Military officer involved in international intelligence

Not sure I've worded that right, but it goes to show how I'm faffing around on this question.

In the next novel in my Architects series, I'm introducing a new character who was my male protagonist's commanding officer in Vietnam. The idea is that when my MMC left Vietnam, his colonel told him if he ever needed to talk about certain things, to look him up. Now it's 15 years later (1982) and my MMC does want to talk about those certain things, and . . . how did one go about looking up members of the US military, back before the days of Google?

My protag will find out that his old CO has been promoted from colonel to some level of general (not 4 or 5 star, I don't think), and has a job with or is somehow involved in U.S. intelligence; specifically, monitoring the activities of pro-Communist radical groups in Europe.

I don't want my general's job to be covert. I need my two protags to be generally aware of what he does. And he has to be free to talk to them about the activities of such groups. Not in any detailed, classified way; more like a knowledgeable discussion of current events over dinner.

I also need him to be in the position to be able to rustle up a detachment of Army Rangers or similar commandos when my protags get into a jam in West Germany and need some backup.

What sort of position might a military officer like that have? Would that be CIA or Military Intelligence? Would or could he just be an expert on the subject of European terrorist cells (which knowledge the US government calls on from time to time), and his military connections would be something separate?

Heck, I'm so ignorant, I don't even know what generals do all day when they're not deployed. Would he have an office he works in? A secretary or other admin assistant? I'm assuming so, but don't want to get it wrong.

And what kind of government or military business would cause him to travel? I need to get him out of Washington, DC, over to the Midwestern city where my protags reside so they can talk face to face. But I don't see him flying out just to see them.

Thanks. Anyone with experience, please chime in. And if anyone can suggest resources, I'd appreciate that, too.

 

Hi there,

I won't be replying to the issue of rank since others are more able to help you on this (@zoupskim , hear me calling!) but ...

... if you want to stay realistic this might be a problem. Because your fictional general would need to justify his actions, and that means a threat-level that justifys him sending people into danger, which means being held accountable, which means higher-ups involved. Which might or might not be what you want. I don't know much and am still learning, but no one is able to just 'rustle up' guys to put themselves into dangers because of your stupid/or not so stupid actions as a private person. If so, there's a larger concern (politics, media, physical threat on the level of non-state actors) and your story would have to take that into account. I also think that US military acting in another country would definitely be a problem, even with an allied/friendly country. They would most likely have to sit back and let the local units take care of it.

There are so many possible jobs your fictional General could have that I can't list them all. It needn't be CIA or military intelligence. It could be one of the think tanks if your General quit and went into private employment. If the threat level is there, he could then talk to one of the guys still in, and they'd have to get permission from their chain of command.

Edited to add:

You could send me a PM if you want to talk . Welcome to the rat's nest I'm living with in my story!

 

There's an infamous Red Army Faction assault on a US air base in West Germany where a serviceman was killed sadly, and round about the era you cite.[?]

You might research from there and blossom, bloom. You can stretch all kind of truths - having someone assigned to the German police hunting the Beider Meinhof/dispatched to Palestine where they conducted their paramilitary training...all that kind of thing.

 

It could be either CIA or MI, but... prepare to hit an informational wall where you're just going to have to invent things therein after. I worked in the intel field. So did @Iain Aschendale. We did similar jobs, me in the USAF, him in the US Marines.

The world of handling classified data has two core facets. 1) The data itself, and 2) how that world functions. The data, by nature, has a shelf-life of importance as the scenario changes. It's only valuable for a given period of time, even though it may remain classified in perpetuity because its existence, who has it, who uses it, can be used to shed light on how the internal world of intel functions. I mentioned this a long time ago to someone in this forum who thought I was making a joke, but it just goes to show how little people know about the internal structure of the world you are talking about, which is exactly how people in that world want it. Who hands what to whom is a more tightly guarded secret than what is being handed.

 

Might your general have gone into the private security business, a la Blackwater/Academi? That company wasn't founded until the late nineties, but I imagine there were precursors?

Lots of ex-military guys get involved in them, and it would make the "rustle up a detachment" aspect more believable.

 

A

Ah. Well. I certainly needed to know all this before I landed myself in the soup.

The scenario is that my protags are in West Germany on their honeymoon when they hear that the FMC's ex-boyfriend, an internationally-famous West German violinist, has been kidnapped and is being held for ransom by one of these Red Army Faction-type gangs. The Bonn government refuses to negotiate and things look very dire for the ex. His recently-divorced wife seeks out my honeymooning couple and convinces them that the only way to save his life is for my FMC to go in posing as a dumb tourist to confirm his presence at the suspected location. (Working out the character issues/emotional dynamics of that will be my problem. They're central to the novel's theme.) But she herself is captured and held, and the band of private mercenaries the ex-wife says she has hired never show up to rescue the two of them. The MMC knows he is not in a position to sneak in and get them out, which is when he gets in touch again with on his old CO.

