Black Entry by Regis P. Sheehan
3 stars
Black Entry is a fictional military account of a period during The Vietnam War and is specific to ‘Project Tiger’. This was a plan to train local Vietnamese soldiers and drop them into North Vietnam where they had various instructions which ranged between intelligence work, sabotage and infiltration of their enemy.
The chapters tend to be written in a report style and are filled with lots of names of serving officers in the US army and CIA agents. The historical evidence is quite interesting, but I do think that it could have been used to create more of a fictional tale. The opening and closing chapters were the most fictional in style and I was drawn in by the opening pages of the book. I imagined that I would then be reading something along the lines of a good spy thriller. Instead the author has written more of a factual account and sadly I did begin to lose interest towards the end.
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This is a fictionalized account of “Project Tiger”, which was an operation spanning 1962 and 1963 in which the CIA inserted numerous indigenous agent teams into North Vietnam for the purposes of espionage, sabotage and other special operations. It also relates the story to earlier CIA operations in which similar efforts were made to drop agents in Communist East Europe – with similar results.
Author Bio: A native of Pittsburgh and a resident of Northern Virginia, the author is a former Special Agent of the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS), U.S. State Department. His career included criminal investigations and dignitary protection in the Miami and Washington field offices, as well as a tour in MSD – or the DSS Mobile Security Division. With MSD he provided training, tactical support to protective details and emergency security enhancement to high threat embassies and consulates around the world. Assigned overseas, he was a member of the Regional Security Offices in El Salvador, South Africa and China. Prior to retirement, he served as the Chief of the DSS Counterintelligence Division.
Rosie Amber 