by Tom Bissell
Indeed, with the exception of an amazing 1970 U.S. raid on a North Vietnamese prison camp twenty-three miles away from Hanoi (though the American prisoners had been moved by the time the camp was stormed), the story of U.S. covert operations during the Vietnamese War is largely one of consistent failure. In response to the Bay of Pigs disaster, President Kennedy took the responsibility for covert operations in Vietnam away from the CIA and gave it to the Pentagon. The possibilities of the SOG's “unconventional warfare” were enthusiastically entertained by many in the Kennedy administration, Dean Rusk being a notable exception. Robert McNamara's early belief, crushed by reality within two years, was that covert operations could break the back of North Vietnam's Politburo, despite the CIA's predictions that such work had no chance in North Vietnam's “kind of society”—that is, tightly knit, xenophobic, and oppressive. General William Westmoreland believed that the “professors” in Kennedy's government were a bit too credulous when it came to unconventional warfare. What they did not understand, Westmoreland held, was that special operations tended to hog the most highly trained personnel and often got them killed.
The doubters were on to something. It was true that many of the SOG's operations were conceptually brilliant, such as the scheme of dropping into North Vietnam hundreds of parachutes with ice blocks in their harnesses, so that when patrols found the empty chutes they would believe North Vietnam had been infiltrated by a small guerrilla army. But many other operations resulted in the deaths of hundreds of local agents, most of whom were ethnic Nung, a group used by the United States, since the ARVN did not consider the Nung draftable. Thus the SOG sent five hundred “long-term agents” into North Vietnam. Not one was “exfiltrated.” In other words, they were all killed or captured. Weirdly, the SOG's goal during these deadly shenanigans was never the toppling of Ho Chi Minh's government, only steady harassment. As the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge explained, if Ho Chi Minh fell, “his successor would undoubtedly be worse.”
The SOG settled upon a program of dirty tricks. A chemical contaminant called Bitrex was used to poison the North's rice supplies. It did not kill but merely made rice inedibly bitter. The State Department initially failed to see the difference, regarding Bitrex as an illegal form of chemical warfare (though napalm was fine). The SOG also papered North Vietnam with pamphlets emblazoned with “I saw you” in Vietnamese above a picture of a North Vietnamese soldier within a rifle sight. Below that: “Next time you die.” It also dumped into North Vietnam AK-47s designed to explode when the trigger was pulled. In some areas SOG agents slapped up posters of Ho Chi Minh buggering children that triggered an explosive when torn down. According to Shultz, “highly authentic replicas” of North Vietnamese money were also printed. Agents were preparing to flood North Vietnam with the counterfeit money and destroy its economy until it was pointed out that this was actually unbelievably illegal.
This secret war was mostly shut down in 1968, when President Johnson announced a halt to the post-Tet Offensive bombing. When North Vietnam returned its 591 prisoners of war to the United States in 1973, there were no SOG or covert operators among them, despite the fact that some are known to have been taken alive. The final fates of these dozen or so secret warriors are the only actual POW/MIAs whose whereabouts the United States has any real call to question.
The coast was gone now. We were inland, amid the jungle, and soon a Vietnamese wedding procession began to pass us in the opposite direction, the lead car wrapped in yellow ribbons. Hien explained that, as with all things in Vietnam, there was a rigid hierarchy at work here. Rich families drove buses during their wedding processions; middle-class families drove cars; poor families drove scooters; really poor families walked. As the ribboned cars passed by, my father declaimed something about how, in America, people usually waited until the weekend to get married, so they did not miss work. Today was Wednesday. Most likely the day's date was regarded as some kind of “lucky” day: Vietnamese, by and large, tend toward numerological consultation and astral divination in most life matters.
“That is true?” Hien asked.
“Yes,” my father said.
“I don't understand,” Hien said.
“It's important to Americans that they don't miss work.”
Despite a polite nod, Hien was obviously unconvinced. What was work when compared with the celebration of one's family?
I looked at my father. “It's really uncanny.”
