Oklahoma Congressman Carl Albert, then Democratic floor leader, was also along. Although he later became House majority leader, we rarely had any business to discuss. I remember him best for his great devotion to President Johnson and his efforts to support him in every way he could.
It was the first time I had met Lady Bird Johnson. She was hostess at dinner and later escorted us each to our bedrooms. At the time I did not realize how strong a lady she is, and how fortunate the country was in having her in the White House in the late sixties when the country was riven and President Johnson was under siege. She was best known as the champion of a program to beautify the country, but to those who came and went at the top of government, she was the lady of the house and the balance wheel on all occasions. She was especially concerned with the President’s health and ever mindful of the massive heart attack he had suffered some years earlier. I recall President Johnson at one of the Tuesday White House luncheons declining dessert and muttering, “Lady Bird keeps reminding me that if I can’t discipline myself, I can scarcely expect to lead the country.”
On the way back to Washington on Air Force One, the President instructed me to “shake things up” at the Agency. It was less than clear to me exactly what he meant. Admiral Raborn and I were inheriting an organization that had been well tuned by John McCone, a man whose business experience had given him a matchless grasp of organizational efficiency and managerial responsibility. He had made all of the changes and adjustments that I thought necessary, and I believed it would be quite a while before I might be able to improve on any of them. My guess was that presidential directives to new appointees usually included the injunction to shake things up, on the theory that everything can be made better, maybe. Throughout our time together, the President never mentioned the matter again.
Vice Admiral William F. Raborn, Jr., a Naval Academy graduate, is the only DCI who stepped into office with no experience in intelligence. His highly successful naval career was almost entirely spent in weapons development. Lean and florid-faced, he came aboard with full military bearing. In the some fourteen months he served before retirement from the Agency in 1966, he tried hard to find his way in what was for him an uncharted area. He was expected to know about unknown places which had never previously come to his attention; he neither knew nor had even met any of the key CIA subordinates upon whose judgments and counsel he would have to depend; and he had no experience in dealing with the State Department or with Director Hoover at the FBI. Admiral Raborn was, of course, more familiar with the personnel and procedures of the Pentagon, but he had never met any of the Western intelligence chiefs with whom he would be in liaison. Admiral Raborn’s effort and hard work notwithstanding, it was clear that President Johnson had thrust him into the wrong job. To his credit, I never heard Red complain.
*It was another of LBJ’s secrets at the time but General Carter later told me that he had been named chief of the National Security Agency, a considerable promotion.
Chapter 25
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THE WAR WE WON
It was mid-June 1966 and one of the occasional Saturdays on which I resolved not to spend the morning in the office. There were errands to run in Chevy Chase, and I barely got home in time to pick up the telephone. John Macy, then head man at the Civil Service Commission, came right to the point. “The President is holding a small press conference this morning, only half a dozen reporters. He plans to announce three or four appointments, and among them, you’re being named director of Central Intelligence.” I managed to mumble a surprised acknowledgment before John went on to say, “Nobody knows anything about this, and you’re not to mention it to anyone.” There was no category of Top Secret Code Word, Cosmic, Eyes Only information any higher than the secrecy which President Johnson reserved for the name of anyone he planned to appoint to any office. The vaguest rumor was enough to make LBJ table the appointment.
Before I could assure John that the secret was safe with me, he added, “Sometimes the President decides at the last moment to postpone an announcement, so I mean what I’m saying—not a peep from you until you hear from the White House.”
Within two hours my phone began to ring, not the White House but various friends calling to congratulate me.
For fear of being held up in traffic, and like a freshman on a date with a prom queen, I arrived at the White House early on June 30, the morning I was to be sworn in. As I walked up the stairs to the main floor, a segment of the Marine Band was tuning instruments in the foyer. Until three or four of a group of congressmen and senators stopped chatting and turned to congratulate me, I was convinced that I had stepped into the wrong ceremony. Not at all. LBJ had summoned the group and the musicians for my ceremony. After twenty years in Washington, this was a genuine and pleasant surprise.
