Air America's Black Helicopter
The secret aircraft that helped the CIA tap phones in North Vietnam.
By James R. Chiles
BLACK HELICOPTERS ARE A FAVORITE FANTASY when conspiracy theorists and
movie directors conjure a government gone bad, but in fact, the last
vehicle a secret organization would choose for a stealthy mission is a
helicopter. A helicopter is a one-man band, its turbine exhaust
a drum, the tail rotor rasping like a buzzsaw.
In the last dark nights of the Vietnam War, however, a secret
government organization did use a helicopter for a single, sneaky
mission. But it was no ordinary aircraft. The helicopter, a
limited-edition model from the Aircraft Division of Hughes Tool
and try to figure out the first time I could hear it and which
The Quiet One grew out of the Hughes 500 helicopter, known to aviators
research-and-development contract from the Advanced Research Projects
Agency (now the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in 1968.
The idea of using hushed helicopters in Southeast Asia came from the
quietly drop off and pick up agents in enemy territory. The CIA bought
assets of previous front companies, Air America was throughout its
life beholden to the CIA, the Department of State, and the Pentagon.
charter airline delivering food and supplies to civilians in Laos, and
flying occasional combat evacuation missions in Laos and South
Vietnam. While it did substantially more than that, and at
considerable peril (217 of its employees died in Laos), Air America
crews did not make it a practice to fly deep into North Vietnam.
The mission was intended to fill an information gap that had been
galling Henry Kissinger, secretary of state under President Richard
Nixon. Negotiations to end the 11-year war had begun in March 1972 but
stalled in part because South Vietnamese leaders feared that North
Vietnam would invade not long after U.S. troops left. A five-month Air
Force and Navy bombing campaign called Operation Linebacker had
brought the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table in Paris that
October, but even that campaign could not force a deal. Kissinger
wanted the CIA to find out whether the North Vietnamese were following
the peace terms or just using them as a smokescreen for attack plans.
From its intelligence work a year earlier, the CIA knew about a weak
point in the North Vietnamese wall of security: a telephone line used
of Vinh. A patrolled bicycle path ran alongside the string of
telephone poles, but at one spot, about 15 miles southwest of Vinh and
just east of the Cau River, the phone line went straight up a bluff,
over a ridge, and down the other side. The terrain was too steep for
bikes, so the path followed the river, which flowed around the bluff,
map, p. 67). This would be the best place to drop off commandos to
place a wiretap.
Because the Vinh tap would be sending its intercepts out of North
Vietnam, across Laos, and into Thailand, it would need a solar-powered
relay station that could catch and transmit the signal, broadcasting
from high ground. The station would be within earshot of enemy
patrols, so both the tap and relay would have to be dropped in by
Disturbing the peace
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The Hughes Tool Aircraft Division had started working on such a
helicopter in 1968; that year an affluent suburb of Los Angeles had
bought two piston-powered Hughes 269 helicopters for police patrols.
Citizens soon called to complain about the noise of the low-flying
patrols, and the city told
Hughes to either make them quieter or take them back. An emerging
market for police patrols was at stake. Engineers at Hughes identified
one of the worst of the noisemakers: the tail rotor. By doubling the
number of blades to four, Hughes was able to cut the speed of the
Coincidentally, the Advanced Research Projects Agency was hunting for
contractors who could cut noise from military helicopters of all
ARPA offered the company $200,000 in 1968 to work similar magic on a
Hughes OH-6A light helicopter. Hughes Tool made a short movie about
the modifications, which included a new set of gears to slow the tail
helicopter was to be addressed in an attempt to reduce the signature
Mainstreet. Even before work was fully under way, the CIA ordered two
(later registered as N351X and N352X) for use in the field. Test
flights began at Culver City, California, in 1971, followed by a brisk
training program for the U.S. instructor-pilots who would later train
mission pilots.
