Bill Colby spent most of his first year in Vietnam putting out fires—and keeping himself and his family from getting burned. The official charge to the station was to gather information on everything that happened of any import in South Vietnam, and, if possible, in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north as well. But Colby’s assignment to Vietnam and his quick promotion to station chief indicated that Langley had another priority—nation-building. Colby’s background was not in intelligence per se but in covert operations, and especially in political action, an area in which he had been spectacularly successful in Italy.
The former Jedburgh spent his first months in-country learning about Vietnamese society and politics and trying to master the bureaucratic jungle that was the US Mission. By the close of 1960, he had come to the conclusion that the House of Ngo’s approach was flawed. Economic and technical progress in the countryside à la Diem was not enough; Nhu understood the need to win hearts and minds, but he did not seem to know how to go about it. Colby did not insist on democracy for South Vietnam, but he did believe the government would have to be responsive to the needs of the people and foster local empowerment. Specifically, South Vietnam’s villagers would have to be armed and encouraged to defend their communities. In this, Colby believed, was the key not only to rural security but to nation-building as well. The advent of a new president in the United States seemed to set the stage for the program that was beginning to take shape in Colby’s mind.
A week before the failed coup attempt, the American people had elected an old friend of Diem’s as president of the United States. In a 1956 speech, while he was still a US senator, John F. Kennedy had declared that “Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike.” If the “red tide of communism” should pour over it, he said, much of the rest of Asia would be threatened. Vietnam, he insisted, was “our offspring; we cannot abandon it; we cannot ignore its needs.”1 Although initially he was concerned more with the communist threats in Laos and Cuba, Kennedy as president had no intention of backing down on his pledge. His inaugural address was a call to arms. According to Carl Colby, he and his father listened intently to the radio as the new president called upon the American people to pay any price and bear any burden to defend democracy and freedom at home and abroad. Kennedy and his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, were determined to combat the forces of international communism on every front. The new administration poured billions of dollars into the US Air Force and its nuclear arsenal and vastly expanded the nation’s conventional forces. At the same time, Kennedy and his foreign policy team believed that the real struggle would be in “the countryside of the world,” to anticipate Chinese minister of defense Lin Piao’s phrase.
The new president had long been concerned about the threat of communist-supported insurgencies and was especially alarmed by a speech Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev delivered in 1961 entitled, “For New Victories of the World Communist Movement.” In it Khrushchev pledged to support “just wars of liberation,” making it clear that he believed these conflicts would serve as a prelude to the collapse of the West. Kennedy distributed copies of Khrushchev’s speech at the inaugural meeting of his National Security Council and suggested that his colleagues read the writings of Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara on guerrilla warfare. He had already read them, the president said. “We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence,” the new president declared, “on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.” Following the meeting, Kennedy directed McNamara to develop a counterinsurgency capability. An instrument was already at hand.2
The US military had long struggled—and not very successfully—with the concept of unconventional warfare. By its very nature, the US Army was a hide-bound, traditional institution. Instances of organized violence that did not seem to fit under the term “war” were labeled aberrations or quarrels. In conventional conflicts, the role of soldiers, acting as agents of the state, was to apply force and violence—“to kill people and break things,” as Thomas K. Adams, a former director of intelligence and special operations at the US Army’s Peacekeeping Institute, put it. Wars were to be fought between armies whose goal was to destroy each other. But military scientists seemed to assume that armed conflicts took place in a void. In the years immediately after World War II, OSS veterans, including Colby, began urging the US military to train soldiers to live among and mobilize foreign populations threatened by a common enemy. They argued for the institutionalization of unconventional warfare, conflict in “the gray area where violence has entered the practice of politics but the struggle has not yet reached the level of conventional warfare,” Adams wrote.3
The Truman Doctrine’s commitment to aid peoples of the world threatened not only by overt aggression but also by internal subversion provided further impetus to the creation of a corps of unconventional warriors. Ranger companies served in Korea, but they were more shock troops than counterinsurgency operatives. In 1952, the Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare authorized the creation of a Special Forces Division. An OSS veteran, Colonel Aaron Bank, was recruited to head the 10th Special Forces Group headquartered at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Unlike main force units, the Special Forces were not concerned primarily with destroying the enemy’s army, at least directly, or even with occupying and holding territory. As Adams, who was the SF’s principal historian, put it: “Its terrain is symbolic and lies in the minds of the population. . . . In most forms of unconventional warfare the objective is the allegiance of the people around whom, and presumably on whose behalf, the conflict is taking place.”4
In the spring of 1961, President Kennedy and his brother Robert, who was then serving as US attorney general, paid a visit to Fort Bragg to view the Special Forces soldiers in action. Colonel William Yarborough, the commander of the Special Warfare Center, did not disappoint them. The center put on a show that included hand-to-hand combat, the scaling of an obstacle course, and the use of weapons ranging from bow and arrow to exotic rifles. The finale featured a soldier flying past the grandstand propelled by a futuristic rocket belt.5 During the Kennedy administration, the Special Forces—more popularly known as the Green Berets—increased from some one thousand personnel to more than twelve thousand. In January 1962, the White House created the 303 Committee Special Group (counterinsurgency) chaired by General Maxwell Taylor and including Robert Kennedy. (The 303 Committee was the successor to Eisenhower’s 5412 Committee.) The Taylor committee saw the Special Forces not only as a paramilitary unit capable of sabotage and counterterrorism, but also as a progressive political and social force that would assist local governments in winning the hearts and minds of indigenous peoples—a sort of Peace Corps with guns.
For Colby, the advent of the Kennedy administration—with its obvious awareness of the role that propaganda, political action, counterinsurgency, and covert operations were to play in the Cold War—was like a dream come true. And, in fact, Vietnam was to become the primary laboratory for testing America’s new commitment to unconventional warfare. But the CIA and the new administration wanted to do more than just defeat the communist insurgency in South Vietnam; they wanted, initially at least, to take the fight to the enemy.
