Stuart Arthur Herrington, Col, U.S. Army (Ret.) is an author and retired counterintelligence officer with extensive interrogation experience in three wars (Vietnam, Operation Just Cause, and Operation Desert Storm). Herrington's 2003 audit of interrogation practices by U.S. forces in Iraq, including conditions at the Abu Ghraib prison and other sites, prompted scrutiny of U.S. interrogation efforts in the War in Afghanistan (2001-2021), the Iraq War, and elsewhere. For his experience in the Vietnam War, he was interviewed in Ken Burns's series about the war.
Military and Intelligence Assignments
Vietnam Herrington joined military intelligence in 1967 training at the US Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird and then served in West Berlin for 2 years. He then trained as a military adviser at Fort Bragg and spent 3 months learning Vietnamese at Fort Bliss before deploying to South Vietnam in March 1971 as an intelligence adviser in the Đức Huệ District of Hậu Nghĩa Province on the Cambodian border. In this role he took part in the Phoenix Program identifying and then capturing or killing Vietcong cadres. Herrington later wrote that he saw the waterboarding of a 19-year-old girl, and was shocked into a permanent aversion to torture as an interrogation technique. Herrington then served at the Defense Attache Office in Saigon as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Delegation, Four Party Joint Military Team, which was charged by the terms of the Paris Peace Accords with obtaining information on the dead and missing from the war. At dawn, April 30, 1975, he was one of the last Americans to be evacuated from the roof of the US Embassy during the Fall of Saigon.
German and post Cold-War operations Herrington spent six years during the 1980s in West Germany, culminating with a three-year tour as the Commander of the 766th MI Detachment, Army counterintelligence's unit in West Berlin. During his tenure, the Detachment scored a success against the Soviet KGB when three Soviet officers were detained while meeting with an American soldier they believed was a traitor.(Operation Lake Terrace) Transferring to Ft. Meade, Maryland in 1986, he continued his focus on counterintelligence, commanding three Intelligence & Security Command CI/Human Intelligence units there over a period of eight years. His most significant command challenge was as Director, U.S. Army Foreign Counterintelligence Activity (FCA), between January 1988 and May 1992. During his tenure as Director, FCA, the unit pursued and wrapped up two of the most sensitive and significant espionage cases in post WW II history. In a global counterespionage case, FCA, working with the CIA, the FBI, Germany, and several foreign governments, successfully concluded the Clyde Lee Conrad espionage investigation, which involved the arrests and/or exposing of eleven participants in a spy ring that had been stealing war plans in Europe and selling them to the Czechs and the Hungarians, who provided them to the Soviet Union. Conrad, a retired Army NCO, was arrested in August 1988, and eventually given the first and only life sentence for espionage by the German government. Following the Conrad case, Herrington's FCA team successfully handled another sensitive investigation, resulting in the arrest and conviction of Warrant Officer James Hall, his Turkish courier, and four other co-conspirators, all of them soldiers or former soldiers. During his service as Director, FCA, Herrington twice deployed to hostile contingencies, first in Panama (Just Cause-1989-90) and second to Saudi Arabia (Desert Storm). (1991). During both contingencies, Herrington constituted a team from FCA and other assets, then established and led sophisticated interrogation projects targeting high-value detainees from among the prisoner population. His account of these interrogation operations, which did not employ torture, brutality, or any of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that became famous/infamous during the post-9-11 period, can be found in a major address Herrington delivered in 2009. In June 1992, after giving up command of FCA, Herrington established "Task Force Russia: POW/MIA" at the request of the Chief of Staff, Army, which supported an intensive probe into the fates of unaccounted for personnel from WW II, Korea, Cold War shootdowns, and Vietnam POW/MIA. Initially the TF Director, he became its deputy director when the Army determined that the highly charged nature of the POW/MIA hunt merited the assignment of a general officer as its director. From June 1992 to June 1993, Herrington and his TF Russia team reestablished the DoD's credibility in POW/MIA matters, and cemented cordial and respectful ties with the families of unaccounted for servicemembers.
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