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Fake Vampires, Wailing Ghosts, and Other Fascinating Psy-Ops and Military Deceptions

Khalid Elhassan January 29, 2020 33 min

North Vietnam - Viet Cong Fighter — Viet Cong. Wikimedia

9. Operation Popeye

Operation Popeye. Ripley’s Believe it or Not

To discourage anti-Diem protests, the CIA and the US military cooked up a plan to seed clouds and make them, literally, rain on the parades of anti-Diem protestors. Doing so, it was hoped, would dampen turnout and disperse the crowds. That did not save Diem, who was overthrown and assassinated in 1963, but cloud seeding survived to be used as a tactic in the Vietnam War.

Codenamed Operation Popeye, modified cargo planes began flying over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1967, releasing silver and lead iodide flares. The goal was to increase the monsoon period’s rainfall, and thus negatively impact the routes used to supply and reinforce communist forces in South Vietnam. By the time Operation Popeye was terminated in 1972, over 2600 missions had been flown, during which roughly 47,000 cloud seeding charges were dropped. Their impact on the Ho Chi Minh trail and communist supplies and reinforcements were next to nil.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.