The lowland Cham who inhabit the valleys are Buddhists and survive on sticky rice. These valley dwellers are peaceful and lethargic except during the equinox or summer solstice, when the advent of fertility rites turn them into frenzied Cham copulators.
The highlanders, or montagnards, live in thatched stilted huts on slash-and-burn plots that have been hacked out of the surrounding forest. Fierce warriors, they hunt with crossbows and drink fermented wine. Their staple crop is the opium poppy.
Cham has two capitals. The seat of government is in Viensiang, a sleepy town lying along the Mekong River across from neighboring Thailand. The royal capital, Luang Prabat, is up in the mountains and, at the time I lived there, boasted the world’s only monarch who drove a Ford Edsel.
That the Cham are fatalists is not surprising. Their country has been invaded by tribes of Mongols, Chinese hordes, Vietnamese marauders, and the French, die-hard colonials backed by their Foreign Legion.
In 1954 the French were defeated by Ho Chi Minh’s Vietminh at Dien Bien Phu and Cham became an independent country. Unfortunately, its borders as well as those of Vietnam and Cambodia, were drawn by European bureaucrats, and this explains why the people of Cham have no sense of a “national identity.”
Henry
That glorious vision of doing good, which is so often the sanguine marriage of so many good minds, arose before him, and he even saw himself in the illusion of some influence.
—CHARLES DICKENS, Tale of Two Cities
That there was even a Station in bucolic Cham was an anomaly. Only when the KGB set up shop in Viensiang did the CIA decide to follow suit. The small espionage outpost remained an operational backwater until the arrival of its new station chief, Henry.
Henry was an old European hand who had several operational coups to his credit, including the tunnel under East Berlin and the defrocking of a KGB station chief. Eventually, Henry tired of Europe, where most of his case officers were OSS retreads and their agents shopworn refugees and unsavory defectors. When Henry heard about the opening in Viensiang, he sensed the country was an operational lode waiting to be mined and volunteered for the post.
Detractors at Headquarters were concerned that Henry’s Teutonic character would grate on the easygoing Cham. The director, however, an old friend of Henry’s, was confident the dynamic Prussian would win over even the lethargic Cham.
Henry caused a stir shortly after he arrived. Instead of keeping a “low profile,” he let the Cham know his office was open for business. Clients began coming to his door, and Henry soon developed a number of government officials and young army officers.
Henry’s openness with the Cham grated on the American ambassador, a corpulent political appointee who took great pride in his karate black belt, which he hung on the wall behind his desk. It irritated the ambassador that Henry lived outside Viensiang on the airport road, which made it difficult to contact him on short notice.
The electricity outside Viensang was erratic and unreliable, and Henry had a backup generator installed at his house. When the Chinese madam who ran “the house” next door asked Henry to leave his generator on at night for her late clients, Henry agreed. And in return for letting her tap into his generator, he asked her to provide information on some of her clients.
Henry lived on the airport road for only a few months before the ambassador ordered him to move into town nearer the embassy. Henry had no choice, and he turned his house over to a newly arrived case officer and his wife, Brenda Lou, a strict Southern Baptist, who had only agreed to come to Cham to protect her husband from Asian fleshpots.
Her husband was often away on field trips, and Brenda Lou became increasingly irritated at the noise from the generator in the shed out back. One night the throbbing noise so infuriated Brenda Lou that she stomped out to the shed and threw the switch to shut off the generator.
Unbeknownst to Brenda Lou, she plunged the entire airport road into darkness. The tap from the generator to the madam’s “house” was only one of a series of taps into the line by noodle and cigarette shops along the airport road, the last tap at the Buddhist temple Wat Phrasay faintly lighting the one lamp flickering above the inner courtyard.
The morning after Brenda Lou threw the switch, an angry saffron-robed monk, the “Venerable Bonze” from the Buddhist wat on the airport road, stormed into the ambassador’s office in the embassy. Rapping his cane on the floor, the Venerable Bonze berated the ambassador for shutting off power to a Buddhist shrine while the monks were praying.
The ambassador assured the bonze he would take action. He called Henry in and told him to turn that “damn generator” back on and leave it on!
Henry later claimed credit for the most successful electrical power project since the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority).
More serious matters lay ahead for Henry. In 1959 the slumbering Cham were again rousted from their hibernation. Armed Pathet Cham cadre, trained in North Vietnam, were infiltrating into northern Cham. With little government presence in the area, the infiltrations went unreported until an alert outpost commander picked up “bamboo telegraph” clackings announcing the “return of our brothers from the North.”
The clackings were reported to Viensiang, and Henry’s military intelligence contact briefed him on the reports. Henry cabled the gist of the report to Headquarters, flagging it for the director’s attention. Henry added his own comment that the report was evidence that the Pathet Cham intended to gain control of Cham. It would achieve this goal by infiltrating Moscow-trained cadre into Cham, establishing bases in the two northern provinces to serve as springboards to take over the whole of Cham. Henry concluded, “The Cham government, still weak from a bungled French Caesarean and viral Marxist infection, was paralyzed and unable to take action to remedy its maladies since it was run by ‘colonial leftovers.’”
