Young Bill Colby in Tientsin in native garb
(The Colby Family Collection)
Bill Colby had a love-hate relationship with the military. He was a warrior and had immense respect for soldiers, but he did not trust the military as an institution. Though it was free of corruption, and for the most part apolitical, the US military was hidebound and inflexible. As an institution, it lacked agility, the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. And if there was ever a time and a place for pragmatism and imagination, it was the Cold War in the developing world. The Vietnamese military suffered from the same rigidities, but it was also in many places and at many levels incompetent and corrupt. One of the reasons Colby continued to support the House of Ngo was that it transcended the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. But then, in 1962–1963, to Colby’s great dismay, and to the detriment of the counterinsurgency/pacification effort, the military captured the flag in both Washington and Saigon.
Early on the morning of February 15, 1962, the residents of Saigon were again awakened by the thud of bombs and the rattle of machine-gun fire. Stanley Karnow, an American journalist, recalled the scene: “Rushing to my hotel room window, I peered across the city to see smoke billowing above the presidential palace, nine or ten blocks away. I pulled on my clothes, ran downstairs, and sprinted up Tu Do . . . to the Boulevard Norodom, a handsome avenue that opened onto the palace, an imposing structure that dated back to French colonial days. It was now a flaming shambles. Overhead, beneath a low cloud cover, two fighter aircraft were circling in an almost leisurely racetrack pattern.”1
Bill Colby was preparing to head for the office when he heard the roar of aircraft overhead, followed by explosions at the palace. “I quickly went to the porch to see another airplane coming in low and aimed at us,” he wrote in Lost Victory. “I saw its rockets release. I ducked into the house and herded the family and servants into a protected area under the stairs while some of the rockets detonated in the trees in front of the house.” Carl Colby was already at school when the assault began. Naturally, the students were sent home, but that decision, with the Colby residence three doors down from the presidential residence, meant the child would be deposited into the heart of the battle. Government tanks and personnel carriers clogged the streets. “I was picking up shrapnel because I thought I could use it in show and tell,” Carl remembered. “Then I walked into the house and there was glass and some plaster on the floor. My heart sank. Then my father stuck his head around the door of the kitchen and said, ‘Sit down, sport. We’re having lunch.’”2
The attack on the palace was not the harbinger of a coup but an attempt to assassinate Diem and Nhu by two South Vietnamese Air Force pilots. They had turned back from a combat mission against the Viet Cong and dropped their ordnance on the palace because they had been passed over for promotion and believed that the government was not prosecuting the war with sufficient vigor. One was shot down over the Saigon River; the other escaped to Cambodia. The Ngo brothers, their paranoia increasing, chose to view the attack as part of a multifaceted plot to oust them. This fear, coupled with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, spelled trouble for the Civilian Irregular Defense Group program as well as counterinsurgency and pacification in general.
From its inception, Colby’s initiative with the Rhade had been plagued by hostility and jealousy on the part of the South Vietnamese military and the provincial governors. Even as it complained about American usurpation, the ARVN refused to supply the officers that Combined Studies had asked for. Layton later described the role of South Vietnamese government officials in the program as one of “obstructionism, jealousy, suspicion and continual concerted drive to get their hands in the till.” In the spring of 1962, two Viet Cong companies attacked the village of Buon Trap. With the defenders under siege, a strike-force relief unit had to fight its way through a large ambush before it could relieve them. While the battle raged, a company of ARVN marines sat on a hill overlooking the village and did nothing. Dave Nuttle, who was a CIDG adviser, subsequently learned that they were cheering for the Rhade and Viet Cong to kill each other.3
Beginning in June 1962, Nhu started pressuring Combined Studies to turn over CIDG villages to local ARVN commanders. That same month, Colonel Le Quang Tung’s Special Forces began moving in and disarming the Rhade. The government then drafted strike-force members into the regular army and sent them to the Cambodian-Laotian border to guard the frontier. The Highlanders were, of course, interested in protecting their homes and families, not the Vietnamese, and they melted away into the jungle. As far as the Montagnards were concerned, the government in Saigon and the Americans had violated both the letter and the spirit of their original agreements. During the Vietnamese takeover, two Montagnard representatives petitioned Layton. Why have you abandoned us? they asked. “Mr. Dave” had come to the villagers and promised them that the weapons they were being given would belong forever to the Rhade. Without arms, the villagers would once again be at the mercy of the Vietnamese; it mattered not whether they were from the South Vietnamese government or the Viet Cong. Their appeals fell on deaf ears. In truth, the CIA was in the process of being pushed out of the paramilitary business in Vietnam.4
If distrust and antagonism from Saigon were not enough, the CIDGs and other CIA-run covert operations in Vietnam were coming under attack from Washington. In October 1961, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Maxwell Taylor and Deputy National Security Adviser Walt Rostow arrived in South Vietnam to conduct a fact-finding mission for President Kennedy. Colby almost missed them; he had been summoned to Baguio, in the Philippines, together with other Far Eastern heads of station, to meet with newly appointed DCI John A. McCone. He arrived back in Saigon just as Taylor and Rostow were preparing to leave. “I had the chance for no more than a hurried exchange with Taylor and Rostow at the end of their visit,” he wrote in his account of the Vietnam conflict, “certainly not enough to give the rationale for our approach and to interest them in its potential.”
Upon his return to Washington, Taylor advised the White House and the 303 Committee that the CIA was not adequately staffed or organized to carry out any but the smallest paramilitary operations. Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and MAAG smelled blood. Unlike the regular military, McNamara did not disdain unconventional warfare—he had vocally seconded Robert and Jack Kennedy’s enthusiasm for special forces—but he believed that any and all paramilitary operations should be controlled by the Department of Defense (DOD). The new DCI was not one to swim against the tide. On June 28, 1962, the 303 Committee met to consider the Agency’s request for a $10 million supplemental to support the CIDGs, the Sea Swallows (Father Hoa’s Catholic Youth), and other paramilitary operations. McCone spoke up: “It may be advisable for DOD to take the lead in CIA counterinsurgency programs, with the CIA in support, rather than the reverse situation.” Thus was “Operation Switchback” born. It would have a profound impact on America’s struggle to contain communism in Southeast Asia.5
Colby would have an opportunity to monitor and, he hoped, influence Switchback directly. In the summer of 1962, Desmond FitzGerald, who had been named head of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs in the Directorate of Plans, summoned the former Jedburgh to Washington and asked him to become his deputy. Colby recognized a promotion when he saw one, but he asked FitzGerald for another year in Vietnam to see his various projects through to maturity. FitzGerald said no—and so the Colbys bid a fond farewell to Vietnam. Before leaving, in company with General Nguyen Khanh, Diem’s military aide, and General Tran Van Don, from whose father-in-law the Colbys had rented their second house, the station chief toured the Highlands. Bill accepted a tiger skin from the Corps Commander, General Ton That Dinh; visited Father Hoa in Ca Mau; and then met Barbara and the children (sans baby Catherine and the newly independent John) as they emerged from a drive over the picturesque Hai Van Pass separating Hue and Danang. The entire family attended an exit interview with President Diem. Smoking cigarette after cigarette, Diem reminisced from early afternoon until dusk. Finally, Bill interjected: “Mr. President, we would like to continue this conversation as long as you would like, but we are expected for dinner at the ambassador’s and your brother will be there.” Diem apologized and called in the photographer.6
Colby was well-satisfied with his work in Vietnam: “For one thing, I could feel that CIA had played a key role in helping to find a proper strategy by which to fight the war,” he wrote. “Moreover, the station had contacts and influence throughout Vietnam, from the front and rear doors of the Palace, to the rural communities, among the civilian opponents of the regime and the commanders of all the key military units.”7 Following a leisurely trip halfway around the world that included stops to see the Taj Mahal in India, Jerusalem, Greece, Rome, Lourdes, and the bull rings of Spain, the Colbys arrived back in Washington in the summer of 1962. To Barbara’s delight, Bill bought a house in suburban Bethesda, Maryland, and equipped her with a station wagon.
Colby found the atmosphere in Washington very different from when he had last worked there in 1951. The CIA was in turmoil on several levels. Throughout the 1950s, Americans had viewed their spooks and spies as unadulterated heroes. Even, and sometimes especially, to those on the political left, the Agency was exemplary. Had not Joe McCarthy himself targeted the CIA for a purge? “After all,” Colby wrote, “we were the derring-do boys who parachuted behind enemy lines, the cream of the academic and social aristocracy, devoted to the nation’s service, the point men and women in the fight against totalitarian aggression, matching fire with fire in an endless round of thrilling adventures like those of the scenarios of James Bond films.” In those halcyon days there had been no journalistic exposés or congressional investigations. The press accorded the Agency a privileged position, heeding its call to refrain from reporting on its activities in the name of national security and even allowing operatives to use jobs in the print and broadcast media as cover. Congressional oversight was superficial, at best. The CIA director consulted periodically and vaguely with the chairmen of the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees as well as with a subcommittee of the latter that supervised the process by which the CIA’s budget was hidden among those of other agencies. The senators and congressmen, typified by Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, were patriotic, anticommunist, and discreet. All agreed that in the intelligence business, the need for secrecy trumped both the press and the public’s need to know. Russell told the director that though he was entitled to detailed information about the Agency’s activities, he didn’t want it “except in the rarest of cases.”8
But the Bay of Pigs had tarnished the CIA’s image and opened a Pandora’s Box. Virtually every literate American became aware of the CIA, and not in a positive way. The botched invasion of Cuba made the Agency appear callous, incapable of secrecy, and, worst of all, inept. Contempt and respect are mutually exclusive. America’s James Bond had become a character out of Laurel and Hardy. Media coverage of the nation’s intelligence community intensified. News stories appeared on the CIA’s failed attempt to oust Sukarno in Indonesia, its use of ex-Nazis to build the West German intelligence service, the Gary Powers U-2 fiasco, and other failures.
No one was angrier at the CIA and its humiliation of the president over the botched Bay of Pigs operation than Robert Kennedy, JFK’s alter ego and guardian angel (or devil, as some would say). The attorney general, with the White House’s approval, had decided to seize control of the intelligence community and do what it had not been able to do—get rid of Castro. JFK had wanted to appoint his brother DCI, but Bobby felt the White House needed to distance itself from covert operations. After six months, the Kennedys had settled on McCone, a deeply conservative Catholic from California who had made a fortune in the shipbuilding business. He had served in both the Truman and Eisenhower Defense Departments and as head of the Atomic Energy Commission. Robert Kennedy and McCone immediately bonded; the attorney general’s Hickory Hill home was adjacent to the brand-new CIA headquarters compound at Langley, Virginia, and he would often stop by to visit with McCone on his way to the Justice Department in downtown Washington.
