Ch. 1a. "OPERATION RED ROCK": The Pegasus File by David G. Guyatt from Nexus Magazine

"OPERATION RED ROCK"

Tatum has written of his early career in the military, and his involvement in a highly sensitive and classified operation, in an unpublished manuscript entitled "Operation Red Rock". Joining the Air Force in February 1970, he went through Army jump school, escape and evasion training, jungle training, sea survival school and diving school and was assigned along with six others as "Combat Controllers" (the USAF equivalent of Special Forces), receiving his distinctive Special Forces burgundy-coloured beret. From there he was assigned to Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma, and then on to Fort Bragg, North Carolina - home of the "Green Berets" - for training in C4 plastic explosives, mines, nuclear, biological and chemical warfare, plus indoctrination in electronic and psychological operations.
Posted to South-East Asia as Airman First Class (A1C) in December 1970, he was assigned as a radio operator on a Forward Air Control (FAC) aircraft attached to Task Force Alpha at Nakhon Phanom, Thailand. In short order he was recruited (an involuntary "volunteer") to "Team Red Rock". The team was composed of eight US Army Green Berets, three US Navy SEALs and two "cowboys" - a euphemism for CIA paramilitary specialists. With Tatum attached, Team Red Rock totalled 14 in all, and was about to be tasked with an operation that came directly from the White House.

In January 1971 the team received a final briefing from General Alexander Haig, who had flown in specially, along with CIA Saigon Chief William Colby - nicknamed by the team as "Mr Peepers" because of his resemblance to a well-known character in a TV sitcom. Haig and Colby outlined the plan, stressing its importance and extreme classification. President Nixon, desperate to quell domestic riots over an increasingly unpopular war, sought to withdraw all US personnel from South-East Asia. Withdrawal would - and, in the end, ultimately did - cause a military vacuum, quickly leading to the defeat of South Vietnamese forces.
During those years, Nixon was also running a "secret war" in Cambodia and Laos. In Laos, a dwindling number of Meo tribesmen, together with covert US personnel employed by the CIA proprietary company, Air America, were battling against superior North Vietnamese ground forces. A much similar pattern was occurring in Cambodia, amid grave fears that the "domino theory" would result if either of these two nations were to fall to the Communist North Vietnamese. Nixon hoped that the vacuum caused by the withdrawal of US covert forces could be filled by native Cambodian forces. Lon Nol, the Cambodian leader, stubbornly continued to resist Nixon's diplomatic overtures to take up the slack, being anxious to hedge his bets and realistic about his chances of survival as Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese forces prepared to swarm in, unhindered by US air power.
A plan had been drawn up at the highest levels of Nixon's administration. Team Red Rock were to enter Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh, in secret and attack the airport and military and civil installations, wreaking as much havoc as possible. The plan called for the team to parachute into the outskirts of Phnom Penh, carrying captured NVA "Sappers" with them. Taken in unarmed and alive, the Sappers would be "sacrificed" and their bodies left to be discovered by Cambodian forces. A furious Lon Nol would assume North Vietnam was to blame. It was hoped that such an act would stiffen Lon Nol's backbone. With nowhere else to turn, the US puppet would urgently seek US hardware to strengthen his forces and continue the battle.
The team members were not told that they, too, were to be sacrificed by their President to ensure that word of the operation never reached the light of day. A detachment of Montagnard tribesmen ("the Yards"), in the pay of the CIA, was assigned to liquidate each member of the team and dispose of the bodies. The attack went successfully, but the team's suspicion of "the Yards" foiled the betrayal. Using their knowledge of "escape and evasion" tactics, the team decided to trek to the Vietnamese border and back to safety with US forces.^1.
Casualties thinned out their numbers until only eight of them remained. Soon these, too, were captured by NVA regulars and underwent hideous torture at the hands of Chinese and Russian interrogators. Ultimately, only Tatum and one other team member survived the ordeal.
Convalescing, Tatum was debriefed by CIA station chief, William Colby, and told he would, in future, be kept close to "the Agency". Recruited into the CIA, the yawning door of future "black" operations creaked open. Life would never be the same again for Chip Tatum.