Here is where everything fell apart. Smith, Chuyen’s handler, feared for his own safety and retreated to the CIA’s Nha Trang office seeking protection. Word quickly got out and Abrams asked Rheault about the situation on an open and unsecured line. When pushed by Abrams, the Group Commander repeated the cover story.
Abrams was never a fan of Airborne troops and especially Special Forces and he quickly had all of the officers and men involved in the situation, including Rheault arrested and placed in Long Binh Jail. All were to be charged with premeditated murder.
“Get up there and clean all those bastards out!”, Abrams told his staff. His chief intelligence officer said that Abrams has peculiar prejudices. “This commonsensical, well-read, sophisticated man harbored some of the longest lasting, strangest, and most unusual prejudices. For one, he hated halfbacks, football halfbacks…Abrams held another unusual, and more serious, bias: he disliked paratroopers.”
He wasn’t alone. The Big Army hated Special Forces, all the attention that the relatively new unit had gotten from National Geographic, Look Magazine and the Barry Sadler craze had rubbed the brass the wrong way. Many senior officers hated that the best and brightest NCOs were choosing on going to the expanding Special Forces units rather than stay and beef up the conventional army.
Article 32 Fiasco
Reporters who routinely covered Special Forces found out about the arrests and the story went public in a big way. Most Americans felt that Rheault and the SF soldiers were being made scapegoats in a CIA operation, especially when the defense produced photos taken by the GAMMA Intel team that showed the asset in a meeting with NVA intelligence officers in Cambodia. The public wanted to know why the men were being singled out for killing the enemy, which is what they were supposed to do.
Abrams insisted that the Article 32 hearing take place and it did, turning into a circus. The defense hired a civilian attorney, Henry Rothblatt who was well versed in military court martials. He immediately deposed both CIA agents and Abrams himself to testify.
The defense also moved for dismissal due to a lack of evidence. There was no body. Abrams tried to have the Navy drag Nha Trang harbor and use divers to find the body. He was taking a beating in the press, he denied the defense the use of any kind of office which further gave credence to his bias.
Lack of a body prompted the prosecution to give immunity to one of those charged, Chief Warrant Officer Edward Boyle and was going to use his testimony to push for a murder trial. Boyle refused the offer of immunity and also refused to testify.
Meanwhile, another SF recon team inserted in Cambodia and was hounded by NVA troops on insertion, but broke contact and later killed two enemy troops. One was believed to be a senior Chinese intelligence officer. In his possession, he had a case with a list of agents working for the NVA in the South Vietnamese and US military. Listed prominently was the dead “double agent” Chuyen. There was now no doubt that Chuyen was guilty.
In a side note, Col. Charles M. Simpson, who would eventually take over for Rheault and was a friend, flew to Saigon trying to be of any assistance. When Abrams found out, he flew into another rage. “Tell that SOB to get the hell out of the country ASAP, or his ass will be in a cell next to his buddy.”
Both Abrams and the CIA refused to testify, so finally the Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor announced that the charges against Rheault and the others would be dropped. Rheault asked to be re-instated as the Commander of the 5th SFG(A) and it was denied. So, his career over, he promptly filed paperwork for retirement. The others soon left the military as well.
Aftermath
Rheault was, prior to this incident, a rising star in the SF community. He was considered a great candidate to make General Officer and his career, on the fast track was ruined. Project GAMMA was shut down in March 1970. An official Army history of the Green Berets, published after the Vietnam War, does not mention Project GAMMA or Detachment B-57 despite the high level of intelligence garnered. Although the Pentagon has declassified much material about Green Beret cross-border operations inside Laos and Cambodia, nothing on Project Gamma has ever been made available.
Rheault retired and quickly took a position with the Outward Bound program in Maine. He remained there until his death in October of 2013, just two weeks shy of his 89th birthday. He refused interviews and book deals on the incident but was working on a book about SF in Vietnam but never got it published because publishers wanted him to discuss the entire “Green Beret Affair.” Eventually, his friend Simpson published the book, “Green Berets, The First Thirty Years”
Rheault never tried to augment himself financially or in any other way over the affair. He did work with veterans of both the Iraq and Afghanistan, assisting veterans in another unpopular war.
Lessons Learned
What does the entire affair mean to the SF and Special Operations Forces of today? There still remains within the Big Army some of that petty jealousy and distaste for Special Operations and Special Forces in general.
And in the shadowy world in which the SOF operate in today with constant changing of the rules of engagement, troops will always have that question of whether a kill is “a good one.” There was another wrongful prosecution for an SF captain and master sergeant of a “suspected” insurgent in Afghanistan about 10 years ago. Although the charges were later dropped, they never should have been brought in the first place.
Allegations are surfacing that certain SOF units from Britain and Australia were operating outside the rules of engagement as well. While the verdict is still out on those, proper caution must always be used in these types of situations. And the chain of command must leave no doubt in the SF operators’ minds on what is or is not allowed in the ROE (rules of engagement).
The life of the SOF operators is dangerous enough already, they don’t need anything else adding to it. Including a hostile higher headquarters that doesn’t believe in SOF.
Photos courtesy DOD
This article was originally published on SpecialOperations.com
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