While Colby’s CORDS programs were making progress in South Vietnam, new actors appeared on the American political stage; indeed, a new play was about to unfold. The bloodletting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968 had ended with the nomination of Hubert H. Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president. Though he had been “loyal as a beagle,” as LBJ put it, Humphrey had begun to have doubts about the conflict in Vietnam. After the convention rejected an antiwar plank in its platform, however, Humphrey could not avoid association with the increasingly unpopular war. The Republicans, meantime, had nominated Richard M. Nixon, Eisenhower’s vice president, a politician with impeccable anticommunist—some said red-baiting—credentials. During the campaign, he announced that he had a “secret plan” for ending the war in Vietnam.
Democratic Party leaders pleaded with the Johnson White House for a dramatic peace initiative to boost Humphrey, who lagged well behind Nixon in the early polls. Over the next few weeks, Harriman, in Paris, carefully negotiated an “understanding” with the North Vietnamese. The United States would halt its bombing unilaterally, but in return Washington would expect cessation of communist rocket and mortar attacks in South Vietnam and a limit on the infiltration of men and supplies. Hanoi agreed, and the two sides declared that meaningful peace talks would begin four days after the bombing halted.
The problem was that President Thieu refused to go along. Ky and other South Vietnamese hardliners, including virtually the entire Catholic community, warned him against an American sellout. Henry Kissinger—a Harvard government professor who had served in the Johnson administration as an unofficial envoy, but now smelled a Republican victory—informed Nixon that Johnson was planning an election-eve end to the bombing. Using Anna Chennault, the widow of Lieutenant General Claire Chennault and a prominent member of the conservative China Lobby, as an intermediary, the Nixon camp urged Thieu to hold out; he was certain to get better treatment from a Republican administration, Madame Chennault assured him. Thereupon, Thieu informed the Americans that Hanoi would have to agree to negotiate directly with the government of Vietnam; he proclaimed that his administration was not “a car that can be hitched to a locomotive.” He knew that North Vietnam would never extend to the south the de facto recognition such negotiations would entail.
Thieu’s opposition notwithstanding, Johnson announced a bombing halt on November 1, four days before the general election in the United States. Polls showed Humphrey and Nixon in a dead heat. But without South Vietnamese participation, the US delegation to the Paris Peace Talks felt that it could not proceed with negotiations. Nixon won by a hair, and two weeks later, Thieu agreed to send representatives to Paris. By that time, however, the Johnson administration had run out of time.
Prior to taking office in January 1969, Nixon, along with Kissinger, who would become Nixon’s national security adviser, vigorously defended the American commitment in Vietnam. Indeed, during the campaign, the Republican candidate had criticized the Johnson administration for not putting more military pressure on North Vietnam. The presence of American troops in Southeast Asia, he declared, was necessary to contain Communist China. Kissinger admitted privately that the strategic assumptions that had led to escalation might have been flawed, but he believed that America’s prestige was now on the line, and it must persevere. In truth, Vietnam was but a pawn in the larger game that the two men had in mind. They envisioned a US-led new world order that would be based on great-power negotiation and accommodation of strategic and economic interests. At the heart of this plan were openings to Communist China and the Soviet Union. For these things to occur, there would have to be peace in Vietnam. But it would have to be “peace with honor,” as Nixon put it, that is, there would have to be no hint of defeat.
The president and his national security adviser decided to gamble. They would intensify the bombing campaign against North Vietnam and communist positions in the south, and authorize a joint MACV-ARVN incursion to wipe out the communist sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos. At the same time, to undercut the antiwar movement at home, the administration would order a gradual US stand-down in South Vietnam. Perhaps North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front would feel pressured enough to negotiate with the Thieu regime, and the United States could quietly repair to the sidelines. “We were clearly on our way out of Vietnam by negotiation if possible, by unilateral withdrawal if necessary,” Kissinger declared in his memoirs.1
The White House was playing a dangerous game, however. What if none of the parties involved—Hanoi, the NLF, Saigon—cooperated? The CIA warned the White House that the ARVN could not hold out against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army without US help. Even after plans for modernization of the South Vietnamese military were completed in 1972, government forces were “simply . . . not capable of attaining the level of self-sufficiency and overwhelming force superiority that would be required to counter combined Viet Cong insurgency and North Vietnamese Army main force offensives,” said Abrams.2
In March 1969, Nixon dispatched Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to Saigon to notify Abrams that a gradual drawdown of American combat forces was at hand. MACV, backed by the CIA, expressed strong reservations. Laird subsequently reported that in his opinion, the US military mission was being too pessimistic. Once freed from the stifling presence of the huge American expeditionary force, the ARVN would be able to hold its own against all comers. The secretary of defense, a former power in the House of Representatives and still a force in the Republican Party, would become a relentless advocate for military withdrawal.
The following month, Vice President Ky came to Washington to prowl the corridors of power. During one meeting, Laird made it clear that the role of the United States henceforward would be to enable the South Vietnamese to choose their own form of government, whatever that might be. How did the South Vietnamese government like the term “Vietnamization”? Just fine, Ky replied gloomily. On June 8, Presidents Nixon and Thieu met at Midway Island, where Nixon announced that 25,000 US combat troops (out of a total of 542,000) would be out of Vietnam by August. On November 3, in a major address to the American people, he outlined his plan for turning the war over to the South Vietnamese. After seeming to appease opponents of the conflict, he lashed out at them in the same speech. Antiwar protesters were irrational and irresponsible. He openly appealed for the support of “the great silent majority” and then concluded with a melodramatic warning: “North Vietnam cannot humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”3 Lest the communists think that he was throwing in the towel, Nixon ordered the air force and the navy to conduct top-secret saturation bombing raids against communist sanctuaries in Cambodia.
