Shadow Warrior

by Randall B. Woods

  Three weeks after his arrival in Vietnam, Colby tuned in with other members of the US Mission to listen to LBJ’s March 31 speech to the American people on Vietnam. Everyone sensed that a turning point in the war was afoot.

  In the weeks following the Tet Offensive, former administration supporters in the media, including the New York Times editorial board, had advised the president to negotiate a withdrawal from Vietnam. The “Wise Men”—a group of veteran diplomats called together by LBJ to advise him on the war in Vietnam—which included such Cold War luminaries as former secretary of state Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett—called for the “gradual disengagement” of the United States from the war.

  The military, however, took a different lesson from Tet. Sensing that the time was right for a knockout blow, Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs asked for an additional 205,000 troops, approval for an amphibious landing north of the 17th parallel, and permission to attack North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos. Lyndon Johnson was, to say the least, conflicted. “I feel like a hitchhiker caught in a hailstorm on a Texas highway,” he remarked to an aide. “I can’t run, I can’t hide. And I can’t make it stop.”41 After conferring with Clark Clifford, the new secretary of defense, Johnson rebuffed his military commanders. He approved an additional 22,000 men, chiefly to help lift the siege of Khe Sanh, and ordered Ambassador Bunker to make a “highly forceful” approach to Thieu and Ky to get their house in order.

  In his March 31 speech, President Johnson announced that henceforward the bombing of North Vietnam would be limited to the area just above the demilitarized zone, and he declared that the United States was ready for peace talks anytime, anywhere, anyplace. In the event the enemy responded positively and such talks opened, LBJ said, Averell Harriman would serve as head of the US delegation. Then came the bombshell: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as president.”42 Johnson had come to the conclusion that much of the divisive debate at home centered on him personally. The prospect of new leadership, he concluded, might lead to reconciliation both in the United States and abroad.

  The “Operation Shock” memo from Colby and his colleagues had played a key role in the decision to deny the request for a major escalation from Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs. It had been the substance of George Carver’s presentation to the Wise Men and their subsequent advice to the president that he throw in the towel in Vietnam. On March 27, LBJ demanded and received the same briefing from Carver. Vice President Hubert Humphrey subsequently wrote to Carver to thank him for his “brutally frank and forthright analysis.” The president’s speech of March 31, Humphrey declared, “indicated that your briefings had a profound effect on the course of U.S. policy on Vietnam.”43 The irony of the “Operation Shock” memo was heavy indeed. Tet would provide Bill Colby and his fellow advocates of the “other war” with their greatest opportunity, but the backlash from that initial pessimistic evaluation would constitute their greatest obstacle.

  After a great deal of back-and-forth concerning the location and composition of delegations, preliminary peace talks opened in Paris on May 13, 1968. Colby recalled a visit by the new secretary of defense and his chief of international security affairs, Paul Warnke, in the spring of 1968. Neither man seemed at all interested in the military’s optimistic reports or the presentations put on by CORDS. “The two visitors departed,” Colby wrote in Lost Victory, “with no successful contradiction of their attitude on arrival—to wit, the United States was deep in a quagmire, and the sooner it withdrew, the better.”44

  Though the Paris talks immediately deadlocked, those on the ground in Vietnam—both Americans and Vietnamese—assumed that a cease-fire was possible. In that eventuality, the two adversaries would have to continue the struggle by other means. Indeed, much of the war after March 1968 was built around this premise, and this gave the CORDS mission of counterinsurgency, pacification, and nation-building a special urgency. “Having failed in their bid for conquest in the Tet attacks, the communists were now laying the groundwork for a claim to political power, or at least participation, and for an effort to negotiate a compromise political solution with the Americans over the heads of the Vietnamese Government,” Colby later observed. “Clearly the response of the Vietnamese Government and its American ally had to be political: to establish legitimate local authority to counter the claims of the Communists and their fronts.”45

