Diem’s current imbroglio with Buddhists began on May 8 after he prohibited monks from displaying their flags. South Vietnamese security forces acting on orders from Diem’s security advisor Ngo Dinh Nhu, who also happened to be Diem’s younger brother, fired into a crowd of Buddhist protestors, killing eight of them.
In the weeks after that, Buddhists wearing their saffron robes conducted almost daily protest marches through the streets of Saigon, burning incense, carrying icons, and chanting.
In June, a monk named Thich Quang Duc burned himself to death in protest at a busy Saigon intersection. Photographs of his self-immolation circulated around the globe.
“No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one,” President Kennedy publically proclaimed with honest emotion.
Protests escalated in Saigon with other monks aping Quang Duc’s example and self-immolating. Diem’s brother, Nhu, urged on by his Dragon Lady wife, the de facto First Lady since President Diem was unmarried, launched nationwide raids on Buddhist pagodas. He killed thirty Buddhists. More than two hundred were wounded and 1,400 arrested. The cremated remains of Quang Duc, considered a sacred relic, were confiscated. The raids caught U.S. officials back in Saigon and in Washington flat-footed.
“It’s hitting the fan,” DCI McCone said. “Bone, I want you to go back over there now. Get with Jocko Richardson to see what the hell is going on.”
Richardson, I discovered, was under a load of stress. He looked much older when he picked me up at the airport than when I last saw him. During the days after my arrival we observed events as they played out while I attempted to provide McCone a comprehensible picture of the situation. If things were fucked up in Washington, they were bleeding over tenfold into Saigon.
As Jocko predicted, Henry Cabot Lodge’s arrival in June to replace Nolting as U.S. ambassador signaled a dramatic change in policy. A firm believer in the “Domino Theory,” Lodge insisted the U.S. had to take a stand somewhere; it might as well be in Vietnam as in Mexico or Central America.
The new ambassador seemed convinced the U.S. could not defeat the communists with Diem in office. Jocko intercepted a dispatch Lodge sent to Washington in which he supported disgruntled Viet officers who were apparently plotting a coup to overthrow Diem.
In response, Secretary of State Dean Rusk advised Lodge not to push the coup plot “pending final decisions which are being formulated now.”
“We kill Diem,” Jocko said to me, “and it’s a point of no return in Asia.”
I agreed. “Ho Chi Minh will exploit it to infiltrate NVA into South Vietnam. We’ll have no choice but to send in combat troops.”
“That’s what Lodge is pushing for.”
In Washington, the choosing of sides and the plotting continued. Lining up with Lodge were McGeorge Bundy, special assistant to the president for national security affairs and a chief architect of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia; Averell Harriman, undersecretary of state for political affairs; and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
“A pit of vipers, the bunch,” Jocko opined. “They’ll bite you when you’re not looking.”
On the other side were Jocko Richardson, who opposed a coup against Diem and argued for patience; Bureau Chief Far Eastern Division William Colby, who opted against abandoning Diem, although he had become disillusioned with the way the struggle against the communist National Liberation Front was proceeding; DCI John McCone; and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, both of whom feared supporting a coup made the U.S. responsible for South Vietnam and whatever came afterward.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara likely stood with Kennedy on whichever side the president finally landed.
So far, JFK remained committed to backing Diem, arguing that Diem had been a U.S. ally for nearly a decade now and that there was no guarantee that whoever replaced him would be any better. Nonetheless, the Buddhist uprising was weakening Kennedy’s commitment and forcing him to straddle the fence.
“I think we want to make it our best judgment,” he hedged over the question of whether or not to support a coup against Diem, “because I don’t think we have to do it.”
Ambassador Lodge considered Jocko a symbol of American support for Diem. He attempted to have Richardson fired as Saigon station chief in back-channel letters to the president. McCone warned Kennedy that the ambassador was so eager for a coup that he might act unilaterally.
Dean Rusk’s State Department transmitted Cable 243 to Averell Harriman, with a copy to Bundy, stating that—and I only got the gist of it through sources—if “Diem remains obdurate … we must face the possibility that Diem cannot be preserved.”