Meanwhile, in Hanoi, representatives of the NLF and other front organizations announced the formation of a Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) for South Vietnam. This would be the capstone for the village and hamlet liberation committees and give form and structure to the communists’ subsequent claims to be the legitimate government of South Vietnam. At the same time, the Central Committee of the Lao Dong, the Communist Party of Vietnam, instructed communist operatives in the south to focus once again on political organization and small-scale guerrilla warfare. In effect, Colby, Abrams, and Bunker had been put on notice by Washington and indirectly by Hanoi. The other war had become the only war, and they had a very limited amount of time to win it.4
Colby and Abrams decided that the quickest and most effective way to secure victory was to break the back of the Viet Cong. “That infrastructure is just vital,” Abrams proclaimed to his staff, “absolutely critical to the success of either the VC military or . . . political [effort].You wipe that part out and goddamn it, if he’s got 50 divisions it’s not going to do him any good.” Colby could not have agreed more. The CORDS chief now believed that Phoenix, the war against the Viet Cong Infrastructure, must receive top priority. “You’d have a village election, and the VC would come in and chop off the village chief’s head in front of his family and the villagers and then shoot his family. You are not going to have much community development in that environment.” Colby continued to insist that the communist cadres were imposing their will on the rural population rather than winning their support through appeals to nationalist sentiment and promises of social and economic justice. The enemy had “a wonderful cadre machine, absolutely magnificent cadre machine,” Colby observed at a MACV commanders’ meeting, “but it hasn’t turned into mass political support.” The CORDS chief was probably correct, but his observation was largely irrelevant. Vietnamization was in full swing, but for the villager it was all about not burning bridges with the winning side. One did not have to show political support for the communists, merely to stay out of the way, turning a blind eye when they beheaded the district chief.5
The Provincial Reconnaissance Units continued to be the heart of Phoenix. This collection of ARVN deserters, Viet Cong turncoats, common criminals, and Nung tribesmen was funded and supervised by the CIA through early 1970. The Agency provided weapons and training and paid the salaries of the strike team members, salaries that averaged three times what was paid to regular ARVN soldiers. Bounties were available for information, captured weapons, prisoners, and, in some cases, dead bodies. Because the Agency’s funds were hidden within the regular budgets of other government entities, an accurate accounting is impossible; estimates of the amount the United States spent on Phoenix ranged from $7 million to $15 million a year. The CIA vastly improved its purchasing power by buying South Vietnamese piasters on the black market, which was illegal under both Vietnamese and US law.6
Colby would insist throughout the life of the Phoenix program that the primary objective of the operation was capture and interrogation, not assassination. Indeed, he deeply resented the term “assassination.” What the PRUs and US Navy SEALs were doing was both legal and justified. The South Vietnamese National Assembly had passed legislation in 1967 that forbade “any activity designed to publicize or carry out Communism.” Those convicted under the law were guilty of treason. Moreover, according to historian Guenter Lewy, between 1957 and 1972 the Banh-anh-ninh—the terror, security, and espionage branch of the Viet Cong—carried out 36,725 targeted killings and abducted another 58,499 South Vietnamese. If there were deaths associated with Phoenix, Colby insisted, they came about as part of a normal and appropriate reaction by the PRUs when Viet Cong cadres fought back or tried to run. A US Information Service officer working with CORDS developed a set of posters with the names and photos of suspected members of the local Viet Cong Infrastructure emblazoned on them. “In a significant contrast to the old Western posters offering a reward for the subject ‘dead or alive,’” Colby recalled with pride, “a statement at the bottom of the poster conveyed the word to those described that the amnesty program would receive them without punishment for whatever they had done.”7
Frank Snepp, a CIA operative who came to Vietnam in 1969 and who spent a lot of time with the PRUs and at the Provincial Interrogation Centers that housed the people they apprehended, identified a continuing problem, however, one that eventually placed a premium on killing rather than capture. The Phoenix operatives would conduct a successful “snatch” operation and deliver their captives to the PICs. Following interrogation, they were jailed. The more incorrigible were housed in Chi Hoa prison in Saigon—a facility that CORDS officer Gage McAfee described as looking like something out of Midnight Express—and on Con Son Island on the southern coast of South Vietnam, soon to be notorious for its “tiger cages.” (The “tiger cages” were tiny bamboo cells used to house Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army prisoners.) But most were released within six months. The strike team members were not going to risk life and limb to capture the same person over and over. “Let’s say you’re a Tucker Gougleman [the CIA man in charge of overseeing Phoenix] or a SEAL guy running a PRU team,” McAfee said. “You go out and you’re targeting some fairly highlevel VC infrastructure guy. You pick him up. It’s harder to capture a guy than kill him. You run the snatch operation correctly. You bring him in with some evidence against him. Six months later the guy is out. He knows the province chief’s brother. So the PRU team is not going to risk its collective life. Next time they are going to shoot him.” Frank Snepp recalled: “Several times, I said, ‘I’m going with you [the PRU] to make sure you capture this guy.’ . . . What they would do was to take me to the edge of the hamlet, and I would lie low. They would go zipping in and come back empty-handed. What happened to our guy? I would inquire. ‘Oh, he tried to escape.’”8
Corruption was also an ongoing problem for Phoenix. It was not unusual, especially in the northern part of South Vietnam, for the provincial or district power structure to treat the PRUs as their private armies, extorting protection money, intimidating rivals, and suppressing dissent. Sometimes one reconnaissance unit would be pitted against another in local vendettas. It was relatively easy for the well-to-do to buy their way out of a PIC, and some people were imprisoned there just so they would. “The VCI blacklist eventually became corrupted,” said PRU adviser Mike Walsh. “It became a place to put the names of these corrupt senior officers’ enemies, to avoid repayment of debt or even to settle a score.” Underpaid provincial and district province chiefs would frequently rake money off the top of funds that were given to them to provide for their prisoners’ care.9
Finally, there were rumors of atrocities by the PRUs and even by the Americans. On the night of February 25, 1969, Team One of SEAL Platoon Delta, under the command of Lieutenant Robert Kerry (the future senator from Nebraska), infiltrated the village of Thanh Phong. Its mission was to capture the National Liberation Front district committee chief, who, according to intelligence, was supposed to be sleeping there. To conceal their presence, “Kerry’s Raiders,” as they called themselves, murdered villagers on their way in. Thinking they were under fire from the Viet Cong, they then killed more villagers as they retreated. When the smoke cleared, Kerry’s Raiders had twenty-one dead civilians to their credit, with not a Viet Cong cadre among them. Word of these and other misdeeds inevitably percolated up to headquarters. In August 1969, Colby asked MACV to require that all American Phoenix advisers attend lectures at Vung Tau on South Vietnamese police procedures.10
In the fall of 1969, Colby hired a young lawyer named Gage McAfee as MACV-CORDS legal adviser. McAfee, who spoke both French and Vietnamese, was to put together a team that would bring accepted police practices and the rule of law to the Phoenix program. In 1968, the Vietnamese officials working with Phung Hoang (the Vietnamese name for Phoenix) had three categories in which detainees were to be placed: there were class “A” offenders, who were communist cadres working at the district level and up; class “B” offenders, who were active in the communist infrastructure as tax collectors, terrorists, or propagandists, or performing any other function on behalf of the NLF; and class “C” offenders, individuals who had not done anything concrete to benefit the Viet Cong but were suspected sympathizers. Those arrested were tried by a Province Security Committee, but the proceeding was considered extrajudicial, and there was no appeal. The suspect had no right to counsel, no right to see his dossier, and no right to testify, confront accusers, or question the prosecution. Security forces could hold a detainee for a total of forty-six days while they gathered evidence. At trial, three pieces of evidence were sufficient for conviction, and acceptable evidence ranged from allegations to confessions under duress to actual captured documents.11 McAfee and his team preached Western legal methods to the South Vietnamese—consistent procedures, rules of evidence, a detainee’s right to legal defense, the requirement that there be a new piece of hard evidence every year to keep a dossier alive—but much of this fell on deaf ears. Characteristically, the Thieu regime saw the anti-VCI campaign not only as an instrument with which to combat the communists but also as one to stifle noncommunist dissent.