He returned my attention. “What's uncanny?”
“You're a complete and utter square.”
“Cut it.”
“No, really. Do you have corners?”
“Enough.”
Query: Why did officials at all levels of the U.S. military and government lie so often during the war?
A journalist named Murray Marder coined the term “credibility gap” during the Vietnamese War's early years, and this shattering of the public trust is probably the war's most profound and seemingly irreversible bequest. But any serious discussion of the war must consider the argument, made by some revisionists, that the lies told by those waging the war were, in many cases, understandable. After all, the appropriateness of “telling the truth” is always mutable in the face of higher imperatives. During times of conflict, one can hardly expect governments to behave with complete transparency, since a major component of every war is secrecy of action and misdirection of intent.
Especially in a war that saw the United States constantly playing catch-up. However one regards Vietnam's Communists, it is hard to deny that they were on the verge of winning power in 1945 when a multilateral fiat blew out that verge from beneath them. Or that the Communists were again on the verge of winning power in 1954 when another multilateral fiat blew out that verge from beneath them. Or that the Communists were on the verge of winning power a third time in 1964 when the United States slammed down its foot to roadblock the verge once and for all. For the U.S. officials responsible for widening the Vietnamese War, anti-Communism as a practice had become synonymous with freedom as an ideal, and if one had to lie to ensure that freedom, so be it. Lying often and enthusiastically became not only desirable but absolutely crucial to keep hidden the various miscalculations of U.S. policy.
According to the historian Fredrik Logevall, Paul Kattenburg, the State Department's leading expert on Vietnam, announced in 1963 that the war was hopeless, that the South could never win, and that the only option left for the United States was withdrawal. Within a year the State Department's resident Vietnam expert had been excluded from all policy decisions involving Vietnam. Years later, with the oral historian Christian G. Appy, Kattenburg would have words for the men who had pushed him out: “[W]hat struck me more than anything else was just the abysmal ignorance around the table of the particular facts of Vietnam, their ignorance of the actual place. They didn't know what they were talking about. It was robot thinking about Communism and no distinctions were being made.” The meeting in which he voiced his career-ending objections ended with Kattenburg thinking to himself, “We're walking into a major disaster.”
The fact remains that the type and quality of U.S. lies during the war varied greatly. There were, for example, institutional lies told by the military (inflated enemy body counts, exaggerations that turned indecisive skirmishes into victories and victories into Waterloo-grade routs); self-delusional lies told by government officials (hiding or eliding evidence that suggested the war was going badly, using the gag of patriotism to pressure pessimistic lower-ranking officials into silence); and finally the bigger-picture executive lies told by the likes of Richard Nixon (announcing in 1969 that the first withdrawal of American soldiers had been President Thieu's idea when in fact Thieu had fiercely opposed it) and Lyndon Johnson (who campaigned in 1964 as the “peace candidate” while fully intending to expand the war as soon as he was elected). Some lies, in other words, differed little from those told by all governments during wartime, while others were the sulfuric stuff of human m
alevolence itself. Robert McNamara has suggested that what in many cases looks like lying today was at the time more akin to a willful deafness and blindness. What they were often doing, McNamara argues, was not lying but reacting without bothering to examine the reasoning behind those reactions. McNamara's view finds some concurrence among scholars, one of whom has described U.S. policy during the period of 1961 to 1968 as “whatever looked like a good idea at the time.”
