In some respects, Colby was never able to break free of his experiences as a Jedburgh and NORSO operative during World War II. Parachuting in, linking up with anti-Axis partisans, and facilitating their efforts to overthrow the occupying power or its collaborators had made a deep impression on him. He subsequently witnessed these partisans coming to power in Italy and other European countries, and helping the noncommunist factions defeat those controlled by the Kremlin. He had sponsored agent drops behind enemy lines in the Baltic and subsequently in North Vietnam in Project Tiger. Colby reluctantly concluded that these two operations had been dry holes, but he continued to believe in the efficacy of covert action behind enemy lines. Consequently, in 1964-1965, the head of the Far East Division began to press for the CIA to organize and arm the Hmong who lived in the mountains of western North Vietnam so that they could act as a fifth column behind enemy lines. Doug Blaufarb, station chief in Vientiane, was aghast. Proponents of such tribal resistance, he opined to Langley, were being “carried away by visions derived from [World War II] experience and [were] thinking of an approach that would inevitably end in disaster unless [the] United States were serious about seeking a complete victory over [North Vietnam].” Ambassador Sullivan, who feared that such a move would lead to an escalation of the war in Laos, agreed. Finally, there was something that Colby seemed unaware of, namely, that the 303 Committee had already decided not to undertake any efforts to subvert the government in Hanoi (in fact, only a handful of people were privy to the decision). On May 18, 1964, Sullivan wrote William Bundy, who headed Far Eastern Affairs at the State Department, saying that it was his understanding that “to nurture the seeds of internal resistance” on North Vietnamese soil would undermine Washington’s ongoing attempt to assure Hanoi that any peace agreement would respect absolutely the integrity of North Vietnam. And there were the Hmong themselves. “It would be immensely cruel and counterproductive to develop such a movement and then bargain it away as part of a political counter.”53
Colby remained unconvinced. The CIA and its allies could not operate in areas where the local population was not committed to supporting them. The Agency and its Hmong allies would not even be able to gather intelligence, much less take effective action to interdict the flow of men and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, without counterinsurgency bases supported by pacification programs on both sides of the Laotian–North Vietnamese border. In short—and this was true throughout the conflicts in Southeast Asia—Colby wanted to do to the enemy and its clients what it was doing to the United States and its allies.
In November 1965, US forces fought a pitched battle with the North Vietnamese Army in the Ia Drang Valley in northern South Vietnam. Each side bloodied the other, but the communists withdrew to bases in Laos. To MACV it was simply unthinkable to allow Hanoi a quasi-sanctuary through which to supply its soldiers, now engaged in bloody combat with American troops. The Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed an amphibious landing on the coast of North Vietnam at Vin and a subsequent drive inland that would sever the country at the 17th parallel and block the Ho Chi Minh Trail at its source. Concerned about possible Communist Chinese intervention, President Johnson and his advisers rejected the proposal, however. Then let us cut the trail by other means, the military said, through covert action by US and South Vietnamese commandos and clandestine bombing raids.
