Shadow Warrior

by Randall B. Woods

  “Blowtorch Bob,” as Komer would be nicknamed by the US contingent in Vietnam, was long on action and short on thought. For example, he was initially determined to make the struggle for the control of the countryside primarily an ARVN operation. John Paul Vann, for one, was appalled. It was his experience that the South Vietnamese Army was frequently a greater threat to counterinsurgency and pacification than the Viet Cong. “Night before last,” he wrote a friend, “a group of ARVN soldiers became drunk at the town’s [Bao Trai’s] only eatery . . . got into a fight with security officials who tried to stop them—then began shooting up the town—to include ricocheting about twenty rounds off the side of my house.” This all occurred within yards of the province chief’s house and the quarters of the local military command. “You can imagine how much respect the population must have for the allegedly constituted authority when it can’t control its own soldiers—or—how ridiculous it is that soldiers who will not seek out the enemy will nevertheless terrorize an entire civilian community.”29

  Many in the CIA thought Komer a rank amateur. When one of his reports was circulated through the foreign affairs bureaucracy, Special Adviser for Vietnam Affairs George Carver wrote Helms: “Surface features such as its ‘gee whiz style,’ fondness for the perpendicular pronoun, and breezy bandying of first names (‘Westy’) are irritating but relatively unimportant. What is important is its tone of activist omniscience which masks some fundamental misconceptions about the nature of the war in Vietnam.” For Komer, it was all about the organization and allocation of resources. If military security could be provided and rural reconstruction undertaken, all would be well, he seemed to think. What then would happen when the United States pulled out? Carver asked. Pacification meant more than that. Echoing Colby, he declared that there had to be a “doctrine,” an ideology, something for the people to fight for. As Helms (via Colby) subsequently put it to Komer, “engagement of the population in a pacification effort, to secure its collaboration in expunging the communist fish from the popular sea, must come as a result of a motivated population, not merely an administered one.”30

  For his part, Lodge did not know whether Komer was an expert or an amateur on pacification; he did think him a pain in the ass. The ambassador did not respond well to having arrangements imposed upon him. He had accepted Porter as deputy for pacification and then assigned him most of the embassy’s administrative duties. When Porter was able to give time to the “other war,” he showed himself to be a conciliator rather than a whip-cracker, and he wanted to be left alone. “I am frankly non-plussed by the tone of our recent exchanges,” Komer wrote to Porter in late July, “which from your end seems almost to suggest either that the real war is between Washington and Saigon or that you wish we’d stop bothering you.”31

  If these philosophical, personal, and bureaucratic issues were not enough, Komer’s decision in the fall of 1966 to recommend that counterinsurgency and pacification be put under Westmoreland and MACV, with himself as civilian deputy in charge, threatened to blow matters completely apart. Surveying the bureaucratic landscape in Saigon, Blowtorch Bob came to the conclusion that only the US military, with 80 percent of the money and personnel in Vietnam, was big enough to take on the other war. Whether or not MACV was the organization best equipped by experience to assume the task—and clearly, with the exception of the Marine Corps, it was not—the counterinsurgency/pacification effort was going to remain a stepchild as long as the US military was not invested in it. But there were signs that the Pentagon was ready to get on board.32

  By 1966, Secretary of Defense McNamara was coming around to the idea that pacification was crucial. In part, this had to do with his growing disillusionment with the war itself. In the spring of that year, the Pentagon chief had shocked LBJ by observing that, in his estimation, the United States had no better than a one-in-three chance of winning in Vietnam, and that Washington should consider openings to the National Liberation Front, even to the point of including its representatives in a coalition government. He was, he said, ready to accept responsibility for counterinsurgency and pacification. “McNamara feels it is inevitable that I be given executive responsibility for American support of the Revolutionary Development program,” Westmoreland recorded in his diary. “He is convinced that the State Department officials do not have the executive and managerial abilities to handle a program of such magnitude and complexity. I told Mc-Namara I was not volunteering for the job, yet I would undertake it if the President wished me to do so.” The president tended toward the Komer-McNamara solution, but he did not want to ride roughshod over Rusk and Lodge, who were adamant in their opposition to a military takeover of pacification. The CIA was not only opposed to a MACV takeover, it was ready to cite legal and constitutional arguments—whatever those might have been—to block administration of Agency funds and operations by another bureaucratic entity. The stalemate in Washington continued through the winter of 1966, while counterinsurgency and pacification remained at a standstill in South Vietnam. In November, LBJ wrote to Lodge saying that the civilian sector had four months to get its pacification act together.33

