The leadership of CORDS was well aware of the ongoing need for local security, even in the wake of Tet. In addition to ARVN units, the average province boasted 20 Regional Forces (RF) companies and 100 Popular Forces (PF) platoons. But they had not been provided with modern weaponry, and most lacked US advisers. The Rural Development Cadre program was tasked with turning out 46,000 graduates a year, but desertion rates for 1967 ran as high as 35 percent. General Thang, the minister for rural development, confided that South Vietnamese corps commanders were “basically hostile to the program.” Major Nguyen Be, who then supervised the program at Vung Tau, was more explicit. As long as the majority of South Vietnamese military and civilian officials at the provincial and district levels remained corrupt, incompetent, and antidemocratic, he declared, the Rural Development Cadre program would make little headway. The CIA repudiated Be when he attempted to revise the curriculum and called for a new national leadership, drawn from elected district and provincial officials, to replace the Thieu-Ky regime. But he continued to name names as part of his clean government campaign. Frank Scotton finally had to smuggle him out of South Vietnam in an Air America plane to prevent his assassination. Because the RFs and PFs moved in and out of villages, the security they provided was transitory. Left on their own, the RD cadres were terrorized by the local Viet Cong. The ARVN and MACV were still hostile to arming villagers, a step that Bill Colby considered essential, not only for security, but for nation-building as well. Saigon’s opposition to a rice-roots revolution continued unabated.27
The so-called Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI) constituted the heart of the communist insurgency in South Vietnam. With Ed Lansdale’s help, Diem and Nhu had identified a number of these individuals and killed or captured them during the notorious anticommunist campaign of the late 1950s. Many within the US Mission assumed at the time that the back of the organized insurgency had been broken. Then came the 1963 coup and subsequent revelations that, despite all that Nhu’s Special Forces and the Can Lao had done, the VCI still existed and in some areas was flourishing. In 1963 and 1964, the CIA station, under Colby’s successors, had begun to try to pick up the trail and put together an organization that could identify Viet Cong cadres and either turn or kill them. All they had to go on were the dozens of file-card trays that Lansdale and his people had accumulated over the years containing the names, occupations, and locations of suspected communists. Much of this information had come from the Hamlet Informant Program, in which the station subsidized police payments to casual and usually untrained informants. MACV had its own extensive intelligence mechanism, but it focused on the enemy order of battle rather than on the VCI.28
In 1964 and 1965, Chief of Station Peer de Silva developed an analytical unit within the Saigon Station to coordinate intelligence activity against the communists. To gather information, the CIA turned to the South Vietnamese Police Special Branch—a descendent of the old French Sûreté, the internal security arm of the French colonial government—and subsequently to the South Vietnamese government’s newly created Central Intelligence Organization (CIO). With CIA encouragement, the Special Branch began developing a system of Provincial Interrogation Centers nationwide. By mid-1966 there were twenty-two in existence. The Sûreté had been notorious for torturing its detainees, and that culture carried over to the Special Branch. An Agency officer who toured all of the existing PICs in 1966 found two in the Mekong Delta that were exemplary, but elsewhere, the facilities were “absolutely appalling,” with prisoners being interrogated in the presence of other prisoners, clerks, and janitorial staff. Suspected members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure were often housed in a common detention room, which guaranteed collusion and facilitated intimidation of the weak by the hard core. Interrogators seemed not to know the difference between a criminal investigation and an intelligence debriefing. The South Vietnamese, who were aware of the American aversion to torture, reacted not by refraining from it, but by hiding it. Nevertheless, several CIA inspectors remembered seeing blood-spattered walls, batteries and wires, and assorted cudgels and restraints.29
