Deadly Deceits

by Ralph W. McGehee

  We pulled up at the open-fronted police station, and I went in to ask the desk sergeant about Colonel Chat Chai. He said the colonel had left that morning for Had Yai, a city further south. The sergeant gave me directions for taking a bus to Had Yai and pointed out the location of the bus station, a wide spot in the road.

  After a long wait the bus appeared, or rather chugged, snorted, rocked, and rolled into sight. And what a sight! Its roof was loaded with pigs and chickens in bamboo cages, bundles of the locally famous rambutan fruit, large sacks of rice, and an assortment of bags and ratty suitcases that mushroomed out over the top of the bus, which seemed to defy the law of gravity by not tipping over under the weight of that top-heavy load. With some trepidation I boarded and squeezed my way back onto one of the hard wooden benches at the rear. My six-foot-plus frame could not fit in the space between the benches, so I found an aisle seat where my legs could hang out. Farmers, both men and women, jammed the bus. The women, some of them chewing the unattractive red betel nut, wore traditional farm garb—waist-high, wrap-around sarongs and long-sleeved blouses. Most had removed the conical straw hats that in the fields protected them from the hot sun. The men wore clothing that was stained from their labors. The all-purpose pakama, a large rectangular cotton piece of material, usually with a large checkered design, was in general use. It was folded diaper fashion to serve as shorts; it was wound around the head as a turban, and it was used to carry lunches.

  After several attempts the driver got the motor started. The bus lurched, coughed, lurched, coughed, wheezed, and took off. Within the next half hour the driver stopped three times. It appeared the driver served also as a courier, as he stopped and passed on messages, or sometimes picked up passengers on the road. These passengers were usually accompanied by agricultural produce or animals, and each stop entailed the long ritual of unloading, loading, and balancing the load. With the overhead load getting bulkier, noisier and more aromatic, my sense of adventure waned. After many hours of start-and-stop driving, we arrived at Had Yai. I booked a hotel room, went out and bought two quart-sized bottles of Thai Singha beer—with a potency close to that of wine—returned to the room, consumed the beer, and dropped off into a thankful mist of sleep.

  The next day I found Colonel Chat Chai. He was short even by Thai standards, was in his early forties, and had a round, almost swollen face. As I soon discovered, he had a full complement of personality quirks. He was cantankerous, irascible, and outspoken, but he was also competent, hardworking, and honest. His directness undoubtedly was a liability in Thai society, which seemed to run on extreme politeness, face-saving, indirectness, dropped hints, and circumlocutory evasions. In talks with most Thai officials you had to plumb for the hidden meaning behind the polite words. Not so with Colonel Chat Chai. He said what he thought straight out. However, to lessen the impact of his directness, he giggled after virtually every statement.

  We went to an outdoor reception area of a local hotel to conduct our talk in privacy. I outlined our proposal for him and told him that his commander had agreed to the plan. Colonel Chat Chai obviously had not yet received word from his superiors and greeted my statements with giggles and questioning looks. I suggested as a first step for our joint program that he tell me about the police intelligence structure, its faculties and procedures. This really threw him. Here was a stranger, a foreigner yet, asking a professional intelligence man to reveal his organization’s most closely held secrets.

  “Why should I tell you this, hea, hea, hea?” he asked. “No one has told me about the plan.”

  I appreciated his situation, so I explained how the Agency worked with other Thai services. He asked many questions and my informed responses seemed to convince him that I was who I claimed to be and that I knew a lot about the other Thai intelligence organizations. He gradually began to loosen up, particularly after I said that I was not interested in the names of intelligence agents but instead needed general information such as his office procedures, staffing, training, and file holdings.

  Slowly and with increasing detail he began to outline the functions of the police intelligence office. It consisted of another colonel and several enlisted men, and primarily recorded and filed reports on communism. The enlisted men received no intelligence training and knew little about Communist organizational procedures. His office had no real charter to gather intelligence aggressively.

