Shadow Warrior (26 page)

Upon his arrival in Saigon, Colby had been struck by the absence of any political or paramilitary initiative on the part of the US Mission. “I had come to Vietnam from Italy,” he later recalled, “where, apart from our cooperation with the Italian intelligence services, the CIA had conducted major programs to support the Italian center democratic parties against the Communist effort to subvert Italy through political means.” It seemed to him that both the embassy and the Military Assistance and Advisory Group were missing the point. General Samuel Williams and his successors believed that the primary threat came from an invasion by North Vietnam, and so they concentrated on converting the ARVN into a mirror image of the US Army. MAAG did provide some assistance to the Civil Guard, the 68,000-man rural force, but viewed it primarily as static defense to protect lines of communication and supply depots while main force units conducted massive sweeps through the countryside. For his part, Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow believed that stability and security would flow from Western-style democratic reforms and processes. The embassy continued to press Diem to take noncommunist nationalists into his cabinet and to conduct US-style congressional investigations to root out corruption. “More influenced by the growing discussion in those days of doctrines of counterinsurgency, coming from the post-mortems on the French failures in Vietnam and Algeria and the British success in Malaya,” Colby wrote in his memoir, “I soon found that I didn't agree with either the military or the diplomats.”
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Neither did President Kennedy. While still president-elect, Kennedy had dispatched Ed Lansdale, then assigned to the Pentagon as its expert on counterinsurgency, to Vietnam to investigate and report. Colby knew of Lansdale and his work in the Philippines. “Lansdale . . . developed warm and personal relations with Asians and sought to understand their cultures and yearnings and not just the texts of their political and propaganda statements,” he later observed. Colby arranged for his section chiefs to brief the man behind Magsaysay and then accompanied him into the field. During the tour, the two compared and contrasted the Philippine experience with
Malaya, Algeria, and Vietnam. Lansdale returned to Washington to report that the situation in the countryside was deteriorating. The communist insurgency was accelerating at an alarming pace. At Lansdale's suggestion, Durbrow was replaced as ambassador by Frederick Nolting, a less assertive Foreign Service Officer who was not likely to insist that American aid be conditioned upon reforms within the Diem regime. Then came NSAM 52 in March 1961, in which Kennedy authorized a “program for covert actions to be carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency which would precede and remain in force after any commitment of US forces to South Vietnam.”
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“Uniquely in the American bureaucracy, the CIA understood the necessity to combine political, psychological, and paramilitary tools to carry out a strategic concept of pressure on an enemy or to strengthen an incumbent,” Colby wrote in his 1989 book
Lost Victory
.
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Fundamental to his thoughts on nation-building was that there was an essential link between political and paramilitary action. That is, in defending themselves from a communist insurgency or a predatory government, individuals in a community experienced a sense of empowerment and entitlement. In the American and French Revolutions, the armies of the rebellions had become agents of nationalism and nation-building, both symbols of and advocates for new regimes that would be responsive and responsible to the people. Colby remembered the effect that Colonel Chevrier (Adrien Sodoul) had had on villagers in occupied France as his patriotic speeches rallied them to the resistance. The problem was to come up with a model that was appropriate to Vietnam.

Low-intensity conflict had been part of warfare since men had first taken up arms against each other. But following the emergence of nation-states in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, individuals or small groups that committed acts of violence against the state were considered bandits or criminals rather than legitimate combatants. Kings commanded their armies in set-piece battles disconnected both strategically and politically from their respective populations. With the coming of the Napoleonic Wars, that began to change. Indeed, the term “guerrilla”—derived from the Spanish term for “small wars”—originated with the Peninsular Campaign of 1808, in which Wellington's sixty-thousand-man army, together with a much smaller Spanish force and Spanish
guerrilleros
, tied down a quarter million French soldiers. More important, Napoleon, building on
the experience of the French Revolution and its armies, combined the people, the army, and the government into what Carl von Clausewitz had termed a “remarkable trinity.” The true author of “the people's war,” however, was Mao Tse-tung. Unlike Napoleon, Mao viewed the populace not as an effective adjunct to war, but the principal weapon. In its simultaneous struggle against the Japanese and the Nationalists, the Communist Party under Mao had focused on building a “unity of spirit” between soldiers and the local populace. “Be neither selfish nor unjust,” read the third of Mao's “Three Rules.”