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As DCI, John McCone handled all significant relations with the White House, Bob Kennedy, Congress, State, and the Pentagon. It was only when McCone was out of town that General Carter assumed these duties. In contrast, Admiral Raborn insisted that I accompany him to most meetings with Congress, or at State or the Pentagon. I assumed that this was in keeping with President Johnson’s intention that I become better known in Congress and at other departments and agencies. Whatever the reason, I appreciated the opportunity. There was one marked drawback. I could not make the trips to the East Asian and Pacific area that I needed to in order to acquaint myself with some of the countries I had never visited. Nor could I visit key officers in place throughout the area that I knew least.
There were problems aplenty in the USSR, Eastern Europe, and Near East, but from the early months of the Johnson administration, the political and security situations in the East Asian area—most importantly, Vietnam and Laos—were of increasing concern. CIA’s role was expanding in bounds.
Aside from a relatively few—mainly OSS veterans—none of our operations officers had any significant paramilitary experience in the Pacific and Southeast Asian areas. We had an adequate depth of language competence in Europe, the Near East, and the Western Hemisphere. We were not tongue-tied in Southeast Asia, but competent linguists were in short supply. There was much training to be undertaken, and a sorting out of officers who could be expected to adapt to the political and cultural challenges of a completely new area.
Laos had first come forcefully to my attention in 1962 when I was appointed deputy director for plans. Until then, I had known the kingdom only as a small former French colony in a remote region—a hotchpotch of jungle and mountains squeezed between Thailand on the west, Vietnam on the north and east, China on the north, and Cambodia on the south, and plagued with conflicting ethnic and regional interests, feuding clans, and local warlords. Few areas in Southeast Asia are ridden with a more complex history or a more complicated tangle of political interests than this “accidental country,” as one of my briefing papers described it. Lacking natural defenses, the ancient monarchy barely survived centuries of pressure from greedy neighbors, who saw Laos as a gateway to the richer lands they wished to appropriate. At one time or another, each of the neighbors had encroached upon the slender Laotian defenses. In our day, this happened most blatantly when North Vietnam (NVN) established the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the system of roads which began in the North, skirted the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Vietnams, and ran through the narrow Laos panhandle into South Vietnam and Cambodia. Without this pathway, the North Vietnamese might never have sustained their war effort in the South.
At the time, the second Geneva Conference was under way, with the contesting nations—the United States, USSR, China, and North Vietnam—still trying to negotiate a settlement among competing Lao factions and their various foreign allies. The neutralization formula for defusing the Laotian tinderbox seemed adequate on paper, and conceivably might have worked had the North Vietnamese honored it. But just as it had after the first Geneva Conference of 1954, North Vietnam failed to withdraw its troops from Laos. Some twelve thousand of them were left in
the northern provinces, where they provided training and combat cadres for the Pathet Lao, the indigenous Lao communist force. This enabled the Pathet Lao to keep pressure on the weak, neutralist Royal Lao government, and freed the North Vietnamese troops to deepen their hold on Lao territory. Unobstructed, they continued to strengthen the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Cynical Americans referred to the trail as the “W. Averell Harriman Expressway.” Harriman, then assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, was the architect of the neutralization of Laos.
As specified at Geneva, the United States was obliged to halt all but very limited assistance to the regular forces of the Royal Lao government. Before the Geneva Agreement was signed, the White House authorized the CIA office in Vientiane to provide small arms to the Hmong (also referred to as the Meo) guerrilla fighters in northeastern Laos. This support was terminated, and all but two CIA officers were withdrawn. They were soon able to report that the Royal Lao armed forces were no match for the Pathet Lao and its North Vietnamese mentors. The Hmong highlanders who were willing to fight were primarily concerned with defending their homelands against the despised NVN force and the Pathet Lao. Like successful guerrillas everywhere, the Hmong knew their terrain intimately and were experts at ambush and hit-and-run forays.
