Shadow Warrior (20 page)

B
ecause of his experiences in China and his passing familiarity with the language, Bill Colby had assumed that the OSS would assign him to the Far East. Instead he had gone to France and then Norway. As he readily admitted, he had been fascinated with Asia ever since his romantic sojourn in Tientsin as a child. In 1956, while he was still in Italy, CIA headquarters had offered him Edward Lansdale's just-vacated post in the Philippines, but Colby opted to remain in Rome through the 1958 elections. In his subsequent application for transfer, he specified Asia, and the request was duly passed on to Desmond FitzGerald, who headed the Far East Division of the Directorate of Plans.

As a young army officer during World War II, FitzGerald had served in Burma and then in China as liaison officer to the Chinese Nationalist Sixth Army. After joining the CIA in 1950, he served successively in Korea and Japan, where he supervised espionage and sabotage activities directed against China. He had also been posted to the Philippines for a time, working the political action desk of the Manila station. Colby's application immediately caught his attention. By this point, the former Jedburgh had credentialed himself in the fields of both covert political action and paramilitary operations. There were the intangibles as well. FitzGerald, whose first military assignment had been command of an African American company, noted Elbridge's service with the 24th Infantry Division with satisfaction. Finally, FitzGerald and Colby had had a passing acquaintance after the war when their respective law firms shared the same building. There were two spots open, one in Malaya, where the British were fighting off a communist-led insurgency among the ethnic Chinese, and the other in
South Vietnam, where President Ngo Dinh Diem was gearing up for a campaign against a Viet Minh rebellion still in its infancy. Colby's fluency in French was the deciding factor. Vietnam it was to be, as deputy chief of station. “And so it was,” Colby observed in his memoir, “that I began more than a decade and a half of intense involvement in what was to be one of the most traumatic and tragic experiences in modern American history, the Vietnam War.”
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From the last quarter of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of World War II, Vietnam had been part of French Indochina, a tightly controlled colonial federation. The French had ruled Vietnam with an iron hand, exploiting it economically and crushing any sign of indigenous opposition. In 1940 and 1941, Japan, with the aid of its ally Germany, forced the French to cede control of the area, and from 1941 to 1945 Vietnam was a Japanese protectorate with the French still nominally in power. In 1941, Ho Chi Minh, a cofounder of both the French and Vietnamese communist parties, established the Viet Minh, a communist-led but broadly based insurgent movement whose goal was to rid Vietnam of foreign control, whether Japanese or French. At first, American operatives in the China-Burma-India theater supported Ho and the Viet Minh and opposed French reinfiltration. But with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's death, the onset of the Cold War, and the perceived need to shore up metropolitan France as a bastion against Soviet aggression, the United States decided to tacitly aid France's efforts to regain control of its lost colony.

In 1945, from Hanoi in the north of Vietnam, Ho and his colleagues in the Viet Minh proclaimed the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). The following year, France and the Viet Minh went to war in a conflict that would last eight bloody years. In 1950, in order to dispel notions that it was fighting a purely colonial war, Paris recognized the State of Vietnam as an autonomous state within the French Union and brought deposed emperor Bao Dai out of exile to rule the new entity. Despite massive amounts of US aid—military and nonmilitary—France gradually wilted in the face of a war, both conventional and guerrilla, waged by the Viet Minh's commanding general, Vo Nguyen Giap. In 1954, following the disastrous French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, France, the People's Republic of China, Laos, Cambodia, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam signed the Geneva Accords, dividing
Vietnam temporarily at the seventeenth parallel, with the Viet Minh compelled to withdraw to the north and the French and their Vietnamese allies to the south. National elections for a government to rule a unified Vietnam were scheduled for 1956.

John Foster Dulles and the Republican Party viewed the Geneva Accords as something of a sellout, however, and the Eisenhower administration set its face against the reunification provisions of the agreements. From 1954 until 1961, Eisenhower and Dulles labored tirelessly to build a viable noncommunist republic south of the seventeenth parallel. One of the principal instruments they wielded in this task was the CIA.

