Shadow Warrior (37 page)

As 1965 progressed, Colby found himself more and more peripheral to Vietnam policy discussions in Washington. In April, John McCone resigned as DCI. His imperiousness and flip-flopping on Vietnam had alienated Johnson. In 1964, he had been a leading advocate of the bombing of North Vietnam, but in 1965, as the bombing was getting underway, he had warned that Rolling Thunder might very well bring Communist China into the war. The DCI began to complain that LBJ was not giving him enough face-time. And so the two agreed to a parting of the ways. Johnson replaced Mc-Cone with Rear Admiral William F. “Red” Raborn Jr., a blue-water sailor
with almost no experience in intelligence. Raborn, a native Texan, had publicly campaigned for Johnson in his victory over Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. Colby's power cord, McCone, was gone. The former Jedburgh would be front and center on Vietnam again, but not for more than a year.
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V
ietnam was but one hotspot in the “arc of crisis” that demanded Bill Colby's attention when he was head of the Far East Division. Although Switchback and the 1965 decisions to escalate US military involvement in Vietnam temporarily blunted the CIA's initiatives in Vietnam, the mid-1960s witnessed a dramatic expansion of covert operations around the world. Between 1964 and 1967, the US government increased the funds available for political action and paramilitary operations by 60 percent. A quarter of these monies went to support secret armies or to pay for covert arms transfers to established military forces. The Directorate of Plans employed 6,000 people—two-thirds engaged in espionage and counterespionage activity and one-third in paramilitary operations—a quarter of whom worked for Colby. The Directorate of Plans spent 58 percent of the Agency's annual budget of $750 million.

