by Gerard Colby
Vaky’s concern was for SIL’s survival as an American presence in Colombia. SIL’s expulsion would damage the United States’ reputation and the U.S. Embassy’s ability to gather intelligence on Colombia’s hinterlands.
SIL was in contact with the U.S. Embassy. An SIL spokesman, noted Vaky, “pointed out that Lopez set no time limit for the Colombian take-over.… In addition … Cornelio Reyes said that he would speak on behalf of the SIL programs.”31
Cornelio Reyes, Lopez’s interior minister, was a large landowner in the Planas region of the Guajibo Indians, near where exploration by American oil companies was taking place. He had also backed landlords in the fertile Cauca valley, where Indians who were active in the Regional Indian Council of the Cauca (CRIC), including those who were training their own bilingual teachers and organizing mass passive resistance to the theft of Indian lands, were being arrested, tortured, and murdered. Now Reyes was suddenly posing as the champion of Indian bilingual education—at least as carried out by SIL. He agreed with Cam’s translators that “outside agitators” could be found everywhere there were “Indian problems.” To SIL, these “agitators” were the agents of Satan. To Reyes, they were communists. The distinction blurred.
In November, besieged by congressional critics, SIL’s Colombia branch called for help from beyond the U.S. Embassy. It turned to the man who had led SIL’s advance to Lomalinda out of donated Standard Oil trailers and who had been “retired” from the field only four years earlier.
CAM TO THE RESCUE
Cam Townsend flew into Bogotá and threw himself into organizing SIL’s defense with the energy of a much younger man. Needed as more than just a legend, he found that he still had the old skills and hard drive. He worked the halls of government like a pro from Capitol Hill, making discreet calls on high officials, marshaling his old allies, and using whatever help Vaky’s embassy could provide. When a congressman displayed U.S. military maps designating the Macarena Mountains as a security zone and charged that a secret U.S. base existed there equipped with missiles, Colombia’s defense minister did a turn for the Lord. A former critic of SIL’s alleged clandestine operations, he was now ready to defend SIL and publicly dismissed the claims as fabrications.
Ambassador Vaky cabled Kissinger with reassurances that “Colombianization … is essentially what the SIL has proposed for the new contract. The López move may, accordingly, provide an arrangement satisfactory to both parties while providing an appearance of [government] action that should placate most SIL critics here.”32
The same was true in Peru, where the battle in Colombia was carefully monitored by SIL’s friends and foes. “The reported [expulsion from Colombia] will complicate the scheduled February renewal of SIL’s contract,” U.S. Ambassador Robert Dean cabled Kissinger.33 Dean was another old hand in intelligence circles, having worked closely with the CIA and the Pentagon on a number of missions in the past, including the 1964 coup in Brazil.34 Now Dean was in volatile Peru, where SIL was not above criticism. SIL’s Fundamentalists did not bring Peruvians into the organization or its decision-making process, reported anthropologist Stefano Varese of the Ministry of Agriculture in the government of Juan Velasco Alvarado.35 Peruvian linguists and anthropologists charged that government dependence on SIL for bilingual education programs was not healthy for Latin America or Indians.36 Moreover, SIL made arbitrary interventions in tribal affairs, entering tribes without permission and flying JAARS planes without regard for national borders.
Negotiations over SIL seemed to be going the way of the nationalization of Standard Oil, until a military coup came to the rescue once again.
President Velasco’s revolution had been bankrupted by his trans-Andean pipeline to Amazonian oil fields that every American company but Armand Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum had trouble finding. Forced out of office by his fellow officers in 1975, Velasco was replaced by a more conservative general, Francisco Morales Bermudez. The new president proved more amenable to Kissinger’s regional designs, including the reversal of Velasco’s nationalizations and agrarian reforms and acceptance of World Bank president Robert McNamara’s demands for tightening already short Peruvian belts. In the midst of this reversal, Ambassador Dean paid his respects to SIL’s Yarinacocha base. He discussed the renewal of contracts and applauded Cam Townsend at a banquet in his honor. Cam pushed for Peru’s renewal of its contract with SIL before flying on to Bogotá to do the same there. In Colombia, he hosed down the last embers with an endorsement by López’s education minister, Llanos landowner Hernando Duran Dusan.
