Shadow Warrior

by Randall B. Woods

  The second week in May, David Nuttle received an urgent message from IVS headquarters: Ambassador Nolting wanted to see him in his office the following day. The aid worker jumped on his motorbike and set off on the “Frontier Highway,” the main north-south route connecting Saigon to the Central Highlands. “I arrived in Saigon about an hour after dark,” Nuttle wrote in his unpublished memoir, “having flipped over after hitting a big wild hog that ran out of the jungle into my path.”37 Nuttle showered and dropped by the Layton villa to see Bonnie Layton, Gil’s daughter. The elder Layton intercepted him at the door. “Listen,” he said, “all I want to do is make sure that you got the message about your meeting with the Ambassador.”

  “How do you know about that?” Nuttle asked.

  “I have my sources,” was Layton’s terse reply.

  As it turned out, Colby and Layton had arranged a meeting of the US Mission to discuss the situation in the Highlands with Nuttle present.

  At 2:00 the next afternoon, Nuttle walked through the front door of the US embassy and was directed to the ambassador’s conference room. As he waited at the long mahogany table, others began to file in: General Lionel C. McGarr, head of the US military mission, and his deputy; USAID director Arthur Gardiner; Colby; Vietnam expert Douglas Pike; and then the ambassador himself. MAAG presented its solution to the threat of a communist takeover in the Highlands. Essentially, McGarr supported the Diem regime’s plan to concentrate the tribal population in secured reservations while the ARVN conducted massive sweeps to root out and kill the Viet Cong. It was a makeover of the reconcentration tactic the Spanish had used in Cuba from 1895 through 1898 and that was adopted by US forces in their war against Philippine insurgents—in both cases with disastrous results.

  When McGarr finished stating his view, Nolting asked Nuttle to respond. “I ripped into the ‘reservation plan’ by focusing on all the obvious negatives,” Nuttle recalled. The Montagnards would resist being relocated. It would be impossible to keep them from slipping away at night into the dense jungle, which was honeycombed with hunting trails. Once there, they would become fodder for the Viet Cong. With McGarr clearly irritated, Colby interceded, asking Nuttle whether there was an alternative. There was, Nuttle said: “Mr. Colby, if the GVN [government of South Vietnam] will begin to bring the Montagnard into the social and economic mainstream, there will be some motivational basis for a security program.” The Diem government could make a good beginning by stopping the bombing of aboriginal villages. If arms were provided to the Highlanders, and they were allowed to defend themselves, there was a chance that further communist inroads could be stopped.38

  Nuttle had played the role that Colby, Layton, and Nolting had hoped he would. By this point Nolting and Colby had bonded. “Colby became not only a friend,” Nolting later recalled, “but one of my most trusted advisers.” When it became clear that Colby had cleared away any objection the House of Ngo might have, Nolting, with the approval of the 303 Committee, gave the go-ahead for a small, experimental counterinsurgency/pacification program focused on the Rhade.39

  In 1962, the Rhade numbered between 100,000 and 115,000. Residents of the high plateau that formed the heart of the Central Highlands, the tribe had migrated southwestward from China and Mongolia centuries earlier, dependent on slash-and-burn agriculture for its subsistence. The Rhade had a matrilineal society with the eldest woman in the family owning the house, property, and livestock. Members of an extended family resided in a bamboo longhouse sometimes reaching 400 feet in length. Male and female roles were traditional, with the males hunting, clearing the land, building the houses, burying the dead, conducting business, and preparing the rice wine. The women drew water, collected firewood, cooked, cleaned, washed the clothes, and wove the traditional red, black, yellow, and blue cotton cloth of the Rhade. The average Rhade male was about five feet five inches tall, with a brown complexion and broad shoulders. Healing was the responsibility of shamans or witch-doctors. The religion was animist, but included a god (Ae Die) and a devil (Tang Lie).