The 303 Committee continued its supervisory role over covert operations, but the Kennedy brothers created a supercommittee, the Special Group (augmented), to oversee the plan, code-named Mongoose, to kill Castro and overthrow Cuba’s communist government. Just before Mc-Cone’s swearing in, the Kennedy brothers summoned him to the White House and introduced him to Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, who would be chief of operations for “Project Cuba” (subsequently renamed Operation Mongoose). McCone promised to make Richard Helms, the newly appointed deputy director of plans, and all of his assets available for the war against Castro. Over the next few months, Lansdale devised more than thirty anti-Castro schemes; psychological warfare, sabotage, the raising of a guerrilla force within Cuba, disruption of the Cuban economy, and assassination of Castro himself and his chief lieutenants were all on the drawing board. The more outrageous assassination plots involved the use of exploding cigars, a lethal hypodermic needle disguised as a pen, a bacteria-infected wetsuit, and exploding seashells. To implement Mongoose, Helms selected William King Harvey, a pop-eyed, pot-bellied veteran of the Berlin spy wars of the 1950s. Over the winter of 1961–1962, Harvey, the only CIA officer to openly carry a gun, assembled a team that included some 600 CIA operatives with some 4,000 to 5,000 contract personnel at their disposal. There were those in the Agency who decried Mongoose. Samuel Halpern, deputy chief of the Cuban desk, informed Helms that the Agency had only a few agents on the island, and they were rarely heard from. There was no evidence at all of a meaningful guerrilla movement. “Some people believed Ed [Lansdale] was a kind of magician,” Halpern later observed. “But I’ll tell you what he was. He was basically a con man.”9
The Cuban Missile Crisis, culminating in October 1962, derailed any invasion plans, but after the dust settled, Bobby Kennedy ordered the men and women of Mongoose to redouble their efforts to wreak havoc on the island. Why, he kept asking, was it not possible for commandos to blow up Cuba’s power plants, sugar mills, and factories?10 In early 1963, the Kennedy brothers, disgusted with the lack of results in the Cuban operation, fired Harvey, sidelined Lansdale, and brought Des FitzGerald on board to head the team. Bill Colby would replace FitzGerald as head of the Far East Division.
Perhaps the most important change Colby found upon his return to Washington from Saigon was an altered culture at CIA headquarters. During one of his first interviews with President Kennedy, McCone had observed that the CIA could not continue to be seen “as a ‘cloak and dagger’ outfit . . . designed to overthrow governments, assassinate heads of state, [and] involve itself in political affairs of foreign states.” The primary task of the Agency should be to gather intelligence from its agents and from all intelligence agencies within the government, analyze it, and present its findings to the president. McCone would establish a Division of Science and Technology within the CIA to build on the successes of the U-2 and the Discover Spy Satellites. He did not say it, but McCone believed that the DCI should be one of the chief executive’s principal advisers on foreign policy. Significantly, McCone chose Dick Helms, who came from the Foreign Intelligence (espionage) branch of the Agency, to head the Directorate of Plans. During their first year in office, McCone and Helms fired more than a hundred clandestine operatives. “It was clear that the FI culture was in the ascendancy and CA [covert action] no longer had the glamorous advantage it once had,” Colby wrote. Rumor had it that there would be no more large-scale paramilitary operations. Funding was cut for Colby’s political action initiative in Italy and for Frank Wisner’s innumerable front operations.11
The irony was that nobody was more committed to covert action as a means to combat communism and realize the foreign policy objectives of the United States than the Kennedy brothers. Because of its unique position, only the CIA could operate behind the scenes to plan and fund covert paramilitary and political action operations, avoiding, as Colby put it, “diplomatic and political complications.”12 In the eyes of the Kennedy brothers, the CIA had been able to redeem itself in part through its actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis. U-2 overflights and reports from agents on the ground in Cuba had provided absolutely vital information on the presence and placement of Soviet missiles. In 1963, the White House would okay the continuation of covert operations in Laos and dozens of other hotspots around the world, but this turn of events was not in time to halt Operation Switchback in Vietnam.
The assumption between May 1962 and November 1963 of all paramilitary operations in Vietnam by the Department of Defense dealt a major blow to the counterinsurgency/pacification operations begun by Ed Lansdale and revived by Bill Colby and his colleagues. Colby’s successor as Saigon station chief, John “Jocko” Richardson, quickly came to see the struggle between the South Vietnamese government and the National Liberation Front purely in military terms. Events in the field seemed to confirm the wisdom of that view. On December 6, 1962, the Politburo of the North Vietnamese Communist Party (Lao Dong) voted to “dispatch combat forces to South Vietnam to build our mobile main force army and our combat arms and combat support units.”13 In January 1963, only 40 miles from Saigon, a small contingent of Viet Cong mauled a division-sized ARVN force near the village of Ap Bac. Sixty-one South Vietnamese soldiers were killed, a hundred were wounded, and five helicopters were shot down; only three Viet Cong bodies were found at the site at the end of the battle. Ap Bac would become grist for the mill of US journalists, many of whom were becoming increasingly disillusioned with the Diem regime; but neither John Richardson nor General Paul Harkins, the head of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV, the successor to MAAG), seemed to blame the government in Saigon. Harkins geared up for the war the US military had always wanted to fight, and Richardson continued to heap praise on the Ngo brothers, particularly Nhu. In the Highlands, Gil Layton and Combined Studies reluctantly began to turn over control of the CIDG program to the South Vietnamese Army and US Special Forces. Surprisingly, given their training, Special Forces personnel seemed deaf and dumb to the need to build political consciousness and self-determination among the Rhade and other tribesmen.
By early 1963, Diem and MACV were increasingly obsessed with the Ho Chi Minh Trail and communist sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos. Those CIDG strike forces that Colonel Tung and his men did not disarm and disband were organized into regiment-sized units by the Special Forces and moved to the border to conduct intelligence and harassing operations against the Viet Cong and Pathet Lao (Laotian communists) across Vietnam’s western borders. Meanwhile, in the Highlands, Tung replaced strike-force leaders with “haughty, cocky Vietnamese, who ‘intend[ed] to ride hard on the Rhade,’” according to one of the few remaining Combined Studies officers. The result was low morale and numerous desertions; the number of personnel enrolled in the CIDGs shrank from 38,500 in January 1963 to about 19,000 in January 1964. By early 1963, in fact, the Montagnards were on the verge of open revolt.14
Meanwhile, in Washington, Colby, as deputy and then head of the Far East Division, was trying to accommodate himself to Switchback. In February 1963, he advised the DCI that there was no alternative to the Agency relinquishing full control of paramilitary operations to the military. MACV and the ARVN might turn to Combined Studies when they needed advice and liaison on political matters, but there were no guarantees. Colby was not optimistic. He understood that in Vietnam, the military had from time immemorial been the enemy of the peasant: “Throughout history the army has been tax collector, oppressor and representative of ‘outside’ authority and control,” he observed in a report to the National Security Council. Colby had experienced MAAG and MACV’s tunnel vision during his tour as station chief; political action was, in their view, not only irrelevant but counterproductive. As often as not, the US military mission believed, political action threatened the regime in Saigon, and in wartime, political “stability” was a must. General Harkins paid lip service to the need to win the support of the countryside, but he would never admit to the need to subsume military measures to a political and social program, much less to the idea that large-scale military operations might be damaging to an effort to win hearts and minds. In these views, Colby would later write, the military was complicit in the Ngo brothers’ growing tendency toward authoritarianism and insularity.15
In meetings at US Pacific Command headquarters in Honolulu in May and November 1963—the latter held two days before JFK’s assassination—McNamara outlined the Pentagon’s increasingly grandiose plans for counterinsurgency and pacification in Vietnam. Special Forces would continue to train and arm irregular units in the Highlands, the delta, and the Central Lowlands, but they would be used in support of traditional military operations, in gathering intelligence, and in harassing the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. The secretary of defense unveiled Operational Plan 34A (OPLAN 34A), which would see the US military take over and expand the remnants of Project Tiger, the effort to insert spies and saboteurs into North Vietnam. Under the supervision of a new, top-secret unit—the Studies and Observation Group, or MACV-SOG—the Pentagon’s unconventional warriors would, in Clausewitzian terms, attack North Vietnam’s “centers of gravity.”16 The first target would be Hanoi’s internal security. SOG would continue to smuggle agents into North Vietnam—this time primarily through maritime operations—to spy, harass, and sabotage. It would create a resistance movement in North Vietnam to do what the communists were doing in South Vietnam. McNamara expressed confidence that a massive covert effort could wreak havoc inside the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and cause Ho Chi Minh to stop supporting the insurgency in South Vietnam. The second target was the Ho Chi Minh Trail. SOG would coordinate the Special Forces border operations and attempt to launch strikes into Laos and Cambodia that would interdict North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong traffic.
Following his return to the States, Colby found himself in the thick of the Vietnam policymaking process, especially after he became head of the Far East Division in January 1963. He frequently accompanied McCone to National Security Council meetings and sometimes made the Agency’s presentations himself. What he had seen of McNamara, he did not like. “In so many briefings,” he wrote, “I saw him furiously scribbling notes about the number of weapons, trainees, and equipment being supplied to Vietnam rather than standing aside and considering how to adjust our style of war to the one being conducted from the North.” During the discussions of OPLAN 34A and SOG in Hawaii in November, Colby finally had enough. Taking his career in his hands, the former Jedburgh stood up and said, “Mr. Secretary, it won’t work,” referring to the stepped-up plan to insert espionage and sabotage agents into North Vietnam. The DRV was a denied area. As had been the case in Eastern Europe and Communist China, the inserted personnel would be killed or turned and used against the United States and its allies. McNamara ignored him. Following the group’s return to Washington from Honolulu, President Kennedy approved NSAM 273, which gave the go-ahead for OPLAN 34A. Operation Switchback would prove to be a disaster, Robert Myers, Colby’s deputy, later recalled. McNamara, Myers said, succeeded in “increasing American and South Vietnamese failures by a factor of ten.”17
In his plans for Vietnam, Bill Colby had placed his trust in two things: first, a CIA-controlled counterinsurgency/pacification program, and second, the House of Ngo. One had fallen prey to the military, and now the other was enduring the same fate. The November 1963 coup that would oust Diem and Nhu from power would be an excruciating experience for Bill Colby. The pair were clearly flawed, but not to the degree of some other anticommunist leaders with whom the United States had chosen to work. The Ngos wanted to do the right thing, but just did not know how, Colby believed. Like the Kennedy foreign policy establishment as a whole, the CIA would split as to the wisdom of a coup. Diem’s supporters would lose out; to make matters worse, once the decision was made, Colby, as Far East Division head, would be compelled to do everything in his power to facilitate a change of government.
