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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (193856)	11/21/2022 12:30:00 AM
From: Gemlaoshi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218075

TJ, After 50 years,I don't believe anything I did or know from that time is a threat to anyone. But I have always been careful (perhaps paranoid) in order to protect my family. Even they only vaguely know what I did. Chiang Mai was not the major metropolitan city full of expats that it is today. It was essentially a provincial market town that the hill tribesmen came down to trade in. Spare time? There weren't the diversions there are today, but Thailand has always been a paradise for young men. One of my good friends, after three years in country refused to relocate to the US and had to be shackled and forcibly repatriated. To be clear, I was not a CIA employee. My specialty was electronic intelligence. I worked primarily with the NSA and military intelligence. But we all worked together on certain missions bringing our various skills to bear on the mission. How deep did the knowledge go that certain actors had wandered off the ranch? Damn good question! I'm not sure anyone has the answer to that question. Intel connections are often very murky. Some are agency employees, many more are contractor assets being managed by employees, and some are just hangers on who are addicted to the danger and intrigue. Safety lies in limiting your ID exposure and not asking unnecessary questions, and others feel the same. For most of us, it was much more than just following orders. The intelligence mission changed significantly after the Paris Peace Accords in 1972-73. The US combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam and everybody in DC abandoned everything to do with SE Asia. We were being squeezed for people, money, and resources. I relate this because I was not high enough to know if we were off the ranch. It might have gone all the way to CIA headquarters. Perhaps we were the ranch. I prefer to think not, but in my cynical old age I realize it is a distinct possibility. Our intel mission became ensuring that major NVA armor formations did not sneak down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and sneak into the back door of Saigon through the Parrot's Beak area. The Saigon gov't (and remaining US assets) wouldn't have lasted 24 hours. CIA paramilitary folks were operating in the Plain of Jars in Laos at the northern end of the HCM Trail and my group was operating out of Sattahip Thailand on the southern end of the trail. We employed indigenous folk to infiltrate and set up listening posts and eavesdropping equip in order to hear tanks and heavy artillery coming down the trail. Tanks are notoriously noisy, so we flew frequent missions on the trail to interrogate our listening devices. I came back to CA in April 1975 because my wife was about to have our daughter. So, I was not present at the fall of Saigon. I still chuckle at the irony of all of the work we put into securing the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the NVA marched right down Hwy 1 (the coastal highway) and rolled up the South Viet army in no time.