Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub , USA (Ret.)
Chairman
The Jedburgh Group, Inc.

Our 2005 George Washington Military Leadership Award is going to be presented by Jerry Lizinski; he is the Chairman and CEO of Centurion Alliance Incorporated, specializing in private global investment management. He is the former president, CEO of Templeton portfolio advisory, where Jerry originated, and built TPA into a two-plus billion dollar global investment organization. He received his bachelor’s of science from the United States Military Academy, where he earned the top 1 percent military leadership ranking and his MBA is from Golden Gate University. Jerry also served as an infantry officer, a paratrooper, a ranger, in the eighty-second airborne division, and the Special Forces—Special Operations. He is a graduate of numerous military specialty schools and he completed five combat tours and is a highly decorated Vietnam veteran. Please welcome Mr. Jerry Ledzinsky. (clapping)

Thank you, Tony, and this is not an easy project--it’s like stuffing ten pounds in to a one pound bag, literally, to properly explain General Jack Singlaub’s background is virtually impossible, to you, but I’m gonna give it a try. Also say that the last speech I read was in 1966 and I was translating the Portuguese language for Brazilian generals so I want to make sure that I stay on track otherwise I can talk for forty-five minutes. This’ll help me.
In May of 1962 I was a plebe at West Point when General Douglas Macarthur gave a profound, stirring speech, which I personally heard. Much of what General Macarthur powerfully communicated applies this morning. Especially poignant was his initial comment: ”Unhappily, I posses neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination,  nor that brilliance of metaphor” to adequately explain why General Jack Singlaub was chosen to receive CNP’s first George Washington Military Leadership award for demonstrating a lifetime of achievement in military leadership.
A couple things about the soldier that I pulled out of General MacArthur’s speech, which I think very much applies today. General Macarthur stated “The solider, above all other men, is required to practice the greatest act of religious training—sacrifice.” He further stated that “Professional officers are the leaven which binds together the entire fabric of our national system of defense. From the professional officer’s ranks come the great captains who hold the nation’s destiny in their hands. The moment the war talks and sounds.” He went on to say, “This does not mean that you are warmongers. On the contrary, the soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.”

That pretty much says it well. My experience started involved with General Singlaub when I checked into Vietnam. But let me preface that by saying when Steve Baldwin asked me to make this presentation, he knew that I was—served in Vietnam, that I was in the military, but I don’t think Steve was aware that I actually served  under General Singlaub (then Colonel Singlaub) in Vietnam, in a unit with the innocuous name, Studies and Observations Group. Or as we called it, SOG.

And it’s only in the last probably ten to fifteen years that the secrecy things came apart,. I had Edward James almost come to Carmel; he’s the guy that played Miami Vice and now he’s in this Battlestar Galactica thing (kind of a comeback). And he was trying to drill me for information to see what I could provide for him regarding our operations. He said, “Because no records exist.”

Back then you could shred files and so forth and not get in trouble I guess with it.  But we were doing things, basically, that we didn’t do; it didn’t exist; it was black operations. But the group has that really kind of innocuous sounding name, but from personal experience, when I processed into Vietnam as a young captain fresh out of Fort Bragg Special Warfare School, I was told by the Special Forces Administration personnel in the training—Vietnam--that I was selected for SOG. Nobody knew what SOG was. I said,

“Well, What’s SOG?”

And I had just come through several months of training in Special Forces--never heard of the organization. The NCO looked up at me from his desk (and I remember this very very well) and he forced a weird-lookin’ smile--he was almost apologizing--and he proceeded to say that it was a top-secret organization within Special Forces, was multi-service (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines), but he was unable to comment. But he said that “You’ll be briefed upon arriving at your unit, detachment B56, known as Sigma, at a base camp called Hu Nuc Tow, near a two-duck water plant outside of Saigon.”
General Singlaub, you probably haven’t heard this nomenclature since the 1960s.  After I in-processed and completed, I turned to exit and the guy said, “Sir, good luck, you’re going to a crazy operation. “

And I looked at him kind of strange and said, “We see the casualty list daily.”
And I thought people argued and killed and you expect that and that’s what we signed up for. In Special Forces you’re a triple volunteer--you volunteer for paratrooper, you volunteer for Ranger, you volunteer for Special Forces; so we were going into it with eyes wide open. But then he responded, “We processed a death yesterday of a SOG guy that got stomped to death by an elephant.”

I thought, “What does that mean?”

Well the bottom line, it was a very different, highly effective but deadly element, which operated primarily “behind the lines” or, more specifically, in Cambodia, Laos, and sometimes North Vietnam. General Singlaub was a key architect in building SOG. He was very carefully selected to develop the organization because of his extensive earlier experience behind the lines, in World War II and Korea. He actually worked for the CIA in Korea.