When Colby arrived in Saigon, he had discovered two locked safes left behind by Lansdale and his team. They contained information on Vietnamese Catholics the French had recruited in 1954 to stay behind and report on doings within the DRV. Then there was some information on the twenty or so spies and saboteurs Lou Conein had recruited during his brief stay in North Vietnam. After 1959, the CIA station in Saigon had come under increasing pressure to provide information on what the communists called the Truong Son Route and the Americans called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. After all, the principal threat to stability in South Vietnam would come from the ninety thousand former Viet Minh who were returning to their home provinces. The NVA went to great lengths to keep the route secret and conceal the identity of the infiltrators, clothing them in peasant garb and equipping them with captured French weapons. Colby had recruited some Europeans and Vietnamese to go to Tchepone, a Laotian town adjacent to the communist transportation network, but they provided little useful information.6
The Eisenhower administration had demonstrated a penchant for paramilitary operations, helping to overthrow suspected pro-communist regimes in Guatemala and Iran and then planning the Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba. In late 1960, the National Security Council, with DCI Allen Dulles’s enthusiastic concurrence, had directed the Saigon station to accelerate its penetration of North Vietnam and add sabotage and resistance-building to its list of duties. By the end of the year, Colby had nine CIA officers on the project, plus several others acting as liaison with South Vietnamese police and intelligence. Russell Miller was in charge. In Danang, US Navy SEALs (sea-air-land naval commandoes) began training ships’ crews to land secret agents in the north; they also organized a civilian raiding force, the Sea Commandos, for hit-and-run coastal attacks.7
On March 9, 1961, President Kennedy approved NSAM 52, a National Security Action Memorandum explicitly endorsing covert action against North Vietnam. To come up with specific initiatives, McNamara created a policy review group under Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric. Allen Dulles recalled Colby from Vietnam to participate in the meetings. “One of the questions came up very soon,” Colby recalled: “Why don’t we do to them what they do to us, in North Vietnam. And we went back to our World War II experience of dropping people in by parachute.” The ensuing report to JFK recommended that measures to be taken “include penetration of the Vietnamese Communist mechanism, dispatch of agents to North Vietnam and strengthening South Vietnamese internal security services.”8
Kennedy authorized use of American personnel to penetrate North Vietnam—a revival of the World War II Carpetbaggers and Jedburghs—but expressed a preference for Vietnamese and foreign nationals, especially agents of the Chinese Nationalist government. It should be noted that Kennedy’s order was accompanied by an intense debate as to the objectives of the penetration effort. To do what the North Vietnamese were doing to South Vietnam meant to subvert and eventually bring down Ho’s government. The CIA and State Department argued that a successful armed uprising against the communist regime in Hanoi was highly unlikely. Ho was popular, and a quarter million Chinese troops lurked just over North Vietnam’s border. In 1958, the Agency had turned down requests for arms and other supplies from anticommunist guerrillas scattered along North Vietnam’s Chinese border and from the king of the Black Thais, who offered to send three thousand French-trained soldiers to fight against the DRV.9 Langley and Foggy Bottom saw operations in North Vietnam by clandestine operatives as a means to convince the North Vietnamese Politburo that there was more internal opposition in the north than there actually was, and hopefully to compel it to agree to coexistence with South Vietnam. The Kennedy brothers took note of these arguments, but in the spring of 1961, at least, US policy included clandestine efforts to not only harass but also overthrow the communist regime in Hanoi.
One overcast evening in February 1961, a 38-foot fishing junk threaded its way through the towering limestone islands that lay off the coast of North Vietnam. Such vessels—wooden, hand-built, two-masted, with a small rectangular wheelhouse on the aft deck—had sailed the waters of the South China Sea and the Gulf of Tonkin for hundreds of years. This particular junk bore blood-red sails to identify it with the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The captain and crew had selected what was the monsoon season in the north because it reduced the chance of being stopped by a government patrol boat. But it was not Diem’s navy they were worried about; it was North Vietnam’s. Despite the hue of its sails, the ship had been built in Vung Tau, South Vietnam, some 800 miles to the south. The crew members were North Vietnamese who had fled south in 1954. They had subsequently been recruited to use their knowledge of the North Vietnamese coastline to insert agents capable of gathering intelligence on Ho’s Vietnam; the agents would then radio that information to Colby and his subordinates. As the junk neared the seaside village of Cam Pha, a slight, middle-aged man named Pham Chuyen came from below decks and was lowered into the water in a basket boat. It was loaded with a crystal-powered radio and provisions sufficient to support him for several weeks. Chuyen, code-named “Ares,” would be the CIA’s first long-term North Vietnam–based operative.10
Shortly thereafter, Colonel Nguyen Cao Ky, the slender, mustached commander of Tan Son Nhut Air Base, was summoned by the air force chief of staff. “We’ve been working on new plans with the American CIA to drop specially trained agents into key positions in North Vietnam,” he said. “What we need now from you is a highly trained group of flyers to drop the right men at the right spot.” The mission would involve flying unmarked, blacked-out C-47s deep into enemy territory at treetop level. The thirty-year-old pilot smiled and replied, “When do we start?” The code name given to the overflight and insertion operation was Project Tiger.11
Ky selected twenty of his best pilots for the operation and developed the fundamentals of the project. His C-47s would fly northward and enter the DRV where one of its rivers emptied into the sea. The planes would fly as low as possible and carry two navigators, one to calculate time and distance and the other to maintain visual contact with the ground. The CIA provided Air America (the private airline owned and operated by the CIA) personnel to help train Ky’s aviators. The men practiced by flying night missions through tight mountain passes near Dalat. Upon returning from one of these training runs, Ky found a slight, bespectacled American waiting for him. It was Colby. “I remember thinking he looked like a student of philosophy,” he wrote in his memoirs. From this point on, the Saigon station chief would personally supervise Project Tiger.12
Colby arranged for Ky and his men to move to a detached, guarded villa within the Tan Son Nhut compound to better maintain security. In defiance of protocol, Ky insisted on commanding the inaugural flight himself. “I’m the commander; I’ll fly the first mission,” Colby recalled him saying. The first team to be dropped, four in number, was code-named Castor. The night before its scheduled flight, Colby, Ky, passengers, and crew gathered at a Chinese restaurant in Danang for dinner. Noting that their number was thirteen, one of the Vietnamese offered to retire, but Ky would have none of it. The next evening they reassembled, with the Vietnamese clad in the pajama-like clothing—cotton died indigo blue—typical of Vietnamese peasants. Each carried $100 in currency and a cyanide pill. While Ky and his team waited on the tarmac with the plane’s engines running, Colby and his communications officer tried desperately to secure a final go-ahead from the 303 Committee in Washington. When their “Immediate” cable received no response, they sent a “flash,” a cable of the highest priority. Within minutes the go-ahead was received, and Colby gave Ky thumbs up.13
To the CIA chief’s relief, the first Tiger flight reported in as the C-47 turned inland from the Gulf of Tonkin. All aboard the aircraft were northerners, and it was with some excitement and nostalgia that they flew over their former homes. Ky recalled sighting a battlefield where he had fought the French when he was with the Viet Minh. At approximately 1:30 A.M., Team Castor was parachuted into the mountains west of Hanoi in Son La Province. The plan was to stay away from the more densely populated areas, at least at first. “I think there was the idea that if you could live in the mountains you’d be safer than if you’d tried to live in a highly controlled structured society,” Colby later told one interviewer. “The idea was, I think, to build up a base or bases from which you could then penetrate the lowlands.” The C-47’s return trip through Laos proved uneventful, and Ky put his wheels down at Tan Son Nhut around 6:00 A.M. To his delight, Colby was there to greet him and his crew with a case of champagne.14
Ky was scheduled to pilot the second team, code-named Atlas, but was persuaded by one of his recruits, Lieutenant Phan Thanh Van, to allow him to fly instead. The C-47 carrying Team Atlas was hit by antiaircraft fire crossing into North Vietnam and crash-landed. Three months later, Hanoi held a much publicized trial of the survivors. “Hanoi issued a press release,” Colby recalled, “containing confessions by the crew and team that they had been trained by Americans and sent by South Vietnam. No plausible denial there.” Things quickly went from bad to worse. Team Castor went off the air and its members were presumed captured. Three more teams—Dido, Echo, and Tarzan—were inserted. After one of the operators included a code word indicating that he had been turned, that is, compelled to become a double agent, Saigon operated under the assumption that all of the teams had been turned and began feeding them false information. Another seven-man team was lost over North Vietnam on May 16, 1962. By the end of 1963, only four teams and one singleton were thought still to be operating inside North Vietnam. The rest of the infiltrators were dead, in prison, or had been doubled. By the time he left South Vietnam in 1962, Colby had become disillusioned. The encrypted code word sent by the radio operator warning that his team had been captured had included more than one message, he subsequently told an interviewer. “The message sent to me,” he said, “was that the thing wouldn’t work.”15
Not only was North Vietnam a denied area, but Project Tiger had been penetrated by the communists at the outset. Pham Chuyen—Ares—was either a North Vietnamese agent who had been sent south for the sole purpose of being recruited into the US–South Vietnamese scheme, or he had been captured and turned. He had lured at least one junk to its destruction. Captain Do Van Thien, deputy chief of the South Vietnamese unit cooperating with the CIA on Tiger, was also a North Vietnamese intelligence officer; he fed Hanoi a continuous stream of information on the air and sea insertions. In truth, a number of CIA operations that took place during Colby’s tenure as station chief had been compromised. “It is clear . . . operations [under William Colby] were thoroughly penetrated by the Communists from the start,” counterintelligence operative Russell Holmes later recalled. “By this, I mean they had penetrated the South Vietnamese and because we were not even looking at them from a CI [counterintelligence] point of view; we inherited their penetration.” Holmes did not know the half of it. Tran Kim Tuyen’s most trusted deputy at SEPES, South Vietnam’s intelligence and internal security apparatus, was the famous North Vietnamese spymaster Pham Xuan An.