By 1963, the Ngo brothers felt the political and military walls closing in on them. The National Liberation Front had grown to some 300,000, and its military wing, the PAVN, or Viet Cong, as the Americans and South Vietnamese called it, was able to launch regiment-sized attacks on ARVN and regional forces. A large majority of the Strategic Hamlets had either been abandoned by their disgruntled inhabitants or overrun by the Viet Cong. In order to convince the Americans and the rest of the international community that Saigon was prevailing, Nhu’s subordinates simply incorporated communist-dominated districts, and even some provinces, into government-controlled ones. The Montagnards had staged a bloody, unsuccessful uprising against the government in Saigon earlier in the year. A number of noncommunist, non-Catholic dissidents were still in jail, and their followers were becoming increasingly restive and vocal, especially against the Can Lao (the Ngo brothers’ personal political party) and a National Assembly that rubber-stamped every presidential decree. Elements of the military were on the verge of open rebellion, infuriated by Diem’s habits of promoting the loyal rather than the competent and interfering in military operations down to the company level.18
There were still members of the French Sûreté (secret police) around who were conspiring with every possible group to overthrow the Diem regime. As early as 1962, Nhu began to suspect that the Americans were complicit in various coup plots. Nhu and Diem even managed to get into a dispute with their brother Ngo Dinh Can, warlord over central South Vietnam. Angry that Diem and Nhu had not cut him in on their lucrative counterinsurgency deal with the CIA, he moved forward with not only his own version of Project Tiger but also a counterinsurgency/pacification organization named the Force Populaire (which was actually fairly effective). And then there were the Buddhists, who made up a large majority of South Vietnam’s population. They resented being ruled by a Catholic minority that constituted no more than one-tenth of the whole. So offensive was Diem and Nhu’s method of ruling that it brought a certain degree of cohesion to a religious group historically devoid of a political agenda. The largest and best organized of the rapidly galvanizing Buddhist groups was the General Association of Buddhists of Vietnam, which, at its strongest, spoke for nearly five thousand pagodas and corresponding lay organizations. Their leader, operating out of Hue, was the charismatic and enigmatic Thich Tri Quang.
Although there had been protests and demonstrations led by monks and carried out by Buddhist youths before 1963 in South Vietnam’s largest cities, they had been sporadic. But then, during Vesak, the celebration of Gautama Buddha’s birth, an incident occurred that brought South Vietnam to the verge of civil war. On May 8, the Buddhist community in Hue staged a public celebration, ignoring a previous order by the provincial government banning the display of religious flags. The Buddhists were indignant that only a few days earlier, Catholics had flown Vatican flags during a ceremony honoring Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc. Police and local civil guards surrounded the Buddhists and ordered them to disperse. When they refused, the deputy province chief, a Catholic, ordered the police and troops to open fire. When the smoke cleared, nine celebrators, including children, lay dead, with scores more wounded. Diem immediately issued a statement blaming the carnage on a Viet Cong hand grenade.
Young Bill Colby in Tientsin in native garb
(The Colby Family Collection)
15th Regiment on parade
(The Colby Family Collection)
Guardians of American interests in China
(The Colby Family Collection)
Members of the 15th Regiment in training
(The Colby Family Collection)
Colby, the newly minted paratrooper
(The Colby Family Collection)
Jumpmaster for a training drop
(The Colby Family Collection)
Colby with NORSO commandos
(The Colby Family Collection)
NORSOs depart to blow a bridge on the Northland Railway
(The Colby Family Collection)
Saluting NORSO crash victims
(The Colby Family Collection)
Colby and Herbert Helgerson, Norway, 1945
(The Colby Family Collection)
Liberating Namsos, Norway, 1945
(The Colby Family Collection)
More than ten thousand people participated in a protest demonstration in Hue on May 10. Prominent monks signed a manifesto demanding legal equality with Catholics, an end to official persecutions, and indemnification of the victims of the May 8 shootings and their families. On June 10, a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc sat down in the middle of a busy Saigon intersection and set himself on fire. His colleagues at the local pagoda had invited members of the media, and soon images of the protesting monk engulfed in flames appeared on front pages and television screens across the world. From that point, the Buddhist protests grew into a powerful, deeply rooted movement with broad support among students, intellectuals, and even some in the Catholic community. Aware that unrest had spread to the military and that certain officers were planning a coup, Nhu hatched a byzantine plan to crush the Buddhist movement, blame the military, and seize control of the government from Diem. He had concluded that his brother had become too weak to rule. “I don’t give a damn about my brother,” Nhu exclaimed to CIA station chief John Richardson in June. “If a government is incapable of applying the law, it should fall.” The regime, he said, was incurably “mandarin and feudal.”19
In a gesture of goodwill toward the United States, Diem permitted his flag officers to attend a Fourth of July reception at the US embassy. Afterward, CIA operative Lou Conein joined the men, nearly all of whom he had known since his OSS days in 1945, for drinks at a downtown hotel. There, General Tran Van Don informed Conein that he and fellow officers were going to remove Diem and Nhu from power. Conein duly passed this information on to Richardson, who, with the approval of the ambassador, told the former legionnaire to maintain his contacts.
On the evening of August 18, the coup plotters met and decided to ask the president to approve imposition of martial law. They would argue to Nhu and Diem at a subsequent meeting two days later that the decree was needed to enable the military to disperse Buddhist crowds in the nation’s cities. It was clear, they said, that the communists had co-opted the protest movement, a charge Diem was only too ready to believe. Their real purpose, however, was to use martial law to position troops strategically in and around Saigon.
But Nhu had other plans. On the night of August 21, with Ambassador Nolting out of the country, Colonel Tung’s Special Forces, dressed in regular ARVN uniforms, attacked pagodas all across the country. Armed with pistols, submachine guns, and clubs, they flattened the gates of Xa Loi Pagoda in Saigon and began beating monks and nuns with clubs and pistol butts. They then vandalized the main altar and seized the intact heart of the martyred Thich Quang Duc. In Hue, the violence was even worse. At Tu Dam Pagoda, the temple of protest leader Thich Tri Quang, Nhu’s Special Forces soldiers ransacked the building before blowing it up. At Dieu De Pagoda, a Buddhist crowd fought back but was eventually overwhelmed, with 30 dead and 200 wounded. The total number of people killed in the raids nationwide was never confirmed, but estimates ranged into the hundreds. More than 1,400 monks, academics, and other protest leaders were arrested and jailed indefinitely. Nhu knew that the raids would further outrage the Vietnamese and Americans, and he hoped that ire would be directed at the regular military, thus undercutting support for a possible coup. He miscalculated.20
As it happened, at the time of the raids, outgoing ambassador Nolting and incoming ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. were meeting in Honolulu with Admiral Harry Felt, commander of US forces in the Pacific. Bill Colby was there representing the CIA. At that point, the Agency had ruled out Nhu as head of government no matter what transpired in Vietnam. McCone had not made up his mind on Diem, but he tended to agree with Colby, who would subsequently note the danger of discarding a bird in the hand before knowing the “birds in bush, or songs they may sing.” Nolting reiterated his view that the Diem regime was the best choice available and that its overthrow would lead to a communist victory. Colby observed that the best that could be hoped for from a military coup was that the United States and anticommunist elements in South Vietnam would work through “a Naguib first phase” while waiting for the emergence of a “Vietnamese Nasser.” The references were to Muhammed Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser. The former was the popular nonpolitical general who had become the first president of Egypt after the antimonarchist uprising of 1953. He was a front man for a younger, nationalist, and politically ambitious group of officers headed by Nasser. Lodge kept his counsel, but in fact he had already set his face against the House of Ngo.21
Washington, DC, unbearably hot and humid, was typically nearly empty in August. Thus it was that on the Saturday following the pagoda raids, a rump of the foreign policy establishment gathered to decide how to respond to the embassy’s request for guidance. Present were Undersecretary of State George Ball; Roger Hilsman, the State Department’s Vietnam expert; Michael Forrestal, an aide to NSC director McGeorge Bundy; and W. Averell Harriman, the veteran diplomat who was then serving as undersecretary of state for political affairs. To a man, the four believed that Diem and Nhu were morally and politically bankrupt and that the United States must abandon them. They prepared a cable instructing Lodge to seize the opportunity to rid himself of Nhu; if the president refused to jettison his brother, “the U.S. must face the possibility that Diem cannot be preserved.” Lodge was also to make clear to the generals that Washington would provide them with direct support during the period between the breakdown of the present government and the establishment of a new one. The cable was cleared with President Kennedy, who was vacationing at Hyannisport in Massachusetts. On Sunday, a copy was circulated to the relevant agencies. As soon as he read it, Colby realized that a major change of policy was in the offing. He phoned McCone, who was vacationing at his palatial home in California. At the DCI’s request, Colby borrowed one of the CIA’s small jets and flew out to brief his boss. McCone, according to Colby, was furious and returned to Washington with him Sunday evening.22
On the following day, August 26, with the full team back in Washington, JFK presided over a stormy NSC meeting. McNamara and Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, together with the DCI and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, declared their support for Diem and accused Harriman and Ball of blindsiding them. Kennedy wavered, but in the end he instructed Lodge, at his discretion, to publicly announce a reduction of American military and economic aid to Diem’s government, the signal the rebellious generals had asked for. From late August on, the United States was firmly committed to a coup. As Colby noted in Lost Victory, “there was an almost total absence of consideration and evaluation of the personalities who might succeed Diem[,] beyond generalized references to ‘the military.’”23
The day following the NSC meeting, Colby instructed Richardson in Saigon to begin casting about for a replacement if Diem could not be saved. The chief of station did not trust the generals. If and when they came to power, he told Colby, “the Ngos would be lucky to get out of the country alive.” He wanted to see Vice President Nguyen Ngoc Tho succeed to the presidency and the constitution preserved. Don’t be absurd, Colby replied. The “U.S. must win this affair if it goes into it, and it has already decided to do just that. . . . We are confident you will keep [your] eye on this main ball rather than [the] window dressing of civilian leadership.” He wanted, he said, ideas on a “man, team, or false face behind which we can mobilize the necessary effort to continue the main war against the Viet Cong.” Colby had such a person in mind, although he saw him as more of a Nasser than a Naguib. Before leaving Saigon, Colby had suggested to Langley General Nguyen Khanh as a possible replacement for Diem. Both former parachutists, Colby and Khanh had become personal friends during the former’s tour as chief of station. Colby was drawn to Khanh because of his skill at maneuvering between the palace and various generals as well as among the political factions that constantly roiled the waters in Saigon. The general had expressed understanding of, and sympathy for, Colby’s ideas on counterinsurgency and pacification. Last but not least, he had not demonstrated the racism toward the Montagnards that was characteristic of so many of his fellow Vietnamese.24
Policymakers in Washington and Saigon anticipated a coup before the week was over, but on August 30, General Tran Thien Khiem, chief of staff of the South Vietnamese Army, informed General Harkins that he and his colleagues did not have sufficient forces in and around Saigon and did not feel ready to proceed. “This particular coup is finished,” Richardson cabled headquarters.25 The fundamentals of the situation had not changed, however. The Buddhists may have been intimidated, but they were no less resentful of the regime, and the military would never trust the House of Ngo again. The White House was wracked with angst, but Kennedy insisted on leaving the matter in Lodge’s hands. Thus it was that the newly arrived ambassador would be the American who held the fate of South Vietnam’s ruling family in his hands.
