Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.)

by Tim Weiner

  On March 28, Schlesinger told the president that it was imperative to cut back on “the prominence of CIA operations” around the world. “Within the CIA there is bitter dissension,” said Schlesinger, who had helped to sow it. The clandestine service was “full of tired-out old agents,” men who might spill secrets. Colby was being “too damned cooperative with the Congress.” The danger of disclosure was growing by the day.

  34. “SAIGON SIGNING

  OFF”

  On April 2, 1975, Bill Colby warned the White House that the United States was about to lose a war.

  “Let me get a grasp on the situation,” Kissinger said. “Is there anywhere the South Vietnamese have a chance of establishing a line and of stopping the North Vietnamese?”

  “North of Saigon here,” Colby said, pointing to a line on a map.

  “That’s hopeless!” Schlesinger shouted.

  Was South Vietnam going to collapse? Kissinger asked. It seemed inevitable to Colby.

  “I think Martin”—Ambassador Graham Martin—“should begin preparing a plan of evacuation,” Kissinger said. “I think we owe—it’s our duty—to get the people who believed in us out…. We have to take out these people who participated in the Phoenix program.” This was the paramilitary campaign of arrest, interrogation, and torture that Colby had helped run as a civilian, with the rank of ambassador, from 1968 to 1971. At a minimum, Phoenix had killed more than twenty thousand Vietcong suspects.

  “The real question now,” said Colby, “is do we try for a redoubt around Saigon?” Or negotiate a face-saving, possibly life-saving, settlement so as to evacuate the capital without bloodshed?

  No negotiations, Kissinger said—“not as long as I am in this chair.” Keep the weapons flowing to Saigon and let the North and the South work it out. “We can save nothing,” he said.

  “Nothing but lives,” Colby replied. But Kissinger was adamant. He would not negotiate a peaceful end to the war.

  On April 9, Colby went back to the White House to try to focus President Ford on the fact that communist armies were closing in on the capitals of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Twenty years of struggle by the military and intelligence forces of the United States were going down the drain.

  “The Communists have begun a new round of fighting, with Saigon as the ultimate target,” Colby told the president and the National Security Council on April 9. The United States needed to start evacuating everyone it could—Americans and Vietnamese—as soon as possible, he said. There would surely be vengeance when Saigon fell. Thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of political, military, and intelligence allies among the South Vietnamese were at risk if they remained.

  “The North Vietnamese now have 18 infantry divisions in South Vietnam,” Colby said. “We believe Hanoi will take whatever action is necessary to force the war to an early conclusion—probably by early summer.” He was off by two months. The city of Saigon, where six thousand American military officers, spies, diplomats, and government aid workers still labored, would fall within three weeks. Colby told the president that “we should ask Congress to commit money to carry out the pledge to let the Vietnamese, perhaps one to two million, leave.” This would have been the biggest emergency evacuation in the history of the United States.

  Colby’s warning did not register anywhere in Washington, not at the White House, not with Congress, not in the Pentagon, and not in the mind of the American ambassador in Saigon. One man understood all too well: the Saigon station chief, Tom Polgar.

  “IT HAS BEEN A LONG FIGHT AND WE HAVE LOST”

  At 4 a.m. on April 29, 1975, Polgar awoke to the sound of rockets and artillery. The airport was under fire. Seven Air America helicopters—the CIA’s shuttle service in South Vietnam—were destroyed. Polgar had hundreds of people to look after. The Americans who worked for him were one problem. The Vietnamese who worked for the CIA, and their families, were another. They were desperate to leave, but getting fixed-wing aircraft in and out of the airport would be impossible now.

  Polgar dressed quickly in a blue shirt and tan slacks, instinctively put his passport in his pocket, and sped to the American embassy. The streets of Saigon, a city of four million people, were empty, under twenty-four-hour curfew. He called Ambassador Martin. Suffering from emphysema and bronchitis, Martin was reduced to anguished whispers. Polgar then contacted Kissinger and the American commander in chief in the Pacific, Admiral Noel Gayler, the former director of the National Security Agency. He received new orders from Washington: push the evacuation of nonessential personnel to the utmost. Kissinger offered no instructions beyond that as to who would stay and who would go and how they would leave.

