Samuel V. Wilson - Military Career

Military Career

Sam Wilson joined the (116th Infantry Regiment, Virginia National Guard) as a 16-year old private bugler in June 1940. By early 1942, he had become successively a squad leader, platoon sergeant and acting first sergeant before being sent to Infantry Officer Candidate School (OCS), where he graduated as an 18-year old second lieutenant at the head of his class and was selected to remain at The Infantry School, Fort Benning, Georgia, as an instructor.

As a young officer, Wilson taught guerilla and counterguerilla tactics at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1942 and 1943. In 1943, already a first lieutenant at the age of 19, he joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and subsequently responded to a presidential call for volunteers for “a dangerous and hazardous mission” to be undertaken by an elite regimental-sized unit. This move resulted in his becoming chief reconnaissance officer for the 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional), better known as Merrill's Marauders, which operated behind enemy lines in Burma during World War II. His role in that theater was later memorialized in Charlton Ogburn's book The Marauders, which subsequently was made into the 1962 movie Merrill's Marauders (film). Then-Lt. Col. Wilson served as technical advisor for the film and was cast as General Merrill's deputy "Bannister" under the pseudonym Vaughan Wilson; he also appeared in the film trailer introducing the film and narrating the trailer.

Upon returning stateside from the China-Burma- India Theater as a combat veteran in fall 1944 with his fifth consecutive appointment in hand to the US Military Academy, Wilson was denied admission to West Point for medical reasons. His tour in Burma had ended with multiple medical ailments, including malaria, amoebic dysentery, mite typhus and severe malnutrition. He returned to the Infantry School where he developed and taught courses in military leadership for the next two years.

During this period he applied for and was granted a commission in the Regular Army. This move exposed the fact that he had been a fraudulent enlistment, having told a “white lie” earlier about his age, and resulted in his being appointed a second lieutenant in the Regular Army as of age 21—by which time he had already become a combat-experienced captain, Army of the United States (AUS).

In September 1947, although he was only a high school graduate from a small rural school, he entered the Army's Foreign Area Specialist Training Program (FASTP) and was enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University, specializing in the Russian language and related background and area subjects.

Following a successful stint in graduate school, he was assigned for 3½ years to Europe as a language and area student, where he developed near-native fluency in the Russian language, as well as a working knowledge of several other languages. Noteworthy extra-curricular activities during this period included being assigned to the State Department’s Diplomatic Pouch and Courier Service, which led to extensive travels throughout the Iron Curtain countries and the Soviet Union, as well as to other countries peripheral to the USSR; functioning as an official interpreter in Berlin, Potsdam and Vienna; and serving in a liaison capacity with elements of the Soviet Armed Forces in East Germany and in Eastern Austria.

Newly promoted to major, Wilson returned to Washington and was assigned to the General Staff (Intelligence) in fall 1951, where he handled a variety of sensitive special projects until re-assignment to attend the Infantry Officers Advanced Course in 1953. Upon graduation from this course, he was placed on special assignment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he worked on Coordinating Board (OCB) matters as a consultant on Soviet affairs. In the fall of 1955, Wilson began a three -year assignment with CIA’s clandestine services, serving part of this period as a CIA case officer running a series of clandestine operations against the Soviet Union from a cover office in West Berlin.

His success in obtaining Soviet secrets allegedly led the Soviets to send a false defector on an ultimately unsuccessful assassination mission.

Following completion of the US Army Command and General Staff Course and promotion to lieutenant colonel, Wilson was assigned in June 1959 as Director of Instruction of the US Army Special Warfare School, Fort Bragg, NC. Over the next two years, he gained considerable notoriety for his foundational work on doctrine for small wars, insurgency and counter-insurgency. In June 1961 he was appointed Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, serving in that capacity for the next two years and playing a key staff support role at such critical moments as the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.