In Washington, Colby’s nemesis, Jim Angleton, smelled blood. From the beginning, he and his colleagues in counterintelligence had viewed covert operations and nation-building as extraneous to the mission of the CIA. According to Ray Cline, Angleton considered Colby to be “just a paratrooper.”17 The intelligence operation Colby presided over in Vietnam was Swiss cheese, he declared, and he persuaded Allen Dulles to allow him to send a counterintelligence team to investigate and, if possible, clean up the mess. No one was beyond suspicion, even Colby himself. To Angleton’s delight, his men uncovered a friendship between the station chief and a French doctor. Vincent Gregoire (a pseudonym, as it turned out) had been or would be recruited by the National Liberation Front and was later caught passing documents to the Russians. Angleton decided not to confront Colby. He would keep that nugget tucked away for later use.
Colby was aware of some communist penetrations and unaware of others. He was vastly annoyed by Angleton’s meddling. He did not believe that the kind of counterintelligence security Angleton sought for the United States was possible in South Vietnam. Some Vietnamese nationalists were willing to work with Hanoi, or at least with the NLF. Both communists and anticommunists had once been brothers-in-arms against the French. Family ties were strong, even transcendent. Many members of Diem’s government and military had brothers, sisters, uncles, or cousins who served the communists. If the United States was not to supplant the South Vietnamese government with a colonial regime, it would have to work with the existing authorities, penetrated or not.18 Colby had come to believe that, except for monitoring traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the spy game—intelligence gathering and analysis—was of secondary importance. The communists made no secret of what they intended to do. The task at hand was to beat them at their own game, to build a nation before the Lao Dong (the Communist Party of North Vietnam) and the NLF could.
Upon his arrival in Saigon, Colby had been struck by the absence of any political or paramilitary initiative on the part of the US Mission. “I had come to Vietnam from Italy,” he later recalled, “where, apart from our cooperation with the Italian intelligence services, the CIA had conducted major programs to support the Italian center democratic parties against the Communist effort to subvert Italy through political means.” It seemed to him that both the embassy and the Military Assistance and Advisory Group were missing the point. General Samuel Williams and his successors believed that the primary threat came from an invasion by North Vietnam, and so they concentrated on converting the ARVN into a mirror image of the US Army. MAAG did provide some assistance to the Civil Guard, the 68,000-man rural force, but viewed it primarily as static defense to protect lines of communication and supply depots while main force units conducted massive sweeps through the countryside. For his part, Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow believed that stability and security would flow from Western-style democratic reforms and processes. The embassy continued to press Diem to take noncommunist nationalists into his cabinet and to conduct US-style congressional investigations to root out corruption. “More influenced by the growing discussion in those days of doctrines of counterinsurgency, coming from the post-mortems on the French failures in Vietnam and Algeria and the British success in Malaya,” Colby wrote in his memoir, “I soon found that I didn’t agree with either the military or the diplomats.”19
Neither did President Kennedy. While still president-elect, Kennedy had dispatched Ed Lansdale, then assigned to the Pentagon as its expert on counterinsurgency, to Vietnam to investigate and report. Colby knew of Lansdale and his work in the Philippines. “Lansdale . . . developed warm and personal relations with Asians and sought to understand their cultures and yearnings and not just the texts of their political and propaganda statements,” he later observed. Colby arranged for his section chiefs to brief the man behind Magsaysay and then accompanied him into the field. During the tour, the two compared and contrasted the Philippine experience with Malaya, Algeria, and Vietnam. Lansdale returned to Washington to report that the situation in the countryside was deteriorating. The communist insurgency was accelerating at an alarming pace. At Lansdale’s suggestion, Durbrow was replaced as ambassador by Frederick Nolting, a less assertive Foreign Service Officer who was not likely to insist that American aid be conditioned upon reforms within the Diem regime. Then came NSAM 52 in March 1961, in which Kennedy authorized a “program for covert actions to be carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency which would precede and remain in force after any commitment of US forces to South Vietnam.”20
“Uniquely in the American bureaucracy, the CIA understood the necessity to combine political, psychological, and paramilitary tools to carry out a strategic concept of pressure on an enemy or to strengthen an incumbent,” Colby wrote in his 1989 book Lost Victory.21 Fundamental to his thoughts on nation-building was that there was an essential link between political and paramilitary action. That is, in defending themselves from a communist insurgency or a predatory government, individuals in a community experienced a sense of empowerment and entitlement. In the American and French Revolutions, the armies of the rebellions had become agents of nationalism and nation-building, both symbols of and advocates for new regimes that would be responsive and responsible to the people. Colby remembered the effect that Colonel Chevrier (Adrien Sodoul) had had on villagers in occupied France as his patriotic speeches rallied them to the resistance. The problem was to come up with a model that was appropriate to Vietnam.
