Shadow Warrior

by Randall B. Woods

  In the months that followed, the Indonesian president continued to move steadily closer to the PKI. He initiated a communist-supervised land reform program, included PKI leaders in his government, and made threatening noises toward foreign capital, including $500 million worth of US-controlled petroleum properties. Then, on August 17, 1964, during his Independence Day address, Sukarno declared the United States to be the number one enemy of anticolonialist nationalism, not only in Indonesia but in all of Asia. He announced his intention to form an anti-imperialist alliance with Communist China, virtually daring the military to stop him. “The current combination of Sukarno’s tough dictatorship,” Colby reported to his superiors, “coupled with an increasingly effective brainwashing of all local population elements, plus the skilled PKI exploitation of legitimate Indonesian nationalism, and lastly the inbred Javanese tradition of acquiescence before authority, will surely result in elimination of the remaining barriers between communists . . . and those who would resist them.” Two months later, Colby presented the 303 Committee with a blueprint for covert action in Indonesia that would have as its objective “agitation and the instigation of internal strife between communist and non-communist elements.”5

  Colby’s man in Jakarta was Bernardo Hugh Tovar, a Colombian-born Harvard graduate who had parachuted into Laos with the OSS in 1945. Following a tour of duty with Lansdale in the Philippines, he joined the CIA. Low-key, intelligent, and staunchly anticommunist, Tovar was one of Colby’s favorites, and the compliment was returned. That the two were practicing Catholics did not hurt their relationship. Despite the growing seriousness of the situation in Indonesia, however, the station remained small and surprisingly ineffective. As of 1964 the Agency’s sole success had been to recruit Adam Malik, a forty-eight-year-old disillusioned ex-Marxist who had served as Sukarno’s ambassador to Moscow and his minister of trade. Back in Washington, Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy asked Bill Colby why operations to counter communist influence in Indonesia were so meager. “We just don’t have the assets,” the Far East Division chief replied.6

  On the morning of October 1, 1965, a group of junior army officers assassinated six of the seven members of the Indonesian military’s high command—executing three of them in their own homes and the other three in an open field near Jakarta’s Halim Air Force Base. All six of the bodies were thrown down an abandoned well. Only General Abdul Haris Nasution, the minister of defense, managed to escape.7 Apparently, the killings were the result of long-held grievances by the junior officer corps, which was resentful over the lack of promotions and conspicuous corruption on the part of their superiors.

  At this point, Nasution, Malik, and the commander of the Armed Forces Strategic Reserve, General Suharto (most Indonesians go by only one name), stepped forward to fill the void. Suharto declared that he was taking command of the armed forces and ordered all uniformed personnel to barracks. The triumvirate then announced the formation of a new political organization, the 30 September Movement, which would exercise temporary political control and protect President Sukarno from his enemies. From that point on, Sukarno was nothing more than a pawn. A week later, the new regime, fully backed by the armed forces, launched a major propaganda campaign against the PKI that, among other things, blamed the communists for the assassinations. The leaders of the PKI were hunted down and killed. Then followed a bloodbath of horrendous proportions, with the military and rightwing Muslim gangs murdering every PKI or suspected PKI member that could be found. The victims were shot or beheaded in Japanese samurai style. Municipal officials complained to the army that the rivers running to the city of Surabaya were so clogged with bodies that commerce had ground to a halt. The killings continued sporadically until 1969. Best estimates were that more than 500,000 Indonesians lost their lives at the hands of Suharto’s henchmen.8

  Hugh Tovar would later claim that the coup and countercoup of 1965 took the station completely by surprise. Assistant Secretary of State Bill Bundy confirmed that assessment. In a 1967 interview, Bundy was asked whether the United States had played a role in the Indonesian drama. “No,” he replied, “we just lucked out.” But Washington certainly welcomed developments. Bill Colby flew into Indonesia immediately following the coup, landing at the same airfield where the generals had been murdered. With Colby camping out on his office couch, Ambassador Marshall Green provided words of encouragement to the new government and arranged for the transfer of radio equipment and small arms to troops in the field. American approval extended as well to the rural massacres that followed. Green’s deputy told a high-ranking Indonesian army officer “that the embassy and the USG [US government] were generally sympathetic with and admiring of what the army was doing.” Indeed, in 1990, American journalist Kathy Kadane charged that the CIA station in Jakarta had provided Suharto and his minions with a list of 5,000 alleged PKI members. In a subsequent interview, Tovar denied that there was a list. He said he had heard that someone in the embassy had given the government twenty or thirty names, but none that could not have been gleaned from the newspapers.9

