Shadow Warrior (28 page)

In early November, work on the defensive perimeter began, with some 50 residents of Buon Enao and another 125 people from surrounding villages performing the labor at 35 piasters (50 cents) a day. When building
materials ran low, Campbell led nocturnal expeditions to steal what was needed. The scavengers commandeered sand from a Vietnamese landowner's riverbed and crushed rock from a highway construction project. Vietnamese who had been resettled in the area would cut bamboo by day, and Campbell would confiscate it by night. The Rhade were delighted. And indeed, the scavenging raids were more about demonstrating that the Americans were not dupes of the government than about any real logistical necessity.
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Although work on Buon Enao's defensive perimeter and dispensary was completed in early December, there was nothing to defend the perimeter with. Layton and Colby arranged a quick visit from some of Thuy's people at the Presidential Survey Office. They certified that the Rhade had lived up to their end of the bargain: the village chief had arranged for signs on the fence declaring the Viet Cong persona non grata and had personally vouched for each of his people. PSO authorized the arming of thirty of Buon Enao's residents. Layton requisitioned the necessary number of carbines from MAAG, and the Special Forces began training. By this time Colby had come up with a name for the Buon Enao experiment—Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDGs)—descriptive and nondescript at the same time.

Military action was to be purely defensive. Buon Enao and villages that were subsequently brought into the program were connected by radio. Platoon-sized strike forces conducted long-range patrols and were on call to come to the aid of a village under attack. The patrols were scouting enterprises to gather intelligence on the whereabouts of marauding Viet Cong. By July 1962, the strike force at Buon Enao had about 650 armed and trained men deployed in support of 3,600 unpaid village defenders; Layton's people were recruiting among the Jarai, Sedang, and Bahnar in the neighboring provinces of Kontum and Pleiku.
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As the CIDGs evolved, Combined Studies and Special Forces personnel became deeply involved in health and economic development projects. By July 1962, Campbell and his cohorts had set up dispensaries in eighty-eight Rhade villages around Ban Me Thuot. Widespread application of the insecticide DDT began to bring malaria under control. The Americans wanted desperately to improve living standards among the Highlanders, but other than paying the construction workers and members of the strike force, there was no way to directly introduce money into the economy. Recognizing
the dangers posed by the nonmilitary side of the CIDG project, the Viet Cong began targeting health workers and those who aided them. In two cases, they executed villagers, one an old man and the other a small boy, for warning Layton's people of an impending ambush.
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As the number of fortified villages and strike forces multiplied, the Viet Cong stepped up their campaign of terrorism. The communists decided to make an example of one particularly effective strike-team commander. An informant came into the captain's village and told him that the Viet Cong were setting up an ambush some kilometers into the jungle. That evening the officer took his platoon out to investigate. While he and his men were absent, a Viet Cong squad entered the village and ordered the people to assemble. They dragged the strike-force commander's wife and infant son out of their hut, decapitated the woman, placed her head on a stake, and then bayoneted the baby. These were the fruits of cooperating with the South Vietnamese government, the Viet Cong cadre declared.
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The more engagements the Rhade irregulars fought, however, the more confident they became. In 1960, Buon Enao defenders alone killed more than 200 Viet Cong and captured another 460. During CIDG's heyday—from 1960 through 1962—the US Air Force established an operation entitled “Farmgate” to provide tactical air support for ground operations. Flying prop-driven trainers and substituting cowboy boots for combat footgear, Farmgate pilots provided close support to Rhade villages under attack. Indeed, for several months, Farmgate acted as the unofficial air force of the CIDGs.
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There was no political or ideological dimension to the Civilian Irregular Defense Group program, at least in the form of propaganda or organization. Colby recognized that in the act of self-defense, the Montagnards would experience a sense of empowerment, but beyond that, it was the medical care, new clothing, improved agriculture, and animal husbandry that would gain and hold the Highlanders' loyalty. In truth, as between the Montagnards and the ethnic Vietnamese, all one could really hope for was peaceful coexistence. And as with the CIA station's other operations, there was little or no security or counterintelligence. “In my shop, and most of the Agency shops,” Layton said, “you assumed [your South Vietnamese counterparts] were penetrated. . . . When I started recruiting all these people, somebody said, aren't you afraid there might be some Viet Cong in there[?] . . . I said, we figure on about ten percent but then we outnumber
them nine to one.” Colby and Layton insisted that information be shared on a strictly need-to-know basis and limited to the mission at hand.
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In December 1961, Colby had persuaded Nhu to pay a visit to Buon Enao. So impressed was he, that he not only okayed expanding the project to other tribes in the Highlands but also approved it for the lower Mekong Delta. The problem that had plagued the Agroville program—namely, the remote and dispersed nature of the rural population living amidst a maze of canals and dikes—still remained. Colby and Layton had enjoyed some success in the delta, but the South Vietnamese government had so neglected the Buddhist and Confucian Vietnamese of the coastal lowlands and the delta that Colby and Layton felt they had even less traction with them than they did with the Montagnards. Nevertheless, the threat of a communist takeover in the south was great and had to be addressed. The Viet Cong had turned the Agroville program against the government, and CIA intelligence reports indicated that the communists regarded the Ca Mau peninsula as one of its strongholds. Indeed, the U-Minh Forest would subsequently become home to PAVN's famous U-Minh Battalion. During the 1950s, the station had cooperated with Diem's intelligence apparatus in creating stay-behind nets in the south composed of indigenous Catholics and Vietnamese who had fled from the north in 1954. In 1961, Colby decided to try to create an archipelago of anticommunist islands—starting with the Catholic villages—in the Mekong.

