Stuart A. Herrington

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 US forces in Iraq, including conditions at the Abu Ghraib prison and other sites, prompted scrutiny of U.S. interrogation efforts in the Global War on Terror.

Herrington joined military intelligence in 1967 and served in Berlin before deploying to Vietnam in 1971. In Vietnam, Herrington later wrote, 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 Organization 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 Agreement (cease-fire) with obtaining information on the dead and missing from the war. At dawn, April 30, 1975, he was one of the last Americans to helicopter off the roof of the United States Embassy during the Fall of Saigon.

According to Bien Hoa CIA spymaster Orrin DeForrest in his book "Slow Burn: The Rise and Bitter Fall of American Intelligence in Vietnam," Herrington was the one who finally ordered Ambassador Graham Martin's huge tamarind tree cut down as it was preventing large helicopters from landing in the Embassy parking lot to rescue the evacuees. Ambassador Martin had ordered that the tree not be cut down while there was any chance of settlement with the North Vietnamese, though most everyone already knew the situation was hopeless. According to DeForrest, Herrington's Defense Attaché Office had taken over the mechanics of the evacuation operation and Herrington was, ...screaming bloody murder. 'Cut that fuckin' tree down now,' I heard him yelling. 'Cut it down now!'" by 3 PM on April 29, 1975, the tree was finally cut down and heavy helicopters began landing in the parking lot.

Herrington spent six years during the 1980s in 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.

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