Shadow Warrior (27 page)

At the time of his arrival, the insurgency was heating up in the Highlands. The Viet Cong were quick to recognize that the persecution of minorities by the Diem regime and its efforts to settle Catholic refugees and Vietnamese lowlanders in the Rhade's midst made them ripe for recruiting. Nuttle traveled about the countryside on a BMW motorcycle that had been muffled. “If you kept at about seventy miles an hour,” he recalled, “you could run right through an ambush.”
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An incident in early 1960 demonstrated the heavy price to be paid for the continuing divide between the indigenous people of the Central Highlands and the government of South Vietnam. Nuttle learned that a team of officials was coming out to inspect an agricultural project in a village some miles from Ban Me Thuot. A friend, Y-Cha, warned the American that the group would be ambushed by the local Viet Cong. The IVS worker tried to warn the province chief—an ethnic Vietnamese—that the site was remote and the danger great. The chief responded by adding more security guards. Nuttle wisely contrived an excuse not to go. In the midst of its journey, the Vietnamese officials and their guards were indeed ambushed. The Viet Cong felled two large trees at either end of the column. Guerrillas popped out of spider holes on one side of the group, peppering it with fire. The officials and their guards exited their vehicles on the other side only to be greeted by fire from another row of spider holes. Thirty-six of the thirty-seven-man party died, with one spared to tell the tale.
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It was at this point that Gil Layton appeared on the scene. After encountering Nuttle during a tour of the Highlands, he asked the IVS worker to visit whenever he was in Saigon. He did, and the two men struck up an ongoing conversation about the situation of the Rhade.
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The animosity between the ethnic Vietnamese and the people of the Highlands, whom the Vietnamese referred to as
moi
(savages), was so great that it was unlikely the tribe, or other Montagnards of the region, would ever take up arms against the communists on behalf of the government in Saigon. The two men agreed, however, that the aboriginals would fight to defend their homes and families. The tribesmen were fiercely independent, and, after all, the Viet Cong themselves were mostly ethnic Vietnamese. Nuttle recalled
that the French had singled out the Montagnard tribes for special attention, providing them with health care, education, and farming equipment. The Highlanders had responded positively, and during the First Indochinese War had acted as a counterweight to the Viet Minh. One thing was certain: the Rhade and the other tribes were going to be crushed between the ARVN and the Viet Cong if they did not have some means to defend themselves.

On May 5, 1961, Layton sent a memo to Colby requesting that he approve a program to recruit as many as a thousand tribesmen to “operate in the guerrilla-infested areas bordering on northern Cambodia and southern Laos.” Layton introduced Nuttle to Colby, and one discussion led to another. The Montagnards seemed the perfect guinea pigs to try out Lyautey's, Thompson's, and Serong's ideas, not to mention Colby's own. “We . . . decided that we should start small and make the case for a program by a successful experiment, rather than try to sell a massive panacea and arouse all possible objections before we had any experience with the idea,” Colby later wrote.
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The first task was to sell Nhu on the concept, and Colby reserved that job for himself. In truth, Colby had been trying to point Nhu toward his particular vision of counterinsurgency and pacification since their first meeting in 1959. The station chief was careful to express sympathy with the counselor's criticism of his brother's essentially military and developmental approach. Both men agreed on the necessity of building political support for the regime among Vietnam's vast peasantry. Diem and Nhu both realized that these efforts could backfire, fostering antigovernment insurgencies among noncommunist peasant communities. Nowhere was this irony more likely than among the Montagnards. Colby would recruit some trustworthy Vietnamese to monitor the program; this, together with the promise that Vietnamese Special Forces would be designated to train the Montagnard self-defense forces, did the trick.
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Next, Colby and Layton had to persuade the larger US Mission, especially the Military Assistance and Advisory Group, to embrace the idea of a Montagnard self-defense force. The former Jedburgh was all too aware that the regular military had historically taken a dim view of unconventional warfare. The Joint Chiefs had approved the creation of Special Forces in the army and air force and the US Navy SEALs, but only very reluctantly. The brass believed that violence was violence and on any scale
could be handled by conventional military. MAAG also suspected that the unconventional forces would drain off the best and the brightest from regular units. Political action was completely beyond the pale for the US military in the early 1960s. Civil action companies in the army were in their infancy and tended to be dumping grounds for the inept and incompetent. General Williams and his replacement, General Lionel C. McGarr, believed that the conflict in Vietnam was military in nature and that they were there to provide a military solution. The issue of a viable, responsible political culture was of purely secondary importance. More significant, as a result of events halfway around the world, covert operations and the CIA had suddenly fallen out of favor with the Kennedy administration and the American people.