Cam flew back to the United States to find that the CIA’s use of missionaries had escalated into a major international scandal. The publicizing of Banzer’s Plan of Action had prompted an ad hoc coalition of Protestant and Catholic missionaries to draft a suggested “Code of Ethics and Action” on involvement with the CIA. This code of ethics inspired Senator Mark Hatfield, a supporter of Protestant overseas missions in the past (including SIL), to ask William Colby to halt the CIA’s use of missionaries. Colby rejected Hatfield’s request. “I believe it would be neither necessary nor appropriate to bar any connection between CIA and the clergy and the churches.” Colby wrote:
In many countries of the world representatives of the clergy, foreign and local, play a significant role and can be of assistance to the United States through CIA with no reflection upon their integrity nor their mission.… Thus, I believe that any sweeping prohibition such as you suggest would be a mistake and impose a handicap on this Agency which would reduce its future effectiveness to a degree not warranted by the real facts of the situation.37
Hatfield then wrote President Ford, noting reports of the CIA’s use of missionaries in Chile and in Mozambique and Angola. In the latter country, the chief of the CIA task force that was using tribal differences to foster a civil war was actually posing as a missionary.
If legislation was needed to put a stop to this practice, Hatfield was prepared to introduce it, he warned Ford. The integrity of American religious missions was not the only thing being threatened; missionaries’ lives were at stake. Efforts to secure the release of missionaries who had been captured in Vietnam were being answered with charges that the missionaries were involved with the CIA.
THE BANMETHUOT FOURTEEN
SIL translators Jim and Carolyn Miller had been among the missionaries who were captured when the Saigon regime collapsed in April 1975. In fact, they had been caught at the beginning of the collapse, in March, when the CIA’s Montagnard troops in the Central Highlands once again revolted against Saigon’s rule. The Millers had been working with the same Brú tribe that the CIA used in cross-border attacks against North Vietnamese supply lines along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in neighboring Laos. When the Vietnamese struck back against the CIA base in the Brú town of Khe Sanh during the 1968 Tet Offensive, the Millers barely escaped.
In 1974, they had followed Brú refugees when they were relocated by the CIA to Banmethuot, a large town in the Central Highlands. It was here, a center of CIA activity among the Radê who dominated the area, that SIL and the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA) had suffered severe losses during the Tet Offensive. Despite the prominence of the missionary compound near the Vietnamese army base and the fact that it had been the site of most of the deaths of missionaries during Tet, the Millers moved into a C&MA house there. As in 1968, when the missionaries were captured with a Radê-speaking AID official, the Millers took refuge from the fighting in the house of the local AID official, Paul Struharik, not knowing that the house had previously been occupied by the CIA.38 Here, they found themselves with Jay Scarborough, a visiting member of the International Volunteer Service, and Enrique Tolentino, a Filipino community development specialist working with AID under the CIA-sponsored Operation Brotherhood. Peter Whitlock, an Australian who had just arrived from Chiang Mai, Thailand (where he had been setting up tribal-language radio broadcasts), was also with them. Struharik was frantically trying to contact the CIA’s Air America wi
th the missionaries’ radio using a code name: “Any Air America station. Any Air American station. This is Foxtrot. This is Foxtrot.”39
The presence of such AID-linked Americans among them, and the fact that the missionary International Voluntary Service in Vietnam and Laos was funded entirely by the U.S. government,40 did not help the Millers convince the Vietnamese Communists that they were not CIA agents. The CIA had left officers and agents behind as “sheep-dipped” civilians when the Kissinger–Le Duc Tho cease-fire was finally signed in 1973, and Struharik suspected that his radio appeals had been monitored. “We know there are 24,000 American military men in Vietnam masquerading as civilians,” was one of the first statements the Millers heard from their captors.41
Senator Hatfield’s concerns were based on such realities. Jerry Ford was guided by the concern of Director Colby and probably other members of the National Security Council that the CIA should have access to missionaries’ knowledge and contacts.