I was back in Langley when a dramatic confrontation between Ambassador Lodge and Jocko in Saigon ended with Richardson’s recall to Washington and his replacement by a new station chief who took orders from Harriman and Lodge’s military assistant, an Army Special Forces officer named James Michael Dunn. Dunn, I discovered through the DCI, was known to be in touch with Colonel Big Minh and other plotters against Diem.
Sending Jocko home was a public signal that the U.S. had withdrawn support for the South Vietnam regime. I also took it as a sign that Kennedy may have caved and would allow the coup to proceed.
In the predawn of November 1, 1963, Colonel Big Minh made his move. Ambassador Lodge received a frantic phone call from Diem, demanding, “What is the attitude of the U.S. toward this coup attempt?”
The ambassador equivocated: “I’m not well enough informed at this time to be able to tell you,” he replied.
Rebel soldiers dragged pudgy little Diem, his brother Nhu, and a Catholic priest out of a church where they were hiding and shoved them into the back of an armored personnel carrier. The APC stopped at a railroad crossing, where all three were executed with bullets to the backs of their heads.
On November 22, 1963, three weeks after Diem’s murder, bullets from another assassin felled President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. When I heard the news, I trudged through the underground passageway that connected the CIA headquarters building to the auditorium. The auditorium was unoccupied. It was one of my favorite places when I had some thinking to do. I stood at a window overlooking the grounds outside. I couldn’t help considering how the president who became the most fervent supporter of military special operations may have himself become its victim.
DCI John McCone approached quietly from behind and stood next to me looking out the window. He was the first to speak.
“Maybe we were blind,” he said. “Maybe we should have anticipated this.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
THE DIEM COUP AND assassination uncorked instability throughout South Vietnam, which the communists immediately exploited. Lyndon Baines Johnson, Kennedy’s VP and now the new United States president following JFK’s assassination, appeared ready to tackle Vietnam head-on.
“I’m not Jack Kennedy,” he declared in a meeting of top Defense officials. “Them little yellow bastards are gonna get their asses kicked so high they’ll have to take off their shirts to shit.”
“A real war,” McCone gloomily forecast.
Johnson was a Cold War warrior whose first impulse was victory. He made his new direction clear when he stripped control of all operations in Vietnam from the CIA and transferred authority to a military entity labeled as Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) under the command of Army Lieutenant General William C. Westmoreland. The military took to the locker room to ramp up for it. The introduction of American combat troops was only a matter of time.
With CIA activities reduced from active control to more or less an advisory status, and with renewed requirements for innovation on the battlefield, CNO McDonald was ready to consider recommendations I submitted from my fact-finding tour of OP-34. He released a study by his office supporting the expanded use of naval special warfare and for the development of watercraft to support it. No more junks and sampans and pretending to be fishermen.
What his report requested was “bo
ats of many kinds and sizes for real fighting. … U.S. national policy will permit the use of effective military means short of open warfare to counter communist aggression. … The U.S. Navy will be called upon to conduct sublimated warfare in restricted waters, rivers, maritime areas, and on the high seas.”
I volunteered the Maritime Office to design and test boats for use by SEALs, UDTs, and Riverine Forces. I took on the task personally.
Doug Fane, who had retired from the Navy in 1960, called me up. “Bone, you’re doing a hell of a job.”
“I owe it all to your nasty, ill-tempered ass,” I retorted, laughing. “How’s your, what? Fourth wife?”
“How’s your second?”
He had been keeping up with me.
During the following months, I logged more time out at the Little Creek SEAL Base working on new boats than I did at Langley. The DCI simply shook his head whenever I showed up now and then to let him know I was still alive.
My partner-in-crime was a fellow named Perry Pratt, vice president of United Aircraft Corporation (UAC), which built Pratt & Whitney engines for Navy aircraft and hoped to get into the Navy boat business. He was a rather small and frail-looking man in his forties who nonetheless had a big set of balls and the brains to go with them. We were often together offshore on the Atlantic testing boat styles, types, and prospects, returning in the evenings drenched with salt spray and burned by the sun.
