When you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.
—“Fred Graves”
Hong Kong, May 1968
• The Cathay Pacific Boeing 707 banked sharply right, its gleaming wingtip pointing straight at a junk gliding across the surface of the South China Sea. The two-masted junk was close-hauled, tacking against the southern monsoon breeze from the mainland to Hong Kong. I watched the setting sun gild the junk’s sails like the wings of a butterfly.
Embarking on my first Temporary Duty (TDY) away from the base on Okinawa, I felt the mounting excitement of a fledgling voyager approaching the exotic world of Asia. Back at the base, my family and I lived within the military cocoon: We shopped at the commissary and PX. Milk was pasteurized, and the children ate fast food at the base club. Karen and I played golf on weekends. My TDYs in the coming years would take me places where few of the locals had even heard of such amenities.
The plane completed the 180-degree turn on its approach toward Kai Tak International Airport, heading toward the spit of land which jutted from the Kowloon Peninsula into Hong Kong Harbor, one of the world’s busiest deep-water ports. I caught a glimpse of a luxuriously green pyramid straight ahead—Victoria Peak, rising steeply behind the dragon’s teeth of Hong Kong’s skyscrapers. Lights were coming on, which made the dark vegetation an even richer green. The calm, gun-metal harbor teemed with thousands of ships and boats of all sizes, ranging from tiny sampans sculled by a single fisherman to the hulking gray monolith of an anchored American aircraft carrier, on leave after several weeks of air strikes against North Vietnam from Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin.
I heard the grinding whir of the flaps extending, then the comforting thud of the landing gear locking into place. But suddenly, something seemed wrong. Instead of lining up straight on the final approach toward the string of twinkling strobe lights, sprinkled amid the neon glare of the tenements ahead, the plane banked hard right again while descending fast. Oh, my God, I thought, with an adrenaline rush, they’ve lost control. The jumbled television antennas, chicken coops, and elaborate bamboo laundry poles on the flat roofs of the high-rise tenements seemed to reach up and grasp the right wingtip. In the airliner’s blinking green running light, I could see the faces of the Chinese hanging their washing. A big Ralston Purina billboard loomed ahead.
Suddenly the plane snapped back, and the pilot eased the throttles. Crouching in my seat, I dared a glimpse at the narrow canyons between the tenements, the shadows where the routine bustling street life of an Asian city continued undisturbed with vendors peddling fried squid and scribes sitting in their underwear, slowly pecking at elaborate Chinese-character typewriters.
We’re going to live after all. The plane skimmed over a wall of billboards plastered with garish ads, and I saw the runway’s parallel amber lights. Then the plane slammed down on the concrete; the pilot applied full brakes and engine reversal, and we fishtailed twice before slowing to a controlled taxi.
On that first trip into Kai Tak, I was impressed by the straightforward and efficient nature of the British colony’s immigration and customs controls. The officials manning the arrival lines were typically young Chinese men and women who had been trained to gaze intently, but nonaggressively, into the eyes of the traveler, betraying no emotion, but making it clear they were alert to deception. I did not encounter any of the confrontational behavior exhibited by arrival officials at third world airports. The officials at Kai Tak exuded pure business. Their midnight-blue uniforms were neatly tailored, trousers and skirts alike, with military, cable-knit sweaters, starched white shirts, immaculate ties, and shiny black shoes. They were a class act.
I observed these details not merely out of personal curiosity, but also because of professional interest. After a year of work and additional training at my Okinawa base, this TDY was to serve several purposes. One was to file a report on immigration and customs procedures in as much detail as I could possibly obtain without arousing suspicion. Espionage often involved moving people from country to country, and frequently these people had to travel under false identities, using altered or forged documents. My apprenticeship involved not only the preparation of these documents, but also the “building” of convincing cover legends for the illicit travelers, whether they were agents controlled by case officers or foreign defectors under hostile pursuit, seeking asylum in the United States. Sending me through an ostensibly friendly international crossroads such as Hong Kong was an excellent test of my ability to observe. At the end of this TDY, I would have to prepare both a “probe” report on the controls and an infiltration/exfiltration plan for Hong Kong to be used by defectors traveling in alias.
The female immigration officer flipped quickly through my burgundy official passport, inoculation record, and ongoing airline tickets, expertly absorbing the details.
“How long will you stay in Hong Kong?” Her polite question was spoken in perfect, clipped English. My answer was less important than the way in which I returned her unwavering gaze. Although she was a small person, her dark eyes felt large and powerful. I sensed strongly that the indignant-Western act would have little impact on these immigration inspectors.
Satisfied by my demeanor, she slammed the All Square Dater onto a blank page in my passport, depositing the blue-black impression of the arrival cachet. She initialed the lower left-hand corner of the Dater stamp with an indecipherable swirl. I noted that the Dater employed Roman numerals for the month, and I knew there was also a random rotation that included Arabic numerals, full words, and abbreviations for months. The employment of the sequence was a closely guarded secret. I was one of many TSD officers whose job it was to detect this arcane lore so that our duplication of passport cachets would be accurate and not trigger alarm bells among airport security personnel.
The officer handed back my papers with a perfunctory smile, but her eyes had already shifted to the next person in line. Carrying an official passport, dressed in PX sports clothes, I was just one of thousands of Americans working for the government in some capacity during the endless years of the Vietnam War. The fact that I did not represent the U.S. government agency I had claimed to when completing my disembarkation card was less important than my demeanor before that official. Impeccably forged or altered travel documents were only one-half of the equation in espionage travel: The ability to bluff convincingly while carrying them was just as crucial as “good docs.”
Over the next few years, as my travel throughout the region increased, my worn passport overflowed with immigration cachets and visas, even expanding into eight-page foldout sections. That passport carried a rainbow collage of cachets: Wattay Airport in Vientiane, Saigon’s Ton Son Nhut, Rangoon, Manila, and Bangkok. The efficient immigration officers at Kai Tak International slowly scrutinized each page. Perhaps they thought that I was traveling too much for a U.S. government rice production officer or administrative type. Just when I thought the immigration police were caricatures of the Inscrutable East, an officer stamped my passport and handed it across the counter, with her right thumb covering the first four letters of the word OFFICIAL and her left thumb obscuring the last letter. The gap left between her hands read: CIA. Neither of us spoke or smiled. I took my passport and walked toward the Nothing to Declare line of customs control. As I passed the end of the immigration counter, I noticed a thick, loose-leaf volume—the immigration police “Watch List.” Is my name in there? I thought, wondering how secure these police files were from scrutiny by the opposition.
But that level of sophistication took me several years to achieve. On this first night in Hong Kong in May 1968, I fit the tourist persona more than the would-be street spook I’d pictured myself to be during exercises at the Farm. The brief taxi ride from Kai Tak swept me through the crowded streets of Kowloon, past the Peninsula Hotel, where a line of gleaming Rolls Royce sedans was arrayed, their liveried drivers tenderly stroking the lacquered bodywork with long feather dusters as they awaited the arrival of their passengers.
The taxi dropped me at the Star Ferry landing, and I was immediately engulfed in a churning crowd. I noted that my medium stature was hardly a drawback here. Traveling light, with just a canvas Pan Am carry-on bag and a large briefcase, I was able to slip through the human wave flowing toward the ferry ramp. It was a simple, preliminary Surveillance Detection Run. Any taller Westerner following me on foot would have been easily detected, moving diagonally through the crowd. I allowed several hundred people to clamber aboard the ferry, then jumped on myself just as the ramp was being lifted. Sailors in neat blue-and-white uniforms cast off the lines, the engines rumbled, and we churned out into the darkening harbor toward the sparkling lights of Hong Kong island.
Now my artist’s eye overcame the emotions of a gawking tourist. The early monsoon had come, overpowering the dust and haze of the baking dry season. The sunset’s afterglow above Victoria Peak created a halo of deep violet, dark crimson, and burnt orange. I snapped a picture with my Spotmatic. As we forged relentlessly ahead, Hong Kong’s gleaming towers rose higher. We entered the main crossroads of the harbor, and the swirling wakes of hundreds of vessels reflected the dying sunlight in a kaleidoscope. The ferry was suddenly surrounded by boats and ships: freighters, other ferries, junks and sampans, poorly lit barges carrying loads of sand and rubble, and wallah wallah boats transporting whole families from the colony’s outer islands.
