ALTHOUGH NOT CUT from the same cloth as Maxwell Taylor, Ed Lansdale also considered himself something of a theorist. Managing Operation Mongoose and backstopping covert action at the Pentagon took Lansdale away from his primary interest, counterinsurgency (CI). For a decade after his work in the Philippines, Lansdale continued to advocate psychological warfare and other CI techniques. He expounded what he called the “demotic” strategy, an approach especially aimed at the popular will, its goal the same as “winning hearts and minds.”
Lansdale occasionally got the chance to articulate his vision. In 1959, after Eisenhower ordered air force C-130s to fly construction equipment to certain upland villages in Laos, Lansdale toured, adding the Philippines and Vietnam to his itinerary, then wrote a long report on the potential of “civic action.” A skilled harmonica player, he believed in the armed patrol with a guitarist, helping build village dispensaries and schools, giving medical help to villagers, and employing other tactics designed to win popular sympathy. Lansdale argued his case strongly, and he had extra credibility as architect of the successful Huk campaign for which he had won the National Security Medal.
General Lansdale also happened to be the American behind the ascendancy of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. Despite his fervor, Lansdale’s remained a controversial strategy until the advent of Jack Kennedy. Even within CIA, where political action had become a credo, many preferred direct measures. At the beginning of 1961, a few weeks before Kennedy’s inauguration, Lansdale went to Saigon for a fresh assessment. He found the Diem government losing its dynamism in the countryside while guerrilla warfare spread and the army floundered. Diem had barely survived a coup two months earlier. The U.S. military advisory group, with which Lansdale had once served, remained too hampered by restrictions to have much impact.
Lansdale spent a little over two weeks in Vietnam. He spoke with Diem and other Vietnamese as well as embassy people. Compiling his report on the plane to Washington, Lansdale submitted it on January 17. In Saigon he had found American and Vietnamese officials who talked like the French and Vietnamese in Hanoi in 1953–1954. He saw Vietnam as under “intense psychological attack”; 1961 would be a fateful year, and “Vietnam is in a critical condition and [we] should treat it as a combat area of the cold war, as an area requiring emergency treatment.”
Lansdale’s report presented his vision of an operation “changed sufficiently to free these Americans to do the job that needs doing.” His answer was to select “the best people you have”—in Lansdale’s opinion, “a hard core of experienced Americans who know and really like Asia and the Asians”—and give them a free hand. A new ambassador should be sent immediately as well as “a mature American” to conduct “political operations to start creating a Vietnamese-style foundation for more democratic government.”
This report created a stir in Washington. Walt Rostow showed it to President Kennedy days after he entered office. Busy, Kennedy didn’t want to read it. Rostow told him he should. Kennedy looked up when he had finished.
“This is the worst one we’ve got, isn’t it?” asked JFK curiously. “You know, Eisenhower never mentioned it. He talked at length about Laos, but never uttered the word Vietnam.”
The secretary of defense wanted to hear from the author himself. Robert McNamara asked Lansdale around. “Somehow I found him very hard to talk to,” recalled Lansdale later. “Watching his face as I talked, I got the feeling that he didn’t understand me.”
Several attempts to assign Lansdale to Vietnam were blocked until 1965 when Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge overrode all opposition. In the meantime Ed Lansdale retired after Mongoose. In Vietnam, psychological warfare would be strictly an adjunct to conventional force.
President Kennedy formed a committee to canvass Vietnam alternatives. Given the Pentagon’s status as the biggest player, McNamara deputy Roswell Gilpatric chaired the group. The Gilpatric committee faced a difficult task: many of its members had entered with the new administration and were just finding their balance. Gilpatric’s own recollection is that “none of us . . . who were charged with the responsibility for this area, had any preparation for this problem. What we didn’t comprehend was the inability of the Vietnamese to absorb our doctrine, to think and to organize the way we did.” Still, the Gilpatric group came to President Kennedy on May 6, 1961, with a list more than forty items long.
Kennedy’s decisions set a course for the American experience in Vietnam. Between doing nothing or committing U.S. forces, JFK chose graduated expansion of effort, beginning a cycle repeated many times. On May 11 Kennedy approved some of the Gilpatric recommendations. The United States expanded its advisory group and paid to increase South Vietnamese forces. Of particular importance for the secret warriors, the program included deployment to Vietnam of a provisional Special Forces group of Green Berets plus a mandate to “expand present operations in the field of intelligence, unconventional warfare, and political-psychological activities.”
Kennedy also searched for a strategic concept he could use in this growing conflict. Counterinsurgency theory suggested population resettlement, leading to “strategic hamlets” and many subsequent variants. Geography suggested sealing off South Vietnamese borders, preventing infiltration from the North or through Laos. The border-control approach, touted as early as May 1961 by Robert Komer, a CIA analyst on duty with the NSC staff, became a pillar of the U.S. concept. With its twin, pacification, it provided the foundatiom for U.S. strategy throughout the Vietnam War. North Vietnam countered with the Ho Chi Minh Trail, begun in 1959, which moved cadres to the battlefields of the South. Supplies traveled down the trail and went by sea as well.
In November 1961 Kennedy faced a recommendation for a commitment of regular U.S. troops, this time from Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow, just returned from a survey trip on Kennedy’s behalf. General Taylor tried to prevent Ed Lansdale from participating, but McNamara insisted he go to perform a special assignment—helping the Bissell study of resources for unconventional warfare. The Taylor-Rostow report included options for a “radical” increase in the numbers of Green Berets, and “increased covert offensive operations in the North as well as in Laos and South Vietnam.” President Kennedy rejected the troop request while approving almost everything else, including covert action.
Indeed more secret warriors were reaching South Vietnam. The same day he sent Taylor and Rostow to Saigon, JFK ordered out the 4400th Combat Crew Training Squadron, the special air warfare “Jungle Jim” unit, operational on November 16, 1961. It flew missions under the code name Farm Gate. The deployment figured in a wider expansion. America’s assistance group grew from fewer than 700 when JFK entered the White House to more than 12,000 by mid-1962. There were U.S. supply units to support the Vietnamese, U.S. helicopter units to fly them to battle, the Special Forces, plus navy, air force, and Marine Corps detachments. Farm Gate retained its clandestine status while semi-clandestine air force units followed: Mule Team to fly short-range air transport, Ranch Hand (at first called Hades) which dumped toxic chemicals to defoliate the countryside, and more. The Vietnam contingent could hardly be called a “group” anymore; it became the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), continuing to grow to about 22,000 by 1964.
Despite this plentiful support, conditions in South Vietnam deteriorated. The Vietnamese never seemed to catch the elusive National Liberation Front (NLF) rebels. It was evident by 1963 that Diem had lost most of his remaining political support, in particular when his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, began using force to quell demonstrations by Buddhists, the majority religious movement. South Vietnamese army officers felt the crisis made it impossible to prosecute the war. In Saigon, talk of a coup filled the air.
Those early days in Vietnam, much like Korea in years past, were an adventure for Americans. In the beginning it had been Ed Lansdale who established the close U.S. relationship with Vietnamese authorities. When he left at the end of 1956 the liaison role remained a major activity of the CIA station at Saigon. Later that role grew. The CIA wanted its own sources among South Vietnamese politicians. By 1960 the agency had the best information outside the presidential palace, save perhaps for the NLF intelligence networks. Indeed, in a 1960 coup attempt, CIA officers were in contact with both sides throughout. This caused some difficulty for station chief William E. Colby when Diem’s brother Nhu found out. Threatened with arrest or worse, CIA officer George Carver had to be spirited out of Saigon. A second officer, Ed Regan, was pulled out temporarily until the Vietnamese cooled off.
Another task on the CIA’s list was to infiltrate North Vietnam using Vietnamese special forces (formed in 1958) or paramilitary teams recruited by the CIA. Allen Dulles briefed Kennedy on the initiative early in 1961, and the president ordered intensification of the effort. Bill Colby created Project Tiger for this mission. The agency quickly gave up on Saigon special forces—they ran operations only inside South Vietnam. Instead the CIA recruited its own Vietnamese commandos. Colby, with his experience on Soviet programs and with the OSS in France and Norway, ought to have been the first to question feasibility here, but he forged ahead. North Vietnam had excellent security services. Colby tried to send agents, both singleton spies and teams, by sea and air. Ed Regan and Russ Miller trained the commandos assiduously. Navy detailees to the CIA prepared the boat crews. The South Vietnamese air force manned CIA planes for airdrops. But Hanoi swept up every team and even mounted a show trial late in 1961 of a Saigon aircrew captured when their plane crashed on a resupply flight. More than 200 commandos were lost in Project Tiger. McGeorge Bundy warned Kennedy in 1963 that the missions involved most of the dangers common to those in denied areas. But the U.S. military took over and continued five more years, losing 450 more South Vietnamese to no effect. Hanoi had penetrated the program from the beginning.
Col. Gilbert Layton of the army ran the Combined Services Division of Colby’s CIA station, controlling Project Tiger and other paramilitary efforts. “Chink” Layton, originally detailed to the CIA, had joined the agency in 1950 and participated in many of the projects of that era. Like Colby, he had set up “stay-behind” networks (in Germany). He had been an instructor on Saipan, had an earlier tour in Saigon and one in Turkey, and had been liaison between the army and the CIA’s Tibetan training center at Camp Hale. The fifty-year-old Layton knew a losing proposition when he saw one but proved unable to change the luck of Project Tiger.
