Operation Tailwind: A Vietnam Report Which Almost Destroyed a Television Network
Fear, mania, and hatred inflamed in the United States after the airing of the first televised war in Vietnam. During the deadliest year of the battle in 1968, color reverberated through cathode-ray tubes in television sets for all Americans, depicting a ravaged nation as CBS News anchor, Walter Cronkite, announced that he believed America had lost the war. His statement haunted patriots and reportedly prompted then U.S President Lyndon B. Johnson to state, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” The failure prompted decades of malcontent. American trust plummeted, and the media reflected the flurry of discontent through film and novels, devolving into biblical paranoia as people saw apocalyptic chariots in the huey helicopters and Viet Cong as “David” taking on the “Goliath” of the world. This fractured interpretation of the war had ripple effects which shook the whole media world.
On June 7th, 1998, the famed multinational news channel CNN released a story on the Vietnam war which almost ruined the network. Upon releasing an investigative report, they were cornered by the pentagon, CIA, veterans, journalists, and the public at large. Employees were fired, millions of dollars lost in settled lawsuits, and the damage of decades worth of credibility. It was a story to shake the industry, the power to end presidencies, cause nationwide protests, but it instead destroyed a reporter’s career.
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April Oliver, with short dark hair and often in ironed suit and pants, always looked ready for a friendly chat or cross examination. After rising through the journalistic ranks, working for public news broadcasting PBS and others, came to CNN from fifteen years of experience in the field; five years of international affairs coverage, running from Nicaragua, South Africa, to the Middle East. However, her arrival at the news network was at a time of disorder from a new acquisition by Time Warner. The new managerial crew with massive funding and big dreams stoked division among the staff at the time. Despite that, she proved herself among her peers, joining the special assignment unit which centered around investigative reporting.
Upon one of her assignments, investigating covert missions during the Vietnam war, she was advised to go to Colonel Van Buskirk, a veteran of the war and talkative source who’d be able to give her the information she needed. Van was an eccentric figure, after serving in Vietnam he did some soul searching around the globe, selling arms, getting stuck in international prisons, until April met him in the 90’s where he became a born-again Christian preacher offering comfort to American prisoners. It was during her interaction that her initial story was set aside to investigate something much bigger.
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Through her talks with Van and other brothers in arms, tape recorder and legal pad at the ready in their homes, she found that they had something to say after keeping a twenty-year-old secret. During the United States’ long war in Vietnam, there was Laos bordering the land just to the north, a mutually agreed “red-zone,” where no side was granted foot into the neutral space. However, as battles go, the rules of engagement were broken. Both sides, the Vietnamese communist forces and Americans with their allies used the lands to transport arms and engage in covert skirmishes. This is what Van Buskirk and his team did.
Their unit was called S.O.G, (Studies and Observations Group) a name given to some fifty members to leave a paper trail insinuating they were land surveyors, benevolent researchers scanning the fauna. With training grounds hidden within the forests of Laos the SOG team received CIA direction, coated in sweat, sleeping in the cool eyots in between missions, scarcely bathing and eating the locals food to hide their scent. Their names spoke peace, on paper they didn’t exist, and in the forest they maintained a one hundred percent mortality rate, every man who was of the squad was, sooner or later, to be injured or killed. High command did not quite like the rowdy group, as Eugene McCarley claims, “but if you need a hairy job done, this was your team.”
On paper, the new mission given to SOG, and their allied indigenous mercenary Montagnards, was a diversionary attack. A few kilometers northeast, the CIA was engaging in an Operation Gauntlet. SOG team was to blow up a bridge to distract and slow down the forces. However, as many of the insurgents later discovered, their mission was quite different. Before going in they were told to eliminate defectors if any were encountered. Named Operation Tailwind, the SOG forces and Montagnard allies retrieved their gas masks and ventured on foot into the ‘red zone’, the furthest excursion into Laos ever, some seventy kilometers north to an area called Chavan.
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The true mission was to invade an enemy outpost, intelligence from a CIA memo established a training ground, their job was to wipe it out. Lieutenant Van Buskirk at the time led the mission, and by the words of him and corroborating witnesses, blond men were found on the training ground, unshackled and combative. As lieutenant Buskirk says
And I remember it this day as if it was yesterday. He had piercing blue eyes, was a Caucasian. He had long, blond hair. And he looked the saddest look I’ve ever seen in my life. And his English was perfect.
