institute Press with a contextual forward by the author or an NSA historian.

(Thanks to http://www.farnboroughspotters.com/blackbushehistory.html http://flickrhivemind.net/User/aviatorr727/Interesting and http://www.sandiegoairandspace.org/library/stillimages.html for the WV-2 photos)