Shadow Warrior (42 page)

Shackley began by establishing a standard road-watch team, giving it a chief and a deputy, a radioman, a medic, and six riflemen. Within six weeks, seventy of these teams were operating along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. At the same time, the chief of station ordered his field officers to begin forming battalion-sized units in the panhandle. To conserve and focus resources, he ended CIA support for the village defense program, a move that must have been particularly galling for Colby. For Shackley, the CIA was in Laos to win the war in Vietnam, not to build a nation.
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With the North Vietnamese Army still streaming down the trail, and the Pentagon continuing to lobby for a larger role in the Laotian theater, LBJ, in February 1967, approved a vast expansion of Operation Shining Brass, to include company-strength incursions. It was the Studies and Observation Group, or SOG, that would implement the expanded operation. Created in the wake of Operation Switchback, SOG consisted of Special Forces teams that trained and led South Vietnamese commandos on top-secret missions into Laos. Initially, the SOG teams dropped in; called in
airstrikes on the trail, its convoys, and supply and maintenance barracks; and then were extracted. Soon, however, these highly decorated warriors were engaging much larger North Vietnamese forces in close combat and then calling in airstrikes on their own positions. During one six-month period, the American contingent of the SOG teams suffered 100 percent casualties. Shackley coordinated Shining Brass raids first with Colonel Don Blackburn and then Colonel John Singlaub. By 1967, SOG comprised 2,000 Americans and 8,000 Indochinese.
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The first Shining Brass incursion—the first of thousands—would be typical. The commander of SOG in 1965 was already legendary. During the Bataan Death March of World War II, Blackburn and a fellow soldier had escaped into the hills, where they had linked up with Filipino partisans. Dodging Japanese patrols, Blackburn and his compatriots had established jungle training camps to train Igorot tribesmen—notorious headhunters during the nineteenth century—in guerrilla tactics. In 1944, when General Douglas MacArthur's forces returned to the Philippines, “Blackburn's Headhunters” emerged from the jungle to scout for the Americans, act as spotters for aircraft and artillery, and rescue downed fliers.
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The Shining Brass teams—which were Blackburn's idea—consisted of two or three Special Forces noncommissioned officers and nine indigenous people, usually either Nung (ethnic Chinese tribespeople who were generally anticommunist and supplied mercenaries to the US military and CIA) or Montagnards. The teams would be inserted into and removed from Laos by H-34 Kingbee helicopters, powered by 32-cylinder engines and capable of hovering on slopes with one wheel on the ground. When it was too dangerous to land—which was often—the Shining Brass teams, or what was left of them, harnessed up and were snatched from the ground by skyhooks attached to the aircraft. Commanding each team was a Green Beret, with the code number “One-Zero.” These men, who were responsible for leading their tiny forces against far superior odds, inflicting as many casualties as possible, calling in airstrikes on what remained, and then assembling at a prearranged landing zone, would become legendary in Laos and Vietnam.

The One-Zero for SOG's first cross-border operation was Master Sergeant Charles “Slats” Petry. The entire team was “sterile,” meaning that its members wore no rank or unit insignia. They carried Swedish K submachine guns and Belgian-made Browning 9 mm pistols, both of which had
been acquired clandestinely. If captured, “RT Iowa,” as the team was code-named, was to recite a flimsy story about how it had accidentally strayed across the border looking for the crew of a downed C-123. If team members were killed or captured, the US government would deny knowledge of them. RT Iowa's landing zone would be a slash-and-burn area that looked like an old logging clear-cut in the Pacific Northwest. The team dropped in at dusk and proceeded through the rain-soaked jungle to their target area, a camouflaged North Vietnamese fire base that had been shelling US facilities near Danang. The area was dense with trails and campsites, and crawling with enemy troops. For three days, the team engaged and then maneuvered away from enemy patrols, waiting for the weather to ease so that they could summon airstrikes. Finally, the clouds lifted, and RT Iowa called in thirty-seven sorties by F-105 Thunderchief fighter bombers. The team was successfully extracted, with one missing in action and one killed. Petry returned soon thereafter with a forward air controller and called in fifty-one additional sorties, whose bombs and cannon fire touched off numerous secondary explosions.
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These Special Forces teams had been consciously modeled on the Jedburghs. Colby had worked with the Green Berets closely, beginning with the CIDG operation, and he subsequently supported and advised SOG. Colonel John Singlaub, who replaced Blackburn in 1966 as SOG chief, was himself an old Jedburgh. Shining Brass was Colby's kind of warfare—individual, heroic, low-level, with maximum gain for minimum effort.

