Shadow Warrior

by Randall B. Woods

  Meanwhile, the Lao Dong, the communist party of North Vietnam, and, after its formation in December 1960, the National Liberation Front, designed a strategy—a “people’s war”—that would exploit the political void and the peasant resentment that Diem’s policies were creating. The key to victory over the “American Diemists,” Hanoi believed, was to disperse armed political cadres throughout South Vietnam and convince the rural populace that it was the communists—the former Viet Minh who had defeated the French and the Japanese—who held out the best chance for social and economic justice. Drawn from the southerners in the Viet Minh who had regrouped to the north in 1954 and headed south in 1959, as well as Viet Minh still hiding in the south, these cadres would wage a war of terror against Diemist officials to create fear and demonstrate their powerlessness, propagandize and organize disaffected peasants, and, in areas where government control was weak, establish shadow hamlet and even district governments capable of levying taxes and instituting land reforms. As the official history of the CIA in Vietnam put it, “the movement’s anticolonialist legacy, its land reform policy, its egalitarian style and offer of opportunities for the ambitious among the rural poor, together with the assiduous personal attention devoted to even low-level candidates for recruitment, stood in stark contrast to Diem’s mandarism, which had ‘dried the grass’ of peasant resentment into incendiary opposition.” The Saigon government was not without its supporters. There were thousands of Catholics, Hoa Hao, and Montagnards (tribespeople of the Central Highlands) who for various reasons were anticommunist, but they were the minority.28

  To make matters worse, the US Mission was deeply divided. The embassy under Durbrow wanted to condition US aid on Western-style democratic reforms; this was especially true following the election of John F. Kennedy. American diplomats in Vietnam urged the Ngo brothers to stop persecuting their noncommunist opponents, to name some Dai Viet and VNQDD personalities to ministerial posts, and to restore self-government at the local level. With the support of the Pentagon, General Williams and MAAG resisted any attempt to tie political reform to military aid. At mission meetings, he and Durbrow were openly hostile to each other. Williams took the position that military matters were beyond the comprehension of civilians. The bulk of US military aid went to the ARVN in anticipation of it having to fight a Korean-style war, a conventional invasion from the north. Diem was most happy with this arrangement, not least because the Americans were simultaneously providing him with a formidable armed force that he could use against his enemies whether they were the North Vietnamese Army, the Viet Cong, or some noncommunist ethnic or sectarian force. Colby noted with dismay that virtually no aid went to the local territorials of the “Self-Defense Forces”—village-level troops organized in platoons to protect local communities—or to the Civil Guard, the company-level force at the disposal of province chiefs. “Little wonder that their morale was abysmal, and that their nightly maneuver was limited to closing the barbed wire around their pathetic fort and waiting for morning in hopes that Communist guerrillas would ignore them as they went about the organization, exhortation, and direction of their fellow villagers,” Colby wrote.29

  Colby thought both the soldiers and the diplomats were wrong. The US Mission was convinced that if physical security could be established in the countryside, the peasants—innately anticommunist—would rally to the government in Saigon. Diem and the American leadership in South Vietnam assumed that whatever support for the communists there was among the peasantry was coerced. Colby gave the communists more credit than that. In a people’s war, the focus would not be on traditional military encounters. The enemy would employ violence to discredit the government and intimidate the population, but it would also bring a degree of social and economic justice to the countryside. Conventional battles would serve no purpose and indeed would be counterproductive, in that they would turn large portions of the rural population into alienated refugees. Nor were Western-style democratic forms and the empowerment of well-meaning intellectual elites in Saigon the answer. Empowerment would have to be authentic, to come from below. A solution, rooted in Colby’s philosophy, background, and reading of the situation on the ground, was taking shape in his mind. As fate would have it, that perspective would be made all the more significant by Colby’s elevation to chief of station in June 1960. But before he could act, he would have to deal with a situation that threatened to bring down the whole South Vietnamese house of cards.

