Shadow Warrior (46 page)

As Far East Division head, Bill Colby kept close tabs on developments at Vung Tau. He thought Chau able and energetic, but a bit too independent, a bit too much “the mandarin,” as he once put it. He expressed support for Be, but observed that although he was an exceptionally talented pacification planner, he was possessed of “ingrained xenophobia and hypersensitive nationalism.” For Colby, Chau and Be were a means to an end; at this point, however, that end remained obscure. Colby and Carver would criticize those who would seize control of counterinsurgency and pacification, including Komer, for not having a “doctrine,” for neglecting the political approach, for seeking to manipulate rather than engage the population. In their own way, however, they were as vague and mystical as the activist Mahayana Buddhists of whom they were so dismissive. Yet another CIA review of the Vietnam situation, vetted in February 1967, and in all probability written by Colby, declared that neither the military nor
the civilian roles and mission statements provided “a clear-cut definition of the fundamentally political objective of the pacification task, which is to align the people against the Viet Cong and on the side of the GVN [South Vietnamese government]. All other aims and goals—security, social development, administrative control, democracy, economic development, etc.,—are really subordinate to the basic political objective of turning the people against the VC and gaining their support for the GVN.”
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One thing was clear—that Bill Colby and the CIA were not averse to dallying with the devil—in this case, the Vietnamese communists. Neither was Lyndon Johnson, but his room for political maneuver was shrinking. Archrival Robert Kennedy had come out in favor of negotiation with the National Liberation Front, raising a firestorm among supporters of the war, both Democratic and Republican. The president had to publicly disavow any intention of allowing the communists into whatever political tent might be erected, but what he said behind the scenes was another matter. As noted earlier, in 1966 LBJ named Averell Harriman his “ambassador for peace.” Most wrote off the appointment as a stunt to undercut the mushrooming antiwar movement in the United States, but they were only partially correct. There was some real hope in the State Department that the United States could find exploitable issues between the National Liberation Front and its northern sponsors, and in the summer of 1965, Bill Bundy asked the CIA to explore this possibility. Nguyen Khanh, then in exile in the United States, met secretly with a CIA operative, offering himself as an intermediary in talks with the NLF.
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Meanwhile, the Komer juggernaut was about to pick up steam. Despite the Rural Development Cadre program, pacification continued to proceed at only a modest pace. The CIA estimated that during all of 1966, 400 villages were brought under South Vietnamese control, for a total of 4,400 out of 11,250. These less than impressive numbers were due in part to enemy countermeasures. The NLF's Liberation Radio on April 3 broadcast a warning that “the enemy is concentrating great efforts on training a group of lackeys, the so-called Pacification . . . Cadres, and organizing them into groups to follow the rebel forces to deceive and repress our population.” Accordingly, the communists called for “great attention to the destruction of US-Rebel Pacification Groups.”
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In March 1967, LBJ appointed Komer deputy for pacification to the US military commander, William Westmoreland. All pacification activities
would be placed under his supervision, whether they were civilian or military. At the same time that Johnson named Komer to assume control of the pacification effort, he created a new, more comprehensive organization for him to head. National Security Action Memorandum 362 established CORDS—Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support.
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Leaving no question regarding his authority, the Blowtorch descended on Saigon and ordered the biggest, blackest limousine he could find. He had it adorned with a four-star flag indicating that he was the equal of Westmoreland's other three deputies. In the days and weeks that followed, Komer ran roughshod over anyone and everyone who got in his way except Westmoreland, to whom he was relentlessly obsequious. But Komer was only the first member of a new American team that would put the “other war” front and center.