  Nuttle signed on as a contract agent with the CIA on October 4, 1961. His assignment was to survey the tribes around Ban Me Thuot and identify those willing to participate in a self-defense and development program. Colby arranged for a Special Forces medic, Sergeant Paul Campbell, to assist Nuttle. Accompanied by a Captain Phu from Thuy’s Presidential Survey Office (PSO, the South Vietnamese government’s version of the CIA) and Nuttle’s man Friday, Y-Rit, the team set up shop in Ban Me Thuot. Nuttle recalled that before departing for the bush, they took stock: Rhade villages were being attacked by the ARVN and bombed by the Vietnamese Air Force when they were suspected of supporting the Viet Cong. For their part, the communists were using terrorism to extort rice, livestock, and manpower from the Rhade villages. Native lands had been taken without compensation by the government in Saigon for resettlement of refugees from North Vietnam.40

  The team found tribal elders initially suspicious and reluctant to cooperate, but “Mr. Dave” and “Dr. Paul” persisted, with Campbell conducting sick call at each village and Nuttle sounding out the leadership about a possible cooperative effort. The tribesmen hated the South Vietnamese government, but they were afraid of the Viet Cong. In one village, insurgents had captured the sister of a Rhade who had been working with the IVS; they took her into the village and eviscerated her, “filling the cavity with odds and ends[,] and gave propaganda lectures to the assembled observers while the girl was engaged in dying,” according to a CIA report.41 Eventually, Colby and his colleagues settled on the village of Buon Enao, only 6 miles from the provincial capital of Ban Me Thuot, for their first operation. During October, the team visited Buon Enao every day for three weeks. Its proposals were minimal: a perimeter fence for defense and a dispensary.

  Layton and Colby made frequent visits to the site, and the team grew to include more Agency personnel, USAID workers, and the first Special Forces A-Team under Captain Lawrence Arritola. Everything was subject to extended debate: the Rhade said the fence would provoke the ARVN; the Americans promised they would secure a letter of approval from the province chief; the Rhade said the fence would elicit a Viet Cong assault; the Americans said they would arm the Rhade and teach them to shoot; the Rhade said they had no bamboo for the fence; the Americans replied that they would go into the jungle and cut it for them. Gradually, the elders’ resistance began to melt. In a Hollywood touch, Campbell, working in conjunction with the village shaman, was able to cure the village chief’s daughter of a serious illness.42

  In early November, work on the defensive perimeter began, with some 50 residents of Buon Enao and another 125 people from surrounding villages performing the labor at 35 piasters (50 cents) a day. When building materials ran low, Campbell led nocturnal expeditions to steal what was needed. The scavengers commandeered sand from a Vietnamese landowner’s riverbed and crushed rock from a highway construction project. Vietnamese who had been resettled in the area would cut bamboo by day, and Campbell would confiscate it by night. The Rhade were delighted. And indeed, the scavenging raids were more about demonstrating that the Americans were not dupes of the government than about any real logistical necessity.43

  Although work on Buon Enao’s defensive perimeter and dispensary was completed in early December, there was nothing to defend the perimeter with. Layton and Colby arranged a quick visit from some of Thuy’s people at the Presidential Survey Office. They certified that the Rhade had lived up to their end of the bargain: the village chief had arranged for signs on the fence declaring the Viet Cong persona non grata and had personally vouched for each of his people. PSO authorized the arming of thirty of Buon Enao’s residents. Layton requisitioned the necessary number of carbines from MAAG, and the Special Forces began training. By this time Colby had come up with a name for the Buon Enao experiment—Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDGs)—descriptive and nondescript at the same time.

  Military action was to be purely defensive. Buon Enao and villages t
hat were subsequently brought into the program were connected by radio. Platoon-sized strike forces conducted long-range patrols and were on call to come to the aid of a village under attack. The patrols were scouting enterprises to gather intelligence on the whereabouts of marauding Viet Cong. By July 1962, the strike force at Buon Enao had about 650 armed and trained men deployed in support of 3,600 unpaid village defenders; Layton’s people were recruiting among the Jarai, Sedang, and Bahnar in the neighboring provinces of Kontum and Pleiku.44

  As the CIDGs evolved, Combined Studies and Special Forces personnel became deeply involved in health and economic development projects. By July 1962, Campbell and his cohorts had set up dispensaries in eighty-eight Rhade villages around Ban Me Thuot. Widespread application of the insecticide DDT began to bring malaria under control. The Americans wanted desperately to improve living standards among the Highlanders, but other than paying the construction workers and members of the strike force, there was no way to directly introduce money into the economy. Recognizing the dangers posed by the nonmilitary side of the CIDG project, the Viet Cong began targeting health workers and those who aided them. In two cases, they executed villagers, one an old man and the other a small boy, for warning Layton’s people of an impending ambush.45

