A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  LBJ was in no sense a sphinx. Neither was he an oracle.

  —

  My involvement in Vietnam began when President Kennedy authorized a substantial increase in the commitment of U.S. advisors and military equipment to South Vietnam in expectation of increasing resistance to Ho Chi Minh’s continuing military success and underground activity. Where there had been a unit in Saigon probing South Vietnamese government stability and intentions, there was now an effort to expand intelligence coverage in the countryside, in the Delta as well as north to the Demilitarized Zone. The operations officers were pushing hard to cope with the formidable Viet Cong operations and to support the Diem administration. The demand for additional officers in Vietnam was soon causing shortages in other critical areas.

  One of the many aspects of secret intelligence that I brought to the attention of the White House several times is that operations officers at work overseas must have a backup system in Washington that will support their activity and provide a pool from which replacements may be drawn. The rapid expansion of our staff in Vietnam played havoc with our other personnel commitments. The administrative backup involved in relocating hundreds of officers and clerks working under a variety of cover arrangements stretched our support staffs to the limit.

  It was in 1962 that we began a concentrated effort to penetrate the government of North Vietnam, and to break into and thwart its deeply grounded, subversive operations in South Vietnam. On form, civil wars create an optimum espionage venue. A common culture and language, family ties that stretch across the battle lines, massive social dislocation, and intense political convictions are among the most easily exploited elements in denied-area espionage operations. The common language and culture make it easy for an operative to assess and approach a potential recruit; cross-border family relationships offer a ready-made cover for operational communications; and the political, ethnic, and religious reasons for a civil war are strong motives for active participation.

  In South Vietnam these factors proved to be a one-way street. The common culture and family ties greatly facilitated Viet Cong paramilitary and espionage operations in South Vietnam, but had only a slight impact on our efforts to recruit and run agents with access to the North Vietnamese governing and military hierarchy. In contrast to the strong political and nationalist ideals expressed by Ho Chi Minh and his administration, the series of weak governments of South Vietnam inspired little but pro forma anti-communist political support among persons who might otherwise have been motivated to assume the risks involved in espionage. In the months that followed our withdrawal from South Vietnam it became quite clear that many of the South Vietnamese who by day appeared loyal to their government were by nightfall active supporters of Ho Chi Minh’s Hanoi regime. This might be taken as a counterintelligence or security problem. In fact, it ran much more deeply than that. For all its faults as perceived by Western observers, Ho Chi Minh’s government offered the Vietnamese something that the politically weak governments in the South were never able to match. The faults and iniquities in the Soviet system that were so obvious to Western observers had little meaning and even less political resonance in a society as remote as that of Vietnam. Simple anti-communism was not much of a battle cry.

  Another of the reasons the various “pacification programs” the United States initiated in South Vietnam failed was, as one of our officers has observed, that the Viet Cong had managed to become “custodians of Vietnamese anti-colonialism” and enjoyed a “near-monopoly of political energy among the South Vietnamese.”*

  In the ten years of our most intense efforts we tried every operational approach in the book, and committed our most experienced field operatives to the effort to get inside the government in Hanoi. What had worked successfully against the USSR and its Eastern European cohort failed in North Vietnam. It is little comfort to describe how hard we tried, or to contrast it with our work in other areas.

  One of the unique differences in operations against Hanoi and the USSR was the all but total absence of defectors who had had any reasonable access to Ho Chi Minh’s policymaking structure. From the collapse of Nazi Germany until the end of the Cold War, the string of defectors from the military, diplomatic, and intelligence services of the USSR and the Eastern European communist administrations provided significant intelligence information. In addition, these sources gave us the background data we needed to facilitate the recruitment of penetration agents in place. The prisoners of war and the deserters from the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese military in South Vietnam were of some military value but offered little of strategic interest.

  Within the Agency, our failure to penetrate the North Vietnamese government was the single most frustrating aspect of those years. We could not determine what was going on at the highest levels of Ho’s government, nor could we learn how policy was made or who was making it. Along with the entire foreign policy element of the U.S. government, the Agency could not determine what might bring Ho or any of his principal officers to the table for face-to-face negotiations. As we eventually came to learn, the government of North Vietnam wanted a unified North and South Vietnam, independent of any foreign power, and would accept nothing less. In retrospect, I am convinced that there was nothing within our grasp which at that time might have brought about a reasonable negotiated peace.

  Not the least of the operational and policy problems in Vietnam was our national ignorance of Vietnamese history, society, and language. As a tonal language, Vietnamese is at its best very difficult for native English speakers, and no crash course is likely to result in more than a basic competence. Beyond that, the ability to distinguish between polite agreement, delicate disagreement, sarcasm, and irony is not easily taught in a classroom. No series of background lectures can be counted on to replace serious study of the history and society of a distant country, and even this should be buttressed with a measure of in-country experience.

