Access to Lima Site 85 required strict authorization. Only a limited number of American men were stationed there at any given time. The men directly under Col. Clayton's command, working under the code name Commando Club, were under orders not to mingle with others at the site any more than absolutely necessary. They were officially civilians and their cover story could be endangered if they happened to be recognized at military locations, such as Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base or NKP, Thailand. During their assignments at Phou Pha Thi, the Laotian name for the mountain, his men stayed away from most of the others stationed there. The radar bombing equipment manned by Col. Clayton's men was situated at the peak of the mountain, a difficult climb of several hundred yards from a narrow landing strip below.
This small landing strip, carved onto a ridge slightly south of the radar site, was used primarily by helicopters, and a few brave Air America pilots, to drop supplies when weather permitted. Near this landing strip were the buildings that housed the others stationed at the site, including the "CAS" men. CAS, or “Controlled American Source”, was the term for the CIA in Laos, though often they were simply called “the customer”. The CAS men were there to run road watch teams, gather intelligence, and maintain a refueling stop for Air America helicopters. The Combat Controller’s station was also located near the end of this landing strip. The combat controllers generally carried out their mission from a vantage point near the edge of the cliffs, a spot overlooking an older Air America landing strip far below at the base of the mountain.
This older Air America landing strip led me to consider another slight possibility. In his message posted on the History Channel web site Doty had said that he had been at LS-85 from January 28th to February 19th, 1968. While the designation “LS-85” commonly referred to the entire operation on the mountaintop, technically it was the Air America designation for the original longer landing strip at the base of the mountain. If Doty had "spent some time at Lima Site 85", as he claimed, perhaps he was only referring to this older Air America landing strip. His claim would be literally accurate, but this seems an improbable distinction.
If a special assignment had taken Doty to LS-85, would anyone there have known him by his real name? One thing was made very clear to me—in Laos no one was intended to be easily identifiable. As a case in point, in Roger Warner’s book about the clandestine war, Shooting At The Moon, he describes Col. Clayton’s first meeting with the air attaché in Laos. The meeting took place in a soundproof chamber at the U.S. embassy, where:
…the visitor, whose name was Gerald Clayton, explained that he was in charge of Commando Club and that until recently he had been a lieutenant colonel in the Strategic Air Command. He was a civilian now, with an ID card from Lockheed Aircraft Services to prove it. When he went back across the river to Udorn, where he would live, however, he would change back into uniform again, as the commander of a radar evaluation detachment that had no official existence. The air attaché, who was used to double and triple layers of identity in Wonderland, listened politely and then took the colonel downstairs to meet Ambassador Sullivan.
If Doty had been to LS-85 as part of a special mission, one about which Col. Clayton did not have a need to know, then perhaps Doty also had a double-layered identity. His presence would certainly have been known to the CIA men and others located near the landing strip, but while there is plenty of evidence of these other men and others readily recall them, no one seems to recall Richard Doty. He claimed to have been a Combat Controller, but between late January and mid-February 1968, the only Combat Controller assigned at LS-85 was an experienced controller named James Gary, who preceded Roger Huffman. Combat controllers, often part of a Special Forces unit, were trained air traffic controllers serving on the ground, sometimes having to parachute into hostile territory. At LS-85 they called in air strikes over the surrounding region, and there appears to have been no requirement for more than one combat controller to be there at any given time. I also found no indication that Gary had ever been called away and a substitute needed for a few weeks.
At one time, on the now defunct Yahoo Geocities “Death On Call” member site (dedicated to Air Control personnel,) a note Doty had posted there stated that he had been an “AF Combat Controller, Jan 1974 to Oct 1980.” If he served two tours of duty in Laos, as stated in his History Channel web site message, then perhaps this claim referred to having been a Combat Controller only on his second tour. Nevertheless, despite these claims, I have been unable to find any independent evidence that he was ever a Combat Controller. Likewise, despite a strong sense that there was some truth to his claims of having been in Laos in early 1968, at this point I had nothing that actually proved he had ever been there and I had yet to find a witness who knew him or had seen him there.
While searching for information relating to the LS-85 incident I came across a Yahoo group where the members had been discussing the site and the attack. One of the messages happened to list several email addresses, and one them I recognized as belonging to Richard Doty. More significantly however, was an email address that appeared to belong to Roger Huffman, the Combat Controller Doty claimed he had spoken with in May of 1968. There were actually two addresses that appeared to be Huffman’s, and I quickly asked Col. Clayton about them. He confirmed that they were addresses he also had for Huffman, but, then he offered a word of caution if should I decide to write to them, “Be forwarned that this also may be Doty.”
I had hoped to stay under the radar as much as possible, but by this time there was no way to know who might have heard that I was asking questions. Even if I did reach Huffman, if he and Doty had both been Combat Controllers and still knew each other then I had to accept that any question I addressed to Huffman might be quickly relayed to Doty. I had little choice though. With Col. Clayton’s words in mind, I wrote to both email addresses supposedly belonging to Roger Huffman. The first came back as no longer valid but, a few days later, I had an answer from the second.