Standing on the open deck with the humid tropical wind in my face, I wondered how the ferry captain managed to avoid the dozens of possible collisions with other vessels that crossed our track. Our air horn blasted, and the other vessels sounded urgent warnings in a variety of pitches. I had never seen or heard anything like this. It was Asia—crowded, busy, and chaotic, yet somehow organized along incomprehensible patterns.
For me, the sunset ferry ride was over much too quickly, and I found myself climbing the steep narrow streets between tier upon tier of Hong Kong skyscrapers, high-rise hotels, office blocks, and apartment buildings—some old and mildewed, others flaunting the gaudy steel-and-glass modernity of Manhattan or Los Angeles. Candy-pink and green neon lights replaced the glare of the sunset as I climbed the switchback roads of Central. Almost every block was broken by a strange Jack-and-the-Beanstalk latticework of bamboo scaffolding that vanished into the monsoon clouds, now colliding with the upper slopes of the mountain. In Southeast Asia, I would soon learn, strong and supple bamboo replaced the steel used for construction sites in the West.
When I checked into the Hong Kong Hilton on Queens Road Central, the officious desk clerk almost sneered as he asked if a bellhop could help with “the gentleman’s suitcase.”
“Airline misplaced it, I’m afraid,” I said. “It’ll be along tomorrow.”
If all went well, I’d be out of this hotel and into a CIA safe house by the next night.
ACCORDING TO PLAN, the phone in my room rang around 8:15, and a dry English voice invited me to join him for a “whiskey and soda and a spot of dinner.”
The invitation was the signal from the man I’ll call “Jacob Jordan” to meet him at the rooftop bar at the Miramar Hotel on the Kowloon side. Jacob was already a mythical figure in the CIA when I began working with him in 1968. He was a senior TSD disguise and documents officer in the region, and undoubtedly had the most operational experience, moving both case officers and agents through difficult and dangerous areas. He also planned and conducted the exfiltration of defectors, often having to contend with hostile pursuit.
But the man I met for gin and tonic on the Miramar terrace that warm evening appeared to be anything but an American spy. Tanned and fit, with a distinguished military bearing, Jacob possessed British features and complexion, but his characteristically British qualities went far beyond appearances. That first night, he wore a tailored vested linen suit and a pair of expensive, custom-made Bond Street shoes. Everything about him, from his public school, regimental drawl, to the way he pinched his long Dunhill cigarettes between the thumb and index finger of his left hand, was evocative of a loyal British subject.
Yet I would soon learn that Jacob was in fact American-born and had been raised in a small town in the Midwest. Over the many years I worked with Jacob, often on long, exhausting operations, one would have expected him to drop his guard and reveal his true American persona. But he never did. Jacob was perhaps the best example I ever encountered of someone living his legend.
This permanent shift in style had been well justified. Jacob had entered the Army in the last year of World War II and was selected because of his aptitude for Oriental languages to attend the military language institute in Monterey, California. It was there that the kid from a prairie hick town completely lost his nasal Midwestern twang and was speaking Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Japanese within three years. With the war over and his military obligation fulfilled, Jacob joined the CIA’s old Technical Services staff, the predecessor of TSD.
His first overseas assignment was to the CIA base in Shanghai, just before the Communist takeover in 1949. Working with Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalist Kuomintang intelligence operatives, Jacob amassed a trove of documents and information about the security controls that Mao Tse-tung’s Chinese Communists were implementing in the areas they had captured. By the time Mao’s Red Army had taken control of the entire mainland, he was perhaps the leading American expert on Communist Chinese security and travel documents. He was then assigned to Japan, Taiwan, and, finally, the Okinawa base where I had my initial overseas experience.
While he was there, Jacob refined the basic document operations techniques employed by most intelligence services, adapting the American linear approach to security devices in official documents to more subtle Asian techniques. With his knowledge of the region increasing, he was able to detect patterns others could not. For example, a travel document might have been stamped with several hand-carved official “chops,” bearing the approval of ascending levels of bureaucracy. In the West, the initial stamp of the most important authority would probably be the clearest and boldest. But on many Communist Chinese and North Korean documents, the chops of lesser officialdom were more prominent, while the obscure stamp of approval and initials of Party cadre appeared almost as an afterthought. Jacob’s pioneering analytical eye and skill at replication techniques set the precedent for an entire generation of CIA disguise and documents officers, myself included.
Then the Korean War intervened, and Jacob was posted to support irregular warfare operations against the Chinese and North Koreans. Next, the Agency sent him to Taiwan, where he helped authenticate Nationalist infiltration teams to be parachuted into the mainland by providing them with convincing documents and personal effects. Although these were bold and desperate operations, Jacob later explained, they were only marginally effective. As with similar efforts in Eastern Europe, the attempt to use OSS-type infiltrators and saboteurs in a Communist totalitarian state proved futile.
Nevertheless, his impressive language skills and ability to replicate almost any document, from a train ticket to a Party membership card, marked him as a “comer” with a brilliant career ahead. But this bright future suddenly came to a halt when Jacob fell in love with a beautiful mainland Christian Chinese refugee named Donna. Their marriage violated one of the Agency’s most rigidly enforced policies: On marrying a foreign national, the officer must immediately resign. Headquarters tried to judge Jacob’s case on its merits, but Donna still had an extended family living under Communist rule on the mainland, an unacceptable situation for an officer with access to sensitive operations. Jacob’s security clearance was promptly downgraded to a “staff agent” contract, which meant he could no longer enter a secure CIA facility or read classified communications. He would be kept in this netherworld of espionage for several years until he arranged for his wife’s family to leave the mainland and join them in Hong Kong, and was fully reinstated with TSD.
“Nice of you to drop by,” he said, leading me to a wrought-iron table in the shadows at the far end of the terrace. I explained that my ferry ride back over had been “calm,” meaning that I’d detected no surveillance.
“Lovely,” Jacob quipped, signaling the waiter with a folded Hong Kong five-dollar note. “Let’s just see if Victoria Harbor is still calm.”
For the third time that night, I found myself on the Star Ferry, having completed yet another surveillance detection run up to the landing. Amid the confusion and hooting boat horns, Jacob explained our mission.
Chairman Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was at its crest. Young Red Guards had decimated the ranks of the Communist bureaucracy, executing tens of thousands and exiling millions of intellectuals and other “parasites” from the cities to face starvation in the countryside. With the Vietnam War at its height, America desperately needed a better picture of the situation in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Was the military still loyal to Mao? Was there a solid cadre o resistance within the Party around which anti-Mao forces might coalesce? These were crucial questions. Despite the destabilizing upheaval China was still shipping thousands of tons of military materiel to North Vietnam each month and providing that “fraternal” Communist regime with many vital advisers.
Yet we had no diplomatic relations with the PRC, and therefore no embassy or consulates. Of course, we had no CIA station or bases on the mainland, nor did we have NOC (“Non-Official Cover”) Agency officers permanently assigned to China, either in international organizations or under third-country business cover. In many ways, the vast nation of China, one-fifth of the world’s population, was a hopeless enigma.
“We have to have agents in China,” Jacob explained. “The PRC is one of U.S. Intelligence’s major targets.” But, he added, “most of the China watchers conduct their observations from here in Hong Kong.”
As in Eastern Europe, he said, the CIA had assembled a system of legal travelers to serve as bridge agents. “But bridge agents are never really quite the thing, are they?” Jacob asked as the ferry nosed into the pilings on the Hong Kong side again. “With all the intelligence factories here in Hong Kong pumping bogus material, you can never tell when you’re being led down the garden path.” He turned to stare again at the mainland. “We need to bring important assets together for face-to-face meetings with our best case officers.”
Making our way up the steep streets toward one of Jacob’s favorite seafood restaurants in Wanchai, we mingled with throngs of GIs on R&R from Vietnam and sailors on liberty from the carrier task force in the harbor. It was easy to spot the differences among them. The real war zone grunts had what we used to call “ranchers’ tans,” their arms and faces burnt an umber brown, but their upper foreheads white from months of wearing steel-pot helmets. Most of the sailors were pale and overweight from long tours spent below deck, scarfing down ten-cent cheeseburgers from the ship’s snack bars. The black GIs and sailors kept to themselves, a moody, vaguely threatening presence that served as a reminder that we were engaged in a geopolitical struggle in Asia while our own society still had unhealed wounds.
Moving along these narrow streets, Jacob continued to explain the nature of this particular operation. One of the most effective bridge agents had contacted an allegedly “top drawer” Chinese asset, a man with excellent Party and government connections who had undergone preliminary recruitment, now bore the cryptonym BARGER and was ready for an extensive meeting with a debriefing team in a nearby free port enclave. BARGER had legitimate business in the south of China and had already scheduled an extended holiday.
