Shadow Warrior (25 page)

For Colby, the advent of the Kennedy administration—with its obvious awareness of the role that propaganda, political action, counterinsurgency, and covert operations were to play in the Cold War—was like a dream come true. And, in fact, Vietnam was to become the primary laboratory for testing America's new commitment to unconventional warfare. But the CIA and the new administration wanted to do more than just defeat the communist insurgency in South Vietnam; they wanted, initially at least, to take the fight to the enemy.

When Colby arrived in Saigon, he had discovered two locked safes left behind by Lansdale and his team. They contained information on Vietnamese Catholics the French had recruited in 1954 to stay behind and report on doings within the DRV. Then there was some information on the twenty or so spies and saboteurs Lou Conein had recruited during his brief stay in North Vietnam. After 1959, the CIA station in Saigon had come under increasing pressure to provide information on what the communists called the Truong Son Route and the Americans called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. After all, the principal threat to stability in South Vietnam would come from the ninety thousand former Viet Minh who were returning to their home provinces. The NVA went to great lengths to keep the route secret and conceal the identity of the infiltrators, clothing them in peasant garb and equipping them with captured French weapons. Colby had recruited some Europeans and Vietnamese to go to Tchepone, a Laotian town adjacent to the communist transportation network, but they provided little useful information.
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The Eisenhower administration had demonstrated a penchant for paramilitary operations, helping to overthrow suspected pro-communist regimes in Guatemala and Iran and then planning the Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba. In late 1960, the National Security Council, with DCI Allen Dulles's enthusiastic concurrence, had directed the Saigon station to accelerate its penetration of North Vietnam and add sabotage and resistance-building to its list of duties. By the end of the year, Colby had nine CIA officers on the project, plus several others acting as liaison with South Vietnamese police and intelligence. Russell Miller was in charge. In Danang, US Navy SEALs (sea-air-land naval commandoes) began training ships' crews to land secret agents in the north; they also organized a civilian raiding force, the Sea Commandos, for hit-and-run coastal attacks.
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On March 9, 1961, President Kennedy approved NSAM 52, a National Security Action Memorandum explicitly endorsing covert action against North Vietnam. To come up with specific initiatives, McNamara created a policy review group under Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric. Allen Dulles recalled Colby from Vietnam to participate in the meetings. “One of the questions came up very soon,” Colby recalled: “Why don't we do to them what they do to us, in North Vietnam. And we went back to our World War II experience of dropping people in by parachute.” The ensuing report to JFK recommended that measures to be taken “include penetration of the Vietnamese Communist mechanism, dispatch of agents to North Vietnam and strengthening South Vietnamese internal security services.”
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Kennedy authorized use of American personnel to penetrate North Vietnam—a revival of the World War II Carpetbaggers and Jedburghs—but expressed a preference for Vietnamese and foreign nationals, especially agents of the Chinese Nationalist government. It should be noted that Kennedy's order was accompanied by an intense debate as to the objectives of the penetration effort. To do what the North Vietnamese were doing to South Vietnam meant to subvert and eventually bring down Ho's government. The CIA and State Department argued that a successful armed uprising against the communist regime in Hanoi was highly unlikely. Ho was popular, and a quarter million Chinese troops lurked just over North Vietnam's border. In 1958, the Agency had turned down requests for arms and other supplies from anticommunist guerrillas scattered along North Vietnam's Chinese border and from the king of the Black Thais, who offered
to send three thousand French-trained soldiers to fight against the DRV.
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Langley and Foggy Bottom saw operations in North Vietnam by clandestine operatives as a means to convince the North Vietnamese Politburo that there was more internal opposition in the north than there actually was, and hopefully to compel it to agree to coexistence with South Vietnam. The Kennedy brothers took note of these arguments, but in the spring of 1961, at least, US policy included clandestine efforts to not only harass but also overthrow the communist regime in Hanoi.

