By the close of 1967, the CIA had come to symbolize for many Americans all that was wrong with the US government—its values, its policies, its practices. For doves, the Agency was the evil empire, a secret society in thrall to the radical right, Wall Street, and the military-industrial complex. It would become the Great Satan in the Cold War passion play penned by liberals and radicals.
In March of that year, an article appeared in a small, muckraking California magazine—Ramparts—documenting a relationship between the CIA and the National Student Association. The student association acted as a bridge between US college students and their compatriots abroad. To Langley’s consternation, the Times and the Washington Post followed with their own exposés, revealing CIA links to the AFL-CIO and the American Newspaper Guild. Americans read how the Agency had used the Ford Foundation to funnel funds to the Asia Society, and learned that the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe were nothing more than CIA mouthpieces. The orgy or revelation climaxed on March 13, when future 60 Minutes television reporter Mike Wallace stood before a large diagram depicting the flow of covert subsidies to various front organizations as part of an hour-long CBS documentary entitled “In the Pay of the CIA: An American Dilemma.”1
In the weeks that followed, syndicated columnist Jack Anderson repeated rumors that the Agency had plotted to assassinate Fidel Castro. Outraged congressmen and senators, virtually all of them opponents of the war in Vietnam, wrote to LBJ protesting the CIA’s corruption of democratic institutions and its reckless violation of the law. The president was properly outraged and announced the formation of an investigatory body. Helms ordered his own internal investigation, and Colby was part of the team. If there were any plots to liquidate foreign leaders, Helms said, he wanted to know about them. The Far East Division head was able to report that the Agency had played no direct part in the Diem coup, or at least in the deaths of the president and his brother. News brought by Colby’s compatriots was more ominous. There was Operation Mongoose, as well as Agency involvement in the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Helms ordered the results of the probe locked away as far from public and congressional sight as possible.
Much as Frank Wisner had been a victim of the Hungarian uprising, Desmond FitzGerald, deputy director for plans, was to be a victim of the Ramparts revelations. In addition to overseeing CIA political and psychological operations and manipulation of various cultural oganizations, he was also deeply complicit in the anti-Castro operation; indeed, on the day that Jack Kennedy was assassinated, FitzGerald had been in Paris meeting with a would-be assassin to hand over instructions and weapons. FitzGerald—bird-watcher, poetry-lover—was an enormously social animal. Richard Helms once remarked that he believed that the DDP knew everyone on the New York and Washington social registers personally.2 During the summer of 1967, FitzGerald’s friends noted his unusual despondency, his sudden self-absorption, and his rundown physical appearance. On September 13, while playing mixed doubles with the British ambassador and his wife, FitzGerald collapsed and died of a massive coronary. Like Frank Wisner, Des FitzGerald was fifty-six years old when his life ended.
Helms had the president award FitzGerald the National Security Medal posthumously and then began the search for a successor. Colby was a candidate, or believed that he was. In June 1965, when Helms had been promoted to deputy director, he had launched a search for his own successor as DDP. At the time, he had called Colby in and told him, “Your time will come later.” Colby now seemed to be a likely candidate to replace FitzGerald. There was his Jedburgh pedigree; he was an Ivy Leaguer (if a liberal, middle-class one), had worked political action in Italy, had served as station chief in Saigon, and then, as Far East Division head, had run the Agency’s many complex paramilitary operations throughout Asia. But he was not foreign intelligence (espionage), and Helms was. Helms was a traditionalist, believing that the primary functions of the CIA were to spy on the enemy, to gather intelligence from every possible source, and to provide that information to policymakers. In 1967, he chose as deputy director of plans not Colby but Thomas Karamessines, a Greek American with impeccable foreign intelligence credentials. He had opened the CIA’s station in Athens and then overseen its activities in Vienna. Most recently, he had served as FitzGerald’s chief of operations. Helms never even discussed the DDP position with Colby. Instead, in September 1967, he summoned him to his office and suggested that he take over the Soviet and East European Division.3
Colby tried to put the best face on the offer, choosing to view it as a move by Helms to provide him with the credentials to advance, to “shuck my stereotype as strictly a political and paramilitary operator.”4 Although he had spent the last eight years obsessed with Southeast Asia, Colby believed he had no choice but to accept. The new post would offer an opportunity to move against the “hard targets,” the military and civilian officials who held the secrets of the Soviet empire.
Years later, Colby recalled that as he prepared for his new duties, he became aware of two separate and often conflicting cultures within the Agency regarding Russia and its satellites, one in the division he was to head, and another in counterintelligence, Angleton’s CI Staff. Colby’s Soviet and East European Division was charged with developing sources behind the Iron Curtain, identifying and encouraging defectors, and coordinating with allied espionage operations. The CI Staff was devoted to protecting the Agency against penetration and disinformation operations by the KGB. Colby soon discovered that in its obsession with uncovering a Soviet mole, counterintelligence was not only overshadowing, but also undermining, the Soviet and East European Division.
Theoretically, CI was just another component of the clandestine services supervised by the deputy director of plans. In reality, by the mid-1960s, Angleton and his staff had evolved into an autonomous fiefdom operating outside of regular channels, reporting to the DCI only. Helms was as enamored of Angleton as Allen Dulles had been. “Do you know what I worried about the most as Director of the CIA?” he asked Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post several years after his retirement. “The CIA is the only intelligence service in the Western world which has never been penetrated by the KGB,” the former DCI said. “That’s what I worried about.”5 Angleton was the shield that Helms thought indispensable. The CI director, who was also sole manager of the Israeli desk, was a legend by the time Helms took over. He would provide invaluable intelligence to the DCI, and through him to the White House, on the 1967 Arab-Israeli Conflict.
Counterintelligence itself was perceived to be an esoteric undertaking involving unique expertise and Jesuitical dedication. It required, or so its practitioners would have others believe, the cerebral acuity of Lord Peter Wimsy and the ruthlessness of Rasputin. Personally, Angleton delighted in his eccentricities, among which were fly-fishing, orchid-raising—a hobby requiring infinite patience—and drinking. He continued to patronize La Niçoise on Wisconsin Avenue, where lunches would frequently last from noon to 3 P.M. Though no Bill Harvey—he of the Berlin tunnel and Bay of Pigs fame, whose alcohol consumption was legendary—Angleton would sandwich a martini or two between bourbons. Shortly after he became counterintelligence chief in 1954, Angleton set up the Special Investigation Group to look into the possibility that the Agency itself had been penetrated. He succeeded in converting his subordinates into a devoted, even fanatical band of followers not only because of ideological affinity, but also because he understood the isolation and loneliness of counterintelligence; only he was able to recognize and reward his underlings’ sacrifices.6
Angleton’s office at Langley reflected the man and his trade. There was a large inner chamber, its windows covered with venetian blinds that were permanently closed when the doctor was in. Angleton perched in a high-backed leather chair behind a large, executive-style wooden desk that dominated the room. “When a visitor entered Angleton’s office,” his biographer wrote, “it was almost impossible to see the head of CI. His long, thin frame would be stoop-hunched behind a Berlin wall of files. Since the blinds were firmly closed, the room was always dark, like a poolroom at midday. The only light came from the tip of Angleton’s inevitable cigarette and . . . his desk lamp, permanently wreathed by nicotine clouds.” The outer office featured several large black iron safes, and across the hall was a specially reinforced vault with a combination lock and an electronic keypad. Only Angleton and his secretary possessed the combinations. Here were stored the millions and millions of pages of intelligence that Angleton and his staff had gathered on KGB spies and suspected turncoats in the CIA.7
The Soviet Union and its satellites were dedicated to the destruction of the West, Angleton continued to believe. The KGB, the largest and most imposing security and intelligence apparatus the world had ever seen, was determined to penetrate Western intelligence agencies to gather crucial data and spread destructive disinformation. Rumors of a Sino-Soviet split had been planted by the KGB to sow confusion in the ranks of its enemies. An “integrated and purposeful Socialist Bloc,” Angleton wrote in 1966, sought to foster false stories of “splits, evolution, power struggles, economic disasters, [and] good and bad Communism” to ensnare America and its allies in a “wilderness of mirrors.” The object of the communist initiative was to splinter Western solidarity and pick off the Free World nations one by one. The only protection the United States and its friends had was the counterintelligence service. Literally, Angleton believed that he and his team held the fate of Western civilization in their hands. Always in the back of Angleton’s mind was the traitorous Kim Philby, the ultimate mole, his former friend and confidant.8
Just as the fictional James Bond had a license to kill, Jim Angleton, it seemed, had a license to cast suspicion. From the beginning of Helms’s tenure, he had given the CI chief free rein, tolerating his secret trips abroad and his end runs around Karamessines. Like so many others, Helms seemed in thrall to Angleton. Howard Osborne, director of security, recalled “how Helms never turned [Angleton] down on anything.” Even if everyone in a meeting opposed Angleton’s view, Helms always decided in favor of his CI chief. “It never failed,” Osborne declared, “no matter how senior [Angleton’s] opponent.”9
By the mid-1960s, Angleton’s obsession and Helms’s tacit support of it had hamstrung the Soviet and East European Division’s efforts to conduct espionage within the Soviet bloc, especially by recruiting defectors. To Angleton and his team, every defector was a KGB plant charged with spreading disinformation. By extension, every Soviet and East European Division officer who sought to provide bona fides for defectors was a willing or unwilling tool of the KGB. Bolstering this view were the cases of two Soviet defectors, Yuri Nosenko and Anatoliy Golitsin.