When Bob Komer arrived in South Vietnam in the spring of 1967, he had set about institutionalizing the war on the communist cadre. What he wanted was a national intelligence clearinghouse to collect and analyze information gathered from detainees at the PICs. To this end, he established, in the words of Agency historian Thomas L. Ahern Jr., a “new VC infrastructure intelligence collection and exploitation staff (ICEX) system reaching from [the CIA] station down through corps, province, and district levels.” The CIA would continue to supervise the PICs and the Special Branch efforts in the field. Finally, the decision was made to assign the Provincial Reconnaissance Units—South Vietnam’s counterterror shock troops—to the war on the VCI. The 303 Committee stipulated that these strike forces would remain under the sole supervision of the CIA. The PRUs gave teeth to the ICEX program, providing it with a heavily armed force capable of acting on the intelligence that was gathered. In December 1967, the figurehead prime minister, Nguyen Van Loc, renamed ICEX “Phung Hoang” after a mythical Vietnamese bird endowed with extraordinary powers. Komer came up with what he believed was the closest English equivalent—Phoenix. The name Phung Hoang was ironic. “The Phung Hoang,” according to one source, “does not show itself except in times of peace and it hides at the slightest sign of trouble.” Komer’s bird, however, was frequently the harbinger of imprisonment, torture, and death.30
According to Tom Martin, the CORDS district adviser in the Mekong Delta, the Provincial Reconnaissance Units were notorious by the time they were incorporated into the Phoenix program. Because the PRUs and their SEAL advisers wore civilian clothes and operated at night, they were invisible, at least to the other Americans in the area. “These were sort of like the Dirty Dozen,” Martin recalled. “They were recruited from jails and deserters; they were real killers. The PRUs were a very deadly force; they were the ones who started giving rewards for enemy ears and noses and stuff like that.” In January 1967, the station reported that an “overzealous” PRU contingent in Long An Province had decapitated several Viet Cong after killing them in a pitched battle. In many districts, the campaign against the communist infrastructure turned into a duel between the local Banh-anh-ninh—the terrorism, espionage, and assassination arm of the Viet Cong province committees—and the PRU. In Tan An, the capital of Long An, a former head of the communist assassination unit who had defected in 1966 learned the whereabouts and itinerary of the current Banh-anh-ninh chief. He passed it on to the PRU, which mounted an ambush in which the Viet Cong unit leader and his bodyguard were killed. At this point, the Banh-anh-ninh had lost seven chiefs at PRU hands, while communists had managed to kill three PRU commanders in three months. In the delta, a Viet Cong “avenger unit” had killed the mother of one defector after he rallied to South Vietnam; he swore revenge on the perpetrators, whose identities he knew. Leading his five-man team into Viet Cong territory, the defector discovered the unit’s hideout, and in the ensuing attack all eight of the enemy were killed. Found in the hideout was an outboard motor of a Special Forces lieutenant who had been ambushed and shot to death while patrolling a nearby canal a week earlier. In many ways, then, the CIA-supervised PRUs operated as combat units fighting an enemy asking no more quarter than it gave, rather than as a police force constrained by law and procedure. For the period from May through September 1967, the PRUs registered 1,500 Viet Cong killed and 960 captured. Counterterror team losses were 99 dead. Nevertheless, the stated objective of the PRU campaign was to capture and interrogate; killing was a last resort.31
Still ensconced in Langley, Colby had viewed the evolution of the war on the Viet Cong Infrastructure with mixed feelings. He approved of the campaign in principle, even of its organized violence. Every effort should be made to lure members of the communist cadre to switch sides through indoctrination, persuasion, or blackmail. Failing that, however, the PRUs should take “direct action to capture or arrest” members of the
infrastructure; “on occasion casualties will result from efforts by the Viet Cong to escape arrest or capture.” Colby wanted the PRUs to be incorporated into the South Vietnamese National Police. He was, as he would later claim, concerned about due process and ethical treatment of prisoners, but he had another reason. If there should be a cease-fire and negotiations, the PRUs, as part of the police rather than the ARVN, would be able to continue the struggle against the Viet Cong.32
The former Jedburgh quickly settled into his new job as chief deputy to Komer. He was to be Blowtorch Bob’s alter ego, knowledgeable about every aspect of CORDS and thus able to stand in for his boss. Technically, Colby was on leave from the CIA, but he had full access to the station and CIA operations. He could go places where Komer could not. Indeed, that was one of the reasons for his selection. Becoming bogged down in the CORDS-MACV bureaucracy was an ever-present danger. As he had when he was station chief, Colby got out into the field whenever possible. “I saw as the real purpose of my being in Vietnam to spend as many nights as possible in the provinces,” he wrote in Lost Victory.33 Initially, the new DEPCORDS deputy limited his forays to the weekends. He would put in a half-day at the office on Saturday and then helicopter out in the afternoon to spend the night with a district or province advisory team. Colby did not give advance notice of his arrival. Dinner with the Americans and Vietnamese, an inspection tour the next morning, and then a flight back to Saigion Sunday afternoon in time for a swim and dinner at the Cercle Sportif.