In early 1965, LBJ had appointed Averell Harriman ambassador-at-large with a twofold mission: to build international support for the war effort in South Vietnam, and to pave the way for peace talks with North Vietnam. As part of this effort, Sullivan, Harriman’s protégé, refused to permit the US Air Force to conduct unrestricted bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail; he also opposed significant ground operations. They would, he feared, bring down Souvanna Phouma’s government in Vientiane and destroy the Geneva Accords. Sullivan finally agreed, however reluctantly, to Operation Shining Brass, in which twelve-man teams, composed of three US Special Forces personnel and nine Nung Chinese each, would penetrate from South Vietnam into Laos to conduct intelligence and interdiction activities. The incursions were limited to 12 miles of the border, however. Privately, the ambassador referred to Shining Brass as “an Eagle Scout program.” For his part, General William Westmoreland, MACV commander, accused Sullivan of “fiddling while Rome burned.” The Special Forces began referring to the Ho Chi Minh Trail as the Averell Harriman Memorial Highway.54
In mid-1966, Colby dispatched a new CIA station chief to Vientiane. Theodore Shackley had been recruited by the Agency in 1951. Fluent in Polish (from his mother, a Polish immigrant), he was first assigned to Berlin, where he had worked under Lou Conein. In April 1962, CIA officer William Harvey summoned Shackley to head Operation Mongoose, the Kennedy brothers’ scheme to assassinate Fidel Castro. Harvey had known Shackley in Berlin, where Harvey had been in charge of constructing a secret underground spy corridor beneath the Berlin Wall. In Operation Mongoose, it was Shackley and the Cuban exiles he supervised who would wield poison pills, poison dart guns, exploding cigars, and more conventional means in an effort to do away with the charismatic Castro.55
Ted Shackley was an ambitious, intelligent, and rather ruthless company man. He was not interested in native cultures, or in nation-building, for that matter. The winners in Washington’s bureaucratic sweepstakes were those officials who fit into the larger plan, and the larger plan was containing communism and stopping the advance of Sino-Soviet imperialism. By the time Shackley joined the country team in Laos, the 303 Committee had made it clear to Langley that operations in Laos were to be subsumed into the burgeoning conflict in Vietnam. Washington wanted two things from the Laos operation: first, complete and timely intelligence on communist traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and second, a much higher level of resistance to that traffic. One can only assume that Colby made the choice to name Shackley to head the Vientiane station under pressure from his superiors; he made no mention of Shackley in Lost Victory. The pressure from the Pentagon to assume control of military operations in the panhandle was intense, Colby and Bill Bundy told the new man. The message he was to take to his CIA colleagues was, “If we don’t do it, the Army will.”56
The Hmong operation was then being directed out of Udorn Air Base in Thailand by Bill Lair and Pat Landry, with Vint Lawrence—and Tony Poe before he was shot in the hip on an operation he should not have been on—acting as liaison with Vang Pao at Long Tieng. Shortly after he arrived in Vientiane, Shackley flew to Thailand to meet with Lair and Landry. He first made it clear that this would be his last trip to Udorn; in the future, they would come to him in Vientiane. They had been running a country store, he declared; he was going to turn it into a supermarket. There would be many more CIA personnel arriving in-country; there would be dozens of T-28 fighter bombers and B-24 bombers. American airpower would be used to support the Hmong, who would now be expected to fight the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao in battalion and even larger-sized units. Lair and Landry received this news in glum silence. They rather liked their country store. Thus far the operation had been effective for the very reason that it was low key. There were very few white men to stir anti-Western prejudices among the Hmong and the Lao. The hit-and-run guerrilla tactics employed against the communists had kept the North Vietnamese Army from moving in with division force and crushing the CIA’s secret army. And there was the salient fact that the Hmong were not suited, by experience or temperament, to fighting large-scale battles and defending fixed positions. But Lair and Landry kept their counsel. The handwriting was on the wall.57
Ambassador Sullivan was pleased with the new arrangement. The only alternative to escalating the secret war was direct US military intervention, and with it the final collapse of Laotian neutrality. For these same reasons, Souvanna Phouma proved compliant. During the period that followed, from 1965 through 1968, Sullivan and Shackley were left largely to their own devices. “We got practically no instructions from Washington,” the ambassador later recalled. “In a way the assignment was in
toxicating.” One of his lieutenants said it best: “It was great fun. You sit in the Ambassador’s office, deal with leaders of the Lao government, arrange for Thai artillery strikes, map out strategy, decide what moves Vang Pao’s army should make, send orders to field commanders. It had everything.” Clearly, Colby had been sidelined in the secret war in Laos, a conflict in which he had once taken so much pride.58
