Shadow Warrior (41 page)

At the same time, the village defense program, designed to better secure the eastern edge of the panhandle and modeled after Colby's CIDGs, was accelerated. The Laotian version was called Mu Ban Samaki. The CIA provided support for the “covert or semi-covert” aspects of the program, including weapons, radios, and militia pay, while the US Agency for International Development and the US Information Service designed and
funded the accompanying economic and social programs. Sullivan, Colby, and the CIA station chief in Laos, Douglas Blaufarb, were able to keep much of this activity secret from Laotian prime minister Souvanna Phouma. Paramilitary and political activities among upland tribal peoples were no less suspect in the eyes of the dominant ethnic group in Laos than they had been in Vietnam. CIA officials in Vientiane and Washington feared that Souvanna Phouma would give in to his chronic urge to accommodate his half-brother, Prince Souphanouvong, the titular head of the Pathet Lao, and reveal details of the operation to the communists, or at least demand that the programs be turned over to the Royal Laotian Army.
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As chief of the Far East Division, Colby made semiannual tours of Southeast Asia, including Laos. His December 1965 to January 1966 tour was one of the most memorable. After paying his respects to Sullivan and visiting with station chief Blaufarb in Vientiane, Colby flew to Long Tieng. His drip-dry suit, bow tie, and polished shoes were a stark contrast to the fatigues and Hawaiian shirts of the resident Americans. Lair and Lawrence met the man from Langley at the landing strip. Colby had read Lawrence's long, literate, and insightful reports. He had been impressed with his fellow Princetonian's combination of toughness and sensitivity, his thirst for knowledge about the Hmong culture, and his care for the welfare of the people. Colby asked the young man to act as his guide and interpreter.

Following a long and cordial meeting with Vang Pao, Colby and Lawrence visited over drinks. He had served two two-year tours in Laos and intended to complete another, Lawrence confided, but to his surprise, Colby discouraged him. “You'll never come home,” he said. Lawrence at first thought the Far East chief meant that he would die in an air crash, as had five other CIA operatives in Laos. But he soon realized that he was being warned not to “go native,” a seduction always present for counterinsurgency operatives like Lawrence and Lair, whose effectiveness depended in no small part on their ability to submerge themselves in the local culture. In Langley's view, once the line was crossed, the operative lost his or her usefulness. Colby said he wanted to talk to him about returning to the States and beginning his ascent up the Agency hierarchy, but that that conversation could wait. Colby wanted to visit Phou Fa, a Hmong outpost in the mountains surrounding the Plain of Jars, to really get out in the field.
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The method of transportation for CIA operatives in the bush in Laos was the Helio-Courier STOL (short takeoff and landing) aircraft. Without this remarkable plane, which could take off on a runway 100 yards long and land at an airspeed of 35 miles an hour, the secret war in Laos could not have gone forward. Utilizing the Helios, CIA personnel and Vang Pao's cadres could reach the remotest Hmong base. In addition to people, the aircraft carried medicine, radios, and payrolls. Many of the tiny airstrips followed ridgelines that featured a precipice at one end and a nearly vertical mountainside rising at the other. Landings were always made going uphill, and the approach had to be correct the first time; if an unanticipated down-draft or other event forced the pilot to break off, he would lack the airspeed to rise up from the precipice or turn away from the mountain.

The landing area at Phou Fa was typical. The strip there followed a sharply sloping ridgeline near the summit of the mountain. It also tilted to one side near the downhill end. The Hmong had tried to reduce the angle by building a log retaining wall and filling earth in behind it. The result was something that resembled a ski jump. Though the Helio-Courier that carried Bill Colby was piloted by an experienced man, he misjudged his approach that day. The plane skittered off the side of the strip—the uphill side, fortunately—and the plane overturned. Both men extricated themselves and escaped before the plane's fuel had a chance to ignite. Once in the village, Colby recalled the strictures imposed on Americans operating upcountry to avoid too close contact with the local culture, “including politely tasting but not ingesting the locally fermented rice ‘wine,' keeping clear of the ritual bull-baiting that preceded feasts and tactfully turning down the maiden offered by the local chief to ease the strain of a mountain village visit.” The exhilarated Colby was later evacuated by an H-34 helicopter.
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Back in Long Tieng, the chief of the Far East Division paused briefly to regroup and then flew southeastward to the panhandle to inspect the Laotian version of the Strategic Hamlet Program. The approaches in the south were sometimes as hazardous as the mountain landings in the north. Colby recalled rocking along “from side to side during a ten-foot altitude approach along the Mekong under a morning fog bank, twisting and turning to avoid the islands in the river.”
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There, in the fortified villages struggling to achieve modernity, was where Colby's heart lay. Indeed, the sight of villagers beginning to prosper and cooperating in their own defense was what Bill Colby had come to the bush for.