Low-intensity conflict had been part of warfare since men had first taken up arms against each other. But following the emergence of nation-states in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, individuals or small groups that committed acts of violence against the state were considered bandits or criminals rather than legitimate combatants. Kings commanded their armies in set-piece battles disconnected both strategically and politically from their respective populations. With the coming of the Napoleonic Wars, that began to change. Indeed, the term “guerrilla”—derived from the Spanish term for “small wars”—originated with the Peninsular Campaign of 1808, in which Wellington’s sixty-thousand-man army, together with a much smaller Spanish force and Spanish guerrilleros, tied down a quarter million French soldiers. More important, Napoleon, building on the experience of the French Revolution and its armies, combined the people, the army, and the government into what Carl von Clausewitz had termed a “remarkable trinity.” The true author of “the people’s war,” however, was Mao Tse-tung. Unlike Napoleon, Mao viewed the populace not as an effective adjunct to war, but the principal weapon. In its simultaneous struggle against the Japanese and the Nationalists, the Communist Party under Mao had focused on building a “unity of spirit” between soldiers and the local populace. “Be neither selfish nor unjust,” read the third of Mao’s “Three Rules.”22
There were two ways open to those who would put down revolutions through counterinsurgency—one with many variations, and the other with none. The first was an extension of Antoine-Henri Jomini’s nineteenth-century dictum, “Annihilate the enemy’s force in the field and you will win the war.” The operative word here was “annihilate.”23 Modern sensibilities made such a course much more difficult than in the past, as public outcry in the United States had demonstrated during General Valeriano Weyler’s “reconcentration” campaign in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the subsequent and equally barbaric struggle against guerrilla forces in the Philippine-American War from 1899 to 1902. Nevertheless, such an approach still had its advocates in the 1960s. The other stratagem was to “win the hearts and minds” of the populace in which the rebellion was being fomented, that is, to counter the communist insurgency by doing what the insurgents were doing. In this approach, military action was to be subjugated to political maneuvers. With friendly outside powers advising and supplying it, the anticommunist central government would build trust among the people, if not through democratic reforms, then through responsive and responsible government.
By 1961, a kind of counterinsurgency think tank had emerged in Saigon. There was Colby with his OSS experiences, Lansdale in and out of country, and Colonel Francis Philip “Ted” Serong, the Australian counterinsurgency expert retained by the Diem regime as a temporary adviser. In September 1961, Sir Robert Thompson, the United Kingdom’s best-known counterinsurgency expert, was appointed head of the British Advisory Mission in Vietnam. Each of these individuals had read Clausewitz, Jomini, Mao, Sun Tzu, and Che Guevera. Each had as great an understanding of unconventional warfare as anyone in the West at that time. Each was aware of the dictums of insurgency and counterinsurgency. The task at hand was to adapt and apply them to Vietnam, with its religious diversity, ethnic minorities, colonial heritage, and strategic realities. Colby and his colleagues set about learning all they could about Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and then coming up with a plan.
Colby was particularly influenced by the experiences of Marshal Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey, who had served as French resident general in Morocco from 1912 to 1925. His principal task, he knew, was to put down an anticolonial insurgency, which he proceeded to do by means of “peaceful penetration” and the “oil-spot theory,” or, in French, the tache d’huile. This was Lyautey’s term for his method of influencing a region, named after the way an oil spot slowly spreads out on a dry surface. Military force was secondary in Lyautey’s scheme, used primarily to intimidate the enemy by its presence. By working through existing authorities and structures and demonstrating respect for Islam and Moroccan culture, the resident general, who had also been a member of the French Academy, succeeded in decreasing anti-French feeling and deflating the nationalist insurgency. The idea was to work in the safest areas first, winning hearts and minds through projects of economic development, education, and public health. Gradually, these loyal, secure areas would spread and link up until eventually the entire country was pacified. Lyautey actually strengthened the authority of the sultan. Not only was the armed uprising defeated, but Lyautey’s reforms contributed to the emergence of modern Morocco. One of France’s most respected military intellectuals, Lyautey had been a contemporary influence on T. E. Lawrence. Colby applauded Lyautey for recognizing that the employment of a massive conventional force in guerrilla warfare was counterproductive. “My line has always been that you could conduct a strategic offensive through defensive tactics,” he would later say.24
Colby believed that Robert Thompson, probably the dominant counterinsurgency voice in South Vietnam in the early 1960s, could have profited from a closer study of Lyautey. An advocate of “clear and hold,” Thompson, like Lansdale, gave great weight to physically separating the peasantry from communist insurgents. Small and medium-sized indigenous forces trained by Western military advisers would expel guerrillas from a discrete area and then establish and maintain a defensive perimeter. Colby had familiarized himself with the British counterinsurgency experience, especially in Malay, even before Thompson’s arrival. “I had studied enough of the Malayan Emergency to have gained great respect for the priority the British had given there to the local-level struggle, in which they used only 80,000 troops and 60,000 police but some 400,000 home guard,” he wrote in Honorable Men. Like other British colonial officials, Thompson gave great weight to the training and deployment of local police forces. With this, Colby the lawyer also agreed. Freedom from crime and arbitrary justice—a mechanism to settle disputes fairly—was crucial to pacification. Thompson and the British sought to impose firm but fair discipline on the villagers as they cut them off from the insurgency. But Malaya was different from Vietnam. It was ethnic Chinese who launched the Malay Communist Party in the early 1930s, and the Chinese who dominated it. The Malays were never really interested in communism and tended to remain loyal to the British. What was missing with Thompson’s approach, Colby believed, was a political or ideological dimension. In his discussions with Nhu, Colby emphasized that the peasantry must be motivated rather than simply directed to organize self-defense forces. They had to feel truly empowered and look upon the national government as a source of that empowerment. “[In Vietnam] we had to enlist the active participation of the community in a program to improve its security and welfare on the local level,” Colby observed, “building cohesion from the bottom up rather than imposing it from the top down.”25
As CIA station chief, Colby’s two most important counterinsurgency assets were a Political Action Section and a Military Action Section, the latter headed by Colonel Gilbert “Chink” Layton. Layton, who arrived in Saigon in 1959, was one of Colby’s favorites. Part Native American, Layton had grown up in Iowa, raised by his grandmother. He was an excellent athlete and a fine student with a passion for history. Because of his high cheekbones and narrow eyes, his fellow high-school students had nicknamed him Chink. Layton had served with distinction in Patton’s Third Army, participating in the relief of Bastogne, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge. He joined the Agency in 1950, serving first in West Germany, and was then in the Pacific on the island of Saipan. There he trained Chinese Nationalists and South Koreans in the art of guerrilla warfare. A stickler for detail, Layton constructed entire villages for liberation or capture and taught his charges the fundamentals of small-unit tactics.26
While Colby was deputy chief of station from 1959 to 1960, Layton’s principal duty was to advise and train the commando teams of South Vietnam’s 1st Observation Group. The outfit was part of the South Vietnamese Special Forces, which were commanded by Colonel Le Quang Tung; its assignment was to cross into Laos and Cambodia and stage hit-and-run attacks against the Ho Chi Minh Trail then being built. During these early years, the 1st Observation Group was the CIA’s most important source of information on the burgeoning network of paths and roads that the North Vietnamese Army was expanding and improving. He also helped train the singletons and teams that Russ Miller was inserting into North Vietnam. “You would have a field day if you were here,” Layton wrote a friend. “It’s just like War Planning! You write a plan, go find some people, train ’em, equip ’em, deploy ’em, fight ’em, rescue ’em, furlough ’em, catch ’em, make another plan and start all over again.”27