  I asked how soon he would be returning to Bangkok, where I could visit his office and we could continue our discussions.

  “I must first finish my work here,” he said. “Then I must get a travel chit for the train to Bangkok, hea, hea, hea. I should arrive in Bangkok in a week or so, hea, hea, hea.”

  I knew the executive officer would consider such a delay intolerable, so I offered to pay for a plane ticket if he would fly back with me the next day. At this point Colonel Chat Chai began to appreciate the benefits of working with the Agency. “You can buy my ticket, hea, hea, hea?”

  I did not want to leave him with the impression that what I was proposing was illegal or could in any way be considered a personal gift or bribe, so I said, “It is most important that we get started immediately. I assure you that I have authority to buy your ticket and that I will make a full accounting to the appropriate authorities.”

  Later a tour of the police headquarters intelligence facilities convinced me that I could not expect to turn the police into a traditional intelligence agency even if it were desirable to do so. A memorandum I wrote outlined the deficiencies of the police’s intelligence-collection program and suggested development of a pilot effort to test various approaches using the police as intelligence gatherers. At the same time I began to read available literature on other intelligence-counterinsurgency programs. I came across one small reference that caught my eye—a “mailbox” operation that had some success in the British fight against the communist insurgency in Malaya. The Malayan mailbox operation was the essence of simplicity. A heavy steel, locked box with a slot for letters was anchored in a problem village. The people in the village were encouraged to drop into the box anonymous written tips identifying communists. The box was emptied daily, and through this simple mechanism the British learned a great deal about communist activity in isolated hamlets.

  The operation gave the villagers a chance to inform on communists without being subjected to reprisals. It gave the government forces access to previously unavailable information. The operation did have its drawbacks—it was difficult to confirm the information, and success depended on a villager working up the necessary courage and motivation to inform. However, it had potential, and this germ of an idea I was later to develop into a full-scale, effective intelligence-counterinsurgency operation.

  As a first step, Colonel Chat Chai and I traveled throughout the Northeast talking to provincial governors, police and military commanders, American advisers, and officials at the district level (comparable to an American county). At each stop we looked into file holdings and methods of reporting information, and received briefings on the status of the communist movement.

  When we returned to Bangkok, I put together a tentative proposal that we conduct an intensified intelligence-collection operation in one district. In that small, defined area we could in a relatively short time test various theories and methods. We could get a better idea of general communist activity and plan more effective ways to collect information. If any one method proved successful, we would use it in an expanded effort later.

  I noted in the proposal that vagueness, incompleteness, and incident reporting seemed typical of current intelligence. Officials often had a visceral feeling about the nature of communist activity, but they could not adequately explain why the local people cooperated actively or passively in communist killings, ambushes, or other incidents. The shifting frequency and locales of such incidents, which had begun about 1963, conveyed the impression that something was going on, but no one seemed to know exactly what.

  Agency reporting at the
time claimed that the armed communist movement was confined primarily to the mountainous provinces of Northeast Thailand. There were, according to the Agency, only a few armed communists in South and North Thailand, and no more than 2,500 to 4,000 in all of Thailand. The armed guerrilla bands, so it was claimed, hid out in the rugged highland areas of the Phu Phan mountain range, and they would occasionally come down to the lowlands in search of rice, money, and recruits. CIA reporting insisted that the communists had no popular support and that they had to use terrorist tactics to force the peasants to cooperate with them.

  My proposal made the rounds of Thai and American authorities in Bangkok. After receiving the necessary approvals, Colonel Chat Chai and I took the proposal to a Northeast province where we hoped to begin our work. The Thai governor of the province enthusiastically approved the idea and assigned some of his best people to work with us. During our first visit we had identified one district as a site for the pilot project. The district had a nascent but growing insurgency. The nai amphur of the district (somewhat comparable to a sheriff) was a problem. His reputation reached all the way back to Bangkok—a reputation he earned killing suspected communists “trying to escape.” The refugee Vietnamese community particularly feared this quick-triggered man.