In addition to introducing proper legal procedures into the Phoenix program, McAfee was also charged with looking into abuses. The problem was that it was very difficult for outsiders to gain entrance to the Provincial Interrogation Centers. The attitude of the Special Branch—a division of SEPES, the South Vietnamese intelligence and internal security apparatus—which ran the PICs, was that if the Americans did not like coercive interrogations, then they wouldn’t let them see any. In this the CIA was complicit. McAfee recalled that during a trip into a really dangerous part of the Mekong Delta, he first contacted the principal American adviser for Phoenix, who happened to be a US Army officer. “I want to tour the nearest PIC,” McAfee said. “I don’t know,” the officer replied. McAfee asked if he had ever been inside of one. “No,” the officer said. McAfee, talking about the incident years later, said, “Here is a guy who is running the Phoenix program who hasn’t even been to the PIC.” Describing what happened next, he said, “We went to the CIA place, which was this ratted out, dusty, sand-bagged hooch full of radios. The CIA guy looked like the Ohio State football coach. You know, shaved head . . . tough guy wearing a Chicom pistol. He said to me, ‘You can’t go to the PIC.’ I said, ‘That’s my job, and I’m going to the PIC whether you like it or not.’” The Woody Hayes lookalike called headquarters and was told that McAfee worked for Bill Colby. “Okay, you can go,” he announced, “but not the Phoenix guy.” Later, Frank Snepp complained to Station Chief Tom Polgar about a prisoner whom Snepp found beaten nearly to death by the South Vietnamese. “Wait a minute,” Polgar responded. “You want me to go to the South Vietnamese with 140,000 North Vietnamese in their country and say to them you’ve got to ease up on the bad guys because we think it is wrong?” McAfee labored long and hard to have the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners applied to Phoenix detainees, but to no avail.12
Estimates are that during its existence—roughly from 1968 through 1972—the Phoenix program was responsible for neutralizing—that is, killing, capturing, or turning—between 19,000 and 20,000 Viet Cong cadre. The ratio of captured to killed ran about 2:1. During one ten-month period from mid-1968 through the spring of 1969, the PRUs ran 50,770 missions and tallied 7,408 captured and 4,406 killed.13
In March 1969, the South Vietnamese government decreed that the PRUs be absorbed into the National Police. From that point on, Vietnamese province chiefs appointed PRU commanders, but the CIA continued to advise and fund the units. After the war, North Vietnamese officials termed Phoenix the most effective program the Americans and South Vietnamese had mounted against the Viet Cong. Colby’s appraisal was more negative. Though he was proud of Phoenix, he regarded it as a failure. “You know our special program on the VCI, General,” he reported to Abrams in July 1969. “This, frankly we can’t report any great success on. Figures of those neutralized seemed fairly impressive standing by themselves. But they represented a reduction of only one and one-half percent of the total VCI strength each month.” That would amount to 20 percent by the end of the year. “And they can probably replace a good part of that,” he said. “The standard version was that they were all being abused, killed,” Gage McAfee said. “From our perspective, the problem was that they were all being freed.” Indeed, Colby estimated that during the life of the Phoenix program, the South Vietnamese government released some 100,000 “communist offenders” from its correction centers.14
Phoenix became one of the seemingly endless ironies plaguing the American effort in Vietnam. Colby and Abrams placed increased emphasis on the campaign against the Viet Cong Infrastructure in 1969 and 1970 out of a recognition that time was running out, that US opinion was turning against the war. But by the beginning of 1970, news reporting on Phoenix—always identified as a CIA program in the American media—had become one of the principal factors contributing to public disillusionment. In story after story, the word “assassination” was used to describe the CIA’s war on the Viet Cong.15
Colby understood the impact that bad press could have, not only on Phoenix but on CORDS in general. In October 1969, he issued a directive through MACV that Americans working with Phoenix should have nothing to do with targeted killings, that they should observe the rules of war when conducting operations, and that they should promptly report questionable activities by the PRUs to their superiors. But what would Phoenix be without at least the threat of violence? Colby’s directive ended by allowing for “reasonable military force . . . as necessary.”16 Whatever effect Colby’s order had on American opinion was vitiated when, on November 13, 1969, journalist Seymour Hersh reported in the New York Times that US Army troops at a village called My Lai had massacred hundreds of Vietnamese civilians eighteen months earlier. Lieutenant William Calley and his Americal Division soldiers were not attached to Phoenix, but most Americans did not or would not differentiate.