Late in 1961, Golitsin, a KGB officer, had surrendered himself to CIA agents in Finland. He was vetted by Britain’s MI-6 and officers of Angleton’s CI division. America’s counterspy personally endorsed Golitsin’s bona fides and from that point on treated everything the defector said as the gospel truth. Angleton subsequently gave him the keys to the kingdom, that is, access to the vault. Using the material within, Golitsin began casting suspicion on various CIA operatives, especially in the Soviet–East European division. The Agency was riddled with moles, he told Angleton. Expect the KGB to send false defectors to spread disinformation.
Just as Golitsin had suspected he would, Angleton exulted. Almost on cue, Soviet KGB officer Yuri Nosenko contacted American embassy officials in Geneva in June 1962, offering to sell information. The deal was sealed, and for the next two years Nosenko fed the CIA intelligence on KGB activities inside and outside the Soviet bloc. In 1964, feeling the hot breath of the Kremlin’s security apparatus on his neck, Nosenko himself defected.
From the outset, Angleton and others on his CI team were suspicious of Nosenko. He was just too good to be true. When the Russian insisted that the KGB had shunned Lee Harvey Oswald repeatedly during the assassin’s time in the Soviet Union, and in fact had been “horrified” by the killing of the president, Angleton became convinced that he was a double agent. Golitsin had warned him that Nosenko’s appearance just three months after JFK’s assassination, and his news that Oswald was not a KGB hit man, seemed too coincidental. Angleton bullied the head of the Soviet and East European Division at that time into agreeing with him, and for the next two years Nosenko was intermittently confined and interrogated in a CIA safe house in Clinton, Maryland. During the first year and a half, his home was a ten-by-ten-foot concrete cell with an iron bed bolted to the floor. He was put on a diet of little more than bread and water and subjected to sensory deprivation. Throughout, Nosenko refused to confess. In 1966, Helms ordered his release, but the case was still pending when the director asked Bill Colby to take over the Soviet and East European Division. Nosenko’s plight was symptomatic.10
By the time Colby arrived on the scene in the fall of 1967, Angleton had so paralyzed the Soviet and East European Division that the Agency was producing virtually no human intelligence (HUMINT) on its most fearsome opponent. “Indeed,” he later observed, “we seemed to be putting more emphasis on the KGB as the CIA’s adversary than on the Soviet Union as the United States’ adversary.” Colby hoped to avoid a clash with Angleton, but if that was what the situation required, so be it. A sudden turn of events, however, postponed the confrontation.11
One afternoon in November, Richard Helms summoned Colby to his office. Bob Komer had pulled a fast one on him, he complained. During the most recent of LBJ’s famous “Tuesday lunches,” the president had turned to Helms and said that Komer had asked that Colby be dispatched to Saigon to act as his deputy in running CORDS. Johnson had made it plain that this was not to be considered a request, but an order. Would he think it over? Helms asked Colby. Of course, the former Jedburgh replied.
Colby later wrote in Honorable Men that he was at first shocked by the sudden assignment change, but upon reflection, he decided that it made sense. He had been deeply involved in Vietnam for almost a decade; Komer was embarking on a course that Colby had been advocating for years. The assignment would interrupt his career path within the CIA, but hopefully he could get back on track when the war was over. His departure would impose a hardship on Barbara and the children, but he had ordered numerous CIA and Foreign Service Officers to make the same sacrifice. During a lengthy discussion with his wife, Colby convinced her that the family would have to do what was best for the country. The temptation “to move toward the sound of the guns” was irresistible, and both knew it. Informed of the decision the next morning, Helms thanked Colby and assured him that he would be welcomed back to the Agency at the close of his assignment.12
From a bureaucratic perspective, Colby’s appointment as CORDS deputy was essential. The CIA was already running the Rural Development Cadre program, the counterterror teams, and the Provincial Interrogation Centers. It would have to assume a central role in any assault on the infrastructure of the enemy in South Vietnam, the omnipresent Viet Cong cadre. The Agency was not about to allow Komer and CORDS to gain control over Agency operations and funds. Having a CIA man as Blowtorch Bob’s deputy was a solution to the problem. Nevertheless, in his memoir, Helms accused Colby of conspiring with Komer behind his back. “In his book, Colby notes that the appointment came as news to him,” Helms wrote. “This I must doubt. I’ve been around Washington too long to believe that a senior officer of one agency might be transferred across town to another agency, and offered the prospect of ambassadorial rank, without ever having been asked if he might so much as consider the proposition.” He added, “It is probably just as well that Colby was assigned to Saigon. His lack of understanding of counterintelligence, and his unwillingness to absorb its precepts, would not have been compatible with the Soviet responsibility, and would surely have put him at loggerheads with Jim Angleton.”13
Helms’s reaction to Colby’s reassignment is fraught with possible hidden meanings. One explanation is that he felt insulted: the Soviet division was a plum, and Colby had rejected his offer of it. Another is that Helms was setting Colby up for a showdown with Angleton, a confrontation in which he was sure Angleton would prevail. In truth, Helms was much closer to Angleton than Colby; he came out of the espionage and counterespionage side of the organization. Political action and covert operations had never excited him, although he was willing to bend with the wind when counterinsurgency and pacification became popular at the White House. The sound of guns aside, by accepting the CORDS position (even possibly having arranged to be offered it), Colby might have been escaping the trap that was being set for him. But the former Jedburgh had another reason for wanting an assignment in South Vietnam. By 1967, he had become completely alienated from Barbara.
According to one source, Bill had told Bob Myers, his old friend and former deputy, that he knew two weeks after his marriage that he had made a dreadful mistake. Barbara Heinzen came from money and had attended Barnard College, but her adolescence and early womanhood had not been particularly happy. Following a nervous breakdown and subsequent illness, her father died during her freshman year in college. Her mother was a fashionista, a social butterfly, and not particularly nurturing. Bill Colby was just one of several boys she dated. After Bill left for the service, she became engaged to a young man who was subsequently killed in action. Bill would later confide to his second wife that when he was home on leave awaiting orders for the Pacific, he got out his little black book and began calling girls he had dated before the war. Barbara was the fifth or sixth, not the first, as he would claim in his memoir.14 They got married because that was what returning veterans and the girls who waited at home did. The couple had five children not because they were Catholic—both Bill and Barbara were only children—but because this was typical in the 1950s: couples during that decade had four offspring, on average.