In the reply, Roger Huffman, or the person I hoped was Huffman, wrote briefly about his memory of the incident at LS-85. But I noticed that he had not actually answered any of the questions I asked about Doty, which struck me as odd since those questions were my whole reason for writing. However, after the next two emails, and after forwarding to him a copy of Doty’s message from the History Channel web site, I finally had what seemed to be all the verification I could have hoped for. He stated very plainly that he knew Doty well and that they had both been Combat Controllers in Laos. More important to me was his statement that “after checking with our history guys” he had learned that Doty had, in fact, been at the LS-85 site for some type of operation. Curiously though, he said it had only been for a few days at the beginning of February, not the almost three week period that Doty had given. To cap it off, he also claimed to not only have seen Doty at NKP, Thailand, but also at Phan Rang, Vietnam, though he could not recall the exact dates. However, in his second email he also brought up the attack on Site 5, the third location that Doty had mentioned in his message on the History Channel web site. For Huffman to bring up this incident on his own struck me as very interesting, if not strange—I had certainly never mentioned Site 5.
Now, finally, I seemed to have eyewitness testimony that Doty had indeed been in Laos. This would also mean that if Doty had been in the Air Force at that time, his military service records, as released by the National Personnel Records Center, had been intentionally adjusted to hide this fact. And yet, even as I was enjoying this apparent breakthrough, the fact that Huffman volunteered information about the Site 5 attack without being asked, continued to bother me. I had already done several online searches and found nothing at all about a “Site 5” in Laos. So for Huffman to casually insert it into our conversation brought back Col. Clayton’s words of caution. It also brought to mind another peculiarity I had noticed when I first saw the Huffman email address. The username was very straightforward, but the letters “nm” had been added at the end. Whatever
purpose there was for those two letters, one thought kept coming to mind...New Mexico.
I wrote a few more messages to Huffman using the same email address, though most of our exchange had little of significance as far as Doty was concerned. Eventually, I asked Huffman where he was living, hoping that there was a chance we could meet some day (though I was also growing more curious about the letters “nm”.) After several days with no reply, I began to wonder if asking him where he lived had posed a problem, so I decided to see if I could determine where his emails were originating from. What I found convinced me beyond any doubt that I had been in communication with someone impersonating Roger Huffman.
As I am certain many people know, each email contains what is called the email “header.” The “header”, which is separate from the message body, shows the Internet route the message travels on its way to the recipient. When an email is sent, it may be received and transferred by a number of email servers along the way, each of which places its Internet Protocol (IP) address and a date/time stamp in the email “header”. By examining these IP addresses, it is often possible to trace where each IP address is in use geographically, and ultimately, where the email originated. In most cases the locations can be traced fairly accurately, and, in this case, the locations immediately raised my suspicions.
The first email I received from Huffman appeared to originate in New York, which was certainly not what I expected. Col. Clayton had told me that he thought Huffman might be living somewhere in Florida, though it was possible that Col. Clayton was mistaken. Also, having some experience with Internet services, I thought it was unusual that the email originated from a static IP address. Without going into too much detail, while it is possible to pay for a permanently assigned (static) IP address, it is far more common in these days of cable and DSL Internet services for the average user not to have one. Internet service providers typically own a block of IP addresses and allocate these dynamically to their customers, so a static address for an individual is somewhat unusual. Checking on the originating IP address in Huffman’s first email turned up another bit of strangeness.
That IP address, controlled by a company in New York, was actually assigned to the domain myprivacytools.com. They are a company that sells a software program called "Hide My IP", which routes connections through anonymous proxy servers to hide where a computer is actually connecting from. I thought it was very strange that Roger Huffman would go to the extreme of hiding his location when sending me a message. It was on checking the second email received from him that my suspicions grew even more. The location from which the second email had originated, traced directly to Qwest Communications, an Albuquerque, NM area Internet Service Provider. In fact, the IP address traced outside of Albuquerque to a location in the small town of Milan, New Mexico. A check with Qwest Communications verified that the IP address in question was one of their IP addresses, though they would not say more than that. This same Qwest Communications IP address range soon echoed in another strange way.
In 2005 and 2006 a peculiar scenario began to evolve concerning a mysterious Project Serpo. The details of the project are unimportant here, but what is significant is that Richard Doty was apparently caught using deceptive email accounts to add support for the existence of this previously unknown project. As enthusiasts interested in this subject began to exchange emails and look for evidence that the project was genuine, other email messages began to appear from mysterious individuals who seemed to add support for the project and to bolster each others’ stories. Fortunately, a few clever souls at www.realityuncovered.com became suspicious of these email messages and the way they seemed to fit together a bit too nicely. As I had just recently done, they also decided to check the email headers to see what they could find.
