X Descending (35 page)

A copy of Doty’s service records had been released in 1988, under the Freedom of Information Act, to well-known researcher Larry Bryant. He sent me a copy of what he had received, and this early set of documents contained substantially more information than the spotty collection of details released to me after my own more recent request. Along with details about Doty’s service, the documents Bryant had received contained a section on emergency contact information that listed a few individual names. That led to several more surprises.

The first was another astounding coincidence—apparently Doty’s first wife had the same unusual first name as Metzger’s wife: Darlene. I sent a copy of this part of the service records to Col. Clayton and, at the same time, pointed out that Doty’s current wife, Shelley, was listed in these records also as Shelley L. Marsden, apparently her last name from a prior marriage. Almost immediately I received a reply from Col. Clayton. He knew that name. When he had met Richard Metzger in Albuquerque, Metzger claimed to be an Albuquerque police officer married to a Darlene Marsden. Sometime later, Col. Clayton had someone check on Metzger in Albuquerque, and found that the home at the address Metzger had given was listed under a woman’s name, someone Col. Clayton had presumed was Metzger’s wife or girlfriend—Shelley Marsden.

Col. Clayton wrote to Doty asking him about his wife’s name, Darlene. Doty responded that his wife’s name was not Darlene, it was Schelley (with a “c”), and her maiden name was Morris, not Marsden! Doty did not bother to mention that his first wife had been named Darlene or that the name Marsden, which had been used as the last name of Metzger’s wife, was a prior last name of his current wife Shelley. However, all the clever wordplay was simply a prelude to a sudden about face. For no clear reason,
Doty suddenly admitted to having known and worked with Richard Metzger.

In an email message dated December 2, 2007, Doty wrote to Col. Clayton that he had in fact assisted Metzger many times in the 1980s. Explaining that he was interested in the LS-85 incident and thought he was doing some good, he proclaimed that he “had things mailed to my address because I was assisting in the research”. He offered no explanation why Metzger, who was ostensibly doing legitimate research for a screenplay, did not provide a business address of his own and would prefer instead to surreptitiously use Doty’s. Nor was there any answer to the more compelling question of why Doty’s name was kept hidden and why variations of his wives names were used in league with Metzger. If it had all been a legitimate and honest research effort directed at producing a film telling the true story of LS-85, then why would Doty need
or even want
to keep his involvement hidden to the point of denying it to Col. Clayton for over ten years? On the other hand, if Doty had lied to Metzger about having served at LS-85 in a ploy to make some money off of him, why then would Doty initiate and maintain contact with Col. Clayton and needlessly risk being exposed? The coincidences could lead anyone to wonder whether there ever was a Richard Metzger.

There seems to be no question that Richard Doty has had a longstanding interest in the LS-85 incident. The question remains however, whether he could have been in Laos in early 1968. He served in Vietnam, the U.S., and Europe before retiring in good standing, so why risk destroying any respectability and legitimacy he rightly earned by making false claims of having been in Laos at that time? On the other hand, if he had been telling the truth, then what would motivate him to obfuscate and deny his own statements now?

It is not difficult to see the Catch-22 the situation presents. If Doty was in Laos in early 1968 and he provides any proof of it, then the façade of his service records and prior statements crumbles. But, keeping the façade intact leaves him looking like another ‘wannabe’ to the very people who could appreciate him and his interest. Still, he never expressed real shock at the message on the History Channel web site, or what was in it, he only stressed emphatically that he had not been in the Air Force at that time.

Nonetheless, Doty’s claim to have been at LS-85 may have been a problem for him as far as Col. Clayton and others were concerned, but for my part, it was his claim to have been in Laos in 1968
at all
that was the issue. He had denied everything when I first asked him about his message on the History Channel web site, but I had not even mentioned LS-85. I had written to him only about the discrepancy with his enlistement date, although...I did allude to his comments about the CIA. LS-85 had become a story in itself, but it was recalling his reaction to my initial questions that left me feeling I was still missing something.

Going back to his original message I began to find that there was more in it than I had first realized.

20-ALTERNATE

The message had asserted that he was a Combat Controller in early 1968 and had been at several locations in Laos and Thailand. Because his Air Force service records do not appear to support any of this, an initial reaction might have been to assume he was misrepresenting his military service. But what I knew of Doty’s involvement in the Bennewitz case, the intelligence and counterintelligence aspects of it, and what I had learned about the U.S. presence in Laos, suggested another possibility. His Air Force service records could be correct and he might still have been Laos in early 1968 if, as he said,
he was not in the Air Force at the time
. The message Doty had written on the History Channel web site was primarily about LS-85, but he had mentioned several other locations as we;;. As I began to look more closely at those other locations, one of them became very interesting.

Lima Site 20A became a turning point when I realized it linked Richard Doty and John Lear to the same secret CIA base in Laos. Both men had brought controversy and confusion to the Bennewitz case during the 1980s though, by all accounts, they appeared to have totally different agendas. So when I realized that Lear and Doty both claimed to have been in Laos and both claimed to have been to the same secret CIA base, LS-20A, a huge read flag went up in my mind. Whether they had been there at the same time, presuming I had any chance of determining that with certainty, was a big question. But I set out to learn what I could...beginning with LS-20A.