By the close of 1966, it was clear that Henry Cabot Lodge's days in Saigon were numbered, politics or no politics. In December, John Roche, special assistant to the president, reported on his trip to Vietnam: “I discovered on arriving that—with the elections [to a constituent assembly] a mere ten days off—Ambassador Lodge was off on vacation in Thailand,” he wrote. “Deputy Ambassador Porter has been virtually forbidden by the chief of Mission to deal with Thieu and Ky—the Kys talk only to Lodges. And Lodge doesn't talk to anybody—in Saigon at least.”
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Mercifully, in February 1967, the ambassador announced his desire to return to the States and resume civilian life. To Colby's delight, LBJ chose veteran diplomat Ellsworth Bunker to replace him. A tall, regal aristocrat, Bunker had made his fortune with the United Fruit Company and assorted banking and investment firms. He had served as ambassador to Brazil, Italy, and India, and most significantly, as far as LBJ was concerned, as his troubleshooter during the 1965 Dominican crisis. Vigorous despite his seventy years, Bunker had recently married the US ambassador to Nepal. “The president emphasized the fact that he wanted to see the training of the Vietnamese accelerated and speeded up to enable us to more quickly turn the war over to them,” Bunker later recalled of his appointment. After stopping off at Guam in March for yet another Vietnam summit conference, he arrived in Saigon on April 22.
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Then in May, General Creighton Abrams—who had welcomed Colby in out of the field in France in 1944—arrived to assume the post of liaison
between the US and South Vietnamese militaries. A West Point graduate, Abrams had distinguished himself in both World War II and the Korean conflict. Although he could be gruff and profane, the cigar-chomping Abrams was, as Colby put it, “more the Eisenhower than the MacArthur or the Patton.”
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Indeed, JFK had thought him sufficiently enlightened and diplomatic to place him in command of federal troops during the Mississippi integration crisis. A connoisseur of classical music, Abrams was a convert to the “other war,” indeed, a not-so-secret agent in the campaign to subsume conventional military operations to counterinsurgency and pacification.

At the Guam Conference in March, Johnson had touted democracy and told Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky that his birthday was in August—and the best present he could possibly receive would be national elections. Dutifully, Ky returned home and announced that elections for president, vice president, and delegates to the National Legislature would be held in the fall of 1967. Here, if ever, was the opportunity for Colby, perhaps the Agency's preeminent theoretician and practitioner of political action, to apply the lessons he had learned in Italy to Vietnam.

In April, a “Political Development Working Group” convened at CIA headquarters to decide how best to facilitate the elections. Several participants argued, in line with the February report, that the CIA must do all in its power to help establish a broad-based political movement that could serve as the rallying point for noncommunist nationalists and compete with the National Liberation Front and Viet Cong. To everyone's consternation, Colby objected. There was no time to grow a rice-roots movement, he insisted. The best alternative was to develop a list of acceptable candidates and provide them with surreptitious support.
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For all his talk about local empowerment and his subordinates' repeated calls for a rice-roots revolution, Colby was not able to shed the Agency's penchant for men on horseback. Vietnam was not Italy with its Western-style parliamentary institutions, legal system, class system, and educational infrastructure. But neither was it a political void. Nevertheless, Colby's only frame of reference seemed to be Lansdale, Diem, and the sect wars of 1954–1955. The Agency should continue to search for another Diem-Magsaysay and then use its money and influence to align Vietnam's various factions behind him.

Shortly after Ky set the date for national elections, he declared his candidacy for the presidency. Chief of Station John Hart and the station assumed
that a military ticket would win; indeed, at that point they preferred such an outcome. Ky sent his police chief, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, to the embassy to solicit campaign funds, which Bunker instructed Hart to provide, but the Americans did insist that the military admit legitimate candidates to the field and that it maintain at least the appearance of honesty. In June, urged on by his ambitious wife, Nguyen Van Thieu threw his beret into the ring. Fearing that a split in the military would lead to a civilian and perhaps pro-neutralist victory in September, the Military Revolutionary Council met in emergency session on June 30. Following three days of wrangling, the generals announced that Ky had agreed to run on a Thieu-Ky ticket as vice president. In the weeks that followed, the station worked to persuade various labor, student, and religious organizations to throw their support behind the sure winners. The Thieu-Ky ticket did indeed triumph in September, but with only 35 percent of the vote, a testimony to the relative fairness of the electoral contest.
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Meanwhile, Langley was rife with anxiety that the CIA's counterinsurgency/pacification operations would be swallowed by the Komer operation. The Agency was willing to cooperate, but only to a degree. It was not just a matter of bureaucratic ego, but of protection of the Agency's ever-sacred methods and sources. If those were opened up to outsiders, the CIA would no longer be the CIA. In July, Helms dispatched Colby to Vietnam to survey the Agency's operations, especially its liaison with CORDS, and report back.