Shackley began by establishing a standard road-watch team, giving it a chief and a deputy, a radioman, a medic, and six riflemen. Within six weeks, seventy of these teams were operating along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. At the same time, the chief of station ordered his field officers to begin forming battalion-sized units in the panhandle. To conserve and focus resources, he ended CIA support for the village defense program, a move that must have been particularly galling for Colby. For Shackley, the CIA was in Laos to win the war in Vietnam, not to build a nation.59
With the North Vietnamese Army still streaming down the trail, and the Pentagon continuing to lobby for a larger role in the Laotian theater, LBJ, in February 1967, approved a vast expansion of Operation Shining Brass, to include company-strength incursions. It was the Studies and Observation Group, or SOG, that would implement the expanded operation. Created in the wake of Operation Switchback, SOG consisted of Special Forces teams that trained and led South Vietnamese commandos on top-secret missions into Laos. Initially, the SOG teams dropped in; called in airstrikes on the trail, its convoys, and supply and maintenance barracks; and then were extracted. Soon, however, these highly decorated warriors were engaging much larger North Vietnamese forces in close combat and then calling in airstrikes on their own positions. During one six-month period, the American contingent of the SOG teams suffered 100 percent casualties. Shackley coordinated Shining Brass raids first with Colonel Don Blackburn and then Colonel John Singlaub. By 1967, SOG comprised 2,000 Americans and 8,000 Indochinese.60
The first Shining Brass incursion—the first of thousands—would be typical. The commander of SOG in 1965 was already legendary. During the Bataan Death March of World War II, Blackburn and a fellow soldier had escaped into the hills, where they had linked up with Filipino partisans. Dodging Japanese patrols, Blackburn and his compatriots had established jungle training camps to train Igorot tribesmen—notorious headhunters during the nineteenth century—in guerrilla tactics. In 1944, when General Douglas MacArthur’s forces returned to the Philippines, “Blackburn’s Headhunters” emerged from the jungle to scout for the Americans, act as spotters for aircraft and artillery, and rescue downed fliers.61
The Shining Brass teams—which were Blackburn’s idea—consisted of two or three Special Forces noncommissioned officers and nine indigenous people, usually either Nung (ethnic Chinese tribespeople who were generally anticommunist and supplied mercenaries to the US military and CIA) or Montagnards. The teams would be inserted into and removed from Laos by H-34 Kingbee helicopters, powered by 32-cylinder engines and capable of hovering on slopes with one wheel on the ground. When it was too dangerous to land—which was often—the Shining Brass teams, or what was left of them, harnessed up and were snatched from the ground by skyhooks attached to the aircraft. Commanding each team was a Green Beret, with the code number “One-Zero.” These men, who were responsible for leading their tiny forces against far superior odds, inflicting as many casualties as possible, calling in airstrikes on what remained, and then assembling at a prearranged landing zone, would become legendary in Laos and Vietnam.
The One-Zero for SOG’s first cross-border operation was Master Sergeant Charles “Slats” Petry. The entire team was “sterile,” meaning that its members wore no rank or unit insignia. They carried Swedish K submachine guns and Belgian-made Browning 9 mm pistols, both of which had been acquired clandestinely. If captured, “RT Iowa,” as the team was code-named, was to recite a flimsy story about how it had accidentally strayed across the border looking for the crew of a downed C-123. If team members were killed or captured, the US government would deny knowledge of them. RT Iowa’s landing zone would be a slash-and-burn area that looked like an old logging clear-cut in the Pacific Northwest. The team dropped in at dusk and proceeded through the rain-soaked jungle to their target area, a camouflaged North Vietnamese fire base that had been shelling US facilities near Danang. The area was dense with trails and campsites, and crawling with enemy troops. For three days, the team engaged and then maneuvered away from enemy patrols, waiting for the weather to ease so that they could summon airstrikes. Finally, the clouds lifted, and RT Iowa called in thirty-seven sorties by F-105 Thunderchief fighter bombers. The team was successfully extracted, with one missing in action and one killed. Petry returned soon thereafter with a forward air controller and called in fifty-one additional sorties, whose bombs and cannon fire touched off numerous secondary explosions.62
These Special Forces teams had been consciously modeled on the Jedburghs. Colby had worked with the Green Berets closely, beginning with the CIDG operation, and he subsequently supported and advised SOG. Colonel John Singlaub, who replaced Blackburn in 1966 as SOG chief, was himself an old Jedburgh. Shining Brass was Colby’s kind of warfare—individual, heroic, low-level, with maximum gain for minimum effort.
