The symposium, “Air America: Upholding the Airmen’s Bond,” comes on the heels of a decades-long effort to declassify approximately 10,000 CIA documents on the airline. These papers—many of which have never been seen by the public or scholars outside of the CIA—will join the History of Aviation Collection (HAC) at the Eugene McDermott Library at The University of Texas at Dallas
In 1970, Air America had 80 airplanes and was "The World’s Most Shot at Airline." Air America lost 240 pilots and crew members to hostile fire.
During 1970, Air America airdropped or landed 46 million pounds of food stuffs—mainly rice—in Laos. Helicopter flight time reached more than 4,000 hours a month in the same year. Air America crews transported tens of thousands of troops and refugees.
על אתר מכ"ם ה TACAN מדגם TSQ-81 שהוקם על ידי ה CIA בצפון לאוס בסמוך לגבול עם צפון ויאטנם והשמדתו בפשיטת קומנדו צפון ויאטנמי קטלנית במסגרת מתקפת הענקית. שימו לב לסיפור אומץ הלב שהפגין טכנאי המכ"ם הצ'ברגר (שהעיטור שלו שודרג לאחרונה מ AFC ל MOH) .
In early 1968 Air America pilot Ken Wood and his flight mechanic Loy “Rusty” Irons carried out one of the most unusual and daring rescues of the entire Vietnam War. Project “Heavy Green” was a top secret U.S. Air Force radar bombing facility located at Lima Site 85, a milehigh Laotian mountaintop a mere 120 miles from downtown Hanoi. The military program was manned by sixteen Air Force technicians working under cover as civilian employees of the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. On the evening of 10 March 1968 the North Vietnamese launched a furious mortar, rocket, and artillery attack on Site 85’s CIA operations area and the Air Force facilities. Concurrently,
a sapper team climbed the steep western cliffs just below the radar buildings.
In a pre-dawn attack the sappers surrounded the technicians and used automatic weapons fire and rocketpropelled grenades in an attempt to destroy the facility and kill all of the Americans. Wood and Irons, responding to a signal from a military survival radio, flew to Site 85 and courageously hovered over a group of radar technicians trapped on the side of the cliff below the radar facility. Irons quickly dropped a hoist to the men and pulled them aboard the unarmed and unarmored Huey helicopter. After forty-one years of secrecy, the CIA is now acknowledging Air America’s role in the rescue of the “Heavy Green” members - Stanley Sliz, Richard Etchberger, Willie Husband, and John Daniel. Etchberger, who heroically defended his injured comrades until they were placed on the helicopter, was mortally wounded by enemy fire as the Huey withdrew. The
communist assault on Site 85 resulted in the single greatest ground loss of U.S. Air Force personnel for the entire Vietnam War. Ten “Heavy Green” technicians remain unaccounted for from this attack.
CIA also acknowledges the actions of two paramilitary officers at Site 85. Howard
Freeman and John Woody Spence, working and living at an operations area several hundred yards below the radar buildings, faced the communist barrage with great courage and determination.[B At first dawn, heedless to the presence of enemy soldiers and the continuing risk of mortars, rockets, and artillery fire, Freeman led a rescue party of Hmong irregulars to the radar facility. While searching for the technicians he came under enemy gunfire and suffered a serious leg wound. Armed only with a shotgun and some phosphorous grenades, Freeman defended his team until forced to withdraw. ]In honor of his heroic actions Howard Freeman was awarded CIA’s Intelligence Star.[/B] At the operations area Woody Spence suffered a severe hearing loss during the bombardment, but continued to maintain critical radio communications throughout the North Vietnamese assault. He also declined evacuation from his post until sensitive equipment and documents were properly safeguarded. Mr. Spence was honored with the
CIA’s Certificate of Distinction.
