Shadow Warrior (55 page)

Chau had long believed that those who had fought with the Viet Minh were nationalists first and communists second, turning to Marxism-Leninism only because they believed it was the only alternative for achieving unification and freedom from foreign domination. In 1964, he had informed the CIA station in Saigon that he had been in contact with “some high ranking officials from Hanoi” who wanted to discuss a possible compromise peace settlement. He asked for an interview with Ambassador Taylor to get his advice, but was rebuffed. The contact, as it turned out, was Chau's brother, Tran Ngoc Hien, an agent of the North Vietnamese government. Hien and Chau would meet periodically at the house of their parents. In Vietnam, family generally trumped ideology. In 1967, Chau finally identified Hien as his communist interlocutor. The Saigon station, then under the direction of Far East Division head Colby, told Chau that he needed to bring Hien in. He refused. The following year, in the wake of Tet, Hien did his best to persuade Chau to defect, promising him any position within the National Liberation Front that he might desire. Chau refused. He could not buy into a system that would always sacrifice the interests of the individual to those of the state.
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In the fall of 1968, Chau moved to create a national political movement that would be built on the rice-roots political revolution that Vann, Scotton, Bumgardner, and Colby had been touting since 1964. He asked the CIA for help; Bill Kohlman, Chau's CIA contact, replied that help would be available only if Chau and his movement made a commitment in advance
to support President Thieu and his policies. Chan demurred. In January 1969, the soldier turned politician announced his peace plan. The National Liberation Front would be asked to designate a certain number of delegates to the National Assembly, as long as they were not communists. The NLF would be permitted to participate in the 1971 presidential elections. Saigon and Hanoi would enter into direct negotiations. Significantly, there was no mention of the United States. Chau later claimed that he recognized immediately that Nixon and Kissinger intended to abandon South Vietnam at the first opportunity. Shortly thereafter, Hien was captured, and in July he was convicted of being an enemy agent. His relationship to Chau was widely touted by the Thieu regime and its captive newspapers. Ominously, Scotton, Bumgardner, and Vann were ordered by Ambassador Bunker to sever all ties with their comrade.
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Knowing that Jean Sauvageot was also an old friend of Chau's, Colby told him to keep his distance. Sauvageot could not. One day he snuck out of the Presidential Palace, where he had a desk in the prime minister's office, and rode his bicycle to the house where Chau was hiding. The two men talked for a while, the American urging Chau to do what was best for him and his family. Upon his return to the palace, Sauvageot found a note from Colby waiting. “I warned you not to see that man,” it read. A CIA acquaintance later told Sauvageot that Colby had a transcript of their conversation on his desk before Sauvageot returned to his post.
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Chau's arrest, conviction, and imprisonment caused a major flap in the United States. Fulbright had his staff investigate and subsequently incorporated the case in his indictment of both the Thieu regime and the US war effort. Vann and Ellsberg were furious at the US Mission's abandonment of Chau. “It wasn't hard to get Vann pissed,” Scotton recalled, “but I had never seen him that mad before or after.” The real villain in the whole affair, in the eyes of Chau's American supporters, was not Colby, but Ted Shackley, the CIA station chief. “Shackley told Bunker that ‘We had documentary proof' that Chau was a communist,” Scotton said. “That was an absolute lie.” Frank Snepp agreed. “Ted Shackley did his best to destroy Chau,” he said. “He had this fixation on Chau. Shackley was a political animal to the core.” In fact, the head of the Vietnamese Special Forces had contacted Shackley before he arrested Chau. The chief of station assured him that he had no interest in the man and no objection to Saigon taking legal action against him.