Frankly (and this opinion is shared by many credible Vietnam analysts) had General Singlaub been given more operational latitude, the war’s outcome might have been very different because SOG literally leveled the playing field with the Vietcong, North Vietnamese, partly by denying them the ability to stage their attacks out of, and run them back into, the border areas—Cambodia and Laos primarily. 
What I’ve just covered, more or less from my own personal experience, was General Singlaub’s Vietnam service. His military career started before I was born. I was going to read his resume but I thought that a better piece to read what some writer wrote on the inside cover of his book. Tom Clancy is quoted above the write-up; and Tom Clancy stated, “Major General John Singlaub’s book is the odyssey of an American patriot.”

Just reading this—went on to say, “It’s a fast-paced narrative that mixes revealing anecdotes with meticulously researched history.  Hazardous Duty is the epic autobiography of one of America’s most respected soldiers. From behind the lines in World War II to behind the scenes of the Iran Contra Affair, Major General John K. .Singlaub provides a unique window on four decades of overt and covert operations. Hazardous Duty also includes personal accounts of some of the most colorful and exotic heroes and scoundrels of America’s military intelligence elite--from Wild Bill Donovan to William Casey and Oliver North.

For more than forty years, Singlaub has been at the center of the cold and hot wars. In this dramatic memoir, he recounts his exploits in unconventional warfare, espionage, covert missions, and front-line action--World War II, the Chinese Revolution, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and Central America.

“An OSS officer in Nazi-occupied France, Singlaub was on of the founding members of the CIA. He fought behind enemy lines in Europe and Asia, headed CIA operations in post-war Manchuria, led troops in Korea, managed a secret war along the Ho Chi Min trail, and worked with the Contras in Nicaragua, and he had a celebrated encounter with President Jimmy Carter, in that he opposed the withdrawal of US troops from South Korea (any of you are I’m sure aware of that confrontation). It’s good that our troops are still in Korea.

“Now drawing on recently declassified records and original interviews with military and government leaders, as well as his own experiences, he names names and vividly describes missions never before made public.”

It goes on, “A richly detailed autobiography as well as an epic adventure, Hazardous Duty is a monument to a true-life hero’s courage and integrity.”

I’ve had the book for many years. I almost read it again the last couple of days and somebody told me just in the audience here, twenty minutes ago, that it’s addictive. You can’t put it down once you pick it because it’s a historical narrative that’s incredible, written by somebody that was really right there on the scenes.

If you’re interested in learning more about General Singlaub’s legacy in building our Special Operations capabilities into what is now the world’s best, copies of Hazardous Duty are available outside and General Singlaub will be out the to answer any questions or to talk to you in any more detail.

(music) Fighting soldiers from the sky
Fearless men who jump and die
Men who mean just what they say
The brave men of the Green Berets.

Silver wings upon their chests;
These are men, America’s best,
One hundred men will test today,
But only three win the Green Berets.

Train to live off nature’s land,
Trained in combat, hand-to-hand,
Men who fight by night and day,
Courage take from the Green Berets.

Silver wings upon their chests,
These are men, America’s best,
One hundred men will test today,
But only three win the Green Berets.

Some history--General Singlaub, Sir, please approach. (clapping)