The CIA's clandestine operations were fundamental to the nation's Cold War strategy. The United States could not fight more than one Korean or Vietnam War at a time. Colby viewed the CIA's covert operations as more than just necessary, however; to him they were far preferable to the type of main force conflict that was developing in Vietnam. The so-called “secret wars,” like the one the CIA was sponsoring in Laos, cost fewer lives, ran less risk of a nationalist backlash against US interference, put the onus of defending themselves against communist invasion and subversion on the people of the country in question, and helped to keep antiwar, anti-imperial sentiment at home to a minimum. Indeed, Colby would tout the secret war in Laos as a model for fighting the Cold War in the developing world.
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Even with all its assets, however, the Far East Division confronted a number of crises that it lacked the means to deal with. In such cases, the Agency had to resort to cruder methods and hope for a bit of luck. The most glaring example was Indonesia. The archipelago nation, extending more than 1,000 miles from east to west and comprising more than 1,000 inhabited islands, boasted a population of almost 80 million. The predominantly Muslim country was the world's fifth-largest nation in the 1960s. Indonesia had gained its independence from the Dutch in 1949, following Japanese occupation during World War II and a two-year war against returning Dutch colonialists. The leader of the independence movement was Kusno Sosrodihardjo, known popularly as Sukarno. Well educated, charismatic, and thoroughly modern, Sukarno espoused a political philosophy rooted in nationalism, racial tolerance, socialism, “guided democracy,” and religious faith. He would be Indonesia's first and only president, ruling from 1950 through 1965.
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Sukarno first came to the attention of the Eisenhower administration in 1953, when the CIA reported that the island nation, sitting atop perhaps 20 billion barrels of untapped crude oil, also boasted a thriving communist party, the PKI, and a leader who was unwilling to align himself with the United States. According to former director of plans Richard Bissell, the CIA seriously considered assassinating Sukarno in the spring of 1955, going so far as to identify an “asset [assassin],” but the scheme never came to fruition. Later that year, Sukarno convened a meeting of nonaligned Asian, African, and Arab nations in Bandung. The conference was intended to establish a neutralist bloc that would be able to fend off the advances of the superpowers. The Dulles brothers—Secretary of State John Foster and CIA director Allen—did not believe in neutrality: if a nation was not with the free world in its struggle with the forces of international communism, then it was against it. Nineteen days after the Bandung Conference, the White House ordered the CIA to use all means at its disposal—monetary, political, and paramilitary—to keep Indonesia from following the Marxist-Leninist path. The Agency set to the task, but it made little headway. In Indonesia's national parliamentary elections in 1955 and then again in 1957, Sukarno's Indonesian National Party came in first, the Muslim Majumi Party second, and the PKI a strong third.
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By the time Lyndon Johnson was sworn in, Indonesia was involved in a war with Malaysia. Sukarno was growing weaker politically as well as physically,
and intelligence reports indicated that he was relying more and more on the PKI, which by then numbered some 3.5 million, making it the largest communist party worldwide outside the Soviet Union and China. At an NSC meeting on January 7, 1964, Bill Colby listened as Secretary of State Dean Rusk railed against Sukarno, declaring him “the least responsible leader of any modern State.”
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In the months that followed, the Indonesian president continued to move steadily closer to the PKI. He initiated a communist-supervised land reform program, included PKI leaders in his government, and made threatening noises toward foreign capital, including $500 million worth of US-controlled petroleum properties. Then, on August 17, 1964, during his Independence Day address, Sukarno declared the United States to be the number one enemy of anticolonialist nationalism, not only in Indonesia but in all of Asia. He announced his intention to form an anti-imperialist alliance with Communist China, virtually daring the military to stop him. “The current combination of Sukarno's tough dictatorship,” Colby reported to his superiors, “coupled with an increasingly effective brainwashing of all local population elements, plus the skilled PKI exploitation of legitimate Indonesian nationalism, and lastly the inbred Javanese tradition of acquiescence before authority, will surely result in elimination of the remaining barriers between communists . . . and those who would resist them.” Two months later, Colby presented the 303 Committee with a blueprint for covert action in Indonesia that would have as its objective “agitation and the instigation of internal strife between communist and non-communist elements.”
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Colby's man in Jakarta was Bernardo Hugh Tovar, a Colombian-born Harvard graduate who had parachuted into Laos with the OSS in 1945. Following a tour of duty with Lansdale in the Philippines, he joined the CIA. Low-key, intelligent, and staunchly anticommunist, Tovar was one of Colby's favorites, and the compliment was returned. That the two were practicing Catholics did not hurt their relationship. Despite the growing seriousness of the situation in Indonesia, however, the station remained small and surprisingly ineffective. As of 1964 the Agency's sole success had been to recruit Adam Malik, a forty-eight-year-old disillusioned ex-Marxist who had served as Sukarno's ambassador to Moscow and his minister of trade. Back in Washington, Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy asked Bill Colby why operations to counter communist influence in Indonesia
were so meager. “We just don't have the assets,” the Far East Division chief replied.
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On the morning of October 1, 1965, a group of junior army officers assassinated six of the seven members of the Indonesian military's high command—executing three of them in their own homes and the other three in an open field near Jakarta's Halim Air Force Base. All six of the bodies were thrown down an abandoned well. Only General Abdul Haris Nasution, the minister of defense, managed to escape.
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Apparently, the killings were the result of long-held grievances by the junior officer corps, which was resentful over the lack of promotions and conspicuous corruption on the part of their superiors.