Quickly upon reaching the training grounds, SOG team engaged in battle, coming under fire from the enemy Vietnamese forces. Van chased one of the blonde individuals who dove into a fox hole, they engaged in conversation with Van above,
“Get out of there!”
“Fuck you!”
“No fuck you!” Van replied before tossing a white phosphorus grenade down the hole, never seeing him again.
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The battle took a turn for the worse, SOG forces called for arial support upon being cornered, and as helicopters approached, the allies equipped their gas masks as a substance was unleashed on the enemy. Supposedly tear gas, the allies escaped the LZ, all SOG members were injured but alive, with the Montagnards sustaining twelve casualties. However, Van knew, and other members of the outfit suspected, that the substance unleashed was not tear gas, but something considerably stronger. Van tells April Oliver later in a cold call,
My unit puked their brains out. We all got amoebic dysentery. Everyone’s nose ran and all this mucous started coming out of everyone’s nostrils. Lots of enemy started having seizures….
These are not tear gas symptoms. “It was nerve gas. They don’t want it called that, but that's what it was,” Another soldier stated in an on-camera interview, Mike Hagan, squad leader.
April Oliver conducted her interviews and research alongside Jack Smith, experienced producer for the network. Both co-wrote the piece, with the twenty-five percent claimed assistance from Peter Arnett, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, acclaimed for his battle coverage of the Vietnam war. In the same war he reported, he later participated in the claim that war crimes were being committed in the very same lands. The exact claim? The internationally banned Sarin gas was used against enemy combatants and U.S defectors during the Vietnam war.
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Some questions arise as to why Sarin nerve gas would be used at all. It is known as an incredibly volatile and unpredictable weapon, its efficacy in an enclosed space, such as the sarin attack in the Japanese subways cars in the early 1990s, was effective due to the close proximity. But in a lush jungle? Some say unlikely. However, April Oliver and other weaponry experts said the opposite. With there being an estimated 40 million pounds at the ready in a storage facility off the coast of an ally-controlled base in Japan, U.S officials found the weapon to be quite effective, choosing it over soman and lucite, other chemical weapons.
Admiral Moorer, member of the Joint Chiefs of staff at the time of the battle and key source for the journalists, corroborated these claims. In their third off-camera interview with April Oliver, Admiral Moorer was asked whether killing 3 defectors was the mission in Tailwind and replied, “I have no doubt about that.” In that interview, he also clearly and unambiguously confirmed that sarin nerve gas was “by and large” available for search and rescue missions, that it was “definitely available” in the Vietnam War and that it saved American lives in Laos.
Sarin is also known as a non-persistent gas, meaning that it would dissipate in about thirty minutes after use, allowing ground forces to ‘clean up’ the area. Also, due to the heat, humidity, foliage, and thick elephant grass, protection against the gas can be limited to a simple gas mask as opposed to the cumbersome gas suit.
With all the information ready, eight months of investigating, forty-four drafts of the script, the thumbs up from CNN officials, the story was set to go. However, according to April Oliver and Jack Smith, things quickly went awry. Instead of the one hour special that the team edited going on air, the network chopped it down to a mere eighteen minutes. According to Oliver and Smith, the management deemed it too bloated for commercialized viewership, especially the new heads from the Time Warner merger.
Yet, despite the issues, the story was a resounding success, at least for the first twenty-four hours. Being one of the most viewed specials of the network at the time, management was pleased.
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Jeff Greenfield, reporting from the desk began,
Earlier this year, the United States nearly went to war with Iraq over chemical and biological weapons. Now, CNN and Time, after an eight-month investigation, report that the U.S. Military used lethal nerve gas during the Vietnam war.
Bernard Shaw follows,
It was 1970, President Nixon had introduced a no-first-use policy on nerve gas, part of his commitment to the Geneva protocol limiting chemical weapons, but the senate had not yet ratified it.