על נסיונות הצפון ויאטנמים להשמיד את האתר מהאוויר בעזרת מטוסי AN-2 עתיקים, שהסתיימו בהפלת אחד מהם ממסוק יואי של ה CIA
The first attempt to destroy the radar site came from the air. About 1 p.m. on Jan. 12, two Russian-built An-2 Colt biplanes made three bombing passes against the summit of the mountain. The biplanes had a World War I look to them, but they were really not that old. The An-2 first flew as a crop duster in 1947. Cruising speed was below 150 mph, which probably was an advantage in this case because the biplanes were dropping improvised munitions through tubes in the floor. The “bombs” were converted 120 mm mortar rounds that would arm in the slipstream and detonate on impact. The brunt of the attack fell on the CAS area, where shiny rooftops apparently drew the attention of the An-2 pilots. They did not target the TSQ-81 facilities until the final pass, and the bombs they dropped there all missed. The attack killed two Laotian civilians and two guerrillas, but it did no damage to the radar site.
An Air America Bell 212 helicopter, the civilian version of the Huey, was on the helipad at the time of the attack. The crew leaped aboard and gave chase. The helicopter was faster than the biplanes. As it flew past the An-2s, the flight mechanic blasted them with a submachine gun, firing out the door and hitting both of them. One An-2 crashed and burned, and the other crashed 16 miles to the northwest while trying to clear a ridge. The rudder from one of the biplanes was recovered and taken to the Air America base at Long Tieng for a souvenir.
פרטים נוספים על הקרב על אתר המכ"ם ב LIMA 85
The Fall of Lima Site 85
http://www.airforce-magazine.com/Ma...6/0406lima.aspx
Lima Site 85 and the secret Air Force radar facility sat atop one of the highest mountains in Laos, 15 miles away from the border with North Vietnam. The site was defended by a force of 1,000 Hmong irregulars in the valley below, but a key element in its security was the mountain itself. The assumptions were wrong. On the night of March 10-11, 1968, under cover of a massive artillery and infantry assault on the mountain, a team of North Vietnamese sappers scaled the cliffs, overran the radar site, and killed more than half of the Americans they found there.
For years thereafter, the fate of Lima Site 85 was classified as top secret. When reports finally began to emerge, they were riddled with gaps and inaccuracies. Even now, almost 40 years after the attack, questions and doubts persist about what happened that night on the mountaintop.
מדוע הוקם שם האתר?
With the onset of the northeast monsoon in October, the weather over North Vietnam turned unfavorable for air operations and it did not improve again until April. This was a big problem for Rolling Thunder, the air campaign against North Vietnam from 1965 to 1968. At the time, the US had two all-weather strike aircraft: the Navy’s A-6 and the Air Force’s B-52. Only a limited number of A-6s were available, and for reasons of political reluctance in Washington, the B-52s were held to bombing near the Demilitarized Zone. That left it up to F-105s and other tactical aircraft to carry the war to the north, and during the monsoon, they could strike targets around Hanoi for only four or five days a month.
A solution of sorts appeared in 1966 with an adaptation of Strategic Air Command’s radar bomb scoring system. This modification, called the MSQ-77, guided aircraft to a precise point in the sky where ordnance was released. It wasn’t pinpoint accuracy, but it was good enough for targets such as airfields and industrial areas. By 1967, the Air Force had five MSQ-77 radars working in South Vietnam and one in Thailand. However, none of these sites covered the North Vietnamese heartland around Hanoi. That required putting the radar where it would have an unobstructed line of sight to the airspace over Hanoi. Also, the target area had to be within 175 miles of the radar, which was the effective range of the system.
תמונת המכ"ם
מיקום האתר
Such a place existed at Phou Pha Thi, a mountain in Laos 160 miles west of Hanoi. The Air Force already had a TACAN navigational beacon in operation on the rim of the mountain at an elevation of 5,580 feet. That was high enough to give the radar a straight shot to Hanoi. There was also a rough landing strip, Lima Site 85, on the flank of the mountain. It was one of several hundred such Lima sites built all over Laos by the CIA’s proprietary airline, Air America, to supply Hmong hill tribesmen fighting the Communist Pathet Lao. By strict definition, the Lima site was the airstrip, but the area around the TACAN was generally referred to as Lima Site 85 as well. A portable version of the MSQ-77 radar, the TSQ-81, could be broken down into sections and transported to Phou Pha Thi by helicopter.