Upon graduation from the US Air War College in Spring 1964, LTC Wilson was placed on loan with the State Department and assigned to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) under the terms of the Participating Agency Service Agreement (PASA). In this capacity, he was employed at the temporary rank-equivalent of a class one foreign service officer and posted to Nam as Associate Director for Field Operations, where he was concerned with pacification and nation building efforts by the Americans and South Vietnamese. Some sixteen months later, he was appointed by the US Ambassador to Vietnam as United States Mission Coordinator and Minister-Counselor of the US Embassy in Saigon, receiving in connection with this latter post a presidential appointment to the personal rank of Minister.

Returning to active military duty in the summer of 1967, Wilson, now an Army colonel - his military service had been continued for promotion and retirement purposes during his temporary foreign service appointment, assumed command at Fort Bragg of the 6th Special Forces Group (Airborne), with a mission orientation on the Middle East. He was shifted From this post in 1ate 1969 to the position of Assistant Commandant of the newly-named US Army John F. Kennedy Institute for Military Assistance (formerly the US Army Special Warfare School), where he again worked on doctrinal concepts pertaining to the role and mission of US military advisors - especially in insurgency, counter-insurgency and nation building environments—and played a key role in the establishment of the Military Assistance Officers Program (MAOP), which subsequently was merged with the Army’s Foreign Area Specialist Training Program (FASTP) under the designation Foreign Area Officers Program (FAOP). Upon being selected for promotion to brigadier general in the summer of 1970, he was assigned as Assistant Division Commander for Operations, 82nd Airborne Division

Between 1971 and 1973 Brigadier General Wilson was US Defense Attaché (USDATT) in the US embassy in Moscow, USSR, at the height of the Cold War. He was the first general officer to hold that particular portfolio. (He reportedly was the CIA Chief of Station during that same period.) A former US Marine corporal recalls in an article that Wilson knew each embassy Marine by name and was considered “our general” by the Marine contingent there.

General Wilson’s 1971-73 tour in Moscow was marked by his achievement of marked professional rapport with senior officers of the Soviet military high command. His near-native fluency in Russian, plus the fact that he earlier had majored in Russian and Soviet history—especially military history—and had practically memorized the major battles on the Soviet-German front during the course of World War II, provided a fortuitous entré into Soviet military circles on which he fully capitalized. His insights into Soviet strategic and doctrinal thinking gained thereby were subsequently recognized as critically useful to policy makers and planners of the US national security establishment.

Wilson again returned stateside, and between 1973 and 1976 held positions in the Defense Intelligence Agency as Deputy Director for Estimates and Deputy Director for Attaché Affairs, followed by an assignment in the rank of lieutenant general as Deputy to the Director of Central Intelligence for the Intelligence Community (D/DCI/IC.)

In May 1976, Wilson, now a lieutenant general, was tapped as the new Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and oversaw the agency through "the death of Mao Zedong, aircraft hijackings, unrest in South Africa, and continuing Mideast dissension." link Director Wilson gave a speech to retired intelligence officers in September 1976, which was declassified in 1993 and included the following notable excerpts:

The revelation of true intelligence secrets makes exciting reading in the morning paper. It is soon forgotten by most readers, but not by our adversaries. Enormously complex and expensive technical intelligence collection systems can be countered. Need I remind this particular audience that dedicated and courageous men and women who risk their lives to help America can be exposed and destroyed? I don't think the American people want this to happen especially when our adversaries dedicated to the proposition that we eventually must be defeated-are hard at work. But Americans must understand or they will inadvertently cause this to happen.

ur primary function is to provide the leadership of this nation with the deepest possible understanding of the military, political, social, and economic climate of countries that affect vital American interests. Our mission is to see that our leaders know about what may happen in the world beyond our borders and about the forces and factors at work there. The American taxpayer should know we do this job well, despite our problems.

Wilson is also credited with this statement: "Ninety percent of intelligence comes from open sources. The other ten percent, the clandestine work, is just the more dramatic. The real intelligence hero is Sherlock Holmes, not James Bond."

Responding to the precarious health condition of his wife, Wilson retired on 31 August 1977. On his return he walked back in the late evening from the local National Guard armory to the family farm, retracing his steps over the same seven-mile route he had traversed 37 years earlier to enter military service.