Bill Colby, as Far East Division head, played a key role in drafting NSAM 249 of April 1963, which essentially established the framework for the Second Indochinese War. In phase one, the Pentagon and the CIA would dramatically escalate their aid to the Royal Laotian Army and the Hmong irregulars, to include howitzers, heavy mortars, and T-28 propeller-driven aircraft. The T-28’s slower speed was suited to the tactical strafing and bombing missions called for in Laos. The CIA would build its paramilitary force to a total of 23,000 men, which, with the Royal Laotian Army, would try to link up zones of influence in a soon-to-be-familiar ink-spot pattern. To Colby’s delight, the Agency was authorized to spread the concept of CIDGs and Strategic Hamlets to the upper Laotian panhandle. A network of villages organized for economic self-sufficiency and local defense would act as a counter to the proselytizing activities of the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese Army cadre.
In the second phase—approved only on a contingency basis—US Air Force units operating out of Thailand would fly reconnaissance and close support missions for Vang Pao and FAR, while the US Navy would permanently station a task force in the South China Sea. If these steps did not deter the communists, the third phase—to include a bombing campaign against North Vietnam and a US-allied invasion of North Vietnam and Laos—would go into effect.39 The bombing of North Vietnam would in fact occur. In 1965, the Johnson administration would deem it necessary to Americanize the conflict in South Vietnam, but the struggle in Laos would change only in scale, with Colby overseeing a burgeoning secret war and pacification program.
In 1963, Vang Pao began recruiting men who would make up the Special Guerrilla Units (SGUs), which became the core of the Hmong force. Following their training in Thailand, they would enable the Hmong to take the war to the enemy. Platoon-sized at first, with about 30 men, the SGUs were by 1965 operating at battalion strength, with up to 350 men. In April 1963, Averell Harriman, promoted to undersecretary of state for political affairs, was replaced by Roger Hilsman as the State Department’s point man on Laos. Colby found Hilsman, a veteran of the Pacific war, to be much more amenable than Harriman had been to requests for air support, supplies, and increased personnel. Air America and Bird & Sons began flying almost without restriction, transporting Hmong, Royal Laotian soldiers, arms, ammunition, food, and—adhering to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy—quantities of opium acquired clandestinely by Lao officials. Long Tieng, initially a hamlet of thatched huts nestled in a picturesque valley interspersed with formations of limestone karst, became a small city of 20,000, including some 300 CIA operatives. An Agency lie-detector expert who visited the settlement after its growth spurt recalled: “The cast of [American] characters at Long Tieng was something the likes of which I had never seen. They were a composite of Robin Hood’s merry men, Hogan’s Heroes, the A-Team, the Magnificent Seven, and the Dirty Dozen. Most were contract employees who had been hired to work in Laos. Many were former Special Forces sergeants, and some were former smoke jumpers who had worked for the U.S. Forest Service. All were adventurers.” All of this activity, a clear violation of the Geneva Accords, was still, officially, a secret.40
In January 1964, King Sri Savang Vatthana made an unprecedented trip to the Hmong base at Sam Thong to express his appreciation. Vang Pao was promoted to general and named a Commander of the Order of the Million Elephants. The Hmong leader was then at the pinnacle of his power, mediating among rival personalities and clans, receiving—Solomonlike—individual supplicants on almost a daily basis. Methven noted that “the finesse and ease with which [he] handles men vanishes when confronted with sobbing women. Every woman on speaking with him bursts spontaneously into tears as if the word on how to handle him had gotten around.” Vang Pao had his less gentle side, however. Prisoners were rare in the secret war; those Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese soldiers that he did not order shot were packed into 50-gallon drums with just their heads protruding and left to die.41
Most of the CIA operatives, at Colby’s insistence, demonstrated deference to Hmong culture. At his direction, field personnel were to do their best to bring Western health care and modern agricultural techniques to the Hmong while doing minimal damage to their traditions. Initially, the tribesmen had resisted bathing, believing that washing would remove one of the body’s thirty-two souls. But eventually, on their own, they came to see the benefits of personal hygiene. American medics plied their trade but did so in concert with healing ceremonies conducted by the shamans. Buildings and runways were constructed so as not to disturb ancestral spirits or sacred animals inhabiting the forests. Colby, recalling the abandonment of the Burmese minorities after the OSS had armed and employed them against the Japanese in World War II, worried constantly that the United States might be setting the Hmong up for a fall.42
By May 1964, the conflict in Laos had risen to the top of the Johnson administration’s foreign affairs priority list. “The political and diplomatic course of action with respect to Laos is probably still the most immediate possible trigger of larger decisions,” National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy wrote to President Johnson.43 Unarmed US reconnaissance flights out of Thailand, Hmong road-watch teams, and White Star US Special Forces probes had revealed continued construction on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, much of which ran through Laos, and larger and larger truck convoys carrying men and materiel into Laos and South Vietnam.