In February 1970, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under the direction of its powerful chairman, J. William Fulbright (D-AR), held four days of hearings on pacification in Vietnam. Colby returned to Washington to testify, bringing with him a CORDS team that included John Paul Vann. By this time Fulbright had become the symbol of establishment disillusionment with the war. In 1967, he had published The Arrogance of Power, in which he charged that in its mindless pursuit of communist enemies, the United States was supporting dictatorships abroad and suppressing civil liberties at home. In so doing, it was violating the very principles for which it claimed to be fighting.
During the hearings, Colby combined lawyer like adroitness with Mc-Namara-style statistics to demonstrate how the joint US–South Vietnamese pacification effort would bring 90 percent of South Vietnamese villages into the secure category by 1971. An entire day was devoted to Phoenix, with testimony being given in executive session. Fortunately for Colby, Fulbright used the term “execution” rather than “assassination” when asking questions about Phoenix. “There has been no one legally executed,” Colby testified. “You have not had convictions of members of the enemy apparatus in which executions followed.” In another exchange, New Jersey senator Clifford Case demanded that Colby “swear by all that is holy” that Phoenix was not a counterterror program. At this point Colby’s emotions uncharacteristically got the better of him. “I have already taken an oath,” he answered with some heat. “There was a counter-terror program, but it has been discarded as a concept.” Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. In its war on the Banh-anh-ninh, Phoenix was nothing if not a counterterror program. Colby’s failure to defend the program on its own merits is striking.17
“The only two things that the Fulbright Committee was interested in, and most of Washington, really . . . were Phoenix and the Chau case,” Colby told Abrams and his staff upon his return from Washington.18 The arrest and trial of Tran Ngoc Chau, the father of Vietnamese pacification, was rooted in Vietnamese national politics and went to the heart of Bill Colby’s nation-building philosophy. The official American reaction to the Chau case would in many ways determine whether there would ever be a connection between the “rice-roots” revolution building in the countryside and the government in Saigon. Since 1962, men like Colby, Lansdale, Scotton, Bumgardner, Ellsberg, and Vann had been trying to foster self-determination and political self-consciousness among the peasantry. If the rice-roots revolution was going to succeed, however, it would have to be manifested at the national level. Some, like Colby, believed that Nguyen Van Thieu was capable of making the connection, and some did not. The naysayers saw in Tran Ngoc Chau an alternative to the venal, grasping, and autocratic generals who continued to hold the keys to power.
Two themes dominated post-Tet politics in Saigon: fear that the United States was going to broker a deal with the communists behind its ally’s back, and the ongoing Thieu-Ky rivalry.
In the wake of Tet, the US Mission had briefly thrown its money and influence behind a nonpartisan political movement headed by the former general Tran Van Don, now a senator. Designed to meld South Vietnam’s myriad of parties and factions into one noncommunist whole, Don’s organization took the name National Salvation Front. Thieu’s suspicions were immediately aroused. The new organization was obviously an instrument that the Americans intended to use to generate support for a coalition government that would include the National Liberation Front, he proclaimed to his friend Lieutenant General Le Nguyen Khang, commander of III Corps. During this same conversation, Thieu asked whether there was any evidence the United States had assisted the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive. Fear of a betrayal continued to accelerate through 1968 as the Paris Peace Talks got underway. LBJ had announced a unilateral US bombing halt on October 31, and then Secretary of Defense Clifford had declared on December 15 that the United States felt completely free to discuss military matters, including troop withdrawals, unilaterally with the North Vietnamese. The Nixon administration subsequently embraced Vietnamization. Thieu’s fears were, then, not without foundation.19
The hidden heart of South Vietnamese politics continued to be the corps commander system. Between 1966 and 1968, these warlords acquired the power to appoint all the key civil and military officials in their zones, including division and regimental commanders and province and district chiefs. These positions generally went to the highest bidders. Utilizing intermediaries—that is, wives, aides, and staff assistants—the corps commander and the aspiring candidate would work out a lump-sum down payment and the monthly tribute that was to follow. These payoffs were made possible by the corruption that came with the post. The key money-collecting official in the system was the province chief, who earned huge sums by raking off funds from various public works projects and payoffs from businessmen for favors and protection. According to Ed Lansdale, who reappeared on the Vietnam scene in the mid-1960s as an adviser to the ambassador, the corps commander system was much more the control mechanism for the South Vietnamese government and the ARVN than the ministries and channels of authority listed in the official organizational charts. In a system in which extortion and payoffs needed to be overseen by intermediaries, a coterie of corrupt subordinates grew up around each of the five warlords (the region around Saigon had been declared a separate corps area). Frequently, these networks became power centers and self-sustaining entities in themselves that continued to operate as various generals came and went. On the rare occasion that a new province chief arrived on the scene determined to eliminate corruption, key subordinates would quietly oppose his efforts at every turn, working to discredit him with his superiors. Significantly, the head of this snake was General Tran Thien Khiem, minister of the interior and subsequently prime minister, whose wife and brother-in-law oversaw a drug ring that sold heroin to all comers, including American GIs.20
Along with Bunker, Colby, as deputy commander of CORDS, had direct responsibility for the war against corruption and for overseeing the creation of a responsible, responsive government. He installed a permanent liaison officer in the prime minister’s office—Jean Sauvageot, a US Army officer who was detailed to CORDS in part because of his fluency in Vietnamese—and paid personal visits to Huong, and subsequently Khiem, several times a week when he was in Saigon. On one level, he came across as a champion of a rice-roots revolution. In a February 1969 letter to Thieu, Colby urged the president to make the Pacification and Development Plan the cornerstone of his nation-building effort. “It should call upon all to share the burden and at the same time it would provide all a share of the power,” he wrote.21
