Tom Mangold

Do you think you're hard? Do you think you're some sort of Tier Zero Modern Warfare Elite Ops Deniable Badass? Do you even think you know about such people? Until you've read this book, you don't know shit.

Cu Chi was a district just 25 miles from Saigon. Starting from the French Indochina War, local guerrillas carved tunnels out of the strong laterite clay that made up the district. By 1968, the Iron Triangle had over 200 miles of tunnels, with three and four level base camps including show more barracks, hospitals, and weapons shops. This book covers the Vietnamese men and women who lived and fought in the tunnels, and the American soldiers tasked with going in and smoking them out, the stone crazy tunnel rats.

The authors have compiled an extensive body of interviews with veterans on both sides of the conflict, bring forth the survivors own words as they describe living without sunlight or fresh air for months on end, and the terror of chasing the enemy into the bowels of the Earth. A secondary topic is weapons, from madcap high-tech schemes to destroy the tunnels, to the trained wasps and snakes that the VC used to defend their bases. Both the human and military elements are well-represented.

In the end, America never learned how to fight in the tunnels. Instead, in the wake of the Tet offensive, the army simply obliterated the entire district, first with defoliants, then with Rome plows, then with B-52 strikes that blew 10m craters in the ground. The guerrillas were essentially destroyed, but only at the cost of the entire region. The Tunnels of Cu Chi is a fascinating micro-history that amply demonstrates the fractally fucked up nature of the war. show less

"Not only were they confronting an army of moles, but they had to deal with them in mole holes, perhaps the most extraordinary battleground the American soldier would ever encounter."

During the Vietnam War American soldiers would be amazed that the Viet Cong could appear, engage in fire, and then fade away. This was due in large part to the networks of underground tunnels in which they hid, and even lived, sometimes for years at a time. In the Cu Chi area, which is a far suburb of Saigon, show more the tunnels were part of a complex of tunnels stretching from Saigon to near the Cambodian border. There were hundreds of miles of tunnels, connecting villages, serving as storage for weapons caches as well as providing hiding places for the soldiers. Some of the tunnels contained hospital wards and even operating rooms. There were workshops to build booby traps and other weapons. There were conference rooms and entertainments stages. (One chapter of the book reports on a North Vietnamese troupe of entertainers who lived in the tunnels in the south for years, entertaining the soldiers.)

Many of the tunnels were built during the time of the struggles with the French, and by the time the Americans arrived in 1965 there were more than 200 kms of tunnels. At first, the Americans discovered, and attempted to destroy the tunnels on an ad hoc basis. Soon, however, the need for a better strategy arose, and the "tunnel rats," a all-volunteer group of soldiers, was formed. They were charged with entering the tunnels when they were found, routing out inhabitants of the tunnels, and destroying the tunnels. Much easier said than done.

The tunnels had evolved as a natural response of poorly equipped guerillas facing a technologically superior enemy. The CuChi tunnels were in a free fire zone near a major US base, and were used for infiltrating Saigon. The Tet Offensive was planned and executed from these tunnels.

The book is told from both sides, primarily through interviews and descriptions of those who experienced the tunnels, on both sides of the conflict. There is almost more information from the North Vietnamese point of view than the American, since many of the American tunnel rats were reluctant to discuss their experiences. This was a fascinating read, and it definitely gives one a clear sense of why the United States could never have won the Vietnam War.

3 stars show less

My reaction to reading this book in 1995.

Fascinating story of one man’s obsession and paranoia and how it greatly crippled the CIA’s intelligence work against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

After reading this book, it’s a wonder we fared as well as we did against the Russians then, and it is an explanation for why human intelligence operations against the U.S.S.R. so miserably failed to see the crumbling of the Soviet Empire and its economic weakness or the crushing of the show more Czechoslovakian revolt. Angleton, head of CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff for 20 years (1954-1974 and the first to hold the position), crippled the agency by his paranoia and obsessions; yet, as Director of Central Intelligence William Colby said, it’s doubtful he actually caught a single spy. He was a brilliant man at bureaucratic intrigue and Machiavellian intrigue. Many people who worked at CIA never met him; he would direct counterintelligence operations against US citizens and CIA officer and leave no paper trail linking it to him as shown by his clever scheme to sell Yuriy Loginov (an alleged KGB double agent) out to his former masters. He was worshipped as a master of Counter Intelligence by his peers in Canada, Britain, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa; a man with intimate contacts with Israeli intelligence.