In 1960, Layton and Miller, who were nominally assigned to MAAG, established the Combined Studies Division as a front for their clandestine activities. After Colby became station chief, he called in Layton and told him, “Gil, there’s something going on out there; find out what it is and see what we can do about it.” By “something going on,” Colby meant the growing insurgency, and by “out there,” he meant the Central Highlands and the lower delta, both of which the South Vietnamese government had virtually abandoned. During his subsequent gamboling in the Highlands, Layton ran into an International Volunteer Services (IVS) worker named David Nuttle who was living among one of the Montagnard tribes, the Rhade. It would prove to be an auspicious encounter.28
IVS was part of the “Tom Dooley phenomenon” that swept the United States during the 1950s and early 1960s. Thomas Anthony Dooley III was the idealistic (some said self-seeking) US Navy doctor who became a celebrity in Vietnam and in the United States when, in 1954, as part of Operation Passage to Freedom, in which the navy transported more than 300,000 Vietnamese from North Vietnam to South Vietnam following the partition of the country, he risked his life treating refugees with type IV malaria and other serious diseases. Dooley subsequently appeared on the popular television show This Is Your Life and wrote a best-selling book about his experiences. Inspired in part by Dooley, Nuttle arranged for and passed a telephone interview, and IVS sent him a oneway ticket to Saigon. The young midwesterner wound up in Darlac Province in the Central Highlands, where he introduced new seed strains and programs focusing on irrigation, animal husbandry, and the use of simple farm machinery. His hosts were the Rhade, the largest of numerous aboriginal tribes living in the Highlands. Within a year, the Rhade, concentrated around the provincial capital of Ban Me Thuot, had accepted Nuttle as a friend.29
At the time of his arrival, the insurgency was heating up in the Highlands. The Viet Cong were quick to recognize that the persecution of minorities by the Diem regime and its efforts to settle Catholic refugees and Vietnamese lowlanders in the Rhade’s midst made them ripe for recruiting. Nuttle traveled about the countryside on a BMW motorcycle that had been muffled. “If you kept at about seventy miles an hour,” he recalled, “you could run right through an ambush.”30
An incident in early 1960 demonstrated the heavy price to be paid for the continuing divide between the indigenous people of the Central Highlands and the government of South Vietnam. Nuttle learned that a team of officials was coming out to inspect an agricultural project in a village some miles from Ban Me Thuot. A friend, Y-Cha, warned the American that the group would be ambushed by the local Viet Cong. The IVS worker tried to warn the province chief—an ethnic Vietnamese—that the site was remote and the danger great. The chief responded by adding more security guards. Nuttle wisely contrived an excuse not to go. In the midst of its journey, the Vietnamese officials and their guards were indeed ambushed. The Viet Cong felled two large trees at either end of the column. Guerrillas popped out of spider holes on one side of the group, peppering it with fire. The officials and their guards exited their vehicles on the other side only to be greeted by fire from another row of spider holes. Thirty-six of the thirty-seven-man party died, with one spared to tell the tale.31
It was at this point that Gil Layton appeared on the scene. After encountering Nuttle during a tour of the Highlands, he asked the IVS worker to visit whenever he was in Saigon. He did, and the two men struck up an ongoing conversation about the situation of the Rhade.32 The animosity between the ethnic Vietnamese and the people of the Highlands, whom the Vietnamese referred to as moi (savages), was so great that it was unlikely the tribe, or other Montagnards of the region, would ever take up arms against the communists on behalf of the government in Saigon. The two men agreed, however, that the aboriginals would fight to defend their homes and families. The tribesmen were fiercely independent, and, after all, the Viet Cong themselves were mostly ethnic Vietnamese. Nuttle recalled that the French had singled out the Montagnard tribes for special attention, providing them with health care, education, and farming equipment. The Highlanders had responded positively, and during the First Indochinese War had acted as a counterweight to the Viet Minh. One thing was certain: the Rhade and the other tribes were going to be crushed between the ARVN and the Viet Cong if they did not have some means to defend themselves.
On May 5, 1961, Layton sent a memo to Colby requesting that he approve a program to recruit as many as a thousand tribesmen to “operate in the guerrilla-infested areas bordering on northern Cambodia and southern Laos.” Layton introduced Nuttle to Colby, and one discussion led to another. The Montagnards seemed the perfect guinea pigs to try out Lyautey’s, Thompson’s, and Serong’s ideas, not to mention Colby’s own. “We . . . decided that we should start small and make the case for a program by a successful experiment, rather than try to sell a massive panacea and arouse all possible objections before we had any experience with the idea,” Colby later wrote.33
The first task was to sell Nhu on the concept, and Colby reserved that job for himself. In truth, Colby had been trying to point Nhu toward his particular vision of counterinsurgency and pacification since their first meeting in 1959. The station chief was careful to express sympathy with the counselor’s criticism of his brother’s essentially military and developmental approach. Both men agreed on the necessity of building political support for the regime among Vietnam’s vast peasantry. Diem and Nhu both realized that these efforts could backfire, fostering antigovernment insurgencies among noncommunist peasant communities. Nowhere was this irony more likely than among the Montagnards. Colby would recruit some trustworthy Vietnamese to monitor the program; this, together with the promise that Vietnamese Special Forces would be designated to train the Montagnard self-defense forces, did the trick.34
Next, Colby and Layton had to persuade the larger US Mission, especially the Military Assistance and Advisory Group, to embrace the idea of a Montagnard self-defense force. The former Jedburgh was all too aware that the regular military had historically taken a dim view of unconventional warfare. The Joint Chiefs had approved the creation of Special Forces in the army and air force and the US Navy SEALs, but only very reluctantly. The brass believed that violence was violence and on any scale could be handled by conventional military. MAAG also suspected that the unconventional forces would drain off the best and the brightest from regular units. Political action was completely beyond the pale for the US military in the early 1960s. Civil action companies in the army were in their infancy and tended to be dumping grounds for the inept and incompetent. General Williams and his replacement, General Lionel C. McGarr, believed that the conflict in Vietnam was military in nature and that they were there to provide a military solution. The issue of a viable, responsible political culture was of purely secondary importance. More significant, as a result of events halfway around the world, covert operations and the CIA had suddenly fallen out of favor with the Kennedy administration and the American people.
In the spring of 1960, the Eisenhower administration approved a plan to bring down the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro, a plan to which President Kennedy subsequently gave the go-ahead despite deep divisions among his advisers.35 Early on the morning of April 17, 1961, the Cuban Exile Brigade, comprising some 1,450 anti-Castro fighters who had been trained in Guatemala by the CIA, landed at the Bay of Pigs on the southern tip of Cuba. The invaders established two of three beachheads, fought well, and inflicted substantial casualties on Castro’s forces, which soon numbered more than 20,000. But the exiles soon ran out of ammunition. A tiny rebel air force, flying outdated B-26s, had failed to destroy Castro’s planes in an April 15 attack; as a result, Cuba’s defenders enjoyed air superiority. Cuban planes sank an exile freighter loaded with ammunition and communications equipment. The anti-Castro forces and their CIA handlers pleaded for US military intervention, but President Kennedy refused. On the second day of the operation, with ammunition running out and casualties mounting, the exiles surrendered.