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If Vann was infuriated, Daniel Ellsberg was devastated. By 1970, he was back in the United States, working as a consultant for the Rand Corporation. Following Chau's arrest he arranged an interview with former undersecretary of state Nicholas Katzenbach to plead for US intervention. The State Department asked Bunker to look into the affair, but that was as far as it went. “Chau and [Nguyen] Be and Hien were all part of a group who Ellsberg, Vann, Bumgardner, and I thought, if South Vietnam could make it through the next decade, through the Thieus, the Viens, the Khiems—this would be the leadership for a new Vietnam,” Scotton later said. “We thought if they do in Chau, and we allow it, then what hope was there?” For Ellsberg, Chau's arrest and America's official indifference was a turning point. “The single most important person in Dan's thinking about the war, the sociology of it, was Tran Ngoc Chau,” Frank Scotton said. “Vann was committed to staying in the war with this smoldering resentment at what had happened; Ellsberg was not. I was in Washington when he was preparing the [Pentagon] papers for release. The Chau case was unfolding at the time and was crucial to his decision.”
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That Colby could have saved Chau is doubtful. What is clear is that he did not try. It was true that, on one level, it was structurally difficult, if not impossible, for the United States to aid and abet a change of government that would profoundly alter the social and economic structure of the country in question. Colby may have recalled McGeorge Bundy's observation in 1965 when he had told him that fostering such change might be desirable, but was institutionally impossible—that is, under time-honored diplomatic rules, Washington interacted with established governments, not revolutionary movements (not unless they were anticommunist). A coup was a different matter. Usually, it was a family affair, involving the exchange of one group of elites for another. The nations of Latin America had labored long and hard to persuade the United States to recognize the juridical equality of all states and not, à la Woodrow Wilson, to apply ideological and other standards to a new regime when considering recognition. And, of course, there was the Cold War prism through which the United States still tended to view every foreign regime and international situation. Colby would remark to Jean Sauvageot, his liaison to the prime minister's office, that Chau's trial and imprisonment were “very unfortunate but . . . we had our relations with the Vietnamese government to consider and had to be very careful.” In subsequent remarks he was not nearly so sensitive. “He
[Chau] was an officer, and he was a province chief and a good one,” Colby said in an oral history, “but he had been contacted by his brother who was a North Vietnamese officer. He had not reported it, and in time of war I really can't get very much cranked up about punishing somebody who plays that game.”
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The arrest and trial of Tran Ngoc Chau showed the CIA in Vietnam in its true colors, and when push came to shove, Bill Colby was CIA to the core. In the developing world during the Cold War, picking the right side was everything. In 1963, during the coup that overthrew the House of Ngo, the Agency had cultivated each faction, waiting to see who would come out on top, and then, just before the climax, threw in with the victor. This was the classic realist approach to counterinsurgency. Colby was a realist first, an idealist second. He was no doubt sincere in his efforts to empower the Rhade, the Hmong, and the Vietnamese peasantry in general, but neither he nor the Agency was going to lead a revolution. In this they were reflecting American Cold War policy. In the end, Chau and Thieu, like Diem, Khanh, and Ky, were merely pawns. Chau, Scotton, Ellsberg, and to a degree Vann were subversives; unconventional Colby might have been, but there were lines beyond which he would not go.