  On the evening of November 10, 1960, Bill and Barbara, clad in formal dress, attended the annual Marine Birthday Ball at the US embassy. Only a select few were invited, and the Colbys felt fortunate to be included. In a ceremony repeated at Marine outposts around the world, the youngest and oldest soldiers present cut the birthday cake. Before retiring for the evening, the Colbys and Durbrows stopped at a popular restaurant barge on the Saigon River for a nightcap. At around 3 A.M., Bill and his family were awakened by thunder, or so they thought. Looking out his bedroom window, Colby saw red and blue tracers arcing across the night sky. The Presidential Palace at the end of their street was under attack.

  Bill’s immediate thoughts were for the safety of his family. As bullets thudded into the exterior walls of the house, he built an impromptu fortress of bookcases and furniture and loaded his weapons. “My father herded us into the middle of the house on the theory that stray bullets would have a harder time hitting us,” Paul, the youngest son, recalled. “I remember him going back and forth to a phone that was in a more exposed place.”30 Finally, Colby pulled out the voice-activated radio he kept in a closet for emergencies and got in touch with the embassy. Peering out an upstairs window, he soon saw that the site of the fighting was the palace; his family was exposed only to collateral damage. As Colby soon discovered, the Ngo brothers were under siege from a renegade army parachute unit.

  At dawn, a young American diplomat, John Helbe, appeared at the Colbys’ back door. He had been dispatched by the embassy to monitor the siege, and the Colbys’ house, at 16 Rue de Rhodes, offered the perfect vantage point. Colby drafted Helbe to do double duty—look after Barbara and the kids and report what he saw to the embassy over the radio. Bill then left for the office.

  In midmorning, the embassy informed Helbe that it was safe to move the family to a more secure location farther from the fighting. “At some point when it was quiet,” Paul recalled, “we filtered out the back of the house away from the action. I remember seeing armed men there. They had no interest in us.”31 Barbara, with kids in tow, walked five blocks to the house of another US Mission family, and then the next day moved still farther from the scene of action to the home of friends in Cholon. Nevertheless, it was a near thing. As the family left the house, they noted that baby Christine’s bed had been crushed by falling debris.

  With his family safe, the CIA chief was able to give his full attention to the coup.

  Colby spearheaded the station’s liaison team, keeping in constant touch by radio with the Ngo brothers as their Philippine-trained Palace Guard fended off the paratroops. One operative, Russ Miller, monitored senior police and military officials, while another, George Carver, kept in close touch with the insurgents. By the afternoon of the 11th, noncommunist political figures, led by Phan Quang Dan, had gathered at the house of a paratroop officer killed early in the fighting. “Dr. Dan,” as he was known to his American admirers, was a Harvard-educated physician who had been one of the two non–Can Lo Party members elected to the National Assembly in 1959 but barred from taking office on trumped-up charges. Energetic, honest, and charismatic, Dan began issuing proclamations intended to give political purpose to the uprising.32

  Throughout the crisis, Durbrow communicated to Nhu by radio that the position of the United States was not to take sides. The US Mission did not in fact align itself with either the government or the insurgents, but that was due more to lack of consensus than to the absence of opinion. The CIA station was of three minds. One group, led by Carver, held that the authorit
arianism and ruthlessness that had allowed the Ngo brothers to survive earlier crises were no longer relevant and were in fact counterproductive. For Carver, Diem had become “a boil to be lanced.” Colby was of the opinion that the Diem regime was still a work in progress and that there were signs that Nhu was ready to embrace the notion of a “rice-roots” political movement that would connect the government with the countryside. Carver later observed that Colby seemed “mesmerized” by the president’s brother. Russ Miller, who was connected to high-ranking police and military officers, reflected their view that although the Ngo brothers were problematical, there was no viable alternative to them at hand. Indeed, if the House of Ngo should fall, a military dictatorship, Dr. Dan notwithstanding, was a virtual certainty. The situation in South Vietnam was unlike those Colby had confronted in Italy; Colby, the Agency, and the United States were being forced to choose between two forms of totalitarianism. As yet, there was no vital center in South Vietnam.33