With money and arms pouring in from the CIA, and with US close air support, Vang Pao managed to reach the high-water mark of his territorial conquests in the late summer of 1966. The focus of military operations was in northern Laos in the mountains ringing the Plain of Jars. After repulsing a major communist thrust at Nakhang, his forces controlled not only that town, near the Xieng Khouang border with Sam Neua, but also Phou Pha Thi, only 25 miles west of Sam Neua. And each of these strongpoints served as a base for operations threatening key communist enclaves. In July and August, Colby made another one of his semiannual inspection tours. “I found the situation in Laos exhilarating,” he subsequently reported to headquarters. Not only had Vang Pao recovered 90 percent of the territory lost around the Plain of Jars during the previous dry season, but the Hmong and elements of the Royal Laotian Army were taking the offensive in the
southern panhandle. Operating with “courage, energy and a high degree of professionalism,” Hmong–Forces Armées Royales units and village security teams had secured Saravane and opened the road between there and Pakse. From these secure areas, road-watch teams and saboteurs were operating effectively against the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Seemingly oblivious to Shackley's termination of CIA aid to local security forces, Colby reported: “The most important point of a review of the Lao situation is the clear effect of a smoothly working country team under a forceful Ambassador and the strength that results from patient adherence to a balanced program of building popular participation in local security forces.”
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In truth, Shackley did not have a completely free hand in Laos. Bill Colby, like Stu Methven and Bill Lair, remained committed to the marriage of pacification and counterinsurgency. The first without the second would leave a political void and ensure that a self-sustaining, self-reliant, anti-communist entity would never emerge in Laos. In his July 1967 report following another survey of the situation in the field, Colby noted that in 1963–1964, the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese Army were on the verge of establishing a foothold on the all-important Bolovens Plateau in southern Laos. But then, building on the Civilian Irregular Defense Group experience in the Highlands of Vietnam, CIA personnel had organized self-defense units, armed them, and implemented social and economic programs. In the north, “from its positions dominating all of North Laos some years ago,” Colby reported to Washington, “the Viet Minh / Pathet Lao enemy has been pushed back to holding a thin edge of North Laos, with a single substantial salient into the Plaine des Jares.” Most important, he continued, US aid was promoting the integration of the Hmong into the larger Lao society, keeping it from acting as “a centrifugal force.” In the process, he boasted, “Meo [Hmong] school registration has risen from 3,000 in 1962 to 12,000 in 1967, settled agriculture is replacing mountain village slash and burn farming, an elected Meo sits in the national assembly . . . and seventy Meo attend the top lyceum of Laos where only 10 were present in 1962.”
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By then Colby's stature in the foreign policy establishment had grown to the point where his memos were being submitted directly to President Johnson. The Far East Division chief continued to worry that the brutal war being fought in South Vietnam would spill over into Laos. He noted in a July 1967 memo to the president that Westmoreland wanted to move
beyond the SOG operations and outfit regular ARVN battalions, complete with American advisers, and unleash them on the trail. Colby observed to Johnson that the harassment and interdiction of Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese Army traffic along the corridor was the best that could be hoped for. An intrusion in force might bring Souvanna Phouma's government down, provoke a massive North Vietnamese offensive in Laos, and eventually threaten the security of Thailand. “The most serious policy question . . . would seem to be the degree to which the U.S. wishes to contemplate increased commitment of U.S. forces in active operations in Southeast Asia,” Colby told Johnson. “The contest in Laos has been by proxy, engaging minimal U.S. prestige, tying down no U.S. forces and involving few casualties.”
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Johnson concurred, and the Pentagon's drive to expand the land war into the Laotian panhandle was thwarted. But the flow of men and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail continued to increase inexorably. If American main force units were to be kept out of Laos, Shackley would have to be allowed to go ahead and prepare the Hmong to engage battalion-sized Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese units.