The proposition was put to the selected candidates at Barksdale AFB, La., in September 1967. Forty-eight of them—four officers and 44 enlisted members—volunteered for the program, which was named Heavy Green. They were separated from the Air Force and employed by Lockheed Aircraft Service Corp., a subsidiary of Lockheed Aircraft Corp. While they were in the program, they would be paid by Lockheed, which also gave each of them a substantial life insurance policy. Their wives were brought to Washington, briefed, and required to sign security agreements to keep the program secret
The radar was rigged with explosives so it could be destroyed before the enemy could capture it. Heavy Green took over the TACAN as an additional duty. The radar bombing system went operational on Nov. 1, 1967.
ההתקפה עצמה
Before midnight, 33 North Vietnamese sappers climbed the western side of the mountain, a feat that US officials assumed was impossible. The sappers had trained for months, practicing on karst peaks and the faces of rock cliffs. They emerged on the top of the mountain at a point between the radar buildings and a Thai guard post. The sappers waited in hiding until 3 a.m., then began moving toward the Heavy Green facilities. They bumped unexpectedly into an enemy guard, who threw a grenade. The sappers immediately opened fire on the radar buildings with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and submachine guns. “The Americans were taken by surprise,” the North Vietnamese report said later.
The Hmong defenders around the site held the trail to the summit as late as 7:30 a.m., but they were badly outnumbered and the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao force was too powerful. Phou Pha Thi soon fell to the enemy. In the furor of the attack, nobody detonated the thermite [I]with which the radar had been rigged. [B]There was no attempt to install another TSQ-81 in Laos. On March 31, President Johnson announced a partial halt of bombing of North Vietnam and made the bombing halt complete on Nov. 1. There was no longer a need for a radar to guide strikes in the north.
the Air Force in 1966 installed a TACAN transmitter on Phou Phathi. A TACAN station is a nearly autonomous radio transmitter that provides military aircraft with a bearing and distance in miles relative to the station location. To support operation of the station on Phou Phathi, the Air Force rotated several technicians to and from the Rock for maintenance and resupply of the transmitter and its associated generator. The Rock was supplied weekly by a secret Air Commando unit, codenamed PONY EXPRESS and based at Udorn Airbase in Thailand, via the 700-foot Lima Site (L.S.) 85 strip in the valley below.
In 1967 the facility was upgraded with a bombing-control radar to improve the control and accuracy of the bombing campaign in North Vietnam. This upgrade brought in more Air Force personnel, "sheep-dipped" to look like civilians, and (allegedly) genuine civilian technicians from Lockheed Aircraft. In reality, the men on Phou Phathi were all Air Force CIRCUIT RIDER teams from the 1st Mobile Communications Group in Udorn who rotated to the site every 24 hours.
Because of their dependence on roads and overland travel, the North Vietnamese and PL only began offensives during the dry season, which in Laos normally begins in mid-October and lasts through early June. The US Air Force had begun upgrading the TACAN site on Phou Phathi in June 1967 with a TSQ-81 COMBAT SKYSPOT radar bomb scoring and impact system. The TSQ-81, a modified air-mobile version of a SAC range-instrumentation radar, would significantly increase bombing capabilities in poor weather conditions(October through April in North Vietnam) in areas of North Vietnam and Laos. It became operational in early November 1967, almost exactly coincidental with the end of the rainy season in Laos.