Chink Layton, Colby, and other CIA officers had far greater success with a paramilitary effort in South Vietnam’s Central Highlands, organizing armed forces among the tribal minorities. For self-defense, an upland counterpart of “strategic hamlets,” then for border control, the tribal units became the basis for a striking force. Called the Village Defense Program by the CIA, and Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDGS) by the military, the units had fortified base camps and Green Beret leadership. Until November 1962 the CIDG program was entirely a CIA project; thereafter operational command shifted to MACV, though the agency continued to foot the bill. All responsibility went to the military in a 1963 phase-out of CIA activity known as Operation Switchback. By the time Colonel Layton transferred to Thailand in 1965 the CIDGS were well established. They comprised eighty base camps.
By then, Colby had left too. At Langley he succeeded Desmond FitzGerald as chief of the DO’s Far East Division. John H. Richardson followed Colby in Saigon. From the army’s Counter Intelligence Corps, Richardson had been an authentic espionage hero in 1944–1945, instrumental in capturing a notorious German spy in Italy. “Jocko” Richardson stayed at CIC after the war, switched to the Central Intelligence Group, then CIA. It was Richardson who, in the denouement of the Albanian project, had shut down the operating bases. He had worked Vienna and Trieste, and moved to Saigon from Manila. Colby introduced Richardson to Ngo Dinh Nhu, now head of Diem’s intelligence services. A gregarious man who had been a classmate of Richard Nixon’s at Whittier College, Jocko, like Chink Layton, spoke four or five languages, including French, indispensable in Saigon. Richardson got on quite well with Nhu, but he was ham-handed—typically, Jocko moved into a house that had been the headquarters for torturers of the French (and then Saigonese) Surété and was thought to be haunted, then wondered why Vietnamese would not visit him there.
With a style not unlike John McCone, who let subordinates carve out empires as long as they did not cross the boss, Richardson waded into the morass. The Saigon station was no longer the homogeneous unit of forty that Bill Colby had squired. The paramilitary crowd made up one circle, the espionage crew another. Since 1961 there had also been a communications intelligence circle while the demands of war swelled the station with a growing cadre of analysts. Then there were the political action people. One of the agency’s political specialists played a key role in the demise of Ngo Dinh Diem. Lucien Conein, his cover as a lieutenant colonel assigned to the Vietnamese Interior Ministry, but whose real function involved contact with the Vietnamese generals, had also been a member of Lansdale’s 1954–1956 mission.
The biggest empire within the CIA station was Richardson’s own. His problem lay not with the Saigonese but with U.S. authorities. Convinced that Diem’s time had run out, Washington tried desperately to get him to broaden his government. The assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, Roger Hilsman, evidently with preliminary authorization but while President Kennedy was out of town, drafted a cable backing a coup suggested by Vietnamese generals. Nhu’s special forces had just made bloody, widely condemned attacks on Buddhist pagodas. That became the last straw. A cable on August 26, 1963, instructed Conein and CIA officer Alphonse G. Spero to tell the generals the United States would not oppose a coup if it had good chances of success. Richardson reported the maneuver through CIA channels.
McCone went on to oppose the coup initiative, soon joined by Taylor, McNamara, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Washington scuttled the Hilsman cable. McCone, Colby, and others spiked the initiative, but Kennedy still insisted Nhu must go. If Diem would not fire his brother, the United States would look for alternatives.
But Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge felt that John Richardson had undermined him. The ambassador insisted on transferring the station chief. He specifically wanted Ed Lansdale to replace Jocko. Then Nhu too sold out the CIA boss, having a newspaper identify the station chief in print. Abruptly recalled on October 5, Richardson was done. For a time the Vietnamese generals backed down, but two days before Richardson’s hurried recall they told Conein of new coup plans. That coup took place on November 1, 1963. The CIA put up $40,000 for expenses, which Conein carried in a briefcase. Diem and Nhu died in custody of the plotters the next day. Thanks to Conein, the CIA had had a front-row seat to the coup planning if not its precise timing, of which the embassy received just minutes’ warning. Assassination seemed epidemic in November 1963. Three weeks later President Kennedy fell to the sniper’s rifle in Dallas.
Asked almost two decades later for his opinion of U.S. support for the Diem coup, Edward Lansdale replied, “I think we should never have done it. We destroyed the Vietnamese Constitution, not we, but the people we were working with, threw it in the waste basket.” Indeed, CIA support flew in the face of America’s commitment to democracy and left the United States embroiled in a war that it remained ill suited for, could not win, and could not walk away from. Washington’s search for military effectiveness stood revealed as deeper than its support for democracy. Those who argue that Jack Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam have never been able to get past the consequences of the Diem coup, which President Kennedy, after all, supported. The maneuver eliminated all possible flexibility in U.S. policy. As for the suggestion that the CIA ought to be excused on the basis of its opposition to the coup, this is based on the secret record of its (excessive) policy role rather than the discoverable one of its agents on the street in Saigon. As a practical matter, public and world opinion would be dictated by the discoverable record, not the secret one.
Several more coups occurred before 1967, when Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu and Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky consolidated control in Saigon. Langley’s political action people made numerous efforts to deepen political support for the regime. Washington repeatedly encouraged Thieu and Ky, as it had Diem, to broaden their base and construct a democracy, but the South Vietnamese institutions created in 1966–1967 never blossomed, and the Saigon regime’s failure never resulted in sanctions from Washington. That too says something about the U.S. commitment to democracy.
Soon after the Diem coup, Bill Colby arrived in Saigon to pick up the pieces. He had John Richardson to dinner the night before leaving Washington. His priority was to replace the station chief. Colby called on Peer de Silva, recently dispatched to Hong Kong after a long tour as CIA chief in Korea, where he too had seen a coup up close. De Silva had a strong background in espionage against denied areas, and had run security for the atomic bomb project. He and Colby had overlapped for part of a year at Columbia University. Director McCone approved de Silva’s appointment about the time Kennedy died, then made the suggestion to incoming President Lyndon Johnson and recalled de Silva to Washington. He took de Silva to meet the president. LBJ wanted only the best for Saigon. De Silva became the first of a succession of CIA chieftains drawn from top agency ranks.
In consonance with John Kennedy’s decisions after the Bay of Pigs, the CIA had been ordered to get out of the paramilitary business. That became the origin of Operation Switchback, which turned over the agency’s montagnard CIDGS to the military command in Vietnam. But the prohibition lasted less than a year. A directive already in draft form when LBJ became president provided for unilateral U.S. pressures against North Vietnam, a program of covert military action called OPLAN 34-A. Langley’s Far East baron Bill Colby went to Honolulu within weeks of Diem’s downfall to discuss this with U.S. military commanders. Colby now opposed missions of the sort he had carried out in Project Tiger, but the CIA view would be overridden. President Johnson approved OPLAN 34-A. The CIA boat base at Da Nang, handed over to the military under Switchback early in 1964, would be expanded to support 34-A. Quite soon the military’s Studies and Observation Group (SOG), with orders for commando attacks along the North Vietnamese coast as part of 34-A, added its own version of the infiltration program. The CIA supplied intelligence and specialized support to these activities as long as they continued.
The 34-A operations led to the next major escalation of the U.S. war in Vietnam. On the last night of July 1964 occurred a raid by fast, heavily armed Swift boats, attacking North Vietnamese facilities on the islands of Hon Me and Hon Ngu in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Hon Me raid coincided with another U.S. intelligence activity, a “De Soto” patrol into the Gulf. De Soto patrols were U.S. Navy collection efforts for communications intercepts. Ships on these operations carried enhanced radio equipment. De Soto patrols had been pursued off the coasts of China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea. President Kennedy had approved a similar program for North Vietnam in 1962, when the first patrol was conducted. A second De Soto mission took place in 1963, and the destroyer Craig made an intercept cruise in the Gulf in March 1964. In any case, the destroyer Maddox was on a De Soto patrol when Swift boats passed her, the 34-A raiders returning to base. That evening the Maddox steamed past the recently shelled islands.
The North Vietnamese sent out torpedo boats which attacked the Maddox in international waters the next afternoon. They were driven off with one sunk and the others damaged. President Johnson then deliberately ordered the Maddox back into the Gulf of Tonkin, accompanied by another destroyer, the C. Turner Joy. Two nights later the two destroyers mistook instrument readings for another attack. President Johnson retaliated with carrier air strikes on North Vietnam. He then went to Congress for a resolution supporting his action, and on August 7, 1964, the legislature approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. President Johnson then relied on the resolution in place of a declaration of war.
McGeorge Bundy’s immediate problem became what to do with De Soto. As a reconnaissance project De Soto patrols were approved by the Special Group, which Bundy chaired. Because of LBJ’s extreme sensitivity to Vietnam developments, the president took up this question directly. Both De Soto and 34-A operations halted while Johnson considered policy. The Joint Chiefs argued for action, bombing North Vietnam and relaxing restrictions on American forces. Maxwell Taylor, ambassador to South Vietnam since July, favored waiting to see if the Vietnamese political situation stabilized. Like Kennedy before him, Johnson selected less than the maximum option: resume De Soto patrols and 34-A; reinforce Farm Gate with heavier jet bombers. Thus operations like De Soto and 34-A, which were provocative, were approved not on their merits but as alternatives to greater provocation.
Meanwhile on the ground the CIA recovered its earlier momentum. In search of some means to counter the National Liberation Front in the villages, several agency officers innovated armed bands of villagers who within months accounted for the killing of hundreds of guerrillas. De Silva’s deputy, Gordon Jorgensen, soon called the units People’s Action Teams. A variant of the same idea took root in the Mekong Delta, sparked by Stewart Methven, reassigned from Laos. The paramilitary specialist “Rip” Robertson presently materialized in Vietnam to work in these programs. In the Central Highlands the CIDG effort continued to expand. In June 1964 Mac Bundy asked Director McCone to turn back the clock to before Switchback, to have the CIA reenter Vietnam, as it were. In March 1965 McCone presented a consolidated program of a dozen projects the CIA proposed to conduct. The agency essentially defined the role it assumed throughout the Vietnam War.
