Listening to every transmission from 35,000 feet
Episode 3.
At 8:45pm, Brig Gen Manor arrives at the Monkey Mountain Command Post and establishes secure, encrypted communications links with us. The Green Berets and their aircrews arrive at Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base (RTAFB) to board their mission helicopters and C-130s, all prepped and readied by their maintenance crews.
Also ready to launch:
F-105s and EC-121s at Korat RTAFB
F-4s at Udorn RTAFB
KC-135s at U-Tapao RTAFB
A-1Es at Nakhon Phanom RTAFB
MC-130s at Takhli RTAFB
General Manor and these soldiers and the mission commanders, and many of the pilots and navigators for these aircrews had been secretly holed up at the CIA compound at Takhli for the past few days in anticipation of President Nixon’s launch order, which came through yesterday.
There is nothing unusual at this time. I focus on my two screens, black CRTs (cathode ray tubes) with green sine waves. My controls are dials, knobs, buttons, rollers, and switches. The modular units before me are functioning well and, in case of equipment failure, they can immediately be swapped out by the AMTs (Airborne Maintenance Technicians). We are in peak condition.
At 10:25, the MC-130 Cherry 2 takes off from Takhli RTAFB headed to rendezvous with the A-1Es from Nakhon Phanom RTAFB.
At 11:05, the Navy’s EP-3 “Big Look” aircraft arrives on station over the Gulf of Tonkin for electronic warfare during the massive diversionary raid on Haiphong harbor that the Navy will be providing just prior to the Son Tay Raid.
At 11:17, a formation of two HC-130s (Lime 1 and Lime 2) and six helicopters (“Banana” and Apple 1 thru Apple 5) are departing Udorn RTAFB with the 56 Green Berets who will actually set foot on the ground at the Son Tay POW camp. This begins the three-hour chopper flight that paces the entire mission. The timing of over one hundred aircraft is built around the smallest slowest aircraft, the crucial HH-3 Jolly Green Giant, code name “Banana,” which will land inside the courtyard of the prison in such a surprise that guards don’t have any time to shoot prisoners. The planned H-Hour is 0215.
[NOTE: In his book The Son Tay Raid: American POWs in Vietnam Were Not Forgotten, John Gargus explains that RC-135 Combat Apple missions were America’s means of knowing when radar sites conduct shift change. They were reliably at 2am. 2:15 was chosen as the H-Hour, when the enemy might be at a minimum level of order.]
At 11:18, the MC-130 Cherry 1 takes off from Takhli RTAFB. This is the special ops aircraft with unique low-level precision navigation avionics. It will take over the formation at the North Vietnam border, leading the helicopters to Son Tay and release the flares over the POW camp at the H-Hour.
Our area is kept dimly lit so we operators can optimally see our screens, a surreal green glow on our faces. Our workstations have a writing table. I write my notes on our special water-soluble paper—it easily disintegrates in an emergency so as not to compromise classified information. There are reel-to-reel tape recorders above the workstations to record intercepts of interest to be studied when back on the ground (or reviewed in flight if necessary).
On my CRTs, I clean the scratchy noise fuzz out of the signals, radio waves emanating from SAM sites in the Son Tay Area. The CRT only shows the top half of the sine wave—that’s all we need. An AM (amplitude modulation) signal looks like a single vertical spike. An FM (frequency modulation) signal has a much wider and more active display with lots of spikes. Tuning for radio frequencies of interest I can tell a lot about what equipment is emitting each signal and its location. At times, monitoring the display for signal strength, we have the pilot modify our orbit (changing the heading or extending the oval) so as not to lose the signal in the middle of a relevant North Vietnamese military conversation.
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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