McCone and Colby attended a series of tense NSC meetings at the White House in May and June. The CIA and the Pentagon disagreed sharply as to the proper course to follow. On June 6, a US Navy jet on an aerial photography mission was shot down over Ban Ban. As the pilot parachuted to the ground, he was surrounded and captured by the Pathet Lao. McNamara and the US Air Force chief of staff called not only for armed escorts for future reconnaissance flights, but also a retaliatory raid on the antiaircraft battery that had shot down the navy plane. America’s toughness, its very credibility, was at stake, they declared. The CIA, still smarting from Switchback, the US military’s takeover of all paramilitary operations in Vietnam in 1962–1963, objected. What the Pentagon proposed was a precipitous, dangerous step, taken not as part of any rational plan to salvage the situation, but out of a desire for revenge. LBJ tended to agree. “The President then said that he questioned whether we had thought through where we are going,” Colby’s notes of the meeting read. “Specifically, he said, ‘and what comes next?’” That question—the most important question raised in the meeting—remained unanswered. McNamara was infuriated. It wasn’t LBJ’s fault, he declared, but the administration was increasingly being perceived as talking tough and doing nothing. There were risks in attacking the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese Army’s antiaircraft battery, but they were worth it. Reluctantly, Johnson gave the go-ahead, but it was clear that he favored the tactics being employed by the CIA. The Agency subsequently secured permission to expand the scope of its operations in Laos.44
In August 1964, Vint Lawrence returned to Southeast Asia from the States, where he had been recovering from a bout with hepatitis. He arrived just in time. Tony Poe, who had replaced Lawrence as chief CIA liaison with Vang Pao, had proved to be a disaster in that position. Poe had refused to turn a blind eye to what he perceived to be the Hmong leader’s corruption. Vang Pao would pay his tribal leaders and soldiers only part of the money he received from the CIA for wages, keeping a substantial portion for himself. It seemed not to matter to Poe that the Hmong commander used the slush fund to provide food, clothing, and shelter to war widows and tribal chieftains, whose mountain families faced intermittent starvation. When Vang Pao seemed to dally in getting his Special Guerrilla Units into action, Poe, usually drunk, confronted him. The last straw came when Poe married a Hmong woman whom the Hmong chieftain had his eye on. Poe’s description of the ceremony said it all. “I was clean,” he recalled of the wedding. “Loaded to the gills with lao-lao [Laotian rice wine]. Normal fighting clothes. Wore my .357 Magnum, like always. But that day I didn’t have any hand-grenades on. . . . And a
fter that, Vint never had to carry me home when I drank. My family did.” Lawrence inserted himself between Poe and Vang Pao, and the crisis passed. Colby could have gotten rid of Tony Poe, but he demonstrated his usual weakness for knuckle-draggers.45
Indeed, as Far East Division chief, Colby was, by all accounts, a good shepherd. As much as possible, he gave his station chiefs free rein, encouraging innovation and delegating authority. He was famously tolerant of dissent, sometimes permitting high-risk activities among his overseas operators if they served a purpose. “One, for example,” he wrote in Honorable Men, his memoir, “rigged himself with a microphone and tape recorder to report his conversation with his close drinking buddy, the chief of state, in precise detail.” He did insist that the stations reporting to him be more discriminating in the intelligence they submitted to headquarters, going so far as to set up a grading system—“A” for information secured through the most sophisticated and reliable means, and “F” for what amounted to little more than newspaper summaries. At one point, he admonished his officers to spend less time spying on America’s friends and more time spying on its enemies. The felt need to maintain close personal contact with his station chiefs dovetailed with Colby’s love of travel. “There were sips of rice wine in tribal-village ceremonies,” he remembered, “sophisticated finger-game contests with cultured Chinese officials, late-night discussions of Indonesian revolutionary theory, drinks at the Selangor Club in the Somerset Maugham atmosphere of Kuala Lumpur.” In 1965, Peer de Silva was seriously injured, blinded in one eye by a Viet Cong bomb that took the life of one of his secretaries. After meeting de Silva’s plane at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, Colby proposed a rotation system for CIA officers serving in Southeast Asia, telling John McCone that he wanted to distribute the burden of high-risk postings more evenly among his officers. No, Colby remembered McCone responding. The president wants only our very best men assigned to Asia, and that is what the Agency will give him.46