The secret war on the western flank of South Vietnam, among the rugged mountains and high plains of Laos, represented a complementary effort to isolate the battlefield in the South. Paramilitary action and political manipulation in Laos attained heights never before achieved. In previous efforts the CIA had always been hampered in one way or another: actions were impeded by U.S. reluctance to show its hand, as with Cuba or in Albania; or by lack of truly popular indigenous groups, as in Indonesia or the People’s Republic of China; or by the absence of suitable support bases, as in Tibet. In South Vietnam the Pentagon had a better claim to command.
Laos was different. There was no difficulty in defining the mission for the secret warriors—insurgency was increasing in South Vietnam, and the North used Laos to move to the battle area. Thus Laos became the front line in the struggle. Bases were plentiful both there and in neighboring Thailand, another American ally. At the same time the American military was excluded from Laos by the 1954 Geneva Accords on Indochina, which allowed only the French to advise the Royal Laotian Government (RLG). In Laos the CIA had the field all to itself, with the military supporting its actions, rather than the other way around.
After the 1954 agreement, Laos had had a chance for independence with stability. A little country with a small political elite, leaders of all persuasions were well known to one another, many related. Prime examples were two princes of the royal blood, Souphanouvong, a leader of the Communist movement, and his half-brother Souvanna Phouma, a proponent of neutralism. The French had residual influence in Laos while the American presence, established after Geneva, grew slowly through the 1950s.
The Eisenhower administration had no mind to accept a neutralist solution. Much as he did with Sukarno, Nehru, and Nasser, Ike insisted that Laos side with the West in the Cold War and spent two years discouraging formation of a coalition government. American aid began in 1955. By 1960 the United States had provided Laos more than $250 million, two-thirds of it to pay the entire cost of maintaining RLG armed forces.
The CIA station played a critical role in political action. Showing their predilection for “third force” options, the secret warriors backed a pro-American Committee for the Defense of National Interests (CDNI), formed after a 1958 electoral upset in which Souphanouvong’s party gained the majority of the seats contested while the prince himself was elected by the largest margin in every district of the country. The young people who formed CDNI were called les jeunes. In the Laotian political capital, Vientiane, many of them represented the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and they were reformist but conservative, anti-Communist, and had the rare advantage of crossing clan and party lines. It quickly became an open secret that American special services supported CDNI. The 1958 elections were supposed to complete reintegrating the nation, which was under military control by different factions, just like warlord China. The socialist Lao People’s Front (Neo Lao Hak Xat, or NLHX) and especially its parent, the Laotian Communists, or Pathet Lao, dominated in two provinces. In November 1958 Prince Souphanouvong accepted the king’s authority, and Pathet Lao troops in these provinces joined the Royal Lao Armed Forces (RLAF) while the NLHX was to be represented in a neutralist coalition under Souvanna Phouma. But the accord disintegrated when the Souvanna cabinet fell in July 1958.
Suddenly les jeunes took center stage, gaining seats in a cabinet formed in August even though some ministers had lost their elections. Pathet Lao ministers were dismissed. Trouble quickly followed within the RLAF as the Pathet Lao troops revolted, rekindling the Laotian civil war. The Eisenhower administration increased aid when fighting resumed, and increased it again as conflict deepened. The CIA station, the American conduit to CDNI, grew especially important in the U.S. embassy.
All was not well there. The ambassador favored Souvanna’s neutralist solution and considered his policy had been sabotaged by the CIA. Station chief Henry Heckscher refused to tell his boss about some agency activities. Ambassador Horace Smith took his grievance to Allen Dulles early in 1959, demanding Heckscher’s transfer. The DCI knew of Heckscher’s arrogance but also his resourcefulness. Dulles backed the station chief and at the end of his tour even assigned Heckscher to northeast Thailand, where he mounted cross-border operations into Laos. Taking that into consideration, Heckscher outlasted his ambassador, for Smith was replaced in the summer of 1960 by Winthrop G. Brown, a former Wall Street lawyer and ambassador to New Delhi.
Only three weeks after Brown’s arrival, the pro-U.S. government was overthrown by the paratroops of Captain Kong Le. A veteran of the French campaign for Dien Bien Phu, Kong Le remained inscrutable to most Americans, who disbelieved neutralist declarations and harbored the theory that he must be a Communist or “fellow traveler.” American perceptions aside, Kong Le became the strongman and asked Souvanna Phouma to form a new cabinet. Winthrop Brown counseled Washington to cooperate with Souvanna, the most pro-Western leader sustainable in Laos. Brown believed that CIA station chief Gordon L. Jorgensen agreed.
In fact the Eisenhower administration was pursuing its own game in Laos, with the CIA at the center of it and Jorgensen squarely on board. Eisenhower sent in a covert military advisory group euphemistically called the Program Evaluation Office. Beginning in the summer of 1959 Ike added more than a hundred Special Forces men under the code name “White Star.” Grayston Lynch, the CIA boat man, first connected with the agency while in Laos with this unit. White Star worked with the RLAF whose strongman, Gen. Phoumi Nosavan, one of the jeunes, denounced neutralism and launched a coup that toppled Souvanna. The CIA had a case officer with Phoumi, John Hasey, who lived next door and shared his aspirations. At the same time Campbell James worked directly with Souvanna.
Not merely playing both sides of this street, the agency took steps to recruit the Hmong tribe in the Annamite mountains. Stewart Methven, who had arrived from Japan in the summer of 1959, met Hmong military commander Vang Pao at the hut of Filipino medical staff. Over a series of visits Methven convinced the Hmong leader to ally with the CIA. This became Project Momentum.
On the surface Washington supported Vientiane, but secretly it backed Phoumi and recruited a Hmong secret army—actually called that, the “armée clandestine.” Desmond FitzGerald dropped in to survey the scene. Toward the end of 1960, John N. Irwin, representing the Pentagon on the 5412 Group, visited southern Laos and talked with Phoumi. A second Irwin trip occurred before Kennedy took office. The Americans began channeling aid to Phoumi, bypassing the Vientiane government. The CIA induced Phoumi to pass supplies to the Hmong, who swore allegiance to the general. Reports of a North Vietnamese invasion of Laos following a trumped-up border incident were used to justify further aid increases.
Fleeing Vientiane after Phoumi’s coup, Souvanna Phouma and Kong Le made an alliance with the Pathet Lao. A little over two weeks later, on December 4, 1960, the Soviet Union began to airlift military supplies to the Kong Le–Pathet Lao forces, and the Pathet Lao started an offensive of their own. Political intrigue had turned Laos, the Land of a Million Elephants, into a Cold War battleground. The effect of U.S. actions would be to undercut the delicate political balance in the country, hardly conducive to democracy. Souvanna Phouma said of a senior U.S. official, and by extension of American policy, that he “understood nothing about Asia and nothing about Laos.”
President Eisenhower’s decisions clearly indicate his concept of Laos as a secret war. Aside from White Star and the Hmong, he approved the movement of B-26 bombers to Thailand, not immediately used in Laos because of the need to assemble non-American crews. Ten lighter T-6 strike aircraft were also approved, initially without bombs, to be flown by Laotian pilots. The aircraft were provided by the Thais, then replaced by the United States. By January 4, 1961, Air America had plans to have mechanics in Vientiane service the Laotian air fleet. Air America also flew White Star troopers around Laos, and enabled CIA officers to shuttle between Phoumi and the Hmong. Fifteen Air America craft at Bangkok were flying one thousand tons of supplies a month into Laos. Ike ordered a naval task force bearing Marines into position for intervention in Laos and placed them on a high state of alert.
Laos figured among the main topics at Ike’s transition discussions with Kennedy. Eisenhower warned Khrushchev that the United States intended to ensure that the “legitimate government” of Laos stayed in power. At a morning meeting on Laos on December 31, 1960, Ike joked that perhaps the time had come to use existing plans for airborne alert of the Strategic Air Command. In parting he told the group, which included Allen Dulles and Gordon Gray, “We must not allow Laos to fall to the Communists, even if it involves war.”
President Kennedy thought Laos no place for major conflict. In office he used coercive diplomacy, threatening with U.S. force and briefly converting the Program Evaluation Office into an open advisory group, but he aimed for international accord. With the help of Averell Harriman, Roger Hilsman, and Dean Rusk, Kennedy achieved his aim. When Phoumi Nosavan stood in the way, his American assistance evaporated and his CIA link, Jack Hasey, disappeared, sent to the Congo despite opposition from Desmond FitzGerald and Bill Colby. Kennedy’s Special Group made that decision themselves on February 5, 1962.
It was Harriman who engineered the cutoff of Phoumi. A loyal Democrat and senior statesman, Harriman carried weight with Jack Kennedy, and he tried for a credible Laotian neutralization agreement. Harriman also knew what he wanted—when CIA officers in Vientiane briefed him on Laotian politics and claimed popular support for Phoumi, the president’s irascible envoy turned off his hearing aid in the middle of the meeting.
Diplomacy led Harriman to Geneva, where an international conference reached agreement in 1962, though in the end neither side observed it. What also flowed from the accord—the installation of a coalition government in Vientiane under Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma—proved to be the one lasting achievement of the negotiation.
Washington laughed with scorn at North Vietnamese assertions that all their forces had withdrawn from Laos: only forty enemy soldiers passed the international commission’s border checkpoints. But the United States violated the agreement too, continuing to supply and command the Hmong secret army. Two agency officers, Anthony Poshepny and Vinton Lawrence, established a CIA base at the Hmong center of Long Tieng. In the spring of 1963 the assassination of neutralist Laotian officials led to a fresh outbreak of fighting. Now the Pathet Lao attacked the neutralist forces, who eventually joined the RLAF. The war resumed. Souvanna Phouma secretly asked for U.S. help, and President Kennedy agreed. In late 1963 Kennedy designated the CIA as “executive agent” for the Laotian paramilitary effort.
