Listening to every transmission from 35,000 feet

Episode 1.

It’s 8pm. We arrive on station above international waters of the Gulf of Tonkin. We are a 30-man team equipped with top secret technologies that allow us to see, hear and detect every transmission of voice, radio, code, and radar in North Vietnam. It’s Friday night, November 20th, 1970. The sun set more than two hours ago and we welcome the protection, stealth, and clarity of this darkness. We need to focus.

We are listeners, an overwatch, sentinels spying on our enemy from a Boeing RC-135M, which resembles the Boeing 707. Our dark-lit workspace spans two-thirds of the arching width of the fuselage. The other third is a partitioned aisle way running the entire length of the port side. That allows pilots, navigators, and others without a need-to-know to pass by without disturbing our work. (All have Top Secret clearances, but not all have a need-to-know.) At two places along the fuselage, we have a doorway to that aisle. From the appearance of our battle station, long and narrow, surrounded by metal, plastic, and colored displays, one might imagine us lurking thousands of feet below Mean Sea Level rather than above.

My station desk is referred to as the “11-Op,” responsible for identifying and monitoring every SAM (Surface-to-Air Missile) site in North Vietnam. Working with a wall of electronics before me, I’m facing toward the partition and the left wing. Centrally among my array of controls arranged in modular black boxes, I have two primary screens that empower me with a sixth sense. Last year, The Who produced a song about “That deaf dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball.” Like Tommy, our sight is beyond the limitations of human eyes and ears. Our existence is electronic.

Unhuman oscilloscopes and tones furnish my mind with a visual that no one can ever see with eyes or make sense of with any one set of ears. We 30 are a band of brothers on a man-o-war that together can see through walls, eavesdropping into the very command centers of the enemy. We detect every signal ever used by militaries: AM, FM, LF, HF, VHF, UHF…and others. Our state-of-the-art electrical engineering has quickly cleaned up those signals. We record every signal of interest but sifting through the recordings later is not good enough—we must comprehend now. We are fluent in the Vietnamese language, so we are listening live to the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Air Force (NVAF) commanders speaking with their staff as well as the controllers in their Air Defense Command throughout North Vietnam. Through our work, vapid, chaotic ether is transformed into humans conversing clearly. We know their thoughts.

Other workstations in our aircraft include “7-Op”, responsible for monitoring all NVAF fighter aircraft, and “6-Op”, monitoring ground vehicle movement along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Each operator has a chair that can be locked in any direction. For takeoff and landing we lock it facing aft. Incorporated into the seatback is a parachute that I’m sitting against. Beneath our seat cushions—and attached to the parachute—each of us has a survival kit which includes a small, personal life raft and a weapon. (The world knows well the horrific torture of American POWs held by the vicious communists. I’m of the mind that if I’m ever shot down and in danger of imminent capture, I’ll save my last bullet for myself.)

Aboard our aircraft are USAF Colonel Norman Frisbie and Lt Col Bill Robinson, an Army Green Beret. Both these gentlemen, we had never met before. This was most unusual. Our missions are Top Secret, Code Word. We can’t even acknowledge to people what level of code word our missions are—literally, even the code word itself is classified. These guests must be special…

See more photos and stories on this website and in Who Will Go, which is just as much to honor the wives and family as the men themselves.

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