JTAD
This article describes the activities of JTAD (the Joint Technical Advisory Detachment) at Khe Sanh Combat Base.
Date: Spring, 1998
Americans walking the jungles of the Khe Sanh area and neighboring Laos in civilian clothes, former NVA now loyal to us reporting on desk at CCN, Da Nang) when asked once if one could really turn the loyalty of a North Vietnamese or if they simply reported what we wanted to hear, said, “They brought back ears. They brought back some fantastic photos too.” Capt. Wayne Long, who flew in to brief Col. Lownds and his S-2, Maj Jerry Hudson, during the Siege during the last week of Feb ’68 and the second week of March on what had been coming down the Ho Chi Minh NVA units operating in the area, reports of NVA regiments and battalions and of Russian advisors which made the Khe Sanh area-seemingly so serene, even a Garden of Eden-to be the playground of lurking demons of destruction which suddenly devoured life: this was the world of JTAD, the Joint Technical Advisory Detachment.
In mid-October ’66, III MAF reported JTAD bilateral collection capability, and soon thereafter a JTAD Station was located at Khe Sanh. By the Hill Battles of ’67, reports from JTAD began pouring into the command at Khe Sanh. For example, on 13 May, JTAD reported a long established NVA bivouac area at Co Roc (XD 741317) into which two battalions of the 95C Regiment had moved. On 27 May, capitalizing on agent reports from JTAD of 15 May, an afternoon of air strikes against a trail complex, harbor site and supply area, produced a virtual 4th of July fireworks display when, at 1305, jet strikes in an area8 -9 clicks directly south of Khe Sanh village produced one large secondary explosion and five secondary fires. Subsequent air strikes during the next two hours produced several additional large secondary explosions and fires. JTAD reported Russian advisors entering the Khe Sanh area ac companying NVA units. J’TAD continued to report caves, 130mm mortars on rails, large troop concentrations, and logistic activity on the Co Roc area throughout the summer and fall of ’67.
III MAF’s G-2, MGEN Kenneth J. Houghton, was cautious, however: “They were a funny outfit,” he noted, “They worked on turning prisoners around. In other words, we’d capture somebody, and then [we would] turn them around. We’d tell them about how great we were … They [the enemy soldiers] would be indoctrinated all their 18, 20 years on earth, and we’d get them for two months! And then, these people [J’TAD] were ‘under cover’. When I inspected them and took over as G-2, they were wearing civilian clothes! I said, ‘Why are you wearing civilian clothes?’ They said, ‘Well, we’re under cover!’ Well, you know anybody who wore civilian clothes stood out like a sore thumb!”
Nagging concerns by those in the “2” shops who Nagging concerns by those in the “2” shops who received their reports varied from “Are they saying this because this is what they think we want to hear?” (which is a typical Oriental propensity) to “Is their loyalty still to North Vietnam, and they’re feeding us information to divert our resources or disregard a major enemy activity.” Furthermore, the information was usually many days old by the time it was received, and then, there was no way to evaluate the information since the track record of individual sources was unknown. Their reports were always F-6. Col Daniel Lord Baldwin, III (the SOG OP-35 desk at CCN, Da Nang) when asked once if one could really turn the loyalty of a North Vietnamese or if they simply reported what we wanted to hear, said, “They brought back ears. They brought back some fantastic photos too.”
Capt. Wayne Long, who flew in to brief Col. Lownds and his S-2, Maj Jerry Hudson, during the Siege during the last week of Feb ’68 and the second week of March on what had been coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and what targets he could utilize, felt that the JTAD was quite successful: “I think that by the time the Siege started, the Regiment had a pretty fair intelligence picture that we updated and kept fairly accurate. I don’t think there were any surprises in terms of forces.” Col Lownds, nevertheless, would ask him, “Was this seen by a round eye” [an American]? (1Lt Wayne Long (later Col) operated out of Pakse, Laos, for a unit headed by Ray Gonzales which consisted of Road Watch teams observing the Ho Chi Minh Trail. “We were primarily working in the ‘denied areas’ with some indigenous assets. We’d set up a little base camp, sit beside the road for about 20 days, sometimes with an American, more often without one, and then we had a thing called a ‘HARK’ radio which had counters-a different frequency for each counter-for trucks, for weapons of various sizes, for people, and even for armor. A convoy would come by and one of our indigenous would just punch every time he saw one. The radio signaled up to a C-130 that orbited e saw one. The radio signalled up to a C-130 that orbited-had a succession of 130s that orbited 24 hours a day.)