The largest tribal mobilization of all, the very foundation of the CIA’s secret war in Laos, was that of the Hmong, or, as they were then known, the Meo. This word is a bastardization of the Chinese name Miao used for this mountain people, but it is a pejorative. The tribes respect no borders and are found in Laos, China, and North Vietnam. Generations of French and American secret warriors knew them as Meo, a proud but friendly people who practiced slash-and-burn farming, raising poppies for opium, with villages in the mountain valleys.
It was probably inevitable that the Hmong would be dragged into the American war. Their poppies had had hidden effects on conflict in Indochina since the French war, when both sides had used opium money, though the Hmong mostly sided with the French under the leadership of Touby Lyfoung, a pro-French notable and the first of his tribe to graduate college. Touby’s Hmong fought for the French, comprising the bulk of the partisan force that vainly attempted to save Dien Bien Phu. Vang Pao, a veteran of that debacle, led a French commando unit on the fruitless expedition. Where Touby Lyfoung functioned as potentate and tribal politician, Vang remained a military commander. When Stewart Methven met him in 1959, Vang held the allegiance of many (though not all) clans and could deliver on promises of recruits.
Feeling too old for another war, Touby left the main leadership role to Vang Pao. While some Hmong sided with the Pathet Lao (clan leader Fay Dang becoming a member of the Pathet Lao central committee), Touby and Vang Pao made their alliance with the CIA, not directly supporting Phoumi but waging a parallel war. Before Kennedy took office there were already 2,500 Hmong in the secret army. Within months the number had almost quadrupled. Vang drew his cadres from the half-dozen ethnic Hmong battalions in the RLAF, which merely enraged Laotian officials. Kong Le forces soon attacked. Vang Pao lost his own village, forced to retreat into the surrounding mountains. Worst of all, the Plain of Jars airfield also fell, endangering supplies. The Pathet Lao joined the Kong Le offensive and threatened the entire Hmong tribal area. The spring and summer of 1961 witnessed a Hmong mass exodus. Whole villages moved. More than 70,000 people trekked into the mountains to make new homes. Without a crop already in the ground, the Hmong were threatened with starvation in their new homes.
Several Americans were vitally important in the Hmong future. When the CIA’s Methven left for South Vietnam—FitzGerald had promised him his choice of posts but reneged at the last moment—Methven handed the Hmong account over to Bill Lair, a thirty-five-year-old officer who spent much of the 1950s in Thailand as a CIA case officer to the Thai Police Aerial Recovery Unit (PARU). He too had watched the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu and thus appreciated Hmong fighting qualities. Lair ran Project Momentum for almost a decade and had the contacts with the Thai that were crucial to secure the assistance of PARU teams, the link between secret army units in the field and distant CIA managers. Known as “Cigar” in agency cable traffic, Lair ran the entire secret army with eight other CIA officers, a White Star team (soon withdrawn), and a hundred PARU Thai.
A second American organized the system that would revictual the armée clandestine for the next eleven years. Maj. Harry C. Aderholt, commander of the air force’s small, unconventional warfare detachment on Okinawa in 1959–1960, helped the CIA on air operations in Tibet and Southeast Asia. Aderholt went to Vientiane in early 1960 to set up a light plane service from the Laotian capital to Phong Saly town, where a tiny landing strip was carved into the side of a mountain. Working with Vang Pao, “Heinie” Aderholt surveyed northern Laos for a network of similar airstrips, soon called Lima Sites, and stayed for two years to oversee their construction. Aderholt also helped the CIA find suitable aircraft such as the Pilatus Porter (Helio U-10 in U.S. service) that could use the smallest Lima Sites.
A third American, Edgar M. Buell of the U.S. Agency for International Development, became a legend in Laos. Buell initiated airdrops of rice into the mountains, indiscriminate “blind” drops at first since the whereabouts of the Hmong were unknown for several months. “Pop” Buell left his embassy desk to parachute into the mountains. He spent two months walking the forests, personally contacting Hmong villages. Those that agreed to follow Vang Pao he listed for regular rice drops, supplies of seeds and tools, medicine, and so forth.
In December 1961 the Hmong opened two new bases farther west, at Long Tieng (LS-30/98) and Sam Thong (LS-20), which became the main centers of the secret army. Long Tieng served as Vang Pao’s headquarters, a major mountain commercial center with a Hmong population of forty thousand. The CIA created a base there initially staffed by Anthony Poshepny and Vint Lawrence, who remained after the 1962 Geneva agreement, told to stay out of sight. Known by its radio “handle,” Sky, Long Tieng became the nerve center of the secret war.
Sam Thong became the administrative, medical, and education center. Consolidation continued through the mid-sixties. A modern hospital and the first Hmong high school were both established there. The Geneva agreement had little effect on CIA support. Air America continued regular humanitarian flights. Even before fighting resumed in the spring of 1963 the agency had directed Air America to make almost a dozen flights specifically to deliver weapons euphemized as “dirty rice.” Ingeniously, the CIA met requirements for “withdrawal” of foreign troops by pulling its people back to Thailand, from which they would simply fly to their jobs in Laos with Air America shuttles each morning.
For the CIA, Project Momentum became a model of “nation-building,” the political action approach fostering civic institutions in hopes that grateful clients would then cooperate with American policies. But nation-building among the Hmong, as with the montagnards in South Vietnam, brought political problems. The CIA effectively created nations within nations. Activities were possible only to the degree the central government extended autonomy to tribal peoples. Saigon triggered a montagnard political crisis in 1964–1965 precisely by reducing the autonomy accorded tribes in the Central Highlands. The CIA’s relative success with Vang Pao resulted from Vientiane’s being too weak to exert similar authority. From the American strategic standpoint, however, keeping the Vientiane government weak to enable the secret army flew in the face of fostering a national government that could defeat the Pathet Lao. Rather, in recognition of Hmong autonomy, Vang Pao received repeated RLAF promotions and was treated as the commander of an RLAF military region while Touby Lyfoung became a minister in the Royal Laotian Government. Despite such tokens, the lowland Lao never trusted the Hmong.
Vang Pao struck his greatest blow to date in 1963, in a raid that destroyed a Pathet Lao supply road, dynamiting a full kilometer and sending sections tumbling down a mountainside. Cable traffic suggests that Vang Pao moved without CIA approval, and ahead of any Pathet Lao attacks. It was not the first time CIA troops acted beyond the secret warriors’ control, nor would it be the last.
The armée clandestine grew to thirty thousand troops. Vang Pao and the CIA worked out a program to increase striking power: a third of the Hmong formed Special Guerrilla Units (SGUs), partisan battalions supported by bazookas and a few heavy mortars. These became the regular forces in Vang Pao’s army. They were later supplied with 75- and even 105-millimeter guns, the latter usually lifted from mountaintop to mountaintop by Air America helicopters and used to fire down into Pathet Lao posts.
Air America provided the airlift under contract to USAID. Lima Site techniques were perfected to the point that C-130s could disgorge entire palletized cargoes in quick flybys. Smaller Air America planes relayed cargo to outlying sites. Each morning Sky handed out assignments to the fleet as the planes entered Laotian airspace. Sometimes Air America hauled passengers, often fuel for the stocks at the Lima Sites or additional cargo for distribution. Sky frequently assigned as many as four or five successive missions a day to the light transports.
Secret warfare in Laos assumed the dynamic, free-wheeling style of Sky air operations. The epitome was embodied by Tony Poe, who attained legendary stature in the war. Identified by his CIA cryptonym “Pin,” Poe (really Anthony Poshepny) went everywhere with a boxer’s mouthguard in his pocket, always ready for a fight. Tony came from the big CIA Thailand base at Takhli to be senior adviser to Vang Pao, or Sky chief. Poe transferred up from the Cambodian border, where he had been working with anti-government rebels. An alumnus of the Camp Peary class of 1953 and a veteran of Indonesia, Saipan, and Camp Hale, Poe had an extensive paramilitary resumé. At Long Tieng he presided over intensification of the struggle. Vint Lawrence manned the base while Poe ranged out with Hmong SGUs. The Laotian operation heated up.
Status as a CIA project greatly facilitated the armée clandestine mobilization in Laos. Supplies were disguised in aid to Thailand and the RLAF. Money was hidden in military assistance, USAID, and CIA budgets. In fact the main obstacle proved to be funding. The expansion of the secret army after 1964 could not be accomplished without noticeable increases. Although the agency budget remained secret, the small CIA subcommittees of Congress had to approve the higher requests. To obtain that approval the CIA relied on its recognized role in counterinsurgency plus its vital contacts in Laos and Thailand. The agency also spiced up its presentation. Langley desk officer Ralph McGehee, handling Thai matters at headquarters after a tour in the field, recalls being flattered one day when division chief Colby invited him to present parts of the CIA case. Des FitzGerald approved the briefing and asked Congress to fund more than a hundred secret army units. Vang Pao actually had only a couple dozen small-size formations at the time, but at Langley, McGehee and other DO officers performed a paper reorganization, endowing the Hmong overnight with the required number of units, each of just a few men. McGehee felt remorse over the falsification, but the subcommittees approved the money. Congress as a whole never explicitly considered the Laos request. For Richard Helms, who became director of central intelligence in 1966, congressional inattention freed him to do a job. The Central Intelligence Agency settled down to fight a real war in Laos. The question remained how long it could stay secret.