  In Lost Victory, Colby painted a favorable portrait of Bob Komer. “As chief of the CIA’s operations in the Far East,” he wrote, “I came directly under Komer’s gun—and loved it. Finally, I had found someone who understood the need for a pacification strategy and who had the clout to push the Washington agencies. . . . He understood what the CIA Station was trying to do in its various experimental programs in the countryside. Insisting only that more be done, he provided the policy approval we needed to do it.” To some extent, Colby was right. Following his April 1966 visit to Vietnam, the Blowtorch reported to LBJ that although the Rural Development program had some “questionable aspects,” it looked like “the most promising approach yet developed.”34

  In truth, the thousands of Vietnamese who passed through the Vung Tau training center were a microcosm of the society, a reflection of its many ambiguities and contradictions. Some of the trainees, indeed many, were former Viet Cong. “Every effort was made to convert VC sympathizers (and even those who engaged in guerrilla activities),” South Vietnamese pacification expert Tran Ngoc Chau wrote, “by helping to solve their personal and family problems, usually created by local authorities and troops. . . . If these efforts did not succeed, we tried compromising the individuals in various ways so that they would either have to work with us, or at a minimum be less effective for the other side.” A few of the trainees were Viet Cong cadres themselves and remained so, clandestinely organizing and recruiting agents who would sabotage pacification efforts once the trainees graduated and went into the field. Many of the recruits brought their families with them to Vung Tau to protect them from communist retaliation. Security was hardly absolute, however; periodically, the Viet Cong units active in the Vung Tau area would shell one of the camps. The South Vietnamese government had its own agents in the barracks and classrooms. Ky clearly did not trust Chau, who became camp commander in 1966; the whole census-grievance methodology, with all its revolutionary implications, was anathema. As was true of South Vietnam in general, loyalties at the training camps were unclear and constantly shifting; intrigue and conspiracy were everywhere. Chau and his successor, Major Nguyen Be, an exceptionally able and outspoken officer who had been running pacification in Binh Dinh Province, labored constantly to create a higher loyalty, but they were only partially successful.35

  As Far East Division head, Bill Colby kept close tabs on developments at Vung Tau. He thought Chau able and energetic, but a bit too independent, a bit too much “the mandarin,” as he once put it. He expressed support for Be, but observed that although he was an exceptionally talented pacification planner, he was possessed of “ingrained xenophobia and hypersensitive nationalism.” For Colby, Chau and Be were a means to an end; at this point, however, that end remained obscure. Colby and Carver would criticize those who would seize control of counterinsurgency and pacification, including Kom
er, for not having a “doctrine,” for neglecting the political approach, for seeking to manipulate rather than engage the population. In their own way, however, they were as vague and mystical as the activist Mahayana Buddhists of whom they were so dismissive. Yet another CIA review of the Vietnam situation, vetted in February 1967, and in all probability written by Colby, declared that neither the military nor the civilian roles and mission statements provided “a clear-cut definition of the fundamentally political objective of the pacification task, which is to align the people against the Viet Cong and on the side of the GVN [South Vietnamese government]. All other aims and goals—security, social development, administrative control, democracy, economic development, etc.,—are really subordinate to the basic political objective of turning the people against the VC and gaining their support for the GVN.”36

