Detachment B-57 arrived in
South Vietnam in June 1967. On 26 February 1968 it was moved from
Saigon to
Nha Trang and it received the designation Project GAMMA on 1 April 1968, in conjunction with other special forces units such as
Project DELTA (Detachment B-52), responsible for
special reconnaissance. Members of the detachment operated from nine sites under the cover of civil affairs and psychological operations offices.
Operational authority The teams did not report up the normal military chain of command. Members of Project GAMMA were military but they were only nominally under the chain of command of the 5th SFG(A). Instead, they received operational orders from the CIA
Station Chief in Saigon and through the agency's satellite office in Nha Trang. Historian Shelby Stanton wrote that by early 1969 Detachment B-57 "had developed into the finest and most productive intelligence-collection operation the United States had in Southeast Asia". Stanton and others attributed this success to the fact that South Vietnamese intelligence were kept in the dark about the unit's operations including those conducted by the detachment's indigenous agents. The South Vietnamese intelligence apparatus was a sieve that had been infiltrated by many North Vietnamese agents.
Death of Chu Van Thai Khac In early 1969 some of Detachment B-57's assets (human sources of information) started to disappear. The detachment's leadership concluded that its intelligence staff had been compromised by a
mole. Rheault had been in command of the 5th Group for only a few weeks when the suspected spy was uncovered. In the spring of 1969, a
MACV-SOG reconnaissance team operating in Cambodia captured photos showing Chu Van Thai Khac (AKA Thai Khac Chuyen), a South Vietnamese GAMMA agent, meeting with North Vietnamese intelligence officers. Sergeant Alvin Smith, who had been Chuyen's handler, identified Chuyen in the photos. Sergeant Smith, Chuyen's handler, was not a member of Special Forces, but an Army intelligence specialist. Smith had failed to follow protocol when recruiting Chuyen. He had failed to require Chuyen to take a polygraph test that might have revealed why Chuyen spoke fluent English, was from North Vietnam and had family there, and had worked for a number of U.S. outfits and left them all in turmoil.
Soldiers tried Smith became concerned for his safety and sought sanctuary with the CIA in Nha Trang. The CIA alerted the Army's
Criminal Investigation Division, who granted him immunity. Smith revealed that Chuyen had been killed and identified the Green Berets involved. General Abrams ordered all of the officers and men involved including Colonel Rheault arrested and confined to Long Binh Jail. All were charged with premeditated murder. The trial was covered extensively by the media and became known as the Green Beret Affair. Information revealed during pre-trial preparation revealed that the CIA had ordered Chuyen to be "terminated with extreme prejudice" which entered the public lexicon as a euphemism for "execute". The CIA issued a statement denying they knew of Chuyen when the soldiers asked them for input and that they strongly urged the Green Berets not to kill him. The Army defense lawyers for the eight soldiers summoned General Abrams and CIA officials as witnesses. All refused to testify on the grounds of national security. In September 1969 Secretary of the Army
Stanley Resor announced that all charges would be dropped against the eight soldiers since the CIA refused to make its personnel available as witnesses, making a fair trial impossible. Project GAMMA was deactivated on 31 March 1970. An official Army history of the Green Berets, published after the Vietnam War, does not mention Project GAMMA or Detachment B-57. Although the Pentagon has declassified much of the material about Green Beret operations inside Laos and Cambodia, , nothing on Project GAMMA has been made available. ==See also==