Deadly Deceits

by Ralph W. McGehee

  The Agency also financed the construction of interrogation centers in all provinces and a National Interrogation Center in Saigon, all under the CIA-backed Central Intelligence Organization.28

  In early 1964 President Johnson’s national security advisers decided something was needed to overcome the U.S. public’s apathy toward the war. To this purpose an entire series of U.S. provocations occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin. They included a July 31 attack on Hon Me Island by MACV-supported South Vietnamese Special Forces; the August 2 bombardment and strafing of North Vietnamese villages in the vicinity of Hon Me by aircraft, and the repeated feints of attack against Hon Me Island by the U.S. Navy destroyer Maddox. The ruse worked and North Vietnamese patrol boats, assuming the Maddox to be a part of the earlier South Vietnamese Special Forces attack, fired a few rounds at the destroyer. The next day the Maddox returned with a second destroyer and another so-called attack was launched at this two-ship patrol. Congress reacted immediately to what became known as the Tonkin Gulf incident. It passed a joint resolution of support and the American people responded to this “attack” on our sovereignty.29

  However, in a few months U.S. policymakers needed additional evidence to justify the war to foreign and domestic audiences and to sustain the view that the insurgency was an invasion of the South by the North. To this end the State Department issued a second White Paper. In 1961 it had already published the first one, “A Threat to the Peace: North Viet-Nam’s Effort to Conquer South Viet-Nam.” In 1965, just before the entry of U.S. combat troops into Vietnam and before the regular bombing of North Vietnam by American planes, the State Department issued “Aggression from the North: The Record of North Viet-Nam’s Campaign to Conquer South Viet-Nam.” Both papers relied on contrived CIA intelligence to support their arguments, and the second paper was based in part on evidence planted by the CIA.30 The Agency conducted at least two covert operations to prove the paper’s thesis. One involved an elaborate scheme to print large numbers of postage stamps showing the Viet Cong shooting down a U.S. helicopter. The highly professional production technique was meant to indicate that the stamp was produced in North Vietnam because the Viet Cong had no such capability. The Agency printed sheets of those stamps, wrote letters in Vietnamese, mailed them all over the world, and made copies available to U.S. journalists. A full-color blow-up of the “North Vietnamese Stamp” appeared on the cover of Life magazine on February 26, 1965, just two days before publication of the White Paper.31

  The second covert operation entailed planting a weapons shipment and blaming it on the North Vietnamese. The Agency took tons of Communist-made weapons out of its warehouses, loaded them on a Vietnamese coastal vessel, faked a firefight, and then called in Western reporters and International Control Commission observers to “prove” North Vietnamese aid to the Viet Cong. The White Paper featured details of this operation under the headline, “Hanoi Supplies Weapons, Ammunition and Other War Material to Its Forces in the South.” Seven pages of the White Paper were devoted to the CIA-planted evidence, including photographs of the beached Vietnamese junk and the assortment of ammunition it carried.32 On March 6, 1965, just a week after the issuance of the White Paper, President Johnson ordered two Marine Corps battalion landing teams into Vietnam and the initiation of Operation Rolling Thunder, which consisted of the systematic bombing of North Vietnam.

  U.S. combat troops in South Vietnam quickly discovered that the rural South Vietnamese, who were fighting for and supporting the Viet Cong, considered them the enemy. Nonetheless, the United States developed a simple plan to win—force the peasants by the millions into the cities and towns, turn the entire country into a massive police compound, and you deny those millions to the communists. Search-and-destroy missions, free-fire zones, and bombing of rural South Vietnam were all conducted to force the peasants out of their villages into the cities.