  The South Vietnamese army was collapsing into chaos. The national police dissolved. The once-silent streets were anarchy.

  President Ford ordered a reduction of the embassy from 600 people to 150. Fifty among those to remain were CIA officers. Polgar did not quite envision the North Vietnamese allowing a robust CIA station to go on working after Saigon fell.

  Inside the embassy, Polgar saw people in states of rage smashing and trampling photographs of Nixon and Kissinger. The embassy had become, in Polgar’s words, “a thirty-three-ring circus, without a ringmaster.”

  At 11:38 a.m. Ford ordered the American mission in Saigon to shut down. Now all Americans had to be out of the city by nightfall. The embassy was surrounded by thousands of panicked Vietnamese, a wall of desperate people. There was only one way in and out, a secret passageway from the parking lot to the garden of the French embassy. Ambassador Martin used it to round up his wife and their servants. Polgar called home. His maid told him he had visitors: a deputy prime minister, a three-star general, the chief of the nation’s communications intelligence agency, the chief of protocol, senior military officers and their families, and many more Vietnamese who had worked with the CIA.

  Three hours after President Ford issued the evacuation order, the first American helicopters arrived from eighty miles offshore. The marine pilots performed with skill and daring, shuttling out about a thousand Americans and close to six thousand Vietnamese. A famous photograph shows one of the last helicopters leaving Saigon, perched on a rooftop, as a trail of people climb a ladder to safety. That photo, for many years, was mislabeled as a shot of the embassy. But in fact it was a CIA safe house, and those were Polgar’s friends clambering aboard.

  Polgar burned all the CIA’s files, cables, and codebooks that evening. Not long after midnight, he composed his farewell: “THIS WILL BE FINAL MESSAGE FROM SAIGON STATION…. IT HAS BEEN A LONG FIGHT AND WE HAVE LOST…. THOSE WHO FAIL TO LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE FORCED TO REPEAT IT. LET US HOPE THAT WE WILL NOT HAVE ANOTHER VIETNAM EXPERIENCE AND THAT WE HAVE LEARNED OUR LESSON. SAIGON SIGNING OFF.”

  Then he blew up the machine that sent the message.

  Thirty years later, Polgar remembered the final moments of the American war in Vietnam: “As we stepped up the narrow metal stairs to the helicopter pad on the roof, we knew we were leaving behind thousands of people in the Embassy’s logistics compound. We all knew how we felt, leaders of a defeated cause.”

  “FIFTEEN YEARS OF HARD WORK THAT TURNED TO NOTHING”

  The CIA’s long war in Laos came to an end two weeks later in a valley surrounded by tall shafts of limestone. The communists surrounded the agency’s central outpost in Long Tieng. The ridge above the valley was covered with North Vietnamese soldiers. Tens of thousands of the Hmong—the CIA’s fighters and their families—were gathering at the primitive airstrip, hoping for a flight. The agency had no plans to save them after fifteen years of paramilitary missions.

  One CIA officer remained at Long Tieng: Jerry Daniels, a onetime Montana smoke jumper known to his Hmong friends as “Sky.” He was thirty-three years old and he had been up-country for close to ten years. He was the case officer for General Vang Pao, the military and political leader of the Hmong and the agency’s greatest asset in Laos since 1960. Daniels was one of seven CIA officers—Bill L
air and Ted Shackley included—who had been awarded the Order of the Million Elephants and the White Parasol by the king of Laos in gratitude for their work.

  Daniels pleaded with Dan Arnold, the station chief in Laos, to send planes to Long Tieng. It was “imperative that the evacuation proceed without delay,” Arnold said in an oral history. But there weren’t any planes. “Of course the authorization for an airlift had to go to Washington, and this was done with the highest precedence,” Arnold said. “This went from CIA to the White House…. Washington was repeatedly requested to urgently arrange for additional airlift capability because we had drawn down so heavily. The problem was occasioned by delays at the highest political level.”