Wow.
It’s not fair to do that to somebody that has to give a presentation.
Well, thank you. Thank you, thank you very much. This is truly a great honor and I am visibly shaken by this experience. I would expect that it would be a great introduction coming from this young soldier here--one of the best--and so I’m proud to be associated with an award that is based on the father of our country: the man who was designated as first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.
George Washington was a role model for my generation. It was not at all unusual that every classroom in the schools that I attended had a picture of George Washington. And I have to tell you, that my father took a lot of his philosophy and the way in which I should grow up from George Washington. He seemed to concentrate on the story of the cherry tree. The emphasis was not on whether or not that was a true story—he admitted that no one had ever found the stump of the tree that he had chopped down—but the philosophy of George Washington’s father impressing on him that he must always tell the truth. The moral of that story (and I didn’t hear it once, I heard it many times) was that you do not lie.
As a matter of fact, I had tried very hard to get an appointment to the military academy when I was in high school. I had political problems; my father was a Democrat. He was the only one I ever knew--until I met Larry MacDonald, of which I was really proud. But, at the military academy, as Jerry well knows and others here who have attended that institution, the honor code is a very simple one. It is: I will not lie, cheat or steal, nor will I tolerate those who do.
Now that last part of that is what makes it most difficult. My father converted those negative strictures into a positive statement to guide me and it has. And that is: You must have complete integrity. And he was one who believed that integrity is indivisible; it can’t be graduated. There are no degrees of integrity; you have it, or you don’t. And I’ve advised young officers when I first came into the Army, into my unit: If you did not bring integrity with you, it’s unlikely we will have the time to teach you how important it is, so you may want to, right now decide on another profession, but you must have and practice integrity.
Now another thought that George Washington had that has been important in our lives recently and that is the statement that he made in his first address to the nation on the eighth of January in 1790. And that is, “To be prepared for war is the most effectual way of preserving peace.”
Now some of our presidents over the years have not paid much attention to that; they probably didn’t learn that lesson of history. Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, did. You may recall he said that he was campaigning on the basis of peace through strength, and he practiced that. He rebuilt our armed forces that had been terribly degraded in the years immediately preceding his presidency and he had to do the same thing with the CIA.  Most important, he made two significant policy changes. The first of these was to defend this nation against the threat of Soviet ICBM missiles rather than accepting the first strike-- the McNamara proposed philosophy called MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction, where we absorbed the first strike, killing how many millions of Americans? But we then struck back in retaliation and killed millions more.  That was considered our national strategic policy. Reagan believed it was immoral and said, ‘We are going to build a strategic defense which will make it unlikely that any enemy will attack us and that is a better form of defense.” (clapping)
He made a second major policy decision, and that’s one which is frequently referred to as the Reagan Doctrine. Now the Reagan Doctrine was proposed by Jack Wheeler, who is a member of CNP; he pushed it hard. Many of us talked about this and the concept was to provide help to those who were already captured (the captive nations, as they were called, were under Soviet domination), and we would provide them and opportunity to become free.
Previously, we had been concerned about those who were free—making sure that they were not taken over by the Communists, but this was a new dimension and it was a dimension that gave such tremendous encouragement to the captive nations--to the people in the Soviet empire, that it caused, ultimately, the defeat of the Soviet empire and, in fact, it was the reason that Reagan won the Cold War. And it’s important to understand that we won the war. It just didn’t stop, go away, we won it by positive action—actions of--(clapping)
And incidentally, some of you may have heard Jim Woolsey, who refers to the Cold Ward as World War Three, and points out that the war we are in now against terrorism is World War Four. Let’s not lose sight of the fact that we did have a struggle, a struggle in which many of our military forces were lost, not the least of which were those in the Special Operations forces who were operating, helping these people who wanted to become free as well as those who wanted to remain free.
Now, I was asked to come here initially to talk to you on a subject which was been described simply as Korea: Then and Now. Now that’s a pretty big subject, one that probably can’t be covered in the time allowed. I presume that Jerry will give me a signal when I run out of time.
My time started with respect to Korea in 1946. Some of you may know that immediately after the Japanese surrendered, President Truman disestablished the office of Strategic Services. The thought was, we don’t really need to have that kind of a force in peacetime. It’s suspected that a better reason, a more logical reason for that course of action by President Truman was he did not want to have William Donovan, General Donovan, in a position where he might be a threat to other Democrats hoping to run for the presidency. So, in a stroke of his hand he disestablished OSS on the nineteenth of September 1945 for thirty-four days after the end of World War II. The assets of that organization were turned over to the War Department, the War Department created an organization to take care for these--to try to preserve the real assets and eliminate any liabilities--and that was called the Strategic Services Unit of the War Department, SSU. Well, when I returned not knowing that OSS didn’t exist; I was informed that I was in OSS--I was in SSU and here were my orders releasing me from SSU and assigning me back to the Army from which I had been recruited.
While I was still on leave, I received a call to come to Washington, which I did before I checked into my new assignment, which incidentally wasn’t very exciting; I was going to an infantry replacement training center at Camp McLlellan, Alabama.
When they offered to send me to Mukdan, Manchuria, they thought that I would want to take a lot time to decide whether I wanted to go or not--to ask my wife if she would agree to this. But having visited Camp McLlellan, Alabama, I told them, “I’ve already made up my mind, I accept.”
