Shadow Warrior (45 page)

Colby did not say so, but the answer was clear: in Vietnam, as in other Cold War battlegrounds, the United States was consistently aligning itself with the forces of reaction. This was so sometimes because ideological conservatives controlled the foreign policy agenda, but more often because of the institutional mechanisms that emerged with the founding of the nation-state system. Perhaps, as McGeorge Bundy had remarked to Colby, there was no institutional means by which the United States could nurture a “rice-roots” revolution that would bring to Vietnam the same blessings that Americans enjoyed. The United States could apply diplomatic and economic
leverage to a friendly government—even support coups against it—but it did not possess the means or the will to foment revolutions that would change the social and political equation in other countries. This seemed particularly true in South Vietnam. For the most part, the South Vietnamese Army, one of MACV's principal tools in the war with the communists, was one of the most counterrevolutionary entities in South Vietnam. If things did not change, Colby told Forrestal, the United States was going to lose the fight against the forces of international communism. His people on the ground were urging a policy shift whereby the United States would seek out rising young leaders even if they had joined the National Liberation Front. This would mean working with “dynamic young men” in the trade unions, in peasant organizations, in veterans groups, and on college campuses.
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Throughout 1965 and 1966, the Johnson administration operated on the assumption that it did not have to make a choice, that it could pursue counterinsurgency and pacification vigorously in the countryside without repudiating the Ky-Thieu regime. If the United States just refocused and redoubled its efforts, victory was still in reach. The picture of the nationbuilding effort in South Vietnam painted for President Johnson in 1966 was not compelling. “[I] don't think there's a single area pacified,” McNamara reported on January 11, following one of his many fact-finding trips to Vietnam. Returning from a similar mission in August, Henry Kissinger, an unofficial adviser to the State Department, observed that eighteen months after the Marines landed at Danang, one could not go outside the city at night without running the risk of being shot. Traveling by helicopter, he had observed numerous Viet Cong roadblocks across some of South Vietnam's principal highways. There was not a moment to be lost, the president decided, and ordered his advisers to draft a plan to pursue the “other war.”
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Would-be architects of a comprehensive counterinsurgency/pacification program were struck first by the huge advantage the communists held in the field of command and control. Department of Defense analyst Townsend Hoopes wrote, “For the enemy the war remained fundamentally . . . a seamless web of political-military-psychological factors to be manipulated by a highly centralized command authority that never took its eye off the political goal of ultimate control in the South.” By contrast, the United States was fighting three very loosely connected conflicts: the large-scale conventional war on the ground, the air war over North Vietnam,
and the counterinsurgency effort in the countryside. The counterinsurgency campaign was just as bureaucratically splintered in 1966 as it had been when Lansdale had left Vietnam for the first time. Lodge insisted on absolute authority and overall command, but he was lazy, leaving the military, USAID, USIS, the Joint US Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO), and the CIA to go their own ways in the provinces. As a consequence, dozens of counterinsurgency/pacification operations unfolded without any interaction whatsoever between them. Matters were further complicated by the always complex relationship between the South Vietnamese and the Americans, from the US Mission and the government in Saigon down to the village-level advisers. As one pacification official later observed of the struggle in the countryside: “It was everybody's business and nobody's.”
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As early as 1964, Bill Colby had recommended the appointment of a counterinsurgency/pacification “czar” to oversee the “other war” in South Vietnam, but his suggestion had gotten lost in the turmoil of escalation. Nevertheless, he had been heard, especially by McGeorge Bundy. In early 1966, the national security adviser arranged for a conference on pacification to be held at Airlie House, the CIA retreat near Warrenton, Virginia. The State Department was represented by Leonard Unger and William Porter. Colby headed the Agency delegation, with Chester Cooper, an assistant to Bundy, representing the White House. Lansdale was there as well. After much pulling and tugging, the group decided to recommend to the president that he appoint a deputy ambassador for pacification. LBJ did just that at the Honolulu Conference in February, naming Porter to the post and gently nudging Lodge to get on board. LBJ followed up on March 28 by naming Robert Komer, a National Security Council staffer, to the post of special assistant to the president for pacification and rural reconstruction. In doing so, he took the first major step toward shutting the bureaucratic Pandora's Box.