  On May 12, 1975, the CIA scoured up the last two C-46 aircraft in Thailand. The planes, roughly the size of a DC-3, belonged to Continental Air Services, a private contractor for the agency. Over the years, hundreds of planes of that size had landed on the Long Tieng airstrip carrying cargo. But they always left empty, barely clearing the high ridgeline. No one had ever flown a loaded C-46 out of Long Tieng. The planes were built to carry thirty-five passengers. With twice that number aboard, and thousands clamoring to get on each flight, they slowly began the evacuation.

  In Bangkok, on the morning of May 13, Air Force Brigadier General Heinie Aderholt, chief of the U.S. Military Assistance Command in Thailand, got a call from a stranger. General Aderholt, who had worked alongside the CIA on air operations for twenty years, ran the only functioning American military operation remaining in Southeast Asia. “The guy did not identify himself by name,” the general remembered. “He said the U.S. was abandoning the Hmong at Long Tieng. He used that word, ‘abandoning.’” The stranger asked Aderholt to send a four-engine C-130—a midsized cargo transport plane—to save the Hmong. Aderholt somehow found an American pilot who was minutes from clearing the departure lounge at the Bangkok airport and offered him $5,000 in cash to fly the C-130 to Long Tieng. Then he called the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General George Brown, for authority to carry out the mission. That afternoon, the C-130 arrived. Hundreds of Hmong loaded themselves within a few minutes; the plane departed and returned the next morning.

  The CIA’s Jerry Daniels was running the evacuation, serving as bodyguard to General Vang Pao, working as flight controller at the airstrip, and holding a lifeline for fifty thousand panicked people. Daniels and Vang Pao could not be seen to abandon the troops and their families. When the C-130 returned on the morning of May 14, thousands of Hmong ran for its rear cargo door. It was a scene of fury and despair. Vang Pao stole away to a helicopter landing zone a few miles away; a CIA crew spirited him away.

  Daniels procured a plane for himself. The flight log reads: “All was in turmoil…. We took off at 10:47 and this ended the secret CIA base at Long Tieng, Laos.” A CIA contract pilot on the scene, Captain Jack Knotts, recorded an audiotape memorializing the final minutes of the long war in Laos. Daniels, carrying a briefcase and a case of Olympia beer, rolled up to the landing zone in his white-and-blue Ford Bronco. He stepped out of the car and then stopped dead. “He won’t get in the chopper,” Knotts said. “He doesn’t want to leave yet! He gets his briefcase out of the back, and then he starts talking on the radio. He messes around and messes around and finally—and this is a very bad thing because he’s been there for so long—he salutes. He comes to attention, just like he is saluting the jeep. But he is really saluting ten or fifteen years of hard work that turned to nothing.”

  Richard Helms called Laos “the war we won.” It was hard to see how. Ford and Kissinger forced a political arrangement that certified communist control of the country. “And then we left,” said the CIA’s Dick Holm, who had started his thirty-five-year career at the CIA in Laos. Those among the Hmong who survived wound up in refugee camps or in exile. “Their way of life has been destroyed,” Holm wrote. “They can never return to Laos.” The United States, he said, “failed to assume the moral responsibility that we owed to those who worked so closely with us during those tumultuous years.”

  Jerry Daniels died of gas poisoning at his apartment in Bangkok seven years after the evacuation of Long Tieng. He was forty years old. No one knows if he took his own life.

  35. “INEFFECTIVE AND

  SCARED”

  The CIA was being sacked like a conquered city. Congressional committees were combing through its files, the Senate focusing on covert action, the House homing in on failures of espionage and analysis. In the streets of Washington, handmade posters of Bill Colby had appeared, inscribed with skulls and crossbones and the ace of spades. The agency’s senior officers feared personal and professional ruin. The White House feared political destruction. In the Oval Office on October 13, 1975, the president and his men met to weigh the damage.

  “Any document which officially shows American involvement in an assassination is a foreign policy disaster,” Colby told the president. “They also want to go into sensitive covert operations”—like Laos. Would the White House go to the courts to stop Congress? “We are better off with a political confrontation than a legal one,” said Don Rumsfeld. To prepare for that fight, the president shook up his cabinet at the end of October 1975.