By late 1967, it was obvious that the enemy viewed Laos as a major front in its war of liberation and unification. In the spring of 1968, combined Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese forces, now numbering some 110,000, captured twenty-seven Hmong outposts and airstrips. The fighting created an estimated 10,000 refugees. Vang Pao fought on, but by 1969, observers reported an increasing number of adolescents in the ranks of his warriors. Reading Colby's book
Lost Victory
, one would never know that the secret war in Laos ended in disaster for Vang Pao and his fellow Hmong. “The enemy was fought to a standstill,” Colby wrote. “After ten years the battle lines in Laos were approximately where they were at the start, although the North Vietnamese forces had increased from 7,000 to 70,000.” By the time the denouement began, Bill Colby was out of the CIA (ostensibly) and back in Vietnam as second in command of the largest and most successful counterinsurgency/pacification program in American history.
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C
olby had to accept the subordination of the secret war in Laos to the conflict in Vietnam, but he did not and would not accept the subordination of counterinsurgency and pacification to the main force, search-and-destroy operations that General Westmoreland was running. In Colby's view, the United States was fighting one war in South Vietnam—largely irrelevant and even counterproductive—and the communists another—relevant and generally effective. If the United States and its allies did not meet the enemy on its own terms and fight a people's war, it would surely lose. Physical security was important, but so were political accountability, a reliable justice system, educational opportunity, and at least a modicum of economic and social security. US and South Vietnamese forces could kill communist soldiers until the coming of the next ice age, and it would make no difference if South Vietnam did not evolve into a viable society. He believed that military action should be subsumed to nation-building, not substituted for it. He dreamed of an integrated civilian/military operation that would train and equip the Vietnamese to defend themselves at the local level, build better lives for the majority of Vietnamese who lived in the countryside, and bridge the political and cultural gap between Saigon and the villages and hamlets of South Vietnam.

During late 1965 and 1966, the tide began to turn in Colby's favor. On the ground in Vietnam, a team of counterinsurgency/pacification officials—men with time and experience in the bush—began putting together a plan they called “Harnessing the Revolution,” a strategy for fighting a
people's war. In Washington, Colby, joined by unconventional war converts in the Pentagon, began lobbying the White House to approve a change of course in South Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson, the architect of the Great Society, responded with enthusiasm, and “the other war” was launched.

In the summer and fall of 1965, the Johnson administration poured more than 200,000 troops into Vietnam. These, together with ARVN units, succeeded in blunting communist military operations in the south. The CIA matched the military buildup, increasing its in-country staff from some 200 to 6,000 and employing more than 400 contract personnel, many of them retired military, especially Special Forces. By early 1966, there were CIA officers on duty in each of South Vietnam's 44 provinces and 242 districts. Agency operatives gathered intelligence, advised the South Vietnamese government and its provincial and district security forces, and supervised a variety of paramilitary operations. As of September 1965, nearly 15,000 Vietnamese cadres—men and women—were deployed across South Vietnam in Political Action Teams (PATs) and Advanced Political Action (APA) Teams. Counter-Terror (CT) Teams comprised 1,900 members, and Tran Ngoc Chau's Census Grievance (CG) Program was in the process of going national. (Chau was province chief in Kien Hoa and South Vietnam's leading expert on counterinsurgency and pacification.) C-G personnel conducted 350,000 interviews, while medics attached to the Advanced Pacification Program treated more than 200,000 patients. US Navy Construction Battalion engineers built and repaired roads, dug wells, and maintained bridges. Frank Scotton, the USIS officer who had fathered the armed propaganda teams in Long An Province, moved to Saigon, where, with Westmoreland's imprimatur, he organized combined Political Action–Counter-Terror Teams in the six districts around the capital.
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