Operation Grand Eagle

Operation Grand Eagle

In October 1978, as Lieutenant Colonel James "Bo" Gritz later told it, DIA Deputy Director General Harold R. Aaron asked him to "retire" from the Army to work on "private sector" approaches to the POW problem. Gritz, whose own father had gone missing in a B-17 during WWII, stepped down that month and soon received a phone call from Texas.

"This is H. Ross Perot," came the curt folksy voice through the phone. "I want you to come to Dallas to see me."

Gritz duly showed up at Perot's ten-story headquarters, which was monitored by sophisticated security systems and surrounded by a private 18-hole golf course. On hand was retired Gen. Bull Simons, who had commanded the Sontay raid eight years before, and was now in the pay of Perot. According to Gritz, Perot said that General Tighe had asked him (Perot) to fund back-channel intelligence missions in Laos. According to Perot, however, it was Gritz who asked him (Perot) to pony up funds, which he did. In any case, Gritz began to plan an operation code-named VELVET HAMMER, training a group of over-aged vets at an abandoned cheerleading academy in Orlando, just down the road from Disney World.

DIA was aware of Gritz's operation - and Gritz was aware of Pocket Change. As planning for Pocket Change reached an advanced stage, Admiral Tuttle contacted Gritz and asked him to terminate VELVET HAMMER, so that there would be no operational interference.

Gritz said he would comply, but, distrustful of the Pentagon's record on POWs, he quietly continued his training. Worse yet, spoke of VELVET HAMMER to a reporter, under "threat of death," that would not release the story until June. On 26 March, due to Gritz's indiscretion, the possibility of a raid to free POWs in Laos appeared as the front page headline of the Orlando Sentinel.

In June 1981, shortly after the cancellation of Pocket Change, Gritz received a telephone call from Rear Admiral Allen G. Paulson, DIA Assistant Vice Director for Collection Management. After a countersurveillance routine of changing cars and hotels, Paulson finally introduced himself in connection with the newly created Intelligence Support Activity. Paulson said that ISA wanted to "put an American across into Laos to verify, using various recording means, the presence of Americans thought to be at specified locations." Gritz convinced Paulson that the Velvet Hammer force could help in this effort, which carried the ISA code-name Grand Eagle.

Over the next six months, ISA provided Gritz with cameras, polygraph equipment (to check the veracity of Indochinese sources), a PRC-74 radio, four gas masks, a long-range camera, binoculars, camouflage jungle fatigues, scuba gear, and plane tickets to Bangkok. Gritz was also given access to satellite photos and other classified intelligence data. He expected that his team would be issued cyanide tooth fittings, to bite down on in case of capture.

On 4 January 1982, however, Gritz got a call from ISA chief Jerry King. "Bo," King said, "I have been ordered to put Grand Eagle back on the shelf as if it never existed. ISA had become embroiled in jurisdictional disputes, and Paulson's proposal had never even risen above the first level in the approval process. Gritz was told that if he continued to attempt a Laos mission, he would be operating counter to Government policy.

Gritz decided to press on anyway. Using a letter allegedly written by former DIA Deputy Director Aaron - by then deceased - he raised $150,00 from right-wing Hollywood heavyweights, such as Clint Eastwood and William Shatner. By November 1982, Gritz had recruited nineteen operatives - three other vets and sixteen Lao exiles - and had set up a field post on the Mekong.

On 27 November Gritz led the team into Laos. Within days they confronted a rival Lao resistance band and were caught in an ambush. One of Gritz's Laotians was killed, and the rest scattered. Gritz and his three vets swam back across the Mekong into Thailand, where they were arrested for illegal border crossing. After a minor media circus of a trial, they were declared persona non grata and expelled.

DIA took pains to distance itself from Gritz. But despite public statements that "as far as we knew, he wasn't doing anything specific," the Pentagon was well aware of both Velvet Hammer and Grand Eagle. NSA had tapped Gritz's calls from Thailand, and Paulson later admitted he had "constantly been kept aware of Lt. Col. Gritz's... activities and intentions from any number of sources."

"I have never questioned that he [Gritz] was a brave and capable soldier," Paulson added, "but speaking as an intelligence officer, his methods have been completely baffling to me. The efforts seemed like a parody, a caricature of the clandestine operation, [and] his activities have been inexplicable from an intelligence point of view."

ISA's contact with Gritz seemed equally inexplicable, however. And why, if DIA did nothing to help him after January 1982, did the agency also do nothing to hamper or halt his efforts? A Senate Committee probe later concluded that DIA was using Gritz's apparat "as a cover for financial support to resistance groups... [for] other US [rescue] initiatives."

Were there other initiatives? Officially, there were none after Pocket Change. But Ross Perot later testified to Congress that in the "1981 time frame" the Pentagon "sent a guy down to me for money for a rescue.... Then later I learned that a rescue attempt was made and a Colonel Gerraghty, who was the same officer in charge of the Marines at the Beirut airport, was in charge.... I know the Gerraghty thing is real... There is considerable indication that all or most members of a Navy Seal team in Laos were killed. There is some indication that a few were captured, and were put on display to some senior people who visited from other Communist countries." No confirmation of any such "second" rescue mission has surfaced, however.

