Shadow Warrior (50 page)

Still ensconced in Langley, Colby had viewed the evolution of the war on the Viet Cong Infrastructure with mixed feelings. He approved of the campaign in principle, even of its organized violence. Every effort should be made to lure members of the communist cadre to switch sides through indoctrination, persuasion, or blackmail. Failing that, however, the PRUs should take “direct action to capture or arrest” members of the infrastructure; “on occasion casualties will result from efforts by the Viet Cong to escape arrest or capture.” Colby wanted the PRUs to be incorporated into the South Vietnamese National Police. He was, as he would later claim, concerned about due process and ethical treatment of prisoners, but he had another reason. If there should be a cease-fire and negotiations, the PRUs, as part of the police rather than the ARVN, would be able to continue the struggle against the Viet Cong.
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The former Jedburgh quickly settled into his new job as chief deputy to Komer. He was to be Blowtorch Bob's alter ego, knowledgeable about every aspect of CORDS and thus able to stand in for his boss. Technically, Colby
was on leave from the CIA, but he had full access to the station and CIA operations. He could go places where Komer could not. Indeed, that was one of the reasons for his selection. Becoming bogged down in the CORDS-MACV bureaucracy was an ever-present danger. As he had when he was station chief, Colby got out into the field whenever possible. “I saw as the real purpose of my being in Vietnam to spend as many nights as possible in the provinces,” he wrote in
Lost Victory.
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Initially, the new DEPCORDS deputy limited his forays to the weekends. He would put in a half-day at the office on Saturday and then helicopter out in the afternoon to spend the night with a district or province advisory team. Colby did not give advance notice of his arrival. Dinner with the Americans and Vietnamese, an inspection tour the next morning, and then a flight back to Saigion Sunday afternoon in time for a swim and dinner at the Cercle Sportif.

Tet had dealt a major blow to the Viet Cong, but that did not mean the countryside was secure. Excluding communist military forces, the VCI still numbered some 82,000 nationwide. The South Vietnamese government, anxious about protecting its urban constituencies, reverted to its habitual passiveness, redeploying ARVN and even Regional and Popular Forces troops around the country's major population centers. On a visit to the provincial capital of Vinh Long, Colby's helicopter had to descend rapidly in a tight circle to avoid enemy ground fire from the outskirts of the city. A trip to Ban Me Thuot, near his old stomping grounds of Buon Enao, was enlivened by a Viet Cong mortar attack. As the barrage marched up the main thoroughfare, Colby and his cohorts retreated to their compound and, fully armed, sat up all night waiting for a ground attack that never came.
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During his weekend visits to the countryside, Colby, to his dismay, discovered that CORDS would have to spend much of 1968 simply rebuilding South Vietnam. Destruction from the fighting was widespread; virtually every town and village had suffered damage to its infrastructure. Before the 1 million refugees created by Tet could return home, there would have to be homes for them to return to. Colby understood that the vacuum in the countryside would have to be filled before nation-building could begin once again.

What Komer needed above all else were energetic, effective CORDS personnel in the field. His model was John Paul Vann. One of Colby's first forays out of Saigon was to visit with the already legendary proconsul, then
DEPCORDS for II Corps. The two men had met only once, in Washington, when Colby was Far East Division head. Vann had paid a visit to Langley to inform him that the members of the Rural Development Cadre of which the Agency was so proud were spending more time huddled in their compounds protecting themselves than proselytizing among the peasants. With characteristic diplomacy, Colby had observed that he and his colleagues realized that the Vung Tau graduates were a work in progress. Vann remembered the exchange and, mindful of his job security, had expressed some concern to Komer that his new deputy might bear a grudge. One of the reasons for Colby's visit was to assure Vann that this was not the case.