Yet, in 1967, when he was chief of the Far East Division, Colby had reported to Helms: “On the Ambassador’s behalf we are developing discreet relationships and covert assets that can be manipulated to sponsor the emergence of what appears to the outside world as genuinely Vietnamese political initiatives, constitutional provisions, and electoral platforms.” Colby was, of course, a pragmatist. In a note to Bob Komer about the South Vietnamese government, he wrote, “While I certainly concur in its many flaws I am somewhat inclined to believe that this is part of the ‘given’ of any problem such as this and that we should find a similarly flawed instrument almost wherever we looked.” The real solution to this sort of dilemma was the “patient collaboration” the United States was providing to Thieu but had denied to Diem. One day, Frank Scotton, then on special assignment to CORDS, was having lunch with Colby at the latter’s house. “You know,” Scotton said, “does it strike you as strange that we are maintaining these files and presenting cases for removal to one of the half dozen most corrupt officials from one of the most corrupt families in South Vietnam [Khiem]?” Colby just laughed and said, “Well, that’s the most we can do right now.” There came a point, however, when Bill Colby could no longer temporize.22
On February 26, 1970, Tran Ngoc Chau, secretary-general of the lower house of the National Assembly, was arrested in his office and forcibly removed by a squad of plainclothes policemen. Days before, he had been convicted in absentia by a military tribunal of collaborating with the enemy. Chau was confined in an eight-by-ten-foot cell and informed that he had been sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. During the mid-1960s, as province chief in Kien Hoa and then director of the Rural Development Cadre center at Vung Tau, Chau had become the darling of American counterinsurgency/pacification enthusiasts. The creator of the Census-Grievance Program, Chau had authored a two-volume work on the dos and don’ts of nation-building in South Vietnam. Vann, Scotton, and Ellsberg considered him a mentor and a friend. In 1967, frustrated with the corps commander system, Chau had resigned from the military and run successfully for the National Assembly. He became the representative from Kien Hoa, where he had built a noncommunist political coalition that included Catholics, Buddhists, Cao Dai, and members of various ethnic minorities. He and Thieu had been classmates and friends at the South Vietnamese military academy at Dalat. Initially, like Colby, Chau had viewed Thieu as a pragmatic, patriotic leader who might be induced to put together an authentic national political organization that included all of the major noncommunist factions, religious groups, and ethnic minorities. He watched approvingly as Thieu gradually moved Ky and the northerners to the edge of the South Vietnamese political stage, but he steadfastly refused to join the growing coterie of Thieu loyalists in the National Assembly. Repeatedly, Chau pleaded with Thieu to broaden his political base, and, in particular, to reach out to the Buddhists. “How can I compromise with them,” the president had replied. “Their leaders are at least pro-Communist, if not outright Communists.” Ridiculous, Chau retorted. Marxism-Leninism called for the eradication of all religions. What the Buddhists wanted was a clean, responsive government in Saigon.23
Chau had long believed that those who had fought with the Viet Minh were nationalists first and communists second, turning to Marxism-Leninism only because they believed it was the only alternative for achieving unification and freedom from foreign domination. In 1964, he had informed the CIA station in Saigon that he had been in contact with “some high ranking officials from Hanoi” who wanted to discuss a possible compromise peace settlement. He asked for an interview with Ambassador Taylor to get his advice, but was rebuffed. The contact, as it turned out, was Chau’s brother, Tran Ngoc Hien, an agent of the North Vietnamese government. Hien and Chau would meet periodically at the house of their parents. In Vietnam, family generally trumped ideology. In 1967, Chau finally identified Hien as his communist interlocutor. The Saigon station, then under the direction of Far East Division head Colby, told Chau that he needed to bring Hien in. He refused. The following year, in the wake of Tet, Hien did his best to persuade Chau to defect, promising him any position within the National Liberation Front that he might desire. Chau refused. He could not buy into a system that would always sacrifice the interests of the individual to those of the state.24
In the fall of 1968, Chau moved to create a national political movement that would be built on the rice-roots political revolution that Vann, Scotton, Bumgardner, and Colby had been touting since 1964. He asked the CIA for help; Bill Kohlman, Chau’s CIA contact, replied that help would be available only if Chau and his movement made a commitment in advance to support President Thieu and his policies. Chan demurred. In January 1969, the soldier turned politician announced his peace plan. The National Liberation Front would be asked to designate a certain number of delegates to the National Assembly, as long as they were not communists. The NLF would be permitted to participate in the 1971 presidential elections. Saigon and Hanoi would enter into direct negotiations. Significantly, there was no mention of the United States. Chau later claimed that he recognized immediately that Nixon and Kissinger intended to abandon South Vietnam at the first opportunity. Shortly thereafter, Hien was captured, and in July he was convicted of being an enemy agent. His relationship to Chau was widely touted by the Thieu regime and its captive newspapers. Ominously, Scotton, Bumgardner, and Vann were ordered by Ambassador Bunker to sever all ties with their comrade.25
Knowing that Jean Sauvageot was also an old friend of Chau’s, Colby told him to keep his distance. Sauvageot could not. One day he snuck out of the Presidential Palace, where he had a desk in the prime minister’s office, and rode his bicycle to the house where Chau was hiding. The two men talked for a while, the American urging Chau to do what was best for him and his family. Upon his return to the palace, Sauvageot found a note from Colby waiting. “I warned you not to see that man,” it read. A CIA acquaintance later told Sauvageot that Colby had a transcript of their conversation on his desk before Sauvageot returned to his post.26
Chau’s arrest, conviction, and imprisonment caused a major flap in the United States. Fulbright had his staff investigate and subsequently incorporated the case in his indictment of both the Thieu regime and the US war effort. Vann and Ellsberg were furious at the US Mission’s abandonment of Chau. “It wasn’t hard to get Vann pissed,” Scotton recalled, “but I had never seen him that mad before or after.” The real villain in the whole affair, in the eyes of Chau’s American supporters, was not Colby, but Ted Shackley, the CIA station chief. “Shackley told Bunker that ‘We had documentary proof’ that Chau was a communist,” Scotton said. “That was an absolute lie.” Frank Snepp agreed. “Ted Shackley did his best to destroy Chau,” he said. “He had this fixation on Chau. Shackley was a political animal to the core.” In fact, the head of the Vietnamese Special Forces had contacted Shackley before he arrested Chau. The chief of station assured him that he had no interest in the man and no objection to Saigon taking legal action against him.27
