When the “all-clear” sounded, Sister Rose led me to the dispensary and poured out two glasses of “medicinal tea,” which tasted suspiciously like Beefeaters gin. She told me about recent Viet Cong probes against her compound that had recently increased in both frequency and intensity, adding that the only reason they hadn’t stormed the compound was out of fear of becoming infected. It was only a matter of time, however, before they mounted a major attack.
I told Sister Rose that Colonel Dien had asked me to help her. I said we could provide thirty M-2 carbines, one Browning automatic rifle (BAR), and ten cases of ammunition, not enough to hold off a sustained Viet Cong attack, but maybe enough to buy her some time and possibly raise the morale of the defenders. She thanked me in advance for any “donation” I could provide.
I returned a week later with the thirty carbines, the BAR, and the ammunition. Sister Rose blessed each weapon as it was removed from the crate and then gave me a blessing as well. She also hung a crucifix around my neck and called me “the Father Damien of Zone D,” after the Belgian missionary who died ministering to the lepers on the Molokai colony in Hawaii.
I heard from Colonel Dien later that Sister Rose’s colony had fended off several Viet Cong attacks before being overrun. She was taken prisoner and sent to another reeducation camp, probably one without a volleyball court.
Coup #2
On November 1, 1965, a cabal of Vietnamese generals led by Duong Van Minh, “Big Minh,” staged a coup d’état against South Vietnam’s President Diem. Air force planes strafed the presidential palace neutralizing forces loyal to Diem, forcing the president and his brother, Nhu, to flee to the Cholon district of Saigon. Shortly afterward, they decided to give themselves up, and General Minh, guaranteeing them safe conduct, sent an armored car to Cholon to escort the president and his brother to coup headquarters. When the armored car arrived, the bullet-riddled bodies of Diem and Nhu were inside, the two having been assassinated by the captain charged with bringing them back safely.
The day of the coup, air force planes flew over our house, diving and strafing the barracks of troops loyal to the president. I had gone into the embassy, but my family and the visiting wife of a CARE official took shelter under the stairs until the planes flew off and the bombardment stopped.
An hour later Joy phoned me at the embassy, telling me that the “special radio” was squawking and I should come home. The special radio had been installed in my house before the coup, with instructions that it was not to be touched except in an emergency. The radio was still squawking when I got home, so I picked up the hand receiver and immediately knew it was my friend, Colonel Lou Conein. He barked at me to “bring him some scotch whisky,” and when I told him to get off the phone, he repeated his request, yelling at me to relay his message to the embassy. I learned later that “scotch whisky” was the signal indicating the coup was in progress.
I phoned the Station with Conein’s message, and the acting chief of station told me to go immediately to coup headquarters, which was located in a military compound a little over a mile from my house. I was to tell Conein to contact the Station immediately.
I jumped in my jeep and drove out to coup headquarters, where the armored car with the bodies of Diem and Nhu had arrived. The entire press corps was standing around the armored car, and then several journalists began to leave the compound to file their stories. They were heading in the direction of my jeep, which I had parked near the gate of the compound. I jumped out, ducked down behind the jeep, and, using my radio, called my station chief in the embassy. I told him that I couldn’t get to Conein without passing a phalanx of reporters.
Dave Smith, the acting chief, told me to forget Conein and get out of the compound, saying, “If those correspondents see you, it will confirm their suspicions that CIA is behind the coup. And you and I will be on the next plane home!”
I jumped in the jeep and got away without being observed. In the end my exit didn’t make much difference, because the press accused the CIA anyway of being behind the coup.
The coup, which even the communist journalist Wilfred Burchett described as a “colossal American blunder,” destabilized the country. A succession of “general’s coups” followed the one against Diem, until finally Nguyen Van Thieu, the only general left standing, took over and became the last president of South Vietnam.
