Shadow Warrior (48 page)

Late in 1961, Golitsin, a KGB officer, had surrendered himself to CIA agents in Finland. He was vetted by Britain's MI-6 and officers of Angleton's CI division. America's counterspy personally endorsed Golitsin's bona fides and from that point on treated everything the defector said as the gospel truth. Angleton subsequently gave him the keys to the kingdom, that is, access to the vault. Using the material within, Golitsin began casting suspicion on various CIA operatives, especially in the Soviet–East European
division. The Agency was riddled with moles, he told Angleton. Expect the KGB to send false defectors to spread disinformation.

Just as Golitsin had suspected he would, Angleton exulted. Almost on cue, Soviet KGB officer Yuri Nosenko contacted American embassy officials in Geneva in June 1962, offering to sell information. The deal was sealed, and for the next two years Nosenko fed the CIA intelligence on KGB activities inside and outside the Soviet bloc. In 1964, feeling the hot breath of the Kremlin's security apparatus on his neck, Nosenko himself defected.

From the outset, Angleton and others on his CI team were suspicious of Nosenko. He was just too good to be true. When the Russian insisted that the KGB had shunned Lee Harvey Oswald repeatedly during the assassin's time in the Soviet Union, and in fact had been “horrified” by the killing of the president, Angleton became convinced that he was a double agent. Golitsin had warned him that Nosenko's appearance just three months after JFK's assassination, and his news that Oswald was not a KGB hit man, seemed too coincidental. Angleton bullied the head of the Soviet and East European Division at that time into agreeing with him, and for the next two years Nosenko was intermittently confined and interrogated in a CIA safe house in Clinton, Maryland. During the first year and a half, his home was a ten-by-ten-foot concrete cell with an iron bed bolted to the floor. He was put on a diet of little more than bread and water and subjected to sensory deprivation. Throughout, Nosenko refused to confess. In 1966, Helms ordered his release, but the case was still pending when the director asked Bill Colby to take over the Soviet and East European Division. Nosenko's plight was symptomatic.
¹⁰

By the time Colby arrived on the scene in the fall of 1967, Angleton had so paralyzed the Soviet and East European Division that the Agency was producing virtually no human intelligence (HUMINT) on its most fearsome opponent. “Indeed,” he later observed, “we seemed to be putting more emphasis on the KGB as the CIA's adversary than on the Soviet Union as the United States' adversary.” Colby hoped to avoid a clash with Angleton, but if that was what the situation required, so be it. A sudden turn of events, however, postponed the confrontation.
¹¹

One afternoon in November, Richard Helms summoned Colby to his office. Bob Komer had pulled a fast one on him, he complained. During the most recent of LBJ's famous “Tuesday lunches,” the president had
turned to Helms and said that Komer had asked that Colby be dispatched to Saigon to act as his deputy in running CORDS. Johnson had made it plain that this was not to be considered a request, but an order. Would he think it over? Helms asked Colby. Of course, the former Jedburgh replied.

Colby later wrote in
Honorable Men
that he was at first shocked by the sudden assignment change, but upon reflection, he decided that it made sense. He had been deeply involved in Vietnam for almost a decade; Komer was embarking on a course that Colby had been advocating for years. The assignment would interrupt his career path within the CIA, but hopefully he could get back on track when the war was over. His departure would impose a hardship on Barbara and the children, but he had ordered numerous CIA and Foreign Service Officers to make the same sacrifice. During a lengthy discussion with his wife, Colby convinced her that the family would have to do what was best for the country. The temptation “to move toward the sound of the guns” was irresistible, and both knew it. Informed of the decision the next morning, Helms thanked Colby and assured him that he would be welcomed back to the Agency at the close of his assignment.
¹²

