Shadow Warrior (22 page)

Heading the US Mission, which encompassed the various bureaucracies—civilian and military—accredited to the Diem government, was Elbridge Durbrow. Colby had come to know Durbrow while serving as Clare Luce's deputy in Rome. Head of the Military Assistance and Advisory Group was General Samuel “Hanging Sam” Williams, a spit-and-polish career officer who jealously guarded the military's prerogatives. He aggressively resisted Durbrow's efforts to put military, political, and economic matters under one umbrella, insisting on communicating directly to Washington through the commander in chief of the US Pacific Command (CINCPAC). The US Agency for International Development (USAID) chief in Saigon upon Colby's arrival was Arthur Gardiner, who was much more perspicacious than many of his colleagues but no less determined to protect and enhance his agency's turf.
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CIA chief of station was Nick Natsios, a veteran operative who had served with the OSS in Italy and the CIA in Greece during that country's civil war. Natsios was a tough-minded individual who evoked fierce loyalty from his team of some forty members. The head of station in Saigon needed to be a strong personality: there was the usual handful of academic types—quiet students of the Orient—on the staff, but the majority were colorful swashbucklers like Conein. They were not only accustomed to danger and adventure, but eager for it. Some had been born and raised in China as members of missionary or business families and had played a role in the communist-nationalist civil war and the subsequent Taiwan Strait crises. Some had been in the Philippines fighting the Huk, while others had participated in the failed 1958 uprising against Sukarno in Indonesia. These were men who were used to living at the edges of civilization and authority; most had been through the coups and countercoups that had wracked Thailand, Laos, and Burma since World War II. They lived in a world of conspiracy and violence, both overt and covert; were equally comfortable dealing with established governments and the Orient's innumerable secret societies; experienced in the ways of the authoritarian regimes so typical of underdeveloped nations; and equally adept at working through military and civilian channels.
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The CIA station in Saigon was not divided, as other stations were, into foreign intelligence and covert action, but rather into “liaison” and “unilateral”
operations. The liaison officers focused on partnering with Vietnamese intelligence and police to gather as much information on communist activities as possible. This involved interviewing refugees from North Vietnam, recruiting double agents, and infiltrating operatives into the north. Given the division of Vietnam after 1954 and America's recognition of the Diem regime as the sole political authority throughout the country, liaison agents required little cover. Not so for the unilateral personnel, whose job it was to cultivate ties with the whole array of political factions working openly or covertly in South Vietnam. This included everything from the Cao Dai and the Binh Xuyen before its demise to the old noncommunist nationalist parties, such as Nguyen Ton Hoan's Dai Viet Quoc Dan Dang (Nationalist Party of Greater Vietnam) and the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang (VNQDD, Vietnamese Nationalist Party). These operatives worked under deep cover as members of MAAG; USAID; private charitable entities, such as the Catholic Relief Organization; or the American business community. They recruited and ran Vietnamese agents from the organizations they were assigned to keep tabs on. They did not necessarily share their contacts or the information they gathered with the Vietnamese government.
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Diem and Nhu's attitude toward the growing American presence in Vietnam was, not surprisingly, ambivalent. They needed US guns and money; they were not sure they needed American advice, but that seemed to come with the territory. The Ngo brothers were authentic nationalists fully aware that their own positions depended on their ability to ensure that the Americans remained in a subordinate position. To this end, Diem pursued the divide-and-conquer approach that the Chinese and French had used so effectively against Vietnam. The brothers dealt with Ambassador Durbrow and General Williams formally, while behind the scenes they nurtured ties with as many American bureaucracies and nongovernmental organizations as possible, seeking their guidance and playing up to their host organizations back in Washington. At the same time, Diem maintained contact with Francis Cardinal Spellman, Senator Mike Mansfield, the Kennedy brothers, and other powerful individuals who had befriended him during his stay in the United States. “Diem's style,” Colby observed, “was that of the traditional mandarin, assuming the legitimacy of his position to be beyond challenge and manipulating the currents of the distant imperial court (now in Washington) to ensure the continued support necessary to his mission.”
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Because Diem and Nhu perceived the
CIA to be above both politics and the law in the United States, and because they knew the Agency had probably penetrated every faction, sect, and secret society in Vietnam, the Ngo brothers singled it out for special attention.