There were in Saigon in the summer of 1954 not one but two CIA stations. The first was to gather intelligence and establish a liaison with the government of South Vietnam as soon as it was established. The other, called the Saigon Military Mission (SMM), was headed by Colonel Edward Lansdale, who had helped put down the communist-led Hukbalahap insurrection in the Philippines. Lansdale, quite simply, was DCI Allen Dulles's man in Vietnam, reporting only to him and operating with complete autonomy. In June 1954, when ordering Lansdale to Saigon, Dulles had instructed him to “find another Magsaysay,” that is, a charismatic leader capable of building a viable economic and political system and rallying noncommunist nationalists. The “Quiet American,” to use the title of Graham Greene's fictionalized account, believed he had found such a figure in Ngo Dinh Diem, the newly named prime minister of South Vietnam.
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When France granted unconditional recognition to Bao Dai's government in June, the former emperor had turned to Diem, who had a long history as a nationalist but anticommunist figure in Vietnam, as the natural choice to run his government. Diem, who would dominate South Vietnamese political life for nearly a decade, was part mandarin, part monk. He was a devout Catholic, remaining celibate throughout his adult life, and a Confucian, agreeing with its emphasis on hierarchy, respect for authority, and noblesse oblige paternalism. Diem was honest, patriotic, and sincere, but he was no democrat and had absolutely no patience with the give-and-take of Western-style politics. He and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, who would serve as presidential counselor and later minister of the interior, embraced “personalism,” a philosophy espoused by an obscure twentieth-century French Catholic intellectual, Emmanuel Mounier.
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Personalism
placed equal emphasis on the value of the individual and the duty of each citizen to make sacrifices for the community. Diem and Nhu saw in it a means to reconcile the modernist, Western notion of individualism with Vietnam's Confucian traditions.

Diem, who would oust the playboy-emperor Bao Dai in 1955 to become president of a newly created republic, faced a host of problems during his first two years in office. The colonial economy was in shambles; the bureaucracy was filled with sycophants who had catered alternately to the French and the Japanese; and the large French community lurked in the background, waiting to pick up the pieces if Diem and the Americans faltered.

Within days of his arrival in Saigon, Ed Lansdale had obtained an interview with Diem, and in the weeks that followed, he positioned himself as the prime minister's adviser and confidant. The quiet American had two things to offer: the first was an insurgency in the north intended to keep Ho and the Viet Minh off balance, and the second was a constituency that could serve as the beginning of a political base in the south. Within weeks, Lansdale had assembled a colorful team of operatives. The SMM was supposedly part of the Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG), which had been put in place in 1950 by the Truman administration to help build a viable South Vietnamese Army, but Lansdale and company, clad in khaki shorts, knee-length socks, and pith helmets, operated completely independently.

Perhaps the most conspicuous member of Lansdale's lot was a prototypical knuckle-dragger named Lucien Conein. Born in Paris in 1919, Conein had been raised by an aunt in Kansas after his father, a French Army veteran, died. In 1941, he enlisted in the US Army and graduated from Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning two years later. Like Colby, he and the OSS seemed made for each other. The two men first crossed paths at Area F, the Congressional Country Club, where Conein was an instructor. He made the trip with Colby and the other OSS operatives to the United Kingdom and then served as an instructor at Milton Hall from January to May 1944. In August of that year, Conein parachuted into occupied France just ahead of Operation Anvil. He and Colby subsequently spent time together in London haunting its many nightclubs and bordellos. In March 1945, Conein was transferred to the Pacific. There he joined up with a group of Vichy French who had escaped the Japanese; from their base in China, these irregulars waged guerrilla warfare against Japanese positions
in Vietnam. After V-J Day, Conein was sent back to Europe to work with the OSS and its subsequent iterations, running saboteurs and spies into Eastern Europe from West Germany. During his stints in France and in Germany, Conein established strong links with the Corsican Brotherhood, an underworld organization allied first with the anti-Nazi resistance and then employed as contract workers for the Western intelligence services in their struggle with the NKVD. Joining the CIA shortly after its formation, Conein was a natural for Lansdale's team.
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Lansdale and his cohorts were instrumental in helping the Diem regime survive its first great crisis, the so-called sect wars of 1955. The Vietnamese Army that the French had left behind was little more than a shell, more a police force than a conventional fighting force. In the countryside, the government had to compete with two religious sects, the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, which had been nurtured by the Japanese. The Cao Dai sought to combine the best of the religious and secular worlds. Its adherents worshipped a pantheon of figures that included Jesus, Buddha, Victor Hugo, Joan of Arc, and SunYat-sen (the founder of the Chinese Nationalist Party) at colorful rococo temples and a giant cathedral at Tay Ninh, north of Saigon. By 1954, the sect could count more than 2 million adherents and boasted a paramilitary force of 20,000. The Hoa Hao, named for a village in the Mekong Delta, emerged by the eve of World War II as a sort of reform Buddhism whose driving force was a faith healer named Huynh Phu So. The Hoa Hao appealed particularly to the tens of thousands of Cambodians who lived in the western delta. By 1954, it could claim a membership of some 1 million and an army estimated at 15,000. Finally, there was the Binh Xuyen, a Vietnamese mafia operating prostitution rings, opium dens, protection rackets, and a black market in and around Saigon. A large portion of the metropolitan police was in the pay of this group.

The Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, and Binh Xuyen each demanded virtual autonomy in its zone of operation. Utilizing Lansdale and his deputy, Rufus Phillips, Diem negotiated with the first two, but he refused to have anything to do with the Xuyen. In the fall of 1955, the three sects banded together; in and around Saigon, fighting erupted between their paramilitary forces and government troops. With the fate of the House of Ngo hanging in the balance, Lansdale and Phillips journeyed deep into the forests near the Cambodian border to make contact with the Cao Dai leaders at their hideout on Black Lady Mountain. The Americans succeeded in bribing
them with cash and promises of high office. With the Cao Dai now fighting by their side, government troops routed the Binh Xuyen; the Hoa Hao withdrew to its delta strongholds and subsequently negotiated its own deal with the government in Saigon. Diem's victory in the sect wars was key: whatever opposition there was to him in Washington melted away, and from 1955 onward, the Eisenhower administration proved an unflagging ally.
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Lansdale himself did not survive the events of 1955–1956. Washington's envoy to Saigon, J. Lawton Collins, a World War II general and chum of General Paul Ely, head of the French military mission, detested the quiet American and distrusted the Ngo brothers. Indeed, he had been in Washington pressing for the withdrawal of US support for Diem when the sect wars erupted. In addition, the regular CIA mission in Saigon had deluged headquarters with a steady stream of complaints about its rogue rival. Diem, having read too many reports in the American press of Lansdale's influence over his government, had himself tired of the American. Whatever the cause, by the end of 1956 Ed Lansdale and the SMM were gone, and all CIA functions in South Vietnam were being carried out by the regular station.

Despite his recall, Lansdale's name would become synonymous with pacification and counterinsurgency in Vietnam. As with the Filipinos, he told a colleague, his objective with the Vietnamese was to help them achieve the goals they set for themselves. But he was convinced that communism was not one of those goals, that any people with the freedom to choose would reject totalitarianism and embrace democracy. During his first two years in Vietnam, Lansdale had worked tirelessly to convince the Diem regime that the key to securing the countryside, to filling the political and military vacuum there before the Viet Minh did, was to win the hearts and minds of the peasantry. He made little headway. Diem perceived the primary threat to his country to be the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and insisted that his military should concentrate on preparing to meet an invasion. Nhu's secret police could deal with any insurgency in the south. Diem did not say so, but he believed it was demeaning for a ruler to ask for support from his subjects.
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From 1955 to 1961, the United States poured more than $1.4 billion into South Vietnam; by the end of that period there were 1,500 American civilians and just under 700 uniformed personnel advising the South Vietnamese government. In 1956, Diem and Nhu launched their Anti-Communist Denunciation
Campaign, which was designed to root out the 10,000 to 15,000 cadres the Viet Minh had left behind as they departed for the north. In June of that year, Diem sought to tighten his control over the peasantry by replacing locally elected village councils with committees appointed by his province and district chiefs. Soon, local authorities were focusing almost exclusively on rooting out and jailing subversives in their respective communities. Efforts to organize the peasantry politically and win them over through health, education, and economic development programs went by the boards. The result of the denunciation campaign, according to Chester Cooper, another Agency expert on Vietnam, was “innumerable crimes and absolutely senseless acts of suppression against both real and suspected Communists and sympathizing villagers. . . . Efficiency took the form of brutality and a total disregard for the difference between determined foes and potential friends.”
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