The situation was challenging. It was unlikely BARGER would be under internal security surveillance all the way from Beijing to the south. But without travel documents in an alias identity, BARGER could never pass in and out of the tight surveillance screen between the mainland and the free port. In addition, the combined allied debriefing team would have to be well disguised and documented in Crown Colony aliases, employing their most effective tradecraft because the free port itself was overrun with PRC counterintelligence officers.
The ethnic Asian bridge agent responsible for BARGER’s preliminary recruitment had sent out his own travel documents, replete with legitimate entry and exit visas, to our office in Hong Kong via a smuggler’s “rat line.” Also contained in this sealed package were passport photographs and alias information for BARGER, who was due to meet our team in the free port within days. My job was to transform the bridge agent’s travel papers into fully backstopped alias documents for BARGER, and I had less than twenty-four hours to do so. But that was not all. Once the meeting with the case officer debriefing team was completed and BARGER was safely back in Beijing, the bridge agent had to arrange to have the altered documents smuggled back to us in Hong Kong, where I would restore them to their original state.
The timing had to be precisely choreographed. Otherwise, someone could be badly “burnt,” and in the PRC at that time, this often meant agonizing interrogation and execution.
Finishing my dinner with a clumsy display of chopstick work, I understood why Jacob had insisted we drink plenty of green tea at the end of the meal. We had a night of hard labor ahead of us.
“Got everything you need in your kit?” he asked, folding some Hong Kong dollars into the hand of the smiling waiter.
I patted my briefcase. Among my watercolor pads and brushes were the steel nibs, inks, glue, cutting and embossing tools, and passport binding thread I’d need for the job.
Jacob walked me to a taxi stand on the Admiralty waterfront and mumbled an address to a driver, noting he would meet me there in precisely thirty-five minutes. If he missed the first meeting, I was to return forty minutes later. He’d already briefed me on the need for such an elaborate countersurveillance “drill.” It was always possible that either the trusted subagent or BARGER were doubles controlled by PRC counterintelligence. They might be trying to identify Agency officers and operations using Hong Kong as a base. Linking me with Jacob and an expanding circle of subagents would certainly earn some ambitious young PRC officer a promotion. But as Jacob taught me over the coming years, “Tradecraft is all in the details. If we can’t accomplish the simple tasks, how can we take on the impossible missions?”
The safe house was a poorly air-conditioned, three-room apartment in a working-class Eurasian neighborhood. It had the advantage of both front and rear entrances and an exit from the rear courtyard onto two busy streets. A little Brit with a graying RAF sergeant’s mustache soon appeared with the blank Crown Colony IDs for me to complete.
I spent the next six days and nights in that suffocating safe house, working under the hot glare of a watchmaker’s lamp for hours at a time, or collapsing in complete exhaustion in the only air-conditioned bedroom, while the altered documents were being used during the two stages of the operation.
Once I had prepared the briefers’ alias Hong Kong identity papers and delivered the package for Jacob to have smuggled back to BARGER on the mainland, I could relax until the documents were returned for me to work on them again. But Jacob insisted I stay indoors.
After five days, Jacob returned the altered documents, blithely commenting that the intricate debriefing operation in the free port had been a “really good show.” BARGER had entered the enclave without mishap and conducted his extensive debriefing with the case officer team. They included a veteran polygrapher and an operational psychologist, who concluded the man was “solid.” I felt more confident as I set to work reestablishing the bridge agent’s identity on these well-used documents.
By the end of that week, I had begun to earn my spurs in real-world espionage, where people go down in flames if there are mistakes.
Much later, I learned that the information that BARGER provided had been of great value in the formation of our China policy. He was certain that Mao’s Cultural Revolution did not represent the revolutionary future of China; instead, it was the final convulsion of internal class warfare between the Mandarin urban tradition inherited by the Party bureaucracy and the peasant populism exploited by Maoism. But BARGER was not merely an abstract philosopher. He had provided essential practical details on the precise nature of the power struggle, identifying names and incidents.
Leaving Hong Kong on an overcast monsoon morning seven days after having arrived, I had no idea if the operation had been important to my government at all. But I had finally gotten a sense of the immense pressure I would experience as a field tech ops officer.
Little did I know.
Pakse, Laos, September 1968
• While most adult Americans know something about the war in Vietnam, few could explain why a CIA technical operations officer like myself would be strapped into the canvas sling seat of a World War II-vintage C-46 one day in September 1968. We were flying south from Vientiane, the diplomatic capital of the landlocked Kingdom of Laos, to the provincial town of Pakse on the banks of the Mekong in the south. The side door had been removed for rice drops, and the aisle was jammed with bamboo cages of chickens and ducks.
As a fragment of France’s lost Asian empire, Laos had become another pawn on the Cold War chess board. When Ho Chi Minh’s Communist Viet Minh forces defeated the French Army at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the first Geneva peace conference on Indochina later that year officially divided Vietnam into two zones, north and south, but did not clearly establish the status of Laos and Cambodia. Laos became a constitutional monarchy, and I suppose the statesmen in Geneva convinced themselves it would somehow evolve into a neutral mini-Sweden in the cloud forests of the Annamite Cordillera (what the Vietnamese call the Truong Son, or Long Mountains). Instead, the country quickly slipped into a heated civil war, initiated by the Viet Minh-led Pathet Lao, who had been generously supported by the Soviet Union. The Communists soon drove the inexperienced and ill-equipped Royal Lao Army from the north of the country, and a series of coups and countercoups ensued, leading to a new Geneva treaty that divided Laos into rightist, neutralist, and leftist factions, backed by both the U.S. and the Pathet Lao, a Hanoi-Soviet surrogate.
Those who suffered most were the estimated three million members of mountain tribes, whom we came to call by their rightful name Hmong (“the People”), but whom the lowland Lao and the Vietnamese disparaged as the Meo or the moi, meaning “savage.” After the 1962 accord guaranteeing the “neutrality” of Laos, both the U.S. and the Soviets were obliged to remove their military advisers. The U.S. Green Berets, who had trained and sometimes fought beside the Royal Lao Army, were withdrawn. But the Soviets retained their adviser mission to the NVA and the Pathet Lao, trying to operate more discreetly from airfields and depots around Hanoi.
The year I arrived in Indochina, the North Vietnamese had thousands of road builders, truck mechanics, and antiaircraft crews stationed along a vast web of rain forest roads known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Every year from 1967 onward, Hanoi had moved another 100,000 NVA replacements down the Trail and into South Vietnam. Yet political constraints still prevented the Johnson administration from openly breaching the 1962 Geneva Convention.
Therefore, one of the few ways America could respond to Hanoi’s flagrant violation of the Convention was through a combination of bombing and covert military and CIA action. The U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) in Saigon ran cross-border reconnaissance, sabotage, and prisoner-snatch missions as part of its highly classified Studies and Observations Group (SOG), sending teams of local Nung and Montagnard troops, led by American Green Berets, into Laos from secret launch bases in South Vietnam. But the SOG cross-border teams were restricted to a narrow band of operational boxes close to the mountainous border. One of the SOG team’s key contributions was to identify “lucrative” targets for airstrikes, such as ammunition caches, truck repair facilities, and the bivouacs of large units moving south.
The North Vietnamese responded by expanding the intricate network of high-speed foot paths and vehicle roads of the Ho Chi Minh Trail system to the west, where the CIA covert action took over. The Agency stationed road-watch and “striker” teams—composed of tribal irregulars and tough Thai mercenaries led by CIA case officers—on Lima (“Landing”) Site bases, carved into the imposing limestone domes and monoliths above the Trail network and concealed by the unbroken triple canopy of the rain forest below.
I was flying to Pakse that rainy September morning, en route to Lima Site 38, one of the secret bases closest to the main axis of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in southern Laos.
My first impression of the local “knuckle draggers,” as the paramilitary covert action boys were known, was mixed. Some looked like overgrown Boy Scouts, while others looked like paunchy retreads from several wars back. I was wrong on both counts. In my opinion, the case officers serving with the Hmong army and other anti-Communist tribesmen in Laos were in fact some of the best guerrilla leaders America ever put onto a battlefield. Almost all of them were well-trained military veterans, most with Special Forces combat tours in Vietnam behind them, and many with experience as advisers to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) under their belts.