During the summer of Colby's first year in Vietnam, 1959, Chief of Station Natsios returned to the United States for his annual leave. In his absence the deputy chief of station began a series of weekly meetings with Ngo Dinh Nhu that would continue for nearly three years. To many Vietnamese and French, Nhu was Vietnam's Rasputin. From 1954, the year of Diem's return, until his fall in 1963, Nhu held the position of counselor to the president, but he was clearly the second most powerful figure in South Vietnam—some said the most powerful. He personally controlled not only the Can Lao (the government's party apparatus), but also the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) Special Forces, which existed not to combat a communist insurgency directly but to act as a palace guard and supply political muscle for the House of Ngo. Nhu was as corrupt as Diem was uncorrupt. A lifelong opium user, the counselor to the president used his connections with international drug-smuggling rings to enrich himself and his extended family.

Colby knew all of this, but it was his duty, as he perceived it, to take what was available and do the best he could with it. Just before leaving for his vacation, Natsios had escorted his second to Independence Palace to meet Nhu. They entered through the back gate, turned left to the West Wing, and went upstairs to the small office inhabited by the presidential counselor. Following a short wait, Nhu entered. “He was . . . thinner than his brother, delicately handsome, informally clad in a white sport shirt, and very soft-spoken, giving the impression of being extremely shy,” Colby recalled of that first encounter.
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The meeting, conducted in French, stretched over some four hours and covered a variety of subjects. At this and subsequent conferences, Colby quickly learned that the Ngo brothers did business in a most un-Western way. The American came prepared with a list of topics, talking points, and options. Nhu would listen quietly and then break in, discoursing at length on a subject of interest to him—the travails of the House of Ngo before Dien Bien Phu, the evils committed by the French-trained bureaucracy that still remained in place, the machinations of the French themselves, the irrelevancy of the noncommunist political critics of the government, and the relevancy of Mounier's philosophy of
personalism, not only to Catholics but to all Vietnamese. Nhu smoked constantly, and servants moved in and out serving tea and emptying ashtrays. Diem's brother struck Colby one minute as a man of the Enlightenment—his reasoning precise, rife with Cartesian logic—and the next as a mystic, with every argument and scheme cast in spiritual terms. Nhu expressed his devotion to Diem but confided to Colby that his brother was somewhat naïve. Vietnamese leaders could no longer command respect simply by virtue of the position they held. Nhu observed that the president thought of modernity only in technical, concrete terms—highways, schools, bridges, hospitals—assuming that if these were provided, the people would follow. In this he was mistaken, Nhu said. To Colby's great satisfaction, Nhu seemed to appreciate the need for a political base, particularly in the countryside.

Desperately, Colby searched for common ground with the Saigon regime. He sensed that Nhu was the key. During his less frequent meetings with Diem, which also lasted at least four hours, there were no discussions of political models and theories, but rather an endless monologue, in which the president expounded with great enthusiasm and even greater detail on his infrastructure programs. There was his Agroville Program in the delta, where, typically, the population lived dispersed and isolated, scattered along the banks of the endless network of canals. In this project, peasants would be clustered in communities large enough to support schools, hospitals, and proper marketplaces. There were new cash crops to raise the living standards of the peasants; light industries, such as textiles, for the cities; and a national Institute of Administration to train bureaucrats and free the country of the Francophile bureaucrats who then ran it. All fine and good, thought Colby and Nhu, but the people were not a formless mass waiting to be shaped. The government swam in a sea of sects, secret societies, political factions, and ethnic groups that were ambitious, more or less organized, and sometimes armed. And, of course, there were the communists.

