By the time Colby arrived on the scene in the fall of 1967, Angleton had so paralyzed the Soviet and East European Division that the Agency was producing virtually no human intelligence (HUMINT) on its most fearsome opponent. “Indeed,” he later observed, “we seemed to be putting more emphasis on the KGB as the CIA’s adversary than on the Soviet Union as the United States’ adversary.” Colby hoped to avoid a clash with Angleton, but if that was what the situation required, so be it. A sudden turn of events, however, postponed the confrontation.11
One afternoon in November, Richard Helms summoned Colby to his office. Bob Komer had pulled a fast one on him, he complained. During the most recent of LBJ’s famous “Tuesday lunches,” the president had turned to Helms and said that Komer had asked that Colby be dispatched to Saigon to act as his deputy in running CORDS. Johnson had made it plain that this was not to be considered a request, but an order. Would he think it over? Helms asked Colby. Of course, the former Jedburgh replied.
Colby later wrote in Honorable Men that he was at first shocked by the sudden assignment change, but upon reflection, he decided that it made sense. He had been deeply involved in Vietnam for almost a decade; Komer was embarking on a course that Colby had been advocating for years. The assignment would interrupt his career path within the CIA, but hopefully he could get back on track when the war was over. His departure would impose a hardship on Barbara and the children, but he had ordered numerous CIA and Foreign Service Officers to make the same sacrifice. During a lengthy discussion with his wife, Colby convinced her that the family would have to do what was best for the country. The temptation “to move toward the sound of the guns” was irresistible, and both knew it. Informed of the decision the next morning, Helms thanked Colby and assured him that he would be welcomed back to the Agency at the close of his assignment.12
From a bureaucratic perspective, Colby’s appointment as CORDS deputy was essential. The CIA was already running the Rural Development Cadre program, the counterterror teams, and the Provincial Interrogation Centers. It would have to assume a central role in any assault on the infrastructure of the enemy in South Vietnam, the omnipresent Viet Cong cadre. The Agency was not about to allow Komer and CORDS to gain control over Agency operations and funds. Having a CIA man as Blowtorch Bob’s deputy was a solution to the problem. Nevertheless, in his memoir, Helms accused Colby of conspiring with Komer behind his back. “In his book, Colby notes that the appointment came as news to him,” Helms wrote. “This I must doubt. I’ve been around Washington too long to believe that a senior officer of one agency might be transferred across town to another agency, and offered the prospect of ambassadorial rank, without ever having been asked if he might so much as consider the proposition.” He added, “It is probably just as well that Colby was assigned to Saigon. His lack of understanding of counterintelligence, and his unwillingness to absorb its precepts, would not have been compatible with the Soviet responsibility, and would surely have put him at loggerheads with Jim Angleton.”13
Helms’s reaction to Colby’s reassignment is fraught with possible hidden meanings. One explanation is that he felt insulted: the Soviet division was a plum, and Colby had rejected his offer of it. Another is that Helms was setting Colby up for a showdown with Angleton, a confrontation in which he was sure Angleton would prevail. In truth, Helms was much closer to Angleton than Colby; he came out of the espionage and counterespionage side of the organization. Political action and covert operations had never excited him, although he was willing to bend with the wind when counterinsurgency and pacification became popular at the White House. The sound of guns aside, by accepting the CORDS position (even possibly having arranged to be offered it), Colby might have been escaping the trap that was being set for him. But the former Jedburgh had another reason for wanting an assignment in South Vietnam. By 1967, he had become completely alienated from Barbara.
According to one source, Bill had told Bob Myers, his old friend and former deputy, that he knew two weeks after his marriage that he had made a dreadful mistake. Barbara Heinzen came from money and had attended Barnard College, but her adolescence and early womanhood had not been particularly happy. Following a nervous breakdown and subsequent illness, her father died during her freshman year in college. Her mother was a fashionista, a social butterfly, and not particularly nurturing. Bill Colby was just one of several boys she dated. After Bill left for the service, she became engaged to a young man who was subsequently killed in action. Bill would later confide to his second wife that when he was home on leave awaiting orders for the Pacific, he got out his little black book and began calling girls he had dated before the war. Barbara was the fifth or sixth, not the first, as he would claim in his memoir.14 They got married because that was what returning veterans and the girls who waited at home did. The couple had five children not because they were Catholic—both Bill and Barbara were only children—but because this was typical in the 1950s: couples during that decade had four offspring, on average.