Vann had done his homework and knew where Colby's predilections lay. Their first night together, he took his guest to visit a nearby village whose chief had armed his young men with spears fashioned out of straightened and sharpened car springs. Still hobbled by his skating accident, Colby inspected the ranks with cane in hand and promised the chief real weapons. “The important result of the evening,” Colby observed in
Lost Victory
, “was a clear understanding between Vann and myself that the real way we should be fighting the war was by building communities such as the ones we visited, and gradually pressing the Communists away from the population.”
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Vann and Colby would become allies, if not friends. Colby's depiction of Vann in
Lost Victory
conformed to the image that so many of the counterinsurgency/pacification personnel laboring in the vineyard had of him: an almost fearless man absolutely committed to empowering the rural Vietnamese to take control of their communities and defend them simultaneously against the communists, the Saigonese, and, when necessary, inept Americans. Vann's personal shortcomings, so relentlessly portrayed in Neil Sheehan's
Bright Shining Lie
, were overstated and largely irrelevant, Colby wrote.

There was no doubt about John Paul Vann's bravery, his commitment to the villagers of South Vietnam, or his determination to speak out against injustice and ineptitude, but he was often all sail and no anchor—intelligent, undereducated, and intensely ambitious. Part of the Ellsberg-Scotton-Bumgardner coterie, indeed its titular head, Vann had largely traded in the ideas of others. In truth, Vann's views on the conflict in Vietnam were contradictory, even paradoxical. Like Colby, he was opposed to large-scale US military operations. The further American main force units
were kept from his area of responsibility, the easier his job would be. Unlike Colby, he was opposed to forced relocation programs like the Strategic Hamlet initiative because he thought they tore the fabric of Vietnamese society.
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Vann could be pessimistic, even cynical, about the war. He remained a great friend of Dan Ellsberg even after the latter turned against the conflict and became one of its most vocal critics. “John Paul Vann was just the first among many who served in Hau Nghia who came slowly to believe that we were on the wrong side,” declared Vann's friend Colonel Carl Bernard. “[He and I believed] that the better, and most conscientious persons in Hau Nghia—with just a few exceptions—were working for the Viet Cong.” Bernard recalled that he and Vann often likened themselves to “bankruptcy referees,” that is, individuals dedicated to limiting the damage being done by both sides. The two men, Bernard claimed, had read Ferdinand Otto Miksche's
Secret Forces: The Technique of Underground Movements
, the principal conclusion of which was that once revolutionaries succeeded in implanting an infrastructure, they had won. Yet Vann remained an uncompromising hawk throughout his time in Vietnam. He never reached the point where he believed that too many Vietnamese and Americans were dying. “John Vann never considered that the Vietnamese war might have demanded more, in terms of lives, money, and effort, than it was worth,” Bernard recalled. “No price would have been too great. Vann felt that since America had committed herself to the war effort, she should make the best of it.” On the second if not the first assumption, Colby and Vann saw eye to eye.
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Vann's popularity with the counterinsurgency/pacification people stemmed in no small part from his willingness to speak truth to power. There was his famous exchange with Walt Rostow, LBJ's relentlessly hawkish national security adviser, in December 1967. Buoyed by Westmoreland's optimistic reports, Rostow predicted that there would be a great victory in the coming summer. “Oh, hell no, Mr. Rostow,” Vann replied. “I'm a born optimist; I think we can hold out longer than that.”
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He and another CORDS deputy, Colonel Wilbur Wilson, were openly contemptuous of Westmoreland and his search-and-destroy strategy. At the same time, Vann obsequiously cultivated patrons who could protect him, such as General Bruce Palmer, deputy commander of the US Army in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968 and vice chief of staff of the army from 1968 to 1972. Vann was
deferential to Komer, as well as to Ellsworth Bunker, who had a reputation for firing those who bucked him. Vann was a prolific letter-writer, treating public figures with whom he had only a passing acquaintance—Henry Kissinger, for example—as confidants.

