Shadow Warrior (23 page)

Ever restless, Colby got out of Saigon at every opportunity. He traveled to the Central Highlands with a legislative delegation to witness the inauguration of a government-sponsored settlement to accommodate northern immigrants and surplus population from the coastal lowlands. He did not realize at the time that what he was seeing was a phenomenon similar to the displacement of Native Americans by white settlers. He journeyed to the far south of the country to visit one of Diem's agrovilles in the Ca Mau peninsula. In that province, his hosts told him, there were now some forty elementary and secondary schools, whereas before 1954 there had been but four. In truth, Ca Mau was one of the most insecure regions in South Vietnam; the Agency reported to the State Department in April 1959 that entire districts were under communist control.
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During his first three-year stint in Vietnam, Colby showed no reluctance in traveling to all parts of South Vietnam with his family. There was a Sunday outing to see the multicolored tile and ceramic Cao Dai cathedral at Tay Ninh. The family journeyed farther south, to the coast, and hired a fishing boat to ferry them to the island of Phu Quoc, a refuge for the leaders of the Tay Son Rebellion of the 1770s and onetime home to Alexandre de Rhodes, the Portuguese missionary who had published the first Portuguese-Latin-Vietnamese dictionary. Colby's son Carl remembered two things from the trip: a shark larger than the fishing boat, and the incredible smell from the bins of fermenting fish destined to become
nuoc mam
, the ubiquitous fish sauce of Vietnamese cuisine. Bill remembered “the main roads of the Mekong . . . filled with multicolored, rickety buses hurtling through bucolic villages to teeming market centers.”
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On another outing, Bill and his oldest son, John, took a train north from Saigon to Hue, the old imperial capital situated at the mouth of the Perfume River and home to many of the country's most influential intellectuals and revolutionaries. From Hue the two traveled by automobile to the Ben Hai River which bisected the Demilitarized Zone separating North Vietnam from South. From this vantage point they could see the North Vietnamese flag flying from a military outpost. It was then on to Khe Sanh by way of Highway 9. All along the route were burned-out French villas and tiny forts and guard towers manned in the past, usually with disastrous results, by the French and their Vietnamese collaborators. The Colby family loved to visit Dalat, the exotic mountain resort town where, at 5,000 feet, Americans, Europeans, and members of the Vietnamese elite could escape the heat and humidity of Saigon and its environs.