  What was clear to Bill Colby was not so clear to President Nguyen Van Thieu. In the wake of Tet, the national government abolished village elections and once again began sending Saigon appointees to rule the countryside. Pressed for a timetable to return South Vietnam to civilian rule, Thieu declared that Americans must understand that “the army could not be removed from politics overnight.” The army was not only “his major political supporter,” but “the only cohesive force holding the country together.”46

  In terms of counterinsurgency and pacification, however, the ARVN continued to be the problem rather than the solution. General Thang, the South Vietnamese minister of reconstruction, confided to his American contacts that, in his opinion, ARVN corps commanders were actively sabotaging pacification. Indeed, the entire South Vietnamese performance was marked by “corruption in the provinces and districts, inefficiency at corps, and incompetence in Saigon.” In the fall of 1968, none other than the director-general of the South Vietnamese National Police, Colonel Tran Van Hai, outlined, in a confidential report to the CIA station, five South Vietnamese weaknesses that, if not remedied, would lead to a communist victory. First was the government’s inability to control the hamlets and villages, an ever-increasing number of which contained a liberation committee. Indeed, by one count, the number of communist-administered villages grew from 397 in September 1968 to 3,367 in mid-January 1969. Second was the government’s failure to secure any support in the nation’s schools and universities. “The best and most dedicated students are also dedicated Communists,” Hai reported; their role models among teachers and professors were “invariably Marxists.” Third was the arrogance of the South Vietnamese leaders and their representatives. In the post-Tet refugee centers, procommunist students and cadres were winning over refugees, while government relief officials “walked around in white shirts, looked down on the refugees and, in some cases, profited from relief supplies.” Fourth, Tri Quang and the Buddhists remained firm in their opposition to the Thieu-Ky regime. Finally, whatever the theoretical merits of democracy, what the government was offering could not compete with the communists, who possessed precisely the “discipline and cohesiveness which the democratic forces lack.”47

  Colby was aware of these weaknesses even before Hai’s report made them explicit. The Johnson administration had been persuaded by the “Operation Shock” memo and eroding domestic support for the war to freeze troop levels, limit the bombing campaign against North Vietnam, and initiate peace talks, but the White House proved unwilling to abandon Thieu. In part, harkening back to McGeorge Bundy’s observation to Colby, there was no institutional way for the United States to avoid dealing with whatever national government existed in South Vietnam. So Colby, undaunted, continued his campaign to build a nation beginning at the village level.

  During a visit to Washington in August 1968, the deputy chief of CORDS presented his plan for a “People’s War” in South Vietnam. It was to be based on the “Three Selfs”: Self-Help, Self-Defense, and Self-Government. White House aides could not decide whether Colby was mimicking Sun Yat-sen or Mao Tse-tung. First, as always, was local self-defense. “Experience had shown that a disarmed village community could be entered and dominated by a five-man enemy squad,” Colby wrote. “If they met no opposition, they could assemble and harangue the population with their message, collect taxes and supplies, and conscript or recruit some of the local youths into the Communist forces.” Even the most modest local self-defense forces could discourage such activities. In the three years that followed, Colby saw to i
t that some 500,000 weapons—mostly of World War II vintage, harvested from the Ruff-Puffs (a nickname for the RFs and PFs), who had been supplied at last with M-16 rifles—went to village defense squads. The Rural Development Cadre would be freed of security duties and allowed to focus on economic development and political indoctrination.48

  By this point, Bob Komer had become a prisoner of the Hamlet Evaluation System and numbers in general. The CORDS chief was losing patience, and what Colby was advocating—essentially emulating the techniques of the communists—required patience. What he proposed was an Accelerated Pacification Campaign (APC) aiming to convert 1,000 hamlets from a “contested” to a relatively “secure” state under the HES ranking system.49 For the APC—and pacification in general—to work, they would have to have the explicit support of the new MACV commander, General Creighton Abrams. Komer had reason to be hopeful.