  General Westmoreland put it this way: “So closely entwined were some populated localities with the tentacles of the VC base areas … that the only way to establish control short of constant combat operations among the people was to remove the people.”33

  The CIA created a program of hunter-killer teams. According to Marchetti and Marks, “In 1965 Colby … oversaw the founding in Vietnam of the Agency’s Counter Terror (CT) program. In 1966 the Agency became wary of adverse publicity surrounding the use of the word ‘terror’ and changed the name of the CT teams to the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs).…[The operation was described as] ‘a unilateral American program, never recognized by the South Vietnamese government. CIA representatives recruited, organized, supplied, and directly paid CT teams, whose function was to use … techniques of terror—assassination, abuses, kidnappings and intimidation—against the Viet Cong leadership.’”34

  All of the various civilian, military, and police programs were to contribute to the CORDS structure and programs. The primary CORDS program was the Phoenix operation. Under Phoenix, devised by Colby’s office, all units coordinated “an attack against the Vietcong infrastructure.… Again CIA money was the catalyst. According to Colby’s own testimony in 1971 before a congressional committee, 20,587 suspected Vietcong were killed under Phoenix in its first two and a half years. Figures provided by the South Vietnamese government credit Phoenix with 40,994 VC kills.”35

  Of course, when I arrived in Saigon in 1968 the Agency’s briefers did not discuss this deplorable history. They probably were not aware of it themselves. I certainly wasn’t. All I knew then was that our policy was based on “intelligence” reports of the numbers of communists in Vietnam that had nothing to do with reality. Either they were the result of unbelievable incompetence or they were deliberate lies created to dupe the American people. At that time I still didn’t know which.

  Hoping to correct the mistakes of the Agency’s intelligence concerning the nature and scope of the Viet Cong movement, I immediately wrote a memorandum to the chief of station outlining my findings from the survey operation in Thailand, the details of the composition of the Viet Cong as set forth in the Pike and Conley books, and information from other scattered sources. The memorandum suggested that the Agency’s coverage of the communist movement was somewhat incomplete and that the station ought to adopt a version of the Thailand survey operation to report more accurately on the mass-based communist movement and more effectively counter it. The memo was passed around for a week or two and then came back to me with no comment.

  After a few weeks I was drafted to work in the fifth region or ROIC V. My initial assignment was as officer in charge of Gia Dinh, supervising the various Agency programs in that key province around Saigon. Several military officers detailed to the CIA came under my jurisdiction. They handled various action programs, particularly the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRU) that hunted out and killed or captured the communist infrastructure, one of the Agency’s main contributions to the CORDS program of Rural Development Support.

  The assignment to Gia Dinh gave me the opportunity to see how the Agency’s intelligence program worked, or more accurately how it did not work, at that level. One- or two-sentence intelligence reports poured in, were translated, and were filed or thrown away. A typical report, one of hundreds like it received each week, said: “Two armed VC were seen moving south of the village of … this morning.” A massive Agency/CORDS/Phoenix file system processed this daily flow of nonsense. Collation and analysis never applied. I wondered how this intelligence effort could possibly give our leaders and generals anything even approaching an accurate picture of what was going on. How could we ever defeat the communists if we were going about it like this?

  Gia Dinh CORDS personnel attended weekly meetings chaired by a kindly retired Army colonel. These amounted to several hours of trivia, a waste of the time of the entire large staff. Agency for International Development personnel devoted a good portion of their time to citing progress in removing garbage from Gia Dinh that had accumulated during the 1968 Communist Tet offensive. We should have devoted that t
ime and more to removing the garbage from the Phoenix files.

  The CORDS meetings, the killings by the CIA’s assassination teams—the Provincial Reconnaissance Units—and the absurd intelligence-collection activities progressed as in a Greek tragedy. No one seemed to understand what was going on. Yet people died, reports flowed, meetings convened, and the gods frowned. That experience in Gia Dinh confirmed my worst fears about Vietnam.

  A few weeks after I had been assigned to Gia Dinh a flash message signaled that my old boss William Colby, who had just recently been named by President Johnson to head CORDS, had ordered an immediate briefing by the Gia Dinh CORDS staff. The heads of various programs rushed over to the U.S. Army’s bachelor officers’ quarters, a large concrete and wooden frame building. As I arrived, hard-looking Vietnamese girls in tight leather mini-skirts were being rushed out.