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There were two ways open to those who would put down revolutions through counterinsurgency—one with many variations, and the other with none. The first was an extension of Antoine-Henri Jomini's nineteenth-century dictum, “Annihilate the enemy's force in the field and you will win the war.” The operative word here was “annihilate.”
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Modern sensibilities made such a course much more difficult than in the past, as public outcry in the United States had demonstrated during General Valeriano Weyler's “reconcentration” campaign in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the subsequent and equally barbaric struggle against guerrilla forces in the Philippine-American War from 1899 to 1902. Nevertheless, such an approach still had its advocates in the 1960s. The other stratagem was to “win the hearts and minds” of the populace in which the rebellion was being fomented, that is, to counter the communist insurgency by doing what the insurgents were doing. In this approach, military action was to be subjugated to political maneuvers. With friendly outside powers advising and supplying it, the anticommunist central government would build trust among the people, if not through democratic reforms, then through responsive and responsible government.

By 1961, a kind of counterinsurgency think tank had emerged in Saigon. There was Colby with his OSS experiences, Lansdale in and out of country, and Colonel Francis Philip “Ted” Serong, the Australian counterinsurgency expert retained by the Diem regime as a temporary adviser. In September 1961, Sir Robert Thompson, the United Kingdom's best-known counterinsurgency expert, was appointed head of the British Advisory Mission in Vietnam. Each of these individuals had read Clausewitz, Jomini, Mao, Sun Tzu, and Che Guevera. Each had as great an understanding of unconventional warfare as anyone in the West at that time. Each was aware of the dictums of insurgency and counterinsurgency. The task at hand was to
adapt and apply them to Vietnam, with its religious diversity, ethnic minorities, colonial heritage, and strategic realities. Colby and his colleagues set about learning all they could about Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and then coming up with a plan.

Colby was particularly influenced by the experiences of Marshal Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey, who had served as French resident general in Morocco from 1912 to 1925. His principal task, he knew, was to put down an anticolonial insurgency, which he proceeded to do by means of “peaceful penetration” and the “oil-spot theory,” or, in French, the
tache d'huile
. This was Lyautey's term for his method of influencing a region, named after the way an oil spot slowly spreads out on a dry surface. Military force was secondary in Lyautey's scheme, used primarily to intimidate the enemy by its presence. By working through existing authorities and structures and demonstrating respect for Islam and Moroccan culture, the resident general, who had also been a member of the French Academy, succeeded in decreasing anti-French feeling and deflating the nationalist insurgency. The idea was to work in the safest areas first, winning hearts and minds through projects of economic development, education, and public health. Gradually, these loyal, secure areas would spread and link up until eventually the entire country was pacified. Lyautey actually strengthened the authority of the sultan. Not only was the armed uprising defeated, but Lyautey's reforms contributed to the emergence of modern Morocco. One of France's most respected military intellectuals, Lyautey had been a contemporary influence on T. E. Lawrence. Colby applauded Lyautey for recognizing that the employment of a massive conventional force in guerrilla warfare was counterproductive. “My line has always been that you could conduct a strategic offensive through defensive tactics,” he would later say.
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Colby believed that Robert Thompson, probably the dominant counterinsurgency voice in South Vietnam in the early 1960s, could have profited from a closer study of Lyautey. An advocate of “clear and hold,” Thompson, like Lansdale, gave great weight to physically separating the peasantry from communist insurgents. Small and medium-sized indigenous forces trained by Western military advisers would expel guerrillas from a discrete area and then establish and maintain a defensive perimeter. Colby had familiarized himself with the British counterinsurgency experience, especially in Malay, even before Thompson's arrival. “I had studied
enough of the Malayan Emergency to have gained great respect for the priority the British had given there to the local-level struggle, in which they used only 80,000 troops and 60,000 police but some 400,000 home guard,” he wrote in
Honorable Men
. Like other British colonial officials, Thompson gave great weight to the training and deployment of local police forces. With this, Colby the lawyer also agreed. Freedom from crime and arbitrary justice—a mechanism to settle disputes fairly—was crucial to pacification. Thompson and the British sought to impose firm but fair discipline on the villagers as they cut them off from the insurgency. But Malaya was different from Vietnam. It was ethnic Chinese who launched the Malay Communist Party in the early 1930s, and the Chinese who dominated it. The Malays were never really interested in communism and tended to remain loyal to the British. What was missing with Thompson's approach, Colby believed, was a political or ideological dimension. In his discussions with Nhu, Colby emphasized that the peasantry must be motivated rather than simply directed to organize self-defense forces. They had to feel truly empowered and look upon the national government as a source of that empowerment. “[In Vietnam] we had to enlist the active participation of the community in a program to improve its security and welfare on the local level,” Colby observed, “building cohesion from the bottom up rather than imposing it from the top down.”