Colby had known Komer since his days with the CIA in the early 1950s. A short, bespectacled, intense man, the new presidential assistant for counterinsurgency and pacification was a Harvard graduate and fervent Democrat who had joined with Colby in advocating an “opening to the left” in Italian politics during the 1950s. He subsequently became a member of Kennedy's NSC staff and earned his spurs as a Middle East expert. Impressed with Komer's energy and initiative, Johnson and Bundy subsequently asked him to concentrate on Vietnam, which he did.
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Komer came to his new post determined to bring the apparatchiks and even the politicos like Lodge to heel. His primary task, however, was to keep the president converted. What followed was a series of trips to Vietnam during which Komer would thoroughly irritate the civilian members of the US Mission while deluging LBJ with reports and recommendations. The United States had no choice but to work with and through the South Vietnamese government, he declared. “Suggestions that we must take over Vietnam miss the very purpose of the exercise,” he observed to Johnson. Lodge had proved incapable of coordinating the military and civilian sides of pacification. The military's efforts to secure the country in the short term through free-fire zones and the deliberate creation of refugees was doing more to lose hearts and minds than win them. “We can spur a socioeconomic revolution in a non-country even during wartime,” he told the president, “but it won't be easy at best.” Although he was at pains to keep the fact secret, Komer's chief inspiration and mentor was the iconoclastic Vann. In a letter to a friend in which he reminisced about crucial influences, Komer wrote, “And above all [there was] the incomparable John Paul Vann—whose role in counseling me during 1966–1968 had never been told.”
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“Blowtorch Bob,” as Komer would be nicknamed by the US contingent in Vietnam, was long on action and short on thought. For example, he was initially determined to make the struggle for the control of the countryside primarily an ARVN operation. John Paul Vann, for one, was appalled. It was his experience that the South Vietnamese Army was frequently a greater threat to counterinsurgency and pacification than the Viet Cong. “Night before last,” he wrote a friend, “a group of ARVN soldiers became drunk at the town's [Bao Trai's] only eatery . . . got into a fight with security officials who tried to stop them—then began shooting up the town—to include ricocheting about twenty rounds off the side of my house.” This all occurred within yards of the province chief's house and the quarters of the local military command. “You can imagine how much respect the population must have for the allegedly constituted authority when it can't control its own soldiers—or—how ridiculous it is that soldiers who will not seek out the enemy will nevertheless terrorize an entire civilian community.”
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Many in the CIA thought Komer a rank amateur. When one of his reports was circulated through the foreign affairs bureaucracy, Special Adviser
for Vietnam Affairs George Carver wrote Helms: “Surface features such as its ‘gee whiz style,' fondness for the perpendicular pronoun, and breezy bandying of first names (‘Westy') are irritating but relatively unimportant. What is important is its tone of activist omniscience which masks some fundamental misconceptions about the nature of the war in Vietnam.” For Komer, it was all about the organization and allocation of resources. If military security could be provided and rural reconstruction undertaken, all would be well, he seemed to think. What then would happen when the United States pulled out? Carver asked. Pacification meant more than that. Echoing Colby, he declared that there had to be a “doctrine,” an ideology, something for the people to fight for. As Helms (via Colby) subsequently put it to Komer, “engagement of the population in a pacification effort, to secure its collaboration in expunging the communist fish from the popular sea, must come as a result of a motivated population, not merely an administered one.”
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For his part, Lodge did not know whether Komer was an expert or an amateur on pacification; he did think him a pain in the ass. The ambassador did not respond well to having arrangements imposed upon him. He had accepted Porter as deputy for pacification and then assigned him most of the embassy's administrative duties. When Porter was able to give time to the “other war,” he showed himself to be a conciliator rather than a whip-cracker, and he wanted to be left alone. “I am frankly non-plussed by the tone of our recent exchanges,” Komer wrote to Porter in late July, “which from your end seems almost to suggest either that the real war is between Washington and Saigon or that you wish we'd stop bothering you.”