As the years passed, Barbara became more and more garrulous, talking at times nonstop about nothing in particular. “She was completely effervescent, talked all the time, going from one thing to another. Sometimes she would come back to what the hell she was talking about and sometimes she wouldn’t,” family friend Stan Temko later observed. “They [Bill and Barbara] were completely in a way different personalities.” Barbara loved cocktail parties and small talk; he hated both. Bill loathed suburban life; Barbara thrived on it. The task of raising five children with her husband absent for long stretches of time created a rising tide of resentment. To make matters worse, one, Catherine, had medical problems. She suffered from epilepsy all her life, her grand mal seizures only moderated by medication. Redheaded, plump, insecure, Catherine adored her father. She wanted desperately to please him, for him to be to her what Bill’s mother had been to him. When he was with his daughter, Bill largely filled the bill. There were shared interests and an intimacy that sometimes seemed lacking in Bill’s relationships with other members of his family. The problem was that father and daughter were too often separated.15
Increasingly, to Barbara’s intense frustration, her husband shut her out, even from the family arguments that periodically raged after Carl and Catherine began flirting with the antiwar movement. She would sometimes join them, trying to take the moral high ground. Bill generally ignored her. “Their marriage was unbelievable,” Susan Colby, John’s wife, recalled. “I’ve never seen anything like it. They fought all the time, about the war, when he was going to come home, you name it. . . . There would be these endless dinners.”16
Several times after returning from trips, Colby would pull up in front of the house in Bethesda and be unable to get out of the taxi. When rumors of a Saigon affair drifted back to Barbara, she denied the possibility. “We have a contract,” she declared. By the time Bill was assigned to CORDS, families were not allowed to accompany military and government personnel assigned to Vietnam. “I had one friend, a wife, who said why don’t you come to Bangkok,” Barbara recalled. “But I had five children, and Cathy wasn’t well. I couldn’t go to Bangkok or the Philippines. I wouldn’t have seen that much of him anyway, and I would have had a whole new deal with schools.”17 Her husband was, no doubt, greatly relieved. Bill Colby agreed to go to Vietnam to become second in command at CORDS because he wanted to serve his country and save himself. For him, freedom had become a personal as well as a political cause.
It would be three months, however, before Colby could actually take his leave of the Agency and depart for Saigon. He was still tasked with finding his replacement as head of the Far East Division, and he had to get his personal life in order. Feeling some guilt over leaving Catherine and Paul, who was just entering adolescence, Colby spent as much time as he could with his children. While skating on a frozen portion of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal that runs through Georgetown, he fell and broke his ankle. During his brief convalescence, Colby talked with his children about the f
uture. Catherine had become vastly enamored of Vietnam, though she had been a small child during the family’s years there. What he intended to do, he assured her, was to help the Vietnamese help themselves, to build on the CIDG program and raise up self-sufficient, politically active communities throughout the countryside that could put South Vietnam on the road to self-determination and a prosperous, noncommunist future.18
In the privacy of his own thoughts, Colby was moderately optimistic. The team being assembled in Vietnam—Komer, Bunker, and Abrams—promised a coordination and cooperation that had not hitherto existed within the US Mission. The Johnson administration had declared that the “other war” would take precedence, that the regular military would be the tail and counterinsurgency and pacification the dog. Colby was enthusiastic about a CORDS in which civilians reported to military and military to civilians, though he was never able to rid himself of a lingering distrust of the Pentagon.19 He had been heartened when, on November 27, the White House announced that Robert McNamara was stepping down as secretary of defense to become president of the World Bank. Colby speculated that the original whiz kid had become disillusioned with the war when he realized, finally, that success or failure could not be measured in numbers. In truth, McNamara’s views on the war were driven by the Kennedy family. When Jack and Bobby were hawks, he was a hawk. By 1966, Bobby had begun to turn against the war, partly out of conviction and partly out of his determination to offer an alternative to the hated LBJ and deny him the Democratic nomination in 1968. Whatever the case, a major obstacle to fighting the other war had been removed. Hopefully, Westmoreland would soon follow McNamara to the exit.