If Vann was infuriated, Daniel Ellsberg was devastated. By 1970, he was back in the United States, working as a consultant for the Rand Corporation. Following Chau’s arrest he arranged an interview with former undersecretary of state Nicholas Katzenbach to plead for US intervention. The State Department asked Bunker to look into the affair, but that was as far as it went. “Chau and [Nguyen] Be and Hien were all part of a group who Ellsberg, Vann, Bumgardner, and I thought, if South Vietnam could make it through the next decade, through the Thieus, the Viens, the Khiems—this would be the leadership for a new Vietnam,” Scotton later said. “We thought if they do in Chau, and we allow it, then what hope was there?” For Ellsberg, Chau’s arrest and America’s official indifference was a turning point. “The single most important person in Dan’s thinking about the war, the sociology of it, was Tran Ngoc Chau,” Frank Scotton said. “Vann was committed to staying in the war with this smoldering resentment at what had happened; Ellsberg was not. I was in Washington when he was preparing the [Pentagon] papers for release. The Chau case was unfolding at the time and was crucial to his decision.”28
That Colby could have saved Chau is doubtful. What is clear is that he did not try. It was true that, on one level, it was structurally difficult, if not impossible, for the United States to aid and abet a change of government that would profoundly alter the social and economic structure of the country in question. Colby may have recalled McGeorge Bundy’s observation in 1965 when he had told him that fostering such change might be desirable, but was institutionally impossible—that is, under time-honored diplomatic rules, Washington interacted with established governments, not revolutionary movements (not unless they were anticommunist). A coup was a different matter. Usually, it was a family affair, involving the exchange of one group of elites for another. The nations of Latin America had labored long and hard to persuade the United States to recognize the juridical equality of all states and not, à la Woodrow Wilson, to apply ideological and other standards to a new regime when considering recognition. And, of course, there was the Cold War prism through which the United States still tended to view every foreign regime and international situation. Colby would remark to Jean Sauvageot, his liaison to the prime minister’s office, that Chau’s trial and imprisonment were “very unfortunate but . . . we had our relations with the Vietnamese government to consider and had to be very careful.” In subsequent remarks he was not nearly so sensitive. “He [Chau] was an officer, and he was a province chief and a good one,” Colby said in an oral history, “but he had been contacted by his brother who was a North Vietnamese officer. He had not reported it, and in time of war I really can’t get very much cranked up about punishing somebody who plays that game.”29
The arrest and trial of Tran Ngoc Chau showed the CIA in Vietnam in its true colors, and when push came to shove, Bill Colby was CIA to the core. In the developing world during the Cold War, picking the right side was everything. In 1963, during the coup that overthrew the House of Ngo, the Agency had cultivated each faction, waiting to see who would come out on top, and then, just before the climax, threw in with the victor. This was the classic realist approach to counterinsurgency. Colby was a realist first, an idealist second. He was no doubt sincere in his efforts to empower the Rhade, the Hmong, and the Vietnamese peasantry in general, but neither he nor the Agency was going to lead a revolution. In this they were reflecting American Cold War policy. In the end, Chau and Thieu, like Diem, Khanh, and Ky, were merely pawns. Chau, Scotton, Ellsberg, and to a degree Vann were subversives; unconventional Colby might have been, but there were lines beyond which he would not go.
Life for Bill Colby in South Vietnam was not all reports, briefings, and overnight trips to contested villages. He lived alone in his villa in downtown Saigon. Much to the admiration of his subordinates, the former Jedburgh drove himself around Saigon without escort day and night. This was in contrast to Shackley, who traveled about ostentatiously in his armored black limousine with armed outliers. When in town, Colby was a frequent attendee at the endless round of cocktail parties and dinners. One of his aides, Tony Cistaro, remembered being at a private dinner when Colby, unaware that any other CORDS people were invited, showed up with a beautiful Vietnamese woman on his arm. Colby was on leave from the CIA, but he was still CIA, and the Agency personnel who worked the PRUs and PICs were under his command. If Colby wanted to hobnob with the Vietnamese and French elite, there was the Cercle Sportif. If he wanted American, and especially CIA, company, there was the Duc Hotel. Situated at 14 Tran Qui at the corner of Cong Le, the Duc was only a block from the Presidential Palace and four blocks from the US embassy. The CIA leased the entire five-story hotel to serve as a residence for new arrivals until they completed in-country processing and received their assignments.
The rooftop swimming pool was nicknamed “The Bay of Pigs.” Sundays at the Duc were reserved for socializing. The day started with Bloody Marys and brunch, then continued with swimming, sunbathing, and conversation. Besides the restaurant, bar, and swimming pool, there was a small theater, a liquor store, and a recreation room. Behind the pool was a poker room where a high-stakes game was almost always in session. Nung Chinese guarded the front and rear gates with unloaded weapons. The family that rented the hotel to the CIA had twelve children, one of whom was an officer in the North Vietnamese Army.30
Colby was always surrounded by a coterie of admiring protégés. In addition to Gage McAfee, there was Steve Young. Colby had known Young’s father, Kenneth, who had been Kennedy’s ambassador to Thailand. Steve had met Colby for the first time when the CORDS chief came to Vinh Long for one of his inspections. Young was a USAID officer and happened to be assigned to give the briefing that day. The topic was energizing village governments. A week or so later, Young got a call on the radio ordering him to report to Saigon. He asked why, but received no answer. Dutifully, he caught a ride on a C-134. After landing at Tan Son Nhut, he reported to CORDS headquarters and was directed to a Mr. Aubrey Elliott, “a very prim and proper senior aide with a starched white shirt and a bow tie,” he recalled. Young introduced himself, and Elliott told him to be ready to report for work the following Monday. “The hell I am,” Young said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there is a war going on and it’s not happening in Saigon.” You have your orders, was the reply. At that point, Young had not lost his idealism. He had volunteered for Vietnam; he had come to make a difference. He thought, “I’ll call Ambassador Colby and he’ll get me out of this.” Colby’s secretary put Young through at once.
“Yes, this is Bill Colby.”
“Mr. Ambassador, I am sorry to disturb you, but some son of a bitch is trying to pull me out of the provinces and bring me to Saigon. I need your help.”
“Oh, Steve, I thought you would be very good in that job.”