As the years passed, Barbara became more and more garrulous, talking at times nonstop about nothing in particular. “She was completely effervescent, talked all the time, going from one thing to another. Sometimes she would come back to what the hell she was talking about and sometimes she wouldn’t,” family friend Stan Temko later observed. “They [Bill and Barbara] were completely in a way different personalities.” Barbara loved cocktail parties and small talk; he hated both. Bill loathed suburban life; Barbara thrived on it. The task of raising five children with her husband absent for long stretches of time created a rising tide of resentment. To make matters worse, one, Catherine, had medical problems. She suffered from epilepsy all her life, her grand mal seizures only moderated by medication. Redheaded, plump, insecure, Catherine adored her father. She wanted desperately to please him, for him to be to her what Bill’s mother had been to him. When he was with his daughter, Bill largely filled the bill. There were shared interests and an intimacy that sometimes seemed lacking in Bill’s relationships with other members of his family. The problem was that father and daughter were too often separated.15
Increasingly, to Barbara’s intense frustration, her husband shut her out, even from the family arguments that periodically raged after Carl and Catherine began flirting with the antiwar movement. She would sometimes join them, trying to take the moral high ground. Bill generally ignored her. “Their marriage was unbelievable,” Susan Colby, John’s wife, recalled. “I’ve never seen anything like it. They fought all the time, about the war, when he was going to come home, you name it. . . . There would be these endless dinners.”16
Several times after returning from trips, Colby would pull up in front of the house in Bethesda and be unable to get out of the taxi. When rumors of a Saigon affair drifted back to Barbara, she denied the possibility. “We have a contract,” she declared. By the time Bill was assigned to CORDS, families were not allowed to accompany military and government personnel assigned to Vietnam. “I had one friend, a wife, who said why don’t you come to Bangkok,” Barbara recalled. “But I had five children, and Cathy wasn’t well. I couldn’t go to Bangkok or the Philippines. I wouldn’t have seen that much of him anyway, and I would have had a whole new deal with schools.”17 Her husband was, no doubt, greatly relieved. Bill Colby agreed to go to Vietnam to become second in command at CORDS because he wanted to serve his country and save himself. For him, freedom had become a personal as well as a political cause.
It would be three months, however, before Colby could actually take his leave of the Agency and depart for Saigon. He was still tasked with finding his replacement as head of the Far East Division, and he had to get his personal life in order. Feeling some guilt over leaving Catherine and Paul, who was just entering adolescence, Colby spent as much time as he could with his children. While skating on a frozen portion of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal that runs through Georgetown, he fell and broke his ankle. During his brief convalescence, Colby talked with his children about the future. Catherine had become vastly enamored of Vietnam, though she had been a small child during the family’s years there. What he intended to do, he assured her, was to help the Vietnamese help themselves, to build on the CIDG program and raise up self-sufficient, politically active communities throughout the countryside that could put South Vietnam on the road to self-determination and a prosperous, noncommunist future.18
In the privacy of his own thoughts, Colby was moderately optimistic. The team being assembled in Vietnam—Komer, Bunker, and Abrams—promised a coordination and cooperation that had not hitherto existed within the US Mission. The Johnson administration had declared that the “other war” would take precedence, that the regular military would be the tail and counterinsurgency and pacification the dog. Colby was enthusiastic about a CORDS in which civilians reported to military and military to civilians, though he was never able to rid himself of a lingering distrust of the Pentagon.19 He had been heartened when, on November 27, the White House announced that Robert McNamara was stepping down as secretary of defense to become president of the World Bank. Colby speculated that the original whiz kid had become disillusioned with the war when he realized, finally, that success or failure could not be measured in numbers. In truth, McNamara’s views on the war were driven by the Kennedy family. When Jack and Bobby were hawks, he was a hawk. By 1966, Bobby had begun to turn against the war, partly out of conviction and partly out of his determination to offer an alternative to the hated LBJ and deny him the Democratic nomination in 1968. Whatever the case, a major obstacle to fighting the other war had been removed. Hopefully, Westmoreland would soon follow McNamara to the exit.
On the afternoon of January 29, 1968, Langley received a flash message from the Saigon station. It was 3 A.M. in South Vietnam. A team of Viet Cong sappers was in the process of blasting a large hole in the wall surrounding the US embassy and infiltrating the courtyard of the compound. Colby, still nominally Far East Division head, flashed back the gratuitous advice that the Communications Center should button up its steel doors.20 The sappers were unable to penetrate the heavy doors at the main entrance to the embassy building and so retreated to the courtyard to take cover behind large concrete flowerpots. They raked the building with rockets and automatic weapons fire. A small detachment of Marines and Military Police (MPs) kept the Viet Cong pinned down until reinforcements arrived and killed all nineteen of them.
The attack on the US embassy was but a small part of the Tet Offensive, a massive, coordinated communist assault against the largest urban areas of South Vietnam. In all, the Viet Cong struck 36 of 64 provincial capitals, 5 of 6 major cities, 64 district capitals, and 50 hamlets. In addition to the embassy, enemy units assaulted Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport, the Presidential Palace, and the headquarters of South Vietnam’s general staff. In Hue, 7,500 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops stormed and eventually took control of the ancient Citadel, the interior city that had been home to the emperors of Vietnam.
The US Mission had once again been caught off guard. The CIA and military intelligence had reported increased activity in and around South Vietnam’s major population centers, but MACV’s attention had been focused on the siege of Khe Sanh.
In the midst of Tet, the Agency panicked. On February 2, 1968, Colby, George Carver, and John Hart, Langley’s onsite Vietnam experts—nicknamed “the brethren”—prepared a memorandum entitled “Operation Shock.” “Tet,” the trio declared, “demonstrated that the Thieu-Ky regime clearly lacked the attributes of a national government” and could not “defend its frontiers” without the help of a half million American troops. The GVN [South Vietnamese government] continued to resist pressure to clean up corruption, generate broad-based political support, and prosecute the war in an aggressive, competent style. If Thieu did not demonstrate significant progress toward achieving these goals within a hundred days, the United States should “reserve its position” in regard to future aid. Incredibly, given the public prominence of the Thieu-Ky feud, the brethren envisioned a key role for the vice president in any reform effort. Ky should personally head a team that would ferret out and punish incompetence and corruption among military and civilian officials. He should also be charged with organizing a national political front uniting all noncommunist elements in a “massive rallying of the entire population . . . to develop the country and free it of Viet Cong terror.” If, after the hundred-day interregnum, there was no significant progress, Washington should replace Thieu and consider halting the bombing of North Vietnam, seeking direct negotiations with Hanoi, and begin treating the National Liberation Front as a legitimate negotiating partner.21
Colby and his mates were jumping the gun. American and South Vietnamese forces quickly rallied. Within days, US and South Vietnamese soldiers had cleared Saigon, and in the weeks that followed they drove the communists from virtually every other city and town they had occupied, forcing them deep into the countryside and inflicting massive casualties. In Hue, the occupying forces held out for three weeks. Allied forces pounded the ancient city into rubble and then cleared what remained of the enemy in house-to-house fighting. Estimates of communist troops killed in action in that battle alone ran to 5,000. The liberators of Hue uncovered the graves of 2,800 government officials, police, and soldiers massacred by the communists. In fact, Tet constituted the worst single defeat ever suffered by the fighting forces of North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front. More than 40,000 communist soldiers were killed or wounded, one-fifth of the enemy’s military strength. As a result of Tet—and two smaller offensives in March and August that cost the enemy another 66,000 casualties—the Viet Cong lost much of its ability to conduct offensive operations.22
But public, media, and congressional opinion in the United States reflected Langley’s initial pessimism—and continued to do so. Americans had been led to believe, by Westmoreland’s optimistic accounts, that victory was in sight. How could that be when the Viet Cong could wreak havoc in virtually every major city and town in South Vietnam? “What the hell is going on?” demanded the respected CBS television news anchor Walter Cronkite. “I thought we were winning the war.”23
The long plane ride over the Pacific provided Colby with an opportunity to take stock. The dimensions of the MACV-ARVN victory on the ground, along with the paradoxical wave of disillusionment sweeping America in the wake of the Tet Offensive, were just becoming apparent. The blow dealt to the Viet Cong, coupled with the emergence of a new team in Saigon devoted to prosecuting the war for the countryside to the maximum, had created a window of opportunity, but that window would not stay open forever. Americans were not an imperial people in the traditional sense. They did not have the patience to fight a war of indefinite duration for indeterminate ends. “Our results had to be so effective that they would receive support at home for our efforts. If not, they had to so put the enemy in trouble and so strengthen the Government that it could survive with a major reduction in American assistance,” Colby wrote in his memoirs. He failed to mention his role in contributing to the burgeoning disillusionment.24
As the Pan American jetliner dove steeply into Tan Son Nhut—to fend off possible ground fire—Colby spotted a South Vietnamese Air Force plane off the right wing on a bombing mission. During the drive into Saigon he could hear gunfire coming from the ongoing battle for the suburbs. He was where he should be.