על אפקטיביות האתר בחודשים הספורים שפעל לפני שהושמד
The Air Force and CIA directed numerous airstrikes of F-4, F-105, and A-1 fighter-bombers from Thailand and Vietnam, many using the new radar at Site 85, against the massed columns of enemy appearing to encircle the site. The strikes were increased, even using Air Commando A-26 Invaders to attack at night, in an attempt to turn the twin advances on Routes 19 and 6. This air campaign peaked at 45 sorties on 3 January 1968, but it succeeded only in weakening the North Vietnamese and PL. The battle around Nam Bac intensified in early January, and on the 14th the base was taken by four NVA battalions. There were no survivors, and a massive amount of material and documents were captured.
The operations of the TSQ-81, nicknamed COMMANDO CLUB, were beginning to have real effect, with 23 percent of total strikes over North Vietnam in January coming under control of Site 85's radar. Even in poor weather, the COMMANDO CLUB system was able to direct bombing accurately throughout the Hanoi--Haiphong complex as well as in the immediate area of Phou Phathi for its own defense. This capability seems to have given the Air Force and Ambassador Sullivan an exaggerated sense of the defensibility of the site using air power.
By midday hopes of recovering the missing Americans were discarded and attention turned to destroying the radar to prevent it from falling into the hands of the North Vietnamese, along with the documentation and operational information that was left in the COMMANDO CLUB operations building. The North Vietnamese evidently did not realize what they had captured, or, if they did, did not care. No effort to remove or exploit the TSQ was detected in the hours immediately following capture of the site. The Air Force, however, was not going to give the enemy a chance to think about it. Beginning in late morning on 11 March, airstrikes were directed against the summit every day for a week to obliterate all traces of the COMMANDO CLUB on Phou Phathi. Between the 12th and 18th, 95 sorties were directed to destroy the radar; and on the 19th, two A-1 Sandys leveled every building on the ridge. This aerial barrage had the collateral effect of probably obliterating the remains of any Americans who were left on the mountain.
מדוע כשלו אנשי חהא"א בהגנה עצמית?
What concerns me most is not the defensive action, but the disruption of the pre-planned evacuation procedure. It is still not clear why technical personnel went over cliff to narrow ledge rather than down trail to chopper pad. CAS [euphemism for CIA] personnel subsequently went up same trail to installation, so we know trail was traversable, even under artillery fire. It is also not clear to me how small Vietnamese suicide squad got to the installation site, although it seems they must have scaled the cliff. Why did the COMMANDO CLUB technicians go over the cliff? That action seems to have caused most of the casualties. The answer probably lies in the training of the Air Force personnel. The sheep-dipped technicians, unarmed and posing as civilians, were not really combatants, yet they were in a position where close combat was almost inevitable. As is often the case in war, things did not go according to Plan A and the COMMANDO CLUB did not have a Plan B. The Air Force did not train the CIRCUIT RIDERS to fight as infantry to defend themselves. This was the real tragedy of Phou Phathi. If the technicians had organized their own defense, with armed sentries manning a defensive perimeter around their facility, possibly even incorporating the Hmong guerrilla troops in their effort, their chances of survival would have been much greater. The tactic of climbing over the side of the mountain, rather than maintaining a defensible position, was not militarily sound. The CIA advisers and the Ambassador apparently realized this.
They were lightly armed, with only 10 M-16 rifles shared among them. The mountain—Phou Pha Thi, which rose almost 6,000 feet above the valley below—was defended by 1,000 Hmong irregulars and US airpower. The drop on three sides was nearly vertical and the fourth side was fortified. The assumption was that it would be impossible for attackers to climb the sheer face of the mountain. On March 10, 1968, that proposition was about to be tested. A force consisting of between five and seven North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao battalions had the mountain surrounded.
הסגמנט העוסק בהצ'ברגר מתוך הסרט המצוין SOULS OF VALOR הזמין לצפיה ב YOUTUBE
זהו סרט מרתק בן כמעט שעה הסוקר את שלשת ה MOH שהוענקו במהלך 2010 - אנשי החי"ר רוברט מילר וסלבטורה גיאנטה (שניהם באפגניסטן, הראשון נהרג, השני לא) וכן השדרוג המאוחר של הצ'ברגר שנפל אף הוא בקרב.