From a bureaucratic perspective, Colby's appointment as CORDS deputy was essential. The CIA was already running the Rural Development Cadre program, the counterterror teams, and the Provincial Interrogation Centers. It would have to assume a central role in any assault on the infrastructure of the enemy in South Vietnam, the omnipresent Viet Cong cadre. The Agency was not about to allow Komer and CORDS to gain control over Agency operations and funds. Having a CIA man as Blowtorch Bob's deputy was a solution to the problem. Nevertheless, in his memoir, Helms accused Colby of conspiring with Komer behind his back. “In his book, Colby notes that the appointment came as news to him,” Helms wrote. “This I must doubt. I've been around Washington too long to believe that a senior officer of one agency might be transferred across town to another agency, and offered the prospect of ambassadorial rank, without ever having been asked if he might so much as consider the proposition.” He added, “It is probably just as well that Colby was assigned to Saigon. His lack of understanding of counterintelligence, and his unwillingness to absorb its precepts, would not have been compatible with the Soviet responsibility, and would surely have put him at loggerheads with Jim Angleton.”
¹³

Helms's reaction to Colby's reassignment is fraught with possible hidden meanings. One explanation is that he felt insulted: the Soviet division was a plum, and Colby had rejected his offer of it. Another is that Helms was setting Colby up for a showdown with Angleton, a confrontation in which he was sure Angleton would prevail. In truth, Helms was much closer to Angleton than Colby; he came out of the espionage and counterespionage side of the organization. Political action and covert operations had never excited him, although he was willing to bend with the wind when counterinsurgency and pacification became popular at the White House. The sound of guns aside, by accepting the CORDS position (even possibly having arranged to be offered it), Colby might have been escaping the trap that was being set for him. But the former Jedburgh had another reason for wanting an assignment in South Vietnam. By 1967, he had become completely alienated from Barbara.

According to one source, Bill had told Bob Myers, his old friend and former deputy, that he knew two weeks after his marriage that he had made a dreadful mistake. Barbara Heinzen came from money and had attended Barnard College, but her adolescence and early womanhood had not been particularly happy. Following a nervous breakdown and subsequent illness, her father died during her freshman year in college. Her mother was a fashionista, a social butterfly, and not particularly nurturing. Bill Colby was just one of several boys she dated. After Bill left for the service, she became engaged to a young man who was subsequently killed in action. Bill would later confide to his second wife that when he was home on leave awaiting orders for the Pacific, he got out his little black book and began calling girls he had dated before the war. Barbara was the fifth or sixth, not the first, as he would claim in his memoir.
¹⁴
They got married because that was what returning veterans and the girls who waited at home did. The couple had five children not because they were Catholic—both Bill and Barbara were only children—but because this was typical in the 1950s: couples during that decade had four offspring, on average.

As the years passed, Barbara became more and more garrulous, talking at times nonstop about nothing in particular. “She was completely effervescent, talked all the time, going from one thing to another. Sometimes she would come back to what the hell she was talking about and sometimes she wouldn't,” family friend Stan Temko later observed. “They [Bill and Barbara] were completely in a way different personalities.” Barbara loved
cocktail parties and small talk; he hated both. Bill loathed suburban life; Barbara thrived on it. The task of raising five children with her husband absent for long stretches of time created a rising tide of resentment. To make matters worse, one, Catherine, had medical problems. She suffered from epilepsy all her life, her grand mal seizures only moderated by medication. Redheaded, plump, insecure, Catherine adored her father. She wanted desperately to please him, for him to be to her what Bill's mother had been to him. When he was with his daughter, Bill largely filled the bill. There were shared interests and an intimacy that sometimes seemed lacking in Bill's relationships with other members of his family. The problem was that father and daughter were too often separated.
¹⁵

Increasingly, to Barbara's intense frustration, her husband shut her out, even from the family arguments that periodically raged after Carl and Catherine began flirting with the antiwar movement. She would sometimes join them, trying to take the moral high ground. Bill generally ignored her. “Their marriage was unbelievable,” Susan Colby, John's wife, recalled. “I've never seen anything like it. They fought all the time, about the war, when he was going to come home, you name it. . . . There would be these endless dinners.”
¹⁶

