Shadow Warrior (43 page)

Counterterror activities were particularly effective, leading to collection of dossiers on thousands of suspected Viet Cong cadres and the killing of some 3,100. An operation in Quang Tin Province, in September 1964, was illustrative. Twenty-five-man teams followed in the wake of a conventional ARVN sweep. Dressed in civilian clothes, they stayed behind after government forces departed and assassinated 83 Viet Cong who emerged from hiding. CT Teams also engaged in so-called “black ops,” posing, for example, as Viet Cong tax collectors and occasionally staging a killing and blaming
it on the communists. Colby proudly circulated captured Viet Cong documents to the State Department and the White House that lamented the damage done by CT black ops.
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Throughout 1965, however, US-sponsored counterinsurgency/pacification efforts remained localized and compartmentalized. Even down to the district level, Agency personnel operated almost as free agents. There was no central clearinghouse for intelligence acquired or for the management of either civil or military programs. The South Vietnamese government did not take advantage of the Political Action and Advanced Pacification Teams to build a political network in the countryside. In some cases, the US military authorities cooperated with counterinsurgency/pacification initiatives, and in others they did not. IV Corps adviser Colonel Jasper Wilson, General Nguyen Khanh's former coconspirator, was so hostile to the CIA that he forbade his subordinates from cooperating in any way with the programs. But the obvious successes of the CIA's initiatives did attract one disciple: Henry Cabot Lodge. The proconsul returned to South Vietnam as ambassador again in August 1965, with Ed Lansdale in tow as his personal pacification adviser.
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As Lodge was making his return to Saigon, the military junta was dispensing with Prime Minister Phan Huy Quat and the vestiges of civilian leadership. Nguyen Van Thieu, a southerner and head of the Military Revolutionary Council, assumed the largely ceremonial post of chief of state, while Nguyen Cao Ky, a northerner, became prime minister. In September, Thieu asked Gordon Jorgenson, the new chief of station in Saigon, to stop by the palace and discuss counterinsurgency operations. At this point, the regime was anticipating a negotiated settlement with the National Liberation Front and Hanoi, and it viewed the Political Action, Advanced Political Action, and Counter-Terror Teams as means for combating renewed infiltration, subversion, and political organization by the communists. Ky and Thieu declared pacification to be at the top of their priority list and assigned the task of overseeing nation-building to the Ministry of Rural Reconstruction under the energetic, pragmatic, and generally capable General Nguyen Duc Thang. At a meeting in November, Thang pledged to Jorgenson and his assistant, Tom Donohue, that CIA-sponsored programs would become the core of the government's pacification effort. The process would take two or three years, however. In a “personal judgment which he could not express officially,” Thang observed that an immediate government
takeover of the programs would destroy them. Thieu's paranoia about possible rivals would see to that.
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The most visible manifestation of this mini-renaissance in counterinsurgency/pacification was the National Training Center for Revolutionary Development Cadre at Vung Tau, the former seaside resort of Cape St. Jacques. A result of a partnering effort between the CIA and General Thang's Ministry of Rural Development, the center was to train cadres who would work in Frank Scotton's armed propaganda teams, or in Tran Ngoc Chau's Census Grievance Program, or in counterterror initiatives then on the drawing board. The curriculum at Vung Tau was the creation of Tran Ngoc Chau, whom Thang had recruited to head the ministry's cadre program. In December 1965, Chau produced a two-volume pacification plan that was to become a model for both US and Vietnamese counterinsurgency/pacification personnel. The document was the product of Chau's experiences as a Viet Minh, as a government officer, and then as province chief of Kien Hoa. It was also the product of extended talks with John Paul Vann—who was then a US provincial adviser in Hau Nghia—along with Frank Scotton, Ev Bumgardner, and, especially, Bill Colby. “Colby and I had had many long conversations during his visits to Kien Hoa,” Chau recalled in his memoir. “I felt Colby had a much better insight [than other US personnel] into Vietnam in general, and the pacification process in particular.”
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In postcolonial Vietnam, Chau wrote, the rural population was divided into three groups by the government: those who supported the government—the police, civil servants, military personnel; those who were Viet Cong or their active sympathizers; and the great silent mass in between. During the 1940s and 1950s, the vast majority of peasants had rallied to the Viet Minh and fought against the French and their Vietnamese puppets. The Saigon regime and its representatives viewed anyone who had been affiliated with the Viet Minh as communists or communist sympathizers. Nothing could have been further from the truth, Chau wrote. Ninety percent of the villagers in Kien Hoa were nationalists, not communists. It was this group to whom the South Vietnamese government and their American allies must appeal. Through the Census Grievance process, authorities would learn what the people wanted and who was abusing and who was respecting them. It was simple; as Chau's friend Ed Lansdale had put it: find out what the people want and give it to them.
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The first Revolutionary (or Reconstruction, as the South Vietnamese government preferred) Cadre teams graduated from the National Training Center on May 21, 1966, with Prime Minister Ky delivering the graduation address. The fifty-nine-man teams were recruited from districts and villages around South Vietnam, trained, and then returned to their homes to work. In this way it was hoped that the counterinsurgency/pacification effort would not be seen as the initiative of an absentee government operating out of Saigon. The teams would provide local security; conduct Census Grievance surveys; help with medical, agricultural, and infrastructure initiatives; and, significantly, oversee elections for local officials. Separately, the counterterror squads, now named Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs), sometimes with a contingent of US Navy SEALs embedded, would roam the countryside gathering information on Viet Cong cadres and either turning or killing them. The province chiefs had no control over resident ARVN units: “They wanted some [military] force that they could use for a local purpose and we supported that,” Colby said. In some regions, the PRUs acted as effective—if brutal—adversaries of the Viet Cong; in others, they operated as the enforcement arm of corrupt province chiefs. All of these programs belonged ultimately to Bill Colby. He examined them minutely in theory and in practice, signed off on them, and touted them to the director of central intelligence and the White House.
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In Vietnam, as elsewhere, the CIA operated in a legal and moral world of its own making. The only controls were internal. CIA director Richard Helms (Red Raborn had lasted less than a year); George Carver, the DCI's special adviser on Vietnam (SAVA); and Colby reported in executive session to select congressional committees that were populated with Cold War hawks who wanted only to be briefed in general terms. By its own definition, the CIA existed to operate outside of boxes, whether political, bureaucratic, legal, or moral; the only operations and schemes Bill Colby ever rejected were the ones that he considered counterproductive of long-range policy goals. Like the soldier-priests who came to Southeast Asia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and embraced the world with all of its flaws to win it for Christianity, Colby was willing to employ virtually any means to achieve the end of containing and then defeating the forces of international communism. His pragmatism, coupled with his political liberalism, impelled him to advocate openings to the left to create a vital non-communist center. This was as true in Vietnam as it had been in Italy.