For Jack Kennedy, who publicly accepted responsibility for the Cuban fiasco, the whole affair was a humiliation. “We looked like fools to our friends, rascals to our enemies, and incompetents to the rest,” declared the New York Times. The White House blamed the CIA: indeed, Kennedy was so angry that he considered dismantling the Agency on the spot—“to scatter CIA to the winds,” as he put it. Instead, he appointed Maxwell Taylor to head a committee charged with rooting out the causes for the Bay of Pigs disaster and notified Allen Dulles that he would be retired from public service after a respectable interlude. From April 1961 on, Colby and his team would have to operate under the shadow of the failed Cuban operation.36
The second week in May, David Nuttle received an urgent message from IVS headquarters: Ambassador Nolting wanted to see him in his office the following day. The aid worker jumped on his motorbike and set off on the “Frontier Highway,” the main north-south route connecting Saigon to the Central Highlands. “I arrived in Saigon about an hour after dark,” Nuttle wrote in his unpublished memoir, “having flipped over after hitting a big wild hog that ran out of the jungle into my path.”37 Nuttle showered and dropped by the Layton villa to see Bonnie Layton, Gil’s daughter. The elder Layton intercepted him at the door. “Listen,” he said, “all I want to do is make sure that you got the message about your meeting with the Ambassador.”
“How do you know about that?” Nuttle asked.
“I have my sources,” was Layton’s terse reply.
As it turned out, Colby and Layton had arranged a meeting of the US Mission to discuss the situation in the Highlands with Nuttle present.
At 2:00 the next afternoon, Nuttle walked through the front door of the US embassy and was directed to the ambassador’s conference room. As he waited at the long mahogany table, others began to file in: General Lionel C. McGarr, head of the US military mission, and his deputy; USAID director Arthur Gardiner; Colby; Vietnam expert Douglas Pike; and then the ambassador himself. MAAG presented its solution to the threat of a communist takeover in the Highlands. Essentially, McGarr supported the Diem regime’s plan to concentrate the tribal population in secured reservations while the ARVN conducted massive sweeps to root out and kill the Viet Cong. It was a makeover of the reconcentration tactic the Spanish had used in Cuba from 1895 through 1898 and that was adopted by US forces in their war against Philippine insurgents—in both cases with disastrous results.
When McGarr finished stating his view, Nolting asked Nuttle to respond. “I ripped into the ‘reservation plan’ by focusing on all the obvious negatives,” Nuttle recalled. The Montagnards would resist being relocated. It would be impossible to keep them from slipping away at night into the dense jungle, which was honeycombed with hunting trails. Once there, they would become fodder for the Viet Cong. With McGarr clearly irritated, Colby interceded, asking Nuttle whether there was an alternative. There was, Nuttle said: “Mr. Colby, if the GVN [government of South Vietnam] will begin to bring the Montagnard into the social and economic mainstream, there will be some motivational basis for a security program.” The Diem government could make a good beginning by stopping the bombing of aboriginal villages. If arms were provided to the Highlanders, and they were allowed to defend themselves, there was a chance that further communist inroads could be stopped.38
Nuttle had played the role that Colby, Layton, and Nolting had hoped he would. By this point Nolting and Colby had bonded. “Colby became not only a friend,” Nolting later recalled, “but one of my most trusted advisers.” When it became clear that Colby had cleared away any objection the House of Ngo might have, Nolting, with the approval of the 303 Committee, gave the go-ahead for a small, experimental counterinsurgency/pacification program focused on the Rhade.39
In 1962, the Rhade numbered between 100,000 and 115,000. Residents of the high plateau that formed the heart of the Central Highlands, the tribe had migrated southwestward from China and Mongolia centuries earlier, dependent on slash-and-burn agriculture for its subsistence. The Rhade had a matrilineal society with the eldest woman in the family owning the house, property, and livestock. Members of an extended family resided in a bamboo longhouse sometimes reaching 400 feet in length. Male and female roles were traditional, with the males hunting, clearing the land, building the houses, burying the dead, conducting business, and preparing the rice wine. The women drew water, collected firewood, cooked, cleaned, washed the clothes, and wove the traditional red, black, yellow, and blue cotton cloth of the Rhade. The average Rhade male was about five feet five inches tall, with a brown complexion and broad shoulders. Healing was the responsibility of shamans or witch-doctors. The religion was animist, but included a god (Ae Die) and a devil (Tang Lie).
Nuttle signed on as a contract agent with the CIA on October 4, 1961. His assignment was to survey the tribes around Ban Me Thuot and identify those willing to participate in a self-defense and development program. Colby arranged for a Special Forces medic, Sergeant Paul Campbell, to assist Nuttle. Accompanied by a Captain Phu from Thuy’s Presidential Survey Office (PSO, the South Vietnamese government’s version of the CIA) and Nuttle’s man Friday, Y-Rit, the team set up shop in Ban Me Thuot. Nuttle recalled that before departing for the bush, they took stock: Rhade villages were being attacked by the ARVN and bombed by the Vietnamese Air Force when they were suspected of supporting the Viet Cong. For their part, the communists were using terrorism to extort rice, livestock, and manpower from the Rhade villages. Native lands had been taken without compensation by the government in Saigon for resettlement of refugees from North Vietnam.40
The team found tribal elders initially suspicious and reluctant to cooperate, but “Mr. Dave” and “Dr. Paul” persisted, with Campbell conducting sick call at each village and Nuttle sounding out the leadership about a possible cooperative effort. The tribesmen hated the South Vietnamese government, but they were afraid of the Viet Cong. In one village, insurgents had captured the sister of a Rhade who had been working with the IVS; they took her into the village and eviscerated her, “filling the cavity with odds and ends[,] and gave propaganda lectures to the assembled observers while the girl was engaged in dying,” according to a CIA report.41 Eventually, Colby and his colleagues settled on the village of Buon Enao, only 6 miles from the provincial capital of Ban Me Thuot, for their first operation. During October, the team visited Buon Enao every day for three weeks. Its proposals were minimal: a perimeter fence for defense and a dispensary.
Layton and Colby made frequent visits to the site, and the team grew to include more Agency personnel, USAID workers, and the first Special Forces A-Team under Captain Lawrence Arritola. Everything was subject to extended debate: the Rhade said the fence would provoke the ARVN; the Americans promised they would secure a letter of approval from the province chief; the Rhade said the fence would elicit a Viet Cong assault; the Americans said they would arm the Rhade and teach them to shoot; the Rhade said they had no bamboo for the fence; the Americans replied that they would go into the jungle and cut it for them. Gradually, the elders’ resistance began to melt. In a Hollywood touch, Campbell, working in conjunction with the village shaman, was able to cure the village chief’s daughter of a serious illness.42
In early November, work on the defensive perimeter began, with some 50 residents of Buon Enao and another 125 people from surrounding villages performing the labor at 35 piasters (50 cents) a day. When building materials ran low, Campbell led nocturnal expeditions to steal what was needed. The scavengers commandeered sand from a Vietnamese landowner’s riverbed and crushed rock from a highway construction project. Vietnamese who had been resettled in the area would cut bamboo by day, and Campbell would confiscate it by night. The Rhade were delighted. And indeed, the scavenging raids were more about demonstrating that the Americans were not dupes of the government than about any real logistical necessity.43
Although work on Buon Enao’s defensive perimeter and dispensary was completed in early December, there was nothing to defend the perimeter with. Layton and Colby arranged a quick visit from some of Thuy’s people at the Presidential Survey Office. They certified that the Rhade had lived up to their end of the bargain: the village chief had arranged for signs on the fence declaring the Viet Cong persona non grata and had personally vouched for each of his people. PSO authorized the arming of thirty of Buon Enao’s residents. Layton requisitioned the necessary number of carbines from MAAG, and the Special Forces began training. By this time Colby had come up with a name for the Buon Enao experiment—Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDGs)—descriptive and nondescript at the same time.