One of these men, whom I will call Tommy Lobo, married a Lao princess. I’d already read about his exploits in True magazine when I met the real man on his remote Lima Site fortress in northern Laos. I had heard the tale about Tommy concerning an argument he’d had with Headquarters over his NVA “kill reports,” which some bean counter claimed he had inflated to raise the status of his Hmong strikers. In search of evidence Tommy instructed his men to bring back the severed left ear of each kill they had made. He then wrapped the ears and sent them in his next sealed dispatch to CIA Headquarters. The Headquarters desk officer who opened the pouch never again discredited one of Tommy’s postaction reports.
MY JOB AS a tech ops officer and an artist in the regional Graphics unit was to work with these teams on a wide variety of propaganda and psychological warfare operations. I knew volunteering for this mission would take me to some exotic places, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the scene I encountered my third morning in Pakse, when Buck Foster rose early and rousted me from my sweaty cot with a mug of coffee.
“It’s still blowing a typhoon,” I complained over the drumming beat of the rain on the roof.
“Just a Mekong drizzle,” Buck responded.
At the airfield, the clouds hung low and heavy in the east, but Buck seemed to have reached the conclusion that flying up to Lima Site 38 was both possible and prudent. I stood under the roof of the air ops building, staring dubiously as the ground crew loaded the plane that would take us there. It was a mud-spattered Swiss Pilatus Porter that looked like an overgrown Piper Cub with its single, Pinocchio-snout, turbo-prop engine. But this Short Takeoff and Landing (STOL) aircraft was highly regarded as a reliable Agency bush taxi and “trash hauler,” capable of delivering passengers and enormous loads to remote postage-stamp airstrips.
I certainly hoped the plane’s renown was well earned, as I watched the Thai ground crew heave wooden ammunition crates, bulging white USAID rice sacks, and stacks of weapons rolled like crude cigars in ponchos through the plane’s single cargo door. Once this load was more or less lashed down with webbing, Buck turned to the small crowd of tribal irregulars and Thai mercenaries lounging around the building.
“Time to board,” Buck said. “We’ve got to get you assholes to work.”
I assumed two or three of us were going to clamber aboard the plane and find places among the sacks and boxes. Instead, a total of fourteen men, albeit some of them very small Kha soldiers, dashed through the rain and squeezed into the narrow confines of the cargo hold. With no seats we had to stoop with our heads and shoulders hunched against the lightly padded overhead. The compartment opened forward, revealing a two-seat cockpit with wide Plexiglas windshields.
The pilot, a dapper Thai in neatly pressed khaki uniform replete with crossed bandoleers and two pearl-handled .45 revolvers, picked his way among the puddles under the shelter of a wide umbrella held by a barefoot lackey. His audacious outfit crystallized the impression that had been growing for several days that somehow I had slipped into a time warp back to the U.S.-Mexican border skirmishes between Pancho Villa and General Black Jack Pershing, that the Mekong was actually the Rio Grande and Vientiane was Dodge City.
But the stout little dandy in the cockpit knew what he was doing. In a blur of deft movements, he started the turbine engine, throttled it up to a nose-itching howl, released the brakes, and taxied smartly to the end of the strip. Then we were slamming forward, the turbo-prop screaming as we bumped over the rough steel-mat runway. Only seconds later, the plane bounced from the ground and was sucked into the roiling clouds. Climbing, the engine throttled to the max and the prop shrieking, the stuffy cargo hold was constantly buffeted. A skinny young Kha trooper was wedged onto rice sacks to my left, clinging to a tie-down strap clipped to an aluminum rib. If he pukes now, I thought, there’s no place I can hide.
Just when it seemed that the engine would rip itself apart, the pilot throttled back, and we seemed to stop, suspended in a jar of hot milk. The sensation was terrifying. I knew we were falling, yet had no sense of the roller-coaster weightlessness I should have felt. I’d been seized by vertigo, which seemed to be endless, but I didn’t want to look at my watch and see we were overdue on the scheduled forty-minute “hop.” There’s no way this overloaded plane can still be flying.
Then we popped out of the overcast into the glare of a tropical morning sky. Through the side window I saw we were climbing smoothly away from the wispy tops of the cloud deck. But looking ahead, I felt a stab of adrenaline. We were flying straight toward a vertical, gray limestone wall, which disappeared into a shroud of mist a hundred feet higher than our flight path. A beautiful creamy waterfall arched from a mist-hidden cliff and disappeared into clouds below. That morning, I’d studied the air force navigation chart on the wall of Buck’s office, noting several ominous near-vertical humps blandly marked “karst.” These were jungle-covered monoliths eroded into free-standing towers, like so many unlit phone booths scattered along a dark highway.
The pilot rammed the throttle forward, the engine screamed and whistled, and the overcrowded Porter seemed to rise straight up again, into the mist lapping down from the stony mountaintop ahead. When will we hit? I was trying to remember an appropriate prayer, while simultaneously wondering why I had abandoned a perfectly safe and honorable job in the Graphics bullpen in Washington.
Then the mist shredded, and I could see the craggy top of the karst spreading into a flat mesa covered with mixed hardwood rain forest and scrub jungle. The pilot banked sharply right, lining up with the muddy orange scar of the landing strip that appeared suddenly from a dense forest grove. In another blur of moving hands, the little Thai deployed wide wing flaps and slats, throttled back, and raised the nose toward the vertical. As I caught sight of some bamboo huts and a sandbagged bunker beside the strip, the Porter touched down with amazing lightness on the rutted laterite mud and stopped within forty feet, more like a winged helicopter than a conventional airplane.
I had arrived at Site 38, perched one thousand feet above NVA Supply Route 92 on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Before I could absorb my surroundings, the Kha soldiers had dragged the cargo from the hold, and the Thai pilot revved the Porter’s engine for a quick takeoff. He jolted about thirty yards across the ruts, then lifted off like a dragonfly and disappeared once more into the clouds.
“Welcome to Dogpatch.” The resident Agency case officer in command of the Site’s strikers offered me his hand. A clean-cut, former Special Forces captain, he looked about my age, but had already served over five years in the Indochina war zones. He was one of the many paramilitary men I would work with in the coming years, some of whom I would come to know on a close personal basis. Case officers were supposed to send their local troops into battle and stay out of harm’s way themselves, but most ignored this policy. According to official accounts, only five CIA officers had been killed in Laos by 1973, the end of America’s paramilitary involvement in Indochina. The accuracy of those casualty figures is definitely open for debate.
Like many of his colleagues, the officer in charge of LS 38 preferred a neutral “handle” (in his case, “Ridge Runner”) because he spent so much of his operational life at risk of capture and did not want Hanoi to exploit him as a CIA spy in command of foreign mercenaries. Some covert action case officers in the more exposed Plain of Jars went to war wearing T-shirts and Levi’s. Ridge Runner, on the other hand, favored a composite uniform more appropriate for the jungle trails of the cloud-choked valleys below. He wore the black-and-green, tiger-striped camouflage ARVN Ranger shirt and olive-green, cargo-pocket GI trousers, cinched tight with rubberband leech straps at the ankles. Instead of the familiar American jungle boot with its distinctive cleated sole, Ridge Runner sported the standard ankle-high, canvas Bata boots worn by many NVA units. “Even if you’re good in the woods, everybody leaves footprints,” he later explained, “and I don’t want my people ambushed because some NVA tracker picks up the pattern of my boot soles in the mud.”
Ridge Runner’s attention to detail made my work easier. Whenever his team pulled off an ambush or snatched a prisoner, Ridge Runner studied the papers retrieved from the enemy, personally interrogating the prisoner before turning the “take” over to his superiors. He knew both the NVA and Pathet Lao order of battle in his region intimately, as well as the shifting patterns of enemy morale.
Ridge Runner also proved to be an excellent resource for my office’s propaganda and “psy-war” (psychological-warfare) efforts. Although the 1968 Tet Offensive had been a political and psychological victory for the Vietnamese Communists, the massive assault against the towns and cities of South Vietnam had been a military debacle for their cause, resulting in horrible casualties. Our reconnaissance had revealed that tens of thousands of NVA troops were back in their sanctuaries inside Laos and Cambodia, “licking their wounds.” Ridge Runner had urged us to intensify our surrender pass campaign, tailoring the message to reach weary, malnourished NVA troops, forced to sleep in half-flooded bunkers. Carved into the forest mountainsides along the five-hundred-mile section of the Trail bordering South Vietnam, these ramshackle structures were under constant threat of being bombed by high-flying B-52s.