  One thing was clear—that Bill Colby and the CIA were not averse to dallying with the devil—in this case, the Vietnamese communists. Neither was Lyndon Johnson, but his room for political maneuver was shrinking. Archrival Robert Kennedy had come out in favor of negotiation with the National Liberation Front, raising a firestorm among supporters of the war, both Democratic and Republican. The president had to publicly disavow any intention of allowing the communists into whatever political tent might be erected, but what he said behind the scenes was another matter. As noted earlier, in 1966 LBJ named Averell Harriman his “ambassador for peace.” Most wrote off the appointment as a stunt to undercut the mushrooming antiwar movement in the United States, but they were only partially correct. There was some real hope in the State Department that the United States could find exploitable issues between the National Liberation Front and its northern sponsors, and in the summer of 1965, Bill Bundy asked the CIA to explore this possibility. Nguyen Khanh, then in exile in the United States, met secretly with a CIA operative, offering himself as an intermediary in talks with the NLF.37

  Meanwhile, the Komer juggernaut was about to pick up steam. Despite the Rural Development Cadre program, pacification continued to proceed at only a modest pace. The CIA estimated that during all of 1966, 400 villages were brought under South Vietnamese control, for a total of 4,400 out of 11,250. These less than impressive numbers were due in part to enemy countermeasures. The NLF’s Liberation Radio on April 3 broadcast a warning that “the enemy is concentrating great efforts on training a group of lackeys, the so-called Pacification . . . Cadres, and organizing them into groups to follow the rebel forces to deceive and repress our population.” Accordingly, the communists called for “great attention to the destruction of US-Rebel Pacification Groups.”38

  In March 1967, LBJ appointed Komer deputy for pacification to the US military commander, William Westmoreland. All pacification activities would be placed under his supervision, whether they were civilian or military. At the same time that Johnson named Komer to assume control of the pacification effort, he created a new, more comprehensive organization for him to head. National Security Action Memorandum 362 established CORDS—Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support.39 Leaving no question regarding his authority, the Blowtorch descended on Saigon and ordered the biggest, blackest limousine he could find. He had it adorned with a four-star flag indicating that he was the equal of Westmoreland’s other three deputies. In the days and weeks that followed, Komer ran roughshod over anyone and everyone who got in his way except Westmoreland, to whom he was relentlessly obsequious. But Komer was only the first member of a new American team that would put the “other war” front and center.

  By the close of 1966, it was clear that Henry Cabot Lodge’s days in Saigon were numbered, politics or no politics. In December, John Roche, special assistant to the president, reported on his trip to Vietnam: “I discovered on arriving that—with the elections [to a constituent assembly] a mere ten days off—Ambassador Lodge was off on vacation in Thailand,” he wrote. “Deputy Ambassador Porter has been virtually forbidden by the chief of Mission to deal with Thieu and Ky—the Kys talk only to Lodges. And Lodge doesn’t talk to anybody—in Saigon at least.”40

  Mercifully, in February 1967, the ambassador announced his desire to return to the States and resume civilian life. To Colby’s delight, LBJ chose veteran diplomat Ellsworth Bunker to replace him. A tall, regal aristocrat, Bunker had made his fortune with the United Fruit Company and assorted banking and investment firms. He had served as ambassador to Brazil, Italy, and India, and most significantly, as far as LBJ was concerned, as his troubleshooter during the 1965 Dominican crisis. Vigorous despite his seventy years, Bunker had recently married the US ambassador to Nepal. “The president emphasized the fact that he wanted to see the training of the Vietnamese accelerated and speeded up to enable us to more quickly turn the war over to them,” Bunker later recalled of his appointment. After stopping off at Guam in March for yet another Vietnam summit conference, he arrived in Saigon on April 22.41

  Then in May, General Creighton Abrams—who had welcomed Colby in out of the field in France in 1944—arrived to assume the post of liaison between the US and South Vietnamese militaries. A West Point graduate, Abrams had distinguished himself in both World War II and the Korean conflict. Although he could be gruff and profane, the cigar-chomping Abrams was, as Colby put it, “more the Eisenhower than the MacArthur or the Patton.”42 Indeed, JFK had thought him sufficiently enlightened and diplomatic to place him in command of federal troops during the Mississippi integration crisis. A connoisseur of classical music, Abrams was a convert to the “other war,” indeed, a not-so-secret agent in the campaign to subsume conventional military operations to counterinsurgency and pacification.