Military action was to be purely defensive. Buon Enao and villages that were subsequently brought into the program were connected by radio. Platoon-sized strike forces conducted long-range patrols and were on call to come to the aid of a village under attack. The patrols were scouting enterprises to gather intelligence on the whereabouts of marauding Viet Cong. By July 1962, the strike force at Buon Enao had about 650 armed and trained men deployed in support of 3,600 unpaid village defenders; Layton’s people were recruiting among the Jarai, Sedang, and Bahnar in the neighboring provinces of Kontum and Pleiku.44
As the CIDGs evolved, Combined Studies and Special Forces personnel became deeply involved in health and economic development projects. By July 1962, Campbell and his cohorts had set up dispensaries in eighty-eight Rhade villages around Ban Me Thuot. Widespread application of the insecticide DDT began to bring malaria under control. The Americans wanted desperately to improve living standards among the Highlanders, but other than paying the construction workers and members of the strike force, there was no way to directly introduce money into the economy. Recognizing the dangers posed by the nonmilitary side of the CIDG project, the Viet Cong began targeting health workers and those who aided them. In two cases, they executed villagers, one an old man and the other a small boy, for warning Layton’s people of an impending ambush.45
As the number of fortified villages and strike forces multiplied, the Viet Cong stepped up their campaign of terrorism. The communists decided to make an example of one particularly effective strike-team commander. An informant came into the captain’s village and told him that the Viet Cong were setting up an ambush some kilometers into the jungle. That evening the officer took his platoon out to investigate. While he and his men were absent, a Viet Cong squad entered the village and ordered the people to assemble. They dragged the strike-force commander’s wife and infant son out of their hut, decapitated the woman, placed her head on a stake, and then bayoneted the baby. These were the fruits of cooperating with the South Vietnamese government, the Viet Cong cadre declared.46
The more engagements the Rhade irregulars fought, however, the more confident they became. In 1960, Buon Enao defenders alone killed more than 200 Viet Cong and captured another 460. During CIDG’s heyday—from 1960 through 1962—the US Air Force established an operation entitled “Farmgate” to provide tactical air support for ground operations. Flying prop-driven trainers and substituting cowboy boots for combat footgear, Farmgate pilots provided close support to Rhade villages under attack. Indeed, for several months, Farmgate acted as the unofficial air force of the CIDGs.47
There was no political or ideological dimension to the Civilian Irregular Defense Group program, at least in the form of propaganda or organization. Colby recognized that in the act of self-defense, the Montagnards would experience a sense of empowerment, but beyond that, it was the medical care, new clothing, improved agriculture, and animal husbandry that would gain and hold the Highlanders’ loyalty. In truth, as between the Montagnards and the ethnic Vietnamese, all one could really hope for was peaceful coexistence. And as with the CIA station’s other operations, there was little or no security or counterintelligence. “In my shop, and most of the Agency shops,” Layton said, “you assumed [your South Vietnamese counterparts] were penetrated. . . . When I started recruiting all these people, somebody said, aren’t you afraid there might be some Viet Cong in there[?] . . . I said, we figure on about ten percent but then we outnumber them nine to one.” Colby and Layton insisted that information be shared on a strictly need-to-know basis and limited to the mission at hand.48
In December 1961, Colby had persuaded Nhu to pay a visit to Buon Enao. So impressed was he, that he not only okayed expanding the project to other tribes in the Highlands but also approved it for the lower Mekong Delta. The problem that had plagued the Agroville program—namely, the remote and dispersed nature of the rural population living amidst a maze of canals and dikes—still remained. Colby and Layton had enjoyed some success in the delta, but the South Vietnamese government had so neglected the Buddhist and Confucian Vietnamese of the coastal lowlands and the delta that Colby and Layton felt they had even less traction with them than they did with the Montagnards. Nevertheless, the threat of a communist takeover in the south was great and had to be addressed. The Viet Cong had turned the Agroville program against the government, and CIA intelligence reports indicated that the communists regarded the Ca Mau peninsula as one of its strongholds. Indeed, the U-Minh Forest would subsequently become home to PAVN’s famous U-Minh Battalion. During the 1950s, the station had cooperated with Diem’s intelligence apparatus in creating stay-behind nets in the south composed of indigenous Catholics and Vietnamese who had fled from the north in 1954. In 1961, Colby decided to try to create an archipelago of anticommunist islands—starting with the Catholic villages—in the Mekong.
The principal locus of what the CIA termed “the clerical paramilitary program” was a network headed by Father Nguyen Loc Hoa. In truth, Father Hoa was Chinese and had only adopted a Vietnamese name in 1951 when he led his flock of three hundred from southern China through northern Vietnam and Cambodia and all the way to the Ca Mau peninsula. Neither the French nor the South Vietnamese government dared venture south of Ca Mau city, and in 1959 Diem created a special district there, called Hai Yen, for Hao and his parishioners. From this stronghold, Father Hoa was able to contend with the communists for control of an area stretching from the ninth parallel to the tip of the peninsula. In 1960, the Viet Cong launched a frontal assault on Father Hoa’s headquarters, but were repulsed with a loss of 174 men.
Father Hoa—Colby referred to him as the “dynamic Pastor from the North”—became a frequent visitor to Layton’s house in Saigon. “At dinner at our house, he didn’t dress as a priest,” Dora Layton, Gil’s wife, recalled. In 1961, Colby and Layton dubbed Father Hoa’s army the Sea Swallows. In early January 1962, Layton and Colby coordinated a Seabee (US Navy Construction Battalion) effort to construct a landing strip near Father Hoa’s headquarters, and weapons, uniforms, medicine, and other supplies began flowing in. Shortly thereafter, Father Hoa began recruiting ethnic Chinese from Cholon. By the fall of 1962, ten Special Forces A-Teams were working in the lower delta, and by the end of the year more than 4,500 armed and trained Catholic youth had joined the “Fighting Fathers.”49
By mid-1962, Gil Layton, loosely supervised by Bill Colby, found himself in command of a clandestine paramilitary force numbering more than 36,000, trained and reinforced by three dozen Special Forces A-Teams. “Gil ran the war by night from our compound in Saigon,” Dora Layton recalled. The Layton’s house was a spacious, two-story white stucco of French colonial design. It featured a roof garden and a high cement-and-steel picket fence surrounding a small yard. Large iron gates could close the driveway and seal the compound in case of a security threat. And security threats there were. In January 1963, Dora Layton wrote a friend in the States: “They came yesterday to measure for barbed wire all around the place. We have our guns freshly cleaned and loaded in our room, and a whole arsenal in our bathroom.” Just outside the main living quarters, within the walled villa, was a communications shack with a Vietnamese radio operator on duty twenty-four hours a day. From that vantage point Gil Layton could direct strike forces and call in air support for operations all across the country.50
In comparison to the Laytons, the Colbys lived a rather humdrum existence. Colleagues remembered Bill attending Mass regularly, sometimes at the cathedral and sometimes at a Benedictine chapel in Cholon. He left childrearing to Barbara and the Catholic Church. Each morning, a van would pick up Carl and his brother Paul and take them to school. Carl recalled that he and his friends had the run of the city when they were not in class. “I would sometimes sleep over at my friend Billy Shepherd’s house (his father worked for the United States Information Service) for two days in a row. My parents would not know where I was.” In the evenings, Bill and Barbara would often give the kids a kiss and leave for one of their continuous rounds of parties. Carl and his friends would then call a cab to drive them to Cholon. He was eleven.51
In August 1960, when he was fourteen, John was shipped off to the States to attend Portsmouth Priory, a Catholic boarding school in Rhode Island. Barbara put him on a plane in Saigon, and Elbridge picked him up at the airport in Washington, where the young man, already intensely homesick, spent time with his grandparents until school opened. On the day the term was to begin, Elbridge drove John to the Benedictine school his parents had picked out for him. The brother in charge told Elbridge that Hurricane Dora had torn the roofs off of several buildings; the opening of school would have to be delayed. John recalled Elbridge’s retort: “Well, I’ve done my duty; his father instructed me to deposit him and here he is.” He then got in the car and drove off.