“Clear the Decks”
After the coup, the situation in Saigon remained tense. Our family’s life went on, but not quite as before. Kent and Gray, wearing green berets and cut-down camouflage uniforms given them by a Special Forces “A Team” commander, played war games and built sandbag revetments in the yard. Laurie was at a movie when a Viet Cong terrorist lobbed a grenade into the theater. Laurie, having been told to lie on the floor in the event of a bomb explosion, did as instructed but was trampled by other moviegoers running out of the theater. The bombing left Laurie with permanent ear damage and recurring nightmares.
A Viet Cong car bomb exploded in front of the American embassy, killing a CIA secretary and leaving the CIA station chief, Peer de Silva, with permanent eye damage. On Christmas Eve the same year an explosion rocked the Rex Hotel, an American officers’ billet, and with the security situation worsening, U.S. military police were assigned to ride shotgun on school buses and stand guard on the roof of the American School.
The situation in Saigon continued to deteriorate with a series of plastic explosive and grenade attacks, the self-immolation of Buddhist monks, civil unrest, and a rash of assassination attempts. A magazine photo of a South Vietnamese police colonel executing a blindfolded prisoner and the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk received wide play in the United States.
President Johnson decided it was time to “clear the decks.”
Evacuation #2
Another evacuation. Cham déjà vu. Families were put on notice to be prepared for evacuation by military aircraft from Tan San Nhut airport. Joy and the wives of two other case officers who also didn’t like flying wondered if they could be evacuated by ship. We looked around and learned that a Norwegian freighter was in port. The three of us went down to the port to the office of the shipping line, where we were told the ship’s next port of call after leaving Saigon was Bangkok. We asked if the freighter could “evacuate” three American families.
The Norwegians were very helpful and relayed the request from “the American embassy” to assist in the evacuation of three families from Saigon. The company immediately authorized the ship to take the three families and their pets to Bangkok. Three days after leaving Saigon, the three families walked down the gangplank in Bangkok.
The second time around was easier. The families bypassed the Erawan this time and rented houses scattered around the city. Picking up where they had left off, Joy went back to work for the Bangkok World; Laurie, Kent, Gray, and Megan reenrolled in the international school; and they all resumed their riding lessons, eating off noodle carts, and hopping on three-wheeled samlors.
Bangkok was elevated to status as a “safe haven.”
The Shrimp Soldiers
This is the kind of war that will wind on and make fools of its partners and opponents both.
—MARK HALPERIN, A Soldier of the Great War
Nguyen Van Buu was a Vietnamese businessman close to President Diem. He had the shrimp monopoly in Vung Tau on Vietnam’s southern coast and his own paramilitary force to secure the road between Saigon and Vung Tau. He supported his three hundred armed, mobile, and very effective “shrimp soldiers” out of his own pocket.
I had gotten to know Buu after turning over the Mountain Scout program and had begun working in the southern part of Vietnam. Buu had a training site near Vung Tau, which he offered to let me use for our political action trainees. At the graduation ceremony for our first fifty trainees, Buu introduced me to his friend, Colonel Nguyen Van Thieu, commander of the Fifth ARVN Division, and later president of South Vietnam.
Because of Buu’s close ties to President Diem
, he was arrested after the coup against Diem. He would have been executed if his friend, Colonel Thieu, hadn’t intervened. When Buu was sent to prison on Con Son Island, Thieu took over his mistress, Anna, a former Air Vietnam hostess. I last saw Buu when I visited him on the prison island. President Thieu was still looking out for his old friend Buu and at Anna’s request arranged for me to go down and see him.
I was met at the airstrip by the governor of the island, who invited me to join him and “his friend,” Buu, for a picnic on the beach. It was a tranquil setting for a prison island. We had our picnic near “shark’s cove” with swarms of monkeys swinging through the trees. It was a perfect site for a future Treasure Island–style resort, with casinos and plush hotels designed to attract rich Chinese gamblers from the mainland, Vietnamese businessmen, and even some former case officers.
Buu was never pardoned. He died on Con San Island. Anna eventually emigrated to the United States.
