During the eight-year secret war in Vietnam, when Green Beret-led reconnaissance teams and company-sized elements ran top secret missions across the fence into Cambodia, Laos and N. Vietnam, many of those missions were compromised before the Military Assistance Command Vietnam-Studies and Observations Group units landed on the ground, Soldier of Fortune magazine has learned.

Exactly how many missions were compromised, how many Green Berets and their courageous indigenous counterparts were killed or wounded in action, as a result of these heinous actions, will never be known, due to the highly classified nature of SOG, its tightly compartmentalized command structure and extremely narrow channels of intelligence and counterintelligence reporting.

Thus, one of the hidden horrors of running highly classified missions where intelligence reports were delivered promptly to the White House is: there are few paper trails to follow and the truth about the degree of compromise, if ever documented, will likely never be known.

More than 20 years ago Soldier of Fortune magazine was the first publication in the country to print stories about the highly classified and deadly SOG missions. Recently gathered information from four separate sources confirmed the long-held fears of many SOG Green Berets who ran what many believe were the deadliest missions during that war where casualties exceeded 100 percent among SOG soldiers.