  One morning at a meeting of President Kennedy’s National Security Council, I listened to a discussion of whether or not the immolations of Buddhist monks in South Vietnam was causing serious reflections on the existing Diem regime. Fritz Nolting, the former U.S. ambassador in Saigon, who had a more favorable opinion of Diem than prevailed at the White House, argued that the suicides would have little impact. Averell Harriman, assistant secretary of state for the Far East, disagreed strongly and carried the day. One Agency analyst summed up his years of dealing with some of Washington’s Vietnam policymakers with a single lament: “They simply didn’t know what they didn’t know.” Those who did know were too far down the line of command to have impact on the nationallevel policymakers.

  Granted that the immolations were only one factor in the subsequent decision to favor the replacement of the Diem regime with a more effective leadership in Saigon, it was symptomatic of the lack of knowledge at the policymaking level of the underlying political and cultural forces arrayed against us. In retrospect, it seems clear that the fundamental mistake was the failure to comprehend that Ho Chi Minh represented fighters who for generations had struggled for their freedom and the independence of Vietnam from China, France, and Japan. The North Vietnamese leadership and population were prepared to fight, suffer, and die for as long as it might take to win. Because Ho Chi Minh felt he had been repeatedly cheated by the French, he had no intention of sitting down at a negotiating table with the United States merely to get the hostilities stopped. We bombed, we dispatched emissaries, we tried various maneuvers, but the North Vietnamese gave no positive responses. No amount of diplomatic or military pressure we might plausibly have devised would have moderated this position. To their credit, Agency analysts never agreed to the proposition that bombing North Vietnam would bring Ho’s government to the negotiating table.

  I was sometimes mesmerized by the mixture of domestic political considerations and foreign policy maneuvers. I particularly remember an exchange between Roger Hilsman and President Kennedy. Hilsman, who headed the intelligence component
of the State Department, pointed out rather abruptly that a certain foreign policy decision would have an adverse effect on the political scene at home. Kennedy snapped back, “Let me worry about domestic politics. You help solve our problems in Vietnam.”

  At the Agency, William Colby, then assigned to the Far Eastern Division, caught John McCone’s eye. Bill, the son of a professional Army officer, grew up on Army posts in Panama, China, and the United States, graduated from Princeton, and attended Columbia University Law School until commissioned in the Army in 1941. He volunteered for OSS after an injury interrupted his Army paratroop training, and in 1944 parachuted into occupied France with a Jedburgh paramilitary team. After weeks behind German lines, he returned to London and then led a sabotage team that parachuted into Norway. After the war, Bill was graduated from Columbia Law School. Following a brief hitch with a New York law firm, he joined the Office of Policy Coordination element of CIA when war broke out in Korea. Colby served in Scandinavia and in Rome, where he was deeply involved in political operations supporting center democratic parties in opposing Communist candidates. He was named chief of station in Saigon in 1960.

  With a zeal that has been accurately described as “missionary,” Colby promptly got on board what was known as the “Strategic Hamlet” program, which was designed to create a fighting peasantry, able to defend itself against the depredations of the Viet Cong. Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu perceived the virtue of this effort which, at the beginning, enjoyed some success. Three years later, when optimists were pointing out that Viet Cong attacks on the villages had lessened, an American official based in a province noted that the attacks had subsided because there “were no longer any strategic hamlets worth attacking.” Three quarters of the two hundred strategic villages had been destroyed.* At about this time, three paramilitary programs—Mountain Scouts, Combat Intelligence, and Border Surveillance Teams—utilizing members of the South Vietnamese military and closely supported by American military training officers, were established. Ambitious infiltration operations into North Vietnam were launched without discernible success. Parachute teams were captured or simply disappeared, and some of the radios that came on the air were obviously under hostile control. Serious security problems were encountered, and the entire program needed a counterintelligence overhaul and redirection, if not outright termination. With the arrival of increasing numbers of U.S. military forces, pressure mounted from the Pentagon for the Agency to turn these activities over to MACV, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, despite our strong advice. By December 1963, MACV assumed responsibility for these operations. We were in no position to refuse. The failed landing at the Bay of Pigs was taken in Washington as an indication that the Agency did not have the staff structure to handle major paramilitary operations.

  Whatever value infiltration operations—by parachute, boat, or cross border—may have had before the advent of the modern police state with its high-speed electronic communications, it is doubtful that even well-executed infiltration operations have even a slight potential for collecting strategic intelligence. Paramilitary resistance operations are a different matter, and depend in large part upon the level of indigenous support and favorable terrain.

  As the sixties melded into the seventies and the war dragged on with increasing ferocity, the division of opinion between those—primarily analysts—who were convinced that the war was being lost and the operations officers who could still see possible victory hardened. I did my best to preside over these disparate views. During those years we increased our staff personnel on the ground in Vietnam from some 200 to more than 600. Where there had been a small unit probing the intentions and stability of the South Vietnamese government, our objectives expanded to include intelligence coverage of the countryside from the Delta north into the Demilitarized Zone and across the border into North Vietnam. In addition to the staff personnel, we employed some 400 contract employees, many of them retired Army officers. CIA officers were assigned to the 44 South Vietnamese provinces and on duty in each of the 242 districts. These figures underline the fact that CIA was under pressure incompatible with secret intelligence operations. Our effort to use the Kennedy administration’s favored counterinsurgency techniques to bolster what seemed to me to be developing into a military nightmare was a more than daunting task.