Tet had dealt a major blow to the Viet Cong, but that did not mean the countryside was secure. Excluding communist military forces, the VCI still numbered some 82,000 nationwide. The South Vietnamese government, anxious about protecting its urban constituencies, reverted to its habitual passiveness, redeploying ARVN and even Regional and Popular Forces troops around the country’s major population centers. On a visit to the provincial capital of Vinh Long, Colby’s helicopter had to descend rapidly in a tight circle to avoid enemy ground fire from the outskirts of the city. A trip to Ban Me Thuot, near his old stomping grounds of Buon Enao, was enlivened by a Viet Cong mortar attack. As the barrage marched up the main thoroughfare, Colby and his cohorts retreated to their compound and, fully armed, sat up all night waiting for a ground attack that never came.34
During his weekend visits to the countryside, Colby, to his dismay, discovered that CORDS would have to spend much of 1968 simply rebuilding South Vietnam. Destruction from the fighting was widespread; virtually every town and village had suffered damage to its infrastructure. Before the 1 million refugees created by Tet could return home, there would have to be homes for them to return to. Colby understood that the vacuum in the countryside would have to be filled before nation-building could begin once again.
What Komer needed above all else were energetic, effective CORDS personnel in the field. His model was John Paul Vann. One of Colby’s first forays out of Saigon was to visit with the already legendary proconsul, then DEPCORDS for II Corps. The two men had met only once, in Washington, when Colby was Far East Division head. Vann had paid a visit to Langley to inform him that the members of the Rural Development Cadre of which the Agency was so proud were spending more time huddled in their compounds protecting themselves than proselytizing among the peasants. With characteristic diplomacy, Colby had observed that he and his colleagues realized that the Vung Tau graduates were a work in progress. Vann remembered the exchange and, mindful of his job security, had expressed some concern to Komer that his new deputy might bear a grudge. One of the reasons for Colby’s visit was to assure Vann that this was not the case.
Vann had done his homework and knew where Colby’s predilections lay. Their first night together, he took his guest to visit a nearby village whose chief had armed his young men with spears fashioned out of straightened and sharpened car springs. Still hobbled by his skating accident, Colby inspected the ranks with cane in hand and promised the chief real weapons. “The important result of the evening,” Colby observed in Lost Victory, “was a clear understanding between Vann and myself that the real way we should be fighting the war was by building communities such as the ones we visited, and gradually pressing the Communists away from the population.”35
Vann and Colby would become allies, if not friends. Colby’s depiction of Vann in Lost Victory conformed to the image that so many of the counterinsurgency/pacification personnel laboring in the vineyard had of him: an almost fearless man absolutely committed to empowering the rural Vietnamese to take control of their communities and defend them simultaneously against the communists, the Saigonese, and, when necessary, inept Americans. Vann’s personal shortcomings, so relentlessly portrayed in Neil Sheehan’s Bright Shining Lie, were overstated and largely irrelevant, Colby wrote.