  The deputy nai amphur, Lieutenant Somboon (not his real name), was sui generis. In my entire career I had never met a man who possessed such a remarkable intuitive feel for the esoteric art of intelligence gathering. He could penetrate the heart of the matter and write extensive, well-organized reports. At 30 years old, he was a handsome, tireless man, whom people liked and confided in. He was a graduate in political science from Thailand’s major university, Chulalongkorn, and spoke good English, but used several jarring phrases. I could never bring myself to embarrass him by correcting the occasional “I don’t sure” and its opposite “Do you sure?” that punctuated his conversation. This cosmopolitan Thai official had probably been assigned to the isolated Northeast to serve as a counterfoil to the nai amphur and as the governor’s eyes and ears in the troubled district.

  Somboon was over-qualified for his job as deputy nai amphur and was eager to move upward. When Colonel Chat Chai and I had toured the province earlier, he had made himself available and seemed eager to cooperate. Both the colonel and I had been impressed with him and had chosen his district for the trial project to make use of his special abilities.

  We ran a trial project attempting the gamut of intelligence-gathering techniques. The traditional approach of recruiting agents did not work. It consumed too much time, resulted in reports of doubtful accuracy, and proved to be no way to try to understand a burgeoning communist insurgency. The expanded “mailbox” operation with Lieutenant Somboon as the team leader achieved good results but also revealed some weaknesses. After several days of discussion among Lieutenant Somboon, Colonel Chat Chai and me, we developed the modus operandi for the next team operation, called a district survey. Over the next year we and the team ran four such surveys with dramatic results.

  The surveys were designed around an expanded concept of the “mailbox” operation: go into the villages and get the information directly from the affected villagers, but do this in as organized and active a way as possible. To begin the operation, Colonel Chat Chai gleaned the most valuable information on the selected district from Thai organizations at all levels—the provincial police, the nai amphur’s office, the special police, the Joint Security Centers, the provincial Civilian, Police, Military (CPM), the military base called CPM-1, and the Communist Suppression Operations Command in Bangkok. I gathered all information on that district from the various station file systems. The information was carded by name, and reports were filed by village. Using all these files, I made a study to determine the area of concentration of the recent communist activity, and Colonel Chat Chai and I prepared, in consultation with local officials, a schedule for work in the district. I then wrote a situation report for every village to be visited and attached a list of persons reportedly involved in either pro-government or pro-communist activity.

  While this was going on, the governor gathered a team of 25 of the best people in his province—provincial police officers, enlisted men, a few military officers, deputy nai amphurs, several administrators, and a high-ranking educator. Team members had career status in existing government organizations; the Agency did not create, finance, or sponsor a new bureaucratic structure. They continued to be paid by and remained a part of their parent organizations. This was rare in the history of Agency support to liaison structures. We collected intelligence on the cheap. The best officials in the province worked for us, yet we did not give away vehicles, radios, salaries, or uniforms.

  For two weeks we trained the 25-man team in questioning and interrogation, the basics of communism (such as we knew them), and public relations. Public relations training stressed the necessity of maintaining the good will of the people. During a survey a problem developed in this area. A team member raped a girl he was supposed to question. Lieutenant Somboon sent the man packing. The team took up a collection that amounted to a year’s income for a rural family and presented it and a formal apology to the girl and her family.

  We also provided training in report writing to meet the needs of the survey. Each report of more than basic data consisted of a summary paragraph and pre-selected subject paragraphs on Communist activity; i.e., front groups, weapons and ammunition, propaganda and indoctrination, recruitment, security, guerrilla groups and leaders, campsite locations, training, and conclusions and recommendations.