  As the number of fortified villages and strike forces multiplied, the Viet Cong stepped up their campaign of terrorism. The communists decided to make an example of one particularly effective strike-team commander. An informant came into the captain’s village and told him that the Viet Cong were setting up an ambush some kilometers into the jungle. That evening the officer took his platoon out to investigate. While he and his men were absent, a Viet Cong squad entered the village and ordered the people to assemble. They dragged the strike-force commander’s wife and infant son out of their hut, decapitated the woman, placed her head on a stake, and then bayoneted the baby. These were the fruits of cooperating with the South Vietnamese government, the Viet Cong cadre declared.46

  The more engagements the Rhade irregulars fought, however, the more confident they became. In 1960, Buon Enao defenders alone killed more than 200 Viet Cong and captured another 460. During CIDG’s heyday—from 1960 through 1962—the US Air Force established an operation entitled “Farmgate” to provide tactical air support for ground operations. Flying prop-driven trainers and substituting cowboy boots for combat footgear, Farmgate pilots provided close support to Rhade villages under attack. Indeed, for several months, Farmgate acted as the unofficial air force of the CIDGs.47

  There was no political or ideological dimension to the Civilian Irregular Defense Group program, at least in the form of propaganda or organization. Colby recognized that in the act of self-defense, the Montagnards would experience a sense of empowerment, but beyond that, it was the medical care, new clothing, improved agriculture, and animal husbandry that would gain and hold the Highlanders’ loyalty. In truth, as between the Montagnards and the ethnic Vietnamese, all one could really hope for was peaceful coexistence. And as with the CIA station’s other operations, there was little or no security or counterintelligence. “In my shop, and most of the Agency shops,” Layton said, “you assumed [your South Vietnamese counterparts] were penetrated. . . . When I started recruiting all these people, somebody said, aren’t you afraid there might be some Viet Cong in there[?] . . . I said, we figure on about ten percent but then we outnumber them nine to one.” Colby and Layton insisted that information be shared on a strictly need-to-know basis and limited to the mission at hand.48

  In December 1961, Colby had persuaded Nhu to pay a visit to Buon Enao. So impressed was he, that he not only okayed expanding the project to other tribes in the Highlands but also approved it for the lower Mekong Delta. The problem that had plagued the Agroville program—namely, the remote and dispersed nature of the rural population living amidst a maze of canals and dikes—still remained. Colby and Layton had enjoyed some success in the delta, but the South Vietnamese government had so neglected the Buddhist and Confucian Vietnamese of the coastal lowlands and the delta that Colby and Layton felt they had even less traction with them than they did with the Montagnards. Nevertheless, the threat of a communist takeover in the south was great and had to be addressed. The Viet Cong had turned the Agroville program against the government, and CIA intelligence reports indicated that the communists regarded the Ca Mau peninsula as one of its strongholds. Indeed, the U-Minh Forest would subsequently become home to PAVN’s famous U-Minh Battalion. During the 1950s, the station had cooperated with Diem’s intelligence apparatus in creating stay-behind nets in the south composed of indigenous Catholics and Vietnamese who had fled from the north in 1954. In 1961, Colby decided to try to create an archipelago of anticommunist islands—starting with the Catholic villages—in the Mekong.

  The principal locus of what the CIA termed “the clerical paramilitary program” was a network headed by Father Nguyen Loc Hoa. In truth, Father Hoa was Chinese and had only adopted a Vietnamese name in 1951 when he led his flock of three hundred from southern China through northern Vietnam and Cambodia and all the way to the Ca Mau peninsula. Neither the French nor the South Vietnamese government dared venture south of Ca Mau city, and in 1959 Diem created a special district there, called Hai Yen, for Hao and his parishioners. From this stronghold, Father Hoa was able to contend with the communists for control of an area stretching from the ninth parallel to the tip of the peninsula. In 1960, the Viet Cong launched a frontal assault on Father Hoa’s headquarters, but were repulsed with a loss of 174 men.