So I went to Mukden in Manchuria. I became--I took over from an officer that was a Colonel. I was a Captain, a fairly senior Captain at that time, but I was in charge of espionage in that part of Northeast Asia. My targets were primarily Siberia, Mongolia, and North Korea. And the idea was that I would find assets (people) capable of going into North Korea and set up a system of getting information from them that would be useful;. And of course it was not an easy task but it was one that was very very important. I was able to recruit some Koreans from the fairly large Korean population there, and with some very capable young officers (many of them had not seen combat but many of them had) we were able to give them the necessary training, equip them communications systems and put them into a sort of refugee stream that was crossing the Aloo River from North to South to go into Communist-occupied North Korea.
And it turned out that they did quite well. They were told to, if they were drafted, to do as well as you could and get as high as you could in the Communist Army of North Korea.
The agents were successful, as I suggested, and in fact a very strongly-worded report was prepared and sent to Washington by way of Tokyo. We, our cover assignment was, I was head of the Army Liaison Group in Mukden, but my next higher headquarters was a Navy headquarters in Shanghai called the External Survey Detachment, Number Forty-four, but because it was a military headquarters, the reports went through Tokyo and in that place those reports were subjected to the scrutiny of Sir Charles Willoughby, who was General MacArthur’s Chief of Intelligence.
The reports came to Washington with the indication that they were not particularly useful from the people in Tokyo because they didn’t know who the source was and it’s unlikely that the information that they read—that there was going to be an attack, that the Soviet trained armed forces of North Korea were making preparations to move large numbers of troops, including heavy equipment (as in tanks) South. And bridges were being repaired; railroads were being opened up in places that would be unlikely if they were just concerned about the defense of the country.
Admiral Hillenkoetter briefed the president and had a little trouble with briefing the members of the Senate involved in this, but it was clear that we had been warned; we just refused to believe the intelligence; it was improbable that North Korea would have the capability of attacking. They did attack, as you know, and the country of Korea was under the domination of the Soviet armed forces and their political advisors, converted to a replica of some of the Soviet Republics--say, no question about their doctrine of Marxism, Leninism, and having a very very strong army.
The Soviets were spending a lot of time using the troops that were there, training an army in North Korea and that North Korean army did in fact, as you may know, attack to the South on the twenty-fifth of June, 1950. The army was literally destroyed in our--when we entered the conflict they were saved by the intervention of the Chinese and then the Chinese waited until the North Koreans were strong enough again and then they withdrew.
During the time that we were heavily engaged in Southeast Asia, Vietnam, the North Koreans really start building up their army. They built up an army and disposed it forward--that is they moved their divisions, their heavy artillery as far forward as they could so that they could launch an attack. That’s the normal thing that an army—armed forces would do. And they were in position to attack and they had a large force. They had double the number of their divisions while we were heavily engaged in Southeast Asia. We weren’t even reading the aerial photos that were being taken of that area until 1975; but in 1975 we started to realize that the North Koreans had doubled the number of divisions, they’d tripled the number of tanks and artillery pieces and had acquired a significant air force and a good many submarines. They were a strong, large force which had incorporated new missile systems into their arsenal and in addition to having high explosive warheads, they had chemical warheads, and that was the threat.
Prior to 1991, North Korean economy wasn’t too bad. But when the USSR collapsed, all petroleum stopped going to North Korea. Kim Il Sung died that year, and in addition, there was a serious drought, which did not help a Communist society which lacks the flexibility to make changes to adjust to that. So things were starting to get pretty bad there.
President Clinton came to the aid of North Korea; he sent a delegation to Switzerland to deal with the North Koreans and they came up with what was called a framework and that—I don’t know what a framework is, it’s certainly not a treaty and it’s not an agreement so we didn’t have to get the approval of the Senate, which he would not have been able to get. So we call it a framework in which we promised to provide North Korea with two light water reactors; a nuclear reactor which does not lend itself to produce nuclear material for nuclear weapons. The reaction from the North Koreans was to throw the UN inspectors out and to finally, this year, admit that they have nuclear weapons.
Now that big army has gotten old and is not very useful because they haven’t had the petroleum to train so we have a situation now where the North Koreans have a large conventional force (I don’t think it’s particularly useful), but they now want us to take account--into account--that they have a nuclear—at least one nuclear weapon and this is the threat that they are using to us for both—depending on it for defense and depending on it for deterrence.
South Korea has changed in their attitudes; they are no longer considered the most serious threat from the North. They are focusing the younger generation on reuniting and hope that this will make things easier. Something like the hope that the West Germans had that when they took over East Germany they would have to pay a lot of money which certainly they will in this case. But that’s the situation now in which they have refused to attend the Six Power Talks to work out what they’re going to do in this area.
But Korea today is a great threat, a serious threat, and we have to pay attention to it and we have to get back to the Six Power Talks to find a solution that does not involve the exchange of nuclear weapons which would certainly come if the Soviets fired a warhead with a nuclear weapon on it into downtown Seoul. Seoul has a population of roughly eleven million people. That would be a international worldwide disaster because our response would have to be against the North. I’ve hurried through this faster than I would’ve liked but my coattail has been pulled by Jerry Lizinski and I want to thank you very much, thank you for this award, and thank all of you for your interest, your support and for listening. Thank you. (clapping)

Thank you very much, General. Jerry was actually doing my bidding. I felt a little awkward, a sergeant telling a general that he had spoken enough. So thank you, General, very much for your service and for your information today. Our final speaker this morning for our session here, regarding--is titled: Mr. President, Secure the Borders First. This is an issue that you no doubt have heard a lot about in the last few days--last few weeks, citizens taking matters of concern—taking their security, the borders, up as a personal initiatives, and this is an issue that is not going to go away until something happens--