By the time Bill Colby arrived in South Vietnam on March 2, 1968, “Blowtorch Bob” Komer and CORDS had been in operation for nearly ten months. Despite the flow of optimistic reports from the deputy commander of CORDS (DEPCORDS)—Komer’s official title—the results were spotty. There was a CORDS deputy for each of the four corps areas, with the inimitable John Paul Vann in charge of III Corps, which included his old stomping ground Hau Nghia. Under the deputies were province and district senior advisers, with US personnel eventually stationed at the village and hamlet levels. Overlaying this organizational structure were the various functions assigned to CORDS: the Rural Development Cadre program out of Vung Tau; Chieu Hoi, or “Open Arms,” a program to encourage defection from communist ranks; Census Grievance (C-G); the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES), which involved questionnaires designed to determine if a province or district was controlled by friend or foe; and a program called Phoenix, which aimed to identify and eliminate members of the Viet Cong. MACV, the CIA, USAID, the State Department, and the Joint United States Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO) were in charge of or shared responsibility for these initiatives.25
Belatedly, the Johnson administration had recognized the need for Vietnamese-language training for Americans if counterinsurgency and pacification were going to succeed. The United States Vietnam Training Center was established in early 1967. Classes were held initially in an airless garage in Arlington, Virginia. The Foreign Service imported a number of Vietnamese-English speakers from Vietnam to serve as instructors. The trainees would attend class for five to six hours a day and then take home reel-to-reel tapes of the day’s lessons to study at night. “The key to almost anything I did in Vietnam was the language,” CORDS officer Mike Hacker later recalled. “Going to a war zone without knowing the language . . . was unthinkable to me. Suicidal.” There was some instruction on Vietnamese culture. Toward the end of the cycle, the students were shipped to “the Farm,” the CIA’s paramilitary training facility at Camp Peary, Virginia. Later in the program there was a brief stint at the army’s unconventional warfare school at Fort Benning, Georgia. At the Farm, the Foreign Service Officers were taught the rudiments of hand-to-hand combat. “For some reason they taught us to blow up automobiles,” Bruce Kinsey recalled with a laugh. Upon graduation, each officer was expected to procure his own sidearm. At President Johnson’s direction, from 1967 onward all incoming unmarried Foreign Service Officers were to serve one tour in Vietnam.26
The leadership of CORDS was well aware of the ongoing need for local security, even in the wake of Tet. In addition to ARVN units, the average province boasted 20 Regional Forces (RF) companies and 100 Popular Forces (PF) platoons. But they had not been provided with modern weaponry, and most lacked US advisers. The Rural Development Cadre program was tasked with turning out 46,000 graduates a year, but desertion rates for 1967 ran as high as 35 percent. General Thang, the minister for rural development, confided that South Vietnamese corps commanders were “basically hostile to the program.” Major Nguyen Be, who then supervised the program at Vung Tau, was more explicit. As long as the majority of South Vietnamese military and civilian officials at the provincial and district levels remained corrupt, incompetent, and antidemocratic, he declared, the Rural Development Cadre program would make little headway. The CIA repudiated Be when he attempted to revise the curriculum and called for a new national leadership, drawn from elected district and provincial officials, to replace the Thieu-Ky regime. But he continued to name names as part of his clean government campaign. Frank Scotton finally had to smuggle him out of South Vietnam in an Air America plane to prevent his assassination. Because the RFs and PFs moved in and out of villages, the security they provided was transitory. Left on their own, the RD cadres were terrorized by the local Viet Cong. The ARVN and MACV were still hostile to arming villagers, a step that Bill Colby considered essential, not only for security, but for nation-building as well. Saigon’s opposition to a rice-roots revolution continued unabated.27
The so-called Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI) constituted the heart of the communist insurgency in South Vietnam. With Ed Lansdale’s help, Diem and Nhu had identified a number of these individuals and killed or captured them during the notorious anticommunist campaign of the late 1950s. Many within the US Mission assumed at the time that the back of the organized insurgency had been broken. Then came the 1963 coup and subsequent revelations that, despite all that Nhu’s Special Forces and the Can Lao had done, the VCI still existed and in some areas was flourishing. In 1963 and 1964, the CIA station, under Colby’s successors, had begun to try to pick up the trail and put together an organization that could identify Viet Cong cadres and either turn or kill them. All they had to go on were the dozens of file-card trays that Lansdale and his people had accumulated over the years containing the names, occupations, and locations of suspected communists. Much of this information had come from the Hamlet Informant Program, in which the station subsidized police payments to casual and usually untrained informants. MACV had its own extensive intelligence mechanism, but it focused on the enemy order of battle rather than on the VCI.28
In 1964 and 1965, Chief of Station Peer de Silva developed an analytical unit within the Saigon Station to coordinate intelligence activity against the communists. To gather information, the CIA turned to the South Vietnamese Police Special Branch—a descendent of the old French Sûreté, the internal security arm of the French colonial government—and subsequently to the South Vietnamese government’s newly created Central Intelligence Organization (CIO). With CIA encouragement, the Special Branch began developing a system of Provincial Interrogation Centers nationwide. By mid-1966 there were twenty-two in existence. The Sûreté had been notorious for torturing its detainees, and that culture carried over to the Special Branch. An Agency officer who toured all of the existing PICs in 1966 found two in the Mekong Delta that were exemplary, but elsewhere, the facilities were “absolutely appalling,” with prisoners being interrogated in the presence of other prisoners, clerks, and janitorial staff. Suspected members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure were often housed in a common detention room, which guaranteed collusion and facilitated intimidation of the weak by the hard core. Interrogators seemed not to know the difference between a criminal investigation and an intelligence debriefing. The South Vietnamese, who were aware of the American aversion to torture, reacted not by refraining from it, but by hiding it. Nevertheless, several CIA inspectors remembered seeing blood-spattered walls, batteries and wires, and assorted cudgels and restraints.29
When Bob Komer arrived in South Vietnam in the spring of 1967, he had set about institutionalizing the war on the communist cadre. What he wanted was a national intelligence clearinghouse to collect and analyze information gathered from detainees at the PICs. To this end, he established, in the words of Agency historian Thomas L. Ahern Jr., a “new VC infrastructure intelligence collection and exploitation staff (ICEX) system reaching from [the CIA] station down through corps, province, and district levels.” The CIA would continue to supervise the PICs and the Special Branch efforts in the field. Finally, the decision was made to assign the Provincial Reconnaissance Units—South Vietnam’s counterterror shock troops—to the war on the VCI. The 303 Committee stipulated that these strike forces would remain under the sole supervision of the CIA. The PRUs gave teeth to the ICEX program, providing it with a heavily armed force capable of acting on the intelligence that was gathered. In December 1967, the figurehead prime minister, Nguyen Van Loc, renamed ICEX “Phung Hoang” after a mythical Vietnamese bird endowed with extraordinary powers. Komer came up with what he believed was the closest English equivalent—Phoenix. The name Phung Hoang was ironic. “The Phung Hoang,” according to one source, “does not show itself except in times of peace and it hides at the slightest sign of trouble.” Komer’s bird, however, was frequently the harbinger of imprisonment, torture, and death.30
According to Tom Martin, the CORDS district adviser in the Mekong Delta, the Provincial Reconnaissance Units were notorious by the time they were incorporated into the Phoenix program. Because the PRUs and their SEAL advisers wore civilian clothes and operated at night, they were invisible, at least to the other Americans in the area. “These were sort of like the Dirty Dozen,” Martin recalled. “They were recruited from jails and deserters; they were real killers. The PRUs were a very deadly force; they were the ones who started giving rewards for enemy ears and noses and stuff like that.” In January 1967, the station reported that an “overzealous” PRU contingent in Long An Province had decapitated several Viet Cong after killing them in a pitched battle. In many districts, the campaign against the communist infrastructure turned into a duel between the local Banh-anh-ninh—the terrorism, espionage, and assassination arm of the Viet Cong province committees—and the PRU. In Tan An, the capital of Long An, a former head of the communist assassination unit who had defected in 1966 learned the whereabouts and itinerary of the current Banh-anh-ninh chief. He passed it on to the PRU, which mounted an ambush in which the Viet Cong unit leader and his bodyguard were killed. At this point, the Banh-anh-ninh had lost seven chiefs at PRU hands, while communists had managed to kill three PRU commanders in three months. In the delta, a Viet Cong “avenger unit” had killed the mother of one defector after he rallied to South Vietnam; he swore revenge on the perpetrators, whose identities he knew. Leading his five-man team into Viet Cong territory, the defector discovered the unit’s hideout, and in the ensuing attack all eight of the enemy were killed. Found in the hideout was an outboard motor of a Special Forces lieutenant who had been ambushed and shot to death while patrolling a nearby canal a week earlier. In many ways, then, the CIA-supervised PRUs operated as combat units fighting an enemy asking no more quarter than it gave, rather than as a police force constrained by law and procedure. For the period from May through September 1967, the PRUs registered 1,500 Viet Cong killed and 960 captured. Counterterror team losses were 99 dead. Nevertheless, the stated objective of the PRU campaign was to capture and interrogate; killing was a last resort.31
Still ensconced in Langley, Colby had viewed the evolution of the war on the Viet Cong Infrastructure with mixed feelings. He approved of the campaign in principle, even of its organized violence. Every effort should be made to lure members of the communist cadre to switch sides through indoctrination, persuasion, or blackmail. Failing that, however, the PRUs should take “direct action to capture or arrest” members of the infrastructure; “on occasion casualties will result from efforts by the Viet Cong to escape arrest or capture.” Colby wanted the PRUs to be incorporated into the South Vietnamese National Police. He was, as he would later claim, concerned about due process and ethical treatment of prisoners, but he had another reason. If there should be a cease-fire and negotiations, the PRUs, as part of the police rather than the ARVN, would be able to continue the struggle against the Viet Cong.32
The former Jedburgh quickly settled into his new job as chief deputy to Komer. He was to be Blowtorch Bob’s alter ego, knowledgeable about every aspect of CORDS and thus able to stand in for his boss. Technically, Colby was on leave from the CIA, but he had full access to the station and CIA operations. He could go places where Komer could not. Indeed, that was one of the reasons for his selection. Becoming bogged down in the CORDS-MACV bureaucracy was an ever-present danger. As he had when he was station chief, Colby got out into the field whenever possible. “I saw as the real purpose of my being in Vietnam to spend as many nights as possible in the provinces,” he wrote in Lost Victory.33 Initially, the new DEPCORDS deputy limited his forays to the weekends. He would put in a half-day at the office on Saturday and then helicopter out in the afternoon to spend the night with a district or province advisory team. Colby did not give advance notice of his arrival. Dinner with the Americans and Vietnamese, an inspection tour the next morning, and then a flight back to Saigion Sunday afternoon in time for a swim and dinner at the Cercle Sportif.