In 1953, when Lodge was serving as Eisenhower’s ambassador to the United Nations, a crucial vote on the Korean War had come before the Security Council. The State Department advised the New Englander to vote yes. When Robert Murphy, head of the International Organizations section in State, read the next day that Lodge had voted no, he cabled him: “Apparently, our instructions failed to reach you,” he wrote. The ambassador replied, “Instructions? I am not bound by instructions from the State Department. I am a member of the President’s cabinet, and accept instructions only from him.” Ten years later, nothing had changed.26
Lodge, according to Colby, was a disaster as an ambassador. “He had no concept of running a mission,” Colby later told an interviewer. “He was a total lone wolf, and couldn’t waste his time on administration. He took an instant dislike to Diem.”27 In truth, Lodge came to Vietnam not to manage and coordinate, but to rule. He brought with him a military and a civilian aide, Lieutenant Colonel John Michael Dunn and Frederick Flott, respectively, both junior in rank but both entrusted with his personal mandate. Together they ran roughshod over the rest of the mission—or tried to. Lodge did not believe in delegating authority. He anointed himself as sole spokesman to the press for the entire US Mission and insisted on the right to fire and hire any member of the team, including the CIA chief of station. The ambassador had patience neither for the palace intrigues that swirled around the Ngo brothers nor for the bureaucratic maneuverings within his own camp.
President Kennedy knew who and what Cabot Lodge was and had selected him deliberately. As historian Jane Blair has pointed out, JFK saw Vietnam in 1963 as primarily a political problem. His goal was to keep the South Vietnamese ship of state afloat while shielding his administration from excessive criticism. Lodge, a Republican presidential aspirant, would protect his Vietnam policy from partisan attacks. Above all, however, JFK wanted Lodge to deflect a crescendo of criticism coming from a group of young American newspapermen in Saigon. Beginning with the disastrous battle of Ap Bac, this pack of ambitious journalists, led by David Halberstam of the New York Times and Neil Sheehan of United Press International, had led an assault on US support for the Diem regime. They made the Buddhist crisis their own, writing scathing reports about the perfidious Ngo family and the outrages committed by Tung’s Special Forces. Indeed, these young media turks wrote about the situation in South Vietnam with the deliberate intention of promoting a coup. JFK demanded of Halberstam’s editors that they reassign the young reporter, but at the same time he made it clear to Lodge that he wanted him to get Diem and Nhu to clean up their act. Colby certainly thought that the American press corps and the Buddhists’ manipulation of it were crucial. “When that picture of the burning bonze [monk] appeared in Life magazine,” he told an interviewer, “the party was almost over in terms of the imagery that was affecting American opinion. That put enormous pressure on President Kennedy.”28
It was not until four days after he landed in Saigon that Lodge deigned to meet with Diem. He arrived at the palace dressed in a white sharkskin suit and accompanied by twelve aides. The ambassador urged his host to appease the Buddhists and tone down Madame Nhu—Nhu’s outspoken wife, who was considered the First Lady of South Vietnam because Diem had never married, and who had caused a stir by offering matches and fuel if any monks planned future self-immolations. Diem listened to Lodge and then launched into a two-hour diatribe, during which he chain-smoked two packs of cigarettes. The Buddhist protesters represented a small minority of the total population of South Vietnam, he declared. What he expected of Lodge was that he put an end to interference in the internal affairs of South Vietnam by representatives of various US agencies. Lodge feigned ignorance. This would be the last face-to-face meeting between the two men for nine tension-filled weeks. On September 2, Nhu’s English-language mouthpiece, the Times of Vietnam, sported the banner headline “CIA Financing Planned Coup d’Etat.”29
Meanwhile, Nhu had begun openly consorting with the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese. There had been rumors of secret contacts between the South Vietnamese government and the communists before, but the palace had steadfastly denied them. With the French encouraging and facilitating him, Nhu had recently entered into tentative discussions with North Vietnamese representatives concerning the possibility of a cease-fire and a neutralization scheme that would be similar to the 1962 Geneva Accords on Laos. Word of the contacts spread quickly. On September 4, Conein was summoned by Brigadier General Ton That Dinh, the military governor of Saigon, which was then under martial law. Dinh’s direct command of troops in the capital area made him indispensable to the success of a coup. Conein found him “exultant, ranting, raving,” flanked by bodyguards who kept their submachine guns pointed at Conein even during the luncheon phase of their four-hour session. Dinh declared himself the man of the hour who would save Vietnam from communism and who could kill or kidnap anyone in Saigon, including—should there be a move to accommodate the communists—Nhu himself.30
By this point, Lodge had taken Lou Conein and Rufus Phillips—the Lansdale protégé who had stayed on in South Vietnam to advise the government on its Strategic Hamlet Program—into his inner circle. Phillips had turned sharply against the Ngo brothers, as had Conein. On September 13, Lodge cabled Secretary of State Dean Rusk, asking that Chief of Station Richardson be replaced by Ed Lansdale. Richardson, it seemed, had disobeyed Lodge’s orders to cease all contact with Nhu. The State Department and the CIA had no intention of allowing a free radical like Lansdale back into the picture. Nevertheless, McCone, angry though he was, had no choice but to reassign Richardson. In the meantime, Deputy Chief of Station David Smith became acting chief.31
Colby had been monitoring these developments from afar with a growing sense of unease. Diem was apparently in Lodge’s sights, with the Kennedy administration divided and adrift. “Diem might be difficult,” Colby wrote in his memoirs, “but he was the best—and only—leader South Vietnam had.” The Agency’s Far Eastern chief was generally dismissive of the Buddhists. During one of his frequent visits to Vietnam, Colby had attempted to come to grips with Buddhism as a political movement. “I invited one of the leading bonzes to tea one afternoon,” he later recalled. “Resplendent in his yellow robe, he arrived in a polished limousine equipped with immaculate white cotton seat coverings, precisely as one of Diem’s ministers would have.” Their conversation, Colby said, resembled two ships passing in the night. “Not only could I not understand what he was trying to say, I was inwardly convinced that he did not know what he wanted to say,” he wrote in Lost Victory. Luminaries such as Thich Tri Quang were adept at rallying crowds and stirring protests, Colby believed, but they had no idea what to do with the political power that flowed therefrom.32
Colby’s response to the Buddhist crisis is somewhat puzzling. He repeatedly equated it with the sect wars of 1955 in which the South Vietnamese government had subdued the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, and Binh Xuyen. Rather than placing Buddhism on the same level as Christianity (i.e., Catholicism), as one of the world’s great religions, he seemed to have been relegating it to the status of a sect. There was certainly hard information on the General Association of Buddhists and its goals and organization: CIA dossiers, based on material gathered in July and August, included data on the leaders of the association and their complaints of discrimination by the government in favor of the Catholics as well as conclusive evidence that the movement was free of communist infiltration. Unlike Nolting and Lodge, Colby did not buy the notion that the Buddhist uprising was communist inspired and communist dominated. But he did share his countrymen’s belief that Buddhism was a “soft” religion lacking the discipline and will of the Catholic communion. More important, Colby refused to acknowledge that by the late summer of 1963, Diem had become completely eclipsed by Nhu and that both brothers had lost the support of the military. Those who differed with Colby whispered that it was because the Ngos were Catholic. Colby’s most telling argument was that Lodge and his supporters in Washington—Harriman, Hilsman, and Forrestal—had given no consideration whatsoever to what would follow politically in the wake of the fall of the House of Ngo.33
To make matters worse, it looked as if the ambassador intended to make the CIA his tool in facilitating the fall of the House of Ngo. “There was a clear inconsistency between John McCone’s and my opposition to the move against Diem and Lodge’s use of our subordinates [Conein] to carry out the action we opposed,” he wrote. But, as he noted, the CIA was not supposed to be a policymaking body, and the president’s deferral to Lodge made the Agency available to him to use as he wished.34
On September 23, President Kennedy ordered McNamara and Taylor to South Vietnam to assess the situation. Colby was part of the team. By then, the long trip from Washington to Vietnam—a twenty-four-hour flight in a windowless KC-135 from Andrews Air Force Base, to Anchorage, Alaska, for refueling, and thence to Tan Son Nhut—had become somewhat routine. Lodge was prepared to allow the Taylor-McNamara mission to gather all the information it desired as long as it did not come from the House of Ngo. Knowing of Colby’s close relationship with Nhu and Diem, the ambassador forbade him from calling at the palace or having any contact with high-ranking members of the government. “He did not want the palace to gain any false impression that [the Taylor-McNamara group] offered a potential way around his declared policy of waiting for Diem to come to him with the concessions Lodge thought necessary,” Colby later wrote. The former Jedburgh was outraged, and he sensed that McNamara was displeased, but Kennedy’s Republican proconsul was still in charge. Colby realized that if he could not contact Nhu and Diem, he could not talk with other Vietnamese either, as it would give the Ngo brothers the impression that he was plotting against them. Little did he know that they already had that impression. As the Taylor-McNamara mission was leaving Vietnam, Diem’s chief of special police was reporting that the United States had targeted the president for elimination. According to an Agency informant, the police chief told Diem that “an assistant to the chief of the American CIA [Colby] and about fifty sabotage and assassination experts had been in Saigon for over three months.”35
On October 2, Lou Conein and General Tran Van Don bumped into each other at the Saigon airport; Don asked the CIA operative to visit him at Nha Trang. From this point on, Conein was the mission’s sole contact with the coup plotters. Both the station and the embassy would have preferred someone else; as Bob Myers, Colby’s lieutenant, put it, Conein was one of the “sitting around the bar people,” a relic from an earlier age. Indeed, “Luigi,” who was usually in some stage of inebriation, was notorious. On one occasion when Taylor was ambassador, Conein had become enraged at the airport when his car would not start, pulled out his .45, and blasted away at the engine. Taylor sent him out of the country for a time. Later, during one of Saigon’s rooftop parties, Conein attempted to get the attention of a pal entering the hotel by dropping a flowerpot off the roof. The missile just missed hitting Ambassador Nolting on the head. But the mission had little choice. The generals had made it clear that Conein would be their only acceptable interlocutor. David Smith ordered his operative to go on the wagon for the duration.36