When I first saw Doty’s mention of Lima Site 20A, I did not realize how significant this site was during the secret war in Laos. LS-20A, or “Alternate”, as it was sometimes called, was located in the valley of Long Tieng (Long Cheng). It was the primary CIA headquarters for the northern region during the secret war in Laos
⁷³
. The site was served by a single runway used by Air America and other flights bringing in supplies and transporting people between bases. It was also the base for several Laotian pilots and the pilots of the “Ravens”, a well-known and revered group of Forward Air Controllers. Air America had facilities at one end of the runway that were a frequent stop for their pilots, those of Continental Air Services (CASI), and others flying covertly for the CIA. Long Tieng also served as headquarters for famed Laotian General Vang Pao. In fact, when Vang Pao was finally evacuated in May of 1975, it was a CASI pilot named Dave Kouba who flew him out of Laos across the Mekong River.
⁷⁴

When I realized that Doty was claiming to have been at a major CIA headquarters during the war in Laos—a site once called the most secret place on earth—I began to rethink Doty’s emphasis on the CIA presence and personnel in his description of the incident at Site 5. In his message on the History Channel web site, he made only one reference to the USAF—but three to the CIA, even stipulating that the name, Site 5, was the
CIA code name
for the site. He also stated that Site 5 was near Phong Saly (Phongsali), though in a later communication with Col. Clayton, he said that it was west of Luang Prabang. Both names apply to provinces in Laos and also to cities within each province, so the exact location Doty was describing remains uncertain. Nevertheless, Phongsali, the northernmost province in Laos, shares its southern border with the northern border of Luang Prabang. Either one would be a relatively short flight by air from Long Tieng.

Though Doty had only mentioned LS-20A once in his message on the History Channel site, I began searching online for other instances where “LS-20A” appeared associated with his name. I also searched using “Long Tieng” and the names of the other locations he had mentioned. It was a shot in the dark, but I tried many variations of names and spelling in the hours that I spent searching online. Eventually I found one very compelling hit in a message that had been written in June of 2003.

It was a message placed on a travel related web site, Passplanet.com, describing a trip recently taken to Phongsali. Posted in the Laos section, a “Richard C. Doty” wrote very specific details about Phongsali and his previous experience in Laos. In this message, the writer said he had visited Phongsali in the spring of 2003, having been there previously during the Vietnam War when he served in the U.S. military as part of a
Special Forces unit assigned to Long Tieng, Laos
. He went on to write that he had frequently visited Northern Laos, including Phongsali, and had last been there in 1970, though it was not clear if he was speaking of Laos in general, or Phongsali in particular. There is also the suggestion that he had been there at some time in the late 1960s. He concludes his message saying that in the late 1960s the residents of Phongsali had grown everything, which apparently was not the case in 2003.
⁷⁵

In 2007, I learned from Colonel Clayton that Doty had told him of taking a trip back to Laos a few years earlier. When I sent a copy of this 2003 Passplanet.com message to Colonel Clayton, he forwarded it to Doty who, as might be expected, summarily dismissed it. His rationale was that a simple Google search would return thousands of results for the name Doty, implying that the message I had found could have been written by anyone. I thought differently and decided to test Doty’s assertion.

To begin with, the message had not been written merely by someone named “Doty”, but by one Richard C. Doty, giving the entire full name and middle initial. That meant that doing a Google search was not simply a search for any Doty, but for one with a very specific full name. I had no interest in search results where variations of Doty’s name would show up clearly identifiable as the Richard Doty associated with UFOs, AFOSI, Paul Bennewitz, etc. So I began by filtering out key words that related to these topics. This type of conditional search would return only instances where the full name, Richard C. Doty, was found only in non-UFO-related or otherwise obvious context. As I expected, the results were not in the thousands.

There were only three potential matches with that exact first name, middle initial, and last name. Two were easily dismissible as having no correlation at all to the Doty in question or anything to do with Laos. There was only one other instance of that full name—and it appeared
in the message I had found
.

After finding this message with Doty’s full name and so many matching details, and hearing, in 2007, that Doty had told Col. Clayton he had traveled back to Laos a few years earlier, I felt certain that this message had been written by the Doty I was tracing. I contacted the founder of Passplanet, Benoit Saint Girons, to see whether he maintained any information on people who posted on his site, perhaps an email address. Unfortunately, he had suffered computer problems in 2005 and if there had been any records, they were long gone. All that remained was the text in the messages. Even so, the fact of a Richard C. Doty describing being in Laos, in Phongsali, and at Long Tieng in this message certainly correlates with the original History Channel message. Furthermore, the allusion by the Passplanet.com writer to Phongsali in the late 1960’s may imply he had been in Laos well before 1970.

While there is no absolute proof the Richard C. Doty who posted the PassPlanet.com message claiming to have been Special Forces in Long Tieng, is the same Doty who claimed elsewhere to have been at LS-85 and at Long Tieng in March, 1968, the correlations are difficult to ignore. The known Richard C. Doty has given very similar information to Colonel Clayton and repeatedly implied first hand knowledge of an attack on a second CIA site, Site 5, also in northern Laos and also in 1970. If these are the same Richard Doty and if he is to be taken at his word, then he may have been associated with Special Forces in 1970, if not earlier, and assigned specifically to Long Tieng...the CIA headquarters in Laos.

An especially interesting development came through Colonel Clayton’s efforts to find anyone who might have known Richard Doty in Laos. He was told of another Doty who had served in southern Laos at a location known as the Bolovens Plateau. In this case, it was a Raymond Doty, and Raymond was definitely CAS (Controlled American Source...i.e. CIA.)

Col. Clayton asked Richard Doty about Raymond Doty. At first Doty simply wrote that he had a cousin Ray who had been in the Army from 1964 until 1972. At that point, Col. Clayton responded that the person in question could have been Doty’s cousin, but that he knew this person had worked for the CIA. In his next email Doty claimed to have spoken to an (unnamed) uncle and learned that Raymond Doty had been a Green Beret assigned to a Special Operations group. He also told Col. Clayton that Raymond had served in Laos doing “detached duty”—a term he did not define, but one heavy with implication.