Flights of the Quiet One included low-level work at the secret Air
Force base Area 51 in Nevada and touchdowns on peaks in California to
familiarize pilots with close-quarters maneuvering and landing in
darkness. Pilots needed at least eight hours to get comfortable with
steering by sole reference to the comparatively narrow view of the
forward-looking infrared (FLIR) camera, which was mounted just above
the skids. Says Allen Cates, an Air America pilot who flew one in
The slapping noise that some helicopters produce, which can be heard
which the tip of each whirling rotor blade makes tiny tornadoes that
included an extra main rotor blade, changes to the tips on the main
blades, and engine adjustments that allowed the pilot to slow the main
rear passenger compartment, an alcohol-water injection system to boost
muffler, lead-vinyl pads to deaden skin noise, and even a baffle to
block noise slipping out the air intake.
The extensive alterations did not blank out all noise, Taylor says.
Rather, they damped the kinds of noise that people associate with a
airplane is easily heard. It has a higher frequency and seems
Hughes shipped the two Quiet Ones to Taiwan in October 1971. Under the
the United States some deniability, however flimsy, if any of the
veteran helicopter pilots with experience flying low-level missions in
Vietnam: Lloyd George Anthony Lamothe Jr. and Daniel H. Smith. The two
had joined Air America six months earlier for that purpose.
The decoys arrive
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operations. The job of these plain-vanilla Loaches was to distract
attention from the Quiet Ones before they even landed in Laos. Loaches
were common in Vietnam but not in Laos, so Air America needed to start
using them in full view of North Vietnamese sympathizers. That way, if
an enemy observer later saw the modified Loaches flitting past on a
moonlit night, he might not consider the event worthy of comment.
Initial flight training on the Quiet Ones, conducted in Taiwan, was
complete by June 1972. The two helicopters and their gear traveled on
a C-130 transport to an isolated airstrip in Thailand called LS-05.
Mechanics pulled them out, swung the rotor blades for flight, and
filled the tanks, and the two helicopters flew by night to an even
more obscure base, a secret one in southwest Laos known to insiders as
Pakse, 18 miles to the southeast. PS-44 had been built to house
Laotian commandos and the aircraft that flew them around. Its dirt
strip and three tin-roof buildings sat on the edge of a plateau,
surrounded on three sides by steep ground that was unusual for its
expanses of bright beach-like sand, eroded from nearby cliffs of white
sandstone.
It appeared to be far away from everything, but it was not far from
the enemy. By late 1972, units of the North Vietnamese army were
ensconced 20 miles to the north. To offer some peace of mind, the CIA
had Air America keep a turbine transport helicopter, the Sikorsky
was so steep and overgrown that the enemy could have stormed it from
only one direction: the west. The base also relied on a perimeter of
six guard posts staffed by Laotian soldiers, and reinforcements could
have been called in from a base lying southwest, along the Mekong
River.
No pictures allowed
Cameras were discouraged at PS-44, and photographing the Quiet One was
strictly forbidden. Crews already knew the risk of telling tales in
the bars and brothels of Southeast Asia, but even inside the base, the
closely for months knew each other only by first names or nicknames.
The CIA itself had its own nickname at PS-44: The men called it simply
Casterlin flew an S-58T helicopter during some of the wiretap
attempts, accompanying the Quiet One in order to rescue the wiretap
teams if that became necessary. Casterlin had a security clearance for
Quiet One.
According to base manager Stephens, the Quiet One was kept out of
down an unmarked, narrow forest trail. Because of the distance, the
Even then, at night, it sounded like a far-off airplane. The
helicopter had its own hangar so Soviet spyplanes and satellites could
not get a look at the peculiar profile produced by the extra main
rotor blade, a tail rotor with blades in an odd scissored
configuration, and big muffler on the rear fuselage.
Between June and September, Lamothe and Smith tried to train the
Taiwanese crews to fly the mission, but after months of poor
the chief pilot, the CIA managers got fed up and sent the whole
contingent home. Lamothe and Smith prepared to fly the mission
themselves.