The tale is simple in its outlines and fascinating in its details. Angleton felt severely betrayed when his colleague and friend Kim Philby turned out to be a KGB double agent. he even went so far as destroying all the voluminous records of his conversations with Philby out of embarrassment over what secrets he spilled. When egomaniacal KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn came over to the CIA with grandiose notions of knowing the KGB’s inner workings (he had only been a relatively low ranking KGB officer who did no operational work in the field) and revelations of a “monster plot” run by Philby, he found a very – disastrously so – ready ear in Angleton. The monster plot had three main elements: the Sino-Soviet split was a fake, the KGB was mounting a massive penetration of Western intelligence services, and – most importantly for later developments – that all defectors after Golitsyn would be fake. (In some ways, I find this notion the most incredulous and wonder how even a suspicious counterspy could presume to predict the motives of any possible future defectors.). Angleton swallowed it all. Suspicions were cast on loyal CIA officers and agents and agents at friendly agencies (Angleton did much to sour relations between French and American intelligence agencies with accusations of Soviet moles). Careers were ruined; people were falsely imprisoned. Particularly shameful was the case of Yuriy Nosenko who was imprisoned for 4 years by the CIA because it was believed, as per Golitsyn, that he was a double agent for the KGB – this despite the fact that he helped uncover major KGB moles with much more specific information than self-proclaimed expert of KGB operations, Golitsyn (not to mention the vital information he had on Lee Harvey Oswald’s lack of ties to the KGB).

Angleton’s refusal to accept the veracity of vital information given by defectors hurt the Soviet Division of the CIA and its efforts to provide the U.S. with vital intelligence. In some cases, he simply buried some valuable information from these CIA agents in the USSR in his cavernous safes because he believed the source to be tainted. Other times, he refused to sign off on the recruitment of double agents in the KGB (I was surprised to learn that sometimes spies really do sit around cocktails and try to “turn” each other) lest they be KGB “provocateurs”. Any defector that supported the bona fides of Nosenko was suspect. Eventually, Angleton was fired because of scandalous public revelations of his running surveillance operations on U.S. citizens in the U.S.. It provided an excuse for Colby to fire him. The contention of CIA psychologist John Gittinger that Angleton became a paranoid after Philby’s betrayal seems believable. Golitsyn and Angleton fed off each other, their world views mutually reinforcing each other. Golitsyn’s contentions that all following defectors would be fake was simply reinforced when they would vouch for each other’s credibility.

Intelligence work rarely deals in certainties, and intelligence agencies do certainly engage in disinformation, so Angleton’s obsession with secrecy is understandable; indeed, his job required it. But he took it too far. As the epigraph of the concluding chapter says (paraphrased), a secure agency gets nothing done if it is obsessed with security above all else. That saying of William Donovan’s sums up this book and Angleton’s career. Not only did he cripple intelligence gathering, but he caught no spies. (One bizarre feature of the Counterintelligence Staff under him was that they spent a large amount of time studying Cheka’s Trust operation form the 1920s – a masterpiece of deception but of little use in fighting the Cold War).

Other bits of note was the CIAs efforts to go through Angleton’s files and safes (including taking months with safecrackers to break into safes whose combinations had been lost) after he left and discovering all sorts of intelligence information he had not passed on or, in one case, mail he had illegally intercepted. And there was the embarrassing revelation that Golitsyn had personally – and against regulations – been allowed by Angleton to take very sensitive case files out of the CIA building. (Golitsyn, in his career as a CIA consultant, got to see all kinds of sensitive files from various Allied intelligence services.) Angleton, in his paranoia and suspicions, seems to have become lost in, to use his memorable phrase (he was a lover of poetry and could be an elegant writer), a “wilderness of mirrors”. I find it interesting that Angleton’s successor, George Kalaris, found himself, confronted with fragments of half-truths and unsubstantiated claims, developing the same paranoia after 2 years. He left the job after two years and, concluding that the job itself could induce this outlook, recommended that no one hold the job longer than 2 years. show less

An interesting but biased look at the career of James Angleton. I say biased because it only really looks at what the author considers his failures. While there are chapters covering his life before 1960, it is really window dressing. The book is really only interested in Angleton's support of the Soviet defector Golitsyn who developed a theory that the Soviets were masters of deception. So masterful in fact that not only had they recruited spies in nearly ever Western government, but that show more all defectors after Golitsyn were in fact false defectors. Still loyal to the Soviet Union and who's only role was to spread disinformation to the West. It should have been investigated, but it was also self serving. But it fitted with Angleton's thinking and became his base for all further investigations. The book is not as well written as The Chu Chi Tunnels, by the same author, but it's not terrible either. It's simply biased and in parts dated. We now know that at least two major accusations against Angleton are not true, accusations that his failed methods got agents arrested or killed by the Soviets. They were revealed by real American traitors. Worth reading, but not the definitive book on the man or the subject. show less