Mary complained that I was never home. I shrugged. What else could I do? This was my job.
Pratt trailered in for testing an old WWII PT boat variant like the one JFK commanded in the South Pacific. The inboard ran rough as hell, but we took along a 500hp outboard as a spare and headed for high seas.
“I smell a gas leak,” Pratt remarked from the bridge.
I checked the engine compartment. Gas fumes were filling up the cockpit and cabin below.
“Turn it off!” I shouted.
Too late. The explosion tore through the deck, burping out a red-and-black ball of fire and smoke, shooting debris in all directions, and hurling Pratt and me overboard. I surfaced coughing and stunned but otherwise suffering only minor burns. The flaming PT drifted away like a Viking funeral pyre. I looked about for Perry.
His head appeared not far away. I swam to him as he shook water from his hair and eyes. We watched the burning boat disappear beneath the waves.
“Damn!” he exploded, coughing. “Damn! I thought you were a goner. I couldn’t see you. Where were you?”
I pointed. “Over there. Weeping like a little girl, as is my custom in dangerous situations.”
So there we were in the open ocean, no land in sight. Scorched, soaked, and giggling our fool heads off. Survival is an adrenaline high unlike any other. A civilian boat eventually came by and plucked us out of the brine.
The Navy ultimately awarded Perry’s UAC-affiliated company a contract to produce one thousand Swift Boats for use in Vietnam. The Swift was based on boats used by offshore crews in Louisiana. Built of welded aluminum, it was fifty feet long with a shallow five-foot draft. Twin diesels with a range of four hundred miles at more than forty knots powered a deep V-hull. It was designed to accommodate 50-caliber machineguns and rockets. A fast, formidable weapons boat bound to jerk a knot in the drawers of VC along the Vietnam coast.
Wait until the bastards got a load of this.
* * *
Rudy Enders was the first man I met when I strolled onto the University of Miami campus, where the CIA kept an office. I spotted him approaching wearing slacks and an open, short-sleeved “Florida” shirt as he wended through a group of students playing grab-ass in front of Admin.
“Bone!” he exhorted. “Haven’t seen you since Moses was a pup. What the hell you been doing?”
“Fighting crime and evil and commies.”
He looked around at the students. “You’ve come to the right place.”
Rudy was the spook commander for missions still being run out of Florida into Cuba against Castro. We might have Vietnam bubbling, but we still had Cuba. Castro and that scrawny little bastard Che Guevara were busy carrying the water for Khrushchev in exporting communism around the world.
Over coffee in the bustling student cafeteria, where spooks on campus might be easily mistaken for professors on break, Rudy and I caught each other up on which of our old mutual acquaintances had gotten married, gotten divorced or killed, had kids, were in Vietnam or Cuba, the Dominican Republic, or in Nicaragua or Africa or the Far East.
“You heard about Boehm?” Rudy asked.
“Haven’t had a chance to talk to him. I’ve been testing boats.”
“Roy gets things done but he’s like a rogue elephant in a village of pygmies. He pissed off some high ranker in the Pentagon, and now he’s being kicked out of the SEALs to shore duty.”
Enders explained. As de facto commander of SEAL Team Two under John Callahan, the crusty old mossback had played every underhanded trick he knew to obtain equipment and training for his sea commandos. Pushed, shoved, raised hell with the bean counters, circumvented the system while tweaking the noses of officialdom. Along the way he collected an impressive list of enemies and contributed his name to some even more impressive shit lists.
“It doesn’t make any difference how good you are at your job if you don’t play the kiss-ass game,” Rudy said. “‘Want me to wash your ass, sir? ’Cause I’m gonna kiss it a lot.’ Well, they caught Boehm up on a court-martial for obtaining weapons outside the system and replaced him with someone they can control.”
I lit a cigarette in commiseration. “Bring out the warriors and dust us off when we’re needed, shove us back out of sight when it’s over.”