During the first week of October, USAID announced that it was suspending payments to the South Vietnamese government, and the CIA withdrew financial support from the Vietnam Special Forces. Diem and Nhu had Tung draw his 5,000-man force more tightly around the palace. General Don, speaking for the conspirators, told Conein to expect a coup no later than November 2. On October 27, he told him that the conspirators now believed that “the entire Ngo family had to be eliminated from the political scene in Vietnam.” The question of what exactly “elimination” meant had already come up at the CIA. Smith had recommended to Lodge that “we not set ourselves irrevocably against the assassination [of the Ngo brothers], since the other two alternatives mean either a bloodbath in Saigon or a protracted struggle which could rip the Army and the country asunder.” McCone and Colby immediately ordered Smith to stand down; the Agency could not condone assassination without ultimately being saddled with responsibility for it.37
Also on October 27, Diem finally approached Lodge, inviting him to come to the presidential mountaintop retreat at Dalat to discuss Vietnamese-American differences. During the ensuing meeting, the ambassador reiterated his demands that Diem’s government release the Buddhist prisoners from jail, cease its discrimination against the religious majority, and reopen schools and universities. Vietnam was becoming a public relations nightmare for President Kennedy, he declared, citing as an example Madame Nhu’s offer to furnish matches and fuel for the Buddhist self-immolations and Nhu’s public threat to have his father-in-law (a critic) killed. Diem listened in stony-faced silence and then replied that his government would continue to deal firmly with any disorder so that it could successfully prosecute the war against the communists.38
Shortly thereafter, Bill Colby briefed President Kennedy and the NSC on the situation in South Vietnam. A coup attempt seemed inevitable unless Washington intervened, he said, but the outcome was uncertain. Loyalist and insurgent forces were about equal in strength. JFK’s team remained as divided as ever, with Robert Kennedy joining McCone in declaring that one coup would just lead to another. Harriman observed that support for the Diem regime in Vietnam was continuing to decline, and that there was no way the present government could deal with the communist insurgency. From Saigon, Lodge cabled that the coming coup would succeed, and that the United States could not delay or discourage it. President Kennedy remained on the fence. The day following, Colby proposed to McCone that Ngo Dinh Nhu be installed in his brother’s place. Despite his shortcomings, which included a philosophy with “fascist overtones,” he was a “strong, reasonably well oriented and efficient potential successor.” Colby seemed oblivious to the fact that it was Nhu’s crushing of the Buddhists and his wife’s shenanigans that had precipitated the decision in Washington in late August to let matters take their course in Saigon. McCone did not even bother to bring his subordinate’s suggestion before the president and the NSC. At JFK’s direction, Rusk instructed Lodge not to provide direct aid to the coup plotters, but observed that “once a coup under responsible leadership has begun . . . it is in the interest of the U.S. Government that it should succeed.”39
Nhu was aware of the plotting against the regime, although confusion among the generals made the waters murky even to the best informed. What Nhu did not know was that Ton That Dinh, a devout Catholic and heretofore staunch Diem loyalist, was among the conspirators. Desperate, Nhu came up with an outlandish scheme, code-named Bravo, to save the House of Ngo. Loyalist troops under Colonel Tung would stage a fake coup, vandalizing the capital. In the ensuing chaos, assassination teams organized by Tung would do away with the principal coup plotters—Generals Duong Van “Big” Minh, Tran Van Don, and Le Van Kim—and possibly key Americans, such as Conein and even Lodge. The brothers would then flee to Vung Tau on the coast some 60 miles from Saigon. Finally, another group of loyalist officers organized by Tung would “arrest” the fake coup leaders and call for a restoration of the Diem government. Ton That Dinh was placed in charge of the fake coup. He persuaded Tung to disperse his Special Forces to the provinces and summoned the ARVN’s 7th Division to the capital.40
The morning of November 1, Lodge escorted Admiral Harry Felt to the palace for a courtesy call. At the end of the meeting, Diem asked Lodge, who was due to depart for a long-scheduled trip to Washington the next day, to stay behind for a few minutes. Alluding to rumors of a coup, the president asked Lodge to inform JFK that “I am a good and a frank ally, that I would rather be frank and settle questions now than talk about them after we have lost everything.” Ask Mr. Colby about brother Nhu, he said. It was Colby who had suggested that brother Nhu climb down out of his ivory tower and get out among the people. He was prepared to make changes in his government, Diem said, but it was a question of timing. He was not interested in power but only solutions. Lodge assured the president that rumors of assassination plots directed against him (Lodge) had not in any way “affected my feeling of admiration and personal friendship for him [Diem] or for Vietnam.” Shortly before his meeting with Diem, Lodge had told Conein that if the coup did not go off soon, he would see that the CIA operative would never again work for the US government.41
While the ambassador was at the palace, the station reported to Langley that the city was quieter—“more normal”—than at any time since the first Buddhist demonstration. Then at 13:30 hours, it sent a flash cable reporting “red neckerchief troops pouring into Saigon from direction Bien Hoa, presumably marines.” With the Special Forces out of the capital, Diem and Nhu had only the Palace Guard to fight for them. As Conein looked on, General Ton That Dinh called Nhu, cursing and threatening him. Initially, the counselor to the president believed this was all part of the fake coup, but then he realized the game was up. Meanwhile, the coup leaders had summoned Colonel Tung to military headquarters on a pretext. Shortly after his arrival, he was taken outside and shot. Colby would view the killing as barbaric and unnecessary, describing Tung, Nhu’s instrument in the brutal August pagoda raids, as “a very mild, straightforward, decent guy.” With the palace under full assault, Diem called Lodge to inquire about the American position. Lodge told him that the embassy was not well enough informed to have an opinion. Exasperated, Diem responded, “You must have some general ideas. After all, I am a Chief of State. I have tried to do my duty.” No one could question that, Lodge said, and then noted that the rebels had offered the brothers safe conduct out of the country. “I am trying to reestablish order,” Diem exclaimed, and hung up.42
At 20:00 hours, the brothers escaped the palace by way of a secret underground tunnel. They emerged in a wooded park in Cholon and were whisked away to a safe house that Nhu’s agents had prepared. Using a telephone line that ran directly to the palace, the brothers negotiated futilely with the plotters. Thinking that Diem and Nhu were still inside, Big Minh ordered a final assault on the building. By dawn, the 5th Division under the command of Colonel Nguyen Van Thieu had killed or captured the last of the Palace Guards.
The next morning—November 2—the brothers sought asylum in a Catholic church in Cholon and notified the coup leaders that they were prepared to accept the offer of safe passage. Minh sent an armored personnel carrier to pick them up. During the ride to headquarters, Nhu and one of the men guarding him, Captain Nguyen Van Nhung, got into a shouting match, insulting each other. The other guard, Major Duong Hieu Nghia, later recalled what happened next: “[Nhung] lunged at Nhu with a bayonet and stabbed him again and again, maybe fifteen or twenty times. Still in a rage, he turned to Diem, took out his revolver, and shot him in the head. Then he looked back at Nhu, who was lying on the floor, twitching. He put a bullet into his head too.” Minh is reported to have told an American confidant some months later, “We had no alternative. They had to be killed.” Diem was too popular with the Catholics and refugees, and Nhu posed a threat through the Can Lao Party and the Special Forces.43
In Washington, the National Security Council met again on the morning of November 2. By that time, Kennedy had been informed of the brothers’ deaths; he had blanched and left the room at the news. He could not know that his own date with the assassin was but twenty days away. On his way to the meeting, Colby had stopped off at the Catholic church where Barbara attended Mass every weekday morning at 8:00. He told her of Nhu’s and Diem’s deaths and asked that she say a special prayer for the departed. Colby found the mood at the White House sober—even somber. Only Rusk seemed to share Lodge’s enthusiasm; the ambassador had cabled that the coup had been “a remarkable performance in all respects.” But Colby recalled that there were no recriminations. The NSC turned to face the cold, hard truth that a group of generals, about whom they knew very little, was now in charge of South Vietnam. By this point, Colby had convinced McCone that Washington could no longer continue to treat Lodge with kid gloves. The Military Revolutionary Council, the temporary ruling body that Big Minh and his colleagues had set up in the wake of the coup, was already asking the CIA station for guidance in setting up a new, permanent government.44
Following the NSC meeting, McCone took Colby by the arm and proceeded to the Oval Office. In his usual direct manner, the DCI requested an immediate audience with the president. The two CIA men were duly ushered in. Colby remembers that Kennedy was stricken but composed. “Mr. President, you remember Mr. Colby,” McCone said. JFK smiled and nodded. “In view of the confusion in Saigon, I would like to send him immediately to Saigon to make contact with the generals there and assess the situation on the basis of his close connections with them and his knowledge of the country. I would also like to be able to say that he is going on your authority.” JFK and Colby knew what McCone was talking about: the imperial Lodge. “Certainly,” Kennedy replied.45
Colby was anxious to make the trip, although he was somewhat apprehensive about how he would be received by the coup leaders, given his well-known intimacy with Diem and Nhu. That evening, the Colbys kept a long-standing dinner engagement with the Noltings and Richardsons. It was probably the only wake held for the House of Ngo, Colby later recalled.46
The CIA was in South Vietnam to gather intelligence and to combat the communist insurgency. Bill Colby saw the first function as primarily a handmaiden to the second. His context, as always, was the Cold War. He may have been “mesmerized” by Nhu, as one of his colleagues claimed, and he considered himself Diem’s friend, but personal relationships were a means to an end, and that end was the military defeat of the Viet Cong and the political defeat of the National Liberation Front. Colby clung to Diem and then, at the last moment, to Nhu because he saw no alternative. He considered the Buddhists to be self-serving publicity seekers, mystics, or both. Perhaps the Ngos had mishandled the Buddhist crisis, but Washington would just have to live with it. A military government was not the answer, especially in Vietnam, where, since time immemorial, soldiers of the central power had been associated in the mind of the peasantry with oppression and exploitation. At least Diem and Nhu had recognized the need for economic development and political action, even if their philosophy was tinged with fascism. It was true that Nhu and Tung were ruthless, but the communists were nothing if not ruthless. What kind of conflict did Harriman and Hilsman think the United States and its ally were involved in? Roosevelt and Churchill had embraced Stalin. How much more compromised could the Western democracies be?
Colby had briefly considered resigning in protest over America’s decision to abandon Diem and Nhu, but he quickly rejected the idea. “In the early 1960s,” he wrote, “we had not yet reached that national state of mind that considered any difference from one’s own views as based on immorality or arrant stupidity and justifying the most extreme denunciations and rejection of authority.”47 Colby consoled himself with the thought that he was but an instrument to be wielded by the forces of good in the Cold War. But, in truth, neither he nor the Agency saw themselves as passive instruments. Lodge, the Bay of Pigs, and Switchback had emasculated the CIA in South Vietnam, but Colby and his colleagues were hardly resigned.