By early 1963, the Hmong were experiencing serious difficulty as the strong NVN forces assumed more of the combat burden, and the Pathet Lao were relegated to the role of service troops. If the Hmong were to continue facing the superior firepower of their adversaries, they would need more weapons and training.
It was then that Prince Souvanna Phouma, the Laotian prime minister, quietly asked the United States for secret assistance. President Kennedy agreed, and at a Washington meeting in September 1963 assured the prime minister that the United States would never accept communist control of Laos and was determined to support Souvanna’s government. President Kennedy then made CIA the executive agent for the paramilitary program in Laos. “Executive agent” was a new term that soon slipped into the lexicon.
Here a word on clandestine paramilitary activity. The notion that the CIA engages in any paramilitary or political activity on its own authority is so transparently false that only repeated press references to “CIA wars” make any comment necessary. To refer to U.S. clandestine support of the Laotian resistance to North Vietnam military invasion as “CIA’s war” is as absurd as calling the war in South Vietnam the “Pentagon’s war against North Vietnam.”
The invasion of Cuba was conceived by President Eisenhower and authorized and directed by President Kennedy. The U.S. “secret” war in Laos, an indisputable violation of the Geneva accords, was authorized by President Kennedy and undertaken as a direct response to North Vietnam’s initial violation of the agreements. Appropriate members of the Congress had full knowledge of Kennedy’s action and were thoroughly briefed on CIA’s responsibility for the paramilitary activity. In Washington, CIA’s role was directed and monitored at every stage by the Special Action Group formed by President Kennedy. In Laos, the paramilitary and associated activity was approved and directed by the U.S. ambassador in Vientiane.
A significant element in the success of these activities was the highly competent ambassadors who served in Laos. Ambassador Leonard Unger, who spoke both Thai and Lao, showed skill and courage in thwarting the series of attempted coups which threatened the moderate centrist government in Vientiane. On one occasion, when Souvanna Phouma had been seized and confined by rebellious generals attempting to force his resignation, Ambassador Unger left the embassy and sped to the house where the prince was held. Unger spotted Souvanna Phouma on a balcony and, shouting across a garden fence, assured him of U.S. support and urged him not to resign. The prince held firm, and the generals backed down. It was during Ambassador Unger’s tenure that the Agency began its direct involvement in the war.
Ambassador William Sullivan succeeded Unger and oversaw a significant expansion of the scale and intensity of the U.S. operations. He had been Averell Harriman’s deputy during the Geneva negotiations, and arrived in Vientiane with a good grasp of the situation. Sullivan oversaw the expansion in the scale and intensity of U.S. operations in Laos and focused U.S. airpower on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This coincided with the continuing reinforcements of the U.S. ground forces in South Vietnam. It was at this time U.S. airpower began air support for the Hmong guerrillas. Sullivan was determined to preserve to the degree possible the fiction of Lao neutrality, and made no bones about keeping COMUSMACV (Commander, U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) and his staff at bay, and out of Laos. Bill’s position was not particularly welcome in Saigon, but it was fully in keeping with U.S. policy as decreed by Washington.
Under the direction of these ambassadors, the CIA component served as a key element in the country team. With the substantial increases in the U.S. commitment to Laos, other agencies began to play important roles. The Agency for International Development (AID) was highly effective in propping up the weak Royal Lao government, particularly in providing food and medical support for the thousands of Hmong and other refugees displaced by the rolling tide of the guerrilla fighting.
The years 1967–68 were marked by a changing pattern in ground action. Instead of the traditional hit-and-run tactics, the guerrilla forces CIA supported were drawn into larger units and deployed against the most aggressive enemy forces. The firepower of the North Vietnamese regular units had been strikingly increased, and the lightly armed Lao forces were soon facing tanks and heavy artillery. The NVN incursions into Lao territory were deeper than ever before and covered a much broader area. During the dry season the NVN forces had mobility and pushed aggressively. Come the rainy season, they withdrew to the east and hunkered down to defend themselves against guerrilla attacks.