By now the system had assumed its final form. The ambassador had the last word. Aware of CIA’s major projects, ambassadors were then consulted on each activity that went outside embassy guidelines. He retained specific approval authority for air operations other than armed reconnaissance over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Since Project Momentum relied upon close cooperation between the Hmong and the air force, the CIA was in the ambassador’s office all the time. He became a key player in the Southeast Asia Coordinating Committee, which brought together the American ambassadors, military commanders, and intelligence chiefs in Laos, South Vietnam, and Thailand.
Ambassador Leonard Unger had the helm during the initial phase of the Laotian war. Fluent in both Thai and Lao, deeply interested in the Land of a Million Elephants, Unger successfully protected Souvanna when coup attempts were made against him. Although his successor calls Unger “a most reluctant militarist,” the escalation of CIA’s secret war came on his watch. William H. Sullivan followed Unger. While Sullivan had been a senior member of the U.S. negotiating team at Geneva, in Laos he became an enthusiastic field marshal of the secret war. “There wasn’t a bag of rice dropped in Laos he didn’t know about,” said William P. Bundy of Sullivan. G. McMurtrie Godley replaced Sullivan in 1969. He actually earned the nickname “field marshal.”
The embassy had a small air staff that maintained approved target lists, processed requests for new authorities, and coordinated among the ambassador, the CIA, and air force commanders in Thailand and South Vietnam. Emergency requests often came through the station chief. He supervised at least three parallel programs. One, out of the embassy, assisted the Laotian government directly. A second set of initiatives, in tandem with U.S. forces in South Vietnam, sought to obstruct the Ho Chi Minh Trail where it crossed through the southern panhandle of Laos. One of these, Project Hardnose, looked to place roadwatch teams to report on movements along the trail. Two more CIA officers, Michael Deuel and Michael Maloney, died working on Hardnose in October 1965 when their helicopter crashed in the jungle. The third initiative was Project Momentum.
Although only a few dozen CIA officers labored full time on Momentum, the project actually spun an exceedingly complex web. The command center had been located in Thailand, just across the border at the airfield of Udorn. There Bill Lair and his deputy, Pat Landry, gave orders to Vang Pao’s secret army. They arranged for Air America to support the Hmong and for air strikes to back its operations. Their air boss through the late sixties was Maj. Richard Secord of the air force. For his goals and operational approvals, Lair referred to the CIA station chief in Vientiane. For supplies, Thai volunteers to work with the armée clandestine, and air missions, Lair dealt with the U.S. command and CIA station in Thailand. Through much of this period the station chief in Bangkok was “Red” Jantzen, whom Lair had known for more than a decade. Jantzen would be followed by Peer de Silva and Lou Lapham, both former Saigon chiefs.
Relations between the field command and the CIA station in Vientiane varied. The agency’s chiefs of station had different styles and manners. Gordon Jorgensen left for Saigon in 1962. Charles S. Whitehurst presided over the re-ignition of the Laotian war. He brought the Langley perspective, having headed the FE Division branches for Cambodia and Laos, but much of his field experience had been in China operations. Douglas S. Blaufarb, come to CIA from a career at the Voice of America and the U.S. Information Service, cut his teeth in covert operations setting up radio nets for the Albania project. He believed in adaptive response and mostly gave Lair a free hand. Ted Shackley received the Vientiane posting as reward for his service on the Cuba front. As Shackley arrived in the summer of 1966, the Mekong River suddenly spilled over its banks, inundating Vientiane, in some places rising the equivalent of four stories—an ominous sign. Only incredible ingenuity enabled the Americans to keep the embassy open.
Shackley viewed covert action as a “third option” and saw Project Momentum as an alternative to using U.S. troops, fielding an army for a fraction of the cost. He wanted to control everything. Shackley hurled the secret army into major confrontations with the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese. On his watch Vang Pao’s Hmong began to sustain serious losses. Lawrence Devlin came to Laos at the end of 1968 when Shackley moved to Saigon. Hugh Tovar helped endow the Hmong with their own miniature air force of T-28s. Vang Pao’s losses continued to accelerate during Tovar’s tenure. Tovar arrived in 1970, when combat had intensified and Hmong force levels were falling. He introduced Thai troops in artillery and even infantry roles, all the while denying there was any secret war, even after reporters revealed the existence of Long Tieng and Sam Thong. During Devlin’s time enemy troops actually threatened Long Tieng, with pitched battles for the ridge that dominated it.
As Richard Helms puts it, “The agency . . . was flat out in its effort to keep the tribes viable militarily.” In his later memoir Helms would call Laos “the war we won.” Working flat out meant about 250 Americans either in Laos or commuting to their assignments; air force personnel permanently assigned to Long Tieng; and a budget that grew to $300 million a year. In keeping with covert operations etiquette, Ambassador Sullivan issued strict orders for Americans to stay out of combat. He says that “when I found those orders were willfully disobeyed, I peremptorily removed [offenders] from the country.” But despite Sullivan’s orders, the CIA station appears to have taken little action against such “cowboys” as Tony Poe, who reportedly suffered more than a dozen wounds in assorted firefights and once made a fantastic thirty-mile trek to safety carrying a wounded native comrade. Disciplining Poe meant giving him another assignment to a different tribal strike force, the Yao in northern Laos, where he sent patrols into Burma and China.
Air America made it all happen. In South Vietnam alone, by late 1965 the proprietary moved 1,650 tons of cargo a month with a fleet of more than 50 planes, among them two dozen C-54s, C-46s, and C-47s. The load increased to 2,500 tons a month in 1967–1968. In Laos the relative war effort of the United States and the Royal Laotian Government can be measured in monthly airlift tonnage. The Laotian air force averaged 400 tons a month in 1966; Air America moved 6,000 tons plus 16,000 passengers.
Air America had facilities at Bangkok, Takhli, and Udorn, with maintenance performed at Vientiane and Udon, the site of a major proprietary base. The Air America helicopter fleet began at Udon with the transfer of sixteen air force H-34s in March 1961. In addition to their general aviation role the helicopters were vital for air rescue. During the first years of U.S. bombing, Air America rescued four times as many airmen as the air force.
Pilots were supposed to fly during time off from work on regular flight routes. They were paid bonuses, given tax advantages, and could clear upward of $40,000 a year, a huge sum at the time. As in the Congo, Air America folk in Vientiane had their favorite watering hole; here it was the bar called the Purple Porpoise. Hazardous flying, with clouds, sudden mists, and rain, plus enemy guns, justified the pay. Of four Air America C-130 crews trained in the mid-sixties, only one remained in 1970. Destinations—the Lima Sites—were frequently tiny, tricky airfields. Long Tieng, with a paved runway, good navigation beacons, and an all-weather landing system, was an exception, but it was often merely the first stop of the day. Sky had a sophisticated communications center as well as the Hmong propaganda outlet “Radio of the Union of the Lao Races.” The CIA base at Sky funneled orders to Vang Pao, sent others to the Thai teams that accompanied the Hmong Special Guerrilla Units, and ensured supply deliveries. Vint Lawrence left Laos and the CIA for a career as a cartoonist. When Tony Poe went up-country, new blood took over at Long Tieng. By late 1966 press reports of Americans in the field with the Laotians were eroding the plausible deniability of the secret war in Laos.
With the intensification of the war came growth of the CIA proprietary that fed it. Flying Tiger, by way of comparison, had been the largest private air charter airline in the world when Air America was formed. In 1968 Flying Tiger had twenty-eight aircraft with slightly more than two thousand employees, whereas Air America had almost two hundred planes and four times as many workers. In February 1969 the Air America fleet in Thailand consisted of twenty-nine helicopters, twenty light planes, and nineteen medium transports. That unit alone was larger than Flying Tiger.
The demand for air tonnage in Laos led to an anomaly in secret warfare—competition. Continental Air Services hired away an Air America manager, then sought some of the same USAID contracts. Because legal action to preserve Air America monopoly threatened to reveal its ownership, Continental Air got some of the work. Continental accumulated a couple of dozen aircraft in Thailand by 1968, including C-46 and C-47 transports. In addition, contract work would be done by Bangkok-based Bird Air, and beginning in late 1967 the CIA and USAID got together to buy Vang Pao two old C-47s, the beginning of the Hmong leader’s private air force.
“Air America did a magnificent job,” comments division chief Bill Colby, “but it was not a combat air force.” Attacks in support of the Hmong were carried out from Thailand by air force T-28s in “Jungle Jim”–type units. A few of these planes were given to the RLAF to lend credence to the cover. The T-28 force eventually attained a strength of a hundred fighter-bombers in the Fifty-sixth Special Operations Wing. Heinie Aderholt had a further Laotian incarnation as leader of this formation. The fighter-bombers were supplemented by a wide range of U.S. Air Force gunships, first the AC-47, later the improved AC-119 and AC-130 models.
Vang Pao’s tactical combination remained his Special Guerrilla Units plus “air,” as he called it. Omnipresent airpower did succeed for a long time, and once the Hmong got their own air unit, its pilots’ familiarity with the terrain made “air” even more effective. But Hmong objectives sometimes diverged from American ones. A staff officer with the Thirteenth Air Force in Thailand recalls an occasion when his commander, informed the Hmong had hit a target on his prohibited list, demanded Vang Pao’s immediate appearance so he could be chewed out. Told the United States had no control over Vang’s planes, the general demanded their gasoline and munitions be cut off. The air force had no authority to do that either.