  Before further describing the surveys, I should note that there was an Orwellian big-brother-is-watching concept inherent in the process we developed. Though it distresses me now, at the time it did not. I regarded communists as ruthless killers out to coerce people to join them and kill those who did not. I regarded the survey as a perfectly legitimate way to halt the spread of the cancerous communist growth while simultaneously winning the people back to the Thai government. After all, other counterinsurgency methods in use at the time included boiling suspects in oil, a practice in which one commander was known to engage; shooting suspects, as the nai amphur had done; other forms of torture; as well as our own free-fire zones in Vietnam. Compared to these, I figured our operation was benign.

  Our first complete survey began with the governor’s 25-man team, Colonel Chat Chai, another colonel of the police intelligence service, myself and four translator-interpreters traveling in several jeeps, land rovers, and an open-backed truck to the district seat. The “downtown” of this village at the intersection of two dusty paths consisted of a few two-story buildings with open-front stores downstairs and quarters for the proprietors above. At high noon the only traffic in town was a yoke of oxen hauling a load of rice and several stooped farm women carrying buckets of water on poles across their shoulders.

  The village’s small, wooden-framed, thatch-roofed houses were open to allow maximum air flow in the stifling heat. They sat on stilts, and water buffaloes, pigs, and chickens took refuge in the shade underneath.

  On the first day Lieutenant Somboon, Colonel Chat Chai, and I visited the village headman at his home to explain our purpose and to get his cooperation. The headman, dressed in loose-fitting, pajama-like trousers and a Western shirt, was impressed by the high-ranking visitors. He was extremely polite, although he had some trouble comprehending what was happening and particularly why an American was involved. While we sat on a straw mat on the wooden floor discussing our work, a servant brought us weak tea. The headman agreed to call a meeting of the townspeople that night at the sala glang, the central meeting area.

  When the villagers had gathered that night, Lieutenant Somboon announced, “We have come here to help you people free yourselves from the nuisance of the jungle soldiers [the name given to the Communists]. The jungle soldiers come into your village, take your rice and money, and preach about the evils of our government. They say that the government oppresses you with taxes, but
they don’t explain what your government does with that money. Last year in this village the government collected only a few thousand baht, and yet this sum is less than the annual salary of the teacher the government provides to educate your children, but what do the jungle soldiers do for you?”

  Lieutenant Somboon’s speech was designed to counter the specific propaganda themes that the Communists used in this village, as determined during our research. “I and my group of government officials have come here to learn the problems of you villagers,” explained Lieutenant Somboon, “especially problems caused by the jungle soldiers. To help us in this task, we want to talk to each person to learn what is happening and how best we can help you. We will talk privately to each of you so that the jungle soldiers cannot know what is being said. Everything you tell us we will keep in strictest confidence. Tomorrow we will begin visiting each home. Thank you for your cooperation and for coming here this evening.”

  The next day the team fanned out through the village with each member questioning one person. They would set up just about anywhere—on tree stumps, in a clearing, sitting on high mounds near the houses, but always ensuring that the interviews were conducted out of hearing range of other people.

  If the person being questioned was an ordinary villager, the team member would ask if the subject had heard of Communist front groups such as the Farmers’ Liberation Association (FLA), jungle soldiers, or others. The person was asked about any unusual events that had occurred in the village. The interviewer wrote down any significant information in a notebook he carried with him and later prepared a written report.

  When questioning a suspected or known Communist, the session was more of a confrontation. We had learned during the trial project that the Communists organized three-man cells of what they called the Farmers’ Liberation Association. Once the team got the first confession from a member of the FLA, this was the break it needed. A confessed member of the three-man FLA cell had to name the other members of the cell, the person who had recruited him, and down the line. With this information the team members would interrogate the other named cell members. The interrogators would be able to tell the other cell members the most specific details about their Communist associations—their Communist aliases, the man who had recruited them, the names of the other two people in their cell. The subject was advised that he must cooperate to qualify for government mercy. If he did, he would be forgiven.