What they discovered was that while the suspect messages appeared to have come from three or four different email accounts, each with different usernames, they had, in fact, all come from the same block of IP addresses as Richard Doty’s emails. In on instance, email from three different accounts, one of which was Doty’s, was shown to have originated from one specific IP address. With that, these researchers had to conclude that Doty himself had been writing all these messages using email accounts registered under fictitious names. A clamor arose as supporters of Doty and the Serpo story tried to downplay this evidence. Doty denied his involvement, and various attempts by others to explain away the IP address issue strained credulity. In the end, the sheer number of emails coming from IP addresses that traced back to Richard Doty left most informed readers wary of the entire Serpo debacle. From my point of view, it showed a prior history of Doty creating email accounts with fictitious names to serve his purpose. It certainly set a precedent for my suspicions about the Huffman emails I was receiving.
When it became apparent that Huffman was not going to answer my question about where he was living, I wrote another more general email to which he did respond. In my reply I asked if I could call him on the telephone to talk about a few things that I preferred not to put into an email. He wrote back, but asked for my telephone number, saying he would call me when he got the chance. Strangely though, before I even had a chance to answer, another email came in, this one saying simply, “Send me your number.” A quick check revealed that the first message originated from the Milan, NM area, but the second appeared to have come once again from New York. I wrote him and sent my telephone number, but I asked politely if he would tell me his area code so that I would know to pick up the call when it came through on Caller-ID. Not surprisingly, I have never received an email reply or a call.
It made no sense that the real Roger Huffman would act so strangely when I was simply trying to verify what someone else had said about him. But not wanting to give even a hint of his location was too suspicious to ignore. When enough time had passed to accept that whoever was using that email address was not going to write back, I decided enough was enough. I followed-up with a lengthy and very direct email in which I laid out my concerns and asked if he would care to offer any kind of explanation. I detailed the evidence of his emails apparently originating from both New York and Milan, New Mexico, pointing that the New Mexico location was exactly where Doty was writing from. I included the fact that when I had asked merely to know where he lived—or even just his area code—he refused to provide any information whatsoever. I told him I had expected that, assuming he did know Doty, he might inform Doty of my questions. However, the fact that he only related the same basic details Doty had previously given, and his emails had come from virtually the same zipcode area as Doty’s, made me wonder with whom I was actually corresponding. I plainly stated I was now suspicious that I was not corresponding with Huffman at all and that I felt there were good reasons to suspect I was actually corresponding with Richard Doty.
By this time, it was my opinion that the email address I had located and used was certainly a fraud aimed at anyone who might see it and use it to write to Huffman. More importantly, I had reason to wonder whether the real Roger Huffman was involved at all! I ended my email expressing my opinion that, even if Roger Huffman was involved, at best there was collusion going on to ensure I got only the information they wanted me to have. I wrote that I hoped my suspicions were unfounded, but that all these issues made me question the truth of anything I had been told.
Needless to say, I never received a reply. Did the evidence implicate Richard Doty in an attempt to impersonate a fellow veteran? Was Roger Huffman, assuming he was writing the emails I received, willing to vouch for Doty’s claims even if it was all a lie? Would someone who had served honorably at the LS-85 and who knew others who had given their lives there allow anyone to usurp a bit of glory by perpetuating a lie? Or was there more to the story? With no evidence that the real Roger Huffman even saw my emails, based on what I had found, I have to believe it was all Richard Doty.
In a final bit of adding insult-to-injury, I forwarded to Col. Clayton a copy of Huffman’s email in which he had verified t
hat Doty had been to LS-85 in early 1968. Col. Clayton then wrote to Huffman, using the same email address, and referred directly to the message that Huffman had sent to me. Col. Clayton then sent me a copy of Huffman’s reply. Huffman, or whoever it was, totally denied he had said any such thing and countered that, after all, Doty had not even joined the Air Force until later that year! To top it all off, he told Col. Clayton that he had never even heard of me. It was an interesting response for someone who should have had nothing to hide.
I can only speculate as to why email messages that appeared to have been sent by Roger Huffman would alternate between originating in the New York City area and a location in what seemed to be Milan, New Mexico. The majority of the email messages I received from Doty and Huffman came by way of a Qwest Communications IP address range suspiciously similar to one Richard Doty’s emails have originated from in the past, with most appearing to have originated at a home or office computer in the vicinity of Milan, New Mexico. To make the issue even more specific, several recent emails sent by Richard Doty to both Col. Clayton and another person I have worked with came from the exact IP address that Huffman’s email originated from. Why the real Roger Huffman would be writing from a small town in western New Mexico (or using an anonymous proxy) and feel the need to be evasive about where he lived was odd to say the least. On the other hand, it is fairly common knowledge that Richard Doty now works for the New Mexico State Police and, according to the state police web site, he is a Sergeant in the District 6 substation covering Grants and Milan, NM.72
In 2007, when I first wrote to Col. Clayton and told him what I was looking into, I was very surprised to learn that he already knew Richard Doty. I admit to being very suspicious when he said that he had known Doty for years, because I could not imagine how they could have known each other if it were not tied somehow to LS-85. It was obvious that Col. Clayton knew Doty—the right Richard Doty—but it was how the two of them had come to know each other in the first place that made Doty’s interest in Lima Site 85 even more compelling to me. The explanation began with Col. Clayton asking me if I had ever heard the name Richard Metzger.
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