  But of course there was a list. The CIA maintained extensive files on communists and communist sympathizers all across the arc of crisis in Asia. That was its job. Lansdale’s Vietnam card files—passed down through the years and expanded—included tens of thousands of names. “I don’t suppose that certain people would forgive what we did,” Bill Bundy said later, “but I thought that it was eminently justified.”10 What is surprising is that the CIA did not do more in Indonesia, much more. It was a nation of 80 million people, rich in petroleum and other mineral resources. Strategically situated astride Asia’s seaborne trading routes, it had been the principal prize of Japanese imperialism during World War II. It also had the third-largest communist party in the world. Indeed, in his recommendations to the 303 Committee in 1964 recommending a modest program of covert action in Indonesia, Colby had observed that if the PKI was not thwarted, even a clear-cut victory in Vietnam would mean nothing. What was the Johnson foreign policy establishment thinking? It may have been that the CIA knew that the Indonesian military would never tolerate a communist takeover. It may have been that Sukarno did not seem to pose a threat until 1965. It also may have been that by 1965, Bill Colby and his Far East Division were completely consumed with the secret war then raging in Laos.

  Once a substantial power on the Indochinese peninsula, the Kingdom of Laos had collapsed in the eighteenth century, splintering into three petty principalities that survived by appeasing their stronger Vietnamese and Thai neighbors. The French reassembled the country when they imposed a protectorate in 1893 and ruled it until 1953. Elections to a parliamentary-style government were held in 1955, and in 1957 Prince Souvanna Phouma formed the first coalition government. By mid-1954, the communist Pathet Lao (PL), claiming to speak for the exploited peasantry and Laotian nationalists who had struggled against the French and their collaborators, had taken over de facto control of the two northernmost provinces—Phon Saly and Sam Neua. Backed—and essentially controlled—by the Viet Minh, the PL soon dominated parts of other provinces as well. From the fervently anticommunist perspective of 1954, vulnerable Laos appeared to Washington to represent a potential domino that, if toppled by North Vietnam and China, could fall on any or all of its four noncommunist neighbors.

  Laos was the quaintest of dominoes. Shaped like an upside-down gourd, the broad northern part of the country consisted of hills and mountains surrounding the 500-square-mile Plain of Jars. The area derived its name from the presence of dozens of huge, lipped bowls carved from solid stone, standing as high as a man’s head, placed there either as storage bins or funeral urns by some ancient civilization. The Mekong River flowed south along the western edge of the panhandle, forming the boundary between Thailand and Laos, with the land rising in the east toward the Annamite Range on the Laotian-Vietnamese border. The river valley and lowlands were occupied by ethnic Lao, who also constituted a large part of the population of adjacent Thailand
. Most were rural-dwelling rice farmers living in longhouses raised on stilts. Vientiane, the largest city and modern capital of Laos, was exotic in a laid-back sort of way. Buddhist monks dressed in saffron robes gamboled along the tree-lined French colonial boulevards. Two open-air markets and a series of Western-style shops made up the commercial district. Portraits of the king adorned nearly every public wall. The Forces Armées Royales (FAR) had never missed a meal or won a battle.11

  The Geneva Accords of July 1954, which recognized Viet Minh control of North Vietnam, also provided for a neutralized Laos under a regime to be safeguarded by the International Control Commission. The United States did not sign the accords but promised not to use force to alter them. The Pathet Lao had refused to lay down its arms and entrenched itself in the north. Then, in November 1957, the newly named prime minister, Souvanna Phouma, reached a short-lived agreement with the Pathet Lao.12

  Washington did not approve of Souvanna Phouma’s collaboration with the communists—dalliances with the devil never turned out well, John Foster Dulles believed. In 1959 General Phoumi Novasan proposed to the CIA that he and the Laotian military “engineer” the next round of parliamentary elections to produce an anticommunist majority. This would be followed by “directed democracy,” a system that observed constitutional, parliamentary forms but excluded “masses too ignorant for normal democracy.”13 The National Assembly’s mandate duly ran out in December 1959, and King Sri Savang Vatthana authorized the military to supervise the ensuing elections. The PL was virtually shut out of the new assembly, and General Phoumi Novasan assumed the post of minister of defense in Souvanna Phouma’s new government.