By the next spring, John was depressed and getting fatter by the day. He would call Elbridge and Margaret collect; sometimes his grandfather wouldn’t accept the charges. When Bill returned to Washington that fall to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John flew to Washington to meet him. Following a pleasant weekend, John boarded his plane for the return trip. When it landed, and the youngster saw the school bus waiting for him, something snapped. He told the flight attendants he was sick and wanted to go back to Washington. As that happened to be the aircraft’s return destination, he was allowed to stay on board. From the terminal, John called Bill to come and get him. Father and son argued until three in the morning in the basement of Elbridge and Margaret’s house. John was homesick, lonely, disgusted with Elbridge, and tired of the harsh New England climate. Boarding school was his duty, Bill replied; he needed to buck up and be somebody. John implied that, like Elbridge, his father was hard-hearted and self-absorbed and did not care about his family. The message had the desired effect. Angry though he was, Bill agreed that if John would finish the term in Rhode Island, he could then move to Florida, where his maternal grandparents lived, and go to school there.52
The Civilian Irregular Defense Groups in the Central Highlands and Father Hoa’s Catholic Youth in the Ca Mau peninsula were promising starts in the emerging counterinsurgency/pacification initiative envisioned by Bill Colby and his colleagues, but they did not address the political core of Vietnam—the Buddhist-Confucian majority. At one point, Nhu pleaded with Colby to provide a step-by-step plan to build a stable democracy in Vietnam; the trouble was, he said, that the communists had a plan, and the “Free World” did not. A charismatic strongman like his brother would serve only as a temporary stopgap. The West expected underdeveloped countries to move from colonialism to democracy in one step, he complained.53
Nhu and Diem, it will be recalled, had very different ideas about how best to mobilize the Vietnamese-Buddhist peasantry, with Nhu committed to an essentially political stratagem and Diem to an economic-military one. Colby, of course, discreetly sided with Nhu. In October 1961, the counselor to the president convened a meeting of province chiefs and informed them that he wanted to launch a “social revolution . . . in which a new hierarchy should be established, not based on wealth or position.” The most important people in a village would be the model anticommunist fighters. The losers, he said, would be the “notables and gentry,” many of whom had been “lackeys of the imperialists and colonialists.”54
Shortly thereafter, Colby persuaded Nhu to try going national with the CIDG model, adding a political component. The counselor was receptive, but his brother was not. Diem’s prime minister, Tran Van Huong, told Colby that weapons delivered to villagers could easily find their way into the hands of the Viet Cong. Colby replied that arms were not the primary issue; the real enemy was communist propaganda and political action. Huong did not say so, but what he and Diem were really afraid of was that weapons furnished to peasant groups could be used to fuel a noncommunist uprising against the regime.55
In late 1961, the South Vietnamese president decided to hire his own counterinsurgency expert—Sir Robert Thompson. As usual, Colby adapted to the situation. As plans for what became known as the Strategic Hamlet Program evolved, it became clear that the main difference between Nhu and Colby, on the one hand, and Diem and Thompson, on the other, was that the American wanted development and political indoctrination—“winning hearts and minds”—to come first, and physical security to follow. Thompson, whom Nhu regarded as nothing more than a colonial administrator, favored fences, moats, guard towers, self-defense forces, and police first, and political and economic development second. Colby and Nhu eventually conceded the point, and the Strategic Hamlet Program was born. In February 1962, Diem announced an interministerial committee to manage it and named Nhu its chairman.56
Colby got behind the Strategic Hamlet Program with a vengeance. In theory, it had everything—local self-defense, economic development, health care, and education—all leading to a sense of empowerment. It had been child’s play, Colby wrote, for a few armed communist cadres to enter a village at night, terrorize and propagandize the population, recruit soldiers, and impose taxes. Not so anymore. There were failures, fraud, and fakeries, he admitted, but the program marked the beginning of the first nationwide response to the Viet Cong. And, by Hanoi’s own later admission, the sheer volume of the military and economic activity of the program eliminated the Viet Cong presence from hundreds of villages, even in those where the local populace was hostile to the South Vietnamese government.57
On the whole, however, the Strategic Hamlet operation was a failure, and, like the Agroville initiative, largely counterproductive. At Nhu’s insistence, arms were not given to village defense forces, but merely “loaned” for a period of six months. The provincial leadership, itself rich and well-educated, was supposed to support a new system that accorded no special status to wealth, social position, or education. That did not happen. There was no meaningful land reform. The assumption that the South Vietnamese peasantry was either anticommunist or neutral was erroneous. In some villages, there were families that had supported the Viet Minh and its successors for three generations. Finally, the man Nhu relied on to implement the program was Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao, a Catholic and a favorite of the Ngo family. He was also a communist agent. Thao used his position to see that as many strategic hamlets were built in communist strongholds as possible, thus exposing the settlements to maximum external attack and internal subversion.58
Colby later recalled his first meeting with Thao:
I arose at 4:00 A.M. one morning to meet National Assemblywoman Pauline Nguyen Van Tho, a graduate of Bowdoin College in Maine, and drive south with her to her constituency in Kien Hoa province, historically a redoubt of the Communists in the war against the French and once again beginning to stir with revolutionary fever. We were met there by the new province chief, Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao, who combined strong Catholic credentials with an active role in the Viet Minh rebellion against the French. . . . After describing the benefits of concentrated economic and social development programs in building up the villages, and then providing these viable communities with local security forces, he took us on a tour by motorboat. We went through the canals to an arm of the Mekong, meandering through the delta on its way to the sea, and stopped at a small village. The inhabitants greeted Colonel Thao as a frequent visitor, and I was further impressed by the fact that he needed no guards for himself or his Saigon visitors.59
During his first two years as station chief, Colby had made a significant start toward his goal of seeing South Vietnam and the United States partner in an effort to win the support of the rural population. The CIA’s efforts—the CIDGs, the Fighting Fathers, and so on—were small and sporadic, and the Saigon government’s nationwide effort—the Strategic Hamlet Program—ended up with more failures than successes; but at least there were signs that some in authority were beginning to recognize that the conflict in South Vietnam was a “people’s war” rather than a conventional conflict. The events of 1962 and 1963 would conspire to sidetrack the pacification/counterinsurgency train with—to Colby’s mind at least—near disastrous results.