Ridge Runner and his colleagues helped me design illustrated propaganda similar in format to colorful comic books. Intended to impress NVA troops of peasant origin and the poorly educated Pathet Lao, my drawings showed how the Communists had overrun a peaceful land, disrupting the simple life of the tribal people in the mountains, stealing their crops, and enslaving them as porters on the Trail, where many were killed in air attacks. We interwove an underlying theme of karma and redemption into these visual messages, playing on Buddhist beliefs which went far deeper into the hearts of the people than did Communism. Our message was subtle but clear: Unjustly cause pain and death in this lifetime, and the wheel of karma will turn on you and your family.
Over the next five years of American military involvement in Indochina, several thousand Communist troops in South Vietnam and Laos would rally to our side. Most bore our surrender passes, while many others cited the corruption and hypocrisy of their leaders in North Vietnam as compelling reasons for their surrender.
Vientiane, Laos, November 1968
• The only light in the bungalow’s dining room came from the open window behind me, perfect for the delicate task at hand. The morning was overcast, and the typical tropical glare of the sun was filtered by thick clouds. Coming over my left shoulder, the diffuse daylight gave me the steady illumination I needed, free of distracting shadows.
Hunched over the dining table, I was almost paralyzed with concentration; the muscles in my neck, shoulders, and right arm were in painful knots, caused by the fierce effort to maintain control of my fingers on the fountain pen. My pen was held steady by a taut, two-hand “forger’s bridge” formed by my left and right arms—elbows locked against the table, wrists arched, with the fingers of my left hand intertwined with those of my right.
The young woman across the table watched me silently. She sat frozen in place, holding her breath as I followed the proper stroke order of the intricate Asian characters I was inscribing on the blue-lined page of the narrow diary. The characters were totally incomprehensible to me; fortunately, the Asian-American woman with me was the wife of an Agency NOC officer and had been schooled in the language as a child.
Although her presence was one of the positive points of this operation, it was far outweighed by the risks we were taking. If this entry was not exactly right, or if my fountain pen erupted in blots, as it was prone to do in tropical humidity, we would have to re-create the diary, with its complete set of handwritten entries, in the desperately short time available.
But the ink was flowing perfectly after I put a single drop of gum arabic in the pot and refilled the bladder. I applied and released pen pressure on the paper in a slow, rocking motion made possible by the forger’s bridge. This technique allowed me to duplicate the writing speed and pressure of the diary’s owner, whose swirling Asian characters I was imitating. A single drop of sweat ran down my ribs into the waistband of my trousers, and my locked fingers were throbbing painfully as I finished copying the remaining passages in the same casual style we had practiced several times that morning.
Her somber gaze was the only obvious sign of her role in this operation. She wore a plain housedress, and her long, straight black hair was tied back with string. My forgery materials were spread out between us on the teak tabletop. Two well-behaved toddlers were playing with matchbox cars around her bare feet on the faded ceramic tile floor. They chattered in a strange mixture of two languages, sometimes piping up loudly. But their mother and I were completely immersed in the complicated task at hand, working in the high-ceilinged dining room of this shabby villa on the outskirts of Vientiane.
I heard motorbikes on the dusty road outside, then the rumble of military trucks in a convoy approaching from the airport. “If they kick up much dust,” I said, keeping my voice steady, “I’ll have to ask you to close the windows.”
Looking up quickly, I saw her nod in understanding. My eyes moved to the lined pad lying near my right elbow, which contained the template of entries we had worked on for several hours. I had two more to finish, and the job would be done. As usual, I was operating with a sleep deficit. I’d arrived from Bangkok early that morning aboard a CIA contract flight on an old C-47 heading north to the air base at Udorn, Thailand, and then jumped onto a Porter across the Mekong border to the Vientiane airport. It was one of those no-passport-stamp trips we risked on urgent operations. In this case, the urgency had been clear as soon as the Secret IMMEDIATE NIACT cable had hit my Okinawa base thirty-six hours earlier, requesting the services of AN ARTIST/VALIDATOR [FORGER] ON-SITE IN VIENTIANE SOONEST.
As Mark, the case officer who had sent the cable, drove me from the airport to this villa along a circuitous route, he briefed me on the urgent job I faced.
“We’ve got one day—max—to complete some illicit alterations to papers and diaries,” he said, then added details of what must have been one of the most convoluted operations of the endless war in Southeast Asia.
Several weeks earlier, the local CIA station had received word that two members of an Asian Communist party would enter Vientiane en route to Hanoi to help prepare “evidence” of American atrocities and war crimes. They were scheduled to present this propaganda at the dubious international war crimes trial in Stockholm, convened by Lord Bertrand Russell, the elderly British pacifist well known for his naive view of Communist intentions in the world. The station had discovered that their travel itinerary included arrival and departure stops in Bangkok and Vientiane.
The Royal Thai and Royal Lao governments were our allies in suppressing the Communist insurgencies in their countries, but none of our liaison contacts among the local customs or immigration officials felt they could deny the Asian Communists passage through their airports en route to Hanoi. Upon arriving in Vientiane two weeks earlier, the two men had been placed in a modest hotel near the river, courtesy of the North Vietnamese embassy, while they waited for the Aeroflot plane to Hanoi the next day.
Since the Station had orders to deflect them from their mission and the local authorities would not cooperate, Mark and his fellow case officers took matters into their own hands. When the Communists left their hotel for dinner that evening the local TOPS officer helped the case officers enter their rooms and plant what he called “compromising materials” in the men’s luggage. He hoped Lao Customs at the airport would find the incriminating documents in the morning and deplane the men, cancel their transit visas, and send them back to Bangkok.
Unfortunately the Lao officials were too polite to ask the men to open their bags, and they departed safely for Hanoi.
The two Communists returned ten days later and were booked on a flight to Bangkok the next afternoon. The challenge now facing the Station was to capture the questionable evidence they would take to Stockholm. The Station had already alerted a small team of local young people known as the Flying Squad to conduct surveillance on them and snatch the evidence, reporting that the two men always carried a denim shoulder bag. Sure enough, a quick but thorough search of their room revealed that the evidence must have been in the bag, so Mark ordered the Flying Squad to seize it. That evening, as the Communists strolled down to a riverfront cafe, two Squad members coasted by on a Honda motorbike. One of them jumped off, grabbed the bag, and leaped back onto the bike. They roared away, and had almost turned a corner when one of the Communists shouted, “Stop, thief!”
A Royal Lao Army lieutenant came to the rescue, knocking down the Flying Squad members, and retrieving the bag, which he proudly returned to the grateful Communists. Our boys escaped in the confusion, but the Communists still had their precious evidence.
Mark had a fallback plan. He managed to cancel the Communists’ airline reservations and purchase every seat on all the commercial flights leaving Vientiane for Bangkok in the next week. But this proved futile as well. The North Vietnamese embassy then arranged for the Communists to take the ferry across the Mekong to Nong Khai and travel on the overnight train to Bangkok. Resourceful as ever, Mark turned to the next contingency plan, buying train tickets for the Flying Squad members in a last-ditch effort to snatch the bag. Simultaneously, the Station implored its Thai contacts to have their customs authorities confiscate the two Communists’ luggage long enough for us to examine it. Our officers explained that the men were Communist spies conducting espionage operations in Thailand, and we would provide solid evidence. Our claim seemed convincing to the Thais, who were embroiled in a violent Communist insurgency in their northeastern hinterland. They promptly placed the two men under house arrest and allowed Mark’s team to search their luggage, giving us only twenty-four hours out of fear of retaliation from the men’s government.
What Mark discovered made everything worthwhile. The materials included a can of 16mm filmed statements from captured American pilots. These prisoners had been tortured into making false confessions of school and hospital bombings, as well as other grotesque offenses. There were also carefully prepared documents “proving” that the United States was engaged in “genocide” against Socialist Vietnam, while using defoliants and other forms of chemical warfare to destroy farms in the Red River Valley.
It was at this point that Mark decided to send the IMMEDIATE cable to my base.
“I THINK HERE he is drunk,” the young woman said, pointing delicately at the diary page. “See how the characters become twisted.”