  At the outset of the fighting, Diem’s military aide, General Nguyen Khanh, had climbed the rear wall of the presidential compound and set off to rally outlying military units to the government’s side. Meanwhile, the beleaguered Ngo brothers played for time. Colby ordered Carver to urge Dan and the paratroop leaders to open negotiations with Diem. Carver argued that the United States was wasting a golden opportunity to effect a much-needed regime change. “I bitched and moaned and explained why I thought my orders were stupid,” he later recalled. Colby was not to be deterred, however. “George, I know your position,” he told his subordinate. “I don’t agree with you and we haven’t got time to discuss it right now.” Carver persuaded the coup leaders to order a cease-fire and send a delegation to the palace for talks. Meanwhile, Khanh had succeeded in persuading Colonel Nguyen Van Thieu, commander of the Fifth Division of the ARVN, to move up from My Tho and rescue the government. Within twenty-four hours, the insurgent paratroopers were themselves surrounded, and the coup attempt collapsed. The highest-ranking rebel officers fled to Tan Son Nhut Airport, where they persuaded the head of the Vietnamese Air Transport Command, Colonel Nguyen Cao Ky, to provide them with a C-47, which they subsequently used to flee to Cambodia. Dr. Dan and the civilians were not so lucky: Nhu’s secret police rounded them up and threw them in the Chi Hoa prison, home to several generations of Vietnamese who dared rise against the French. They would remain there until the government’s demise in 1963.34

  Diem and Nhu were not at all happy with the role the US Mission had played in the coup. Tuyen’s intelligence agents had discovered that Carver was with the coup plotters throughout the crisis and was perhaps more than a neutral observer. Colby tried to explain that the station’s objective was to stay informed as much as possible about the activities of all individuals and groups in a position to affect the security of the country or the political status quo. Nhu was not mollified. “All nations conduct espionage, and this is not a matter to get upset about,” he said. “But what no nation can accept, and our Government no less, is interference with its political authority and processes.”35 The president’s brother informed Colby that Carver was persona non grata. The chief of station replied that the person in question was a USAID worker and that the Mission had no reason to send him home.

  Shortly thereafter, Carver received a letter ostensibly from coup participants still in hiding. They rebuked him for encouraging and then abandoning them, and threatened Carver and his family with retribution. Colby and Carver recognized the paper and typeface: the letter had come from Tuyen’s headquarters. It was time to end the confrontation. The station chief went to see Nhu and told him that Carver was being threatened by unnamed individuals and had to be taken out of the country. Nhu nodded gravely and ordered his security services to guard the Carver family until it could safely depart. While this was going on, Carver’s principal contact with the insurgents—a lawyer named Hoang Co Thuy—presented himself at the embassy. Thuy was a paid agent of the CIA working for Carver; if he were captured, Tuyen would make short work of him. Colby arranged for Thuy to be sequestered in an Agency safe house, and he was eventually smuggled out of the country in a large mail sack.36

  9

  FIGHTING A PEOPLE’S WAR

  Bill Colby spent most of his first year in Vietnam putting out fires—and keeping himself and his family from getting burned. The official charge to the station was to gather information on everything that happened of any import in South Vietnam, and, if possible, in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north as well. But Colby’s assignment to Vietnam and his quick promotion to station chief indicated that Langley had another priority—nation-building. Colby’s background was not in intelligence per se but in covert operations, and especially in political action, an area in which he had been spectacularly successful in Italy.