Colonel Chau
Following the turnover of the Mountain Scouts, I was assigned to the rice-paddy delta of South Vietnam. Rufus Phillips, a former case officer in Cham and Vietnam and the new Agency for International Development (AID) director for rural development in South Vietnam, introduced me to Colonel Tran Ngoc Chau, the innovative province chief, whose model villages, census-grievance cadre, and provincial reconnaissance (or hunter-killer) teams were having some success in a rich rice-growing province that was also a prime target for the Viet Cong.
Chau’s cadre worked in outlying hamlets building schools, digging wells, setting up dispensaries, and training self-defense militia. His census-grievance cadre counted heads and solicited complaints and grievances, which they would then bring to Chau for action. The teams, working primarily at the hamlet and village level, were unique in a country where authority traditionally trickled down from the top.
Chau’s secret hunter-killer teams were trained to eliminate Viet Cong agents and political commissars in contested villages where the Viet Cong were active. These teams were unfairly associated with the interrogation teams of the controversial Phoenix program.
I worked with Chau for over a year, supporting and aiding him in augmenting his programs. I found traveling with Chau outside the provincial capital was risky, and the province chief barely escaped a number of ambushes set by the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese advisers. Among the latter, as I would learn later, was one of Chau’s blood relatives.
When I was staying with Chau, we had long talks about the war. Chau faulted the government in Saigon, which he believed was so obsessed with “search-and-destroy” operations and the “strategic hamlet” program that it had lost touch with the people at the rice-roots level. His views, which he expressed openly, did not endear him to government leaders in Saigon, including the president.
One night Chau told me he was in contact with a North Vietnamese Army (NVA) officer whom he didn’t identify. The NVA officer said he wanted to open a dialogue with the American embassy about ending the war.
Many South Vietnamese had Viet Cong and North Vietnamese relatives, but I was surprised to learn that Chau’s “contact” was an NVA officer. I encouraged Chau to maintain contact with the NVA officer, and when I returned to Saigon, I reported our conversation about Chau’s NVA contact.
The last time I stayed with Chau before returning to the United States, he confided to me that the NVA officer was a relative he hadn’t seen in more than fifteen years and was surprised when he had turned up at his office. I tried to press Chau on the identity of this relative, but he changed the subject. On returning to Saigon I again reported Chau mentioning his contact with an NVA officer whom he had identified as a close relative. I learned later that the relative was his brother.
After I returned to the United States, I learned that Colonel Chau had been arrested as a North Vietnamese spy. He was charged with passing information to his brother, NVA Colonel Trong Hien. The arrest of Chau, who had become a close friend of his American military adviser, Colonel Vann, and had been extolled in the American press, caused an outcry in Congress. My son, Kent, who was attending Lenox School in the Berkshires, wrote me, enclosing a New York Times article about the trial of Chau. According to the article, during the trial Colonel Chau continually maintained he was not a spy and had “kept the Americans informed of his contact with his NVA brother.” He named CIA officer Stuart Methven as one of the Americans.
My son added a tongue-in-cheek comment about having to learn from the New York Times that his father worked for the CIA.
Chau was sentenced to twenty years in prison, but in 1974 Thieu commuted his sentence and allowed him to return to Saigon. When Saigon fell, Chau was again arrested, this time by the North Vietnamese, who sent him to a reeducation camp, where he probably would have been executed if it hadn’t been for his brother. After over a year in a reeducation camp, Chau was again allowed to return to Saigon but was kept under house arrest. He and his family later escaped from Vietnam on a fishing boat that almost sank before reaching the coast of Malaya. Chau spent the next year in various refugee camps until immigrating to the United States, where he and his family now live. We still speak by phone from time to time.
The Sacred Mountain
The Holy See was at Tamyin. A pope and female cardinals. Prophecy by planchette. Saint Victor Hugo. Christ and Buddha looking down from the roof of the cathedral on a Walt Disney fantasia of the East.
