‘GOING ROGUE’
Capt. Phil Bernstein, commander of the 265th Radio Research Company, the cover name for the secretive intelligence-gathering Army Security Agency, watched as his new soldier arrived at the company’s Phu Bai headquarters in northern South Vietnam in late December 1970. As a military truck rolled in from the helicopter landing zone carrying Staff Sgt. Ed Keith, Bernstein noticed that the new intel analyst was wearing nonregulation camouflage fatigues bearing a Special Forces patch and lugging two heavy Army footlockers.
Bernstein remembers Keith as having “hand grenades, belts of ammunition, knives, Claymore mines,” and an assortment of automatic weapons and pistols. That was hardly equipment needed to analyze intelligence gleaned from enemy radios and telephones.
Impressed by Keith’s background, Bernstein pulled him off to one side. “I told him I had a very weak lieutenant leading one of my platoons” and needed his experience “to prop up” the lieutenant, Bernstein said. He appointed Keith platoon sergeant and sent him off to find that unit. Bernstein, who rarely left his Phu Bai headquarters, never saw Keith again.
Keith had been trained in signals intelligence—listening in on radio and telephone communications to decipher the enemy’s plans and troop movements. He tested extremely high on military aptitude exams, spoke Mandarin Chinese and had quit the Army twice before enlisting a third time to get to Vietnam. Keith had worked with the Special Forces at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and was coming from the 5th Special Forces Group at Pleiku in the Central Highlands, although he wasn’t yet a qualified Green Beret when he got to Vietnam. He rarely told anyone who he worked for.
Keith had arrived in Vietnam on July 20, 1969, and was sent to the Duc Lap Special Forces Camp near the Cambodian border. When troops there found a wire strung across the ground, he quickly determined it was a North Vietnamese telephone line and installed a tap to listen in. He was also dispatched to a border region in the Mekong Delta and looked for phone lines to tap