Apparent success greatly pleased Washington. The Hmong program became something of a showcase. In August 1964 LBJ ostentatiously received Pop Buell at the White House. The Hmong New Year in 1966 was attended by the King of Laos and the diplomatic corps. In 1968, as a gift, Vang Pao gave President Johnson an ornate flintlock musket of Hmong antiquity. On two occasions the Americans rewarded Vang with secret visits to the United States. On one of these trips VP, as Americans affectionately called him, toured the Green Beret training center at Fort Bragg. The agency sent Stewart Methven to be his escort officer. During the other trip, Vang went to colonial Williamsburg and Disneyland. With six wives at Long Tieng, the Hmong chief had a lot of shopping to do. At Disneyland the CIA reciprocated Vang’s gift with a replica Zorro costume. Vang Pao actually wore this outfit to boost morale during a battle in Laos.
The campaign against the Ho Chi Minh Trail gave the armée clandestine a new mission. Accurate bombing required precise navigation, leading the air force to put a radio beacon atop Phou Pha Thi, a Hmong sacred place and one of the tallest mountains in Laos. Later the United States added a radar and based helicopters there for rescue missions. Phou Pha Thi became Lima Site 85. Pony Express, an air force helicopter lift activity, moved 150 tons of equipment to the site for the radar installation and the dozen Americans necessary to operate the equipment. Vang Pao’s Hmong were to defend the facility. Bill Lair warned that the Lima Site could not be defended against serious attack, but the managers of the air war, who wanted to use the radar’s precision targeting ability, overrode all objections.
Phou Pha Thi did not escape Hanoi’s attention. It made a concerted effort to neutralize this installation. In one of the few recorded instances of North Vietnamese bombing, in January 1968, two of four Soviet built AN-2 biplanes, modified to carry bombs, were shot down attempting to bomb LS-85, one actually by an Air America pilot firing a rifle from his helicopter.
This battle punctuated Ted Shackley’s final months as station chief. The blond ghost from Cuba and Berlin rode close herd on Project Momentum, installing his own man, Thomas G. Clines, as deputy chief at Udorn. Bob Blake and Richard Secord still ran the air branch. Secord, who liked to think he and Clines a great team, watched the aerial photography as Hanoi’s troops closed in on the mountaintop. He called repeatedly for air strikes to halt the buildup. Lair took those warnings to heart, but the readout on Clines and Shackley is more confused. Deputy station chief James R. Lilley (who left Laos two months before this battle) records Shackley warning that LS-85 could not be held beyond March 10. Others believe Shackley oddly complacent. Air strikes would be too few and too late. The Hmong SGUs guarding the base were driven off—two of their CIA advisers, a forward air controller, and five of the radar technicians barely escaped in a desperate helicopter evacuation—and the battle unfolded with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. On the night of March 10–11, 1968, the radar base fell. Ten Americans disappeared, and one of those escaping died of gunshot wounds aboard the helicopter. For Jim Lilley, writing thirty years later, the Phou Pha Thi battle “still conjures up wishful thinking of what could have been avoided.”
Vang Pao’s secret army attained its peak strength during this period. It numbered forty thousand soldiers, mostly local defense forces but about fifteen thousand grouped in Special Guerrilla Units. Yet the North Vietnamese matched their strength. Soon roughly two divisions of Hanoi’s army regularly fought in northern Laos, quite frequently against the Hmong. They made regular forays against Skyline Ridge that overlooked Long Tieng. The spooks had Laos wired for sound and filled its air with photo reconnaissance planes. In at least one case, according to Shackley, CIA even planted radio beacons on a Pathet Lao unit and completely monitored its movements. A cycle of operations developed: during the dry season the North Vietnamese attacked the Hmong in the mountains and the RLAF on the Plain of Jars, capturing many positions. When the wet season came, Vang Pao would counterattack and recapture much of the lost terrain.
By this time the CIA had an actual barracks and team house at Long Tieng. Vince Shields had become chief of base, Pat Landry succeeded Bill Lair. Lao sources report that the CIA now backstopped Vang Pao with a command team of three. About thirty more Americans assisted in training, and there were a couple of dozen paramilitary specialists with the SGUs, now being brigaded together as mobile groups to increase their firepower. Agency teams with the Special Guerrilla Units varied from four to twelve men. The CIA advisers, mostly contract officers from the U.S. military under what the agency called its “Jewel” Program—men like James L. Adkins, John Stockwell, James Parker, and Wilbur Greene—lived in the team house when at base, then went into the field with the Hmong. Aside from Long Tieng, there were three other CIA indoctrination bases in Laos and a major training facility in Thailand, where Hmong could undergo unit exercises without the danger of combat.
James R. Lilley puts the total CIA contingent at this point at some 250. Officially the U.S. embassy had 70 “assistant military attachés.” There were also 73 Americans with Continental Air Services and 207 with Air America. In 1970 the Nixon administration admitted to almost a thousand Americans in Laos, including more than 200 military, almost 400 government employees, and more than that number of contractor personnel. According to CIA officer Victor Marchetti, rank-and-file CIA people were becoming less enamored with Laos, not because they objected to the operation but because it had become unwieldy and obvious rather than sophisticated and secret.
A few were concerned with mounting losses. Until 1969 the air force had been lucky—only three helicopters had been shot down in Laos, and all but one of the aircrew were rescued. Now luck ran out. In a year six large air force CH-3 helicopters were downed and a seventh destroyed on the ground, half the total of choppers of this type lost in Laos during the entire war. The Nixon administration admitted to more than two hundred dead in Laos, with about that number missing. The CIA’s deaths now included Louis Ojibway, Wilbur Greene, Wayne McNulty, John Kearns, and John Peterson, one of them in North Vietnam.
Richard Helms finally made a visit to Laos in September 1970. Station chief Larry Devlin squired him around the country. He realized the war had grown—Hmong units now had to be larger to move safely; the North Vietnamese had begun using tanks and artillery; Vang Pao was literally running out of men. The wrecked C-47 that Helms and Devlin shot past as their twin-engine Volpar landed at Long Tieng symbolized the danger that lurked if Hanoi should gain control of the Skyline Ridge. Vang Pao impressed Helms with his command presence, but the Hmong leader had been reduced to recruiting “child soldiers,” boys of thirteen or fourteen. Only Thai mercenaries now kept up the numbers of troops in the Hmong mobile groups.
Perhaps the continuing losses had something to do with the change of heart, a most important one, that occurred in Congress. Political backing for the Indochina war had waned, support for Laos especially. At one time or another fifty senators had been informed of the CIA program, but one by one they jumped off the boat.
A case in point was Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, whose help had been especially important given his membership on the CIA subcommittee.
Symington had backed the Laotian war. On a visit to Laos and Thailand in 1966, the senator said good things to pilots and embassy people about the efficiency of the secret war. He encouraged the CIA to tell its story and listened in the Armed Services Committee on October 5, 1967, when Theodore Shackley palavered for two hours about where fighting took place and how much it cost. The CIA put soldiers on Laotian battlefields for a fraction of the price of the U.S. military effort in South Vietnam. Symington made that observation, and Shackley agreed. Richard Helms sat to one side taking it all in.
Two years later Stuart Symington steered a different course. At hearings on U.S. worldwide commitments he demanded explanations, asserting that the United States was “waging war” in Laos and had been for years. Said Symington, “It is time the American people were told more of the facts.”
At this October 1969 hearing, Senator Symington nudged William H. Sullivan into the admission that there was no formal U.S. obligation to the Hmong.
In his own testimony Richard Helms refused to be drawn out on the authority for this covert “war,” reiterating the “such other functions” language in the 1947 National Security Act. In an October 30, 1969, memorandum to Director Helms, General Counsel Lawrence Houston argued that CIA had “no combatants as such” in Laos, and that “I know of no definition . . . which would consider our activities in Laos as ‘waging war.” ’ Although the CIA lawyer carefully noted that “from 1947 on my position has been that this is a rather doubtful statutory authority on which to hang our paramilitary activities,” he advised Helms, “I think you were exactly right to stick to the language of the National Security Act.”
Symington felt he had reason to be exasperated with the agency’s disingenuousness. As the senator put it, “I have never seen a country engage in so many devious undertakings as this.”
Helms, for his part, fastened on Symington’s change of heart as dishonesty. In a 1981 interview, Helms said, “When Senator Stuart Symington got up and started talking about a ‘secret war,’ he knew far better than that.” In his later memoir, Helms adds that the senator had been briefed several times on the CIA program and had even been Ted Shackley’s houseguest during his visit. Others also held out Symington as a blackguard. In the 1980s former Deputy Director for Intelligence R. Jack Smith published a novel in which Senator Symington was the thinly disguised villain. Agency officials had a deaf ear for the corrosive effects of secrecy on public support for their endeavor.
Drug trafficking in Laos constituted an element that helped sour key figures in Washington. It has already been noted that the Hmong raised poppies. Processed in laboratories, those poppies could become opium, heroin, morphine, or other powerful drugs, some hallucinogenic, many addictive. The lucrative drug trade became pervasive in northern Laos as it was in upper Burma and Thailand. Indeed, the area is known as the Golden Triangle for exactly this reason.
When the CIA decided to run a war in northern Laos, the drugs came with it; there was no way to avoid them. The Chinese in Burma, the old Li Mi band, bought some of the poppies and moved them across the border in caravans. Lowland Lao and Thai bought more. But when the airplanes came they introduced an incomparably more efficient means of transportation.
By the mid-sixties CIA officers were reporting intelligence on the movement of drugs. The agency passed the data on to drug enforcement authorities but not much else was done about it. Even this seemed too much for some. On one occasion Helms told Senator John Stennis, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, of this CIA reporting.
Stennis paused, shook his head, then said, “I’m not sure you people ought to be getting involved in things like that. I don’t know that that’s a proper activity for you.”
“Well, Mr. Chairman,” replied the CIA director, “how could we possibly not help the United States government when we’ve got such a hideous drug problem in this country?”