It occurs to me that my general, due to his work in European counter-terrorism, would likely have connections with the Bonn government and could convince someone he knows there to send in a covert force of West German military. As much as I like the idea of my countrymen riding to the rescue, having it be the Germans who do this makes more sense. Yes?

I suppose it raises the question of why Bonn wasn't planning to do this already, as the kidnapping of the musician is raising a ruckus in the international cultural community. Hmm, maybe they were, and the ex-wife's getting my FMC involved threw a spanner in the works. That might be an interesting plot twist.

Anyway, does this sound better?

 

Wow, yeah.

I was thinking of something on the order of my protag couple and the old CO having dinner together, when they tell him they're planning to honeymoon in Europe. Knowing his area of expertise, they ask him if he thinks things are calm on the German red terrorist front. He says at that point they are, and they have some chat about these groups in general, their methods and goals. My FMC will then pass along something she heard once from her ex, about a college classmate of his who had expressed sympathies towards that kind of group. (Gotta get this info in early, so I don't throw it at the reader at the last minute.)

I mainly want to establish the old CO/general as a guy who might be able to help the MMC when his bride goes missing. (Oooooh, new plot wrinkle emerging here!) At no point does he give them any specific intel like "We've got our eye on a cell in Putzdorf am Scheissenflusse" or anything like that.

 

Huh, welcome to the brainstorming @big soft moose

I won't dispute that, but there's a difference between a 'high profile country' like West Germany and countries like Vietnam or Kambodscha; the latter being more out of the way and easier to disregard/disavow in the media if they raise a fuss when something goes wrong. I would caution against this plot in a country in West Europe, but it's your story

This raises the hairs on the back of my neck; but again, we're talking fiction. If I imagine myself going in under these circumstances, I'd have to be damn sure that the calvary is coming.

Yes, that makes more sense. But why would it have to be a covert force? We're talking about an international recognised musician. I'd have thought the kidnapping would make news immediately...

..., but you thought about that yourself. If you want something to read about international twists in hostage rescue, read up about 'Operation Jonathan', sometimes also called 'Operation Entebbe' or 'Operation Thunderbolt'. It was the kidnapping of a plane in June 1976, 248 passengers, by Palestinians/Germans. This operation can teach you much about international relations during a hostage rescue. Due to the relative low numbers of Israeli citizens on board and the much higher number of passengers from other states, Israel was barred from the lead in the hostage rescue. However, they went in anyway.

I personally think that having an international media frenzy on the sidelines, pressuring the government involved to act or not to act, milking the story for all its worth, would only do your story good

 

Agreed. Since this world is, by nature, closed to the average Joe & Jane, we have to lean into things that still make for a satisfying story, if not necessarily a very realistic one to those who know anything about such matters. I mean, where would spy thrillers be as a genre without the doddering, eccentric old fellah living in a quaintly peaceful American or British town, who in truth is a WWII era scientist with the secret to mass destruction in his head. In the real world, he would either still be very much a part of the hidden world, else his knowledge and skill is so outdated as to be of no actual importance because WMDs are ten-a-penny in the modern world, and his particular flavor of WMD doesn't really bring anything new to the game.

 

Let's not make this a discussion about fiction vs. reality It's all about serving Catrin's vision, whatever she needs. I'm sure all of us would write the story differently, each to our own preferences.

 

It occurs to me that I could use your expertise for another aspect of this.

I was thinking "colonel" because of a conversation I had a couple years ago with a retired colonel who'd commanded a unit in Vietnam (What kind of unit? Division? Regiment? Brigade? Gotta find out). But it hits me that he might not have been that rank back in the 1960s. So I need to find out more about the command structure back then.

Who would be the commissioned officer who would be in charge of the unit in general? The guy who is present on the ground, in charge of deploying the forces and doing his best through training to make sure they came back alive. I see my officer as being the type who would take a personal interest in his troops, the type the men would respect even if they called him rude nicknames behind his back.

Yikes. I'm intending to do the draft of this book for NaNoWriMo, and I may have to give myself permission to leave a lot of stuff blank.

To make things even more interesting, I want my character to be a naturalized US citizen originally from Cuba. But in order for him to be as high as colonel in the US Army by 1967 or so, he could not have escaped the island after the Castro takeover. Maybe he and his parents emigrated earlier, but close relatives were caught up in the post-Castro persecutions. Ergo his fervent hatred of Communism. Why he's specializing in the European variety instead of focussing on Latin America might have to be explained, but that's doable.