I rocked back in my chair, pivoting on my elbows, and eased the tension of the forger’s bridge. I capped my fountain pen and laid it aside to knead the muscles of my neck. Even though I couldn’t read the words, I saw at once that she had detected a subtle point we had both missed during the long rehearsals that morning as we prepared our entries. Now we had to create a fresh template for these final two valuable passages, the most difficult forgery conceivable. Not only would I be adding entries to the same page in foreign characters, but I would also be imitating the idiosyncratic nuances of the writer, which varied from day to day. I sighed, exhausted and anxious, yet all too aware of the fact that I couldn’t just hurl the pen across the room and relax with a cold beer. After a short break, we set to work again.
It was mid-afternoon before we finished. The entries had been brief and oblique, referring to numbered, unnamed documents. Our next task was to create very small notes in the same script on tissue-thin, water-soluble paper that were explicitly related to espionage: agent contact instructions, code names, and lists of clandestine networks in Thai cities and villages. We rolled these small notes into tight bundles and concealed them in the spine of the diary and throughout the confiscated material.
By the end of that long afternoon, I was totally spent but enormously impressed with the intelligence and sophistication of the young woman who had assisted me on such short notice. Only she could have provided the authentic phrasing and nuances needed to convince the world that the two Communists were, in fact, spymasters. We were finally ready for Mark to return the material to the Thais and wait for their reaction.
A MONTH LATER, I was sitting by the pool at the Imperial Hotel in Bangkok, leafing through the Sunday edition of the Bangkok World. A headline caught my eye: NEST OF SPIES UNCOVERED IN NORTHEAST THAILAND. The article went on for several pages, explaining how two members of an Asian Communist delegation entering Thailand from North Vietnam had been arrested for carrying illicit materials indicating that they were involved in espionage against Thailand. A full translation of all the diary entries and the concealed secret notes discovered in the confiscated material followed. This suggested that “some of the evidence being held by the Thai Government also appears to be part of a Communist operation to spread lies about the United States…” The article concluded by noting that the Communist party in the two delegates’ homeland had protested the “false charges” against their members and demanded that the compromising materials be examined by an independent forensic expert in their capital. The Thais had agreed, and the expert had declared the materials to be genuine, not forgeries, as the Communist party had insisted. Satisfied by the outcome, the Thais had released the two Communists but retained all the confiscated material, which was never to be released for public consumption.
In retrospect, was this just another meaningless CIA “dirty trick,” a desperate attempt to prolong a lost war? Not by a long shot. If North Vietnamese military intelligence in Hanoi had the sense that they could get away with the torture of American POWs and peddle valuable propaganda films at international forums, the merciless atrocities committed at notorious camps such as the Zoo in Hanoi, orchestrated by a brutal Cuban interrogator the Americans called “Fidel,” would have continued indefinitely. More Americans would have died under the whip and the bamboo bludgeon. In fact, the escalating campaign to extract propaganda from American POWs in Hanoi ended the next year. Did the success of the diary operation have something to do with improving conditions? We will probably never know.
But I do know with certainty that the North Vietnamese Communists were in no position to launch an international propaganda offensive against American war crimes when their own hands were so bloody. The Viet Cong and NVA routinely tortured and executed South Vietnamese government officials, all the way down to the village school teacher, in an organized effort to exert control over rural areas through terror tactics. During the NVA occupation of the old imperial capital of Hue in the 1968 Tet Offensive, Communist execution squads massacred as many as three thousand unarmed prisoners, including “cruel tyrants and reactionary elements,” who had been slated for extermination months earlier. Commenting on the worst massacre of the Vietnam War, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stanley Karnow noted that the victims “had been shot or clubbed to death, or buried alive.” He added that America had hardly noticed those atrocities because it was preoccupied with “the incident at My Lai—in which American soldiers had massacred a hundred Vietnamese peasants, women and children among them.”
Dalat, South Vietnam, October 1969
• “Hang on to your lunch,” the contract pilot said with a wry grin, dropping the nose of the Beech Twin Baron toward the rolling green landscape below. We dived in a tight corkscrew, trying to stay within the invisible protective cone of ARVN control, which ended at the perimeter of the small airstrip below.
This trip to the lovely old colonial town of Dalat in the “Switzerland of Vietnam” was typical of most of my assignments during six years in the war zone. As had been the case in Laos, I had become one of the leading artist/validators supporting Agency operations in Vietnam. But my artistic abilities were developing beyond the rigid discipline required in the straightforward duplication of enemy documents. In the next several days, my skills would be rigorously tested.
The plane jolted onto the muddy strip, and the pilot immediately jammed on the brakes. I soon found myself standing in the cool sunshine of the Central Highlands, watching the Baron roar down the runway and spiral into a tight, reverse corkscrew climb. Besides the ARVN troops manning sandbagged pillboxes on the perimeter, I was all alone.
The Viet Cong had hit the local marketplace two days before in a grenade attack, killing and maiming innocent people to discredit the South Vietnamese government and to demonstrate their ability to penetrate a tightly guarded provincial capital. I felt the familiar surge of adrenaline and anxiety, which always seemed to haunt me before a new mission.
Suddenly, I heard the roar of an engine behind me. An elegant 1939 Citroen traction-avante lunged into view like a cougar, lurched across the field, and skidded to a stop beside me. Two Americans in unmarked fatigues, carrying CAR-15 assault rifles and draped in bandoleers bulging with extra clips, jumped out to scan the runway.
“Sorry to be late,” one of the case officers said, grabbing my duffel and throwing it into the cavernous rear seat of the Citroën. The other American shoved me in after my bag. In a flash, they were back in the front seat, and the driver threw the car in gear and stamped on the accelerator. Both men kept their short-barreled weapons pointed out the open windows, anticipating an ambush. We were careening down the switchback dirt road from the airport to town before I realized that this ancient saloon car actually had an eight-track stereo. As we bounced along at reckless speed, Johnny Cash was singing “I Walk the Line.” The scene was so bizarre that I exploded in fits of laughter as I tumbled around the backseat.
The local CIA base consisted of an old colonial French villa with a sandbagged gate and windows screened with cyclone fencing to thwart Chinese-made B-40 rocket-propelled grenades. The base also operated several safe houses near the ARVN military academy. It was there that I met one of the most intriguing people I would encounter during my trips in and out of Vietnam.
A woman I will call Ming, in her early twenties, was a former member of the Viet Cong. She had rallied to the government side under the Chieu Hoi program. In itself, this action was not unusual as the war dragged on, but her story was. For several years Ming had been the cook at a Communist safe house used as a way station for infiltrating North Vietnamese Trinh Sat intelligence service officers off the southern terminus of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and into Saigon. Their dual mission was to penetrate the South Vietnamese government and ARVN, and to establish clandestine communication links with Hanoi. When Ming revealed this, we had to find a way to identify these key intelligence operatives, because it was obvious that their presence in the South was compromising the effectiveness of Saigon’s war effort.
But Ming was an uneducated peasant girl and, being good operatives, the Hanoi officers never used true names or revealed personal details in her presence. Ming, however, had a near-photographic memory. I had already helped South Vietnamese counterparts prepare police sketches of suspected VC cadres by debriefing witnesses, but the trail Ming and I had to follow stretched back years. Initially, I wasn’t optimistic. Then, I spent several hours talking to Ming through an interpreter and realized she was indeed a remarkable source.
It turned out that Ming had a romantic streak, a quality discouraged by the Viet Cong. To amuse herself, she had created fantasy tales for each of the several dozen people who had passed through the safe house en route to Saigon over the years. These tales were her mental cues for recalling their exact appearance and mannerisms.
Working with the interpreter, Ming would patiently describe the fantasy image she had created for each real person. Then we would study albums with hundreds of photographs of Northern and Southern Vietnamese, and she would select certain features shared by the subject of her fantasy and the people in the photographs. As I sketched, combining visual details from the photographs with her rich descriptions, Ming would suggest refinements. For example, one of her stories concerned the “worried student” who had lost his books and developed the nervous tic of twisting his left earlobe. Another character was the “impatient doctor” who cleared his throat and brusquely interrupted people before they could complete their statements.
After two and a half days of debriefings and sketches, Ming and I had finished twenty-six face-on and profile portraits of important Communist intelligence infiltrators. Although it occurred to me that she could have been nothing more than an excellent storyteller with a vivid imagination, I did not think so by the end—her descriptions were simply too detailed and consistent.
As events turned out, South Vietnamese counterintelligence officers made thirteen arrests in the following months based on those portraits. Each of the suspects confessed, and most were caught either red-handed, engaged in acts of espionage, or carrying spy paraphernalia. They were all involved in running local agent networks, consisting of Viet Cong who had penetrated the foreign community in Saigon. Their agents were our trusted servants and employees, supposedly “vetted” by our Vietnamese counterparts. For years, these operatives had enjoyed privileged access to the homes of Americans working in Saigon.