The chilly reception Colby anticipated from Lodge and the Vietnamese generals did not materialize. The ambassador was effusive in his praise for the Agency, and for Acting CIA Chief of Station David Smith in particular. Lodge had obviously gotten the message that the head of the Far Eastern Division was JFK’s personal representative. Then it was time to huddle with the junta. Colby was somewhat taken aback when the members greeted him as an old and wise friend. Tran Van Don joked about having been his landlord. Tran Van Kim recalled their work together on the Mountain Scout program. Even the usually reticent Big Minh came around. They barraged him with questions concerning politics, national security, and the US Constitution. General Ton That Dinh did request the immediate recall of Gil Layton, the head of the CIA’s covert operations in Vietnam, who had been the murdered Le Quang Tung’s opposite number and close friend.
Colby met twice with Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao, South Vietnam’s counterinsurgency/pacification guru, who was also a communist agent. He also journeyed to Dalat to call on General Nguyen Khanh, who had been the first to advise the CIA that serious planning for a coup was underway. Khanh, who had not been named to the ruling Military Revolutionary Council (MRC), gave a rather pessimistic view of the generals’ ability to solve the problems facing South Vietnam. Colby asked about the beginnings of a beard that Khanh was sporting. He would continue to grow it, Khanh said, until he was convinced that the new leaders were on the “right path.”48
Colby was due in Honolulu for the fateful conference with McNamara that would endorse Switchback and OPLAN 34A, so he had to leave after only a few days in Vietnam. Before departing, he prepared a report for Mc-Cone outlining the enormous tasks—political, administrative, and military—facing the generals, all of whom had grown to maturity during the heyday of French colonialism. Though the junta was actively seeking guidance from the US Mission, he said, Lodge was insisting that it remain detached. Many in the Mission regarded Big Minh as a feckless opportunist and the MRC as a Trojan horse for National Liberation Front and French neutralization schemes.49
As the generals isolated themselves within their respective compounds waiting for the future to define itself, the situation in the countryside continued to deteriorate. In an effort to court the Military Revolutionary Council, the National Liberation Front had ordered the Viet Cong to reduce the level of violence, but that was hardly necessary. The fall of the House of Ngo revealed that the South Vietnam government’s counterinsurgency/pacification statistics had been a sham. Hamlets and villages listed as secure either had no government presence or were ruled by shadow communist administrations. Strategic Hamlets had either fallen prey to their discontented inhabitants or been overrun by the Viet Cong. Long An Province, barely 40 miles south of Saigon, was a communist hotbed. Because the Strategic Hamlet program was identified with Diem and Nhu, the generals lent it no support whatsoever. Meanwhile, the leadership in Hanoi decided that the time was ripe for it to take a direct hand in the conflict. At the Central Committee’s Ninth Plenum, held in December 1963, the Politburo decided to throw regular units of the North Vietnamese Army into the fray in South Vietnam.50
Meanwhile, in Honolulu, Colby argued fruitlessly against Operation Switchback. He objected particularly to McNamara’s plans to expand Project Tiger to include the insertion of more agents in the north, maritime raids along North Vietnam’s coast, the establishment of a fake resistance movement, and covert bombing raids by unmarked South Vietnamese planes. When it became clear that the Department of Defense would carry the day, Colby, ever the good soldier, agreed to cooperate in developing OPLAN 34A.
Only days later, Colby and his deputy, Bob Myers, sat in the former’s office, listening to radio reports on the assassination of President Kennedy. JFK’s vacillation on Vietnam, especially his willingness to let Henry Cabot Lodge call the shots in the last days of the Diem regime, had dismayed Colby. There was also the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation—arguably the White House’s responsibility—that had so sullied the reputation of the CIA. But Colby admired JFK’s idealism and his activist foreign policy. Had Kennedy lived, Colby wrote in Lost Victory, “I am convinced that his sensitivity to the political aspects of the war waged by the Communists would have led him to insist on a strategy on our side to match them.”51’ There certainly would not have been the massive buildup of troops and indiscriminate use of firepower that occurred under the succeeding administration, Colby believed. How Kennedy would have dealt with the almost certain collapse of South Vietnam in 1964—a product of the South Vietnamese government’s own weakness and North Vietnamese Army infiltration—was a question Colby left unanswered.
Like most Americans at the time, Colby did not know what to make of Lyndon B. Johnson. He knew that he was a political operator par excellence and had been a Diem supporter. But Colby and many others believed the new president to be inexperienced and uninformed on foreign policy matters. Colby applauded Johnson’s dismissal of Roger Hilsman (for his role in the ouster of the Ngo brothers), but he questioned the wisdom of keeping on the rest of JFK’s foreign policy team, fearing that Johnson would become the victim rather than the master of events.52
Johnson was in fact in basic agreement with the foreign policies of the Kennedy administration: military preparedness and realistic diplomacy, he believed, would contain communism within its existing bounds. To keep up morale among America’s allies and satisfy hardline anticommunists at home, the United States must continue to hold fast in Berlin, oppose the admission of Communist China to the United Nations, and continue to confront and blockade Cuba. He was aware of the growing split between the Soviet Union and China, and of the possibilities inherent in it for dividing the communist world. He also took a flexible, even hopeful, view of the Soviet Union and its leader, Nikita Khrushchev. It was just possible, he believed, that Russia was becoming a status quo power, and as such would be a force for stability rather than chaos in the world. The United States must continue its “flexible response” of military aid, economic assistance, and technical and political advice in response to the threat of communist expansion in the developing world. However, there was nothing wrong with negotiation with the Soviets, in the meantime, in an effort to reduce tensions. Insofar as Latin America was concerned, Johnson was an enthusiastic supporter of the Alliance for Progress. As a progressive Democrat, he was drawn to historian Arthur Schlesinger’s stratagem of appealing to the vital center at home and abroad while pursuing openings to the left, as Bill Colby had done in Italy. At the outset of his administration, it appeared that the new president did not buy into the myth of a monolithic communist threat. To all appearances, then, Johnson was a cold warrior, but a flexible, pragmatic one.
Nevertheless, LBJ was no more ready than his predecessor had been to unilaterally withdraw from South Vietnam; nor was he interested in seeking a negotiated settlement that would lead to neutralization of the area south of the 17th parallel. On November 24, 1963, he instructed Ambassador Lodge to tell the generals who had overthrown Ngo Dinh Diem that they had the full support of the US government. Two days later, the National Security Council incorporated his pledge into policy, affirming that it was “the central objective of the United States” to assist the “people and Government of South Vietnam to win their contest against the externally directed and supported communist conspiracy.”53
Frustrated, and angry with Lodge because of his refusal to allow the Agency to do its job in South Vietnam, McCone and Colby were determined to rein in the ambassador. Shortly after Johnson became president, McCone paid a visit to the Oval Office. There could never be a working relationship between the embassy and the Agency in South Vietnam as long as the New Englander was ambassador, he told Johnson. “Lodge would destroy [the new station chief] if he opposed his assignment or did not like him,” McCone declared. “Lodge was absolutely unconscionable in matters of this kind and he had resorted to trickery time and time again during the Eisenhower administration. . . . He never failed to use the newspapers in order to expose an individual or block an action.”54 Johnson assured McCone that he understood how poor a manager Lodge was. He had seen that for himself. But it was impossible to recall the man at that point. The junta would take it as a repudiation of the coup and an invitation to the Diemists to return to power. Moreover, replacing Lodge would remove the political cover that the administration had enjoyed over Vietnam. Lodge needed to come home; one could only hope that he would decide to throw his hat in the ring for the 1964 GOP presidential nomination. Nevertheless, McCone and Colby could have their own man as CIA station chief, the president declared, and he would make it work.
Colby already had that man in mind—Hong Kong station chief Peer de Silva. De Silva was a fellow graduate of Columbia and one of the most experienced field operators the Agency possessed. Colby vetted him with McCone and the president, and both men gave their approval. The Far East Division chief and his boss decided to beard Henry Cabot Lodge in his den.55
In mid-December, McCone, Colby, de Silva, and their aides boarded a C-135 bound for Saigon. There, McCone was to link up with McNamara, who was leading yet another fact-finding mission. The day following their arrival, Lodge hosted a luncheon at the embassy for the CIA men. The issue of who was to be station chief soon came up. Lodge made it clear that he was perfectly happy with David Smith. Mr. Smith was a fine young officer, McCone declared, but the sensitive post required someone with more experience, namely, de Silva. He added, with a tight smile, that the appointment would proceed unless Lodge had some specific objection. It was clear that whoever became chief of station, it would not be Smith. De Silva later recalled that he, Smith, and Colby spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling until, mercifully, the luncheon came to an end.56
Shortly thereafter, the ambassador received a cable from the White House. “It is of the first importance,” LBJ declared, “that there be the most complete understanding and cooperation between you and him [de Silva]. . . . I am concerned not only to sustain effective cooperation, but to avoid any mutterings in the press. . . . I cannot overemphasize the importance which I personally attach to correcting the situation which has existed in Saigon in the past, and which I saw myself when I was out there.” Lodge was vastly annoyed, but after de Silva agreed to give up the oversized black limousine that John Richardson had used, the two men began to get on rather well. Indeed, during one of the first meetings between the revamped CIA team and the ambassador, David Smith let it be known that he had anticipated the naming of a more experienced man as chief of station all along. “Do you think I give a damn about you?” Lodge sneered. For the time being, however, the ambassador continued to block the station from having direct contact with the Military Revolutionary Council.57
Upon his return from Saigon, McCone reported to the president that because of ongoing tensions and rivalries within the military junta, the disconnect between the central government and the provinces, and stepped-up Viet Cong activity in the countryside, the prognosis was not good. “It is abundantly clear,” he wrote, “that [Vietnamese] statistics received over the past year or more . . . on which we gauged the trend of the war were grossly in error.”50
With the MRC fiddling and South Vietnam burning, a new generation of coup plotters stepped forward. First among these was General Nguyen Khanh, Colby’s favorite to replace Diem. A professional soldier, Khanh had fought with the Viet Minh and then rallied to Diem after he came to power. As deputy chief of staff of the Vietnamese Army, he had parlayed with the rebellious paratroopers during the 1960 coup long enough for loyalist units to move up from the south. He had subsequently joined the circle of generals who overthrew the House of Ngo. In December 1963, to his vast annoyance, however, the MRC had assigned him to be commander of IV Corps, the military region furthest from Saigon. In conversations with CIA personnel in January 1964, Khanh complained that members of the MRC were plotting with various Frenchmen to bring about the neutralization of South Vietnam. This he could not permit.
