Several weeks went by before the chief of the Thai desk, whom I shall call Bart, asked me to come down and see him. Bart and I had served together in Thailand, and I considered him to be the ideal CIA officer. He was down-to-earth, one of the boys, yet he had progressed rapidly up the Agency’s chain of command. He worked hard, played hard, and kept his perspective when in a position of authority. (I later learned that when the Agency planned to lower the boom on an employee, it traditionally gave that unpleasant duty to an official most respected by that employee.)
Bart was alone and asked me to sit down. We exchanged a little small talk, but it was evident that he was quite upset. He said, “You know that your suggestion has caused considerable problems here in the division.”
This was news to me. My purpose was to help the division, the Agency, and the United States, not to cause problems.
“Mr. Nelson is most upset,” Bart continued. “He said you have not gone through the proper channels and have conducted an end run around the division.”
Jesus Christ, I thought, what now? Here was the best counterinsurgency program to come down the pike, I try to make the division aware of it, and this is what happens.
Looking sheepish and uncomfortable, Bart said, “Mr. Nelson wants me to tell you that you have jeopardized all future promotions by your actions.”
He then sat there waiting for some reaction. I stared at him in disbelief. A hundred thoughts flashed through my mind. I finally mumbled something like, “I thought I was helping the division. You know what the surveys accomplished.”
He said something, but my mind was far away. I stood up, looked at him, and tried to think of something to say. I couldn’t, so I turned and walked out.
This was the beginning of my real awakening. I could no longer believe that the Agency was serious in trying to understand the communist movement in Thailand. By all standards of measurement taught in its schools, my survey reports had been excellent. Every principle of good report writing—multiple confirmation, collation, analysis—was utilized in the reports. The reports clearly proved that the Agency had seriously misunderstood the nature of the communist threat in Thailand. (In retrospect, some high-level Agency officials, I am sure, had no such misunderstandings.) Yet here was the division chief rejecting the operation and the information it produced. He not only rejected it, but because of it he was going to destroy my career. What had I done wrong? I recognized that some employees used the suggestions channel as a way to circumvent their immediate bosses, but certainly that was not my intention. I worked in China activities and the only channel open to me was the suggestion and achievement awards committee.
I spent the next months running these thoughts through my mind, trying to make some sense of all that had happened. At the same time, Vietnam was growing even more critical. I knew that many Thai Communists had studied organizational principles in North Vietnam, but I noted that none of the reporting I was seeing coming out of Vietnam was mentioning the mass-based organized civilian structure that undoubtedly existed and was supporting the guerrillas. I read every book about Vietnam in the Agency’s library and many that were not in that collection. Some books discussed the mass-based movement but put the number of mobilized civilians at ridiculously low levels. I strongly suspected that Agency reporting, using the same old methods, was as mistaken in Vietnam as it had been in Thailand. I felt that survey operations similar to those I had developed in Thailand were needed in Vietnam. I still did not completely realize that those in the highest echelons of the Agency already knew that any information the surveys might gather would show that we could never win the war. In any case I could not continue to sit in China activities and watch Vietnam go down the tube. After all, I was still fiercely anti-communist. I just felt we’d been fighting the enemy the wrong way.
One night I asked Norma if she would have any overriding objections if I went to Vietnam. She and the children could not come, since this was a family separation tour. Long before I broached the subject, she had recognized all the signs and knew what was coming. She also knew that I would never rest until I got there, so she agreed.
I immediately contacted the chief of the Vietnam desk and told him I wanted to volunteer. He said great, but he would have to clear it with the China activities people. The Agency at the time found it necessary to draft people for tours in Vietnam as not many wanted to serve there, so I guessed that I would have little problem getting the assignment.
At about this point I was contacted by the office of training. It had just begun a course in counterinsurgency operations and had received a copy of my suggestion from the suggestion and achievement awards committee. The training officials were most pleased with my idea and said it was the only comprehensive plan they had seen. They said the survey technique had a direct and immediate relevance, and they planned to make it a major part of the counterinsurgency training. At the request of the training director, I traveled down to Camp Peary several times to talk to both students and instructors about what they labeled the “McGehee method.” One would think that now the Far East division might express some interest, but it did not.
Two months after my initial request for a tour in Vietnam, I was advised that the China desk would release me and that I was to report to the Vietnam desk as soon as possible. This was a great relief to me. I could get out of that do-nothing job, go overseas, and help win the war. But my experience had created serious doubts in my mind. I was just hoping against hope that I would not find the same Agency attitudes in Vietnam that had caused me so many problems in Thailand and at Headquarters. Little did I know that the reluctance to recognize reality about the insurgency in Thailand was nothing compared to the resistance I would encounter in Vietnam.
10. THE CIA IN VIETNAM:
TRANSFORMING REALITY
I flew to Saigon with a jumble of American civilians and servicemen crammed into an American Category Z plane. As government travelers to Vietnam, we got a special rate but had to endure a long flight replete with cramped legs, harried stewardesses, and distressed kidneys.