(Pause)
“Was that nine o’clock on Monday morning?”31
Like McAfee, Young found Colby to be selfless, unassuming, committed, and always open to criticism and new ideas. “You are a leader whom we would follow anywhere,” Young would write as his boss was about to depart Vietnam, “because we believe that with you we can finish the job, any job.” Years later, Paul Colby, Bill’s youngest son, observed: “In many ways my father was more intimate with his protégés—Stephen Young and Gage McAfee—than with his children. He was, after all, responsible for his children—discipline, preparation for life and all that.”32
In March 1970, Richard Nixon announced the phased withdrawal of 150,000 troops over the next year. He hoped, as he later observed in his memoirs, that this would “drop a bombshell on the gathering spring storm of anti-war protest.” But the move caused him serious problems with the military. Abrams pleaded with the White House to avoid setting fixed timetables and instead tie withdrawals to advances in pacification and modernization of the ARVN. Nixon and Kissinger refused. General Alexander Haig, one of Kissinger’s deputies and a White House errand boy, visited MACV. One of Abrams’s lieutenants blurted out, “We have two of your messages. One of them says ‘go get ’em’ and the other one says ‘hurry up and get out.’” Haig replied, “Well, it’s ‘go get ’em’ until the end of the period.”33
The same month that Nixon made his troop withdrawal announcement, Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk was overthrown by a pro-American clique headed by General Lon Nol. On March 12, the new government issued a decree ordering all Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops to be out of the country within three days. The US Mission in Saigon was overjoyed. Not only had Sihanouk tolerated communist sanctuaries along the border with South Vietnam, he had also turned a blind eye as North Vietnam funneled thousands of tons of arms and other supplies through the port of Sihanoukville. The Nixon administration quickly extended diplomatic recognition to the new regime in Phnom Penh and launched a major aid program. The president subsequently endorsed a plan whereby a combined US-ARVN force would invade and clean out two enemy troop concentrations in Cambodia just west and north of Saigon. Chances were that the Cambodian incursion would reignite the antiwar movement in the United States, the president realized, but it would also appease MACV and the Thieu regime and, more substantively, buy time for Vietnamization. This was vintage Nixon: alternately appease and attack the doves, and placate the hawks, all the while pursuing an irreversible course of de-escalation.
The Nixon administration claimed a great victory in the wake of the Cambodian incursion: 2,000 of the enemy killed, 800 bunkers destroyed, and the Central Office for South Vietnam, the “nerve center” of North Vietnamese operations in the south, dispersed. In truth, forewarned, the communists had retreated further into the interior. The incursion had little impact on the enemy’s war-making capacity. As the White House had anticipated, Cambodia galvanized the antiwar movement. In May, six students were killed at Kent State and Jackson State, and more than 100,000 protesters gathered in Washington. In June, the Senate voted to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. An amendment sponsored by Senators George McGovern (D-SD) and Mark Hatfield (R-OR), subsequently defeated, would have required the administration to pull all US troops out of South Vietnam by the close of 1971. Nixon, infuriated, approved the “Huston Plan,” which authorized the intelligence services to open mail, employ electronic surveillance devices, and even burglarize to gather evidence against domestic enemies of the administration.
In early 1971, again over the protests of General Abrams, the White House announced the withdrawal of 100,000 additional troops by the end of the year, leaving 175,000 in-country, only 75,000 of whom were combat soldiers. In February, Nixon approved a major ground operation in Laos whose objective was the same as in Cambodia—to buy time for Vietnamization. This time, the North Vietnamese and the Pathet Lao were ready. They repelled the offensive, inflicting a 50 percent casualty rate on the invading ARVN.
Throughout 1970 and 1971, Bill Colby, well aware that he and Abrams were in a race against time, set a consistently upbeat tone in his reports to the US Mission and to those in the American media who were still taking an interest in Vietnam. “By year’s end,” he wrote in his memoir, speaking of 1969, “I was staying overnight in areas that had been ‘Indian country’ the year before, driving on local roads or going up canals where prudence had dictated no penetration earlier.” To demonstrate that change had truly come to the countryside, he motored 100 miles along Route 4, the road leading south from Saigon through the heart of the Mekong Delta. He encountered the remains of blown bridges and mine craters newly filled with dirt, but no one shot at him. Then, during the 1971 Tet holiday, Colby and John Paul Vann embarked on a much-publicized motorcycle trip across the delta, from Can Tho near the South China Sea to the Cambodian border. “By late 1971,” Colby would later write, “the war in the Delta essentially had been won. Security was so improved that there remained only a residual level of violence, such as the pop-pop of an AK-47 firing at our helicopter as we flew over the mangrove swamp along the sea in a distant southern district.” Robert Kaiser, a reporter for the Washington Post who covered CORDS, dubbed Colby the spokesman for “the new optimists.”34
Many observers believed that the DEPCORDS was helping to create a false reality. James Nach, a high-level political analyst in the US embassy in Saigon and a student of Vietnamese history, likened the situation in the Mekong to that which had existed in Hau Nghia province. While American and ARVN troops swarmed the surface, the Viet Cong and their sympathizers had withdrawn. But the latter were operating their own society belowground in the tunnels of Cu Chi northwest of Saigon. Vann and Colby had literally taken the “high road” during their famous motorcycle trip. If Vann had taken his boss down the muddy side roads that led away from Highway 4, however, he would have found that the area was less pacific than he thought. Perhaps the level of violence had declined, but history and the populace’s memory of it remained. Since the late nineteenth century, the rural population in the upper delta had suffered at the hands of landlords and French colonial officials. The communists had begun organizing in Long An and western Dinh Tuon in the 1930s. The flag of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), a yellow star on a red field, was designed and first flew in the delta. Officially “pacified” by 1971, the amoeba-like Viet Cong Infrastructure had separated, reformed, and returned. In 1972, the whole area would blow up once again, leaving the Americans and the South Vietnamese in possession of Highway 4 and little else.35