Savannakhet, Laos, July 1972
• American ground units had withdrawn from Vietnam earlier that year, leaving behind small detachments to guard coastal enclaves such as Danang and Saigon. But the devastating use of American air power three months earlier to defeat the NVA’s massive Easter Offensive revealed that military issues still needed to be resolved. Nevertheless, America wanted out of the war, which threatened to destroy our society from within and render us impotent on the larger geopolitical stage of the Cold War.
In July 1972, with the American pullout almost complete, the Agency still had important responsibilities in Southeast Asia. Richard Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, was entangled in frustrating, secret peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese in Paris. The issue of American Prisoners of War, especially those known to have been captured alive in Laos, was one of the most contentious points of discussion. Even in the secret talks, the Hanoi negotiators steadfastly refused to admit they had troops in Laos, or that they controlled the Pathet Lao. The military and the CIA estimated, however, that there might have been more than fifty American military and civilian air crew members held captive in caves near the Pathet Lao capital of Sam Neua, in the northeastern corner of the country. It was vital for Kissinger to confront the North Vietnamese negotiators with facts, not estimates, and, unlike Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, who often expressed contempt for “those clowns over in Langley,” Kissinger depended on the Agency for fast and accurate intelligence.
Kissinger’s needs in Paris had brought me to this seedy market town on the Mekong in southern Laos. I had already helped develop clandestine channels of communication to and from captured pilots. We analyzed their handwriting in the occasional letters to their families, which the North Vietnamese allowed, and realized that some of the POWs were placing minute, innocuous dots around certain letters in a code. TSD also maintained a collection of more than fifteen thousand photographs, culled from various enemy military, Chinese, Soviet bloc, and European press sources, which might have shed light on missing American servicemen. Each of these photos had been carefully analyzed and rated on a scale of authenticity so that our peace talk negotiators would have a realistic idea of how many Americans might have reached enemy captivity alive.
My job in Savannakhet related to this issue involved both basic and more sophisticated techniques. The CIA command in Indochina was preparing to dispatch an “indig” team of local agents, composed of Chieu Hoi defectors from the NVA and Pathet Lao, up the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the enemy headquarters at Sam Neua, in a desperate attempt to verify how many American POWs were held there. Kissinger could make good use of any such hard intelligence in Paris, so the potential advantage outweighed the risk. This type of operation was known in the trade as a “10 percenter,” meaning that there was a 90 percent chance of failure.
The man on whom the fate of the operation largely depended was a wiry, former North Vietnamese officer in his early thirties, who sat across a table from me in an Agency hooch, watching intently as I worked on an array of NVA documents. He had been a senior lieutenant in the NVA’s General Political Directorate (Tong Cue Chinh Tri), the important political commissars who played a variety of roles, ranging from secular chaplain to co-commander of combat formations. His particular unit, a crack Hanoi Guards regiment, had been ripped apart by American B-52 Arc Light strikes hitting Rocket Ridge above Kontum during the NVA’s ill-fated Easter Offensive. Our counterintelligence estimated the man was a “50-50,” meaning that he presented even odds of sincere defection. But sending him back among the NVA and north along the Trail on this mission was worth the risk of his possible redefection.
He had advised us that a man in his position would travel the gravel roadways of the western Trail, accompanied by at least two Pathet Lao or NVA-enlisted bodyguards. We located two suitable defectors to form his team, and all his equipment was assembled by Saigon’s TSD operation, working with MACV/SOG. Their vehicle would be a GAZ 69 A series four-wheel drive, Soviet-built jeep with a detachable canvas roof, bearing serial numbers and identification decals of the NVA’s 559th Transportation Group, which managed Trail logistics. The GAZ would carry a Soviet-built tactical radio with special frequencies, allowing it to relay coded messages through American aircraft orbiting the Trail. Each of the men was outfitted with an authentic uniform, weapons, and equipment.
My job was to provide them with convincing infiltration packages and critical “pocket litter” that would stand up to rigorous inspection by either NVA security forces or Trinh Sat officers they might encounter. Working with our interpreter, I consulted the defector on the exact language required to complete the People’s Army of Vietnam identity documents, travel orders, letters of introduction, and ration and fuel coupons. Although the paper had been carefully duplicated in a secret Saigon laboratory, it bore the appropriate scent of jungle mildew that permeated every document ever recovered from the Trail. We had even gone so far as to “season” with rust the stickpins holding bundles of documents together. The rust left behind small telltale orange stains on the sheaves, which looked as if they had been repeatedly opened and stamped by regional security inspectors—exactly the impression we wanted to convey. It had taken me many months to collect the original exemplars and reproduce all the validating stamps and forms needed for this mission.
On this assignment, I was working closely with Jacob, my mentor from the hectic BARGER operation in Hong Kong. As I told Jacob the last time I’d seen him in Saigon, “We’ve got enough paper for this guy to drive all the way to Hanoi and back.”
We were drinking Pernod with a man I’ll call Fred Graves, a “bang and burn” special devices officer and chief of the local TSD contingent, on the roof terrace of the Majestic Hotel, overlooking the bend of the Saigon River. Fred and Jacob preferred the French colon decadence of the hotel to the rowdy, frat-house atmosphere of happy hour at the CIA’s downtown BOQ, the Due Hotel, five blocks away. Across the river to the south, distant flare planes were illuminating the dusk around a firebase on the northern edge of the Mekong Delta. The weak sounds of distant artillery fire reminded us that we were indeed living in a country at war.
“Currency,” Jacob had said curtly. “Never forget you’re in Asia, and the type of money this chap will be carrying will make up a vital part of his pocket litter.”
“Bet your sweet ass,” Fred added. “Charlie likes his money.”
We planned to “insert” the defector back in his old role as a lieutenant in the General Political Directorate, and we needed to be certain that both he and his companions were carrying the type of money that would pass muster, be it North Vietnamese dong, Pathet Lao kip, or U.S. dollars. That night, I’d gone to the Station and sent another in a string of urgent cables around the region, requesting “Essential Elements of Information” (EEI) to be collected from Communist POWs and Chieu Hoi ralliers undergoing debriefing.
As the operation matured, two document analysts from Headquarters joined me to make certain our infiltration package was absolutely current. After all, the rallier and his Pathet Lao colleagues had been out of the enemy loop for almost six months. In a flurry of trips between the Saigon Station and the secret MACV/SOG base at Camp Long Thanh, my team confirmed that U.S. dollars in twenties and fifties, combined with a token amount of Hanoi dong, would be the most appropriate currency for a political officer to carry. We also verified the latest subtleties of route-pass chops issued up and down the Trail. Armed with this information, we had joined the infiltrators in Laos.
It took me most of the day to complete the paperwork as the three defectors watched warily. Understandably, they were an attentive audience—their lives depended on my skill.
Covert action paramilitary officers then took over, showing the team their GAZ 69 A jeep with its mounted radio. They were already familiar with this vehicle, but the next piece of gear they were shown could have been a UFO for all they knew. In fact, it was the MKWURLY, a powerful, twin-engine variant of the workhorse Huey that TSD had developed specifically for this type of insertion. Normally, Hueys made a characteristic “whomp-whomp” noise due to their wide, two-bladed rotors, but these choppers had been completely silenced by installing a smaller, multiblade rotor, geared to spin much faster. The pilots had been trained to fly in absolute darkness, wearing infrared night-vision goggles.
As the infiltration team practiced with the American crew, loading and unloading the jeep aboard the strange chopper, we all understood that the operation was, at best, a long shot. But we also knew that Special Ops teams all over Indochina were conducting similar efforts to locate POW camps, where rescues might be attempted in face of the Communist intransigence.
On the night of the insertion operation, I watched the bizarre WURLY lift off silently and head toward the dark mass of the Truong Song. It was now up to the defector team to follow their orders and training so I settled down with the Special Ops officers, waiting for the first radio SITREP (situation report).
Two days later, we received our initial indication of trouble, a message broadcast in voice code from the team leader. One of the Pathet Lao, he said, had decided to redefect to his old unit. A gun fight had ensued between the two Lao members; one was dead, the other wounded. The NVA lieutenant we had worked with for so many months then announced he was turning himself in to the “proper authorities” of the People’s Army.
That’s probably what he intended to do all along, I thought with some bitterness.