I arrived in October 1968, a few months after the Tet offensive had seen armed Viet Cong raiding the sanctuary of the United States Embassy. Tan San Nhut Airport on the outskirts of Saigon did little to reassure me. The dilapidated terminal guarded by United States military police and Vietnamese soldiers was a swirl of bodies, luggage, and boxes of Hong Kong goodies purchased by privileged Vietnamese. A Vietnamese employee of the Agency held up a name sign “McGehee” and guided me through customs. Once through that mess, he drove me to the Agency’s quarters, the Due Hotel, located a short distance from the Presidential Palace. He said a shuttle bus would leave for the U.S. Embassy in the morning and gave me the name and phone number of the person I was to contact.
That afternoon I took the opportunity to walk around Saigon. I had visited the city in 1960 just before the influx of American military advisers. Saigon had been a peaceful city of tree-lined boulevards, a few three-wheeled cyclos and bicycles, the latter frequently ridden by Vietnamese women wearing the flowing ao-dai—a flared dress over satin trousers. The beauty of the city, the flower markets, and the exotic aromas of Vietnamese herbal cooking evoked a relaxed atmosphere of charm and grace.
The difference between the Saigon of 1960 and the Saigon of 1968 was astonishing. Now military trucks filled with unkempt American soldiers, jeeps, motorcycles, ancient ratty-looking cabs of no discernible make, and small Japanese cars moved in exasperated tempo down the crammed streets. Trying to get a better view of the Presidential Palace, I forded the flow of traffic on Hong Thap Tu Street only to be waved back by two irate Vietnamese soldiers brandishing submachine guns. It was only then that I noticed that no pedestrians were allowed on the wide sidewalks next to the heavy fence around the Presidential Palace.
The politically significant twin-spiraled Catholic Church dominated the square opening on to Tu Do Street. Tu Do was awash with American soldiers, Vietnamese civilians and soldiers, Indian
Sikhs, and Chinese businessmen intermingled in a hectic rush. Like the clouds of exhaust from the slow-moving vehicles, an atmosphere of hate permeated the air. Tu Do Street now housed the bars, the massage parlors, the trinket stores all catering to the American G.I. The open-front bars sheltered tough, haggard-looking girls casting come-on leers out at the strollers to entice them in to try their luck. Beggars pleaded for handouts, while one young Vietnamese asked if I wanted to exchange money “300 to 1” and another was openly hawking “barbits.” The sounds of electronically boosted rock music crashed out from the bars, adding to the din of traffic and the malaise of the people. I began to question my decision to come to this God-forsaken city.
Backtracking down Hai Ba Trung to Thong Nhut Boulevard en route to the zoo, I ran into a group of young Vietnamese protesters scattering in all directions from tear gas fired by the Vietnamese police. Further down, I passed the U.S. Embassy with its ten-foot-high concrete fence, its circular gun turrets, its roof-top helicopter pad, and its thick white outer concrete shell designed to deflect any incoming artillery or rockets. All that it lacked to complete the picture of a medieval fortress under siege was a moat and a drawbridge.
Walking through the zoo, I overheard a conversation that spoiled the relative serenity of that park setting. “The basement of the zoo’s central building was used during the Diem regime as an execution and torture chamber for political prisoners,” one young American G.I. said to another. This was a deeply disturbing comment that I subsequently found out was all too true.
The next day I reported to the Agency offices in the Norodom complex, a few Quonset huts sitting within the fenced grounds of the embassy. This group of offices housed the less glamorous elements of the Agency, while the main Agency contingent was accommodated in the top three floors of the embassy building. I was assigned to the personnel pool. It was explained to me that because of the crush of people coming and going, all but the highest positions were filled by a draft system not too much different from that of the National Football League. While in this suspended status, we all were treated to a series of briefings by the station and other elements of the United States government contingent, especially the all-encompassing Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS) staff. This massive structure molded, or was supposed to mold, all of the disparate Vietnamese and American elements into one united pacification organization. On the American side, the CIA, the State Department, the Agency for International Development, the United States Information Agency, and selected military elements supplied people to CORDS. But all career employees owed their allegiance first, last, and always to their parent agencies, not to the jerry-built CORDS organization. And of course as with most things in Vietnam, the reality of the program was far different from the official illusion.
CORDS held a series of briefings in its two separate headquarters. Major portions of the briefings explained its organizational charter and its horrendously complicated acronyms. The CIA station management held its own separate briefings. The Agency’s more than 700 employees were scattered throughout Saigon and upcountry, administering manpower in the tens of thousands. The station’s breakdown for its internal command structure paralleled that of the Vietnamese and the U.S. Military Assistance Command for Vietnam (MACV)—from I (Eye) Corps in the North to the Southern Delta’s IV Corps, with Saigon and Gia Dinh Province which surrounded it forming the critical V Corps region. The CIA called its supervisors of corps areas regional officers-in-charge or ROICs I through V.
The station’s intelligence briefings on the situation in South Vietnam confirmed all my fears. Intelligence analysts giving the briefings talked only about the number of armed Viet Cong, the slowly increasing North Vietnamese regular army, and the occasional member of the “Communist infrastructure,” i.e., the lone tax collector or party member who “terrorized” the population into cooperation with the Communists. They made no mention of the mass-based Farmers’ Liberation Association, the Women’s Liberation Association, or the Communist youth organizations, all of which in some areas certainly included entire populations.