Early on the morning of January 30, Khanh and his fellow conspirator, General Tran Thien Khiem, overthrew the junta that had ousted Diem. South Vietnam’s new leader elevated Big Minh to the figurehead position of chief of staff and sent five leading members of the MRC, including Tran Van Don and Le Van Kim, off to Dalat, where they were placed under house arrest. Colby believed that Khanh, in addition to satisfying his own ambition, was avenging the deaths of Diem and Nhu. In his memoir, Colby cited a statement attributed to Diem before his assassination: “Tell Nguyen Khanh that I have great affection for him, and he should avenge me.” And in fact, the only casualty of the second coup was Captain Nguyen Van Nhung, the officer who had gunned down the Ngo brothers. Khanh had him shot.59
The new regime faced truly staggering problems. Military operations and the Strategic Hamlet Program had come to a complete standstill. The government’s authority was nonexistent throughout much of the countryside, and the nation’s cities were sliding into anarchy. Increasingly, the Buddhists viewed the Khanh regime as a reincarnation of the House of Ngo. At the same time, Khanh’s foreign minister was confiding to the American embassy that his chief had “possible Communist or neutralist connections.”60 A new wave of protests swept the capital, accompanied by armed clashes between Buddhist and Catholic street gangs. General William Westmoreland, whom Johnson had named to replace Harkins as head of the US military mission in the spring of 1964, wrote that Saigon looked like a city under siege. Concertina wire and military checkpoints were omnipresent.
Colby made another one of his frequent trips to Vietnam in May 1964 to survey the situation. There was one bit of painful business to take care of. Though both were CIA operatives, Lou Conein and Gil Layton were bitter rivals. Like Colby, Layton, who had survived the MRC’s attempts to remove him, was a Diem loyalist, whereas the francophile Conein had worked to bring about the downfall of the House of Ngo. In the wake of the coup, Conein had decided that Vietnam was not big enough for the two of them—and Conein had the ear of both Lodge and Khanh. Before the 1963 coup and his death, Colonel Tung, Layton’s counterpart in Vietnamese intelligence and security, had confided to his friend that if the limousine that came to pick up Layton every morning contained individuals other than the driver, he should not get in it. The extra person meant that he had been targeted for elimination. During the spring of 1964, Gil and his wife, Dora, began noticing that they were gradually being frozen out of parties and receptions. Then one morning the limousine showed up with an unidentified man in the backseat. Layton stayed home. The person in charge of training Khanh’s security force—in effect, Tung’s replacement—was Lou Conein. After Colby landed in Saigon, Layton confronted him. Tell Conein and his Vietnamese friends to back off or there would be blood. Colby said he would take care of it, but there was nothing he could do to keep Layton on the team. He offered his old comrade a post in Thailand, but Layton refused.61
From Saigon, Colby moved on to Honolulu for yet another summit meeting on Vietnam, where McNamara continued to extol the virtues of OPLAN 34A. He reveled in listing trucks destroyed, ammunition dumps blown up, and North Vietnamese paranoia stimulated. McCone and Colby were not impressed. “If we go into North Vietnam,” McCone declared, “we should go in hard and not limit ourselves to pinpricks.”62
On the way from Saigon to Honolulu, Colby had prepared a report and recommendations for the White House. The Khanh regime was making progress, he declared, but not fast enough. The government was particularly ineffective at the grassroots level. He recommended making province chiefs the key officials in the pacification effort, with their American counterparts as the sole commanders of every US activity within their province. The South Vietnamese Army should concentrate on clearing and holding, in line with the “oil-spot theory,” and cease and desist from random sweeps and artillery bombardments.63
On June 6, after the US contingent had returned from Honolulu, Mc-George Bundy took John McCone aside and asked if the CIA was ready to reenter Vietnam in an active role: that is, to reverse Operation Switchback. “If the president so desires and the Pentagon and Embassy were supportive,” the DCI said. He did and they were, primarily because McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were increasingly preoccupied with planning a major escalation of the war.64
The spring and summer of 1964 found Lyndon Johnson an intensely frustrated man. Military intelligence provided evidence of the first main force units of the North Vietnamese Army coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and entering South Vietnam. The prospect of a broad-based, responsive government in South Vietnam seemed as remote as ever. General Harkins declared that victory over the communists was just months away, but Lodge warned that South Vietnam was teetering on the verge of collapse. Johnson had repeatedly told his foreign policy advisers that it was up to the Vietnamese themselves to get their political and military house in order. Meanwhile, Khanh and the government of South Vietnam initiated a public campaign in support of “marching North.” Hot on the campaign trail, GOP presidential hopeful Barry Goldwater suggested the use of “low-yield atomic weapons” against the communists in Vietnam. Hardliners within the Joint Chiefs of Staff, notably Air Force chief of staff Curtis LeMay and Marine Corps commandant Wallace Greene, insisted that “operations in Vietnam should be extended and expanded immediately.” But it wasn’t just politicians like Goldwater and hawkish generals like “Bombs Away” LeMay who were sounding the alarm. In Washington, the CIA’s George Allen, and in Saigon, Peer de Silva, advised McCone that without the commitment of US troops, South Vietnam would fall to the communists in a matter of months, if not weeks. McCone relayed that information to the president and the NSC. McCone did not dispute his subordinates’ dire warnings, but he expressed doubt that the effort was worth it. “I think we are . . . starting on a track which involves ground force operations [that will mean] an ever-increasing commitment of U.S. personnel without materially improving the chances of victory,” he told the president. “In effect, we will find ourselves mired in combat in the jungle in a military effort that we cannot win, and from which we will have extreme difficulty in extracting ourselves.”65
The angst coming from the West Wing was palpable. “Let’s get some more of something, my friend,” the president told McNamara in late May, “because I’m going to have a heart attack if you don’t get me something. . . . Let’s get somebody that wants to do something besides drop a bomb, that can go in and go after these damn fellows and run them back where they belong.” Later, in conversation with Senator Richard Russell, LBJ said, “I don’t think the people of the country know much about Vietnam and I think they care a hell of a lot less.” But if he were to lose Vietnam to the communists, he admitted, there was not a doubt in his mind that Congress would impeach him.66
Mercifully, Henry Cabot Lodge resigned his post in June, returning to the United States to challenge Goldwater for the Republican presidential nomination. To replace him, Johnson chose General Maxwell Taylor, perhaps the military’s best-known intellectual and a Kennedy family intimate. Still, he was a career officer and tended to see things in military terms. Taylor was distinctly unimpressed with Nguyen Khanh—and with the entire upper echelon of the ARVN officer corps, for that matter. Quite simply, he believed, South Vietnam’s new leaders did not know what they were doing. At the end of May, he arranged for the “Dalat” generals—Don, Dinh, Xuan, and Kim—to be released from house arrest. When rumors of a coup began to circulate, Taylor summoned the suspected plotters and dressed them down. If the senior officer corps could not behave with a degree of maturity and responsibility, the United States would have to rethink its economic and military aid program, the ambassador declared.67
With a massive expansion of the Ho Chi Minh Trail underway and North Vietnamese Army regulars trickling into South Vietnam, pressure began to mount within the Johnson foreign policy establishment for air strikes against North Vietnam. As contingency planning for a possible bombardment, blockade, or invasion got underway in Washington, military intelligence began gathering information on a network of antiaircraft missiles and radar stations that had been installed by the Soviets on the bays and islands of the Tonkin Gulf. MACV enlisted South Vietnamese commandos to harass the enemy radar transmitters, thereby activating them, so that American electronic intelligence vessels cruising in the gulf could chart their locations and frequencies. These operations were, of course, in addition to the infiltration and harassment excursions already being carried out under Switchback. On August 2, North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked the USS Maddox, and the Gulf of Tonkin incident was underway. There followed a congressional resolution authorizing the president to take military action in Vietnam to protect US and allied forces. It was somewhat ironic that OPLAN 34A triggered the decision to escalate.
Meanwhile, the political situation in South Vietnam continued to deteriorate. Widespread fear among ARVN officers that the Gulf of Tonkin air strikes would provoke retaliation, even invasion, by North Vietnam provided Khanh with the excuse to decree a state of emergency, which gave him and his associates on the MRC all but absolute power. The government severely curtailed civil liberties, imposed strict censorship on the media, and moved against pro–Dai Viet generals who had been plotting against him. The Dai Viet Party (or Brotherhood) had been formed in the late 1920s by Nguyen Thai Hoc. It took its name from the Vietnamese kingdom that had broken away from China in A.D. 939. Politically conservative, and heavily dominated by nationalist mandarins, the Dai Viet had staged an unsuccessful uprising against the French in Tonkin in the 1930s. Afterward, a number of Dai Viet had sought refuge and military training with Chiang Kai-shek’s army in Nationalist China. The Dai Viet were pro-Japanese during World War II. Following the partition of Vietnam in 1954, the society was banned in the communist north but continued to play an active role in the south. Those who fled from the north following partition tended to be pro-American, and the indigenous southern branch was more pro-French.68
Instead of enabling Khanh to tighten his grip on South Vietnam, his state of emergency decree and the attempted purge of the Dai Viet weakened it. On August 24, 1964, the Buddhists and their student allies took to the streets, staging massive demonstrations. Caught between the Buddhists and the pro–Dai Viet generals, Khanh sought to appease the former. He promised Buddhist leader Tri Quang constitutional reform, early elections, and freedom of both religion and speech. Catholic youth then rioted, and the dissident generals moved in for the kill. In February 1965, Nguyen Khanh resigned and accepted a post as roving ambassador.
As Saigon writhed in the coils of palace intrigue, political theater, and coup plots, the CIA station, with Colby monitoring and encouraging it, proceeded with a series of counterinsurgency/pacification incubators in the countryside.69
In the aftermath of the 1963 coup that toppled the Diem regime, Lodge and one of his counterinsurgency officers, Everett Bumgardner, had sent a young United States Information Service officer named Frank Scotton into Long An Province, only 40 miles south of Saigon. Long An was a Viet Cong hotbed, despite its proximity to the capital, and Scotton’s task was to survey the situation and come up with a counterinsurgency initiative to combat the communists. To this end, he recruited a handful of Americans to go with him to live among the peasants, and they created “armed propaganda teams,” essentially to do what the Viet Cong were doing—fighting by night and recruiting followers by day. With the Long An experiment up and running, Saigon dispatched Scotton and Captain Robert Kelly to Quang Ngai Province on the Central Coast and instructed them to replicate the armed propaganda teams. Impressed by Scotton’s work in Long An, Colby and de Silva decided to adopt the program, hoping that it could eventually be applied throughout South Vietnam. From that point on, Scotton and his comrades had access to CIA money and CIA-operated warehouses containing arms, food, medicine, and building supplies.70
De Silva also ordered that aid and advice be given to Nguyen Van Buu, a Catholic businessman who exercised a virtual monopoly on the shrimp and cinnamon trade in the south. The CIA station helped train more than five hundred “shrimp and cinnamon soldiers,” who, in turn, were largely responsible for keeping the highway from Saigon to the port of Vung Tau open.71 Another CIA-sponsored operative, ARVN lieutenant colonel Do Van Dien, established armed defense teams in, among other places, a Catholic convent and a leper colony situated in the communist-infested Zone D north of Saigon. By far the most significant initiative supported by the station, however, was Major Tran Ngoc Chau’s comprehensive pacification program in Kien Hoa Province, another Viet Cong hotbed located southeast of Long An. Chau, a former Viet Minh who had rallied to Diem, but had grown increasingly disillusioned with Saigon’s repressive policies, had become province chief in 1962.