One overcast evening in February 1961, a 38-foot fishing junk threaded its way through the towering limestone islands that lay off the coast of North Vietnam. Such vessels—wooden, hand-built, two-masted, with a small rectangular wheelhouse on the aft deck—had sailed the waters of the South China Sea and the Gulf of Tonkin for hundreds of years. This particular junk bore blood-red sails to identify it with the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The captain and crew had selected what was the monsoon season in the north because it reduced the chance of being stopped by a government patrol boat. But it was not Diem's navy they were worried about; it was North Vietnam's. Despite the hue of its sails, the ship had been built in Vung Tau, South Vietnam, some 800 miles to the south. The crew members were North Vietnamese who had fled south in 1954. They had subsequently been recruited to use their knowledge of the North Vietnamese coastline to insert agents capable of gathering intelligence on Ho's Vietnam; the agents would then radio that information to Colby and his subordinates. As the junk neared the seaside village of Cam Pha, a slight, middle-aged man named Pham Chuyen came from below decks and was lowered into the water in a basket boat. It was loaded with a crystal-powered radio and provisions sufficient to support him for several weeks. Chuyen, code-named “Ares,” would be the CIA's first long-term North Vietnam–based operative.
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Shortly thereafter, Colonel Nguyen Cao Ky, the slender, mustached commander of Tan Son Nhut Air Base, was summoned by the air force chief of staff. “We've been working on new plans with the American CIA to drop specially trained agents into key positions in North Vietnam,” he said. “What we need now from you is a highly trained group of flyers to drop the right men at the right spot.” The mission would involve flying unmarked, blacked-out C-47s deep into enemy territory at treetop level. The thirty-year-old pilot smiled and replied, “When do we start?” The
code name given to the overflight and insertion operation was Project Tiger.
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Ky selected twenty of his best pilots for the operation and developed the fundamentals of the project. His C-47s would fly northward and enter the DRV where one of its rivers emptied into the sea. The planes would fly as low as possible and carry two navigators, one to calculate time and distance and the other to maintain visual contact with the ground. The CIA provided Air America (the private airline owned and operated by the CIA) personnel to help train Ky's aviators. The men practiced by flying night missions through tight mountain passes near Dalat. Upon returning from one of these training runs, Ky found a slight, bespectacled American waiting for him. It was Colby. “I remember thinking he looked like a student of philosophy,” he wrote in his memoirs. From this point on, the Saigon station chief would personally supervise Project Tiger.
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Colby arranged for Ky and his men to move to a detached, guarded villa within the Tan Son Nhut compound to better maintain security. In defiance of protocol, Ky insisted on commanding the inaugural flight himself. “I'm the commander; I'll fly the first mission,” Colby recalled him saying. The first team to be dropped, four in number, was code-named Castor. The night before its scheduled flight, Colby, Ky, passengers, and crew gathered at a Chinese restaurant in Danang for dinner. Noting that their number was thirteen, one of the Vietnamese offered to retire, but Ky would have none of it. The next evening they reassembled, with the Vietnamese clad in the pajama-like clothing—cotton died indigo blue—typical of Vietnamese peasants. Each carried $100 in currency and a cyanide pill. While Ky and his team waited on the tarmac with the plane's engines running, Colby and his communications officer tried desperately to secure a final go-ahead from the 303 Committee in Washington. When their “Immediate” cable received no response, they sent a “flash,” a cable of the highest priority. Within minutes the go-ahead was received, and Colby gave Ky thumbs up.
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To the CIA chief's relief, the first Tiger flight reported in as the C-47 turned inland from the Gulf of Tonkin. All aboard the aircraft were northerners, and it was with some excitement and nostalgia that they flew over their former homes. Ky recalled sighting a battlefield where he had fought the French when he was with the Viet Minh. At approximately 1:30
A.M
., Team Castor was parachuted into the mountains west of Hanoi in Son La
Province. The plan was to stay away from the more densely populated areas, at least at first. “I think there was the idea that if you could live in the mountains you'd be safer than if you'd tried to live in a highly controlled structured society,” Colby later told one interviewer. “The idea was, I think, to build up a base or bases from which you could then penetrate the lowlands.” The C-47's return trip through Laos proved uneventful, and Ky put his wheels down at Tan Son Nhut around 6:00
A.M
. To his delight, Colby was there to greet him and his crew with a case of champagne.
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Ky was scheduled to pilot the second team, code-named Atlas, but was persuaded by one of his recruits, Lieutenant Phan Thanh Van, to allow him to fly instead. The C-47 carrying Team Atlas was hit by antiaircraft fire crossing into North Vietnam and crash-landed. Three months later, Hanoi held a much publicized trial of the survivors. “Hanoi issued a press release,” Colby recalled, “containing confessions by the crew and team that they had been trained by Americans and sent by South Vietnam. No plausible denial there.” Things quickly went from bad to worse. Team Castor went off the air and its members were presumed captured. Three more teams—Dido, Echo, and Tarzan—were inserted. After one of the operators included a code word indicating that he had been turned, that is, compelled to become a double agent, Saigon operated under the assumption that all of the teams had been turned and began feeding them false information. Another seven-man team was lost over North Vietnam on May 16, 1962. By the end of 1963, only four teams and one singleton were thought still to be operating inside North Vietnam. The rest of the infiltrators were dead, in prison, or had been doubled. By the time he left South Vietnam in 1962, Colby had become disillusioned. The encrypted code word sent by the radio operator warning that his team had been captured had included more than one message, he subsequently told an interviewer. “The message sent to me,” he said, “was that the thing wouldn't work.”
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Not only was North Vietnam a denied area, but Project Tiger had been penetrated by the communists at the outset. Pham Chuyen—Ares—was either a North Vietnamese agent who had been sent south for the sole purpose of being recruited into the US–South Vietnamese scheme, or he had been captured and turned. He had lured at least one junk to its destruction. Captain Do Van Thien, deputy chief of the South Vietnamese unit cooperating with the CIA on Tiger, was also a North Vietnamese intelligence
officer; he fed Hanoi a continuous stream of information on the air and sea insertions. In truth, a number of CIA operations that took place during Colby's tenure as station chief had been compromised. “It is clear . . . operations [under William Colby] were thoroughly penetrated by the Communists from the start,” counterintelligence operative Russell Holmes later recalled. “By this, I mean they had penetrated the South Vietnamese and because we were not even looking at them from a CI [counterintelligence] point of view; we inherited their penetration.” Holmes did not know the half of it. Tran Kim Tuyen's most trusted deputy at SEPES, South Vietnam's intelligence and internal security apparatus, was the famous North Vietnamese spymaster Pham Xuan An.