Success was celebrated in the studio, but quickly a controversy was already boiling to destroy the careers of April Oliver and her co-producer Jack Smith, threatening to bring down CNN itself. Within hours of the broadcast, Reuters reached out to the eighty-four-year-old key source of the program Admiral Moorer for a follow up interview. The admiral quickly backed away from the claim of nerve agents being used in Laos, clarifying that he had no first-hand knowledge, and only heard the claim from other individuals. Reuters also reported that Defense Secretary William S Cohen was ordering an investigation into the claims of chemical weapons being used in the Vietnam war.
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Other teams also conducted investigations into the claims. Retired Green Beret member Lieutenant Rudi Gresham caught hold of files written right after Tailwind by Van Buskirk. In it, it was stated that it was tear gas, not sarin used in the battle. Also, in confidential documents, Rudi found that two sources for Oliver’s report, Jay Cathey and Jay Graves, were not in Laos or in operation Tailwind at all.
Retired Air Force Major General Perry Smith, a highly regarded military analyst on retainer for CNN stated, “I tried very hard to stop it. But they had done promos on it and they had hired Rick Kaplan to kick up the ratings, so he thought they had a really juicy story…I felt sick to my stomach watching it when it aired.” With his own research and internal sources in the government he found no evidence of sarin being used anywhere in southeast Asia, nor evidence corroborating the targeted defectors. Not long after he quit CNN and stated, “I can’t work for an organization that would do something like this.”
Writer Jerry Lembcke, who wrote, “CNN’s Tailwind Tale: Inside Vietnam’s Last Great Myth”, combed through not just the evidence, but the routes April Oliver took in her accumulation of evidence, citing the story’s resemblance to war fiction such as Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter, and books such as Spite House which had a strikingly similar plot to the proposed events of Tailwind. Not only that, but Lembcke cites some of Oliver’s previous Vietnam reporting, citing reactions from Vietnam vets who stated that her telling was ‘sensationalized’.
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CNN themselves began their own investigation into the production of the program titled Valley of Death and hired the highly respected first amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams to conduct research. Called the AK report and weighing in at forty pages, Abrams and his partner went through the documents and sources and found the story “insupportable,” advising CNN to retract the story and apologize. While they found no evidence of intentional falsification, he called into question the reliability of the sources. Since it was a ‘black op’ little documentation into the specifics of the case existed, relying upon oral testimony of the SOG and military members.
April Oliver and Jack Smith, after refusing to resign, were fired. Arnett was suspended. After the Abrams or AF report was released, April Oliver and Jack Smith released a seventy-six-page rebuttal and then held a news conference on July 27th 1998, hosted by C-SPAN with a crowd of journalists in attendance waiting to ask their questions. The main purpose was to respond to the pentagon report, AK report, and cite from their rebuttal. What follows is some arguments proposed by the reporters.
The first section details the timely manner in which the AK report was constructed. While the Valley of Death consisted of eight months of work, forty-four drafts, Abrams and others seemingly disproved Valley of Death in less than two weeks. They also cite the conflict of interest in the AK reporting. Despite the supposed ‘independence’ of the report to avoid bias, the co-author was David Kohler, Senior Vice President and General Counsel of CNN who previously gave approval of the story to begin with.
Going into the claims made by the AK report, much of the report’s qualms are directed towards the manner in which the teams received their confirmations. In some cases, it seems that the Admiral or other sources are confirming one thing, when they are in fact confirming another.
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With a confidential source,
Q. So it was decided then that the agent CBU-15/GB could be used because the Vietnamese were unlikely to complain.
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A. Yes, in covert operation in Laos.
The source here seems to be answering to the words “could be”, not giving the hard confirmation that the weapon was used.
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According to Oliver and Smith, Admiral Moorer confirmed multiple times on multiple occasions that sarin was available for use on SAR (search and rescue) missions, that it was used on Tailwind, and that defectors were indeed targets. Oliver states that after the airing of the story, he grew fearful that he would go down in history as a man who ordered illegal weapons on the NVA (North Vietnamese Army), women, and children. He amended his statements afterwards. “I did not authorize the use of sarin gas…. However, I later learned of the operation, including the use of nerve gas on the mission.”
Robert Van Buskirk, first Lieutenant on the SOG hatchet force on the Operation Tailwind, became viewed as a questionable source. A few years before the Valley of Death special, Buskirk wrote a book about the event, but made no mention of the gas used. He also had a history of taking prescription medication for a nervous disorder, as well as imprisonment for trafficking of arms. He appears to be an eccentric character with a questionable history.
