Full name: The Raid: The Son Tay Prison Rescue Mission

Author: Benjamin F. Schemmer Year: 1976 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: History Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780345446961 0345446968

Minutes after 2 A.M. on November 21, 1970, more than one hundred U.S. war planes shattered the dark calm of the skies over Hanoi. Their mission: rescue sixty-one American POWs from Son Tay prison. Less than thirty minutes later, the raid was over, but no Americans had been rescued. The prisoners had been moved from Son Tay four and a half months earlier and that wasn't all. Part of the raiding force landed at the wrong compound, a "school" bristling with enemy soldiers, but the soldiers weren't Vietnamese . . . Replete with fascinating insights into the workings of high-level intelligence and military command, The Raid is Benjamin Schemmer's unvarnished account of the courageous mission that was quickly labeled an intelligence failure by Congress and a Pentagon blunder by the world press. Determined to ferret out the truth, Schemmer uncovers one of the CIA's most carefully guarded secrets. From the planning and live-fire rehearsals to the explosive reactions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff watching the drama unfold to the aftermath as the White House and Pentagon struggled for damage control, Schemmer tackles the tough questions. What really happened during the twenty-seven minutes the raiders spent on the ground? Did the CIA know the whole time that the Americans were gone? Had the Agency in fact been responsible for the POWs being moved? And perhaps most intriguing, why was the rescue--though it never freed a single prisoner--not a failure after all? Similar books: Dien Bien Phu by Howard R. Simpson A Better War by Lewis Sorley To the Limit by Tom A. Johnson Battle for Hue: Tet 1968 by Keith Nolan The Killing Zone by Frederick Downs The tunnels of Cu Chi by Tom Mangold The Village by Bing West Nam by Mark Baker On Strategy by Harry G. Summers Vietnam by Michael MacLear After Tet by Ronald H. Spector Legend by Eric Blehm Hue 1968 by Mark Bowden The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 by Marilyn Young Everything We Had by Al Santoli The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof by J. A. Rogers Dreamers and Deceivers by Glenn Beck Twenty Million Tons Under the Sea by Daniel V. Gallery