The principal locus of what the CIA termed “the clerical paramilitary program” was a network headed by Father Nguyen Loc Hoa. In truth, Father Hoa was Chinese and had only adopted a Vietnamese name in 1951 when he led his flock of three hundred from southern China through northern Vietnam and Cambodia and all the way to the Ca Mau peninsula. Neither the French nor the South Vietnamese government dared venture south of Ca Mau city, and in 1959 Diem created a special district there, called Hai Yen, for Hao and his parishioners. From this stronghold, Father Hoa was able to contend with the communists for control of an area stretching from the ninth parallel to the tip of the peninsula. In 1960, the Viet Cong launched a frontal assault on Father Hoa's headquarters, but were repulsed with a loss of 174 men.

Father Hoa—Colby referred to him as the “dynamic Pastor from the North”—became a frequent visitor to Layton's house in Saigon. “At dinner
at our house, he didn't dress as a priest,” Dora Layton, Gil's wife, recalled. In 1961, Colby and Layton dubbed Father Hoa's army the Sea Swallows. In early January 1962, Layton and Colby coordinated a Seabee (US Navy Construction Battalion) effort to construct a landing strip near Father Hoa's headquarters, and weapons, uniforms, medicine, and other supplies began flowing in. Shortly thereafter, Father Hoa began recruiting ethnic Chinese from Cholon. By the fall of 1962, ten Special Forces A-Teams were working in the lower delta, and by the end of the year more than 4,500 armed and trained Catholic youth had joined the “Fighting Fathers.”
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By mid-1962, Gil Layton, loosely supervised by Bill Colby, found himself in command of a clandestine paramilitary force numbering more than 36,000, trained and reinforced by three dozen Special Forces A-Teams. “Gil ran the war by night from our compound in Saigon,” Dora Layton recalled. The Layton's house was a spacious, two-story white stucco of French colonial design. It featured a roof garden and a high cement-and-steel picket fence surrounding a small yard. Large iron gates could close the driveway and seal the compound in case of a security threat. And security threats there were. In January 1963, Dora Layton wrote a friend in the States: “They came yesterday to measure for barbed wire all around the place. We have our guns freshly cleaned and loaded in our room, and a whole arsenal in our bathroom.” Just outside the main living quarters, within the walled villa, was a communications shack with a Vietnamese radio operator on duty twenty-four hours a day. From that vantage point Gil Layton could direct strike forces and call in air support for operations all across the country.
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In comparison to the Laytons, the Colbys lived a rather humdrum existence. Colleagues remembered Bill attending Mass regularly, sometimes at the cathedral and sometimes at a Benedictine chapel in Cholon. He left childrearing to Barbara and the Catholic Church. Each morning, a van would pick up Carl and his brother Paul and take them to school. Carl recalled that he and his friends had the run of the city when they were not in class. “I would sometimes sleep over at my friend Billy Shepherd's house (his father worked for the United States Information Service) for two days in a row. My parents would not know where I was.” In the evenings, Bill
and Barbara would often give the kids a kiss and leave for one of their continuous rounds of parties. Carl and his friends would then call a cab to drive them to Cholon. He was eleven.
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In August 1960, when he was fourteen, John was shipped off to the States to attend Portsmouth Priory, a Catholic boarding school in Rhode Island. Barbara put him on a plane in Saigon, and Elbridge picked him up at the airport in Washington, where the young man, already intensely homesick, spent time with his grandparents until school opened. On the day the term was to begin, Elbridge drove John to the Benedictine school his parents had picked out for him. The brother in charge told Elbridge that Hurricane Dora had torn the roofs off of several buildings; the opening of school would have to be delayed. John recalled Elbridge's retort: “Well, I've done my duty; his father instructed me to deposit him and here he is.” He then got in the car and drove off.