The situation in Kien Hoa when Chau assumed control was bleak. Station officers who overflew the province in early 1964 had noticed that where once there had been sizable strategic hamlets, there was now nothing left but bare earth. The Viet Cong had dispersed the population and taken everything else. At this point, military activity against the communists consisted of ARVN sweeps coupled with harassing air and artillery bombardment. There was no concerted effort to carry the war to the enemy, to identify Viet Cong cadres and installations, or to infiltrate their safe areas in order to harass and destroy. De Silva dispatched Stuart Methven, a CIA operations officer, to act as adviser to Chau.
What Methven and Chau came up with were Counter-Terror (CT) Teams trained and armed by the US Special Forces. The first fifteen-man units were, Chau admitted, drawn from “deserters and small time crooks, currently in refuge with one of the district chiefs.” Once they were well armed (and well paid), the CT Teams proved fairly effective and surprisingly loyal. Indeed, Viet Cong leaflets offered 15,000 piasters for the killing of a US adviser or South Vietnamese district chief; 20,000 piasters for an ARVN officer; and 40,000 piasters for a CT cadre. The war in Kien Hoa became quite personal and specific. A Viet Cong sniper assassinated the US adviser to the ARVN Ranger unit in the province, and communist propaganda lionized the shooter. This could not stand, Chau decided, and a CT Team, after pinpointing the man’s location, grenaded his hut, killing him and his family.72
The objective in Kien Hoa, de Silva wrote to Colby, was to “increase results to a level at which they [are] not merely psychological but actually affect [Viet Cong] military and political effectiveness.”73 More significant, Chau developed and implemented what he dubbed the “Census-Grievance Program.” Members of his counterinsurgency force would move throughout the province conducting a thorough census, and in the process they would encourage villagers to list their grievances against both the Viet Cong and the government. Chau and his men made it clear that they understood that before the people could be expected to support their government and its soldiers, they would have to show themselves to be nurturers rather than exploiters.
In November, de Silva visited Quang Ngai and was electrified by what he found. The experiment initiated by Frank Scotton and Robert Kelly and supported by the resident CIA officer was flourishing. Quang Ngai, in Military Region IV, was the southernmost province of Vietnam. (The military regime in Saigon had divided South Vietnam into four military regions, with I being the northernmost and IV the southernmost.) It was a gorgeous area, with the Annamite Range descending from the west to the coastal lowlands and the South China Sea. The area had been a Viet Minh stronghold since World War II but was also the redoubt of one of Vietnam’s oldest noncommunist, nationalist parties, the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang. The province chief was a VNQDD member and a strong supporter of the CIA-funded counterinsurgency/pacification incubator. The small, armed propaganda teams that Scotton and Kelly had started with had morphed into 40-man units that, while putting on pro–South Vietnamese government plays and building village infrastructure, were inflicting heavy casualties on the local Viet Cong. The teams elected their own leaders and had no fixed installations. According to the provincial MACV adviser, between June and October these units, now named People’s Action Teams (PATs), had killed 167 of the enemy and captured 236 others along with large caches of weapons. PAT losses were 6 killed and 22 wounded with no desertions. The PATs would move through the province, living in a particular village for three days while dispensing medicine, giving out seed, helping with various construction projects, and gathering information on the Viet Cong. Then they would move on until the entire province had been covered. The following year, a PAT unit in Binh Son District of Quang Ngai Province provided intelligence and scouting services to a US Marine battalion that led to the destruction of more than 600 enemy troops. According to Stu Methven, de Silva returned to Saigon looking “as if he had found God.” The chief of station was now a committed convert to the Colby cause, but he soon found himself butting his head against the same wall as his predecessor.74
When de Silva presented the PATs as the solution to the counterinsurgency/pacification program to the US Mission Council, he found Westmoreland “less than enthusiastic,” as he put it. The general’s staff saw the chief of station’s recommendations as an indictment of the military’s efforts in the field and just another power grab by the Agency, another attempt to build its own private army. In frustration, de Silva appealed to headquarters. The PATs were the solution to the problem, he wrote to Colby. If the rapidly growing Viet Cong penetration and domination of the rural population were not halted and reversed, it would not matter how well trained and well equipped the ARVN was. The suppression of the Viet Cong had to be seen as a “psychological, political, and spiritual war which distinguishes the war here from classical war, and which I am convinced is susceptible to solution by civil and civic actions spawned in the local populations.” This from a West Point graduate and former army colonel.75
This was all music to Colby’s ears, and he made a forceful presentation to McCone and Helms. Headquarters gave the go-ahead to de Silva to expand the PAT program, and during his February 1965 visit to Vietnam, McGeorge Bundy provided the NSC’s stamp of approval. MACV reluctantly acquiesced on the condition that the program not drain off the military’s best and brightest. Plans were developed to apply the PAT concept in Binh Dinh and Phu Yen Provinces, and Westmoreland paid the program the compliment of asking Frank Scotton to raise up local self-defense forces in the districts around Saigon.
Although Colby was enthusiastic about the People’s Action Team program, he was the first to see its limitations. De Silva conceived of counterinsurgency and pacification much as Ed Lansdale had a decade earlier. If the South Vietnamese government and its American advisers could deny the enemy access to the masses of peasants who inhabited the countryside, the Viet Cong would wither on the vine. In this, de Silva assumed that South Vietnam’s peasants were innately anticommunist and that the Viet Cong held sway principally through the use of terror. Not so, Colby observed to McCone and Helms. The South Vietnamese government and its friends had to fill the void with something positive. There had to be programs of social and economic justice—permanent programs—and a degree of self-determination at the village level. In other words, there had to be something positive for the local people to fight for. Also, who would defend the villagers when the PATs moved on? But the PATs were a start, and Colby limited his criticisms to the inner circle at Langley.76
Unfortunately for counterinsurgency and pacification, South Vietnam was on the verge of collapse by early 1965. A newly constituted Military Revolutionary Council, dominated by ARVN chief of staff Nguyen Van Thieu and Air Force marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, had replaced Khanh. Paying lip service to civilian control of the government, the generals named Phan Huy Quat, a prominent Dai Viet politician, to the post of prime minister. These comings and goings in Saigon were accompanied by a sharply deteriorating security situation in the countryside. On February 7, 1965, the Viet Cong attacked the US air base at Pleiku in the Central Highlands, killing eight Americans and destroying a number of aircraft. National Security adviser McGeorge Bundy, then in-country, rushed to witness the carnage and sent an emotional report to the White House calling for direct American action. The Viet Cong followed up with a bombing of the US military barracks at Qui Nhon, killing twenty-three more GIs. On February 28, the CIA station in Saigon reported “an alarmingly rapid erosion of the GVN [South Vietnamese government] position” in Military Region II: “Provincial capitals and district towns have been progressively isolated (in some cases abandoned)—ARVN Regional and Popular Force units have been decimated in increasingly large scale actions. Finally, the Viet Cong have assumed effective control over more and more hamlets in the countryside.” Privately, CIA and Foreign Service officers in Saigon began discussing their next assignments.77
On March 2, the United States replaced its earlier ad hoc retaliatory raids against the north with a sustained bombing campaign known as Operation Rolling Thunder. Anticipating Viet Cong attacks against US air bases in retaliation for the aerial assault, Westmoreland urgently requested two Marine landing teams to protect the air base at Danang. President Johnson reluctantly approved, and on March 8, two battalions of Marines, fitted out in full battle dress, with tanks and 8-inch howitzers, splashed ashore near Danang, where they were welcomed by South Vietnamese officials and a bevy of local beauties passing out leis of flowers. Neither Rolling Thunder nor the Marine landing did anything to stop the deteriorating situation in the countryside, however, and in mid-March, MACV requested two army divisions—one to be committed to the Central Highlands and the other to the Saigon area. These were to be main force units capable of taking on the battalion-sized echelons the communists were now deploying.
On April 6, President Johnson authorized US ground forces to undertake offensive operations in Vietnam. In May, the Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade arrived in Central Vietnam; the 4th Marine Regiment then landed farther up the coast. The White House approved an additional 50,000 troops to be placed at Westmoreland’s disposal and promised 50,000 more before the end of the year. The first major engagement took place in November when a brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division battled three North Vietnamese regiments in the Ia Drang Valley in the mountains of Military Region II.
Bill Colby understood the necessity of the United States sticking “its finger in the dike,” as Westmoreland had put it, but what then? “The main problem Washington faced was strategic,” he later wrote, “—its effort to fight its kind of war, a soldiers’ war instead of the people’s war the enemy was fighting.” The Johnson administration would soon discover, he feared, that main force units, artillery and air bombardment, and large-scale sweeps were irrelevant, even counterproductive. “The finger of Death [would point] too often at the very people who should have been our allies, not our enemies,” he later wrote. The war would be won or lost in the bush, at the village, even at the individual level. Following a particularly intense White House meeting on Vietnam, Colby approached McGeorge Bundy and asked for a word in private. He recommended that instead of finetuning the bombing of the north or discussing the next increment of US combat forces to be sent to the south, the foreign policy establishment focus on the real problem: how to meet the communist challenge at the village level. Bundy replied, “You may be right, Bill, but the structure of the American Government probably won’t permit it.”78
As 1965 progressed, Colby found himself more and more peripheral to Vietnam policy discussions in Washington. In April, John McCone resigned as DCI. His imperiousness and flip-flopping on Vietnam had alienated Johnson. In 1964, he had been a leading advocate of the bombing of North Vietnam, but in 1965, as the bombing was getting underway, he had warned that Rolling Thunder might very well bring Communist China into the war. The DCI began to complain that LBJ was not giving him enough face-time. And so the two agreed to a parting of the ways. Johnson replaced Mc-Cone with Rear Admiral William F. “Red” Raborn Jr., a blue-water sailor with almost no experience in intelligence. Raborn, a native Texan, had publicly campaigned for Johnson in his victory over Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. Colby’s power cord, McCone, was gone. The former Jedburgh would be front and center on Vietnam again, but not for more than a year.79