  Father Hoa—Colby referred to him as the “dynamic Pastor from the North”—became a frequent visitor to Layton’s house in Saigon. “At dinner at our house, he didn’t dress as a priest,” Dora Layton, Gil’s wife, recalled. In 1961, Colby and Layton dubbed Father Hoa’s army the Sea Swallows. In early January 1962, Layton and Colby coordinated a Seabee (US Navy Construction Battalion) effort to construct a landing strip near Father Hoa’s headquarters, and weapons, uniforms, medicine, and other supplies began flowing in. Shortly thereafter, Father Hoa began recruiting ethnic Chinese from Cholon. By the fall of 1962, ten Special Forces A-Teams were working in the lower delta, and by the end of the year more than 4,500 armed and trained Catholic youth had joined the “Fighting Fathers.”49

  By mid-1962, Gil Layton, loosely supervised by Bill Colby, found himself in command of a clandestine paramilitary force numbering more than 36,000, trained and reinforced by three dozen Special Forces A-Teams. “Gil ran the war by night from our compound in Saigon,” Dora Layton recalled. The Layton’s house was a spacious, two-story white stucco of French colonial design. It featured a roof garden and a high cement-and-steel picket fence surrounding a small yard. Large iron gates could close the driveway and seal the compound in case of a security threat. And security threats there were. In January 1963, Dora Layton wrote a friend in the States: “They came yesterday to measure for barbed wire all around the place. We have our guns freshly cleaned and loaded in our room, and a whole arsenal in our bathroom.” Just outside the main living quarters, within the walled villa, was a communications shack with a Vietnamese radio operator on duty twenty-four hours a day. From that vantage point Gil Layton could direct strike forces and call in air support for operations all across the country.50

  In comparison to the Laytons, the Colbys lived a rather humdrum existence. Colleagues remembered Bill attending Mass regularly, sometimes at the cathedral and sometimes at a Benedictine chapel in Cholon. He left childrearing to Barbara and the Catholic Church. Each morning, a van would pick up Carl and his brother Paul and take them to school. Carl recalled that he and his friends had the run of the city when they were not in class. “I would sometimes sleep over at my friend Billy Shepherd’s house (his father worked for the United States Information Service) for two days in a row. My parents would not know where I was.” In the evenings, Bill and Barbara would often give the kids a kiss and leave for one of their continuous rounds of parties. Carl and his friends would then call
a cab to drive them to Cholon. He was eleven.51

  In August 1960, when he was fourteen, John was shipped off to the States to attend Portsmouth Priory, a Catholic boarding school in Rhode Island. Barbara put him on a plane in Saigon, and Elbridge picked him up at the airport in Washington, where the young man, already intensely homesick, spent time with his grandparents until school opened. On the day the term was to begin, Elbridge drove John to the Benedictine school his parents had picked out for him. The brother in charge told Elbridge that Hurricane Dora had torn the roofs off of several buildings; the opening of school would have to be delayed. John recalled Elbridge’s retort: “Well, I’ve done my duty; his father instructed me to deposit him and here he is.” He then got in the car and drove off.

  By the next spring, John was depressed and getting fatter by the day. He would call Elbridge and Margaret collect; sometimes his grandfather wouldn’t accept the charges. When Bill returned to Washington that fall to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John flew to Washington to meet him. Following a pleasant weekend, John boarded his plane for the return trip. When it landed, and the youngster saw the school bus waiting for him, something snapped. He told the flight attendants he was sick and wanted to go back to Washington. As that happened to be the aircraft’s return destination, he was allowed to stay on board. From the terminal, John called Bill to come and get him. Father and son argued until three in the morning in the basement of Elbridge and Margaret’s house. John was homesick, lonely, disgusted with Elbridge, and tired of the harsh New England climate. Boarding school was his duty, Bill replied; he needed to buck up and be somebody. John implied that, like Elbridge, his father was hard-hearted and self-absorbed and did not care about his family. The message had the desired effect. Angry though he was, Bill agreed that if John would finish the term in Rhode Island, he could then move to Florida, where his maternal grandparents lived, and go to school there.52