Shadow Warrior (56 page)

The Nixon administration claimed a great victory in the wake of the Cambodian incursion: 2,000 of the enemy killed, 800 bunkers destroyed,
and the Central Office for South Vietnam, the “nerve center” of North Vietnamese operations in the south, dispersed. In truth, forewarned, the communists had retreated further into the interior. The incursion had little impact on the enemy's war-making capacity. As the White House had anticipated, Cambodia galvanized the antiwar movement. In May, six students were killed at Kent State and Jackson State, and more than 100,000 protesters gathered in Washington. In June, the Senate voted to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. An amendment sponsored by Senators George McGovern (D-SD) and Mark Hatfield (R-OR), subsequently defeated, would have required the administration to pull all US troops out of South Vietnam by the close of 1971. Nixon, infuriated, approved the “Huston Plan,” which authorized the intelligence services to open mail, employ electronic surveillance devices, and even burglarize to gather evidence against domestic enemies of the administration.

In early 1971, again over the protests of General Abrams, the White House announced the withdrawal of 100,000 additional troops by the end of the year, leaving 175,000 in-country, only 75,000 of whom were combat soldiers. In February, Nixon approved a major ground operation in Laos whose objective was the same as in Cambodia—to buy time for Vietnamization. This time, the North Vietnamese and the Pathet Lao were ready. They repelled the offensive, inflicting a 50 percent casualty rate on the invading ARVN.

Throughout 1970 and 1971, Bill Colby, well aware that he and Abrams were in a race against time, set a consistently upbeat tone in his reports to the US Mission and to those in the American media who were still taking an interest in Vietnam. “By year's end,” he wrote in his memoir, speaking of 1969, “I was staying overnight in areas that had been ‘Indian country' the year before, driving on local roads or going up canals where prudence had dictated no penetration earlier.” To demonstrate that change had truly come to the countryside, he motored 100 miles along Route 4, the road leading south from Saigon through the heart of the Mekong Delta. He encountered the remains of blown bridges and mine craters newly filled with dirt, but no one shot at him. Then, during the 1971 Tet holiday, Colby and John Paul Vann embarked on a much-publicized motorcycle trip across the delta, from Can Tho near the South China Sea to the Cambodian border. “By late 1971,” Colby would later write, “the war in the Delta essentially had been won. Security was so improved that there remained only a
residual level of violence, such as the pop-pop of an AK-47 firing at our helicopter as we flew over the mangrove swamp along the sea in a distant southern district.” Robert Kaiser, a reporter for the
Washington Post
who covered CORDS, dubbed Colby the spokesman for “the new optimists.”
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Many observers believed that the DEPCORDS was helping to create a false reality. James Nach, a high-level political analyst in the US embassy in Saigon and a student of Vietnamese history, likened the situation in the Mekong to that which had existed in Hau Nghia province. While American and ARVN troops swarmed the surface, the Viet Cong and their sympathizers had withdrawn. But the latter were operating their own society belowground in the tunnels of Cu Chi northwest of Saigon. Vann and Colby had literally taken the “high road” during their famous motorcycle trip. If Vann had taken his boss down the muddy side roads that led away from Highway 4, however, he would have found that the area was less pacific than he thought. Perhaps the level of violence had declined, but history and the populace's memory of it remained. Since the late nineteenth century, the rural population in the upper delta had suffered at the hands of landlords and French colonial officials. The communists had begun organizing in Long An and western Dinh Tuon in the 1930s. The flag of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), a yellow star on a red field, was designed and first flew in the delta. Officially “pacified” by 1971, the amoeba-like Viet Cong Infrastructure had separated, reformed, and returned. In 1972, the whole area would blow up once again, leaving the Americans and the South Vietnamese in possession of Highway 4 and little else.
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Vietnamization affected all aspects of the US effort in Vietnam, including the Phoenix program. The PRU teams were Vietnamese, and they were led by Vietnamese officers, but until mid-1970 the South Vietnamese government had not spent a piaster on the program. In July, the US Mission began shifting responsibility for Phuong Huong (the Phoenix program) to the government. Thieu ordered it placed under the Directorate of National Police and canceled draft deferrals for interpreters, those who had constituted the vital link between the PRUs and their American advisers. Shackley, arriving in Vietnam with instructions from Helms to abjure nation-building and counterterrorism and concentrate on traditional intelligence gathering, was anxious to break the CIA-Phoenix link. In 1971, Abrams ordered his staff not to fill the spots in Phoenix that were
being left vacant by officers rotating home. During a December 1970 visit to Washington, Colby found a distinct lack of interest in the entire pacification effort on the part of the administration. As would soon become evident to many within the US Mission, Nixon and Kissinger wanted to deliver a series of face-saving blows to the enemy and then get the hell out of Vietnam.
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Colby consoled himself with the belief that the battle had been won. He and Vann agreed that there would not be another Tet; the possibility of a communist takeover in South Vietnam by means of guerrilla warfare and a popular uprising was gone. The focus of the war would henceforth be on the northern provinces, which would come under increasing pressure from North Vietnamese main force units. Vann asked to be transferred back to II Corps, but this time with supreme authority over all military as well as civilian personnel. It was an audacious request even for a man who had made a career out of being audacious. But after Colby had managed to deflect Bunker's direct order to fire Vann for insubordination, the gadfly had toned down his criticism of the US military and the South Vietnamese government. Abrams probably figured that by the time Vann was in the saddle, there would be very few US troops for the former lieutenant colonel to command. Consequently, he acceded to Colby's request and agreed to make Vann proconsul.
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During this period, Colby appeared to be unwavering in his support of Nguyen Van Thieu. The president had embraced pacification in all its forms, Colby reported to MACV—land reform, village elections, the rule of law, a curb on corruption, and national elections open to all comers.
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He clung to the belief that America's greatest mistake of the war had been to abandon Ngo Dinh Diem. Its greatest accomplishment, perhaps, was to show continuing patience with Thieu, whom Colby believed to be endowed with the same virtues as Diem, but fewer of the vices. Whatever the case, President Thieu required a lot of patience.