Helms insists the CIA helped, but its attitude was ambivalent at best. Tony Poe, for example, threatened to throw out of his plane anyone carrying drugs, but he did nothing about caravan traffic or drug laboratories in his sectors. Nor could the CIA do anything to prevent the Hmong’s own use of drugs, prevalent in their culture. A few attempts were made to encourage the Hmong to raise other cash crops instead of poppies, but the return on growing potatoes, meager by comparison, made the substitution absurd. There are unconfirmed but persistent reports that CIA officers were disciplined when they took such actions as destroying drug labs.
A prohibition against smuggling on Air America planes had been in place since 1957. But enforcement depended on the pilot, and the only remedy was to land at the nearest airfield and put offenders with drugs off the plane. When Air America crews themselves ran drugs, there was nothing to stop them. Not until early 1972 did the proprietary set up a Security Inspection Service, and even then it operated only at large installations.
Moreover there was competition. Some of those running drugs are said to have been among the most senior commanders of the RLAF. Drugs moved on Lao military and private air carriers. Air America crews faced a daily temptation of huge profits for smuggling small packages.
In the summer and fall of 1972, when Hugh Tovar led the CIA station in Vientiane, the agency’s inspector general, spurred by detailed revelations in a book the agency tried to suppress, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, began a formal investigation. Scott D. Breckinridge of the IG office participated in the team of officers who began in Hong Kong and spent more than two weeks at eleven agency facilities, interviewing more than a hundred CIA, State, USAID, Pentagon, Air America, and other employees. Their report, “Investigation of the Drug Situation in Southeast Asia,” found no evidence that the CIA or any of its senior officers had ever permitted drug traffic “as a matter of policy.” There had been individual cases of smuggling, but the persons involved were said to have been promptly disciplined. The Hmong, curiously, are presented as having had little to export.
While exonerating the agency (and claiming its critics discredited), Breckinridge’s account of these events confirms every charge aimed at CIA’s allies: Laotian generals did participate, drugs moved on military aircraft—and boats; laboratories were photographed; the agency even discovered schedules for planned shipments to South Vietnam. The episode is represented as a success, in isolation, as if the criminal activities of allies did not reflect on the agency. A few years later a CIA officer serving in Burma witnessed an IG inquiry on another matter and came away singularly unimpressed: “IGs, hoping for plum assignments, have a personal stake in not rocking the boat. I never again trusted an IG investigation until the inspector general position became presidentially appointed and congressionally approved.”
In any case, despite the denials, drugs moved. Ambassador Godley arranged for one senior Laotian officer to be fired. No more. Breckinridge reached the conclusion that the CIA could not have achieved much more against the drug traffic than it did. This points directly to a key weakness of covert operations: making alliances with indigenous groups inevitably involves buying into their less wholesome features. This in turn may help discredit CIA programs as well as the larger aims of American policy.
In turning against the Laotian secret war, Senator Symington and others in Washington were reacting to factors other than the military situation. Drugs were a major problem in the United States and had real military implications in South Vietnam, where American soldiers were becoming addicted in increasing numbers. Officials who believed the military situation in Laos could be divorced from all other matters were simply wrong.
In Vientiane and Washington the situation looked quite serious by 1970. With Hanoi and the Pathet Lao pressing against the Plain of Jars and the Hmong areas, Ambassador Godley asked for massive strikes by B-52 bombers. By now Washington was at loggerheads over “secrecy” in the Laotian war. Symington pressed for release of the full transcript of his hearing. The Nixon administration sanitized this so heavily as to make it misleading, whereupon Symington refused to issue the document. The request for air strikes came in this charged political context. Fearing leaks from the Pentagon about B-52s in Laos, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird opposed the option so as to create a record of rejecting it. Secretary of State William P. Rogers also resisted the plan. According to Henry Kissinger, national security adviser to Richard Nixon, Laird wanted the strikes put into a super-secret program whose records would be falsified. Such B-52 missions were already under way in Cambodia.
Growing congressional opposition and increasing enemy success sharpened Washington’s problem. “We were caught,” recounts Kissinger of the Washington policymakers, “between officials seeking to protect the American forces for which they felt a responsibility and a merciless Congressional onslaught that rattled those officials.”
Toward the middle of February the Royal Laotian Government appealed for B-52 strikes. Kissinger recommended the attack at a meeting with the president, Laird, Dick Helms, and the Joint Chiefs’ acting chairman. Richard Nixon approved strikes if the Pathet Lao advanced. Within twenty-four hours the condition had been met; an attack with three B-52 bombers took place on the night of February 17–18. More followed, yet Vang Pao relinquished his last positions on the Plain of Jars.
Strikes by the B-52s were enough, in Kissinger’s phrase, “to trigger the domestic outcry.” Senators Eugene McCarthy and Frank Church, along with Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield, deplored the escalation. By February 25 Symington, with Mansfield and Senators Charles Mathias, Albert Gore, John Sherman Cooper, and Charles Percy, were demanding full release of the Laos hearing transcripts.
Within hours the Laos war was secret no more. The story broke at Long Tieng and on press tickers the world over. Making the scoop proved as easy as walking down a mountain. Journalists had chartered an Air America plane to Sam Thong, the USAID center. The secret warriors were proud of their civic action programs and wanted to show the place off. But three reporters were much more interested in Long Tieng and the armée clandestine. They walked out of Sam Thong and down the trail to Long Tieng, leaving behind the official tour. One reporter actually entered the base and watched for two hours before being challenged by a Laotian colonel, then questioned by an American. All were taken into custody and put on a plane to Vientiane. Ambassador Godley was furious, but it was too late. For the first time Long Tieng had been observed by outsiders. Landings and takeoffs from the Lima Site were clocked at one a minute. Air traffic was so intense that planes and helicopters had to form a holding pattern. The reporters saw windowless buildings sprouting numerous radio aerials and tall men wearing civilian clothes but carrying automatic weapons. They knew the men were Americans when they discovered the base had an air-conditioned American-style officers club with panoramic glass windows. Beginning with the Los Angeles Times, the Long Tieng story appeared everywhere.
In the Senate, Symington asked the administration to bring Ambassador Godley back to testify. Foreign Relations Committee chairman J. William Fulbright went ahead and put on the record information the Nixon people had been trying to keep secret: that Helms had admitted in testimony that CIA used USAID cover in Laos. Fulbright added that the embassy’s Rural Development Annex recruited partisan soldiers and native agents while the mysterious Special Requirements Office did logistics. Further details were added in April 1970 when continuing pressure forced the administration to relent and release the 1969 congressional testimony.
Any chance of limiting the damage was lost when Nixon ordered an invasion of Cambodia. Further Laos hearings were scheduled by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Angry senators ruled out allowing testimony in executive session. This record would be in the open. These political events plus the military developments in Laos marked a tidal shift in the secret war.
In late 1971 Senator Symington sponsored an amendment to the appropriations bill that set a ceiling of $350 million for all U.S. funds spent in Laos. This level prevailed in 1972, though it increased to $375 million for the next year. Tovar’s field officers were having trouble keeping the North Vietnamese off Skyline Ridge. By that time Indochina peace negotiations were in full swing, leading to the Paris agreements of January 1973. For Laos these provided a coalition government, like that intended in 1958, except that the Pathet Lao had grown considerably stronger. Fourteen years of warfare accomplished none of the original U.S. goals. Vang Pao became a big loser in the settlement, which ended American air support for the secret army.
The cease-fire was to go into effect at noon on February 22, 1973, when Vang faced a renewed North Vietnamese offensive. Several outposts were under attack as the cease-fire neared. The Hmong general made a last appeal to the CIA. In reply he was handed a message from the chief of unit at Sky: “As we discussed previously, USAF support would cease as of 1200, 22 February. I confirmed this . . . today by talking with CRICKET, the [airbome command post] in this area. USAF were under instructions to clear Lao air space.”
Disgusted, Vang Pao kicked the dirt and showed the message to nearby reporters.
Leaving Laos, one of the last shifts of American command planes radioed back, “Good bye and see you next war.”
One of Long Tieng’s outposts fell two and a half hours later. The last CIA advisers left aboard Air America. Hugh Tovar soon left Laos also. Vang Pao, on his own, walked a road that could lead only to exile.
Beginning in 1973 the new Laotian government pressured Air America to cease operations. The CIA proprietary did halt flights to hundreds of airfields and gave a dozen C-123 transports to the Laotian air force. Many Air America employees at Udon were laid off. After a Laotian prohibition on its operations, Air America closed up shop in June 1974. The Udon facilities were taken over by Thai Airways Aircraft Maintenance Company.
The results of CIA’s postmortems on Laos are not known. One view is that of Douglas Blaufarb, Laos station chief in the mid-sixties. Blaufarb, who defended the Hmong against press criticism in the New York Times in 1971, continued to believe that the tribe had a right to fight for its future, their struggle misunderstood in the United States, in part precisely because of secrecy. In mobilizing the Hmong, the United States incurred an “undoubted moral obligation” which it could not meet. Blaufarb also believes the war effort was hampered by the predominance of the American military in Southeast Asia, which constantly menaced the independence of the ambassador in Vientiane. Finally, argues this former CIA officer, the improvised nature of the secret war led to an open-ended campaign without clear aims other than general U.S. objectives in Indochina.
Of course general U.S. objectives in Southeast Asia revolved around South Vietnam. The CIA labored long and hard there—on building a political base for the Saigon government, on pacification, on unconventional warfare programs. The guerrillas made the war real at the end of March 1965 when they detonated a car bomb just outside the U.S. embassy in Saigon. Station chief Peer de Silva, badly wounded, lost an eye. Agency secretary Barbara Robbins died while several more persons from the typing pool and at least two case officers, like de Silva, were wounded. Eleazar Williams stepped into the breach to act as station chief until Langley promoted Gordon Jorgensen. During that interval President Johnson decided to commit U.S. troops to combat in South Vietnam, and the war intensified.