At this point, Nasution, Malik, and the commander of the Armed Forces Strategic Reserve, General Suharto (most Indonesians go by only one name), stepped forward to fill the void. Suharto declared that he was taking command of the armed forces and ordered all uniformed personnel to barracks. The triumvirate then announced the formation of a new political organization, the 30 September Movement, which would exercise temporary political control and protect President Sukarno from his enemies. From that point on, Sukarno was nothing more than a pawn. A week later, the new regime, fully backed by the armed forces, launched a major propaganda campaign against the PKI that, among other things, blamed the communists for the assassinations. The leaders of the PKI were hunted down and killed. Then followed a bloodbath of horrendous proportions, with the military and rightwing Muslim gangs murdering every PKI or suspected PKI member that could be found. The victims were shot or beheaded in Japanese samurai style. Municipal officials complained to the army that the rivers running to the city of Surabaya were so clogged with bodies that commerce had ground to a halt. The killings continued sporadically until 1969. Best estimates were that more than 500,000 Indonesians lost their lives at the hands of Suharto's henchmen.
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Hugh Tovar would later claim that the coup and countercoup of 1965 took the station completely by surprise. Assistant Secretary of State Bill Bundy confirmed that assessment. In a 1967 interview, Bundy was asked whether the United States had played a role in the Indonesian drama. “No,” he replied, “we just lucked out.” But Washington certainly welcomed developments. Bill Colby flew into Indonesia immediately following the coup,
landing at the same airfield where the generals had been murdered. With Colby camping out on his office couch, Ambassador Marshall Green provided words of encouragement to the new government and arranged for the transfer of radio equipment and small arms to troops in the field. American approval extended as well to the rural massacres that followed. Green's deputy told a high-ranking Indonesian army officer “that the embassy and the USG [US government] were generally sympathetic with and admiring of what the army was doing.” Indeed, in 1990, American journalist Kathy Kadane charged that the CIA station in Jakarta had provided Suharto and his minions with a list of 5,000 alleged PKI members. In a subsequent interview, Tovar denied that there was a list. He said he had heard that someone in the embassy had given the government twenty or thirty names, but none that could not have been gleaned from the newspapers.
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But of course there was a list. The CIA maintained extensive files on communists and communist sympathizers all across the arc of crisis in Asia. That was its job. Lansdale's Vietnam card files—passed down through the years and expanded—included tens of thousands of names. “I don't suppose that certain people would forgive what we did,” Bill Bundy said later, “but I thought that it was eminently justified.”
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What is surprising is that the CIA did not do more in Indonesia, much more. It was a nation of 80 million people, rich in petroleum and other mineral resources. Strategically situated astride Asia's seaborne trading routes, it had been the principal prize of Japanese imperialism during World War II. It also had the third-largest communist party in the world. Indeed, in his recommendations to the 303 Committee in 1964 recommending a modest program of covert action in Indonesia, Colby had observed that if the PKI was not thwarted, even a clear-cut victory in Vietnam would mean nothing. What was the Johnson foreign policy establishment thinking? It may have been that the CIA knew that the Indonesian military would never tolerate a communist takeover. It may have been that Sukarno did not seem to pose a threat until 1965. It also may have been that by 1965, Bill Colby and his Far East Division were completely consumed with the secret war then raging in Laos.

Once a substantial power on the Indochinese peninsula, the Kingdom of Laos had collapsed in the eighteenth century, splintering into three petty principalities that survived by appeasing their stronger Vietnamese and
Thai neighbors. The French reassembled the country when they imposed a protectorate in 1893 and ruled it until 1953. Elections to a parliamentary-style government were held in 1955, and in 1957 Prince Souvanna Phouma formed the first coalition government. By mid-1954, the communist Pathet Lao (PL), claiming to speak for the exploited peasantry and Laotian nationalists who had struggled against the French and their collaborators, had taken over de facto control of the two northernmost provinces—Phon Saly and Sam Neua. Backed—and essentially controlled—by the Viet Minh, the PL soon dominated parts of other provinces as well. From the fervently anticommunist perspective of 1954, vulnerable Laos appeared to Washington to represent a potential domino that, if toppled by North Vietnam and China, could fall on any or all of its four noncommunist neighbors.

Laos was the quaintest of dominoes. Shaped like an upside-down gourd, the broad northern part of the country consisted of hills and mountains surrounding the 500-square-mile Plain of Jars. The area derived its name from the presence of dozens of huge, lipped bowls carved from solid stone, standing as high as a man's head, placed there either as storage bins or funeral urns by some ancient civilization. The Mekong River flowed south along the western edge of the panhandle, forming the boundary between Thailand and Laos, with the land rising in the east toward the Annamite Range on the Laotian-Vietnamese border. The river valley and lowlands were occupied by ethnic Lao, who also constituted a large part of the population of adjacent Thailand. Most were rural-dwelling rice farmers living in longhouses raised on stilts. Vientiane, the largest city and modern capital of Laos, was exotic in a laid-back sort of way. Buddhist monks dressed in saffron robes gamboled along the tree-lined French colonial boulevards. Two open-air markets and a series of Western-style shops made up the commercial district. Portraits of the king adorned nearly every public wall. The Forces Armées Royales (FAR) had never missed a meal or won a battle.
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