The men of Lyndon Johnson's cabinet were contemptuous of the liberals who wanted to negotiate an end to the Vietnamese War and frightened of the conservatives who sought to widen the conflict at the risk of including China. (McNamara claims they were more worried about the latter group.) Lyndon Johnson and his advisers rejected both options early on, settling instead upon a radicalized middle course that became known as “flexible response” or “graduated pressure.” This proved an easy doctrine to practice but an extremely difficult one to justify without a framework of lies. Intended to prevent peripheral struggles such as the war in Vietnam from escalating into a nuclear exchange, graduated pressure, it was thought, would compel North Vietnam's leadership toward recognizing that the more support South Vietnam's insurgency received, the more retaliatory U.S. action North Vietnam could expect. The many ways in which this approach was grossly inappropriate for the war in Vietnam are now obvious: the United States had little contact with the North Vietnamese, few conduits through which to transmit its subtler intentions, and virtually no understanding of Hanoi's mind-set. At the time, however, graduated pressure seemed a wise and even prudent path. President Johnson was especially taken with it, as it allowed him political leverage and the illusion of logical cause-and-effect. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, however, loathed graduated pressure and its clear suggestion that traditional military thinking was obsolete. Many military men loathed Robert McNamara, graduated pressure's most enthusiastic early supporter, as well.
In some ways McNamara earned the military's dislike, as he did not often have much use for standard military solutions. But the “almost cavalier” manner (McNamara's words) in which the generals discussed the use of nuclear weapons in Southeast Asia led McNamara to view much traditional military thinking with horror. As the generals began to sense their lack of access to McNamara, their disgust for him and his “whiz kids” in the Defense Department grew exponentially. (In 1967, the literary critic Dwight Macdonald noted sagely that McNamara “must be a great trial to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as if the College of Cardinals found themselves with an atheist pope.”) One of these whiz kids opined in a memo that, while planning military operations, actual military experience “can be a disadvantage because it discourages seeing the larger picture.” A paternalistic, arrogant view—though can one really claim it is altogether false? Consider Curtis LeMay, the Air Force general who guaranteed President Kennedy that the Soviets would do nothing during the Cuban Missile Crisis if the United States invaded Cuba. As is now clear, the Soviets would have responded to an invasion of Cuba by rendering roughly a dozen stars on the U.S. flag unnecessary. Nevertheless, LeMay and the Joint Chiefs, who believed that Saigon was as militarily significant as Berlin, argued during the war's early years that using nuclear weapons in Vietnam might well lead to “confrontation” with the USSR or China, but on the plus side “atomic weapons should result in a considerable reduction in friendly casualties and in more rapid cessation of hostilities.” (In 1961, the Joint Chiefs had also alluded to the advisability of nuking Laos.) McNamara, “appalled” by such thinking, began to suspect that these medaled, can-do men were utterly mad. Of course, the Joint Chiefs were not mad. They were trying to win a war, which in their analysis was a purely military exploit. Reluctant to question its own means, though quick to take issue with everyone else's, the U.S. military invariably sought to pursue the most effective—which is to say, the most extreme—path available to it in Vietnam. Nonmilitary concerns, such as South Vietnam's political problems and the sanctity of its civilians’ lives, were often viewed as falling outside the parameters of military planning. Which suggests that McNamara's arrogant whiz-kid deputy was, in fact, on to something.
It also suggests why so many U.S. officials felt they needed to lie. One less well known aspect of the war's early years is, in one historian's words, the “pronounced pessimism at the center of American strategy on Vietnam,” which appears as early as 1961. It is a myth that the U.S. public supported the war in Vietnam prior to its official beginning. There was, in fact, a widespread lack of support for the prospect of war before the Marines splashed ashore near Danang in 1965. In September 1963, The New Republic presciently argued that if the United States truly wanted to frustrate China's ambitions in Southeast Asia, support of Ho Chi Minh's government was a good bet to do so. Even the heartland's Milwaukee Journal came out for withdrawal in 1963. One 1964 poll gave an 81 percent approval rating to a negotiated “peace arrangement” in Vietnam (though another poll from the same year found that a quarter of the American people were unaware that China was a Communist country). Lyndon Johnson himself saw the danger of war in Vietnam, even as he lied to escalate it, which is what makes the war a Shakespearean, rather than a Greek, tragedy. This is Johnson from May 1964: “[Vietnam] just worries the hell out of me. I don't see what we can ever hope to get out of this…. It's damn easy to get into a war, but… it's going to be harder to ever extricate yourself if you get in.”