  Other officers of CORDS came scurrying in while reviewing their briefing notes. Within a matter of minutes Colby, trailed by a galaxy of aides and newspaper correspondents, burst into the gathering and we all jumped to attention. I could not believe the change in the man. The year before when he had come to Northeast Thailand he had moved slowly, seemed calm, relaxed, and exuded a concern for all. Now, in Gia Dinh, he looked and acted like a caricature, a harried, self-important, distracted bureaucrat on an important mission. Several of his aides carried massive notebooks, which they laid out for him at the head of the table.

  We all sat down. Colby opened the books, looked up to see if everyone appreciated the gravity of that action, and began calling for statistics: “How many VC killed this month? How many captured? How many firefights?”

  Each unit chief answered. Colby checked the replies against the figures in his book, and questioned each chief about discrepancies or outstanding figures. I sat quietly enjoying the spectacle and not knowing what to expect. Unfortunately, true to his roots, he asked for an assessment of the situation from the CAS representative (Controlled American Source—the phrase used instead of CIA in government correspondence). I had been in Gia Dinh for just a few weeks and had been awash in two-sentence intelligence reports about the movements of one or two Viet Cong and had no files or prior assessments that would have allowed me to learn anything about the situation in Gia Dinh. Not being quick on my feet, I answered honestly that I had just arrived and at this point did not know the security situation in the province.

  Finally after reviewing all the statistics, Colby adjourned the meeting to the adjacent bar for a cocktail party. I wondered as we moved into the next room just what had been accomplished.

  At the party Colby made it a point to talk to me. Maybe he was lonely, and the others seemed to hang back from approaching this important official. I felt no awe, only anger. Here he was supposedly trying to understand the situation in Gia Dinh by digesting a mass of contrived statistics, yet in Northeast Thailand he had rejected undeniable intelligence on the situation there. If he understood what was happening in Thailand, he would have understood what was happening in Vietnam.

  “How is your wife and family?” he asked.

  “Okay. Norma has gone to work,” I responded. “The two boys are in school in Herndon and my two girls are both in college.” All the time I was thinking, you dumb, blind son of a bitch, do you believe all the garbage in your book of statistics? Don’t you know that the Agency’s intelligence is misleading everyone? Why can’t you recognize this?

  “What sort of office setup do you have here?” he asked. “Do you have any good operations with the special police?”

  I gave all the appropriate answers, but I was thinking, here we are in the middle of an insane war, we all are running around shouting statistics that disprove the reality. Am I, is he, an inmate in this asylum or a keeper? Or is there any difference?

  We continued to talk in this desultory manner for what seemed an interminable length of time—would he never go? I considered speaking my mind to force some reality into this fantasy, but I knew it would be futile. If a thousand reports in Northeast Thailand couldn’t convince him, if the Vietnam War all around us couldn’t convince him, then my lone voice certainly couldn’t. And besides, it wasn’t the proper situation. This was a cocktail party. How could I raise a fuss here? It would be so … inappropriate.

  After Colby and his motorcade finally left, I returned to the CIA office-compound and made a large martini. I sat down and drank it while my mind raced to try to make some sense of the chaos of Vietnam. Here the U.S. was trying to fight an enemy it only slightly acknowledged. Why? What had happened to all the idealism, all the rules of getting and reporting intelligence? Why did the Agency blind itself while pretending to look for intelligence? Why did we insist on killing people instead of talking to them? How long would this insanity go on? I was depressed, confused, and in a state of agitated turmoil. I was also furious at Colby and furious at myself for not confronting him with the truth. The tension was unendurable. With all my strength I threw the martini glass at the nearest wall, smashing it and scattering glass everywhere.