  The former Jedburgh spent his first months in-country learning about Vietnamese society and politics and trying to master the bureaucratic jungle that was the US Mission. By the close of 1960, he had come to the conclusion that the House of Ngo’s approach was flawed. Economic and technical progress in the countryside à la Diem was not enough; Nhu understood the need to win hearts and minds, but he did not seem to know how to go about it. Colby did not insist on democracy for South Vietnam, but he did believe the government would have to be responsive to the needs of the people and foster local empowerment. Specifically, South Vietnam’s villagers would have to be armed and encouraged to defend their communities. In this, Colby believed, was the key not only to rural security but to nation-building as well. The advent of a new president in the United States seemed to set the stage for the program that was beginning to take shape in Colby’s mind.

  A week before the failed coup attempt, the American people had elected an old friend of Diem’s as president of the United States. In a 1956 speech, while he was still a US senator, John F. Kennedy had declared that “Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike.” If the “red tide of communism” should pour over it, he said, much of the rest of Asia would be threatened. Vietnam, he insisted, was “our offspring; we cannot abandon it; we cannot ignore its needs.”1 Although initially he was concerned more with the communist threats in Laos and Cuba, Kennedy as president had no intention of backing down on his pledge. His inaugural address was a call to arms. According to Carl Colby, he and his father listened intently to the radio as the new president called upon the American people to pay any price and bear any burden to defend democracy and freedom at home and abroad. Kennedy and his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, were determined to combat the forces of international communism on every front. The new administration poured billions of dollars into the US Air Force and its nuclear arsenal and vastly expanded the nation’s conventional forces. At the same time, Kennedy and his foreign policy team believed that the real struggle would be in “the countryside of the world,” to anticipate Chinese minister of defense Lin Piao’s phrase.

  The new president had long been concerned about the threat of communist-supported insurgencies and was especially alarmed by a speech Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev delivered in 1961 entitled, “For New Victories of the World Communist Movement.” In it Khrushchev pledged to support “just wars of liberation,” making it clear that he believed these conflicts would serve as a prelude to the collapse of the West. Kennedy distributed copies of Khrushchev’s speech at the inaugural meeting of his National Security Council and suggested that his colleagues read the writings of Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara on guerrilla warfare. He had already read them, the president said. “We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence,” the new president declared, “on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.” Following the meeting, Kennedy directed McNamara to develop a counterinsurgency capability.
An instrument was already at hand.2

  The US military had long struggled—and not very successfully—with the concept of unconventional warfare. By its very nature, the US Army was a hide-bound, traditional institution. Instances of organized violence that did not seem to fit under the term “war” were labeled aberrations or quarrels. In conventional conflicts, the role of soldiers, acting as agents of the state, was to apply force and violence—“to kill people and break things,” as Thomas K. Adams, a former director of intelligence and special operations at the US Army’s Peacekeeping Institute, put it. Wars were to be fought between armies whose goal was to destroy each other. But military scientists seemed to assume that armed conflicts took place in a void. In the years immediately after World War II, OSS veterans, including Colby, began urging the US military to train soldiers to live among and mobilize foreign populations threatened by a common enemy. They argued for the institutionalization of unconventional warfare, conflict in “the gray area where violence has entered the practice of politics but the struggle has not yet reached the level of conventional warfare,” Adams wrote.3

  The Truman Doctrine’s commitment to aid peoples of the world threatened not only by overt aggression but also by internal subversion provided further impetus to the creation of a corps of unconventional warriors. Ranger companies served in Korea, but they were more shock troops than counterinsurgency operatives. In 1952, the Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare authorized the creation of a Special Forces Division. An OSS veteran, Colonel Aaron Bank, was recruited to head the 10th Special Forces Group headquartered at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Unlike main force units, the Special Forces were not concerned primarily with destroying the enemy’s army, at least directly, or even with occupying and holding territory. As Adams, who was the SF’s principal historian, put it: “Its terrain is symbolic and lies in the minds of the population. . . . In most forms of unconventional warfare the objective is the allegiance of the people around whom, and presumably on whose behalf, the conflict is taking place.”4