Colby became somewhat addicted to touring the countryside of South Vietnam with Vann. Risk-taking was something the two men had in common, though Colby was somewhat less flamboyant about it. Periodically, Vann would decide to motor about the provinces under his supervision to “find out who owned what.” Inevitably these trips were through territory that was contested. Vann would tell every adviser who came under his command that they must get out in the villages and rice paddies and see for themselves what conditions were like; they needed to visit with village elders and show friend and foe alike that they were not afraid.
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In some ways, the two men were very different. Vann's sexual appetites were legendary, a trait he shared with Ellsberg. Bernard recalled that when he was stateside, Vann would make it a point to visit Ellsberg in Santa Monica for an orgy. In Vietnam, Vann at one point lived near a girls' orphanage and reputedly spent a lot of time there. “His approach to sex was strictly physical,” Bernard observed. “It was something to be done quickly and as often as possible.” Colby professed ignorance of these activities. He would later tell his second wife, Sally, that he and Vann would venture out into the countryside in a jeep or in the latter's International Harvester Scout on Saturday nights in order to “avoid temptation.” Colby was dissembling; he could not have helped knowing about Vann's exploits—the man was an exhibitionist. Nor was Colby pristine in sexual matters; he had come to Vietnam in part to escape from what for him was a loveless marriage. There were reports of other women, but Colby, unlike Vann, was the soul of discretion.
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Three weeks after his arrival in Vietnam, Colby tuned in with other members of the US Mission to listen to LBJ's March 31 speech to the American people on Vietnam. Everyone sensed that a turning point in the war was afoot.

In the weeks following the Tet Offensive, former administration supporters in the media, including the
New York Times
editorial board, had advised the president to negotiate a withdrawal from Vietnam. The “Wise Men”—a group of veteran diplomats called together by LBJ to advise him
on the war in Vietnam—which included such Cold War luminaries as former secretary of state Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett—called for the “gradual disengagement” of the United States from the war.

The military, however, took a different lesson from Tet. Sensing that the time was right for a knockout blow, Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs asked for an additional 205,000 troops, approval for an amphibious landing north of the 17th parallel, and permission to attack North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos. Lyndon Johnson was, to say the least, conflicted. “I feel like a hitchhiker caught in a hailstorm on a Texas highway,” he remarked to an aide. “I can't run, I can't hide. And I can't make it stop.”
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After conferring with Clark Clifford, the new secretary of defense, Johnson rebuffed his military commanders. He approved an additional 22,000 men, chiefly to help lift the siege of Khe Sanh, and ordered Ambassador Bunker to make a “highly forceful” approach to Thieu and Ky to get their house in order.

In his March 31 speech, President Johnson announced that henceforward the bombing of North Vietnam would be limited to the area just above the demilitarized zone, and he declared that the United States was ready for peace talks anytime, anywhere, anyplace. In the event the enemy responded positively and such talks opened, LBJ said, Averell Harriman would serve as head of the US delegation. Then came the bombshell: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as president.”
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Johnson had come to the conclusion that much of the divisive debate at home centered on him personally. The prospect of new leadership, he concluded, might lead to reconciliation both in the United States and abroad.

The “Operation Shock” memo from Colby and his colleagues had played a key role in the decision to deny the request for a major escalation from Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs. It had been the substance of George Carver's presentation to the Wise Men and their subsequent advice to the president that he throw in the towel in Vietnam. On March 27, LBJ demanded and received the same briefing from Carver. Vice President Hubert Humphrey subsequently wrote to Carver to thank him for his “brutally frank and forthright analysis.” The president's speech of March 31, Humphrey declared, “indicated that your briefings had a profound effect on the course of U.S. policy on Vietnam.”
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The irony of the “Operation
Shock” memo was heavy indeed. Tet would provide Bill Colby and his fellow advocates of the “other war” with their greatest opportunity, but the backlash from that initial pessimistic evaluation would constitute their greatest obstacle.

After a great deal of back-and-forth concerning the location and composition of delegations, preliminary peace talks opened in Paris on May 13, 1968. Colby recalled a visit by the new secretary of defense and his chief of international security affairs, Paul Warnke, in the spring of 1968. Neither man seemed at all interested in the military's optimistic reports or the presentations put on by CORDS. “The two visitors departed,” Colby wrote in
Lost Victory
, “with no successful contradiction of their attitude on arrival—to wit, the United States was deep in a quagmire, and the sooner it withdrew, the better.”
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