JTAD was actually part of Company C, 519th Military Intelligence Battalion (and previously SMIAT, Special Military Intelligence Activities Team), which was part of the 500th MI in Japan. The Vietnamese counterpart was the 924th Support Group. The Combined Action Company OSCAR at Khe Sanh was tasked with the responsibility of feeding and housing the Americans of JTAD Station co-located in the MACV District HQ com pound in Khe Sanh village.
From late ’66 to mid ’67, JTAD at Khe Sanh included a Sergeant James Turner and Sergeant Ed Bow man (known to the Vietnamese as “Mr. Ed”); but both wore civilian clothes, had civilian ID, and their cover story was that they were drawing maps of the area for National Geographic. They used a light blue truck at Khe Sanh with a STP sticker on the side door.
One of their informants was the Vietnamese official in Khe Sanh ville from the National Police. (This was a powerful person who had been seen, on occasion, torturing Bru with electric generators by Cpl Daniel R. Kelley who, when he reported it, was promoted to Sergeant, but transferred from the CAP in the village to the CAP just outside the main gate of the Combat Base). The National Police representative was known to be feeding information to the North Vietnamese and became a channel to feed false information to them.
Another contact was a coffee planter, not the Poilanes, but the Basque named Llinares (referred to as Leinterest in a III MAF area study of Khe Sanh) who was located southeast of Khe Sanh village near Lang Kat (1) and (2). It had been rumored that he had killed a Bru woman with an ax, and perhaps was connected with the death of Eugene Poilane in the 1964 ambush on Route 9. Llinares had been with Eugene when the Citroen car they were driving came under rifle fire, mortally wounding Eugene (who had arrived at Khe Sanh in 1918 following his WW I service in Vietnam, and who, because of his coffee plantation, is responsible for the origins and development of Khe Sanh village). Llinares had been very wealthy in North Vietnam, lost everything, and settled at Khe Sanh at the former plantation owned by M. Rome. During WW II, the French planter, Monsieur Rome lived here with his Japanese wife and a Japanese gardener. When the Japanese arrived at the end of WW II, they lived “pretty high,” but then mysterious disappeared. According to Madame Madeleine Poilane, she spied both for the Japanese and the Viet Minh on French positions and was killed-some say by the Viet Minh, others say by the French. Her body was never found and the property reverted to the government.) It was here that Llinares had contacts with the Viet Cong; a network of VC was discovered in the village at the bottom of the Llinares plantation. Following this, the Bru were resettled, and any pro-VC Bru departed into the hills. Following a double assassination of two workers of Llinares in his house, his wife departed, demanded protection from protection from the Province Chief of Quang Tri, and never returned. James Turner recalls the Marine Force Recon detachment at KSCB in early ’67, and the LtCol at the Combat Base who, when informed of NVA units operating in the area, responded, “O, these numbers-they can’t be right.” Turner replied, “I’m telling you, we checked them pretty good; they’re right.” The information was disregarded. The Special Forces also disregarded their reports “until they were nearly overrun one time [04 May 67] and we had given them the coordinates where the mortars were set up before they even started shooting. After that, they listened to us pretty well.”
Ed Brown and James Turner frequently would go out for a week or so, no radios, perhaps deep into Laos. “We carried United Nations Non-Combatant cards. Supposedly you had two of them, duplicates, and if you got captured, you gave one to the enemy, kept the other, and they’d let you go!” Yeah! Sure! “We’d just go out, and there were a couple of times we went out to learn the territory. We went around with the Montagnard troops that were stationed there in the village. We had one guy that went with us all the time who knew the area really well. We’d tell him where we wanted to go, and he’d take us there. He knew where the North Vietnamese walked and he just took us. Sometimes we’d set up in the hills there and watch a battalion go by-it would be just tons of equipment. But it was kind of a crazy operation because we had no radios, they didn’t know where we were, they didn’t even know where we were going. If we turned up missing, they wouldn’t have any idea what happened to us.”
Just before the Siege battle commenced, the JTAD Station at Khe Sanh suddenly disappeared from the CAC OSCAR area in the District HQ compound, but reports from them, concerning NVA units and activity Khe Sanh continued into the early days of the Siege.
Source Note: This article was published in Red Clay, Issue No. 41 (Spring, 1998). This a special issue highlighting US Army activity during the Siege.