“I sympathized with Nhu's insistence that Vietnam needed to discover and develop a new political identity around which its people could rally if the competing Communist appeal for change and for nationalism was to be defeated,” Colby later wrote. But what identity? That was the rub. Like the pope, the Ngos wanted to be both loved and obeyed, but if they could not have love, they were certainly going to have obedience. The difference between the pope and the Ngos, who claimed to be acting in his name,
was that the former resorted to excommunication to compel conformity, whereas the latter were willing to use imprisonment, torture, and execution. Colby decided that for the time being, that was going to have to do. “The task in South Vietnam required strong leadership,” he wrote, “and Diem's messianic dedication seemed more appropriate for it than did the confusion and indecision that could come from overly precise application of the American doctrine of the separation of powers.”
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From the very beginning of his tour in Vietnam, Colby faced the quintessential Cold War dilemma. In the war against the forces of international communism, what were acceptable levels of tyranny and corruption? Would his and the Agency's tolerance exceed that of the American public? In this regard, was it the CIA's duty to lead or to follow? Should it advise, or merely inform the political powers that were?

As with any imperial government, there was a court. Chief among the courtesans was Nguyen Dinh Thuan, secretary of state for the presidency, and Tran Kim Tuyen, chief of the Service d'Etudes Politiques et Sociales (SEPES, Bureau of Political and Social Research), the government's intelligence and security service. Thuan oversaw the vast bureaucracy upon which the Ngo brothers depended to rule. He was also the principal interpreter of the regime to the American mission. Soft-spoken and fluent in English, he listened far more than he talked. US officials like Colby could sound out an idea with Nhu and Diem through Thuan before formally broaching it. Tuyen, who occupied the French governor general's servants' quarters, was a tiny man, less than five feet tall and tipping the scales at a hundred pounds. “He projected the quiet and shy air of the Confucian scholar,” Colby wrote, “the long and carefully tended nail on the little finger of his left hand certifying his status,” an affectation left over from the Chinese tradition intended to signify freedom from physical labor. Tuyen's manner and stature, of course, belied a ruthlessness and cruelty that were the necessary qualifications for his job.
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In July 1959, less than six months after the Colbys' arrival in Vietnam, the first American military casualties occurred when two servicemen died in a communist attack on a MAAG billet outside Bien Hoa. The US Mission was alarmed but did not know what to make of the incident. The level of violence in the countryside was low, and as late as 1958, Hanoi had once again made overtures to the Diem regime about holding nationwide
elections. Saigon had rejected that initiative and scheduled parliamentary elections for the south on August 30, 1959. Still, Ho Chi Minh and the Politburo clung to hopes for a political settlement: communist cadres in the south received instructions to have their supporters vote for left-leaning candidates as a step toward influencing political life, at least indirectly. Privy to this information, Nhu and the Can Lao rigged the elections so that the government won 121 out of the 123 contested seats. Not satisfied, the Saigon government indicted the two non–Can Lao candidates on fraud charges and refused to seat them. On August 31, Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk, whom Saigon viewed as a communist dupe, barely survived an assassination attempt by Nhu's agents. On Nhu's orders, two suitcases had been delivered to Sihanouk's palace, one addressed to the prince and the other to his chief of protocol, Prince Vakrivan. Sihanouk's was filled with explosives, and Vakrivan's was not, but, following protocol, the latter opened both suitcases and was blown to bits. A shaken Sihanouk issued a communiqué blaming the Ngo brothers and the CIA. There was no hope of a political solution, Hanoi concluded, and in early 1960 it began work on what would become the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
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Undeterred by this gathering storm, the Colbys set about exploring their environs. Vietnam, according to a local saying, resembled two rice baskets hanging from the ends of a farmer's carrying pole. Stretching more than 1,000 miles from north to south, the country was 400 miles across at its widest in the north and less than 35 miles across in the center, the pole between the baskets. The northwest was mountainous, forested, and thinly populated; the northeast, featuring the Red River Delta, was heavily populated and included the twin cities of Hanoi and Hai Phong. Along the western flank of the country, from the northern highlands to just north of Saigon, ran the Annamite Range, the site of the Central Highlands and home to many of the country's forty-three ethnic minorities. Between the mountains and the sea ran a strip of incredibly fertile, densely populated land that produced, along with the Mekong Delta to the south, much of the nation's food staple—rice. The southern basket on the pole, with Saigon as its gateway, was the vast Mekong Delta, featuring thousands of miles of mangrove swamps, which had largely been reclaimed and turned into rice paddies. Villages were widely dispersed, running along the canals that provided irrigation and transportation. To the interior toward the Cambodian border lay the dense and mysterious U-Minh Forest.