There was, of course, a bright side to all of this. When Vietnamese military intelligence carefully analyzed all the infiltration documents and gear, and heard tales of silent helicopters flying through the darkness to deliver NVA vehicles deep into the fortified heart of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, they must have wondered, Who among us can we trust?
Fred Graves, who had come up from Saigon for the operation, folded his map and dusted his hands in ironic finality. “Mai pen rai,” he said, a Thai expression appropriate to the situation. Literally translated, it meant “never mind,” but in the context of our often frustrating profession, Graves’s words conveyed something closer to the Thai fatalism: “Mai pen rai krap,” or “What can you expect?”
Vientiane, Laos, November 1972
• Jacob and I were working as quickly as possible while our two subjects conversed intently in rapid, animated French. The room was stuffy with the blinds and drapes tightly closed, and the table lamps glowing brightly. Lou, the resident TOPS officer, had also attended this landmark agent/case officer meeting with us to record it on videotape. That videotape is still highly classified—I cannot disclose all the details of the disguise techniques developed for this operation, which I’ll give the code name GAMBIT. These techniques have evolved over the decades, and many are still employed today.
In the hot glare of the closed room, I worked with one of the subjects, a handsome, young African-American case officer. Meanwhile, Jacob zippered a skin-tight glove onto one arm of the agent (cryptonym PASSAGE), a small Lao who was jabbing the air with his free hand while speaking in a language more evocative of the Seine than the Mekong flowing outside the safe house windows. As he answered, the case officer kept his head motionless while I sewed a light brown, fashionably long hairpiece into his closely trimmed Afro.
The two men paid little attention to us. Their meeting had to be accomplished quickly, and they were completely consumed by the urgency of the subject matter. The local official was passing on the results of the neutralist prime minister’s cabinet meeting that day, which included details of Hanoi’s secret bargaining position in Paris. The case officer had to respond to an urgent EEI list, forwarded from Kissinger’s shop in Washington via Headquarters, by sending an IMMEDIATE cable before morning in Paris.
Jacob and I worked with focused speed on the disguises while trying not to intrude on the conversation. This mission was my first operational trip after undergoing disguise training at Headquarters that summer, and I wanted it to come off without a hitch.
By 1970, I had become chief of a field unit of sixteen graphics specialists. I had proposed the concept of cross-training employees in TSD’s Authentication and Graphics branches so that they could be clustered in smaller units closer to the action than our Okinawa base. Senior management approved of my plan, and Jacob and I now represented a prototype Authentication Generalists Program, operating out of a small regional base in Southeast Asia nearer to where we were normally needed. Jacob was the Authentication half of the team, while I fulfilled the Graphics function.
In effect, we had broken the “rice bowls” of some well-entrenched bureaucrats back at TSD Headquarters, but in doing so, we had saved money and manpower. Now we had to prove that we could indeed deliver the autonomous “quick reaction capability” (QRC) we had promised.
We and other espionage services used disguise heavily in Vientiane. This hick town up on the Mekong teemed with spies from two superpowers and a handful of local factions. The case officer I had to disguise was one of the few African Americans in Vientiane, and certainly easy to keep under surveillance. But now he was in desperate straits, having successfully recruited a major national figure who had agreed to provide vital information on the Communist side of the Indochina peace talks.
For several weeks, they had been able to meet in relative privacy at a safe house, using fairly secure car pickups and dropoffs late at night. But with the Pathet Lao drawing closer to town, the local militia declared a curfew and threw up random roadblocks at night. Our case officer knew it would be disastrous if his well-known agent was ever discovered with him. We doubted that the militia would stop a car bearing Corps Diplomatique license plates, but PASSAGE was too nervous to take the chance. In fact, his nerves had become so frayed that it looked as if we might lose this vital source.
When I arrived, the situation had become very serious, and I had to work on several pending disguise cases. After Lou took me to meet this case officer, I’d sent an IMMEDIATE cable back to Headquarters asking for advice before attending the nightly meeting with PASSAGE. Headquarters responded at once, requesting I make copious measurements of the two men’s heads and photograph them from every angle.
I then prepared the details of my plan, which involved the Agency’s new consultant in Hollywood, whom I’ll call Jerome Calloway. Calloway had recently started working with the Headquarters Disguise Unit, and he was then at the apex of his career, having just received top industry awards for his makeup work in sci-fi movies. When I had been at Headquarters that summer, my Disguise colleagues were perplexed. How could they use Calloway’s products in the real world of espionage? Now, I suggested a concrete plan for our Vientiane case officer and his agent, PASSAGE: Why not use the more malleable disguise materials for their faces, hands, and lower arms? These had completely transformed the Hollywood actors in Calloway’s films and could alter the appearances of our own case officer and PASSAGE in similar fashion.
By pure coincidence, the measurements of the case officer and PASSAGE closely matched the dimensions of materials Calloway had already made for the stunt doubles for Victor Mature and Rex Harrison. Headquarters promptly sent us these materials.
PASSAGE and the case officer had arrived undisguised for this vital debriefing just after dark, but we felt it would be crucial for them to leave fully disguised.
Halfway through our job, we stopped and stared at the subjects. Then they fell silent and gazed at each other. Jacob and I had successfully transformed an Asian statesman and an African-American case officer into two Caucasian diplomats vaguely resembling the two Hollywood celebrities.
“Good evening, sir…” PASSAGE said in heavily accented English to his case officer. His little joke broke the tension in the room.
As they left the safe house that night, the embassy car rounded the corner and encountered a militia roadblock that had not been there five hours earlier, but the nervous young troops waved the CD car through the barrier without hesitation. Our disguises had passed the first test.
Over the coming weeks, we taught the team to use the materials quickly and efficiently in the car as it moved through the darkness. Sometimes, PASSAGE slipped into the OPS vehicle as it coasted through the shadows near the gaudy arches of Patuxai, Vientiane’s equivalent of the Arc de Triomphe. Between the time the car left the traffic circle and approached the first roadblock, both the case officer and PASSAGE were in full disguise.
Obviously, these somewhat crude features would never hold up under close inspection, so Lou took photographs of the two men in disguise and we produced alias Lao diplomatic cartes d’identités. Whenever they came to a roadblock, the men simply flashed their ID cards, and the ragtag soldiers saluted the personages aboard the gleaming Buick. Listening to their accounts later, I recalled the high school dance that Doug and I had crashed as kids in Denver. I had learned then what I knew all too well now. Successful deception involving disguise was as much a matter of planning, demeanor, and attitude as of visual appearance.
Again and again, that resourceful American case officer and courageous Lao gave Kissinger’s delegation in Paris vital insight into Hanoi’s bargaining position in the Indochina peace talks.
Several months later, Jacob and I were thrilled to hear from Headquarters that during budget hearings on the Hill, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence William Colby had used our breakthrough case as an example of the Agency’s innovative spirit. Fortunately for us, this mission was just the beginning of Calloway’s effort to help us rewrite the book on the CIA’s disguise tradecraft.
Bangkok, Thailand, March 1973
• It was from Bangkok that I watched the release of American POWs from Hanoi on Armed Forces Television with a mixture of pride and deep remorse. Fewer than seven hundred came home, out of more than a thousand we felt certain the enemy had captured alive in Vietnam or Laos.
Ultimately, America’s costly involvement in Vietnam was a tragic defeat. From the perspective of an intelligence war, we had failed to understand the fundamental nature of the enemy. Successive administrations and CIA leadership could only perceive the North Vietnamese through the lens of the Cold War, as surrogates of their Communist masters in Moscow and Beijing.
That assessment had been partially true. As a young man, for example, Ho Chi Minh had been one of the founders of the French Communist party. But the North Vietnamese were also fervent nationalists, absolutely determined to unite all of Vietnam under their control. Few leaders in Saigon felt such fervor about protecting their own country.
In hindsight, it is obvious that the Vietnamese Communists could not overrun all of Indochina, knocking over “dominoes” all the way down the Malay peninsula and throughout the Indonesia archipelago. But in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson made major military commitments to the defense of South Vietnam, the situation was far murkier. As the war unfolded, a major responsibility of America’s civilian and military intelligence was to provide accurate evaluations of enemy strength and intentions to Washington.
The system failed. Our policies had been shaped by preconceptions. That was a luxury in which political leaders often indulged, but to which intelligence professionals should never succumb.
For me, however, those experiences in Indochina laid the groundwork for other major Cold War engagements that provided the pivotal successes we needed to help tip the balance in our favor.