One aspect of Pocket Change would also remain a mystery. CIA's "old lady" source in the Laotian government reported, eventually, that the POWs had all been moved to Vietnam "for security reasons" by the end of January 1981, just days after DIA had begun planning Pocket Change - and well before Gritz, the Lao resistance, Congress, or the media knew. This seemed eerily to replay the removal of POWs from Sontay in June 1970, just days after DIA had begun planning Ivory Coast. Could both be but coincidence? Since Pocket Change had ostensibly not been discussed over communications channels, DIA's counterintelligence shop began once again to consider whether the enemy had tunneled deeply into the Pentagon with a "mole."

But to Tighe the main point of the whole episode was that "American servicemen are alive and being held against their will in Indochina." When he told Congress as much in July 1981, there waves of shock. Was DIA really reversing the official position of the Pentagon? Rear Admiral Burkhalter, Tighe's Chief of Staff, quickly "clarified" the General's remark as "a personal opinion, but not DIA's official position." But privately, and at the NFIB, Tighe remained adamant.

"Whoever prepared the statements for DOD in 1973 that all US servicemen were all back or all dead, had a great deal of fog in mind," he would later say. "The persistence of live sighting reports... and other intelligence convinced me that the evidence that there were still live Americans, held against their will in Southeast Asia was strong." But this was, Tighe regretfully added, "toward the end of my tenure as director."

"Scattered All over Hell"

Tighe retired on 10 September 1981, as his second term came to a close, He had directed DIA for fully four years - longer than anyone since Carroll - and it was the Army's turn to have the post (for reasons no one ever publicly justified, there would be a gap of 25 years between Navy directors). Tighe had recently turned sixty; his uncompromising stance on the POW issue had put DIA under escalating public and bureaucratic pressure; and he longed just to be back in California, able speak his own mind. Casey had liked the way Tighe spoke out, but at times it had proved embarrassing. There was, for instance, an incorrect prediction that the Soviets would invade Iran on 1 April 1981. In coming years Tighe was quite content to work as an international-security consultant, serve on corporate boards, and be a regent for Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles.

General Tighe left an impressive legacy. He had decisively defeated Admiral Turner in the area of Soviet estimates, winning a reservoir of Republican goodwill that had led to the agency's buildup. He had correctly predicted the Soviet thrust into Afghanistan, and the Red Army's eventual problems there. True, DIA had been mediocre in Iran, and Tighe had lost nominal control of DODINT budget to the DCI. But the agency's prestige and status had been much increased - and in Washington that counted for much. Nothing symbolized this new ascendance more than Tighe's victory in a war which DIA had been losing for twenty years.

"In Washington there is nothing more permanent than a temporary agency or a temporary building," Rep. Flood had once told Gen. Graham. How Tighe knew it! Had any other federal agency gone into its third decade without a concrete monstrosity to call home? DIA was spread over two-dozen "eighth-rate" annexes in Virginia, Maryland, and DC. At the Arlington Pomponia Plaza, exhaust fumes seeped up stairwells, elevators and ventilating shafts from the underground parking garage. DIA estimators reported headaches, sore throats, watering eyes and dizzy spells. The General Services Administration determined there were concentrations of carbon monoxide, but it took two years to fix the problem. No sooner was it fixed than the building suffered a massive power failure. Just as in the opening titles of Get Smart, the security doors locked shut, trapping agents as they arrived for work. The emergency backup power system also failed. "Secure the safe in sector four," someone whispered in the dark. Someone else cried out: "I'm scared! I can't find my purse." It was all day before anyone got out or in.

Because DIA was "scattered all over hell," as Graham had frankly warned, couriers were constantly running around with sensitive material. The agency's luck held until exactly 12 March 1981, when Air Force Staff Sgt. Jerry Lasseter skidded on an ice-patch and crashed an Army truck into a guardrail, dumping four tons of top-secret documents into the Arlington rush-hour. County police sealed the area until Fort Meade MPs arrived to clean up the classified mess.

The next day, contracts were awarded for construction of a DIA headquarters building. Congress approved $106-million for 860,000 square feet on Bolling Air Force Base. A sausage-shaped parcel of grassy flats, Bolling stretched three miles along the east bank of the Potomac River - opposite National Airport - in a predominantly black area of Southeast DC, known as Anacostia. It was bordered on the north by the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, on the south by the Blue Plains Sewage Treatment Plant, and on the east by Interstate 295.

Bolling was the only air base in the world that had no runways. It had been a cavalry depot in the Civil War, but by 1917 it was an administrative center for the Army Air Staff. It was named in memory of Col. Raynal Bolling, the first high-ranking American flier killed in World War I, gunned down defending his chauffeur from German soldiers in France. The base had one plane: a weather-worn camouflage F-105 fighter, stripped of engines and guns, mounted on display. Scattered around the base were two-thousand two-story homes with carports, occupied by Air Force officers and their families. General Carroll had lived in one. To the south of this military village, on a vacant lot, the Pentagon would build nine interconnecting, steel-framed modules, and a giant parking garage. This complex, to be called the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center, would be the new headquarters of DIA.

After the groundbreaking ceremony (21 April 1981), Tighe was told that the building would not stand. The lot had been left vacant for years, because it had been topped with sandy fill from the Washington Metro subway-project. Construction was postponed until the Naval Facilities Engineering Command could figure out how to pressure-inject footings into the foundation.