—GRAHAM GREENE, The Quiet American
In the apse of the Cao Dai cathedral in Tay Ninh, sixty miles from Saigon, the “pope” pontificates from a cobra-sculpted dais. Founded in 1919 by mystic Ngo Van Chieu, the Cao Dai sect at one time had more than three hundred thousand adherents. Its panoply of saints included Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, George Washington, and Joan of Arc. To communicate with the spirits, Cao Dai elders sit around a long Ouija board, which would emit vibrating messages from their departed ancestors.
The terrain of Tay Ninh Province is flat, except for the for the cone-shaped “Black Virgin” mountain in the northeast corner. The mountain, with a golden pagoda on its summit, is sacred to the Cao Dai.
The Viet Cong in the early 1960s had occupied the Black Virgin Mountain, driven the Cao Dai priests from the pagoda, and raised the Viet Cong flag. The sight of the yellow-star flag flying on their sacred mountain was an irritant to the Cao Dai, particularly the Cao Dai province chief, General Tat. I had met General Tat several times, when he invariably asked for help in recapturing the sacred mountain. He made the same request to Major Johnson, the Tay Ninh military adviser. In the end we decided that recapturing the sacred mountain was justifiable. Recapturing sacred mountains was not an Agency priority, but an operation targeted against a Viet Cong base was.
Together with Major Johnson, we came up with a plan calling for arming and training two fifty-man platoons of Cao Dai commandos, the Station to provide arms, ammunition, logistics, and finances and Major Johnson’s team to train the teams in commando operations. General Tat would be in command.
As a covert operation, retaking the Black Virgin Mountain was to be a “one shot deal.” General Tat recruited the teams, and when Major Johnson said the commandos were combat ready, General Tat convened the Cao Dai elders, who consulted their “board” for the most auspicious day for the attack.
At dawn on the chosen day, the commandos moved out. They climbed up the mountain, skirmished briefly with surprised Viet Cong defenders, and by mid-afternoon the “cult soldiers” had retaken the Black Virgin Mountain.
General Tat made a speech invoking the Cao Dai spirits and extolling the brave deeds of the commandos. The victors then raised the ten-by-fifteen-foot flag of South Vietnam, which had been handwoven by Cao Dai widows. But the flag was so large it still touched the ground when raised to the top of the flagpole. Finally, the wind caught the flag and unfurled it. It could be seen all over the plain and flew on top of the mountain until the fall of Saigon and the occupation of Tay Ninh by North Vietnamese troops.
The
North Vietnamese recaptured the mountain and ran up a flag with a yellow star in the center. General Tat was captured and sent to a reeducation camp. His brother, who escaped and now lives in the United States, told me Tat would never be allowed to leave Vietnam.
The Cao Dai cathedral was gutted but is still standing.
Farewell to Arms
I had been in Vietnam for four years. Our counterinsurgency operations had given way to a full-time war. Census-grievance cadres had been disbanded, and counterterror teams had been sent back to their villages. Political action teams (PATs) had been incorporated into a National Pacification Program.
The Station had grown like topsy. Case officers reported to regional chiefs in a bureaucratic jumble that encouraged coordination and discouraged initiative. When I was told I had to get a ticket to fly an Air America heliocourier, I knew it was time to leave. Headquarters agreed and gave me a sabbatical.
Sabbatical
There was too much farce mixed up with the tragedy.
—ROBERT GRAVES
Boston in 1967 reverberated with echoes of the maelstrom I had just left. Flag burnings and antiwar demonstrations rocked the MIT campus, where I was enrolled as a graduate student at the Center for International Studies. I had persuaded my superiors to forgo sending me to one of the War Colleges, because “I didn’t want to study war no more.” Thanks to Henry Kissinger, whom I had escorted around the highlands and who put in a good word for me, I was one of first operations officers to be sent to attend a private university for his midcareer sabbatical.
The head of the Political Science Department at MIT’s School of International Studies and one other professor were the only faculty members aware of my Agency affiliation. A recent Ramparts magazine exposé of alleged CIA infiltration of college campuses had become a cause célèbre, and I was warned to keep my head down.
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