Colby's ideological flexibility was one of the reasons he was relatively unconcerned with Viet Cong penetration of the civil and military bureaucracies in South Vietnam. Many of those recruited into the Rural Development Cadre and the PRUs were former Viet Minh, and a significant number were turncoat Viet Cong. Colby had no illusions about the CT Teams and PRUs. “They were tough nuts, there's no question about it,” he later observed to an interviewer. “The key was that that was a period in which there was an enormous amount of anarchy and confusion and chaos, and a lot of bad things went on on both sides.”
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Some worried about the age-old question: if a protagonist adopted the tactics and techniques of its antagonist, would it not become morally, politically, and ideologically un-differentiated from the enemy? It was not a question that bothered the head of the CIA's Far East Division. The Cold War was a war, and in warfare rules were made to be broken, boundaries overstepped.

Despite emergence of the National Training Center at Vung Tau, most of South Vietnam remained unpacified through 1965 and 1966. There were two types of villages: those in which there was a vacuum, with neither communists nor the South Vietnamese government showing an appreciable presence, and those that were occupied and administered by the Viet Cong, such as the villages in the provinces of Hau Nghia, Long An, An Giang, Binh Ainh, and Quang Ngai. In these latter communities, “the task was not so much to resist an insurgent threat to Saigon's authority as it was to replace Viet Cong rule with that of the [South Vietnamese government],” Colby noted. The province chief in Hau Nghia told one American official that 200,000 of his 220,000 constituents were under the control of the Viet Cong: “I am not a province chief, I am a hamlet chief,” he said. In June 1965, John Paul Vann, the US representative in Hau Nghia, was ambushed in broad daylight.
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In those provinces where there was an opportunity for the South Vietnamese government to take control, Ky and his subordinates seemed clueless. In a sense, little had changed since Diem and Nhu. The Ky-Thieu regime did not even pretend to adhere to a political philosophy. There was no notion of local empowerment. As one US embassy official observed: “Vietnamese officials do not visualize the program [counterinsurgency/pacification] as essentially revolutionary,” but as an “opportunity for economic development and a channel for the injection of large quantities of American aid.” And, though he did not say it, an opportunity for personal enrichment.
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By early 1966, the Johnson administration was ready to turn its attention to “the other war,” as the president termed it. It was never LBJ's intention to win the conflict in Southeast Asia in conventional military terms; rather, he intended to temporarily interpose American military power between the communists and noncommunists in Vietnam until the South Vietnamese were strong enough to triumph on their own. Indeed, in terms of building a viable society in South Vietnam capable of governing and defending itself, a clear-cut American “victory” would have been counterproductive. Vietnamization, a term Richard Nixon would claim as his own, was always America's policy; the line separating intervention from imperialism was extremely fine, but the White House believed initially that it could be walked. In truth, the concept of nation-building lay at the very core of the Johnsonian vision: at home, the president's Great Society itself, especially the Second Reconstruction, was nothing if not an experiment in social engineering. The speech LBJ delivered to a joint session of Congress on November 27, 1963, immediately following the Kennedy assassination was meant to evoke memories of JFK, but it was pure LBJ. “We will carry on the fight against poverty and misery, and disease and ignorance, in other lands and in our own,” he declared.
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At the outset of his administration, Johnson disavowed any intention to replicate America overseas. But once the exigencies of the Cold War seemed to demand intervention in Vietnam, his mind turned naturally to internationalizing the Great Society. There was, in his philosophy, the assumption that human beings everywhere, especially at the individual and family levels, were the same. “For what do the people of North Viet-Nam want?” he asked rhetorically in his speech at Johns Hopkins University in 1965. “They want what their neighbors also desire: food for their hunger; health for their bodies; a chance to learn; progress for their country; and an end to the bondage of material misery.”
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Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s the views of American counterinsurgency/pacification enthusiasts such as Ed Lansdale, Rufe Phillips, Ev Bumgardner, and Frank Scotton had percolated up through the US foreign policy bureaucracy. Indeed, one of the reasons the Pentagon and the State Department had opposed Lansdale as ambassador during the Kennedy administration, and subsequently worked to circumscribe him, after he returned to Saigon with Lodge in 1965, was that they thought he
had too much clout. But no actor in the South Vietnamese theater created a greater impact in this arena than the iconic John Paul Vann. The subject of journalist Neil Sheehan's
Bright Shining Lie
, which won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1989, Vann would come to represent “the other war” in Vietnam with all its promise and its pitfalls. He would become its prickly advocate, first in Vietnam and then in Washington. After counterinsurgency and pacification got underway in a national, coordinated way, he would become its symbol in Vietnam, a hero, almost an avatar, to the men and women who labored in the vineyard, including Bill Colby.