Tet had dealt a major blow to the Viet Cong, but that did not mean the countryside was secure. Excluding communist military forces, the VCI still numbered some 82,000 nationwide. The South Vietnamese government, anxious about protecting its urban constituencies, reverted to its habitual passiveness, redeploying ARVN and even Regional and Popular Forces troops around the country’s major population centers. On a visit to the provincial capital of Vinh Long, Colby’s helicopter had to descend rapidly in a tight circle to avoid enemy ground fire from the outskirts of the city. A trip to Ban Me Thuot, near his old stomping grounds of Buon Enao, was enlivened by a Viet Cong mortar attack. As the barrage marched up the main thoroughfare, Colby and his cohorts retreated to their compound and, fully armed, sat up all night waiting for a ground attack that never came.34
During his weekend visits to the countryside, Colby, to his dismay, discovered that CORDS would have to spend much of 1968 simply rebuilding South Vietnam. Destruction from the fighting was widespread; virtually every town and village had suffered damage to its infrastructure. Before the 1 million refugees created by Tet could return home, there would have to be homes for them to return to. Colby understood that the vacuum in the countryside would have to be filled before nation-building could begin once again.
What Komer needed above all else were energetic, effective CORDS personnel in the field. His model was John Paul Vann. One of Colby’s first forays out of Saigon was to visit with the already legendary proconsul, then DEPCORDS for II Corps. The two men had met only once, in Washington, when Colby was Far East Division head. Vann had paid a visit to Langley to inform him that the members of the Rural Development Cadre of which the Agency was so proud were spending more time huddled in their compounds protecting themselves than proselytizing among the peasants. With characteristic diplomacy, Colby had observed that he and his colleagues realized that the Vung Tau graduates were a work in progress. Vann remembered the exchange and, mindful of his job security, had expressed some concern to Komer that his new deputy might bear a grudge. One of the reasons for Colby’s visit was to assure Vann that this was not the case.
Vann had done his homework and knew where Colby’s predilections lay. Their first night together, he took his guest to visit a nearby village whose chief had armed his young men with spears fashioned out of straightened and sharpened car springs. Still hobbled by his skating accident, Colby inspected the ranks with cane in hand and promised the chief real weapons. “The important result of the evening,” Colby observed in Lost Victory, “was a clear understanding between Vann and myself that the real way we should be fighting the war was by building communities such as the ones we visited, and gradually pressing the Communists away from the population.”35
Vann and Colby would become allies, if not friends. Colby’s depiction of Vann in Lost Victory conformed to the image that so many of the counterinsurgency/pacification personnel laboring in the vineyard had of him: an almost fearless man absolutely committed to empowering the rural Vietnamese to take control of their communities and defend them simultaneously against the communists, the Saigonese, and, when necessary, inept Americans. Vann’s personal shortcomings, so relentlessly portrayed in Neil Sheehan’s Bright Shining Lie, were overstated and largely irrelevant, Colby wrote.
There was no doubt about John Paul Vann’s bravery, his commitment to the villagers of South Vietnam, or his determination to speak out against injustice and ineptitude, but he was often all sail and no anchor—intelligent, undereducated, and intensely ambitious. Part of the Ellsberg-Scotton-Bumgardner coterie, indeed its titular head, Vann had largely traded in the ideas of others. In truth, Vann’s views on the conflict in Vietnam were contradictory, even paradoxical. Like Colby, he was opposed to large-scale US military operations. The further American main force units were kept from his area of responsibility, the easier his job would be. Unlike Colby, he was opposed to forced relocation programs like the Strategic Hamlet initiative because he thought they tore the fabric of Vietnamese society.36
Vann could be pessimistic, even cynical, about the war. He remained a great friend of Dan Ellsberg even after the latter turned against the conflict and became one of its most vocal critics. “John Paul Vann was just the first among many who served in Hau Nghia who came slowly to believe that we were on the wrong side,” declared Vann’s friend Colonel Carl Bernard. “[He and I believed] that the better, and most conscientious persons in Hau Nghia—with just a few exceptions—were working for the Viet Cong.” Bernard recalled that he and Vann often likened themselves to “bankruptcy referees,” that is, individuals dedicated to limiting the damage being done by both sides. The two men, Bernard claimed, had read Ferdinand Otto Miksche’s Secret Forces: The Technique of Underground Movements, the principal conclusion of which was that once revolutionaries succeeded in implanting an infrastructure, they had won. Yet Vann remained an uncompromising hawk throughout his time in Vietnam. He never reached the point where he believed that too many Vietnamese and Americans were dying. “John Vann never considered that the Vietnamese war might have demanded more, in terms of lives, money, and effort, than it was worth,” Bernard recalled. “No price would have been too great. Vann felt that since America had committed herself to the war effort, she should make the best of it.” On the second if not the first assumption, Colby and Vann saw eye to eye.37
Vann’s popularity with the counterinsurgency/pacification people stemmed in no small part from his willingness to speak truth to power. There was his famous exchange with Walt Rostow, LBJ’s relentlessly hawkish national security adviser, in December 1967. Buoyed by Westmoreland’s optimistic reports, Rostow predicted that there would be a great victory in the coming summer. “Oh, hell no, Mr. Rostow,” Vann replied. “I’m a born optimist; I think we can hold out longer than that.”38 He and another CORDS deputy, Colonel Wilbur Wilson, were openly contemptuous of Westmoreland and his search-and-destroy strategy. At the same time, Vann obsequiously cultivated patrons who could protect him, such as General Bruce Palmer, deputy commander of the US Army in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968 and vice chief of staff of the army from 1968 to 1972. Vann was deferential to Komer, as well as to Ellsworth Bunker, who had a reputation for firing those who bucked him. Vann was a prolific letter-writer, treating public figures with whom he had only a passing acquaintance—Henry Kissinger, for example—as confidants.