On the afternoon of January 29, 1968, Langley received a flash message from the Saigon station. It was 3 A.M. in South Vietnam. A team of Viet Cong sappers was in the process of blasting a large hole in the wall surrounding the US embassy and infiltrating the courtyard of the compound. Colby, still nominally Far East Division head, flashed back the gratuitous advice that the Communications Center should button up its steel doors.20 The sappers were unable to penetrate the heavy doors at the main entrance to the embassy building and so retreated to the courtyard to take cover behind large concrete flowerpots. They raked the building with rockets and automatic weapons fire. A small detachment of Marines and Military Police (MPs) kept the Viet Cong pinned down until reinforcements arrived and killed all nineteen of them.
The attack on the US embassy was but a small part of the Tet Offensive, a massive, coordinated communist assault against the largest urban areas of South Vietnam. In all, the Viet Cong struck 36 of 64 provincial capitals, 5 of 6 major cities, 64 district capitals, and 50 hamlets. In addition to the embassy, enemy units assaulted Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport, the Presidential Palace, and the headquarters of South Vietnam’s general staff. In Hue, 7,500 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops stormed and eventually took control of the ancient Citadel, the interior city that had been home to the emperors of Vietnam.
The US Mission had once again been caught off guard. The CIA and military intelligence had reported increased activity in and around South Vietnam’s major population centers, but MACV’s attention had been focused on the siege of Khe Sanh.
In the midst of Tet, the Agency panicked. On February 2, 1968, Colby, George Carver, and John Hart, Langley’s onsite Vietnam experts—nicknamed “the brethren”—prepared a memorandum entitled “Operation Shock.” “Tet,” the trio declared, “demonstrated that the Thieu-Ky regime clearly lacked the attributes of a national government” and could not “defend its frontiers” without the help of a half million American troops. The GVN [South Vietnamese government] continued to resist pressure to clean up corruption, generate broad-based political support, and prosecute the war in an aggressive, competent style. If Thieu did not demonstrate significant progress toward achieving these goals within a hundred days, the United States should “reserve its position” in regard to future aid. Incredibly, given the public prominence of the Thieu-Ky feud, the brethren envisioned a key role for the vice president in any reform effort. Ky should personally head a team that would ferret out and punish incompetence and corruption among military and civilian officials. He should also be charged with organizing a national political front uniting all noncommunist elements in a “massive rallying of the entire population . . . to develop the country and free it of Viet Cong terror.” If, after the hundred-day interregnum, there was no significant progress, Washington should replace Thieu and consider halting the bombing of North Vietnam, seeking direct negotiations with Hanoi, and begin treating the National Liberation Front as a legitimate negotiating partner.21
Colby and his mates were jumping the gun. American and South Vietnamese forces quickly rallied. Within days, US and South Vietnamese soldiers had cleared Saigon, and in the weeks that followed they drove the communists from virtually every other city and town they had occupied, forcing them deep into the countryside and inflicting massive casualties. In Hue, the occupying forces held out for three weeks. Allied forces pounded the ancient city into rubble and then cleared what remained of the enemy in house-to-house fighting. Estimates of communist troops killed in action in that battle alone ran to 5,000. The liberators of Hue uncovered the graves of 2,800 government officials, police, and soldiers massacred by the communists. In fact, Tet constituted the worst single defeat ever suffered by the fighting forces of North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front. More than 40,000 communist soldiers were killed or wounded, one-fifth of the enemy’s military strength. As a result of Tet—and two smaller offensives in March and August that cost the enemy another 66,000 casualties—the Viet Cong lost much of its ability to conduct offensive operations.22