In the spring of 1960, the Eisenhower administration approved a plan to bring down the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro, a plan to which President Kennedy subsequently gave the go-ahead despite deep divisions among his advisers.
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Early on the morning of April 17, 1961, the Cuban Exile Brigade, comprising some 1,450 anti-Castro fighters who had been trained in Guatemala by the CIA, landed at the Bay of Pigs on the southern tip of Cuba. The invaders established two of three beachheads, fought well, and inflicted substantial casualties on Castro's forces, which soon numbered more than 20,000. But the exiles soon ran out of ammunition. A tiny rebel air force, flying outdated B-26s, had failed to destroy Castro's planes in an April 15 attack; as a result, Cuba's defenders enjoyed air superiority. Cuban planes sank an exile freighter loaded with ammunition and communications equipment. The anti-Castro forces and their CIA handlers pleaded for US military intervention, but President Kennedy refused. On the second day of the operation, with ammunition running out and casualties mounting, the exiles surrendered.

For Jack Kennedy, who publicly accepted responsibility for the Cuban fiasco, the whole affair was a humiliation. “We looked like fools to our friends, rascals to our enemies, and incompetents to the rest,” declared the
New York Times
. The White House blamed the CIA: indeed, Kennedy was so angry that he considered dismantling the Agency on the spot—“to scatter CIA to the winds,” as he put it. Instead, he appointed Maxwell Taylor to head a committee charged with rooting out the causes for the Bay of Pigs disaster and notified Allen Dulles that he would be retired from public service after a respectable interlude. From April 1961 on,
Colby and his team would have to operate under the shadow of the failed Cuban operation.
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The second week in May, David Nuttle received an urgent message from IVS headquarters: Ambassador Nolting wanted to see him in his office the following day. The aid worker jumped on his motorbike and set off on the “Frontier Highway,” the main north-south route connecting Saigon to the Central Highlands. “I arrived in Saigon about an hour after dark,” Nuttle wrote in his unpublished memoir, “having flipped over after hitting a big wild hog that ran out of the jungle into my path.”
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Nuttle showered and dropped by the Layton villa to see Bonnie Layton, Gil's daughter. The elder Layton intercepted him at the door. “Listen,” he said, “all I want to do is make sure that you got the message about your meeting with the Ambassador.”

“How do you know about that?” Nuttle asked.

“I have my sources,” was Layton's terse reply.

As it turned out, Colby and Layton had arranged a meeting of the US Mission to discuss the situation in the Highlands with Nuttle present.

At 2:00 the next afternoon, Nuttle walked through the front door of the US embassy and was directed to the ambassador's conference room. As he waited at the long mahogany table, others began to file in: General Lionel C. McGarr, head of the US military mission, and his deputy; USAID director Arthur Gardiner; Colby; Vietnam expert Douglas Pike; and then the ambassador himself. MAAG presented its solution to the threat of a communist takeover in the Highlands. Essentially, McGarr supported the Diem regime's plan to concentrate the tribal population in secured reservations while the ARVN conducted massive sweeps to root out and kill the Viet Cong. It was a makeover of the reconcentration tactic the Spanish had used in Cuba from 1895 through 1898 and that was adopted by US forces in their war against Philippine insurgents—in both cases with disastrous results.