With money and arms pouring in from the CIA, and with US close air support, Vang Pao managed to reach the high-water mark of his territorial conquests in the late summer of 1966. The focus of military operations was in northern Laos in the mountains ringing the Plain of Jars. After repulsing a major communist thrust at Nakhang, his forces controlled not only that town, near the Xieng Khouang border with Sam Neua, but also Phou Pha Thi, only 25 miles west of Sam Neua. And each of these strongpoints served as a base for operations threatening key communist enclaves. In July and August, Colby made another one of his semiannual inspection tours. “I found the situation in Laos exhilarating,” he subsequently reported to headquarters. Not only had Vang Pao recovered 90 percent of the territory lost around the Plain of Jars during the previous dry season, but the Hmong and elements of the Royal Laotian Army were taking the offensive in the southern panhandle. Operating with “courage, energy and a high degree of professionalism,” Hmong–Forces Armées Royales units and village security teams had secured Saravane and opened the road between there and Pakse. From these secure areas, road-watch teams and saboteurs were operating effectively against the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Seemingly oblivious to Shackley’s termination of CIA aid to local security forces, Colby reported: “The most important point of a review of the Lao situation is the clear effect of a smoothly working country team under a forceful Ambassador and the strength that results from patient adherence to a balanced program of building popular participation in local security forces.”63
In truth, Shackley did not have a completely free hand in Laos. Bill Colby, like Stu Methven and Bill Lair, remained committed to the marriage of pacification and counterinsurgency. The first without the second would leave a political void and ensure that a self-sustaining, self-reliant, anti-communist entity would never emerge in Laos. In his July 1967 report following another survey of the situation in the field, Colby noted that in 1963–1964, the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese Army were on the verge of establishing a foothold on the all-important Bolovens Plateau in southern Laos. But then, building on the Civilian Irregular Defense Group experience in the Highlands of Vietnam, CIA personnel had organized self-defense units, armed them, and implemented social and economic programs. In the north, “from its positions dominating all of North Laos some years ago,” Colby reported to Washington, “the Viet Minh / Pathet Lao enemy has been pushed back to holding a thin edge of North Laos, with a single substantial salient into the Plaine des Jares.” Most important, he continued, US aid was promoting the integration of the Hmong into the larger Lao society, keeping it from acting as “a centrifugal force.” In the process, he boasted, “Meo [Hmong] school registration has risen from 3,000 in 1962 to 12,000 in 1967, settled agriculture is replacing mountain village slash and burn farming, an elec
ted Meo sits in the national assembly . . . and seventy Meo attend the top lyceum of Laos where only 10 were present in 1962.”64
By then Colby’s stature in the foreign policy establishment had grown to the point where his memos were being submitted directly to President Johnson. The Far East Division chief continued to worry that the brutal war being fought in South Vietnam would spill over into Laos. He noted in a July 1967 memo to the president that Westmoreland wanted to move beyond the SOG operations and outfit regular ARVN battalions, complete with American advisers, and unleash them on the trail. Colby observed to Johnson that the harassment and interdiction of Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese Army traffic along the corridor was the best that could be hoped for. An intrusion in force might bring Souvanna Phouma’s government down, provoke a massive North Vietnamese offensive in Laos, and eventually threaten the security of Thailand. “The most serious policy question . . . would seem to be the degree to which the U.S. wishes to contemplate increased commitment of U.S. forces in active operations in Southeast Asia,” Colby told Johnson. “The contest in Laos has been by proxy, engaging minimal U.S. prestige, tying down no U.S. forces and involving few casualties.”65 Johnson concurred, and the Pentagon’s drive to expand the land war into the Laotian panhandle was thwarted. But the flow of men and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail continued to increase inexorably. If American main force units were to be kept out of Laos, Shackley would have to be allowed to go ahead and prepare the Hmong to engage battalion-sized Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese units.
By late 1967, it was obvious that the enemy viewed Laos as a major front in its war of liberation and unification. In the spring of 1968, combined Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese forces, now numbering some 110,000, captured twenty-seven Hmong outposts and airstrips. The fighting created an estimated 10,000 refugees. Vang Pao fought on, but by 1969, observers reported an increasing number of adolescents in the ranks of his warriors. Reading Colby’s book Lost Victory, one would never know that the secret war in Laos ended in disaster for Vang Pao and his fellow Hmong. “The enemy was fought to a standstill,” Colby wrote. “After ten years the battle lines in Laos were approximately where they were at the start, although the North Vietnamese forces had increased from 7,000 to 70,000.” By the time the denouement began, Bill Colby was out of the CIA (ostensibly) and back in Vietnam as second in command of the largest and most successful counterinsurgency/pacification program in American history.66
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