Somehow, Bill found time to head up a Boy Scout troop during his stint in Vietnam, where the Scouts were immensely popular. The upper echelons of the Viet Minh, the military force that had defeated the French in the First Indochinese War, had been filled with former Scouts. Carl remembered on one occasion being flown with the rest of his troop for an outing near Dalat by an air force colonel named Nguyen Cao Ky. Finally, Vietnam was home to some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. Europeans and Americans favored two resorts—Cape St. Jacques, only 60 miles from Saigon, and Nha Trang, an overnight train ride from the capital. During a return trip from one of their weekends at the beach, the Colbys' train shuttered violently to a stop. Shrouded in darkness, huddled in their compartment, Barbara and the children, including baby Christine, born in Saigon in 1960, waited while Bill went to investigate. It turned out that a squad of communist insurgents had dynamited a rail bridge, taking the locomotive and the first couple of cars down with it. With a single ARVN guard at each end of the surviving string of coaches, the passengers were forced to wait in suspense until dawn brought a relief train from Saigon.
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As 1959 turned into 1960, Bill Colby became increasingly convinced that the Diem regime, supported by the American mission, was pursuing policies that were not only irrelevant to effective nation-building but counterproductive. The Agroville Program, designed to concentrate scattered peasant settlements into larger communities where the ARVN could provide security, was a case in point. The Vietnamese practiced ancestor worship, which included annual ritual visitations to their gravesites. To induce the rural population to move far from their ancestors' tombs, the government promised schools, hospitals, and market facilities. But when the uprooted arrived at their new villages, they found that they were expected to build their own homes and community facilities without compensation. Everyone agreed that land reform was essential to pacifying rural Vietnam. A large percentage of the arable land had historically been owned and operated by large absentee landholders who exploited tenants and agricultural laborers unmercifully. Writer Duong Van Mai Elliott, who had lived in Hanoi during the period when the Viet Minh came to power, recalled that the single most important move Ho and his colleagues made was to dispossess French and Vietnamese landlords and distribute their holdings among the peasantry. Diem and Nhu were committed to agrarian reform
in name, but when push came to shove, the national government exempted all holdings smaller than 250 acres. Colby recalled that “we went to Diem at one point saying, ‘Well, you know, you've really got to cut this down and make it smaller, because there were still landlords.' He said, ‘You don't understand. I cannot eliminate my middle class.'”
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Most important, Colby believed, was the absence of any viable political movement in the countryside. Diem was firmly of the opinion that South Vietnam's only enemies were colonialism, feudalism, and communism. With the first two defeated, the sole task remaining was to hold North Vietnam at bay while crushing the insurgency in South Vietnam. The Ministry of Information had created a “mass political organization,” the National Revolutionary Movement, in October 1955; failure to support the party was interpreted as sympathy for the communists. All reform came from the top down. This was true in North Vietnam as well, but there at least some reform was genuine. “The sole political function expected of the citizenry,” Colby later wrote, “was to assemble later in well-ordered lines in the hot sun to greet visiting delegations of foreigners or officials from Saigon, to wave the national flag with its three red stripes on a yellow field, and to cheer ‘Muon Nam!' (‘A Thousand Years!') at mention of President Diem's leadership.”
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There was political dissent in Saigon and Hue, but it consisted primarily of educated and wealthy cliques that resented being shut out of power by the Ngo family and had no connection with the 90 percent of the population living in the countryside. The Cao Dai and Hoa Hao, South Vietnam's largest religious sects, were thoroughly penetrated by the Can Lao, Nhu's political apparatus.

Meanwhile, the Lao Dong, the communist party of North Vietnam, and, after its formation in December 1960, the National Liberation Front, designed a strategy—a “people's war”—that would exploit the political void and the peasant resentment that Diem's policies were creating. The key to victory over the “American Diemists,” Hanoi believed, was to disperse armed political cadres throughout South Vietnam and convince the rural populace that it was the communists—the former Viet Minh who had defeated the French and the Japanese—who held out the best chance for social and economic justice. Drawn from the southerners in the Viet Minh who had regrouped to the north in 1954 and headed south in 1959, as well as Viet Minh still hiding in the south, these cadres would wage a war of terror against Diemist officials to create fear and demonstrate their powerlessness,
propagandize and organize disaffected peasants, and, in areas where government control was weak, establish shadow hamlet and even district governments capable of levying taxes and instituting land reforms. As the official history of the CIA in Vietnam put it, “the movement's anticolonialist legacy, its land reform policy, its egalitarian style and offer of opportunities for the ambitious among the rural poor, together with the assiduous personal attention devoted to even low-level candidates for recruitment, stood in stark contrast to Diem's mandarism, which had ‘dried the grass' of peasant resentment into incendiary opposition.” The Saigon government was not without its supporters. There were thousands of Catholics, Hoa Hao, and Montagnards (tribespeople of the Central Highlands) who for various reasons were anticommunist, but they were the minority.
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To make matters worse, the US Mission was deeply divided. The embassy under Durbrow wanted to condition US aid on Western-style democratic reforms; this was especially true following the election of John F. Kennedy. American diplomats in Vietnam urged the Ngo brothers to stop persecuting their noncommunist opponents, to name some Dai Viet and VNQDD personalities to ministerial posts, and to restore self-government at the local level. With the support of the Pentagon, General Williams and MAAG resisted any attempt to tie political reform to military aid. At mission meetings, he and Durbrow were openly hostile to each other. Williams took the position that military matters were beyond the comprehension of civilians. The bulk of US military aid went to the ARVN in anticipation of it having to fight a Korean-style war, a conventional invasion from the north. Diem was most happy with this arrangement, not least because the Americans were simultaneously providing him with a formidable armed force that he could use against his enemies whether they were the North Vietnamese Army, the Viet Cong, or some noncommunist ethnic or sectarian force. Colby noted with dismay that virtually no aid went to the local territorials of the “Self-Defense Forces”—village-level troops organized in platoons to protect local communities—or to the Civil Guard, the company-level force at the disposal of province chiefs. “Little wonder that their morale was abysmal, and that their nightly maneuver was limited to closing the barbed wire around their pathetic fort and waiting for morning in hopes that Communist guerrillas would ignore them as they went about the organization, exhortation, and direction of their fellow villagers,” Colby wrote.
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Colby thought both the soldiers and the diplomats were wrong. The US Mission was convinced that if physical security could be established in the countryside, the peasants—innately anticommunist—would rally to the government in Saigon. Diem and the American leadership in South Vietnam assumed that whatever support for the communists there was among the peasantry was coerced. Colby gave the communists more credit than that. In a people's war, the focus would not be on traditional military encounters. The enemy would employ violence to discredit the government and intimidate the population, but it would also bring a degree of social and economic justice to the countryside. Conventional battles would serve no purpose and indeed would be counterproductive, in that they would turn large portions of the rural population into alienated refugees. Nor were Western-style democratic forms and the empowerment of well-meaning intellectual elites in Saigon the answer. Empowerment would have to be authentic, to come from below. A solution, rooted in Colby's philosophy, background, and reading of the situation on the ground, was taking shape in his mind. As fate would have it, that perspective would be made all the more significant by Colby's elevation to chief of station in June 1960. But before he could act, he would have to deal with a situation that threatened to bring down the whole South Vietnamese house of cards.