Henry concluded that only a hard-hitting political action program could save Cham.
Headquarters, accustomed to dramatic pronouncements from Henry, usually treated them as “wolf cries” from a pastured-out station chief. In reply to this latest cable, Headquarters insisted Henry provide details on numbers of armed Pathet Cham cadre, specific routes and infiltration points, and evidence that North Vietnam and the USSR were providing aid to the Pathet Cham.
Henry’s detractors had not, however, taken into account the director’s reaction to Henry’s cable. Allen Dulles had a high regard for Henry, as both had entered the Agency around the same time. Both men had distinguished themselves in World War II, Dulles brokering peace talks with Galeazzo Ciano, Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law, and Henry spiriting nuclear scientists out of Germany.
Henry’s cable intrigued the director, who called the Far East Division chief and asked for an immediate briefing on Cham.
Prior to the director’s phone call, there had been little interest in the landlocked kingdom in former Indochina. When the division chief called Friedman, the Headquarters officer responsible for Cham, and told him to report to the director’s office to give a briefing, Friedman ran up all seven flights of stairs to the director’s office.
Allen Dulles sat behind a long, curved mahogany desk, flanked on either side by American and CIA flags. Friedman, without waiting for instructions, went directly to the director’s desk and unrolled a map of Cham. He anchored the corners of the map with opium weights Henry had sent shortly after his arrival in Cham.
Friedman pointed out the two provinces in question and the infiltration routes highlighted by Magic Marker lightning bolts. Dulles pored over the map, then asked Friedman about the political situation, the capability of the Cham army, the reliability of Cham intelligence sources, and the practicability of mounting operations in a country as backward and underdeveloped as Cham.
The director, impressed with Friedman’s briefing, turned to the director of operations and told him to put Cham on the “front burner.” He would go over and brief the president, who would undoubtedly want to know what our agency was going to do abo
ut it.
I was later told that after Dulles briefed the president on the situation in Cham, the president commented, “Those damned Soviet locusts are on the move again, and they’ll be descending on Hawaii soon if we don’t stop them. Get that outfit of yours cracking. I don’t want some half-assed Asian country blowing up in my face!”
Henry enjoyed being in the eye of the storm. He had gotten the green light to come up with a political action program and had already drafted his cable proposing to assist the Cham to establish a national “rice-roots” political organization, with chapters in villages and hamlets throughout Cham, to support civic action projects such as digging wells and setting up dispensaries, to organize hamlet militia, and to recruit and train political action and psychological warfare cadre to support the program. He added that four additional case officers would be required.
Although there was a certain amount of grousing at Headquarters about the “snake-oil charlatan” and his program, the grumbling was muted. A task force was organized and a message sent canvassing for case officer candidates.
In less than a month Henry’s “four horsemen” had been nominated and were at Headquarters “reading in.”
There wasn’t that much to “read in” on. Material on Cham was sparse, limited to dated issues of the National Geographic, foreign missionary memoirs, French military dispatches, and extracts from the Congressional Record documenting abuses of the U.S. AID (Agency for International Development) program, the Record alleging that licenses issued for importing Caterpillar tractors had been altered to permit the import of Mercedes Benz. The result was that Viensiang boasted more Mercedes per capita than Stuttgart did.
Bt the end of June, we four case officers requested by Henry had finished “reading in” and were on our way to the Land of a Million Elephants.
Henry was shorter than I had expected. His jocular face was contrasted by a Teutonic jaw, and his piercing eyes warned against trifling.
Henry was in a good mood, having just come from a verbal sparring session with “the great white whale,” as he referred to the ambassador. Henry didn’t waste any time. After welcoming us to the Station, he briefed us on the program we were to implement. He emphasized that the program would not really be “covert,” because the term had little meaning in Cham, where there were no secrets. In Cham everything was out in the open and tradecraft was useless. The Cham political action program was couched as “nation building” and “civic action.”
Henry said that, with the exception of the Pathet Cham, all of the political organizations and parties in Cham were tattered colonial relics. We would have to start from scratch and create a national rice-roots organization with chapters in every province, district, and village. It was a tall order, and Henry said he counted on us being up to the task.
“To teach you the finer points of raw political action and bare-knuckles politics, a former Chicago ward boss and Agency consultant, is arriving tomorrow. He will instruct you in the techniques of dead voter registration, ballot box switching, and making use of the pork barrel, or in the case of Cham, the rice crock. He is also an expert on precinct organization, how to organize the local population and ensure getting them all out to vote on election day. Chicago may not be Phu Khat or Phong Saly, but the techniques of political organization are universal, and what works in Chicago and Peoria can work in Viensiang and Pat Peng.”
Henry then went over to the map of Cham tacked on the wall of his office. He said we would be playing catch-up to a well-organized Pathet Cham political action program already under way. With his pointer, he indicated the red areas on the map. These were controlled by the Pathet Cham, and, at least for the time being, we could forget about them. The areas shaded in blue were population centers such as Viensiang and Pak Boun, which were more or less pro-government. We should encourage the Cham to set up chapters and do some organizing, but not spend too much time there. “I want you to concentrate on the green areas, the villages and hamlets in the countryside that are neutral or noncommitted. Color that area blue!”