  After six weeks in Gia Dinh I was assigned as officer in charge of liaison activities with the chief of South Vietnam’s Special Police. In this capacity I supervised other Agency case officers working with specific elements of the Special Police in and around Saigon.

  My boss, Tom (fictitious name), was a strange bird whose general incompetence and constant harping had forced numerous case officers to transfer out of ROIC V. Fortunately, Tom left a few months after my arrival. He was replaced by Herman (another fictitious name), a model Aryan in his mid-forties, tall, slim, with a shock of snow-white hair. Herman had tremendous motivation, throwing himself into his job with a vengeance and decorating his office with pictures of dead Viet Cong. Usually he was quite formal, but occasionally he would loosen up and talk. “Ralph,” he once told me, “those people in Headquarters didn’t think it was a good idea for me to come out here. You see, my son was a Marine, and he was killed here. They didn’t think I could bear up under the grief and maintain the proper perspective. They tried to discourage me from coming, but I just had to. I have to do my share.”

  For all his grief and obsession with avenging his son’s death, Herman was a competent man. He was also a friend of the chief of station, Ted Shackley, so he got many important assignments. Herman in turn usually passed those jobs down to me. Numerous times each day he would buzz me to come down to his office where he would assign new tasks, check on the status of the previous day’s requests, or bawl me out about past inadequacies.

  Shortly after Herman became my boss, I gave him a copy of my memorandum explaining the composition of Communist insurgencies and suggested the Agency improve its coverage. Herman, who had spent most of his career in Europe, did not know what to think. But at least he talked to me and heard me out.

  “Ralph, the rest of the world sees things differently,” he said. “How can you be right?”

  I understood his reaction. Here was a man new to Asia inundated with the same garbage briefings we had all endured. He had little background in Asia and knew zero about Asian Communist revolutions. How could he believe that one junior officer was better informed and had a clearer picture of the reality out there than all the rest of the Agency? If it had not been for my experience in Thailand, I would not have believed what I was saying either—simply because no one else was saying it, no intelligence reports mentioned it.

  After a while I stopped agitating, and to escape, I buried myself in 12-hour work days, six days a week. (I worked only six hours on Sunday.) At the end of each long work day, I wearily returned to my small villa on Le Qui Don Street, or as it was commonly called, leaky dong. The villa sat next to the U.S. Information Agency’s Abraham Lincoln Library and only a short distance from the Agency’s Due Hotel. I searched the various U.S. libraries in Saigon for books about Vietnam to read at home, but the shelves were full of nothing but pap and tales of earlier military victories. So I bought a small Japanese TV and spent the last hour or so of each eveni
ng watching the poor selection of programs broadcast by the Armed Forces network.

  Under normal circumstances my job would have been an outstanding opportunity and challenge. But my earlier motivation no longer existed. I had once believed that although the United States followed self-interest in our overseas programs, we matched this interest with a concern for the people in the foreign countries. Now I did not know what to believe. I doubted the Agency’s intelligence, its personnel, and even its integrity. Furthermore, my simplistic view of communists as the incarnation of evil and the United States as all good was slowly beginning to change. I seemed to be the only one around who realized we couldn’t win. I knew by now that any careful examination of available information, let alone the survey, would prove that the vast majority of the Vietnamese people were fighting against the U.S. troops and for the NLF. They had chosen the kind of government they wanted, and all American war efforts were aimed at postponing the inevitable.

  Every waking moment I fought an internal battle of doubts and contradictions. I couldn’t sleep, my head ached all the time, the tension was terrible. My stomach reacted and sometimes I felt like vomiting. I had no one to talk to about my distress. Allen, for years a good friend, had been assigned to Vietnam by the Agency. We met a couple of times for dinner and drinks, but I could not relate to him. I was obsessed with what was happening to me, he could not really understand it, and small talk was impossible. So I spent all my time either at work or alone at home watching TV and drinking, hating it, longing for some human contact. All I wanted was to be home with my family and away from this awful place.