Vietnamization affected all aspects of the US effort in Vietnam, including the Phoenix program. The PRU teams were Vietnamese, and they were led by Vietnamese officers, but until mid-1970 the South Vietnamese government had not spent a piaster on the program. In July, the US Mission began shifting responsibility for Phuong Huong (the Phoenix program) to the government. Thieu ordered it placed under the Directorate of National Police and canceled draft deferrals for interpreters, those who had constituted the vital link between the PRUs and their American advisers. Shackley, arriving in Vietnam with instructions from Helms to abjure nation-building and counterterrorism and concentrate on traditional intelligence gathering, was anxious to break the CIA-Phoenix link. In 1971, Abrams ordered his staff not to fill the spots in Phoenix that were being left vacant by officers rotating home. During a December 1970 visit to Washington, Colby found a distinct lack of interest in the entire pacification effort on the part of the administration. As would soon become evident to many within the US Mission, Nixon and Kissinger wanted to deliver a series of face-saving blows to the enemy and then get the hell out of Vietnam.36
Colby consoled himself with the belief that the battle had been won. He and Vann agreed that there would not be another Tet; the possibility of a communist takeover in South Vietnam by means of guerrilla warfare and a popular uprising was gone. The focus of the war would henceforth be on the northern provinces, which would come under increasing pressure from North Vietnamese main force units. Vann asked to be transferred back to II Corps, but this time with supreme authority over all military as well as civilian personnel. It was an audacious request even for a man who had made a career out of being audacious. But after Colby had managed to deflect Bunker’s direct order to fire Vann for insubordination, the gadfly had toned down his criticism of the US military and the South Vietnamese government. Abrams probably figured that by the time Vann was in the saddle, there would be very few US troops for the former lieutenant colonel to command. Consequently, he acceded to Colby’s request and agreed to make Vann proconsul.37
During this period, Colby appeared to be unwavering in his support of Nguyen Van Thieu. The president had embraced pacification in all its forms, Colby reported to MACV—land reform, village elections, the rule of law, a curb on corruption, and national elections open to all comers.38 He clung to the belief that America’s greatest mistake of the war had been to abandon Ngo Dinh Diem. Its greatest accomplishment, perhaps, was to show continuing patience with Thieu, whom Colby believed to be endowed with the same virtues as Diem, but fewer of the vices. Whatever the case, President Thieu required a lot of patience.
In 1969, a joint operation run by the CIA and South Vietnam’s Police Special Branch had discovered that the president’s top intelligence adviser, Huynh Van Trong, was a communist agent. When Thieu was confronted with the information, he wanted to sweep the matter under the rug. The US Mission insisted, however, that Trong be arrested and publicly denounced. But Trong was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. In 1970, CIA analyst Sam Adams reported to his superiors that the entire government and ARVN superstructure was Swiss cheese. He and his colleagues estimated that the communists had infiltrated between twenty thousand and thirty thousand operatives into the officer corps and civil bureaucracy. Then there was Thieu’s ongoing contempt for the westernized politicians in Saigon and, in George Carver’s words, the “alien institutional toys they call political parties.” The president continued to insist that the South Vietnamese were “not interested in [political doctrine]” but simply “wanted to lead better and more prosperous lives without being afraid.” Thieu seemed, Diemlike, unwilling or unable to comprehend that constitutional procedures and the rule of law were a means to that end. In this sense, his views were diametrically opposed to those of Bill Colby.39
National elections were due in October 1971; Thieu and his wife wanted another term. The US Mission was more than happy for the president to stay in power—what Nixon and Kissinger wanted was someone who would maintain order while the United States withdrew—but it wanted the election to be contested. Thieu announced his candidacy on July 24. At that point, Ambassador Bunker paid a clandestine visit to General Duong Van “Big” Minh and offered him as much as $3 million to challenge Thieu. Minh, whose CIA handler affectionately described him as having “the body of an elephant and the brain of a mouse,” agreed to throw his hat into the ring. Vice President Ky then declared his candidacy for the highest office in the land but was disqualified by the Supreme Court. On August 20, Minh withdrew from the race. President Thieu went on to win, with 91.5 percent of the vote.40
All the while, Bill Colby kept up his weekly visits to Prime Minister Khiem and President Thieu, discussing the course of pacification and proposing various anticorruption measures. The Presidential Palace never for a moment believed that Colby had severed his ties with the Agency. Thieu, egged on by Khiem, was already convinced the CIA was trying to pressure him into negotiating a shameful peace with the communists, or even to bring about his overthrow. “I don’t think he [Colby] was naïve about what was going on in the Presidential Palace,” Frank Snepp later said. “There was just no other place to go. He kept looking for ways to jerry-build the system. That’s what you do when you’re fighting the devil incarnate, and Bill Colby believed that the communists were the devil incarnate.”41
Like Frank Scotton, John Paul Vann, Ev Bumgardner, and Dan Ellsberg, Bill Colby had fallen in love with Vietnam. Individual liaisons aside, he reveled in the manners and customs of the people, the tropical climate, the physical beauty of the place, his postcolonial life in Saigon, and the excitement and adventure of nation-building. “Wear the Arab kit,” T. E. Lawrence had advised young British Foreign Service Officers destined for the Middle East. “Learn all you can. Get to know their families, clans and tribes, friends and enemies, wells, hills and roads . . . speak their dialect of Arabic . . . acquire their trust and intimacy. . . . You will be like an actor in a foreign theater.” There was a saying among old Vietnam hands about those whose final tour was up: “They had to leave their loved ones to return to their families.”42
By this point, Bill and Barbara’s marriage was a shell; he dreaded returning home, but by the summer of 1971, he decided, grudgingly, that there was no choice. His eldest daughter, Catherine, was in dire straits. During Bill’s rare and brief trips home, Barbara had tried to tell him that the family needed him, but she did not try very hard. Her husband had long ago made it clear that he was doing important, even heroic work, and that he expected his wife and family to do their duty and take care of themselves. Eventually, however, some of the family’s friends in the CIA became concerned; an informal delegation approached Colby in Saigon and told him it was time to return to Washington. He could not do it, he said; his country needed him. Finally, Barbara asked thirteen-year-old Paul to intervene. During Bill’s last trip home as deputy commander of CORDS in June, Paul met him in the parking lot of the Little Flower Church after one of the interminable meetings his father seemed always to be attending. He told him that he absolutely had to come home. Grudgingly, Colby agreed.43