Colby became somewhat addicted to touring the countryside of South Vietnam with Vann. Risk-taking was something the two men had in common, though Colby was somewhat less flamboyant about it. Periodically, Vann would decide to motor about the provinces under his supervision to “find out who owned what.” Inevitably these trips were through territory that was contested. Vann would tell every adviser who came under his command that they must get out in the villages and rice paddies and see for themselves what conditions were like; they needed to visit with village elders and show friend and foe alike that they were not afraid.39
In some ways, the two men were very different. Vann’s sexual appetites were legendary, a trait he shared with Ellsberg. Bernard recalled that when he was stateside, Vann would make it a point to visit Ellsberg in Santa Monica for an orgy. In Vietnam, Vann at one point lived near a girls’ orphanage and reputedly spent a lot of time there. “His approach to sex was strictly physical,” Bernard observed. “It was something to be done quickly and as often as possible.” Colby professed ignorance of these activities. He would later tell his second wife, Sally, that he and Vann would venture out into the countryside in a jeep or in the latter’s International Harvester Scout on Saturday nights in order to “avoid temptation.” Colby was dissembling; he could not have helped knowing about Vann’s exploits—the man was an exhibitionist. Nor was Colby pristine in sexual matters; he had come to Vietnam in part to escape from what for him was a loveless marriage. There were reports of other women, but Colby, unlike Vann, was the soul of discretion.40
Three weeks after his arrival in Vietnam, Colby tuned in with other members of the US Mission to listen to LBJ’s March 31 speech to the American people on Vietnam. Everyone sensed that a turning point in the war was afoot.
In the weeks following the Tet Offensive, former administration supporters in the media, including the New York Times editorial board, had advised the president to negotiate a withdrawal from Vietnam. The “Wise Men”—a group of veteran diplomats called together by LBJ to advise him on the war in Vietnam—which included such Cold War luminaries as former secretary of state Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett—called for the “gradual disengagement” of the United States from the war.
The military, however, took a different lesson from Tet. Sensing that the time was right for a knockout blow, Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs asked for an additional 205,000 troops, approval for an amphibious landing north of the 17th parallel, and permission to attack North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos. Lyndon Johnson was, to say the least, conflicted. “I feel like a hitchhiker caught in a hailstorm on a Texas highway,” he remarked to an aide. “I can’t run, I can’t hide. And I can’t make it stop.”41 After conferring with Clark Clifford, the new secretary of defense, Johnson rebuffed his military commanders. He approved an additional 22,000 men, chiefly to help lift the siege of Khe Sanh, and ordered Ambassador Bunker to make a “highly forceful” approach to Thieu and Ky to get their house in order.
In his March 31 speech, President Johnson announced that henceforward the bombing of North Vietnam would be limited to the area just above the demilitarized zone, and he declared that the United States was ready for peace talks anytime, anywhere, anyplace. In the event the enemy responded positively and such talks opened, LBJ said, Averell Harriman would serve as head of the US delegation. Then came the bombshell: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as president.”42 Johnson had come to the conclusion that much of the divisive debate at home centered on him personally. The prospect of new leadership, he concluded, might lead to reconciliation both in the United States and abroad.
The “Operation Shock” memo from Colby and his colleagues had played a key role in the decision to deny the request for a major escalation from Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs. It had been the substance of George Carver’s presentation to the Wise Men and their subsequent advice to the president that he throw in the towel in Vietnam. On March 27, LBJ demanded and received the same briefing from Carver. Vice President Hubert Humphrey subsequently wrote to Carver to thank him for his “brutally frank and forthright analysis.” The president’s speech of March 31, Humphrey declared, “indicated that your briefings had a profound effect on the course of U.S. policy on Vietnam.”43 The irony of the “Operation Shock” memo was heavy indeed. Tet would provide Bill Colby and his fellow advocates of the “other war” with their greatest opportunity, but the backlash from that initial pessimistic evaluation would constitute their greatest obstacle.
After a great deal of back-and-forth concerning the location and composition of delegations, preliminary peace talks opened in Paris on May 13, 1968. Colby recalled a visit by the new secretary of defense and his chief of international security affairs, Paul Warnke, in the spring of 1968. Neither man seemed at all interested in the military’s optimistic reports or the presentations put on by CORDS. “The two visitors departed,” Colby wrote in Lost Victory, “with no successful contradiction of their attitude on arrival—to wit, the United States was deep in a quagmire, and the sooner it withdrew, the better.”44
Though the Paris talks immediately deadlocked, those on the ground in Vietnam—both Americans and Vietnamese—assumed that a cease-fire was possible. In that eventuality, the two adversaries would have to continue the struggle by other means. Indeed, much of the war after March 1968 was built around this premise, and this gave the CORDS mission of counterinsurgency, pacification, and nation-building a special urgency. “Having failed in their bid for conquest in the Tet attacks, the communists were now laying the groundwork for a claim to political power, or at least participation, and for an effort to negotiate a compromise political solution with the Americans over the heads of the Vietnamese Government,” Colby later observed. “Clearly the response of the Vietnamese Government and its American ally had to be political: to establish legitimate local authority to counter the claims of the Communists and their fronts.”45
What was clear to Bill Colby was not so clear to President Nguyen Van Thieu. In the wake of Tet, the national government abolished village elections and once again began sending Saigon appointees to rule the countryside. Pressed for a timetable to return South Vietnam to civilian rule, Thieu declared that Americans must understand that “the army could not be removed from politics overnight.” The army was not only “his major political supporter,” but “the only cohesive force holding the country together.”46
In terms of counterinsurgency and pacification, however, the ARVN continued to be the problem rather than the solution. General Thang, the South Vietnamese minister of reconstruction, confided to his American contacts that, in his opinion, ARVN corps commanders were actively sabotaging pacification. Indeed, the entire South Vietnamese performance was marked by “corruption in the provinces and districts, inefficiency at corps, and incompetence in Saigon.” In the fall of 1968, none other than the director-general of the South Vietnamese National Police, Colonel Tran Van Hai, outlined, in a confidential report to the CIA station, five South Vietnamese weaknesses that, if not remedied, would lead to a communist victory. First was the government’s inability to control the hamlets and villages, an ever-increasing number of which contained a liberation committee. Indeed, by one count, the number of communist-administered villages grew from 397 in September 1968 to 3,367 in mid-January 1969. Second was the government’s failure to secure any support in the nation’s schools and universities. “The best and most dedicated students are also dedicated Communists,” Hai reported; their role models among teachers and professors were “invariably Marxists.” Third was the arrogance of the South Vietnamese leaders and their representatives. In the post-Tet refugee centers, procommunist students and cadres were winning over refugees, while government relief officials “walked around in white shirts, looked down on the refugees and, in some cases, profited from relief supplies.” Fourth, Tri Quang and the Buddhists remained firm in their opposition to the Thieu-Ky regime. Finally, whatever the theoretical merits of democracy, what the government was offering could not compete with the communists, who possessed precisely the “discipline and cohesiveness which the democratic forces lack.”47
Colby was aware of these weaknesses even before Hai’s report made them explicit. The Johnson administration had been persuaded by the “Operation Shock” memo and eroding domestic support for the war to freeze troop levels, limit the bombing campaign against North Vietnam, and initiate peace talks, but the White House proved unwilling to abandon Thieu. In part, harkening back to McGeorge Bundy’s observation to Colby, there was no institutional way for the United States to avoid dealing with whatever national government existed in South Vietnam. So Colby, undaunted, continued his campaign to build a nation beginning at the village level.
During a visit to Washington in August 1968, the deputy chief of CORDS presented his plan for a “People’s War” in South Vietnam. It was to be based on the “Three Selfs”: Self-Help, Self-Defense, and Self-Government. White House aides could not decide whether Colby was mimicking Sun Yat-sen or Mao Tse-tung. First, as always, was local self-defense. “Experience had shown that a disarmed village community could be entered and dominated by a five-man enemy squad,” Colby wrote. “If they met no opposition, they could assemble and harangue the population with their message, collect taxes and supplies, and conscript or recruit some of the local youths into the Communist forces.” Even the most modest local self-defense forces could discourage such activities. In the three years that followed, Colby saw to it that some 500,000 weapons—mostly of World War II vintage, harvested from the Ruff-Puffs (a nickname for the RFs and PFs), who had been supplied at last with M-16 rifles—went to village defense squads. The Rural Development Cadre would be freed of security duties and allowed to focus on economic development and political indoctrination.48
By this point, Bob Komer had become a prisoner of the Hamlet Evaluation System and numbers in general. The CORDS chief was losing patience, and what Colby was advocating—essentially emulating the techniques of the communists—required patience. What he proposed was an Accelerated Pacification Campaign (APC) aiming to convert 1,000 hamlets from a “contested” to a relatively “secure” state under the HES ranking system.49 For the APC—and pacification in general—to work, they would have to have the explicit support of the new MACV commander, General Creighton Abrams. Komer had reason to be hopeful.