The more I heard, the greater my disillusionment. While in Washington I had acquired a copy of Viet Cong, a book by Douglas Pike, the U.S. government’s leading authority on the Viet Cong.1 It described in great detail the farmers’, women’s, and youth organizations and how they were built. That book held the numbers of civilian members of these Communist front groups to ridiculously low levels. Even so, the station did not even acknowledge the existence of the associations. Michael Charles Conley’s book, The Communist Insurgent Infrastructure in South Vietnam,2 written under contract to the Department of the Army under the auspices of American University, set forth a detailed discussion of the mass-based civilian communist structures. Even though Conley must have been under tremendous pressure to keep his number of civilian members of the South Vietnamese communist movement low, he reported that there were probably more than a million—a million that did not exist anywhere in Agency reporting.
The Agency’s briefers told us that there were several hundred thousand armed North and South Vietnamese communists in South Vietnam and that they had been badly demoralized by their losses during the Tet attacks in early 1968. That figure was obviously low. The reason that it had to be low was that U.S. policymakers had to sell the idea that the war in the South was being fought by a small minority of Communists opposed to the majority-supported democratic government of Nguyen Van Thieu. The situation, however, was the opposite, as I was to understand later. The United States was supporting Thieu’s tiny oligarchy against a population largely organized, committed, and dedicated to a communist victory. But the numbers were not the only thing the United States policymakers lied about. The American people were not aware, and neither, I am sure, were my CIA briefers in Saigon, of the extent of CIA covert operations in Vietnam beginning as early as 1954. Only later did this tragic history come out, largely through the Pentagon Papers. It was only years after the publication of those papers during the research for this book that I began to appreciate fully the scope of CIA covert operations in Vietnam and the level of Agency deceits concerning the war.
The origins of the war dated back to 1858 when the French invaded and colonized Indochina. The French, utilizing the Vietnamese landlord class as their puppets, turned Vietnam into a marketplace for high-priced French manufactured goods and a source of cheap labor and raw materials for the “mother” country. At the time of the French invasion approximately 90 percent of the people lived and worked as farmers in the rural areas. The colonizers made laws that allowed them to confiscate peasant land, and as a result, over the ensuing decades, many peasants were left impoverished. The Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) was formed in 1930 to recapture control of the country from the French. This party evolved into Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam Workers Party. In its first manifesto in 1930 the ICP promised to “wipe out feudal remnants [the Vietnamese who cooperated with the French], to distribute land to the tillers, to overthrow imperialism, and to make Indochina completely independent.”3
During the 1930s the ICP was divided by a series of internal battles about the proper way to fight the French, and at the same time was decimated by the French police.
In September 1939, World War II broke out in Europe and in September 1940 Japanese troops moved into Vietnam. During World War II the Japanese asserted control over the ports and airfields of Vietnam but allowed the French to continue to administer the local government. This cooperation ceased a few months before the end of World War II when the Japanese took control of all of Vietnam.
World War II was decisive for Ho’s forces, for in 1941 he returned from China—where he had observed Mao’s program of organizing the peasantry to overthrow Chiang—and formed the Viet Minh coalition to fight the Japanese and the French. A major element of Ho’s program was reconfiscation of the land of the French and their Vietnamese puppets and distribution of that land to the peasantry.4 Through his anti-imperialism and la
nd-reform programs, Ho built the Viet Minh into a committed, broad-based political organization, making him the only Vietnamese leader with a dedicated national following.
During World War II the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA, recognized the strength of the Viet Minh and depended on it for intelligence and help in recovering downed pilots.5 The OSS and the Viet Minh worked in close cooperation and the OSS provided 5,000 weapons, along with ammunition and training, to convert Ho’s guerrillas into an organized army.6 When the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, the Viet Minh marched into Hanoi and dozens of other cities in Vietnam and proclaimed the birth of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). For a few weeks in September 1945, Vietnam was for the first time in recent history free of foreign domination. North and South were united under Ho.
Through a series of maneuvers, the French sought to re-colonize Vietnam and to destroy Ho’s government. They installed a puppet, Bao Dai, and militarily tried to impose their will over the Vietnamese.7 At first the United States was reluctant to accept this blatant French move, but the “loss” of China, the Korean War, and the deteriorating French position caused a reassessment. In 1950 the U.S. began providing direct military aid to French troops fighting in Vietnam as the struggle there was deemed an integral part of containing communism. By 1954 the U.S. was financing 78 percent of the war.8
The 1954 Geneva Conference to negotiate an end to the war concluded in July, only a few months after the French had been defeated at Dien Bien Phu. The accords reached at Geneva stated that there would be a cease-fire and a temporary military partition of Vietnam at the 17th parallel. Each side was given 300 days to complete the evacuation. The North was turned over to the Communists and the South to the French-backed Bao Dai. The final declaration said that North and South Vietnam were to be reunited on the basis of free elections to be held throughout the country on July 26,1956—elections that then Premier Ngo Dinh Diem and his American advisers later refused to hold.
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