There was no doubt about John Paul Vann’s bravery, his commitment to the villagers of South Vietnam, or his determination to speak out against injustice and ineptitude, but he was often all sail and no anchor—intelligent, undereducated, and intensely ambitious. Part of the Ellsberg-Scotton-Bumgardner coterie, indeed its titular head, Vann had largely traded in the ideas of others. In truth, Vann’s views on the conflict in Vietnam were contradictory, even paradoxical. Like Colby, he was opposed to large-scale US military operations. The further American main force units were kept from his area of responsibility, the easier his job would be. Unlike Colby, he was opposed to forced relocation programs like the Strategic Hamlet initiative because he thought they tore the fabric of Vietnamese society.36
Vann could be pessimistic, even cynical, about the war. He remained a great friend of Dan Ellsberg even after the latter turned against the conflict and became one of its most vocal critics. “John Paul Vann was just the first among many who served in Hau Nghia who came slowly to believe that we were on the wrong side,” declared Vann’s friend Colonel Carl Bernard. “[He and I believed] that the better, and most conscientious persons in Hau Nghia—with just a few exceptions—were working for the Viet Cong.” Bernard recalled that he and Vann often likened themselves to “bankruptcy referees,” that is, individuals dedicated to limiting the damage being done by both sides. The two men, Bernard claimed, had read Ferdinand Otto Miksche’s Secret Forces: The Technique of Underground Movements, the principal conclusion of which was that once revolutionaries succeeded in implanting an infrastructure, they had won. Yet Vann remained an uncompromising hawk throughout his time in Vietnam. He never reached the point where he believed that too many Vietnamese and Americans were dying. “John Vann never considered that the Vietnamese war might have demanded more, in terms of lives, money, and effort, than it was worth,” Bernard recalled. “No price would have been too great. Vann felt that since America had committed herself to the war effort, she should make the best of it.” On the second if not the first assumption, Colby and Vann saw eye to eye.37
Vann’s popularity with the counterinsurgency/pacification people stemmed in no small part from his willingness to speak truth to power. There was his famous exchange with Walt Rostow, LBJ’s relentlessly hawkish national security adviser, in December 1967. Buoyed by Westmoreland’s optimistic reports, Rostow predicted that there would be a great victory in the coming summer. “Oh, hell no, Mr. Rostow,” Vann replied. “I’m a born optimist; I think we can hold out longer than that.”38 He and another CORDS deputy, Colonel Wilbur Wilson, were openly contemptuous of Westmoreland and his search-and-destroy strategy. At the same time, Vann obsequiously cultivated patrons who could protect him, such as General Bruce Palmer, deputy commander of the US Army in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968 and vice chief of staff of the army from 1968 to 1972. Vann was deferential to Komer, as well as to Ellsworth Bunker, who had a reputation for firing those who bucked him. Vann was a prolific letter-writer, treating public figures with whom he had only a passing acquaintance—Henry Kissinger, for example—as confidants.
Colby became somewhat addicted to touring the countryside of South Vietnam with Vann. Risk-taking was something the two men had in common, though C
olby was somewhat less flamboyant about it. Periodically, Vann would decide to motor about the provinces under his supervision to “find out who owned what.” Inevitably these trips were through territory that was contested. Vann would tell every adviser who came under his command that they must get out in the villages and rice paddies and see for themselves what conditions were like; they needed to visit with village elders and show friend and foe alike that they were not afraid.39
In some ways, the two men were very different. Vann’s sexual appetites were legendary, a trait he shared with Ellsberg. Bernard recalled that when he was stateside, Vann would make it a point to visit Ellsberg in Santa Monica for an orgy. In Vietnam, Vann at one point lived near a girls’ orphanage and reputedly spent a lot of time there. “His approach to sex was strictly physical,” Bernard observed. “It was something to be done quickly and as often as possible.” Colby professed ignorance of these activities. He would later tell his second wife, Sally, that he and Vann would venture out into the countryside in a jeep or in the latter’s International Harvester Scout on Saturday nights in order to “avoid temptation.” Colby was dissembling; he could not have helped knowing about Vann’s exploits—the man was an exhibitionist. Nor was Colby pristine in sexual matters; he had come to Vietnam in part to escape from what for him was a loveless marriage. There were reports of other women, but Colby, unlike Vann, was the soul of discretion.40
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