  The move was instantly called the Halloween Massacre. Jim Schlesinger was dismissed and Don Rumsfeld became secretary of defense. Dick Cheney took his place as White House chief of staff. And, in an uncharacteristically Machiavellian move, Ford neutralized a potentially troublesome challenger for the 1976 presidential nomination by firing Bill Colby and making George Herbert Walker Bush the next director of central intelligence. It was on its face a strange choice.

  Bush was not a general, an admiral, or a spy. He knew almost nothing about intelligence. He was a politician pure and simple. The son of Prescott Bush, a patrician U.S. senator from Connecticut who had been a good friend to Allen Dulles, he had moved to Texas to seek his fortune in the oil business. He served two terms in Congress. He ran for the Senate twice and lost. He had been United Nations ambassador for twenty-two months and Nixon’s relentlessly cheery Republican National Committee chairman during Watergate. In August 1974, Ford had come very close to making Bush vice president. His failure to win the job was the worst blow of his political life. His consolation prize was a choice of prestigious ambassadorships, and he had chosen China. From Beijing, Bush had seen the struggles of the CIA through a thick prism, relying on the radio reports of the Voice of America and clippings from week-old newspapers.

  But his political instincts told him what the job had to offer. “Bury Bush at the CIA?” he asked himself. “It’s a graveyard for politics,” he wrote. He told Ford: “I see this as the total end of any political future.” The prospect depressed him. But his sense of propriety impelled him to say yes.

  Within weeks after becoming director at the end of January 1976, Bush discovered that he loved the agency—the secrecy, the camaraderie, the gadgetry, the international intrigue. The CIA was Skull and Bones with a billion-dollar budget. “This is the most interesting job I’ve ever had,” he wrote to a friend in March. In less than eleven months at the helm, he bucked up morale at headquarters, defended the CIA against all critics, and deftly used the agency to build a political base for his soaring ambitions.

  Beyond that, he accomplished little. From the start, Bush ran headlong into Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who had control over 80 percent of the intelligence budget. That money belongs to me, Rumsfeld said; spy satellites and electronic surveillance and military intelligence were all battlefield support for American soldiers. Though the American military was in full retreat, Rumsfeld stiff-armed Bush. He was strongly disinclined to let the director of central intelligence have a say in shaping the secret spending. Rumsfeld was “paranoid” about the CIA and, convinced that the agency was out to “spy on him,” cut off long-standing channels of communication and cooperation between the Pentagon and the CIA, the veteran analyst George Carver said in a CIA oral history interview.

  The recruitmen
t of new officers in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam was extraordinarily difficult. The agency was top-heavy with middle-aged bureaucrats playing for time; Bush eased out twelve of the sixteen most senior officers at headquarters to try to make some headroom. He wanted to name his own chief of the clandestine service, so he called in Colby’s chief, Bill Nelson, and said it was time for him to leave. Nelson saluted and left, but not before dropping a memo on Bush’s desk that told him that the clandestine service had two thousand too many officers. Bush, in the tradition of Allen Dulles, buried the study.

  “THE CIA WAS CUT OFF”

  “This is a turbulent and troublesome period for the Agency,” Bush wrote to President Ford on June 1, 1976. “The intensive investigations by both Houses of the Congress for more than a year now have resulted in extensive public disclosures of past and current covert action operations.” The investigations led the Senate to create an intelligence oversight committee while Bush was director; the House set one up a year later. If only the president could find a way to shield the CIA from Congress, Bush wrote, then “covert action operations will continue to make the positive contribution to our foreign policy that they have made over the past twenty-eight years.”

  But the agency, under a newly vigilant Congress, had very few new covert-action operations under way. In a written response to questions from the author, Bush contended that the congressional investigations did long-lasting damage to the agency. They “set back our liaison relationships around the world”—the CIA’s links with foreign intelligence services, the source of so much of the information it gathered—and “they caused many people abroad to pull away from cooperating with the CIA.” Worst of all, he said, “they devastated the morale of perhaps the finest group of public servants this country has.”