Several times after returning from trips, Colby would pull up in front of the house in Bethesda and be unable to get out of the taxi. When rumors of a Saigon affair drifted back to Barbara, she denied the possibility. “We have a contract,” she declared. By the time Bill was assigned to CORDS, families were not allowed to accompany military and government personnel assigned to Vietnam. “I had one friend, a wife, who said why don't you come to Bangkok,” Barbara recalled. “But I had five children, and Cathy wasn't well. I couldn't go to Bangkok or the Philippines. I wouldn't have seen that much of him anyway, and I would have had a whole new deal with schools.”
¹⁷
Her husband was, no doubt, greatly relieved. Bill Colby agreed to go to Vietnam to become second in command at CORDS because he wanted to serve his country and save himself. For him, freedom had become a personal as well as a political cause.

It would be three months, however, before Colby could actually take his leave of the Agency and depart for Saigon. He was still tasked with finding his replacement as head of the Far East Division, and he had to get his personal life in order. Feeling some guilt over leaving Catherine and Paul, who was just entering adolescence, Colby spent as much time as he could
with his children. While skating on a frozen portion of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal that runs through Georgetown, he fell and broke his ankle. During his brief convalescence, Colby talked with his children about the future. Catherine had become vastly enamored of Vietnam, though she had been a small child during the family's years there. What he intended to do, he assured her, was to help the Vietnamese help themselves, to build on the CIDG program and raise up self-sufficient, politically active communities throughout the countryside that could put South Vietnam on the road to self-determination and a prosperous, noncommunist future.
¹⁸

In the privacy of his own thoughts, Colby was moderately optimistic. The team being assembled in Vietnam—Komer, Bunker, and Abrams—promised a coordination and cooperation that had not hitherto existed within the US Mission. The Johnson administration had declared that the “other war” would take precedence, that the regular military would be the tail and counterinsurgency and pacification the dog. Colby was enthusiastic about a CORDS in which civilians reported to military and military to civilians, though he was never able to rid himself of a lingering distrust of the Pentagon.
¹⁹
He had been heartened when, on November 27, the White House announced that Robert McNamara was stepping down as secretary of defense to become president of the World Bank. Colby speculated that the original whiz kid had become disillusioned with the war when he realized, finally, that success or failure could not be measured in numbers. In truth, McNamara's views on the war were driven by the Kennedy family. When Jack and Bobby were hawks, he was a hawk. By 1966, Bobby had begun to turn against the war, partly out of conviction and partly out of his determination to offer an alternative to the hated LBJ and deny him the Democratic nomination in 1968. Whatever the case, a major obstacle to fighting the other war had been removed. Hopefully, Westmoreland would soon follow McNamara to the exit.

On the afternoon of January 29, 1968, Langley received a flash message from the Saigon station. It was 3
A.M
. in South Vietnam. A team of Viet Cong sappers was in the process of blasting a large hole in the wall surrounding the US embassy and infiltrating the courtyard of the compound. Colby, still nominally Far East Division head, flashed back the gratuitous advice that the Communications Center should button up its steel doors.
²⁰
The sappers were unable to penetrate the heavy doors at the main entrance to the embassy building and so retreated to the courtyard to take cover behind
large concrete flowerpots. They raked the building with rockets and automatic weapons fire. A small detachment of Marines and Military Police (MPs) kept the Viet Cong pinned down until reinforcements arrived and killed all nineteen of them.

The attack on the US embassy was but a small part of the Tet Offensive, a massive, coordinated communist assault against the largest urban areas of South Vietnam. In all, the Viet Cong struck 36 of 64 provincial capitals, 5 of 6 major cities, 64 district capitals, and 50 hamlets. In addition to the embassy, enemy units assaulted Saigon's Tan Son Nhut Airport, the Presidential Palace, and the headquarters of South Vietnam's general staff. In Hue, 7,500 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops stormed and eventually took control of the ancient Citadel, the interior city that had been home to the emperors of Vietnam.