In 1969, a joint operation run by the CIA and South Vietnam's Police Special Branch had discovered that the president's top intelligence adviser, Huynh Van Trong, was a communist agent. When Thieu was confronted with the information, he wanted to sweep the matter under the rug. The US Mission insisted, however, that Trong be arrested and publicly denounced. But Trong was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. In 1970, CIA analyst Sam Adams reported to his superiors that the entire government
and ARVN superstructure was Swiss cheese. He and his colleagues estimated that the communists had infiltrated between twenty thousand and thirty thousand operatives into the officer corps and civil bureaucracy. Then there was Thieu's ongoing contempt for the westernized politicians in Saigon and, in George Carver's words, the “alien institutional toys they call political parties.” The president continued to insist that the South Vietnamese were “not interested in [political doctrine]” but simply “wanted to lead better and more prosperous lives without being afraid.” Thieu seemed, Diemlike, unwilling or unable to comprehend that constitutional procedures and the rule of law were a means to that end. In this sense, his views were diametrically opposed to those of Bill Colby.
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National elections were due in October 1971; Thieu and his wife wanted another term. The US Mission was more than happy for the president to stay in power—what Nixon and Kissinger wanted was someone who would maintain order while the United States withdrew—but it wanted the election to be contested. Thieu announced his candidacy on July 24. At that point, Ambassador Bunker paid a clandestine visit to General Duong Van “Big” Minh and offered him as much as $3 million to challenge Thieu. Minh, whose CIA handler affectionately described him as having “the body of an elephant and the brain of a mouse,” agreed to throw his hat into the ring. Vice President Ky then declared his candidacy for the highest office in the land but was disqualified by the Supreme Court. On August 20, Minh withdrew from the race. President Thieu went on to win, with 91.5 percent of the vote.
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All the while, Bill Colby kept up his weekly visits to Prime Minister Khiem and President Thieu, discussing the course of pacification and proposing various anticorruption measures. The Presidential Palace never for a moment believed that Colby had severed his ties with the Agency. Thieu, egged on by Khiem, was already convinced the CIA was trying to pressure him into negotiating a shameful peace with the communists, or even to bring about his overthrow. “I don't think he [Colby] was naïve about what was going on in the Presidential Palace,” Frank Snepp later said. “There was just no other place to go. He kept looking for ways to jerry-build the system. That's what you do when you're fighting the devil incarnate, and Bill Colby believed that the communists were the devil incarnate.”
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Like Frank Scotton, John Paul Vann, Ev Bumgardner, and Dan Ellsberg, Bill Colby had fallen in love with Vietnam. Individual liaisons aside, he
reveled in the manners and customs of the people, the tropical climate, the physical beauty of the place, his postcolonial life in Saigon, and the excitement and adventure of nation-building. “Wear the Arab kit,” T. E. Lawrence had advised young British Foreign Service Officers destined for the Middle East. “Learn all you can. Get to know their families, clans and tribes, friends and enemies, wells, hills and roads . . . speak their dialect of Arabic . . . acquire their trust and intimacy. . . . You will be like an actor in a foreign theater.” There was a saying among old Vietnam hands about those whose final tour was up: “They had to leave their loved ones to return to their families.”
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By this point, Bill and Barbara's marriage was a shell; he dreaded returning home, but by the summer of 1971, he decided, grudgingly, that there was no choice. His eldest daughter, Catherine, was in dire straits. During Bill's rare and brief trips home, Barbara had tried to tell him that the family needed him, but she did not try very hard. Her husband had long ago made it clear that he was doing important, even heroic work, and that he expected his wife and family to do their duty and take care of themselves. Eventually, however, some of the family's friends in the CIA became concerned; an informal delegation approached Colby in Saigon and told him it was time to return to Washington. He could not do it, he said; his country needed him. Finally, Barbara asked thirteen-year-old Paul to intervene. During Bill's last trip home as deputy commander of CORDS in June, Paul met him in the parking lot of the Little Flower Church after one of the interminable meetings his father seemed always to be attending. He told him that he absolutely had to come home. Grudgingly, Colby agreed.
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B
ill Colby would adamantly deny that his role in Vietnam in general, and in the Phoenix program in particular, had anything to do with his daughter's illness. Catherine may not have blamed her father, but the negative publicity surrounding the war on the Viet Cong Infrastructure could not have eased her mind. Indeed, almost as soon as he stepped off the plane from Saigon, Colby was under assault for what one publication would label “The Phoenix Murders.”
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In mid-July, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Operations opened hearings on the USAID program in Vietnam. On the committee were two outspoken critics of Phuong Huong, Ogden Reid (R-NY) and Pete McCloskey (R-CA). Reid, who, like Colby, was a graduate of Columbia Law School, was concerned with the alleged illegal and extraconstitutional aspects of Phoenix. McCloskey, a fierce opponent of the Nixon administration, had previously visited Vietnam. He had been appalled by the conditions he had found at the Provincial Interrogation Centers. Colby appeared on the 19th, and the questioning focused on Phoenix exclusively. “The Phoenix program is not a program of assassination,” the former CORDS chief declared.