When McGarr finished stating his view, Nolting asked Nuttle to respond. “I ripped into the ‘reservation plan' by focusing on all the obvious negatives,” Nuttle recalled. The Montagnards would resist being relocated. It would be impossible to keep them from slipping away at night into the dense jungle, which was honeycombed with hunting trails. Once there, they would become fodder for the Viet Cong. With McGarr clearly irritated,
Colby interceded, asking Nuttle whether there was an alternative. There was, Nuttle said: “Mr. Colby, if the GVN [government of South Vietnam] will begin to bring the Montagnard into the social and economic mainstream, there will be some motivational basis for a security program.” The Diem government could make a good beginning by stopping the bombing of aboriginal villages. If arms were provided to the Highlanders, and they were allowed to defend themselves, there was a chance that further communist inroads could be stopped.
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Nuttle had played the role that Colby, Layton, and Nolting had hoped he would. By this point Nolting and Colby had bonded. “Colby became not only a friend,” Nolting later recalled, “but one of my most trusted advisers.” When it became clear that Colby had cleared away any objection the House of Ngo might have, Nolting, with the approval of the 303 Committee, gave the go-ahead for a small, experimental counterinsurgency/pacification program focused on the Rhade.
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In 1962, the Rhade numbered between 100,000 and 115,000. Residents of the high plateau that formed the heart of the Central Highlands, the tribe had migrated southwestward from China and Mongolia centuries earlier, dependent on slash-and-burn agriculture for its subsistence. The Rhade had a matrilineal society with the eldest woman in the family owning the house, property, and livestock. Members of an extended family resided in a bamboo longhouse sometimes reaching 400 feet in length. Male and female roles were traditional, with the males hunting, clearing the land, building the houses, burying the dead, conducting business, and preparing the rice wine. The women drew water, collected firewood, cooked, cleaned, washed the clothes, and wove the traditional red, black, yellow, and blue cotton cloth of the Rhade. The average Rhade male was about five feet five inches tall, with a brown complexion and broad shoulders. Healing was the responsibility of shamans or witch-doctors. The religion was animist, but included a god (Ae Die) and a devil (Tang Lie).

Nuttle signed on as a contract agent with the CIA on October 4, 1961. His assignment was to survey the tribes around Ban Me Thuot and identify those willing to participate in a self-defense and development program. Colby arranged for a Special Forces medic, Sergeant Paul Campbell, to assist Nuttle. Accompanied by a Captain Phu from Thuy's Presidential Survey Office (PSO, the South Vietnamese government's version of the CIA)
and Nuttle's man Friday, Y-Rit, the team set up shop in Ban Me Thuot. Nuttle recalled that before departing for the bush, they took stock: Rhade villages were being attacked by the ARVN and bombed by the Vietnamese Air Force when they were suspected of supporting the Viet Cong. For their part, the communists were using terrorism to extort rice, livestock, and manpower from the Rhade villages. Native lands had been taken without compensation by the government in Saigon for resettlement of refugees from North Vietnam.
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The team found tribal elders initially suspicious and reluctant to cooperate, but “Mr. Dave” and “Dr. Paul” persisted, with Campbell conducting sick call at each village and Nuttle sounding out the leadership about a possible cooperative effort. The tribesmen hated the South Vietnamese government, but they were afraid of the Viet Cong. In one village, insurgents had captured the sister of a Rhade who had been working with the IVS; they took her into the village and eviscerated her, “filling the cavity with odds and ends[,] and gave propaganda lectures to the assembled observers while the girl was engaged in dying,” according to a CIA report.
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Eventually, Colby and his colleagues settled on the village of Buon Enao, only 6 miles from the provincial capital of Ban Me Thuot, for their first operation. During October, the team visited Buon Enao every day for three weeks. Its proposals were minimal: a perimeter fence for defense and a dispensary.

Layton and Colby made frequent visits to the site, and the team grew to include more Agency personnel, USAID workers, and the first Special Forces A-Team under Captain Lawrence Arritola. Everything was subject to extended debate: the Rhade said the fence would provoke the ARVN; the Americans promised they would secure a letter of approval from the province chief; the Rhade said the fence would elicit a Viet Cong assault; the Americans said they would arm the Rhade and teach them to shoot; the Rhade said they had no bamboo for the fence; the Americans replied that they would go into the jungle and cut it for them. Gradually, the elders' resistance began to melt. In a Hollywood touch, Campbell, working in conjunction with the village shaman, was able to cure the village chief's daughter of a serious illness.
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