When Colby returned to Langley, his duel with counterintelligence chief James Angleton had resumed. The Saigon bombing that had so grievously wounded de Silva brought the security issue to the fore once again. With proper counterespionage work, the incident could have been prevented, Angleton declared. He demanded that the counterintelligence detail in Saigon be beefed up and that, among other things, every Vietnamese employee at the US Mission undergo a background check and take a lie-detector test. Colby objected. The goal in Vietnam was to win the trust and cooperation of the South Vietnamese government. A massive counterintelligence operation would be counterproductive of that goal. Angleton then tried an end run. He summoned John Mertz, a counterintelligence veteran, and dispatched him to Saigon to set up a counterespionage operation outside the regular station, a Vietnam version of the vest pocket operation Angleton had run in Italy. Mertz’s men would have US military cover and report directly to Angleton, bypassing both the station and the Far East Division. Colby got wind of the plot and called a showdown meeting in the DCI’s office. McCone backed his Far East chief, and Angleton’s scheme died aborning.47
Throughout the remainder of 1964 and 1965, the battle for Laos ebbed and flowed. As usual, the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese Army took the offensive during the dry season, with the Hmong and Kong Le regaining lost territory during the rainy period. With the infiltration of North Vietnamese troops into South Vietnam, the launching of Rolling Thunder on March 2, 1965, and the introduction of the first US combat troops that summer, the stakes in the struggle for Laos began to rise dramatically.
Ambassador William Sullivan arrived in Vientiane in November 1964. Caught between his desire to preserve the Geneva Accords of 1962 and to keep Laos from being overrun by the communists, he fended off pressure from Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, to expand the ground war from South Vietnam into Laos, while at the same time giving freer rein to the CIA to conduct secret bombing operations in Laos. Code-named Barrel Roll in the north and Steel Tiger in the south, these clandestine air operations were run out of the burgeoning American air bases in Thailand.48
At the same time, the village defense program, designed to better secure the eastern edge of the panhandle and modeled after Colby’s CIDGs, was accelerated. The Laotian version was called Mu Ban Samaki. The CIA provided support for the “covert or semi-covert” aspects of the program, including weapons, radios, and militia pay, while the US Agency for International Development and the US Information Service designed and funded the accompanying economic and social programs. Sullivan, Colby, and the CIA station chief in Laos, Douglas Blaufarb, were able to keep much of this activity secret from Laotian prime minister Souvanna Phouma. Paramilitary and political activities among upland tribal peoples were no less suspect in the eyes of the dominant ethnic group in Laos than they had been in Vietnam. CIA officials in Vientiane and Washington feared that Souvanna Phouma would give in to his chronic urge to accommodate his half-brother, Prince Souphanouvong, the titular head of the Pathet Lao, and reveal details of the operation to the communists, or at least demand that the programs be turned over to the Royal Laotian Army.49
As chief of the Far East Division, Colby made semiannual tours of Southeast Asia, including Laos. His December 1965 to January 1966 tour was one of the most memorable. After paying his respects to Sullivan and visiting with station chief Blaufarb in Vientiane, Colby flew to Long Tieng. His drip-dry suit, bow tie, and polished shoes were a stark contrast to the fatigues and Hawaiian shirts of the resident Americans. Lair and Lawrence met the man from Langley at the landing strip. Colby had read Lawrence’s long, literate, and insightful reports. He had been impressed with his fellow Princetonian’s combination of toughness and sensitivity, his thirst for knowledge about the Hmong culture, and his care for the welfare of the people. Colby asked the young man to act as his guide and interpreter.