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As CIA station chief, Colby's two most important counterinsurgency assets were a Political Action Section and a Military Action Section, the latter headed by Colonel Gilbert “Chink” Layton. Layton, who arrived in Saigon in 1959, was one of Colby's favorites. Part Native American, Layton had grown up in Iowa, raised by his grandmother. He was an excellent athlete and a fine student with a passion for history. Because of his high cheekbones and narrow eyes, his fellow high-school students had nicknamed him Chink. Layton had served with distinction in Patton's Third Army, participating in the relief of Bastogne, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge. He joined the Agency in 1950, serving first in West Germany, and was then in the Pacific on the island of Saipan. There he trained Chinese Nationalists and South Koreans in the art of guerrilla warfare. A stickler for detail, Layton constructed entire villages for liberation or capture and taught his charges the fundamentals of small-unit tactics.
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While Colby was deputy chief of station from 1959 to 1960, Layton's principal duty was to advise and train the commando teams of South Vietnam's
1st Observation Group. The outfit was part of the South Vietnamese Special Forces, which were commanded by Colonel Le Quang Tung; its assignment was to cross into Laos and Cambodia and stage hit-and-run attacks against the Ho Chi Minh Trail then being built. During these early years, the 1st Observation Group was the CIA's most important source of information on the burgeoning network of paths and roads that the North Vietnamese Army was expanding and improving. He also helped train the singletons and teams that Russ Miller was inserting into North Vietnam. “You would have a field day if you were here,” Layton wrote a friend. “It's just like War Planning! You write a plan, go find some people, train 'em, equip 'em, deploy 'em, fight 'em, rescue 'em, furlough 'em, catch 'em, make another plan and start all over again.”
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In 1960, Layton and Miller, who were nominally assigned to MAAG, established the Combined Studies Division as a front for their clandestine activities. After Colby became station chief, he called in Layton and told him, “Gil, there's something going on out there; find out what it is and see what we can do about it.” By “something going on,” Colby meant the growing insurgency, and by “out there,” he meant the Central Highlands and the lower delta, both of which the South Vietnamese government had virtually abandoned. During his subsequent gamboling in the Highlands, Layton ran into an International Volunteer Services (IVS) worker named David Nuttle who was living among one of the Montagnard tribes, the Rhade. It would prove to be an auspicious encounter.
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IVS was part of the “Tom Dooley phenomenon” that swept the United States during the 1950s and early 1960s. Thomas Anthony Dooley III was the idealistic (some said self-seeking) US Navy doctor who became a celebrity in Vietnam and in the United States when, in 1954, as part of Operation Passage to Freedom, in which the navy transported more than 300,000 Vietnamese from North Vietnam to South Vietnam following the partition of the country, he risked his life treating refugees with type IV malaria and other serious diseases. Dooley subsequently appeared on the popular television show
This Is Your Life
and wrote a best-selling book about his experiences. Inspired in part by Dooley, Nuttle arranged for and passed a telephone interview, and IVS sent him a oneway ticket to Saigon. The young midwesterner wound up in Darlac Province in the Central Highlands, where he introduced new seed strains and programs focusing on irrigation, animal husbandry, and the use of simple
farm machinery. His hosts were the Rhade, the largest of numerous aboriginal tribes living in the Highlands. Within a year, the Rhade, concentrated around the provincial capital of Ban Me Thuot, had accepted Nuttle as a friend.
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