Life for Bill Colby in South Vietnam was not all reports, briefings, and overnight trips to contested villages. He lived alone in his villa in downtown Saigon. Much to the admiration of his subordinates, the former Jedburgh drove himself around Saigon without escort day and night. This was in contrast to Shackley, who traveled about ostentatiously in his armored black limousine with armed outliers. When in town, Colby was a frequent attendee at the endless round of cocktail parties and dinners. One of his aides, Tony Cistaro, remembered being at a private dinner when Colby, unaware that any other CORDS people were invited, showed up with a beautiful Vietnamese woman on his arm. Colby was on leave from the CIA, but he was still CIA, and the Agency personnel who worked the PRUs and PICs were under his command. If Colby wanted to hobnob with the Vietnamese and French elite, there was the Cercle Sportif. If he wanted American, and especially CIA, company, there was the Duc Hotel. Situated at 14 Tran Qui at the corner of Cong Le, the Duc was only a block from the Presidential Palace and four blocks from the US embassy. The CIA leased the entire five-story hotel to serve as a residence for new arrivals until they completed in-country processing and received their assignments.

The rooftop swimming pool was nicknamed “The Bay of Pigs.” Sundays at the Duc were reserved for socializing. The day started with Bloody Marys and brunch, then continued with swimming, sunbathing, and conversation. Besides the restaurant, bar, and swimming pool, there was a small theater, a liquor store, and a recreation room. Behind the pool was a poker room where a high-stakes game was almost always in session. Nung Chinese guarded the front and rear gates with unloaded weapons. The family that rented the hotel to the CIA had twelve children, one of whom was an officer in the North Vietnamese Army.
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Colby was always surrounded by a coterie of admiring protégés. In addition to Gage McAfee, there was Steve Young. Colby had known Young's father, Kenneth, who had been Kennedy's ambassador to Thailand. Steve had met Colby for the first time when the CORDS chief came to Vinh Long for one of his inspections. Young was a USAID officer and happened to be assigned to give the briefing that day. The topic was energizing village governments. A week or so later, Young got a call on the radio ordering him to report to Saigon. He asked why, but received no answer. Dutifully, he caught a ride on a C-134. After landing at Tan Son Nhut, he reported to CORDS headquarters and was directed to a Mr. Aubrey Elliott, “a very prim and proper senior aide with a starched white shirt and a bow tie,” he recalled. Young introduced himself, and Elliott told him to be ready to report for work the following Monday. “The hell I am,” Young said. “I don't know if you've noticed, but there is a war going on and it's not happening in Saigon.” You have your orders, was the reply. At that point, Young had not lost his idealism. He had volunteered for Vietnam; he had come to make a difference. He thought, “I'll call Ambassador Colby and he'll get me out of this.” Colby's secretary put Young through at once.

“Yes, this is Bill Colby.”

“Mr. Ambassador, I am sorry to disturb you, but some son of a bitch is trying to pull me out of the provinces and bring me to Saigon. I need your help.”

“Oh, Steve, I thought you would be very good in that job.”

(Pause)

“Was that nine o'clock on Monday morning?”
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Like McAfee, Young found Colby to be selfless, unassuming, committed, and always open to criticism and new ideas. “You are a leader whom we would follow anywhere,” Young would write as his boss was about to
depart Vietnam, “because we believe that with you we can finish the job, any job.” Years later, Paul Colby, Bill's youngest son, observed: “In many ways my father was more intimate with his protégés—Stephen Young and Gage McAfee—than with his children. He was, after all, responsible for his children—discipline, preparation for life and all that.”
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In March 1970, Richard Nixon announced the phased withdrawal of 150,000 troops over the next year. He hoped, as he later observed in his memoirs, that this would “drop a bombshell on the gathering spring storm of anti-war protest.” But the move caused him serious problems with the military. Abrams pleaded with the White House to avoid setting fixed timetables and instead tie withdrawals to advances in pacification and modernization of the ARVN. Nixon and Kissinger refused. General Alexander Haig, one of Kissinger's deputies and a White House errand boy, visited MACV. One of Abrams's lieutenants blurted out, “We have two of your messages. One of them says ‘go get 'em' and the other one says ‘hurry up and get out.'” Haig replied, “Well, it's ‘go get 'em' until the end of the period.”
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The same month that Nixon made his troop withdrawal announcement, Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk was overthrown by a pro-American clique headed by General Lon Nol. On March 12, the new government issued a decree ordering all Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops to be out of the country within three days. The US Mission in Saigon was overjoyed. Not only had Sihanouk tolerated communist sanctuaries along the border with South Vietnam, he had also turned a blind eye as North Vietnam funneled thousands of tons of arms and other supplies through the port of Sihanoukville. The Nixon administration quickly extended diplomatic recognition to the new regime in Phnom Penh and launched a major aid program. The president subsequently endorsed a plan whereby a combined US-ARVN force would invade and clean out two enemy troop concentrations in Cambodia just west and north of Saigon. Chances were that the Cambodian incursion would reignite the antiwar movement in the United States, the president realized, but it would also appease MACV and the Thieu regime and, more substantively, buy time for Vietnamization. This was vintage Nixon: alternately appease and attack the doves, and placate the hawks, all the while pursuing an irreversible course of de-escalation.