In Washington, Colby's nemesis, Jim Angleton, smelled blood. From the beginning, he and his colleagues in counterintelligence had viewed covert operations and nation-building as extraneous to the mission of the CIA. According to Ray Cline, Angleton considered Colby to be “just a paratrooper.”
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The intelligence operation Colby presided over in Vietnam was Swiss cheese, he declared, and he persuaded Allen Dulles to allow him to send a counterintelligence team to investigate and, if possible, clean up the mess. No one was beyond suspicion, even Colby himself. To Angleton's delight, his men uncovered a friendship between the station chief and a French doctor. Vincent Gregoire (a pseudonym, as it turned out) had been or would be recruited by the National Liberation Front and was later caught passing documents to the Russians. Angleton decided not to confront Colby. He would keep that nugget tucked away for later use.

Colby was aware of some communist penetrations and unaware of others. He was vastly annoyed by Angleton's meddling. He did not believe that the kind of counterintelligence security Angleton sought for the United States was possible in South Vietnam. Some Vietnamese nationalists were willing to work with Hanoi, or at least with the NLF. Both communists and anticommunists had once been brothers-in-arms against the French. Family ties were strong, even transcendent. Many members of Diem's government and military had brothers, sisters, uncles, or cousins who served the communists. If the United States was not to supplant the South Vietnamese government with a colonial regime, it would have to work with the existing authorities, penetrated or not.
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Colby had come to believe that, except for monitoring traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail,
the spy game—intelligence gathering and analysis—was of secondary importance. The communists made no secret of what they intended to do. The task at hand was to beat them at their own game, to build a nation before the Lao Dong (the Communist Party of North Vietnam) and the NLF could.