On the evening of November 10, 1960, Bill and Barbara, clad in formal dress, attended the annual Marine Birthday Ball at the US embassy. Only a select few were invited, and the Colbys felt fortunate to be included. In a ceremony repeated at Marine outposts around the world, the youngest and oldest soldiers present cut the birthday cake. Before retiring for the evening, the Colbys and Durbrows stopped at a popular restaurant barge on the Saigon River for a nightcap. At around 3
A.M
., Bill and his family were awakened by thunder, or so they thought. Looking out his bedroom window, Colby saw red and blue tracers arcing across the night sky. The Presidential Palace at the end of their street was under attack.

Bill's immediate thoughts were for the safety of his family. As bullets thudded into the exterior walls of the house, he built an impromptu fortress of bookcases and furniture and loaded his weapons. “My father herded us into the middle of the house on the theory that stray bullets would have a harder time hitting us,” Paul, the youngest son, recalled. “I remember him going back and forth to a phone that was in a more exposed place.”
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Finally,
Colby pulled out the voice-activated radio he kept in a closet for emergencies and got in touch with the embassy. Peering out an upstairs window, he soon saw that the site of the fighting was the palace; his family was exposed only to collateral damage. As Colby soon discovered, the Ngo brothers were under siege from a renegade army parachute unit.

At dawn, a young American diplomat, John Helbe, appeared at the Colbys' back door. He had been dispatched by the embassy to monitor the siege, and the Colbys' house, at 16 Rue de Rhodes, offered the perfect vantage point. Colby drafted Helbe to do double duty—look after Barbara and the kids and report what he saw to the embassy over the radio. Bill then left for the office.

In midmorning, the embassy informed Helbe that it was safe to move the family to a more secure location farther from the fighting. “At some point when it was quiet,” Paul recalled, “we filtered out the back of the house away from the action. I remember seeing armed men there. They had no interest in us.”
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Barbara, with kids in tow, walked five blocks to the house of another US Mission family, and then the next day moved still farther from the scene of action to the home of friends in Cholon. Nevertheless, it was a near thing. As the family left the house, they noted that baby Christine's bed had been crushed by falling debris.