 

This part I will let someone else answer. It's not a thing I drilled into my head as indispensable knowledge when I was in the USAF. I didn't make a religion of knowing military structure, as some service men and women certainly do. The structure I cared about was the intel structure. When I was in uniform, I worked for a command that doesn't even exist anymore, ESC, Electronic Security Command. As commands went, it was tiny, insular, and highly specialized. We used phrases like regular air force to talk about people not in our command, though that's not remotely a "real" term, but only one that described how we thought of ourselves, how separate we were from the day to day work-lives of other airmen. ESC was subsumed by SAC (Strategic Air Commad), which, iirc, was itself later subsumed into another command. It's been many years. I've long since stopped keeping track.

The officer in charge of our flight was a captain, and frankly, that flight and the mission we were charged with doing inside the dark world of our SCIF, was pretty much the whole air force, as far as I was concerned.

 

I've got a nephew in the Air Force now, but I'm not assuming he would know about Army structure, especially 50 years ago. But hey, he might know someone, right?

 

Thanks,

...

...

Bob lifted the telephone.

'Bob.'

'Jack? Jack from Saigon '75, how are you?'

'Well, first of all I found out about all the military intelligence networks during the Cold War era and then the structure of regiments and battalions in peace and also in the wartime. Fortunately the tea lady remembered your face and through her paramilitary networks I was finally able to trace your cell number.'

'How can I help?'

 

Sounds like you want a spy who's probably unaware of why they're doing what they're doing, and does't question their orders, they just do it; so, they'd openly talk among their circle since all that they know is a need to know basis, and everybody should be on the same page, and what they don't know - they don't need to, so, they'd talk over dinner since at this dinner, everyone should know - if it's dinner in a public setting, then, have fun with using code words.
They'd know who the enemy is and what their job/mission is and that's about it.
So they'd have to have pledged an oath anyway of loyalty to one country or another.

Think when the government needs to do something but not get its hands dirty, they hire spies and use them for their own dirty bidding.
They will do anything anywhere their country needs them.

Sounds like you need this protagonist to be a type of person who's job it is to lead a militia in the event of a government and society breakdown who's been specialised trained in something by the military, but until that day, is a sleeper cell living a normal life.

 

Not going to go through everything above since it all seems pretty solid, but what @Wreybies said about the USAF intel world is largely true of the Marines as well. A Marine rifle platoon in the 90s consisted of, IIRC, 41 people and was commanded by a 1st or 2nd lieutenant, and a rifle company would have 3 rifle platoons platoons and a heavy weapons (mortars, machine guns, stuff like that) platoon and be commanded by a captain. A battalion has something like eight hundred people in total assigned to it. That's for a normal infantry battalion, guys with M-16s (or M-4s or whatever), supported by machine guns and mortars.

In contrast, the company I was in generally had less than thirty people in our company formation. At one point we had 23 corporals (the lowest leadership rank in the Marines) and only 11 lance corporals (the highest non-leadership rank in the Marines). In other words, the "chiefs" outnumbered the "Indians" by more than two-to-one. Furthermore, our battalion wasn't part of any larger unit like a brigade or regiment, but reported directly to the commander of the Fleet Marine Forces Pacific. The reason for all of this is that a battalion is the smallest unit that can be an independent command in the Marines' structure, so by the grace of God Almighty and the powers vested in the Commandant of the Marine Corps, we were created a Battalion, even though we had nowhere near the numbers to justify such a lofty title, it gave us the operational freedom that the Corps needed.

Here's a pretty good set of organizational charts to help you understand how a regular infantry unit is organized in the Marines. However, as I've shown above, once you put MI (military intelligence) or Spec Ops (special operations, things like Green Berets, SEALS, and other such secretive creatures) into the mix, the ranks of everyone goes up (I believe @big soft moose said elsewhere that SAS ranks are actually different than regular Army ranks, but in the USA we don't have such a tradition), the ration of nominal "bosses" to "workers" shifts so there may be almost no lower ranks, and the overall number of people in a unit compared to its name goes way down.

I'd say more about all the bureaucracy and financial infighting that goes along with this, but I'm too tired to think about it. If I were you, I'd create a company like Blackwater, Triple Canopy, or Executive Outcomes to handle the fighting bit of your story.

 

13

 

Yep, yep, yep. This is how it was for me too. The typical composition of any flight at Marienfelde and T-Berg was skewed into a top-heavy dynamic you don't normally see outside of the world you and I knew.

 

Something about the 23 months time in service I had before arriving at a non-training command being the average