But public, media, and congressional opinion in the United States reflected Langley’s initial pessimism—and continued to do so. Americans had been led to believe, by Westmoreland’s optimistic accounts, that victory was in sight. How could that be when the Viet Cong could wreak havoc in virtually every major city and town in South Vietnam? “What the hell is going on?” demanded the respected CBS television news anchor Walter Cronkite. “I thought we were winning the war.”23
The long plane ride over the Pacific provided Colby with an opportunity to take stock. The dimensions of the MACV-ARVN victory on the ground, along with the paradoxical wave of disillusionment sweeping America in the wake of the Tet Offensive, were just becoming apparent. The blow dealt to the Viet Cong, coupled with the emergence of a new team in Saigon devoted to prosecuting the war for the countryside to the maximum, had created a window of opportunity, but that window would not stay open forever. Americans were not an imperial people in the traditional sense. They did not have the patience to fight a war of indefinite duration for indeterminate ends. “Our results had to be so effective that they would receive support at home for our efforts. If not, they had to so put the enemy in trouble and so strengthen the Government that it could survive with a major reduction in American assistance,” Colby wrote in his memoirs. He failed to mention his role in contributing to the burgeoning disillusionment.24
As the Pan American jetliner dove steeply into Tan Son Nhut—to fend off possible ground fire—Colby spotted a South Vietnamese Air Force plane off the right wing on a bombing mission. During the drive into Saigon he could hear gunfire coming from the ongoing battle for the suburbs. He was where he should be.
By the time Bill Colby arrived in South Vietnam on March 2, 1968, “Blowtorch Bob” Komer and CORDS had been in operation for nearly ten months. Despite the flow of optimistic reports from the deputy commander of CORDS (DEPCORDS)—Komer’s official title—the results were spotty. There was a CORDS deputy for each of the four corps areas, with the inimitable John Paul Vann in charge of III Corps, which included his old stomping ground Hau Nghia. Under the deputies were province and district senior advisers, with US personnel eventually stationed at the village and hamlet levels. Overlaying this organizational structure were the various functions assigned to CORDS: the Rural Development
Cadre program out of Vung Tau; Chieu Hoi, or “Open Arms,” a program to encourage defection from communist ranks; Census Grievance (C-G); the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES), which involved questionnaires designed to determine if a province or district was controlled by friend or foe; and a program called Phoenix, which aimed to identify and eliminate members of the Viet Cong. MACV, the CIA, USAID, the State Department, and the Joint United States Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO) were in charge of or shared responsibility for these initiatives.25
Belatedly, the Johnson administration had recognized the need for Vietnamese-language training for Americans if counterinsurgency and pacification were going to succeed. The United States Vietnam Training Center was established in early 1967. Classes were held initially in an airless garage in Arlington, Virginia. The Foreign Service imported a number of Vietnamese-English speakers from Vietnam to serve as instructors. The trainees would attend class for five to six hours a day and then take home reel-to-reel tapes of the day’s lessons to study at night. “The key to almost anything I did in Vietnam was the language,” CORDS officer Mike Hacker later recalled. “Going to a war zone without knowing the language . . . was unthinkable to me. Suicidal.” There was some instruction on Vietnamese culture. Toward the end of the cycle, the students were shipped to “the Farm,” the CIA’s paramilitary training facility at Camp Peary, Virginia. Later in the program there was a brief stint at the army’s unconventional warfare school at Fort Benning, Georgia. At the Farm, the Foreign Service Officers were taught the rudiments of hand-to-hand combat. “For some reason they taught us to blow up automobiles,” Bruce Kinsey recalled with a laugh. Upon graduation, each officer was expected to procure his own sidearm. At President Johnson’s direction, from 1967 onward all incoming unmarried Foreign Service Officers were to serve one tour in Vietnam.26
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