A Murder in Wartime

The Green Beret murder case is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries and political cover-ups of the Vietnam War, a story that burst onto the front page of the New York Times and then suddenly disappeared into a fog of conflicting official explanations. In 1969, members of a top-secret Green Beret intelligence organization were arrested by the Army for the murder of a suspected North Vietnamese double agent. The officers thought they had killed the man with CIA approval. But now the CIA and the military were hanging them out to dry in one of the most bizarre homicide investigations in the history of the U.S. Army. Defense attorneys for the Berets, including the famed Edward Bennett Williams, soon learned of assassinations being carried out under the CIA's Operation Phoenix, and used that to attack the Army for its hypocritical prosecution of the men. The case became an epic, behind-closed-doors courtroom struggle between two West. Pointers: Robert Rheault, a decorated Green Beret colonel from a prominent New England family, and Gen. Creighton Abrams, the supreme American commander in Vietnam. It pitted the Special Forces--tough, bright, unfettered by the past, the fighters of a new kind of war--against an Army establishment that proclaimed its opposition to terror and assassination. When back-channel messages reached Washington that the slain agent's wife was making inquiries, top officials of the. Pentagon and CIA jockeyed to avoid responsibility for the killing. But when a country lawyer ripped the lid off the case, it became an international sensation--and a heated debate on the floor of Congress over the morality of unconventional warfare. President Nixon finally stepped in to abort a trial that would have exposed worldwide CIA operations and the secret, illegal Cambodian bombings. But the government's handling of the case prompted Daniel Ellsberg to leak the. Pentagon Papers, which changed the course of the war and led to Watergate. On one level, A Murder in Wartime is a fascinating tangle of espionage and intrigue, a detective story involving the highest officials of the American government. On another, it is a portrait of an era, a twilight time of fading innocence, when America had only begun to rethink its love affair with spies. Most of all, it is the personal story of eight men caught in a nightmare within a. Nightmare--a politically explosive murder trial in the middle of the Vietnam War.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.