In some respects, Colby was never able to break free of his experiences as a Jedburgh and NORSO operative during World War II. Parachuting in, linking up with anti-Axis partisans, and facilitating their efforts to overthrow the occupying power or its collaborators had made a deep impression on him. He subsequently witnessed these partisans coming to power in Italy and other European countries, and helping the noncommunist factions defeat those controlled by the Kremlin. He had sponsored agent drops behind enemy lines in the Baltic and subsequently in North Vietnam in Project Tiger. Colby reluctantly concluded that these two operations had been dry holes, but he continued to believe in the efficacy of covert action behind enemy lines. Consequently, in 1964-1965, the head of the Far East Division began to press for the CIA to organize and arm the Hmong who lived in the mountains of western North Vietnam so that they could act as a fifth column behind enemy lines. Doug Blaufarb, station chief in Vientiane, was aghast. Proponents of such tribal resistance, he opined to Langley, were being “carried away by visions derived from [World War II] experience and [were] thinking of an approach that would inevitably end in disaster unless [the] United States were serious about seeking a complete victory over [North Vietnam].” Ambassador Sullivan, who feared that such a move would lead to an escalation of the war in Laos, agreed. Finally, there was something that Colby seemed unaware of, namely, that the 303 Committee had already decided not to undertake any efforts to subvert the government in Hanoi (in fact, only a handful of people were privy to the decision). On May 18, 1964, Sullivan wrote William Bundy, who headed Far Eastern Affairs at the State Department, saying that it was his understanding that “to nurture the seeds of internal resistance” on North Vietnamese soil would undermine Washington's ongoing attempt to assure Hanoi that any peace agreement would respect absolutely the integrity of North Vietnam. And there were the Hmong themselves. “It would be immensely cruel and counterproductive to develop such a movement and then bargain it away as part of a political counter.”
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Colby remained unconvinced. The CIA and its allies could not operate in areas where the local population was not committed to supporting them. The Agency and its Hmong allies would not even be able to gather intelligence, much less take effective action to interdict the flow of men and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, without counterinsurgency bases supported by pacification programs on both sides of the Laotian–North
Vietnamese border. In short—and this was true throughout the conflicts in Southeast Asia—Colby wanted to do to the enemy and its clients what it was doing to the United States and its allies.

In November 1965, US forces fought a pitched battle with the North Vietnamese Army in the Ia Drang Valley in northern South Vietnam. Each side bloodied the other, but the communists withdrew to bases in Laos. To MACV it was simply unthinkable to allow Hanoi a quasi-sanctuary through which to supply its soldiers, now engaged in bloody combat with American troops. The Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed an amphibious landing on the coast of North Vietnam at Vin and a subsequent drive inland that would sever the country at the 17th parallel and block the Ho Chi Minh Trail at its source. Concerned about possible Communist Chinese intervention, President Johnson and his advisers rejected the proposal, however. Then let us cut the trail by other means, the military said, through covert action by US and South Vietnamese commandos and clandestine bombing raids.