  Westmoreland’s replacement was a career soldier loyal to his superiors, but his misgivings about search and destroy were well known. “The military . . . have a little problem,” Abrams told his commanders in one briefing, “an institutional problem.” The army could recognize and react to organized violence, he said. “But this trouble [the activities of the liberation committees and the Banh-anh-ninh] that nobody can see, and nobody can hear . . . is just meaner than hell—just going around collecting taxes, quietly snatching somebody and taking him off and shooting him.” He understood the implications of the Paris Peace Talks (though he believed that Harriman and company were giving away too much too soon)—that in the event of a cease-fire, the Americans and South Vietnamese would have to switch to a completely political/guerrilla war. Abrams acknowledged that the operations of US main force units often created more problems for counterinsurgency and pacification than they solved. He deeply resented that the course of the war in Southeast Asia was tied to the vicissitudes of American domestic politics, but, like a good soldier, he was determined to work around the problem. Finally, he appreciated the enemy he was fighting. “The fellows that are running the show up there [in North Vietnam] have been at this a long time,” he observed in another commanders’ meeting. “They’ve been down this road before. They’ve stood right on the precipice and stared hell right straight in the face—and, and, and took it—and took it—and won.”50

  In September, Colby, Komer, and Vann made a pacification presentation to Abrams and his corps commanders. Ambassador Bunker was also in attendance. Colby led off. He described the evolution of North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front from the original Indochinese Communist Party and discussed the activities of the liberation committees, tracing their proliferation on a map. He then outlined the methods and targets of the Accelerated Pacification Campaign. All the military needed to do, he said, was to keep the North Vietnamese Army and what remained of the Viet Cong off-balance and away from areas being pacified. As always, Colby emphasized that there would have to be a political dimension to the APC: “By establishing democratic legitimacy in the villages through local officials, [the APC] would provide a non-Communist structure to counter the claims of the Liberation Committees.” Colby remembered that Abrams listened intently and, at the conclusion of the briefing, thanked Colby warmly. Abrams then gave Komer the go-ahead to work out the details of Accelerated Pacification with President Thieu.51

  Urged on by Joint General Staff Chairman General Cao Van Vien, Thieu signed off on the Advanced Pacification Campaign, and the launch date was set for November 1. Then, suddenly, just as the program was to get underway, Komer was named ambassador to Turkey. He departed South Vietnam without ceremony on November 6. “I accompanied Komer to the small Air Force jet that would take him to Hong Kong for the connection to Washington and thanked him for all he had done to get pacification finally launched as a major strategy of the war,” Colby wrote in Lost Victory. “I thanked him also for arranging for me to succeed him in the job of making it work.” Komer had worn out his welcome. Obsequious though he had been with Bunker and Abrams, he was aggressive and abrasive with everyone else. His tendency to see pacification in terms of the Hamlet Evaluation System had created a multitude of enemies in the field and especially within the CIA station in Saigon. To some he had become absurd. On one occasion he arrived at a party in Saigon following a trip to the provinces clad in a shiny, starched fatigue uniform. A CIA officer standing within earshot of Komer inquired, “Who is that silly-looking twerp?”52

  Komer apparently saw the Accelerated Pacification Campaign almost entirely in military terms, as an opportunity for him to do what Westmoreland and the military had not been allowed to do—take the offensive following Tet. “We can and must achieve victory,” he declared to Washington. “By Tet 69 [that is, 1969, just before the scheduled end of the first phase of the APC], we can make it clear that the enemy has been defeated.” In his hurry to move 1,000 hamlets from the “theirs” to “ours” column, he was willing to abandon the painstaking Rural Development approach designed to demonstrate the South Vietnamese government’s benevolence and attract peasant loyalty. On a Colby memo declaring that the Rural Development Cadre must be the “major political instrument available to confront the VC political apparatus,” Komer had scribbled, “Baloney.”53

  Thus it was that Bill Colby assumed command of CORDS in November 1968 with the personal rank of ambassador. He was now one of the three most powerful Americans in Vietnam. Komer had indeed recommended Colby to replace him, but the former Jedburgh’s main supporters were Abrams and Bunker. The counterinsurgency/pacification struggle was his to win or lose, he believed.54