הנשיא אובמה מעניק את ה MOH לשני בניו של הצ'ברגר באוקטובר 2010
בתגובה להודעה מספר 1 שנכתבה על ידי strong1 שמתחילה ב "ה CIA, אייר אמריקה וההתקפה על LIMA SITE 85"
את הסיפור הנ"ל פרסם strong1 כתגובה באשכול העוסק בשכירי חרב. הוא פוצל לאשכול נפרד משתי סיבות:
1. זה סיפור מספיק מעניין בשביל חיים עצמאיים, ומעבר לכך
2. חברת אייר אמריקה לא עמדה לרגע אחד בקטגוריה של "שכירי חרב", או כל הגדרה מקבילה אחרת.
אייר אמריקה הוא מקרה די נדיר בו סוכנות ביון לאומית הקימה חברה רשמית ורשומה כחוק, והשתמשה בה בצורה עצמאית למילוי צרכיה. בניגוד לסיפור שתואר בסרט משנות ה-90 בו כיכבו מספר שחקנים מוכרים, החברה היתה מבוססת על טייסים מקצועיים ורציניים ולא רק על קאובויים וסתם מופרעים (למרות שהיו שם כמה כאלה, ולמען האמת במקומות בו פעלה זה לפעמים לא רק דרוש אלא קריטי).
במהלך תקופת פעילות החברה היא ביצעה משימות אספקת מזון וציוד אזרחי לשבטים נידחים ואזורים מוכי שיטפון, לצד משימות אספקת נשק ותחמושת, איסוף מודיעין, ולפעמים גם חילוץ טייסים נוטשים. במקרים בודדים חומשו מספר מטוסים בעלי ייעוד כפול, והופעלו במשימות תקיפה וסיוע קרוב - בעיקר כסיוע לשבטים בעלי ברית של ארה"ב.
צחוק הגורל הוא שכאשר פעילות החברה הסתיימה בשנת 1976, צי המטוסים שלה נמכר לחברת Evergreen International Airlines המבצעת עד היום משימות בשירות סוכנויות הביון של ממשלת ארה"ב.
בתגובה להודעה מספר 1 שנכתבה על ידי strong1 שמתחילה ב "ה CIA, אייר אמריקה וההתקפה על LIMA SITE 85"
בעיקר באמצעות חהא"א, הכוחות המיוחדים ואנשי ה CIA במאמציהם לעצור את השטף הלוגיסטי שזרם דרך נתיב הו צי' מין מצפון ויאטנם אל דרומה דרך המדינה (ושכנתה מדרום קמבודיה), לצד הגנה על בסיסים מבודדים ואבטחת המונרכיה הפרו-מערבית.
Ravens of Long Tieng In the remote highlands of Laos, U.S. Air Force pilots fought a secret war. http://www.airspacemag.com/military...ion/ravens.html
The war in Laos was the biggest clandestine operation ever run by the CIA. Most Americans first began to hear about Laos in 1961, at a time when that country's neighbor to the east, Vietnam, was equally unknown. U.S. aid had been flowing into Laos since 1954, the year French forces fell at Dien Bien Phu. That defeat resulted in the Geneva accord that divided Vietnam, giving all territory above the 17th parallel to the communist Viet Minh. One intent of the settlement was to assure that Laos, at the time ruled by a king whose bloodline was centuries old, remained an independent country. But the Laotian border with North Vietnam, the scene of conflict for centuries, continued to prove porous to incursions and influence. Communist-aligned Pathet Lao guerrillas within Laos became even more emboldened by the victory of their longtime Viet Minh sponsors across the border in North Vietnam
ראשי
צ'אט
15-03-2013, 09:31
מצב כלאיים