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If these philosophical, personal, and bureaucratic issues were not enough, Komer's decision in the fall of 1966 to recommend that counterinsurgency and pacification be put under Westmoreland and MACV, with himself as civilian deputy in charge, threatened to blow matters completely apart. Surveying the bureaucratic landscape in Saigon, Blowtorch Bob came to the conclusion that only the US military, with 80 percent of the money and personnel in Vietnam, was big enough to take on the other war. Whether or not MACV was the organization best equipped by experience to assume the task—and clearly, with the exception of the Marine Corps, it was not—the counterinsurgency/pacification effort was going to remain a stepchild as long as the US military was not invested in it. But there were signs that the Pentagon was ready to get on board.
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By 1966, Secretary of Defense McNamara was coming around to the idea that pacification was crucial. In part, this had to do with his growing disillusionment with the war itself. In the spring of that year, the Pentagon chief had shocked LBJ by observing that, in his estimation, the United States had no better than a one-in-three chance of winning in Vietnam, and that Washington should consider openings to the National Liberation Front, even to the point of including its representatives in a coalition government. He was, he said, ready to accept responsibility for counterinsurgency and pacification. “McNamara feels it is inevitable that I be given executive responsibility for American support of the Revolutionary Development program,” Westmoreland recorded in his diary. “He is convinced that the State Department officials do not have the executive and managerial abilities to handle a program of such magnitude and complexity. I told Mc-Namara I was not volunteering for the job, yet I would undertake it if the President wished me to do so.” The president tended toward the Komer-McNamara solution, but he did not want to ride roughshod over Rusk and Lodge, who were adamant in their opposition to a military takeover of pacification. The CIA was not only opposed to a MACV takeover, it was ready to cite legal and constitutional arguments—whatever those might have been—to block administration of Agency funds and operations by another bureaucratic entity. The stalemate in Washington continued through the winter of 1966, while counterinsurgency and pacification remained at a standstill in South Vietnam. In November, LBJ wrote to Lodge saying that the civilian sector had four months to get its pacification act together.
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In
Lost Victory
, Colby painted a favorable portrait of Bob Komer. “As chief of the CIA's operations in the Far East,” he wrote, “I came directly under Komer's gun—and loved it. Finally, I had found someone who understood the need for a pacification strategy and who had the clout to push the Washington agencies. . . . He understood what the CIA Station was trying to do in its various experimental programs in the countryside. Insisting only that more be done, he provided the policy approval we needed to do it.” To some extent, Colby was right. Following his April 1966 visit to Vietnam, the Blowtorch reported to LBJ that although the Rural Development program had some “questionable aspects,” it looked like “the most promising approach yet developed.”
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In truth, the thousands of Vietnamese who passed through the Vung Tau training center were a microcosm of the society, a reflection of its many
ambiguities and contradictions. Some of the trainees, indeed many, were former Viet Cong. “Every effort was made to convert VC sympathizers (and even those who engaged in guerrilla activities),” South Vietnamese pacification expert Tran Ngoc Chau wrote, “by helping to solve their personal and family problems, usually created by local authorities and troops. . . . If these efforts did not succeed, we tried compromising the individuals in various ways so that they would either have to work with us, or at a minimum be less effective for the other side.” A few of the trainees were Viet Cong cadres themselves and remained so, clandestinely organizing and recruiting agents who would sabotage pacification efforts once the trainees graduated and went into the field. Many of the recruits brought their families with them to Vung Tau to protect them from communist retaliation. Security was hardly absolute, however; periodically, the Viet Cong units active in the Vung Tau area would shell one of the camps. The South Vietnamese government had its own agents in the barracks and classrooms. Ky clearly did not trust Chau, who became camp commander in 1966; the whole census-grievance methodology, with all its revolutionary implications, was anathema. As was true of South Vietnam in general, loyalties at the training camps were unclear and constantly shifting; intrigue and conspiracy were everywhere. Chau and his successor, Major Nguyen Be, an exceptionally able and outspoken officer who had been running pacification in Binh Dinh Province, labored constantly to create a higher loyalty, but they were only partially successful.
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