  Outside the halls of government, sentiment against the war increased. Families were torn, emotions ran high. A medical problem kept my son Dennis out of uniform and in college for much of this time. Exposed as he was to the strong antiwar sentiments prevailing on every campus and in much of the media, Dennis had as strong feelings about the war as most of his generation, but he refrained from preaching or otherwise attempting to influence me. The most he ever said was, “Dad, you must know that most of my friends loathe this war, and hate the prospect of being drafted. In the long run, this will affect their attitude toward their government.” This was not lost on me, but the most I could say was, “I know, Dennis, believe me, I know.”

  The notion held by many outside the Beltway that President Johnson and his closest advisors were somehow oblivious to the depth and intensity of the antiwar emotion was absurd, but no more farfetched than the conviction that any of us might have proposed a satisfactory solution to the dilemma. Aside from following the world and national press more closely than many readers, we also had the usual range of friends who offered opinions. At a college reunion in 1970, the wife of a classmate perched on the arm of my chair and launched a tirade so harsh and threatening that for a moment I thought she might use her sharp nails on my face.

  As the war raged on, I was often reminded of a note extracted from a memorandum John McCone hand-carried to President Johnson in April 1965: “I think we are … starting on a track which involves ground force operations [that will mean] an ever-increasing commitment of U.S. personnel without materially improving the chances of victory.… In effect, we will find ourselves mired in combat in the jungle in a military effort that we cannot win, and from which we will have extreme difficulty in extracting ourselves.”*

  At the Agency there was a division of view, some of it generational, on the war and our role in it. On the core objective—to keep an unwelcome communist government from seizing by force of arms and subversion a relatively democratic part of Vietnam—there was slight difference. The obvious breakpoint was the extent of the effort the United States should commit to propping up an imperfect government that was unable to defend itself. Within the Agency, there was also an increasingly skeptical view of the domino theory as applied to Southeast Asia. It no longer seemed axiomatic that the forced reunification of Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh would oust the governments of Cambodia and Thailand, although the status of Laos was seen as more fragile. The National Security Council was much more pessimistic, and at one point actually felt that the collapse of South Vietnam might even increase the threat to India, Australia, and New Zealand. This gloomy view was never shared by the Agency.

  With the passage of three decades, I am relieved to be able to say that although the antiwar sentiment and convictions remained a matter of intense debate within the Agency, they did not bubble over into demonstrations or get in the way of daily work. The discipline that prevailed throughout those difficult years was a tribute to the caliber of Agency officers at the time. Concern for the combat troops was the strong motivating factor.

  While I was still Admiral Raborn’s deputy, I realized the extent to which Vietnam would occupy his everyday dealings with President Johnson. He needed more support than the Agency’s organizational structure provided. The answer was to create a new job—special assistant for Vietnamese affairs (SAVA). It later proved to be as useful to me as it was to the admiral. The assignment went to Peer de Silva, a West Pointer who had left the military after World War II and who had served as chief of station in Saigon. At the time it was difficult to tell whether Raborn was more impressed by Peer’s military posture or the aplomb with which he organized the torrential paper
flow in the DCI’s office.

  When I replaced Raborn, SAVA was a going concern, and a blessing without which I could not have carried the responsibilities of my office while also spending the twenty-four hours a day on Vietnam as President Johnson expected. One day’s schedule lingers in memory. A midnight telephone call summoned me to a meeting with President Johnson and his top advisors. It lasted from 2:40 a.m. to 5 a.m. This session was called by the President to meet with General Creighton Abrams, who had succeeded General Westmoreland as commanding officer in Vietnam, who had just been hustled to the White House from the airport. In LBJ’s opinion, the general’s analysis of the situation on the ground could not even be delayed until the break of dawn. There followed a ride to CIA headquarters in time to check the stack of overnight cable traffic and bolt a bit of breakfast before the Agency staff meeting at 9 a.m. I returned to the White House for lunch with the President at 1 p.m. and got back at my desk by 3 p.m. Four hours and fifteen minutes later I was on my way home. Aside from the time involved in the frequent drives back and forth from the Agency in Langley to the White House, my hours were not much different from those of the staff involved with Vietnam.

  De Silva’s replacement as SAVA was George Carver, a small man with horn-rimmed glasses, a puckish grin, and a boundless enthusiasm for work. He was bright, and the advantages of his education in both American and English universities were readily apparent. He thought fast, wrote voluminously and with great speed. George’s nominal respect for those in high office did not temper the candid expression of his views, and he spoke as bluntly to the highest officials as he did to the members of his own staff. This did not endear him to everyone—within the Agency or without—but he did a superb job in one of the most difficult assignments CIA had to offer.