Westmoreland’s replacement was a career soldier loyal to his superiors, but his misgivings about search and destroy were well known. “The military . . . have a little problem,” Abrams told his commanders in one briefing, “an institutional problem.” The army could recognize and react to organized violence, he said. “But this trouble [the activities of the liberation committees and the Banh-anh-ninh] that nobody can see, and nobody can hear . . . is just meaner than hell—just going around collecting taxes, quietly snatching somebody and taking him off and shooting him.” He understood the implications of the Paris Peace Talks (though he believed that Harriman and company were giving away too much too soon)—that in the event of a cease-fire, the Americans and South Vietnamese would have to switch to a completely political/guerrilla war. Abrams acknowledged that the operations of US main force units often created more problems for counterinsurgency and pacification than they solved. He deeply resented that the course of the war in Southeast Asia was tied to the vicissitudes of American domestic politics, but, like a good soldier, he was determined to work around the problem. Finally, he appreciated the enemy he was fighting. “The fellows that are running the show up there [in North Vietnam] have been at this a long time,” he observed in another commanders’ meeting. “They’ve been down this road before. They’ve stood right on the precipice and stared hell right straight in the face—and, and, and took it—and took it—and won.”50
In September, Colby, Komer, and Vann made a pacification presentation to Abrams and his corps commanders. Ambassador Bunker was also in attendance. Colby led off. He described the evolution of North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front from the original Indochinese Communist Party and discussed the activities of the liberation committees, tracing their proliferation on a map. He then outlined the methods and targets of the Accelerated Pacification Campaign. All the military needed to do, he said, was to keep the North Vietnamese Army and what remained of the Viet Cong off-balance and away from areas being pacified. As always, Colby emphasized that there would have to be a political dimension to the APC: “By establishing democratic legitimacy in the villages through local officials, [the APC] would provide a non-Communist structure to counter the claims of the Liberation Committees.” Colby remembered that Abrams listened intently and, at the conclusion of the briefing, thanked Colby warmly. Abrams then gave Komer the go-ahead to work out the details of Accelerated Pacification with President Thieu.51
Urged on by Joint General Staff Chairman General Cao Van Vien, Thieu signed off on the Advanced Pacification Campaign, and the launch date was set for November 1. Then, suddenly, just as the program was to get underway, Komer was named ambassador to Turkey. He departed South Vietnam without ceremony on November 6. “I accompanied Komer to the small Air Force jet that would take him to Hong Kong for the connection to Washington and thanked him for all he had done to get pacification finally launched as a major strategy of the war,” Colby wrote in Lost Victory. “I thanked him also for arranging for me to succeed him in the job of making it work.” Komer had worn out his welcome. Obsequious though he had been with Bunker and Abrams, he was aggressive and abrasive with everyone else. His tendency to see pacification in terms of the Hamlet Evaluation System had created a multitude of enemies in the field and especially within the CIA station in Saigon. To some he had become absurd. On one occasion he arrived at a party in Saigon following a trip to the provinces clad in a shiny, starched fatigue uniform. A CIA officer standing within earshot of Komer inquired, “Who is that silly-looking twerp?”52
Komer apparently saw the Accelerated Pacification Campaign almost entirely in military terms, as an opportunity for him to do what Westmoreland and the military had not been allowed to do—take the offensive following Tet. “We can and must achieve victory,” he declared to Washington. “By Tet 69 [that is, 1969, just before the scheduled end of the first phase of the APC], we can make it clear that the enemy has been defeated.” In his hurry to move 1,000 hamlets from the “theirs” to “ours” column, he was willing to abandon the painstaking Rural Development approach designed to demonstrate the South Vietnamese government’s benevolence and attract peasant loyalty. On a Colby memo declaring that the Rural Development Cadre must be the “major political instrument available to confront the VC political apparatus,” Komer had scribbled, “Baloney.”53
Thus it was that Bill Colby assumed command of CORDS in November 1968 with the personal rank of ambassador. He was now one of the three most powerful Americans in Vietnam. Komer had indeed recommended Colby to replace him, but the former Jedburgh’s main supporters were Abrams and Bunker. The counterinsurgency/pacification struggle was his to win or lose, he believed.54
Colby decreed that although the APC was nominally a nationwide effort, it should focus on the Mekong Delta. The region contained a disproportionate percentage of the rural population, some 6 million in all, and was the nation’s rice basket. He persuaded Vann to abandon his beloved Hau Nghia and move down to head up the CORDS operation in the delta. While MACV and the ARVN attempted to push communist main force units to the periphery, local security was provided by the mobile Ruff-Puff units and Colby’s village militia. To Thieu’s dismay, CORDS insisted on funneling development funds—up to 1 million piasters per village—directly into the hands of hamlet and village chiefs. Preference was given to the communities that were quickest to hold elections. One village chief, upon hearing that he would be able to expend funds without clearance from national officials, broke down and wept. Vung Tau continued to turn out Rural Development Cadre teams, now slimmed down from fifty-nine to forty men, but also added a six-week training program for village chiefs. Each graduation ceremony was attended by President Thieu and relevant government ministers. In accordance with Marshal Lyautey’s “oil-spot” theory, the APC was to focus on the most populated, most secure settlements first and then spread out to more contested areas.55
“The Accelerated Pacification Program was a great success,” Colby wrote in Lost Victory. In his cables to Washington, Bunker fully concurred: the South Vietnamese government was able to establish a presence in an additional 1,350 hamlets, he reported. According to the ambassador, by the spring of 1969 the percentage of the population controlled by the Viet Cong nationwide had dropped to 13.3 percent, a new low. The People’s Self-Defense Force claimed 500,000 members, and between November 1968 and January 1969, 17,000 additional weapons were delivered to their keeping. Conflicted though he was, Thieu, in June 1969, authorized Phase II of the new pacification program, which was basically a continuation of the methods and structure of the APC into the indefinite future. The South Vietnamese president was willing to support the program as long as the Americans threw money at it, it succeeded in rooting out Viet Cong cadres, and it did not threaten his political position.56
By the end of 1970, CORDS comprised more than 1,000 civilians and 5,000 American military personnel spread across the villages and hamlets of South Vietnam. The civilians were graduates of the Vietnam Training Center in Washington, meaning that all had come to Vietnam able to function in spoken and written Vietnamese. Some were State Department officers, some were from the US Agency for International Development, and some were from the United States Information Service. A few came from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Many of them were extremely bright and motivated individuals, graduates of some of the best universities in the country. A few had previous experience in the Peace Corps. They were independent thinkers, committed but critical. Some had used their days off from the training center to march in antiwar demonstrations. Mike Hacker had joined the Peace Corps in 1962, completing a stint in Bolivia. “I was one of the thousands of young people who at the time were caught up in the Kennedy fever,” he recalled. “We were in college, but we were bored, and along came this idea that just struck the right chord. That we could make a difference.” His first assignment was Vinh Binh Province in the delta.57
Vinh Binh was one of the most insecure provinces in South Vietnam, at one point ranking forty-fourth out of forty-four in terms of the level of Viet Cong activity. Hacker moved into a house with three other Americans, one USIS and the other two military, who acted as advisers to the armed propaganda teams. Hacker and his compatriots employed every tactic imaginable to persuade Viet Cong to defect and villagers in contested areas to relocate to the Chieu Hoi camps in and around Vinh Binh’s capital city. Chieu Hoi operatives offered cash incentives for defections as well as for any weapons the defectors were able to bring with them. The armed propaganda team members were all former Viet Cong cadres who were carefully screened. Together with their American advisers, they went out into the villages and talked to the people about the benefits of coming over to the government side. There were leaflets for those who could read, and for those who could not, plays extolling the virtues of democracy and capitalism and the vices of communism. Once in the Chieu Hoi camps, villagers were presented with more information in special classes. The instructors were all Vietnamese. Hacker’s job was to go into the camps and converse with as many people as he could, but in particular with former Viet Cong. “I talked to them about their families, their economic situation, their experiences with the VC and the government,” he later recalled. “Many had seen battle with the communist forces. The most reliable converts were those who had been pressed into service, but there were hard-core VC who had been wronged or become disillusioned.”58