Despite this, according to Oliver and Smith, as well as corroboration from other confidential and reliable sources, Buskirk is a solid source. They defend his medical history, stating that many veterans suffer from nervous disorders while still being reliable. According to the parties at the time of his statements he was not taking prescriptions. In the initial cold call to Van Buskirk in October 1997, before anyone knew where the story might lead, Van Buskirk said with regard to his book, “It was all about Tailwind, that is why it was so risky, cause it was still top secret.” With regard to the gas dropped on Tailwind, he referred, unprompted, to a conversation he had had regarding the use of “lethal nerve gas” on Tailwind and said, “I didn’t really talk about the gas [in my book] because it was too top secret.”
Later commenting on his sighting of the American defector, Buskirk said, “Peter, I was as close almost as you and I are, and that young man looked right at me. I mean he looked right at me, but he looked through me, looked past me. It’s what I later came to know as the 1,000 yard stare. I had never seen the 1,000 yard stare. I later learned what it is. But he looked at me, through me. It was the saddest look. It’s the only face that I’ve kept from Tailwind. In other words, all the gore and all the blood and I stuck my head in one hootch and that’s all I saw, and all the stuff that would give nightmares to a soldier is gone from my spirit. I don’t have any nightmares or remembrances other than that young man’s face, the second one. And I remember it this day as if it was yesterday. He had piercing blue eyes, was a Caucasian. He had long, blond hair. And he looked the saddest look I’ve ever seen in my life. And his English was perfect.”
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Beyond them, there were numerous other sources who confirmed the defector and sarin angle. Of approximately two dozen pilots interviewed, five describe nerve gas or killer gas or GB as available for SARs; three insist that the available special last resort gas was CBU-15 (the deadly sarin nerve gas weapon) and five say that the special gas available was sleeping gas or simply a powerful last resort gas which was not tear gas. A confidential source, who the AK report does not question their credibility, states, “Remember, it was a major decision to escalate to decide use of that agent. It was not risk free. But it was felt that it was unlikely that the NVA would complain. They were not supposed to be in Laos. They were unlikely to come to the United Nations and complain about the weapon.”
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Later, when interviewed by April Oliver,
Q. So you understood the target of Tailwind to be defectors, and not POWs?
A. Defectors, yeah.
And later:
Q. Just one last time, your own personal understanding of Tailwind is that it was a
mission in which CBU-15, GB, was used at least twice on the village base camp and on extraction, and that the target was a group of American defectors.
A. You are not going to use my name on this are you?
Q. No, sir, you are on background as a senior military official.
A. Yeah. That’s my view.
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Combat medic Gary Rose, SOG reconnaissance leader Mike Sheppard, and others report that they were ordered to carry atropine on the mission. In combat, its main use is as a sarin antidote. Yet, it is important to mention that some members, such as Captain Eugene McCarley, deny that the antidote was ever carried.
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(Medal of Honor: Trump presents to Vietnam-era medic Capt. Gary Rose)
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During the conference hearing held by C-SPAN, April Oliver and Jack Smith expressed no regret about their reporting. The former reported interest in pursuing law to protect first amendment cases and the perceived decline of the journalism field. The latter, Jack Smith, after stating he had not been reached out for hire by other prominent news networks, would work from home, self employed. After their firing from CNN they attempted to sue the network, later receiving a settlement outside of court. Some of the sources, feeling they were misled or misrepresented in the reporting, attempted to sue the duo, however it did not reach court. One of the individuals seeking reparations was Robert Van Buskirk as well as Mike Hagan. Hagan, who confirmed the use of nerve gas, feels that he was misled, although by his own words, part of his motivation for walking back his claims was due to attacks in public and Veteren’s Fund threatening to revoke his benefits.
Although many applauded their reporting, a general calling Oliver after the fact stating that he ‘almost fell out of his chair’ due to the accuracy, just as many, if not more lampooned their work for its gross misrepresentation of not just the case, but veterans who risked their lives for the country, spouting far right-wing conspiracy. To this day, due to the nature of the secret war of Laos, we may never know the true nature of the battle.
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