Following a long and cordial meeting with Vang Pao, Colby and Lawrence visited over drinks. He had served two two-year tours in Laos and intended to complete another, Lawrence confided, but to his surprise, Colby discouraged him. “You’ll never come home,” he said. Lawrence at first thought the Far East chief meant that he would die in an air crash, as had five other CIA operatives in Laos. But he soon realized that he was being warned not to “go native,” a seduction always present for counterinsurgency operatives like Lawrence and Lair, whose effectiveness depended in no small part on their ability to submerge themselves in the local culture. In Langley’s view, once the line was crossed, the operative lost his or her usefulness. Colby said he wanted to talk to him about returning to the States and beginning his ascent up the Agency hierarchy, but that that conversation could wait. Colby wanted to visit Phou Fa, a Hmong outpost in the mountains surrounding the Plain of Jars, to really get out in the field.50
The method of transportation for CIA operatives in the bush in Laos was the Helio-Courier STOL (short takeoff and landing) aircraft. Without this remarkable plane, which could take off on a runway 100 yards long and land at an airspeed of 35 miles an hour, the secret war in Laos could not have gone forward. Utilizing the Helios, CIA personnel and Vang Pao’s cadres could reach the remotest Hmong base. In addition to people, the aircraft carried medicine, radios, and payrolls. Many of the tiny airstrips followed ridgelines that featured a precipice at one end and a nearly vertical mountainside rising at the other. Landings were always made going uphill, and the approach had to be correct the first time; if an unanticipated down-draft or other event forced the pilot to break off, he would lack the airspeed to rise up from the precipice or turn away from the mountain.
The landing area at Phou Fa was typical. The strip there followed a sharply sloping ridgeline near the summit of the mountain. It also tilted to one side near the downhill end. The Hmong had tried to reduce the angle by building a log retaining wall and filling earth in behind it. The result was something that resembled a ski jump. Though the Helio-Courier that carried Bill Colby was piloted by an experienced man, he misjudged his approach that day. Th
e plane skittered off the side of the strip—the uphill side, fortunately—and the plane overturned. Both men extricated themselves and escaped before the plane’s fuel had a chance to ignite. Once in the village, Colby recalled the strictures imposed on Americans operating upcountry to avoid too close contact with the local culture, “including politely tasting but not ingesting the locally fermented rice ‘wine,’ keeping clear of the ritual bull-baiting that preceded feasts and tactfully turning down the maiden offered by the local chief to ease the strain of a mountain village visit.” The exhilarated Colby was later evacuated by an H-34 helicopter.51
Back in Long Tieng, the chief of the Far East Division paused briefly to regroup and then flew southeastward to the panhandle to inspect the Laotian version of the Strategic Hamlet Program. The approaches in the south were sometimes as hazardous as the mountain landings in the north. Colby recalled rocking along “from side to side during a ten-foot altitude approach along the Mekong under a morning fog bank, twisting and turning to avoid the islands in the river.”52 There, in the fortified villages struggling to achieve modernity, was where Colby’s heart lay. Indeed, the sight of villagers beginning to prosper and cooperating in their own defense was what Bill Colby had come to the bush for.
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