Driving into Saigon from Tan Son Nhut, Colby reflected on how much the city had changed since Diem's time. The airport itself had become one of the largest and busiest in the world, home to a constant stream of military and civilian aircraft ferrying in troops and supplies. Another air base of similar size had been established at Bien Hoa, just 17 kilometers away. One entire corner of Tan Son Nhut was given over to Air America and its secret missions. Madame Nhu was gone; bars and nightclubs were everywhere and open for business twenty-four hours a day. The streets were filled with GI's, both American and Vietnamese, with pedicabs, food vendors, and black marketers hawking their goods and services on every street corner. Merchandise, much of it still bearing PX markings, was displayed in shop windows and sidewalk stalls. Luxury items from Europe were plentiful. People frequented restaurants, hotel bars, and cabarets far into the night. The aroma of barbequed ribs and hamburgers was now as common
in some areas of the city as that of
cha gio
(egg rolls) and
pho
(beef soup with noodles and spicy vegetables). It seemed that everything and everybody was for sale. The outskirts of the city had changed little, still consisting of an endless network of warrens, hutches, and tents housing the city's indigent masses. To make matters worse, Saigon was swollen with refugees, nearly a million since 1963. Rock music blended with traditional Vietnamese melodies, forming a backdrop for the intermittent automatic weapon and artillery fire coming from the perimeter of the city.

One thing had not changed—Saigon's incredibly attractive women. David Lilienthal, whom LBJ had charged with devising a plan for the postwar reconstruction of Vietnam, visited the city about the same time as Colby. Never, he wrote in his diary, had he seen the like. “Along every street, in the open half-plaza, crowded and noisy, these fluttering birds—butterflies?—with the incredibly tiny waists, the silken, long, brilliantly white ‘pants' with the dark panels fluttering fore and aft, half concealing and half not the long silken legs.” There was no contrived shyness, but rather a boldness without calculation. These were not the bar girls, but the working young women of Saigon.
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Colby paid his respects at the embassy and huddled with Hart and his colleagues. He drove the 60 kilometers to Vung Tau and subsequently visited a delta hamlet of some 160 families where the Rural Development Cadre had been active; six months earlier, the area had been home to a mere twelve families, all under Viet Cong control.

Colby was adamantly opposed to the use of Rural Development Cadre or local militia in offensive military operations against the Viet Cong, but that did not mean that his view of pacification was pacifist. Beginning with Lansdale's initial mission to Vietnam, the Agency had compiled names of suspected communists who were active in South Vietnam. The General had carted his burgeoning file trays with him everywhere he went. Colby decided to build on this database, making it more systematic and comprehensive. By the time he arrived in Saigon in 1967, the station had set up several Provincial Interrogation Centers (PICs), where suspected Viet Cong, apprehended primarily by the South Vietnamese counterterror units, were brought for questioning. Colby took time to inspect a couple of the detention centers, which were supervised by a CIA officer but operated by the South Vietnamese government's Special Branch. Whether or not he saw any blood on the walls is unclear, but he did note with pride that the
Agency was churning out seven thousand reports a month, including the identity, location, and function of members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure. Before leaving, he huddled with Komer, who declared that the team that he was part of along with Bunker and Abrams was well on its way to making the “other war” the only war. Upon his return, Colby submitted a comprehensive and generally positive report to Helms, who in turn passed it on to LBJ.
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