Colt Terry, Green Beret

15. $3.2 Million Missing and Elephant Missions

15 $3.2 Million Missing and Elephant Missions B  ,     officers, Major Ferrington and Captain Cooper, who Colonel Bennett previously had dispatched to the Mekong Delta to collect intelligence and who had received a large portion of the mission’s . million had still not submitted any good intelligence.1 Colt had been conducting his own investigation and met with Colonel Kelly at least once while filling the command gap between Bennett’s and Wood’s tenures. When Wood arrived, Colt briefed him on the matter. The officers had recruited a South Vietnamese man as an agent. This man turnedouttobeadoubleagent,workingforboththeAmericansandtheNorth Vietnamese. The officers had no idea about his duplicity, but being in intelligence , they should have known. Colt did not know that he was a double agent either until the Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) uncovered his dual status. A CIC officer, “Tim Hammond,” told Colt of the agent’s duplicity and was present when the major told Ferrington and Cooper to “kill the agent—ace him, ax him, shoot him—whatever it takes, but get rid of him.” The two officersarguedfortenminutesthatthemanwasokay .ButColtwasconvincedthat the CIC information was accurate and stood by his order.2 After the two officers left, he told Hammond to let him know when the agent’s body showed up. The CIC had their own man watching the officers. A few weeks later Colt learned that the double agent was still alive. He heard this news when learning that the situation had taken a turn for the worse. Atabarinthedelta,theagenthadhadafightoveragirlwithaVietnamese schoolteacher who he then shot. The South Vietnamese police arrested the man and began interrogating him. The double agent began to compromise Flying Horse, exposing it to the South Vietnamese government. The police, of course, knew nothing about C-’s secret operation. Colt told Ferrington and Cooper that before the South Vietnamese finished their interrogation, the agent would “sing like a mockingbird” and tell the police everything he    knew. Ferrington tried to convince him that the man knew nothing of value, but Colt believed that he knew better. Colt had planted two Special Forces NCOs in the South Vietnamese police station, posing as civilian public-safety officers for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), employees working for the State Department.3 They were there, purportedly, to teach the police about security measures. Colt knew that the murderer had already informed the police that he was an agent. Initially they did not believe him because they thought that he was just trying to get off the shooting charge. When the interrogators asked him for whom he worked, the agent named Ferrington. One of the two USAID officers, realizing that the whole operation was now “blown wide open,” excused himself from the questioning and immediately radioed Colt. Colt sent his XO, Captain Walters, down to the delta to find out what was going on. If Jerry confirmed that the operation was blown, he was to get both Ferrington and Cooper out of the country, hopefully before the South Vietnamese government found out what they had been doing. Walters learned from the two USAID officers that the agent had revealed the name of one of the officers. He told the police that he also knew a captain was involved, but he did not know his name. Walters quickly put Major Ferrington on a flight to Okinawa. Captain Cooper was already on orders to rotate back to the States, so Colt expedited his departure in case the police identified him. Before Ferrington was put on the plane, he asked Walters if he could go to his villa to get some personal things. The captain sent an NCO with him to be sure the officer came back. The NCO called an hour later to report that Major Ferrington was burning every document in the villa. Walters sped to the house, but by the time he got there, Ferrington had all the records burning . When asked why he had done this, the major claimed that he wanted to keep the network from being revealed. Walters did not believe him.4 The South Vietnamese police tried to “roll up” (investigate up the line) the operation based on what the agent had told them, but they were unable to find a major by the name Ferrington. Apparently the national government never found out what the police had learned. If they had, the consequences could have rippled all the way up to the U.S. president. Colt began to dig into what these officers...