By the next spring, John was depressed and getting fatter by the day. He would call Elbridge and Margaret collect; sometimes his grandfather wouldn't accept the charges. When Bill returned to Washington that fall to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John flew to Washington to meet him. Following a pleasant weekend, John boarded his plane for the return trip. When it landed, and the youngster saw the school bus waiting for him, something snapped. He told the flight attendants he was sick and wanted to go back to Washington. As that happened to be the aircraft's return destination, he was allowed to stay on board. From the terminal, John called Bill to come and get him. Father and son argued until three in the morning in the basement of Elbridge and Margaret's house. John was homesick, lonely, disgusted with Elbridge, and tired of the harsh New England climate. Boarding school was his duty, Bill replied; he needed to buck up and be somebody. John implied that, like Elbridge, his father was hard-hearted and self-absorbed and did not care about his family. The message had the desired effect. Angry though he was, Bill agreed that if John would finish the term in Rhode Island, he could then move to Florida, where his maternal grandparents lived, and go to school there.
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The Civilian Irregular Defense Groups in the Central Highlands and Father Hoa's Catholic Youth in the Ca Mau peninsula were promising starts in the emerging counterinsurgency/pacification initiative envisioned by Bill
Colby and his colleagues, but they did not address the political core of Vietnam—the Buddhist-Confucian majority. At one point, Nhu pleaded with Colby to provide a step-by-step plan to build a stable democracy in Vietnam; the trouble was, he said, that the communists had a plan, and the “Free World” did not. A charismatic strongman like his brother would serve only as a temporary stopgap. The West expected underdeveloped countries to move from colonialism to democracy in one step, he complained.
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Nhu and Diem, it will be recalled, had very different ideas about how best to mobilize the Vietnamese-Buddhist peasantry, with Nhu committed to an essentially political stratagem and Diem to an economic-military one. Colby, of course, discreetly sided with Nhu. In October 1961, the counselor to the president convened a meeting of province chiefs and informed them that he wanted to launch a “social revolution . . . in which a new hierarchy should be established, not based on wealth or position.” The most important people in a village would be the model anticommunist fighters. The losers, he said, would be the “notables and gentry,” many of whom had been “lackeys of the imperialists and colonialists.”
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Shortly thereafter, Colby persuaded Nhu to try going national with the CIDG model, adding a political component. The counselor was receptive, but his brother was not. Diem's prime minister, Tran Van Huong, told Colby that weapons delivered to villagers could easily find their way into the hands of the Viet Cong. Colby replied that arms were not the primary issue; the real enemy was communist propaganda and political action. Huong did not say so, but what he and Diem were really afraid of was that weapons furnished to peasant groups could be used to fuel a noncommunist uprising against the regime.
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