  On August 9, 1960, the twenty-six-year-old commander of the elite 2nd Parachute Battalion, Captain Kong Le, staged a mutiny that quickly blossomed into a full-fledged coup. Kong Le was an able, patriotic man dismayed by a corrupt government, an entrenched privileged class, the heavy US hand in Laos, and the interminable internecine warfare between the Pathet Lao and the Royal Laotian Government (RLG). Souvanna Phouma and most of his ministers fled Vientiane for Bangkok, Thailand, but Phoumi Novasan took up residence at Savannakhet, in the Laotian panhandle, where he appealed to the Americans for help in driving the insurgents out of the capital. The embassy, including its CIA station, demurred; Kong Le had evidenced no pro-communist leanings. At this point the king accepted the coup and called on Souvanna Phouma to return to Vientiane and set up a new government that would include communists, neutralists, and rightists.

  During the next few weeks, the State Department became convinced that under a government headed by Souvanna Phouma, and including the PL and Kong Le, Laos would soon go communist. Undersecretary of State Douglas Dillon now described the paratroop commander as “a Castro communist-type individual.” But Washington was unwilling to unleash Phoumi Novasan for fear of bringing North Vietnam into the conflict on one side and South Vietnam and Thailand in on the other. Washington did agree to continue paying and supplying troops loyal to Phoumi Novasan, however. At this point Souvanna Phouma fled to Cambodia. Kong Le’s troops still held Vientiane, but Phoumi Novasan’s forces reached the outskirts of the city on December 13. The insurgents chose to abandon the city, retreating to the north. Thereupon, Phoumi Novasan, Laos’s self-appointed dictator, occupied the capital.14

  On December 21, the crew of an Air America Beechcraft photographed a twin-engine Soviet supply aircraft dropping supplies to Kong Le’s columns. On New Year’s Day 1961, Kong Le’s soldiers, allied with Pathet Lao forces, drove the unprepared Royal Laotian defenders from the strategically and economically vital Plain of Jars. Soviet supply aircraft subsequently began landing at the military airfield that had been built there by the French. The Laotian imbroglio left the Eisenhower administration few options. The US embassy continued to report that the RLG could not be counted on. The Lao, he informed Foggy Bottom, “suffered from disorganization and lack of common purpose within the government, the Army, and the society generally.” On January 3, at a meeting with his foreign policy advisers, Eisenhower declared that “if the communists establish a strong position in Laos, the West is finished in the whole southeast Asian area.” As a stopgap measure, the 303 Committee authorized the CIA to organize and arm the indigenous peoples of the north, who, it was believed, wanted to preserve their independence and way of life.15

  Except for concentrations of Lao on the Plain of Jars and in some valleys, northeastern Laos was inhabited by tribes driven up from the lowlands over the centuries by more numerous and better-organized rivals. As of 1961 they inhabited a succession of mountain ranges (the highest peak rising to 10,000 feet).The largest and most cohesive was the Hmong. Animists without a written language, they practiced slash-and-burn agriculture on the high ridges and plateaus of the mountains overlooking the Plain of Jars. The Hmong were originally Chinese—hill people from Yunan—who, like the ethnic Vietnamese, had been pushed south by the Han Dynasty. They had borrowed the Lao language, but had otherwise refused to assimilate. In Xieng Khouang Province, they created a thriving economy based on silver mining and cattle-raising. The Hmong were content to live and work at higher altitudes in part because they did not possess the lowlanders’ inherited immunity to the bite of the anopheles mosquito, which can carry a deadly strain of malaria. Dutch missionaries introduced the Hmong to steel knives and flintlock muskets, and every village boasted a family of metalworkers who hammered scrap into weapons and jewelry. Most important, as far as the CIA was concerned, the Hmong were fierce warriors who would fight to the death to protect their families and way of life. In 1959 and 1960, the US Mission in Vientiane delivered 2,000 light weapons to the tribespeople to help them protect their villages from the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese Army. True to form, the CIA looked for a Laotian Magsaysay, a charismatic but sensitive leader who could unify and mobilize the Hmong.16