On November 5, Ford had his White House counsel, Philip Buchen, respond to Hatfield. Buchen argued that “the President does not feel it would be wise at present to prohibit the CIA from having any connection with the clergy. Clergymen throughout the world are often valuable sources of intelligence and many clergymen, motivated solely by patriotism, voluntarily and willingly aid the government by providing information of intelligence value.”42
For all his legal experience, Buchen carelessly had conceded that the CIA’s use of missionaries was standard procedure. That admission confirmed Hatfield’s worst fears, and Ford’s intransigence forced him to go public in the next month. By then, it was already all over for Colby. Rockefeller and Kissinger had been upset with Colby’s candor early in the year before congressional committees. By sacrificing the CIA director, Ford was able to placate the Angleton Counter-intelligence wing in the CIA and the Rockefeller wing of his party, while offering outraged clergy, congressional critics, the press, and the public a scapegoat for the CIA’s abuses.
To replace Colby, Ford appointed a man close to Rockefeller’s own views, Connecticut-Yankee-turned-Texan George Bush, former congressman and current ambassador to China (and the son of a prominent Wall Street investment banker and former United States senator). Bush was a presidential contender, but his appointment as the nation’s top sleuth when the CIA’s reputation was at an all-time low effectively killed his chances in 1976.43
SIL officials showed no displeasure at Ford’s sacking of Colby. Colby’s admission and defense of the CIA’s use of missionaries could have jeopardized lives, including the Millers’. During interrogation in Hanoi, Paul Struharik had been pressured to state that the missionaries had collaborated with him in intelligence work. “They tried to get me to admit that the missionaries in Banmethuot were an intelligence gathering network which reported to me,” he told the Millers. “They couldn’t believe that we never met socially and that I didn’t go to your houses or you to mine. I gave them a little talk on difference in life styles, and I think that helped them to understand.”44
It did. The missionaries’ sincerity about wanting to bring the Bible to tribes won over Hanoi’s officials. After almost eight months in captivity, the “Banmethuot Fourteen,” including Struharik and Tolentino, were going home. Exchanging gifts with the staff and commander of the prisoner-of-war camp, they were urged to “give a true report of what you have seen and experienced.”45
The Millers and their friends were flown first to Vientiane, Laos, and then to Bangkok, Thailand, for a press conference and an interview with Far Eastern Broadcasting’s Manila correspondent. After a short rest, they flew to the Philippines for debriefing by SIL officials and a reunion in Muslim Mindanao with the displaced Vietnam branch. Their compatriots were now calling themselves the Mainland Southeast Asia Branch, dreaming of “an expanded ministry.” But that would not happen.
Laos remained closed to them. Nepal was considering SIL’s expulsion for alleged religious conversions and “divisive” vernacular translations. Cambodia’s Lon Nol government had fallen to the Khmer Rouge, who hated the Communist victors in Vietnam almost as much as they hated the Americans and their Cambodian urban collaborators. Burma was still nervous about the CIA’s use of tribes and the Nationalist Chinese troops in the separatist Shan states in the north, and negotiations with Thailand would not improve until the democracy was again overthrown by the military in 1977.
Most of SIL’s Vietnam veterans ended up not in mainland Asia, but in Sabah, the Malaysian northern half of Borneo. Sabah was now open to missionaries and oil companies, which would soon be drilling offshore west of Mount Kinabalu.
The Lord’s work among the Montagnards remained stymied, notwithstanding the transmission of SIL-translated gospels to the lost highlands by Far Eastern Broadcasting. Overall, by early 1976, some SILers had concluded that the CIA’s use of missionaries had closed more doors for the Lord than it opened.
At SIL’s Washington office, David Farah joined the chorus of church officials backing Senator Hatfield’s legislation that would bar the CIA’s contact with missionaries.46 “I feel the bill has many aspects in it that would help us to be free from the stigma of the CIA,” he said. “This degrades the entire profession of missionaries and it makes us all suspect because of the actions of a few. The missionaries that I have heard were operating have left their missions and their mission boards, which I think is the only honorable thing to do. I believe if they want to get into this type of cloak and dagger operation, they should do it under another guise. I believe the clergy should be free from this type of infiltration.”47
In Waxhaw, North Carolina, Cam Townsend kept his silence. He was loyal to the organization he had founded.