  At the Guam Conference in March, Johnson had touted democracy and told Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky that his birthday was in August—and the best present he could possibly receive would be national elections. Dutifully, Ky returned home and announced that elections for president, vice president, and delegates to the National Legislature would be held in the fall of 1967. Here, if ever, was the opportunity for Colby, perhaps the Agency’s preeminent theoretician and practitioner of political action, to apply the lessons he had learned in Italy to Vietnam.

  In April, a “Political Development Working Group” convened at CIA headquarters to decide how best to facilitate the elections. Several participants argued, in line with the February report, that the CIA must do all in its power to help establish a broad-based political movement that could serve as the rallying point for noncommunist nationalists and compete with the National Liberation Front and Viet Cong. To everyone’s consternation, Colby objected. There was no time to grow a rice-roots movement, he insisted. The best alternative was to develop a list of acceptable candidates and provide them with surreptitious support.43 For all his talk about local empowerment and his subordinates’ repeated calls for a rice-roots revolution, Colby was not able to shed the Agency’s penchant for men on horseback. Vietnam was not Italy with its Western-style parliamentary institutions, legal system, class system, and educational infrastructure. But neither was it a political void. Nevertheless, Colby’s only frame of reference seemed to be Lansdale, Diem, and the sect wars of 1954–1955. The Agency should continue to search for another Diem-Magsaysay and then use its money and influence to align Vietnam’s various factions behind him.

  Shortly after Ky set the date for national elections, he declared his candidacy for the presidency. Chief of Station John Hart and the station assumed that a military ticket would win; indeed, at that point they preferred such an outcome. Ky sent his police chief, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, to the embassy to solicit campaign funds, which Bunker instructed Hart to provide, but the Americans did insist that the military admit legitimate candidates to the field and that it maintain at least the appearance of honesty. In June, urged on by his ambitious wife, Nguyen Van Thieu threw his beret into the ring. Fearing that a split in the military would lead to a civilian and perhaps pro-neutralist victory in September, the Military Revolutionary Council met in emergency session on June 30. Fo
llowing three days of wrangling, the generals announced that Ky had agreed to run on a Thieu-Ky ticket as vice president. In the weeks that followed, the station worked to persuade various labor, student, and religious organizations to throw their support behind the sure winners. The Thieu-Ky ticket did indeed triumph in September, but with only 35 percent of the vote, a testimony to the relative fairness of the electoral contest.44

  Meanwhile, Langley was rife with anxiety that the CIA’s counterinsurgency/pacification operations would be swallowed by the Komer operation. The Agency was willing to cooperate, but only to a degree. It was not just a matter of bureaucratic ego, but of protection of the Agency’s ever-sacred methods and sources. If those were opened up to outsiders, the CIA would no longer be the CIA. In July, Helms dispatched Colby to Vietnam to survey the Agency’s operations, especially its liaison with CORDS, and report back.

  Driving into Saigon from Tan Son Nhut, Colby reflected on how much the city had changed since Diem’s time. The airport itself had become one of the largest and busiest in the world, home to a constant stream of military and civilian aircraft ferrying in troops and supplies. Another air base of similar size had been established at Bien Hoa, just 17 kilometers away. One entire corner of Tan Son Nhut was given over to Air America and its secret missions. Madame Nhu was gone; bars and nightclubs were everywhere and open for business twenty-four hours a day. The streets were filled with GI’s, both American and Vietnamese, with pedicabs, food vendors, and black marketers hawking their goods and services on every street corner. Merchandise, much of it still bearing PX markings, was displayed in shop windows and sidewalk stalls. Luxury items from Europe were plentiful. People frequented restaurants, hotel bars, and cabarets far into the night. The aroma of barbequed ribs and hamburgers was now as common in some areas of the city as that of cha gio (egg rolls) and pho (beef soup with noodles and spicy vegetables). It seemed that everything and everybody was for sale. The outskirts of the city had changed little, still consisting of an endless network of warrens, hutches, and tents housing the city’s indigent masses. To make matters worse, Saigon was swollen with refugees, nearly a million since 1963. Rock music blended with traditional Vietnamese melodies, forming a backdrop for the intermittent automatic weapon and artillery fire coming from the perimeter of the city.