The Americans stationed in Vinh Binh operated under no illusions about the strength of the Viet Cong. Travel was absolutely forbidden at night. Every road offered the possibility, if not the probability, of death through mines or ambush. Hacker recalled that the enemy would regularly mortar the Chieu Hoi compound, killing mostly women and children, as a means to discourage defection. A favorite tactic was to blow up a bus, killing thirty or forty people. Americans and their Vietnamese counterparts would rush to the scene only to be ambushed. “The carnage of a mine going off under a vehicle the size of one of our yellow American school buses was just unbelievable,” Hacker said. “Arms and legs and heads were scattered everywhere. They counted on the horror to paralyze us and throw us off guard.”59
Hacker remembered Colby periodically visiting Vinh Binh. “He was the right guy at the right time . . . very cool. I could not imagine Colby sweating.” Vann was omnipresent. One either loved or hated Vann, Hacker recalled. He loved him. “If you worked for CORDS and believed in counterinsurgency/pacification, Vann was your hero,” said Hacker. He showed no weakness or ambivalence, but led by example. Both Vann and Colby knew that the war was going to be a protracted struggle, Hacker said, and they believed that only pacification could win it. Colby was the brains, Vann the brawn and the inspiration. Even more striking than these two Americans were the Vietnamese peasants themselves, Hacker remembered: “Nine hundred years of Chinese domination, one hundred years of French, and now the Americans were pounding the hell out of them.” And yet, whenever the Chieu Hoi teams stopped to ask directions, the locals would invariably invite them for a meal. They were swarmed by smiling children. “They had this innate decency about them,” Hacker said.60
After Abrams, Komer, and Colby arrived on the scene, and John Vann was transferred to the delta, the US military began to recede into the background there. Rural Development teams were paired effectively with CORDS staff and the ablest village leaders. In the wake of Tet, the liberation committees began to step up their pressure on the rural population, demanding more money and more recruits and sowing terror when they were not forthcoming. Slowly, trust began to shift. Bruce Kinsey, who headed the pacification effort in Long An Province, recalled that villagers became increasingly willing to finger Viet Cong tax collectors and members of the Banh-anh-ninh. Kinsey became aware that, over time, local leaders in the delta had worked out accommodations with the Viet Cong. The two sides agreed unofficially on a division of territory: you take everything between here and the river, for example, and we will control everything between here and the marketplace. Kinsey discovered the existence of these clandestine arrangements during one of his first forays into the countryside. He asked for and received a tour, but when his party approached a particular footbridge, the chief halted and forbade Kinsey to go any further. Over time, he and his colleagues began to push the boundaries to expand their work into communist-controlled territory. Vann’s idea, Kinsey recalled, “was that the VC do not wear seven league boots and that they are just as scared as we are and a lot of this war is psychological.” Thus the constant jeep rides through contested territory night and day. Kinsey recalled that the morning after a local official was beheaded in a remote, contested village, Vann declared, “Those people need to know who their friends are.” Vann loaded Kinsey and two of his compatriots into his jeep and, armed to the teeth, they made their way to the village to pay their respects to the dead leader’s family.61
Despite the depredations of the Viet Cong, ongoing government corruption, and other problems, there was progress in Long An. As chief civilian officer for CORDS in the province, Kinsey had an abundance of resources at his disposal: a Construction Battalion (Seabee) team, a battalion of Army Corps of Engineers, road-building equipment, a contingent of nurses and medics, a civil affairs platoon, and a steady flow of unrestricted funds. By the time he left in 1970, things were happening that had not been seen in years: mail delivered, small electrical grids, Kubota tractors in the rice paddies, and roads open day and night. “That did not happen all over the country,” he said, “but it happened over most of the Mekong Delta, and that’s where 65 percent of the people lived.”62
Virtually all CORDS personnel involved in reconstruction, development, and local self-empowerment wanted American main force units to be kept as far away from their areas of operation as possible. The battalion- and division-level sweeps and free-fire zones were, to say the least, counterproductive of what Colby’s outfit was trying to accomplish. But there was a special evil, “Operation Speedy Express,” that unfolded from December 1968 through May 1969.
Speedy Express was the code name for a massive American search-and-destroy offensive against Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces in the Mekong Delta; in charge was Lieutenant General Julian Ewell, commander of the Ninth Infantry Division. Ewell, later dubbed by one journalist “The Butcher of the Delta,” was obsessed with body count, and he was determined that Speedy Express set a record for number of enemy killed; to this end, he applied relentless pressure on his brigade and battalion commanders. Lieutenant Colonel William Taylor recalled a visit from Ewell. “What the fuck are you people doing down here; sitting on your ass? The rest of the brigades are coming up with a fine body count and you people aren’t producing. . . . If you can’t get out there and beat ’em out of the bushes, then I’ll relieve you and get somebody down here who will.”63
Ewell was not above faking numbers, but he much preferred dead bodies. It was his Ninth Division that pioneered nighttime hunter-killer operations. Cobra gunships would fly over “enemy” terrain, spotlighting anything that moved and raining down fire from their miniguns. Vann, who at the time was DEPCORDS for the delta region, began to hear reports of hundreds of dead and wounded civilians. The division claimed 10,899 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers killed but could produce only 788 weapons. Vann forwarded the information to Colby, who asked him to investigate. The practices and procedures the Ninth was using were unprofessional, Vann subsequently reported. The First Air Cavalry did not count an enemy dead until one of its number had “put a foot on ’em.” Eventually, Vann confronted Ewell. How could he account for the disparity between body count and captured weapons? The enemy was crafty, Ewell responded. Frequently, his men got to the Viet Cong only after they had conducted an operation and hidden their weapons. During a trip to Washington, Vann briefed Westmoreland, then army chief of staff, on what Ewell was doing. Vann’s senior advisers in the provinces and districts were up in arms. They were trying to pacify villagers while Ewell was killing them. Westmoreland feigned surprise, Vann recalled. In truth, the person responsible for Julian Ewell was Creighton Abrams. Ewell was one of his top commanders; Abrams had to know about the excesses committed by the Ninth Infantry. In 1972, the army inspector general would estimate that between 5,000 and 7,000 civilians were killed by Speedy Express.64
Colby saw the armed components of CORDS as a police force, not as a military contingent. Ewell and Speedy Express might not have been typical, but they were a byproduct of the military mentality. The CORDS effort, Colby later wrote to a military historian, “was an ad hoc instrument to provide a non-military and primarily political function.” What he envisioned was a police model based on the British constabulary, aiming to protect and serve, not the American model, which was primarily military—“us vs. them, Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral.” The United States had had a brief experience with the constabulary model in the Philippines at the turn of the century, Colby observed, but had apparently forgotten it. The object should be to control and convert enemy guerrillas; killing them should be a last resort. The goal was to engage the population, not impose upon it.65
CORDS men in the field were not merely instruments of Colby’s intellect, however; they were individuals through which he could once again live his Lawrence of Arabia, Baden-Powell, Robert Rogers dream. Kinsey and Hacker—these were Colby’s people. CORDS was his ideal; its concept and practice were his seven pillars of wisdom all in one. It was the dream of Vann, Scotton, and Bumgardner, and, before his defection, Ellsberg, too. Colby’s real contribution, as Bruce Kinsey observed, was to make it all work.66 Prior to 1968, the US effort in Vietnam had been a jungle of competing bureaucracies and clashing personalities. Wielding the authority provided by Abrams and Bunker, Colby somehow got everyone working together, something Komer could never do. Instead of acting like rivals, the State Department, USAID, MACV, and even to some extent the CIA began functioning as a team. The notion that America could produce an organization that blended military and civilian authority would previously have been considered impossible. Indeed, it was antithetical to the writings of the Founding Fathers, who were sharply aware that military power had been an impediment to liberty and self-determination as often as it had been its protector. Only Colby, with his peculiar combination of will, ego, and humility rooted in perceived service to a higher cause, could have presided over an operation like CORDS. The idea that it was possible to fight tyranny and preserve a civil, democratic society went to the root of the man’s beliefs. It was a bold and perhaps unrealistic assumption, but it underlay much of America’s Cold War effort in the developing world.