  The leading candidate was the newly promoted commander of the Royal Laotian Army contingent in Xieng Khouang Province, a young Hmong major named Vang Pao. Life in the Laotian Army was not demanding, and Vang Pao was left free to politic among the Hmong communities of northern Laos. A fiery orator and ardent Hmong nationalist, he soon attracted a wide following. During the coups and countercoups of the 1950s, Vang Pao had sided with Phoumi Novasan and the rightists, not out of ideology, but because the North Vietnamese and their Pathet Lao clients were his people’s mortal enemies. When Kong Le revolted, fled to the Plain of Jars, and allied with the Pathet Lao, Vang Pao, still in command of a Forces Armées Royales battalion, had his tribesmen retreat into the heavily forested mountains to bide their time. “This is the man we have been looking for,” the CIA team in Vientiane concluded.17

  By this point, Stuart Methven, a paramilitary expert attached to the Saigon station, was the CIA’s point man for dealing with Laos’s version of the Montagnards. He epitomized the OSS-CIA operative—a cultivated man who jumped out of airplanes and spoke several languages. “After he moved to Saigon,”journalist Zalin Grant recalled, “he lived in a large villa with a duck-eating boa constrictor as a pet. Many would come to see him as a smoother version of Lou Conein.”18

  Methven arranged for a rendezvous with Vang Pao for himself and his deputy, Bill Lair, at the Laotian’s bivouac site. Lair was a fifth-generation Texan who had been recruited out of Texas A&M by the CIA. His first assignment in 1951 was Thailand, where the Agency was trying to build up guerrilla forces to contain China’s southern flank, should fighting from the Korean War spread. Following the 1953 armistice, Lair convinced his superiors in Washington, along with the Thai government, to allow him to organize an elite paramilitary group named the Police Aerial Resupply Unit, or PARU for short. The Thais commissioned him a major in the Thai Army, and the Agency picked a wife for him—the sister of the Thai foreign minister at the time. She and Lair would remain wedded for twenty-five years. Methven and Gordon Jorgenson, the CIA station chief in Vientiane, decided that Lair and his PARU would be perfect for training a Hmong guerrilla force commanded by
Vang Pao.19

  Flying in on an H-34 helicopter operated by Bird & Sons Airlines—another CIA front—Lair and Methven met with Vang Pao at Muong Om on a bank high above the River Sane. Lair was immediately struck by the Hmong chieftain’s appearance and presence. Five foot five, but sturdily built, with a rounded face; even, white teeth; and narrow, intense eyes, Vang Pao exuded charisma—and ruthlessness.20 He and his people could either flee to the west or stay and fight, he told the Americans; if the Hmong chose to stay, Methven said, the Agency would equip and feed them. The Hmong leader nodded and declared that he could recruit ten thousand fighters; adequately armed and trained, they would be able to hold the mountains in most of Xieng Khouang and even Sam Neua Province, harassing enemy traffic along the mountain roads and valleys.

  Vang Pao confided in Methven about his people’s fear of being abandoned by the Americans as they had been by the French in 1954. Would the United States stay the course, once it began supplying and arming the Hmong, or was there a risk that at some point it would leave him and his people to the tender mercies of the North Vietnamese? Methven assured the Hmong chieftain that an American commitment would be honored as long as his people were threatened by the communists. The CIA men voiced their own concerns. What were the Hmong’s long-range plans, Lair asked? Did his people ultimately seek independence? Vang Pao acknowledged a history of mistrust between the Hmong and the ethnic Lao, but he observed that the Lao had not, like the Chinese and the North Vietnamese, tried to forcibly assimilate the Hmong. The National Assembly had a Hmong member, Touby Lyfoung; his people had no separatist aspirations, Vang Pao declared.21