By 1969, when Bill Sullivan was replaced by Ambassador McMurtrie Godley, the level of combat in Laos exceeded anything envisioned in 1963, and it intensified steadily through the next four years.
I’ve often been asked why CIA, a civilian agency, should have been involved in a military operation this large and so obviously impossible to conceal. A fair question. The Agency did not reach out to assume a paramilitary activity of this scope. When it began, the operation was small and within CIA’s ability to handle, and we did our best to keep it that way. In response to increasing demands, the operation grew in increments small enough not to have been widely recognized in Washington. The Agency’s mandate to carry on was made clear to me by a succession of three presidents. Put simply, the Agency was instructed to do everything it could to sustain the independence of Laos and, consistent with this mission, to do all we could to support the U.S. effort in South Vietnam.
Every attack on the Ho Chi Minh Trail diminished the supplies available to the North Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam. Three of the best NVN combat divisions were tied down and under persistent guerrilla attacks in Laos. The NVN troops were supported by tank units, artillery battalions, and combat engineers. In 1973 the total NVN commitment in Laos was later estimated at 80,000 troops. Every NVN soldier in Laos was one less enemy in South Vietnam.
Basic to the presidential decisions to keep us at it was the fact that the Agency had already developed some unique resources in Laos. We also had great organizational and administrative flexibility. Almost from scratch we had developed a personnel cadre, limited in number, but with a sense of purpose and paramilitary skills particularly well suited to the mission. We had the full support of Air America, a highly efficient, ostensibly civilian airline controlled by the Agency.
The extent of Agency commitment and the outstanding performance of the Agency personnel in Laos came home to me in September 1970 when I visited Laos and saw it at first hand.
Laos, or at least the parts of the country where the war was being fought, has to be seen to be believed. The heavily forested mountains seem to go on forever, but it is the karsts that really catch one’s eye. These great gray limestone shafts stand out above the terrain, often cloud-covered, she
er-sided, beautiful, and ominous. I saw them at close range on the flight north from Vientiane, and as we dropped into the mountain-rimmed valley called Long Tieng.
I’ve done my share of flying, but the pucker factor really kicked in when our tiny Volpar plane suddenly dropped over a 3000-foot stony ridge and made an abrupt ninety-degree turn. After a dismaying glimpse of a crashed C-47, we shot forward onto the landing strip at Long Tieng. This was the headquarters of General Vang Pao and the hub of the Agency’s support structure for the fight against the North Vietnamese forces and the Pathet Lao. As we tumbled out of the plane, Lawrence Devlin, the Agency chief in Laos and my escort officer, pointed to the Skyline Ridge, which shrouded one side of the base. “That’s the catbird seat, and the enemy wants it. As soon as they wiggle back near the top, they begin mortaring us. So far, we’ve been able to knock them off the ridge every time.”
Larry’s briefing was cut short as General Vang Pao stepped up to the plane. Stocky, cheerful looking, only five feet four, Vang Pao possessed a commanding military presence. After a salute, he welcomed us in a mélange of French and English. He led us across the runway to meet his staff officers and to review a company of Hmong troops. The famous Hmong guerrillas offered a near spit-and-polish, military appearance. I hadn’t expected such a formal reception, but told him how much we admired the Hmong courage and their determination to resist the invaders. The general translated, and the troops cheered. We moved to the general’s house for a baci, the traditional ceremony that marks most important occasions in Laos.
Sitting on the floor at nine in the morning, we were immediately surrounded by colorfully attired Hmong maidens and inundated by offers of candy and sweetmeats. This was followed by glasses of straight scotch, at room temperature. Politesse mandated that we down the whiskey in a single swallow. For a moment I thought we might be treated to the drink that had been inflicted upon a colleague who was being feted by a local chief in the South. It was a large glass of fermented rice wine, tarted up with a noggin of buffalo blood and a dash of warm water. Shades of James Bond insisting that his martini be shaken, not stirred.
A Look Over My Shoulder Page 31