  Colby decreed that although the APC was nominally a nationwide effort, it should focus on the Mekong Delta. The region contained a disproportionate percentage of the rural population, some 6 million in all, and was the nation’s rice basket. He persuaded Vann to abandon his beloved Hau Nghia and move down to head up the CORDS operation in the delta. While MACV and the ARVN attempted to push communist main force units to the periphery, local security was provided by the mobile Ruff-Puff units and Colby’s village militia. To Thieu’s dismay, CORDS insisted on funneling development funds—up to 1 million piasters per village—directly into the hands of hamlet and village chiefs. Preference was given to the communities that were quickest to hold elections. One village chief, upon hearing that he would be able to expend funds without clearance from national officials, broke down and wept. Vung Tau continued to turn out Rural Development Cadre teams, now slimmed down from fifty-nine to forty men, but also added a six-week training program for village chiefs. Each graduation ceremony was attended by President Thieu and relevant government ministers. In accordance with Marshal Lyautey’s “oil-spot” theory, the APC was to focus on the most populated, most secure settlements first and then spread out to more contested areas.55

  “The Accelerated Pacification Program was a great success,” Colby wrote in Lost Victory. In his cables to Washington, Bunker fully concurred: the South Vietnamese government was able to establish a presence in an additional 1,350 hamlets, he reported. According to the ambassador, by the spring of 1969 the percentage of the population controlled by the Viet Cong nationwide had dropped to 13.3 percent, a new low. The People’s Self-Defense Force claimed 500,000 members, and between November 1968 and January 1969, 17,000 additional weapons were delivered to their keeping. Conflicted though he was, Thieu, in June 1969, authorized Phase II of the new pacification program, which was basically a continuation of the methods and structure of the APC into the indefinite future. The South Vietnamese president was willing to support the program as long as the Americans threw money at it, it succeeded in rooting out Viet Cong cadres, and it did not threaten his political position.56

  By the end of 1970, CORDS comprised more than 1,000 civilians and 5,000 American military personnel spread across the villages and hamlets of South Vietnam. The civilians were graduates of the Vietnam Training Center in Washington, meaning that all had come to Vietnam able to function in spoken and written Vietnamese. Some were State Depar
tment officers, some were from the US Agency for International Development, and some were from the United States Information Service. A few came from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Many of them were extremely bright and motivated individuals, graduates of some of the best universities in the country. A few had previous experience in the Peace Corps. They were independent thinkers, committed but critical. Some had used their days off from the training center to march in antiwar demonstrations. Mike Hacker had joined the Peace Corps in 1962, completing a stint in Bolivia. “I was one of the thousands of young people who at the time were caught up in the Kennedy fever,” he recalled. “We were in college, but we were bored, and along came this idea that just struck the right chord. That we could make a difference.” His first assignment was Vinh Binh Province in the delta.57

  Vinh Binh was one of the most insecure provinces in South Vietnam, at one point ranking forty-fourth out of forty-four in terms of the level of Viet Cong activity. Hacker moved into a house with three other Americans, one USIS and the other two military, who acted as advisers to the armed propaganda teams. Hacker and his compatriots employed every tactic imaginable to persuade Viet Cong to defect and villagers in contested areas to relocate to the Chieu Hoi camps in and around Vinh Binh’s capital city. Chieu Hoi operatives offered cash incentives for defections as well as for any weapons the defectors were able to bring with them. The armed propaganda team members were all former Viet Cong cadres who were carefully screened. Together with their American advisers, they went out into the villages and talked to the people about the benefits of coming over to the government side. There were leaflets for those who could read, and for those who could not, plays extolling the virtues of democracy and capitalism and the vices of communism. Once in the Chieu Hoi camps, villagers were presented with more information in special classes. The instructors were all Vietnamese. Hacker’s job was to go into the camps and converse with as many people as he could, but in particular with former Viet Cong. “I talked to them about their families, their economic situation, their experiences with the VC and the government,” he later recalled. “Many had seen battle with the communist forces. The most reliable converts were those who had been pressed into service, but there were hard-core VC who had been wronged or become disillusioned.”58