In early 1965, LBJ had appointed Averell Harriman ambassador-at-large with a twofold mission: to build international support for the war effort in South Vietnam, and to pave the way for peace talks with North Vietnam. As part of this effort, Sullivan, Harriman's protégé, refused to permit the US Air Force to conduct unrestricted bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail; he also opposed significant ground operations. They would, he feared, bring down Souvanna Phouma's government in Vientiane and destroy the Geneva Accords. Sullivan finally agreed, however reluctantly, to Operation Shining Brass, in which twelve-man teams, composed of three US Special Forces personnel and nine Nung Chinese each, would penetrate from South Vietnam into Laos to conduct intelligence and interdiction activities. The incursions were limited to 12 miles of the border, however. Privately, the ambassador referred to Shining Brass as “an Eagle Scout program.” For his part, General William Westmoreland, MACV commander, accused Sullivan of “fiddling while Rome burned.” The Special Forces began referring to the Ho Chi Minh Trail as the Averell Harriman Memorial Highway.
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In mid-1966, Colby dispatched a new CIA station chief to Vientiane. Theodore Shackley had been recruited by the Agency in 1951. Fluent in Polish (from his mother, a Polish immigrant), he was first assigned to Berlin, where he had worked under Lou Conein. In April 1962, CIA officer
William Harvey summoned Shackley to head Operation Mongoose, the Kennedy brothers' scheme to assassinate Fidel Castro. Harvey had known Shackley in Berlin, where Harvey had been in charge of constructing a secret underground spy corridor beneath the Berlin Wall. In Operation Mongoose, it was Shackley and the Cuban exiles he supervised who would wield poison pills, poison dart guns, exploding cigars, and more conventional means in an effort to do away with the charismatic Castro.
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Ted Shackley was an ambitious, intelligent, and rather ruthless company man. He was not interested in native cultures, or in nation-building, for that matter. The winners in Washington's bureaucratic sweepstakes were those officials who fit into the larger plan, and the larger plan was containing communism and stopping the advance of Sino-Soviet imperialism. By the time Shackley joined the country team in Laos, the 303 Committee had made it clear to Langley that operations in Laos were to be subsumed into the burgeoning conflict in Vietnam. Washington wanted two things from the Laos operation: first, complete and timely intelligence on communist traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and second, a much higher level of resistance to that traffic. One can only assume that Colby made the choice to name Shackley to head the Vientiane station under pressure from his superiors; he made no mention of Shackley in
Lost Victory
. The pressure from the Pentagon to assume control of military operations in the panhandle was intense, Colby and Bill Bundy told the new man. The message he was to take to his CIA colleagues was, “If we don't do it, the Army will.”
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The Hmong operation was then being directed out of Udorn Air Base in Thailand by Bill Lair and Pat Landry, with Vint Lawrence—and Tony Poe before he was shot in the hip on an operation he should not have been on—acting as liaison with Vang Pao at Long Tieng. Shortly after he arrived in Vientiane, Shackley flew to Thailand to meet with Lair and Landry. He first made it clear that this would be his last trip to Udorn; in the future, they would come to him in Vientiane. They had been running a country store, he declared; he was going to turn it into a supermarket. There would be many more CIA personnel arriving in-country; there would be dozens of T-28 fighter bombers and B-24 bombers. American airpower would be used to support the Hmong, who would now be expected to fight the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao in battalion and even larger-sized units. Lair and Landry received this news in glum silence. They rather liked their country store. Thus far the operation had been effective for the very reason
that it was low key. There were very few white men to stir anti-Western prejudices among the Hmong and the Lao. The hit-and-run guerrilla tactics employed against the communists had kept the North Vietnamese Army from moving in with division force and crushing the CIA's secret army. And there was the salient fact that the Hmong were not suited, by experience or temperament, to fighting large-scale battles and defending fixed positions. But Lair and Landry kept their counsel. The handwriting was on the wall.
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Ambassador Sullivan was pleased with the new arrangement. The only alternative to escalating the secret war was direct US military intervention, and with it the final collapse of Laotian neutrality. For these same reasons, Souvanna Phouma proved compliant. During the period that followed, from 1965 through 1968, Sullivan and Shackley were left largely to their own devices. “We got practically no instructions from Washington,” the ambassador later recalled. “In a way the assignment was intoxicating.” One of his lieutenants said it best: “It was great fun. You sit in the Ambassador's office, deal with leaders of the Lao government, arrange for Thai artillery strikes, map out strategy, decide what moves Vang Pao's army should make, send orders to field commanders. It had everything.” Clearly, Colby had been sidelined in the secret war in Laos, a conflict in which he had once taken so much pride.
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