“Roysi is assigned to Service Squadron 8 at Norfolk as an engineer in charge of propulsion plants. We have to do something for him, Bone. He’ll go stir crazy.”
I thought it over. “I may have an idea. In the meantime …”
I asked him if he was up for an adventure to test my Swift Boats before I sent them to Vietnam. I thought we might cruise Cuba and outrun Castro’s Komars. Rudy did me one better.
A covert Cobra Team led by a CIA operative in the vicinity of Cayo Buenavista may have been compromised. A commo team at Key West noticed in a request for resupply that the sender’s “wrist” was different. Each Morse code operator had a distinctive signature in his dots and dashes.
“The Castroites may be trying to lure us into a trap,” Rudy concluded.
We couldn’t abandon the Cobra Team without knowing for sure.
We arranged with the Key West commo chief to set up a rendezvous with the Cobra Team—or whoever was passing as the Cobra Team—for 2:00 a.m. the following night with the promise of delivering supplies. Before setting out with a crew of trusted Cuban exiles, Rudy and I armed the Swift to its gunnels with machine guns, 40mm grenade launchers, and various personal weapons. The State Department didn’t want U.S. nationals getting into open pissing contests with Castro’s commies, but I didn’t intend us to go into a possible gunfight unarmed.
Usually a resupply boat darted in and out of a Reception Site as quickly as possible. I timed our arrival for midnight, two hours ahead of rendezvous time. Being early to the dance allowed us to look and listen for anything out of the ordinary.
Using binoculars, I scanned the mangrove-shrouded shoreline and glassed a pair of small islands offshore about a half-mile to the southwest. The islands were small dark blights against the sea and thick with tropical vegetation and palms. I listened to the sough of the ocean against the boat’s hull. From somewhere a disturbed bird squawked. Nothing unusual, so far.
One of the crew named Pablo and I slipped into black wetsuits and slithered over the side into a rubber raft to go ashore and make contact with the clandestine team. Rudy wanted to go along, but one of us had to remain aboard the Swift to make sure it got back to Florida safely in case something unexpected happened during the rendezvous. If everything went according to Hoyle and we made the contact, Pablo and
I would return to the Swift to begin transporting supplies ashore. Otherwise …
We paddled the rubber boat into a line of mangroves extending into the surf and pulled up to look and listen. We were still an hour early. That extra hour saved our butts.
Mosquitoes buzzing our faces turned into a different sort of buzz—that of power boats approaching the two small islands. The commo team in Key West was right. This was a trap. I nudged Pablo with a paddle and motioned back the way we came. It was over. There was nothing we could do for the captured Cobras.
“Es una trampa,” Pablo whispered. A trap.
Roy Boehm in this situation would have sped past the islands and opened up with everything he had. Kill the bastards and let God count ’em. I was tempted. But it was that kind of aggressiveness that led him to courts-martial and supervising landlocked power plants.
“Sneaky bastard, Castro,” Rudy remarked when we returned.
“He’s had practice at it.”
The Swift was capable of outrunning anything the Cubans had. By daylight we were back in Key West, boat and crew intact. My boat was indeed swift, long-range, almost silent, and carried a lot of firepower. An excellent war boat for Vietnam waters. CNO McDonald would be pleased with the product.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
FEW CONVENTIONAL MILITARY AND political leaders understood the extent to which unconventional warfare encompassed literally every component of society—military, political, economic, educational, religious. … Anything could be used as a weapon and a tool to further political goals—terrorism, assassination, intrigue, espionage, boycott, propaganda, disinformation, threat. … The insurgent always had the advantage when it came to tactics. The only way to stop him was by using unconventional tactics within a conventional strategy.
DCI John McCone gave me my head when it came to expanding CIA Maritime reach and understanding. After all, part of my job description read: “Direct supervision of worldwide field activities.” And since the CIA through our SOGs (Special Operation Groups) and intelligence-gathering efforts was still active in Vietnam, I had a legitimate purpose for inviting Roy Boehm into Saigon for dinner and a drink at the Majestic Hotel, where I always stayed when in-country.
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