At the same time, the agency placed the project under new management.
James Glerum arrived in Pakse to direct operations. Glerum had been
the Quiet Ones landed in Laos. The new assignment demonstrated how
urgently the state department wanted the wiretapped information,
according to Air America chief helicopter pilot Wayne Knight. Glerum,
headquarters.
Soon after his arrival, Glerum quizzed Smith and Lamothe on their
cover story. When he realized they had none, he provided them with
false identities and a story to go with them in case of capture.
More help came from Air America, which was offering up its best
Idahoan with a background in smoke-jumping. Johnson had started with
Air America in its first year, 1959, rigging bundles with parachutes
and pushing them out of aircraft. A year before, he had been one of
only three men to survive a North Vietnamese attack at another Laotian
Laotian commandos for the Vinh wiretap mission. For years, the
commandos had been fighting communist forces and had reported on enemy
traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in eastern Laos. A group of 100,
they lived in a separate part of PS-44 and manned the perimeter.
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The CIA had hoped to get the wiretap in place before monsoon season,
but a series of mishaps and equipment malfunctions, compounded by the
is the rainy season. It had started right as I got there [in
wiretap mission, refueling in eastern Thailand and heading into enemy
territory, only to turn back after running into clouds in the passes
TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES
Hughes technicians toiled over the troublesome infrared camera;
problems with it had forced cancellation of an October 21 attempt.
Glerum. Other gadgetry included SU-50 night-vision goggles (their
first use in Laos), which worked only when the moon was a quarter to a
half full. The helicopter also had a long-range navigation system
(LORAN-C).
Any mishap during the night flight into North Vietnam, particularly
while the crew maneuvered among trees and telephone poles, would doom
the mission and probably its participants. By day Lamothe and Smith
studied photos and maps marking the stealthiest route to the target.
By night they practiced by using LORAN to navigate from the hangar to
a nearby training ground they called the Hole. The topography of the
Casterlin. Smith and Lamothe dropped the commandos near a simulated
telephone pole (a tree stripped of branches and equipped with a cross
arm) and flew to a pre-selected tree, where they laid out the radio
rig called the spider relay.
The spider relay was to be deployed as the helicopter hovered over a
tree. With its solar panels, electronics boxes, and antennas sprung
open to a width of almost 10 feet, the relay perched atop the branches
with a fishnet-like webbing. It was nearly impossible to see from the
ground. The relay could be folded into a compact package that fit
between the helicopter skids, but there was so little ground clearance
left after it was attached, the pilots could land only on a hard, flat
surface.
through the darkness to the concrete landing pad, which was shaped
like an old-fashioned keyhole. The approach to landing was memorable
because the Quiet One used no landing lights; it relied on an infrared
floodlight on the nose. The light cast an eerie, ruddy glow.
Some of the biggest threats to mission success came not from North
Vietnamese army spies but from plain bad luck. One flight opportunity
was lost when a scorpion bit a wiretap team commando, setting off an
allergic reaction. On one of the training flights at the Hole, after
Lamothe and Smith deployed the spider relay used for practice, it slid
off the branches and crashed to the ground, with pieces scattering.
Training for the mission could not proceed without the relay, and
joyful speculation spread among the ranks: It would be a month or more
until a new spider could come from the States, so the men could go on
leave.
But no: Stephens flew to the spot by helicopter, slid down a rope, and
helped technician Bob Lanning bag up the pieces. Back at camp, Lanning
laid them out on a floor and said he could get the relay working if he
three days we had the parts by courier. Bob worked two and a half
days, almost nonstop, and put it back together. So we only lost a few
With the moon entering the favorable phase, the rescue crews moved to
a forward staging base in eastern Thailand while Lamothe, Smith, and
the Quiet One remained at PS-44. An attempt was scheduled for the
night of December 5, amid rising doubts among Air America veterans as
to whether the scheme would ever work.