It was a fiery pep talk from our Bavarian Knute Rockne. Now it was game time.
Vienna
Vienna wasn’t a crisis Station. A few double agents, defectors, and information peddlers claiming the Russians were dumping nuclear waste into the Blue Danube. Vienna was often referred to as the “Lederhosen” post.
One night Peer, the station chief in Vienna, was called in by his communications officer for an “OPERATIONAL IMMEDIATE” from Headquarters. Peer read the cable twice, then summoned his case officers to his office.
Peer was standing in front of his desk, waving a cable at the five groggy case officers who sat in front of him. “What I want each of you to tell me is why, yes, why all your contacts seem to be unaware of what’s going on in this Austrian paradise they live in. Are they so full of beer and apple strudel that they are sleeping through the biggest crisis in this country since World War II? The entire Red Army could be marching down Lindenstrasse and I have to hear about it from Headquarters!
“I have just been advised by Langley that significant numbers of political action cadre, armed and trained in Moscow, are at this very moment infiltrating this Hapsburgian kingdom through mountain passes and river valleys! I want you to roust your contacts from their hibernation and have them find out about these infiltrations!”
The sleepy-eyed and puzzled case officers looked like chastened school-boys whose knuckles had just been cracked. Peer was still waving the cable at them when the communications officer burst into his office. “Sorry, sir. It was a mistake. The cable was sent to Viensiang and was routed to Vienna by mistake. One of those communications glitches. Headquarters says they’re sorry for any inconvenience.”
Peer sent his befuddled case officers back to bed. His curiosity had been aroused, however, and he reread the cable with its references to black-pajama cadre, pirogues, buffalo carts, and panji-staked trails. He put the cable down and went over to the world globe standing next to his desk. He spun it several times looking for this “Viensiang” without success and finally gave up, deciding to try the Rand-McNally the next day.
Boostershot
All events in history reappear in one fashion or another … the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
—KARL MARX
Henry’s wasn’t Cham’s first political action program. Two years before his arrival, the American embassy’s “Country Team” had come up with Operation Boostershot, a program that had gone badly wrong.
The program centered around two Caterpillar tractors that had been gathering dust in an Agency for International Development (AID) warehouse. The plan called for airdropping the tractors into two districts controlled by the Pathet Cham. The pro-government candidates would take credit for bringing in the two tractors and the grateful villagers would express their gratitude at the polls on election day. The Country Team planners forgot, however, that Cham was a security sieve and the plan was bound to leak.
Rumors that a plane would be arriving had spread quickly through the two districts, and when the C-130 appeared, a crowd had already gathered on the ground. The first plane flew over and dropped the crate with the tractor inside attached to two parachutes. When the crate hit the ground, the Pathet Cham candidate rushed out shouting, “Look! The ‘peoples’ tractor’ the Pathet Cham has gotten for you! With it you can build roads and plow new fields. Long live the Pathet Cham.”
The villagers ran out onto the field, trampling over the hapless pro-government candidate still holding his prepared speech. When the crowd reached the gigantic crate, they ripped it open, revealing the bright yellow tractor. They climbed over it, stroking the silver smokestack, pulling levers, running their hands over the tracks. The Pathet Cham leader climbed onto the seat and pressed the starter button. Puffs of blue smoke belched from the exhaust as the engine caught and the tractor lurched forward, heading across the field. The government candidate, picking himself off the ground, had no doubt about w
ho was driving his tractor.
The performance was repeated in the second district, the Pathet Cham candidate again taking credit for the yellow “manna from the sky.”
Both Pathet Cham candidates won by a landslide. Boostershot was consigned to the shredder.
Henry called the Country Team meetings “The Ambassador’s Amateur Hour.” He had no intention of giving a briefing on his program. He was required, however, to keep the ambassador informed about all nonintelligence operations in which his people were involved. So, Henry told the ambassador his people were working with the Cham on a “civic action program.” Its objective was to help the Cham in “strengthening their democratic institutions.”
The ambassador suspected there was more to the program than Henry told him, but he couldn’t quarrel with “fostering democracy.”
The Young Turks
Henry had already begun laying the groundwork for his political action program before we arrived, organizing evening seminars for young Cham army officers and government officials, Cham’s “Young Turks” fed up with the “Francophile gerontocracy” running their country. Henry worked these seminars like revival meetings, lashing out at communism and corruption, extolling freedom and democracy. He told his audience they were tomorrow’s leaders and should start thinking about what they could do for their country.
The night Henry introduced us to his group; the theme was “political organization.” He agreed with their concerns about the country stagnating because it was run by what they referred to as stale, colonial leftovers. Cham was a new country and needed new blood, new ideas, and a new political organization. Henry, after telling the group he thought the leaders of such an organization were here tonight, excused himself and left the room.
Laughter in the Shadows Page 7