*This was not the first time that Burns worked with AID. Forced out of his Peru base by local students and teachers, Burns had moved to Ecuador to set up the National Bilingual Education Seminar. That seminar featured an AID official who had worked closely with SIL in Vietnam on behalf of the Saigon regime, Charles H. Reed. AID’s plan for SIL included the collection of data from students and teachers and the subtle promotion of the military regime’s network of local Committees of Family Elders, a network modeled after AID’s work in Vietnam. The plan was defeated, however, by Ecuadorian anthropologists who were suspicious of SIL’s role. See Charles H. Reed, “Linguaje y Educación Bilingüe en Vietnam,” in Shucniqui Tandanacuy Ishcay Shimipi Yachachingapac, Documento Final, Primer Seminario Nacional ed Educación Bilingüe del Ecuador, Octubre 15–20, 1973 (Quito: Palacio Legislativo, 1974), pp. 33–38. See also Douglas Williams, ed., Mission Supplement (Huntington Beach, Calif.: Wycliffe Bible Translators, Mission Department, January 1976).
46
THE BETRAYAL
DOMESTIC VIOLENCES
Although Gerald Ford had testified during his own confirmation hearings for the vice presidency in late 1973 that he would not run for reelection if he succeeded Nixon, by 1975, Ford’s desire for election in his own right had grown. Nelson watched this development with concern. He had expected to succeed Ford; now he was not sure Ford would not bend to pressure from the right wing of the Republican party and seek a running mate more to their liking. Nelson knew that California’s Ronald Reagan was busy building a challenge in the Bible Belt. However, he underestimated Reagan, considering him a “lightweight.” Ford’s political advisers took Reagan more seriously.
In the summer, Nelson took a swing through the South. He believed he was stronger there. Except with African Americans, he was wrong. Most white southern Democrats remembered Nelson’s opposition to segregation and his friendship with Martin Luther King, Jr. If they had to choose between Rockefeller or even Ford and a fellow “born-again” Baptist like Jimmy Carter, the most conservative of the 1976 Democratic presidential candidates, there was really no contest. African Americans would also go for Carter, perhaps because they were attracted by his Baptist background and his pledge of an honest, caring government backed by a Democratic Congress that could pass the kind of legisla
tion that Ford, a fiscal conservative, would never introduce.
Southern Republicans were not a base for Nelson, either. Many of them were of the Nixon variety. They had taken their small-town values to the booming suburbs of the New South’s cheap-wage industrialization. They looked to business, not Nelson’s liberal union friends, for progress and to Billy Graham for spiritual inspiration, not the Rockefeller-backed Union Theological Seminary and Riverside Church’s liberal antiwar pastor, Dr. William Sloane Coffin.
Nelson had encountered this stone wall in Alabama, the home state of his “good friend” George Wallace. He found the same chilly reception in Dallas when he lunched with corporate bigwigs like Texas International executives Pat Haggerty and John Erik Johnson (the former mayor who had given William Cameron Townsend the key to the city), computer magnate Ross Perot, and developer Trammel Crow. He thought he had friends here. When he had still been governor, he gave Perot a big contract to process New York’s welfare rolls, even though Perot was not the low bidder. Crow was a business partner of his brothers Winthrop and David. His family owned more than $17 million worth of Texas Instruments stock.1 He even bought 6,000 acres next to the Klebergs’ King Ranch in Texas “for family outings” and Thanksgiving dinners.
But it did no good. What was sweeping the South and Southwest after the defeat in Vietnam and Nixon’s fall was stronger than anything Nelson could stop: a profound feeling radiating out of the region’s two strongest cultural forces—the socially conservative churches and military bases—that an Apocalyptic crisis was at hand.
Nelson left the South defeated. One South Carolina Republican summed up his achievement: “You might say he changed some of our minds from ‘hell no’ to just plain ‘no.’”2