Johnson was forced to dispatch deputies on so many “fact-finding” missions to South Vietnam because the information coming out of the embassy was not always trustworthy. Higher-level officials in the Johnson administration often kept vital strategic information from lower-level ones. The information the CIA station in Saigon sent through the embassy was occasionally altered. The information the CIA in Washington was sending the secretary of defense was being redacted as well. At one point the commander of the U.S. advisory mission in Vietnam and the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam were not speaking. The Joint Chiefs squabbled among themselves for plums for their respective branches of service. McNamara routinely closed the Joint Chiefs out of discussions. Johnson himself was so personally averse to disagreement, and so astonishingly commanding a physical presence, that he actually made people frightened of the prospect of giving him bad news. A war game the Pentagon devised and carried out in 1964 basically predicted the war's final outcome. Unfortunately, no one passed these results on to Johnson.
Like another U.S. president, Johnson was a shrewd judge of people and the pressure points at which they could be influenced; he counted on this supernatural skill to get things done. Like another U.S. president, Johnson viewed “getting things done,” the mere activity of it, as a virtue. Like another U.S. president, Johnson dodged dangerous duty during his military service. Like another U.S. president, Johnson overextended the military he unwisely deployed and attempted to fight an “easy” war on the cheap. (Johnson's gutting of the military before the war in Vietnam began is not widely known. U.S. forces were frightfully undermanned during the war's first two years. Lieutenant General Harold G. Moore wrote that at the time of the battle of la Drang in 1965, “Alpha Company had 115 men, 49 fewer than authorized. Bravo Company, at 114 men, was 50 short. Charlie Company had 106 men, down by 58. And the weapons company, Delta, had only 76 men, 42 fewer than authorized.”) Like another U.S. president, Johnson dismissed as cowardice all neutral opinion. Like another U.S. president, Johnson's powers of persuasion, so overwhelming when one was face-to-face with him, had little effect on those thousands of miles away.
Nowhere is Lyndon Johnson's penchant for deceitfulness more notoriouly evident than during the Gulf of Tonkin incident. In the three days before August 2, 1964, a South Vietnamese spy had been airdropped into North Vietnamese territory and instantly captured, the North Vietnamese coast had been shelled by South Vietnamese gunboats, and two inland areas had been bombed on succeeding days. In the midst of all this, a U.S. destroyer called the Maddox was ordered to travel along North Vietnam's coast at no closer t
han eight miles, then proceed into Chinese waters to see what kind of cooperation commenced between China and North Vietnam. Hanoi had never declared what it viewed as its naval borders, but the U.S. assumed it was three miles, or perhaps twelve. (In fact, it was twelve.) The Maddox was also “showing the flag,” which is to say floating around in enemy waters largely because it could. This was in itself not particularly bellicose behavior, as Edwin Mo'ise, the world's foremost Tonkin scholar, points out. Throughout the Cold War the Soviets ran their submarines mere yards beyond accepted U.S. territorial boundaries for the same purposes of mild intimidation. One of the men aboard the Maddox, Mo'ise writes, assumed it was going to be a “leisure cruise,” while another crewman later reported a distinct feeling of being used as bait. The August 2 attack on the Maddox by North Vietnamese torpedo boats, whose orders are still debated, is today widely accepted by scholars and historians. The North Vietnamese launched three torpedoes, two of which missed and one of which hit. It was a Soviet torpedo, which is to say, it was a dud. One of the Maddux's stacks was also hit by a shell apparently shot from a 14.5 mm machine gun, a piece of which Robert McNamara later personally requested to see.
The lies concerning the first attack on a U.S. Navy vessel since World War II instantly began to congeal. U.S. officials maintained that the Maddox had been thirty miles away from North Vietnam's coast, that it had been on a routine patrol, and that the North Vietnamese had fired first. (The Maddox fired first, though the manner in which the North Vietnamese approached left the Maddox's commanding officer with no other option.) It was also claimed that U.S. fighters did not attempt to pursue and sink the aggressive torpedo boats after the skirmish, even though they did.