That night, the Quiet One flew to a refueling base at the Thai-Laotian
border, where it met a de Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otter with the Laotian
commandos. Two commandos with guns and the wiretap equipment climbed
aboard the Quiet One, and the rest stayed on the Otter with parachutes
and more guns in case they were needed for a rescue. Accompanied by an
Quiet One set course for the northeast. The Twin Pack broke away at
the North Vietnamese border and took up a slow orbit over Laos, out of
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Leaving the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and without being targeted by the
anti-aircraft defenses along it, Lamothe and Smith climbed to cross
the Annamese mountains, then dropped to follow the nap of the earth,
following streambeds when possible. When the pilots identified the
wiretap spot, they hovered, and the two Laotian commandos jumped a few
feet to the ground.
Lamothe and Smith then flew west across the Cau River to a
1,000-foot-high mountain to set the spider relay. Finding the ideal
tree for the relay had taken months of intense photo-reconnaissance
work. The tree had to be tall, on high ground with a clear view of the
western horizon, and flat at the crown. An Otter orbited over a
receiver relay, which was already in place atop another mountain
halfway into Laos. Inside the Otter, technicians were watching an
oscilloscope measure a test signal from the spider relay.
Meanwhile, the Laotian commandos at the wiretap site found that the
pole-climbing boots to get up them or a stapler to attach the antenna.
The men shinnied up instead. After splicing into the phone wires, they
put the tap in place; it was concealed in a glass insulator of the
same color used on the French-built line. The commandos began taping
up the short-range antenna and installing narrow solar panels atop the
When Lamothe and Smith heard from the Otter that the Thai oscilloscope
threw a switch that released the last cables connecting the spider
relay to the helicopter and flew the Quiet One to a streambed to wait
for the commandos to finish attaching the solar panels. At the
the commandos at the wiretap site and the team returned to Laos
without incident. Those listening to progress reports at PS-44, Udorn,
and the Lima 40A refueling site were pleasantly startled to hear that
the crew was on its way back and the tap was in place without a
firefight, recalls Wayne Knight.
DISAPPEARING ACT
regional office at Udorn by conventional aircraft. Much celebration at
Quiet One up again, and within a week all the Americans connected with
the mission and their equipment were on their way out of Laos.
inside information from the North Vietnamese high command to help
nudge all parties to sign a peace pact in late January 1973. Exactly
what Kissinger eavesdropped on remains classified.
The one flyable Quiet One relocated to California. Air America pilots
Allen Cates and Robert Mehaffey trained on it at Edwards Air Force
Base, achieving proficiency in early 1973. Then, before any
special-mission training began, and with no explanation, Cates and
Mehaffey were sent back to their old piloting jobs at Air America.
Mechanics pulled most of the special features out of the Quiet One,
and its trail of insurance and registration papers ends in 1973, after
it was transferred to Pacific Corporation of Washington, D.C., a
holding company used as a screen for CIA-backed companies and assets.
Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
why the CIA did not keep a stable of Quiet Ones, at least while the
technology remained under wraps. And it remained a secret for more
than two decades, until Ken Conboy and James Morrison told the story
in their 1995 book Shadow War.
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But there were valid reasons for dropping the Quiet One from the
light helicopter and had to be loaded with gear that cut into its
payload capability and operating altitude. The Twin Pack was much
louder but also simpler to run and more powerful, so Air America used
it for later wiretap missions in North Vietnam. At least one tap,
placed on the night of March 12-13, 1973, was successful.
including the Hughes AH-64 Apache, which has a scissor-style tail
main rotor blades to cut the slapping noise caused by blade vortices
has been taken up by other experts. Aerospace engineer Gordon Leishman
and his team at the University of Maryland, for example, are
developing a blade with curved tubes at the tip to divert the air,
thereby countering vortex formation. But, thanks to its many unusual
modifications, the 500P still holds the title that Hughes gave it in
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