Under LBJ’s dictum that the first team should go to Vietnam, and given the dominance of Cuban operations in the early 1960s, CIA’s next station chief was John L. Hart, from the Cuba task force. Hart came to Saigon early in 1966, a forty-five-year-old man with broad experience. He had had a hand in Wisner’s Wurlitzer, doing political action in Italy, but also paramilitary work in the Korean War and the Tibetan operation, where he had been in charge when the Dalai Lama escaped the country. Hart had headed CIA stations in Thailand in the early 1950s, and in Morocco later. Far East Division chief Bill Colby had several things in common with Hart: both had been born in the United States and raised abroad, in Hart’s case Albania and Iraq as the son of a diplomat; both served in Italy; and Hart had been born in Minneapolis, across the river from Colby in its twin city, St. Paul. By all accounts the agency’s Asia baron had no problem with the new Saigon station chief.
Some recall that John Hart had little stomach for paramilitary operations. But he had participated in several, and it would be on his watch that the CIA went into high gear on fresh projects, opening a training center at Vung Tau for counterterror team recruits. By the spring of 1966 there were more than three thousand armed men in several programs. Hart also emphasized political action, providing funds and specialists to South Vietnamese labor unions and certain parties, and expertise to Vietnamese writing a new constitution. In 1966–1967 South Vietnam held national assembly and then presidential elections with CIA backing it all the way. The elections were less about democracy than about solidifying the power of the Vietnamese generals.
For much of this period Ed Lansdale resided in Saigon in one last incarnation, this time as a sort of factotum for the ambassador but actually as a conduit for his South Vietnamese contacts. Lansdale functioned as intelligence collector par excellence. He left soon after the enemy’s 1968 Tet offensive. Bill Colby and John Hart shared Lansdale’s perception that the road to success lay in winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. Colby peddled that line incessantly in Washington, in policy papers and in his advice to superiors, with Hart a kindred spirit. But the headaches involved were legion. The United States did not even know how many South Vietnamese there were, even just in Saigon, much less how to gain their allegiance. As Hart later recorded, “We had only the vaguest notion of how many people lived in that benighted country and there was certainly no way of taking a census in the midst of war.” Hart tried his best. In fact, one of his pacification initiatives in 1966 was to create “census grievance” teams—trained at Vung Tau—dispersed into the villages to find out not only how many people there were but what they were saying about Saigon and who had sided with the National Liberation Front.
Hart approved the appointment of a set of regional CIA chiefs for South Vietnam’s military command zones, who could connect with the Saigon Police Special Branch in their areas and take care of other agency activities. The regional officers were followed by CIA people appointed for each South Vietnamese province.
Nelson Brickham, Hart’s chief of operations, came to him with an even more ambitious proposal, one to keep book on the bad guys—essentially to create a database on just who belonged to the NLF and where they stood in its parallel hierarchy. After the consideration at Langley—not only by Colby but by Helms and the agency’s new special assistant for Vietnam affairs, Phillip Carver—this would be called Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation (ICEX), a direct predecessor to the Phoenix Program. Hart, temporarily sidelined by eye problems (a detached retina suffered while playing tennis), did not participate in the late 1967 meetings that actually created Phoenix, which aimed to combine the understanding of the NLF supposedly developed by ICEX with efforts aimed at neutralization. Under Phoenix there were to be interrogation centers in each province, and later district, to collect even more data. A new paramilitary force, the Provincial Reconnaissance Units, became the CIA’s enforcement mechanism, but South Vietnamese police and military units were also involved.
Phoenix was up and running in the spring of 1968, but by then Hart had left, replaced by his deputy, Lou Lapham. It formed part of a fresh organization, Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS), that united all pacification programs. By then William E. Colby had returned to Saigon, sent by LBJ to be deputy chief of CORDS. Colby succeeded to the top job when his boss, Robert Komer—also an old CIA hand—became U.S. ambassador to Turkey. As a result it would be Colby who presided over CORDS and Phoenix. Although much would be accomplished on pacification, the Phoenix Program became highly controversial due to human rights violations, the problem of huge numbers of South Vietnamese political prisoners, and its inability to develop the information necessary to attack the higher levels of the NLF infrastructure.
Most frequently Phoenix functioned as a vehicle for Saigon officials to engage in extortion, eliminate their rivals, or solidify power. While tens of thousands of alleged NLF cadres were “neutralized” under Phoenix, the number of senior Liberation Front officials swept up were a mere handful. Colby worked hard to inject discipline and legal processes into the effort, but he was never able to control it. In the meantime Phoenix became a political football in the United States, leading to a series of congressional hearings, much like those on Laos, in which Colby was beset by critics. He returned to the United States in 1971, his future at every turn dogged by participation in this program.
Phoenix piled up some impressive statistics. During 1969 alone, it “neutralized” just under twenty thousand NLF suspects, of whom more than six thousand died. In 1971 Colby told a Senate hearing that there had been more than twenty thousand killed in all, almost thirty thousand people imprisoned, and about eighteen thousand converted into Saigon agents. Not to be outdone, the South Vietnamese claimed more than forty thousand dead suspects. But when questions arose over the legality of these operations, even under Vietnamese law, authorities rapidly retreated to an admission that 87 percent of the supposed cadres had perished in the course of regular military operations.
From 1969 through 1972 Theodore Shackley led the CIA station in Saigon. Given that CORDS’s purpose fit classic definitions of political action, and that Colby’s organization held formal responsibility here, room for conflict with Shackley existed. In particular the two groups competed over who would run the most promising agents recruited in the course of Phoenix. The CIA had first dibs as the nation’s front-line intelligence agency. That led to temptation among CORDS advisers to keep secret their best spies so as to avoid having them taken over. Vietnam intelligence suffered as a consequence.
Possibly the most contentious matter to arise during Shackley’s time in Saigon was the conflict with army Special Forces over the so-called Green Beret Affair, the June 1969 execution—or murder—of a Vietnamese agent working for Special Forces at Nha Trang. Killed after a long, inconclusive interrogation, on grounds he might be a spy for Hanoi, the case came to the attention of U.S. commander Gen. Creighton V. Abrams, who ordered a full investigation. Counter Intelligence Corps inquiries traced orders for the killing up the chain of command to the head of the Fifth Special Forces Group, Col. Robert B. Rheault, and he plus a number of Green Berets were remanded for courts martial. Their defense was that CIA—Shackley and the agency’s regional officer-in-charge, Dean Almy—had demanded the murder.
Lawyers threatened to subpoena Shackley, Almy, and Richard Helms. During preliminary hearings, the agency began sending its people off on temporary duty assignments so they would be unavailable. The issue rose to the highest levels: memoranda from CIA general counsel Lawrence Houston, meetings between counsel for the agency and the army, even a session of the United States Intelligence Board at which the murder was the only subject, no notes were permitted, and all backbenchers were kept out—unprecedented in U.S. intelligence history. The army dropped all charges without ever going to trial.
Saigon politics per se remained within Shackley’s purview, and there would be another presidential election in 1971. To both Colby’s and Shackley’s credit, their differences remained relatively minor.
Another intelligence mission, principally involving Special Forces, particularly MACSOG, was prisoner rescue, under the code name Bright Light. The most spectacular mission was a raid carried out quite close to Hanoi in November 1970. It hit a complex near the town of Sontay, where Americans were thought to be held. The raid, Operation Ivory Coast, came off without a hitch, unlike the later Iranian hostage rescue fiasco, but it illustrated a different problem with these kinds of missions: no prisoners were found. Intelligence on prisoner locations in rescue missions was always uncertain. Twenty-eight more rescues were attempted after Sontay. Of the total of 119 missions undertaken between 1966 and 1973, fully 98 were raids. The rescue missions freed several hundred South Vietnamese soldiers and 60 civilians but only one American prisoner, and he died shortly afterward from wounds inflicted at the last moment by his captors. Raids might be spectacular, but they were not about to determine the outcome of the war. That could only be done on the ground, in the South, and the prospects dimmed every day.
Thomas Polgar followed Shackley in Saigon, taking over in January 1972. A European specialist with no Asian experience whatever, recently posted in Latin America, Polgar did pretty well, but the war had already gone bad. Hanoi staged a huge offensive that year, finally driving the United States out of the conflict, at least in terms of military involvement. The Paris cease-fire agreement sealed the fate of the Saigon regime. Polgar presided over thirty more months of battles that pitted Saigon, on its own, against Hanoi. In some respects the CIA role actually grew with the U.S. military out of the game, but the South Vietnamese gradually lost ground until, in March 1975, their defenses collapsed. Over two frantic months the issue became the evacuation of South Vietnamese, including the agency’s assets. Many were left behind, along with the Saigon station’s records, which fell into Hanoi’s hands when the U.S. embassy was captured on April 30, 1975. Frank Snepp, Polgar’s top analyst, has left a searing account of the CIA’s final days in-country, and others have also described those terrible weeks when a few CIA officers saved some Vietnamese, often heroically, but the larger defeat remained inexorable. The fall of Saigon brought the end of the wars.
The secret wars in Southeast Asia represented many things to many people. To some they were laboratories to test techniques, to others a political morass at the edge of the Vietnam quagmire. These many years later the full story of secret operations in Southeast Asia is still untold. To some Americans, Laos symbolized government secrecy used to cloak doubtful legality. To many, Vietnam symbolized power illegitimately unleashed and inevitably defeated. To most, all this seemed a terrible mistake. Yet even as these events unfolded, the Central Intelligence Agency had more going on, at home as well as around the globe.