Assassin: The True Story of One of America's Most Successful Assassins. Robert J. Firth
ever be changed- nothing! As long as that's the case, we will be fighting them forever- "a long slog" as McNamara prophetically said!
Yesterday, a repeat of the Itamar massacre in Israel occurred where the Fogel family was butchered while sleeping. In Plantation Florida, an entire family of normal Americans was murdered in their home. The three children, twin boys of ten and their sister who was four, were found decapitated in their beds. Their severed heads discovered the next morning stuck on poles along with those of their parents in the front yard. A woman walking her kids to the school bus found them. She and her children are being treated for hysteria at Holy Cross. They will never truly recover! Why isn't this grotesque crime on the evening news? Because we don't want it to be. Out teams recorded the call directly from the officer who got to the place first. No police radios were used. The cell call was monitored by our dispatcher. Before anyone saw this horrible scene it was cleaned up. The relatives were informed of the incident as a disappearance.
Since 9/11, over eight hundred Americans in Florida have been similarly murdered. The police never found any of the killers. We know radical Muslims are doing the killing but, so far, except for those we "took care of" none have been found or arrested. Federal and local police covering the mosques are watching the likely crazies but, without much success. The Islamic terror cells involved in the killing of Jews and Christians are well hidden and operate with considerable discipline, never going anywhere near mosques or other Muslims. We, of course, have not been sitting still all these years. Our BC (body count) tops 1500 during the same time period averaging 10 or so a month- nowhere near as many as are being recruited but, at least something.
As you know, In Iraq and southern Syria, the American and EU military, with the Peshmerga and elements of Iraqi and other military organizations opposed to the new Caliphate have been killing hundreds of whacked out ISIS fighters for months. The day Western aircraft started bombing, threats against Americans and Europeans were issued and attacks were being carried out across the civilized world. These guys love killing but then again, so do we! Not, however, in the same way and not for the same reasons. Our work is done to create a brake and jam up terrorists networks. We try to balance the books and make it real dangerous to be a terrorist. Because of our efforts we know that thousands who might have been tempted to sign up for Jihad have wisely decided that 72 naked virgins, as tempting that that may be, are just not worth it- at least not yet!
CHAPTER 2
SAIGON, 1966
KILLING A SNAKE USUALLY MEANS CUTTING ITS HEAD OFF
My entry and education into the killing business began in Vietnam in 1966. I learned from experienced war fighters how to take out top cong officials and officers. I spent months learning Vietnamese until no native could tell I wasn't born to the language. Sitting for month after month at the Monterey Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLCM), occupying a sound proof booth, wearing a headset and listening to the strange oriental vowel and coincident sounds, I repeated and memorized them until they became second nature. Thankfully, French Priests decades before had changed the oriental pictographs to roman letters so learning to read and write the language was far easier than it might otherwise have been.
We used phone locators and radio taps to pinpoint our targets locations. We had over 100 well trained and well rewarded spies helping so learning who to kill and where the victim was at a particular moment wasn't too difficult. The guys we wanted had to have communications and that's what led us to them.
Our offices moved around a lot. We rented space in several cities and had a headquarters unit aboard a navy ship stationed offshore. The sophisticated devices we used to locate targets were tapped into local phones systems. No one could make a call that we couldn't listen to. Of course, back then there were no cell phones. We had dozens of sensitive receiving antennas picking up any and every frequency that anyone using a transmitter anywhere in Vietnam or any of the surrounding countries could possibly send voice or coded signal on. We broke every code the enemy had and could read their traffic within minutes. Of course, today we have a thousand times better surveillance equipment and the ubiquitous cell phones are too easy to track and crack! NSA has you in the crosshairs and if you're our enemy so do we! So watch your step or you might be next!!
Once we had the targets location a few of us would infiltrate the area, village, town or hamlet. We carried authentic North Vietnamese letters of identification. Those of us, like myself, who were obviously not locals, presented ourselves as Russian and, of course, I had learned perfect Russian years before. We used local radio to advise the targets staff that we might be in their area- when we showed up, we didn't surprise anyone.
It was 1967 when I made my first kill. We were meeting a local Viet Cong propaganda leader. Let's just call him Nuygen Van Tran (not his real name) at his home in Cholon, a suburb of Saigon, (now called Ho Chi Mihn city). A messenger passed a note to his guards telling him we wanted to meet and- on a rainy and dark Tuesday evening about 7 pm we were greeted at his back door. Our team took the guards out immediately we were inside. Sitting with the target was his wife and two kids. He dismissed them but, before they even got up, I shot him in both eyes with a silenced Makarov pistol or PM (Russian: Пистолет Макарова, Pistolet Makarova), literally Makarov's Pistol) a Russian semi-automatic pistol. My companion, a local, at that same instant, shot the wife and kids. We dumped kerosene throughout the house and setting a timed fuse left.
I think I had better include a few things I want you to think about before adjudicating me nothing but a cold blooded hired killer. Consider carefully and then decide. Tran had written and published hundreds of communist propaganda pamphlets and broadcast thousands of hours of commie crap on local VC radio imploring the loyal followers of Ho to kill Americans by any means. He handed out potassium cyanide syringes to kids to stab into the legs of GI's and, in this way, had murdered over a dozen or our soldiers. We had him cold and he disserved to die. The wife and kids were regrettable collateral damage, dying only because they had seen us and, because they remained with this monster.
Over the next two years our teams repeated this kind of thing at least five hundred times taking out over two thousand top communists and fellow travelers. Did we make a difference? Probably, but truth be told, not much! Do I have a guilty conscience for my role in all this dirty work? No! I learned how to efficiently dispatch America's enemies and for me that was enough. Today, as we do the same to the mad Muslims, I am thankful that I had this kind of education and experience. I landed in Saigon after training in Taiwan and Thailand when I was 26 as a young and dumb civil engineer and pilot with a talent for language mayhem and intrigue! My Government instructors must have noticed something was different about me from the very first.
Ten of us were given a survival vest and told to run and hide and the chasers would try to find us after two hours. This was E&E training (escape and evasion). We had listened to our instructors in Bangkok droning on in the hot classrooms for hours about what to do if we were forced down over enemy territory. We were next to Vung Tao, an Australian air base about 50 miles from Saigon. I let the guys run far ahead of me. When they were out of sight along with the instructors behind me, I turned hard right and ran down the south perimeter road to the west side of the field.
I found a bunch of Aussie soldiers kicking back on the sunny beach. Sitting down beside them said I had a couple of days to kill and asked if they had a BOQ or someplace I could bunk. Two days later, rested well fed and tan, I trotted over to the east side where the old Marine sergeant had search parties combing the swamps looking for my sorry ass for 48 hours. I had a clean Aussie T shirt, a wide brimmed Aussie bush hat, sunglasses and a can of fosters in my hand.
The old guy was fit to be tied! (@#%&&@@XXX)- he screamed curses at me for 30 minutes in languages even I couldn't understand. He frothed and got red faced jumping up and down and carrying on terribly. I stood there quietly. When he finally ran out of air, I said, Look Sergeant, we were distinctly told in class to blend in with the locals if possible. That's exactly what I did, didn't I? What could he say? He was with our small bunch in Bangkok and heard the same thing! The others were dirty, mosquito bitten, covered with leach bites and look horrible- of course they hated me!! Too funny...
After